09/17/16 – Jeffrey Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, September 17th, 2016, I'm Scott Horton, this is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to Show It Is, Anti-War Radio, I'm your host, Scott Horton.
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Alright, introducing our friend Jeffrey Kay, he is a psychologist from the Bay Area in California, has expertise working with torture victims, and he's the author of this brand new book, it's called Cover Up at Guantanamo, the NCIS investigation into the suicides of Mohammed Al-Hanashi and Abdulrahman Al-Amri.
Very good work here, very important work.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff, how are you, sir?
Hi, Scott, thank you very much, glad to be here.
Well, very happy to have you here, and here we are in Obama's last year, and Guantanamo Bay is still open.
One of the major subjects of your book here actually takes place during his term, when everything should have already been closed down by then.
So let's get to it, and let's do that one first, that's how the book begins.
Mohammed Salih Al-Hanashi, tell us about him.
Mohammed Salih Al-Hanashi was from Yemen, he came from a kind of classic Yemen tribe, relatives worked in agriculture, he got involved, as many people did, the idea of religious jihad and supporting the more orthodox, shall we say, elements in Islam around the world, and he went to Afghanistan to help the Taliban, and got swept up in the battles there.
In fact, he was involved in a couple of really big battles, this was even prior to 9-11.
He was captured, finally, and turned over to the Americans, and sent almost immediately to Guantanamo, where he arrived in January, I believe, of 2002, or perhaps it was February, I'd have to look at my notes again.
Anyway, right at the beginning, and very early on, this man, who at the time was in his early 20s, if your listeners can imagine what it's like to be 23 years old, and the decisions you make in life, and what you do.
But of course, the Americans portrayed him as some kind of leader of some kind of Islamic rebellion, and like all the other detainees, of course, he was sent to Guantanamo, renditioned, essentially, and drugged on the plane over, subjected to sensory deprivation.
When he landed at Guantanamo, he was given a powerful dose of the anti-malarial drug, mefloquine, even though there was no malaria in Guantanamo or in Cuba at all.
The purpose of that, I and other people, including some medical authorities believe, was to disorient, in a sense, chemically waterboard the prisoners, make them disoriented, depending on just how sensitive they were to this drug, perhaps even make them psychotic.
Now, let me stop you there for just a second.
This is something that we've talked about before on the show, and with your colleague Jason Leopold as well.
The major discrepancy here, let's assume, well, it's government work, so of course they're giving them a prophylactic for a disease that doesn't even exist in the place where they are.
But that's really the point, is they weren't giving them a prophylactic dose.
They were giving them a treatment dose of these malarial drugs, as though they were already infected.
And as you're saying, it's suspected that basically malaria was a ruse, and that's one of the reasons that we know, is because they gave them a treatment dose, and we know that they know what the side effects of those malarial drugs are.
Oh, absolutely.
They knew in DOD, and in those articles that Jason Leopold and I wrote, we document that from internal documents within DOD, that there was a lot of concern about the side effects, because they were using mefloquine as well, of course, but not treatment doses, prophylactic doses, which your listeners should know are about one-third, or to one-quarter to one-third, the amount of drug that a treatment dose is.
And people were complaining about the effects of the prophylactic dose on soldiers, and it was driving them crazy, it was like mefloquine rage.
And the only reason DOD was doing this was because you only had to give the dose once a week instead of every day.
So it was easier, it was cheaper, for administrative purposes, even though people were getting, as it turned out, neurologically damaged by this drug.
And today, DOD does not use the drug at all, they stopped using it, except in extraordinary circumstances, because it was too dangerous.
But nevertheless, they gave this to all the prisoners.
And I'm sorry, because I interrupted you before at the good part where you were talking about this amounted to basically chemical waterboarding.
So I think basically what we're talking about is it gives them a real bad trip, like an unwitting or unwilling dose of PCP or LSD or something like that, where they go insane for a little while kind of a thing, huh?
Well, longer than you would on LSD, unfortunately.
Mefloquine stays in the system a long time, and the people who have been affected, the medical reports show that people who were badly affected by these drugs continue to exhibit symptoms for weeks or even months.
Some people were permanently disabled by this drug.
And the guy, the man who, Shimkus, his name was Albert Shimkus, who was the chief surgeon and head of the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo at the time, is the man who signed off on this protocol for Guantanamo.
And I spoke to him directly some years ago, and he told me that he wasn't his choice for this drug, that they had consulted, they had all these detainees coming in, and he consulted with the CDC, he consulted with this agency, that agency, and they told him to use the Mefloquine, so he just did.
Of course, he also told me that he was told not to talk about it, which was very interesting, but he wouldn't tell me by whom, except that it was someone at Southern Command, it was someone above him in the command structure.
So he was ordered not to talk about it, he let that slip.
But he did sign off on it, and the story he told me has never panned out, because I, Floyd, CDC, and all the places he told me had asked for, I mean, that he had supposedly consulted with on Mefloquine, and all of them said they had no records of any consultation at all.
He also told me that the Cubans were concerned with the possibility of malaria, by the prisoners being brought in, but the Cubans sadly would not return my request for comment, but one interesting fact came up to show that this was in fact a lie by Shimkus, because at the exact same time that the prisoners were there in the first few years and still coming in daily, or near daily, there were Kellogg Route, Dick Cheney's organization, Kellogg-Brown Route, workers being shipped in from India, the Philippines, other areas of the world that had, in fact, malaria, and that you might worry about the workers having malaria coming in.
And I put this by Shimkus, I said, well, if you're really worried, the Cubans were so worried that you had to treat everyone as if they had malaria, which is called empiric treatment by doctors, why didn't you do that to the Kellogg-Brown Route Halliburton people who were coming in?
Well, that wasn't our business.
So they really weren't concerned medically.
It was obviously a ruse.
Nothing they've said has come out.
Guantanamo is a place of lies, of silence, and sadly, as I make the point in the book, the media, for the most part, there are of course important exceptions, including in the mainstream press, and my book cites some of those, that at times reporters have tried to dig a little bit deeper.
But for the most part, Guantanamo's old business, you and me are talking about it, but for the most part, except for retailing the latest DoD release, or keeping the conversation only to things like, well, when is Obama going to close it?
Or what about the detainees returning to the battlefield if they're released?
These kind of things.
What actually happened inside of Guantanamo is almost never talked about anymore by the press.
My book is trying to change that.
Yeah.
Man, I don't want to change the subject either, but it occurs to me that Obama and the Congress have legalized it, and Trump has vowed to prosecute Americans in Guantanamo and send Americans to Guantanamo if they're accused of terrorism, which could mean anything.
This issue ain't over yet.
It's the end of one era and the beginning of another here, I think.
Well, absolutely.
No, torture is still on the table by the American government.
In fact, according to the United Nations Committee on Torture, which monitors torture practices around the world, has signed the UN's treaty known as the Convention Against Torture.
Just late in 2014, early 2015, came out with a report saying, actually, the United States is involved still under Obama in practices that amount to, quote, ill-treatment that raise concerns of torture.
And that, of course, is in the body of the Army Field Manual, which Congress, that Obama signed off on, that's really his behest, made the law of the land, saying that we're ending torture by putting into law a document that the United Nations says actually includes torture.
And with very, very few exceptions, the press has just went on and said that this is, you know, said nothing about it.
In fact, most recently, and he's done such good work in the series that he put out at The Guardian recently, was so good on the background of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on torture.
But very sadly, and he knows better, Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian let pass, you know, the question of, related the story of the signing off and the changing of the law around closing the CIA torture program and turning it over to the Army Field Manual with zero comment about the charges of torture coming from the UN and other human rights groups.
To do that is to censor by omission and leave intact an abusive interrogation program the United States still operates, and to say nothing about it and make it all appear as if this is political, right?
It's all about Bush and Cheney and the Republicans and not anything, of course, about Obama.
If you're going to criticize Obama, it's, well, he didn't close Guantanamo.
Well, the Congress was against him, there was nothing he could do, you know, which is also not true.
Well, of course, there's Guantanamo East there at Bagram Prison.
I don't know if they still have the wink-wink secret prison over the hill there at Bagram in Afghanistan or not, but they certainly did for a long time in Obama years, and really they used that to, they would rendition people who had never even been to Afghanistan in their lives to Afghanistan just because it was under the battlefield loophole for the same reason that Bush put the captives at Guantanamo in the first place, the idea that, well, they're on Cuban soil and so our courts won't be able to reach them.
Well, in practice at Bagram, that sure was true.
Absolutely, and at Bagram, and then Jeremy Scahill, who today is at the intercept, but some years ago exposed how under the Obama administration, the CIA was managing black sites that the Somalis were running for them, of course, in Somalia.
It was involving torture.
And I've shown in my investigations that, although this was really the Open Society Foundations who did the research on it initially, that the FBI themselves also were charged with torture and abuse of prisoners in their investigation of the World Cup bombings in Kampala, Uganda in 2010.
So, you know, it just continues and continues and continues.
It's really a sign of the lack of civilization or barbarism, really, in a sense, of the world we live in.
And, you know, surely punctures the pretense that the United States is somehow this golden city on a hill or something as Ronald Reagan used to call it.
Yeah, and as Hillary Clinton calls it.
Oh, does she?
Yeah, just the other day in her last big foreign policy speech.
Anyway, let's talk a little bit about the DIMs here to get back to your book because time is short and I want to make sure we get into this a little bit.
D-I-M-S, the Detainee Information Management System.
It seems kind of suspicious.
I think in the book you basically look at this as they're experimenting on these guys.
But I wonder if the simpler explanation that, well, no, there is a rule change that said that they have to take notes on every minute of every day in the life of every one of these captives in order to keep them safe and sound and make sure that they're doing the right thing under the Red Cross rules or whatever.
Wouldn't that be their excuse for keeping tabs on these guys' behaviors the way that you describe?
Well, that is something that the Department of Defense said in the initial days of setting up the DIMs, the DIMs computer system, because it came out of the very early investigations of claims of abuse that were investigated by the military themselves.
And they set up the DIMs they thought would be a more efficient way of handling and gathering evidence and documenting, that is, what was really happening with the detainees, with the guards, with staff members, so that you always would know exactly what was happening.
So therefore, it would be very highly unusual that if a detainee died, that at that moment, someone would come in from an investigatory agency such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, NCIS, and order staff to turn off this computer system, to literally shut it down.
Why would they do that?
Well, one reason they did that, I believe, of course they didn't tell me, but one reason they did that was because the information from the DIMs that came out in other investigations of detainee deaths, particularly in 2006, as Joe Hickman has explained in his book on Guantanamo and the deaths at Camp Delta in 2006, that the evidence, the DIMs would in fact be a record, and you could use that record to show up the lies of the official government record when they did nefarious things.
So for instance, I discovered that no one had even noted, not even Hickman, that in the Army's report on the deaths in 2006, that someone, in the crucial hour before the detainees were discovered dead, three of them, that a headcount, they did these random headcounts and you enter it, sort of like taking roll at school, right?
They would do a random headcount of who was, you know, everyone was there, all accounted for, they're in their cells, that a bogus headcount was done, a false headcount.
And they even note this in the official record put out by the U.S. Army on their investigation into the detainee deaths.
And an earlier headcount that was made a few hours before was made anonymously, they didn't say it was, oddly enough, we don't know who entered that headcount.
And it was just in those late evening hours that Hickman saw detainees taken away to a black site on Guantanamo, he called Camp No, others have called Strawberry Fields, and then returned to their cells.
Now if that's really what happened, then you would expect that someone would have to cover up for that in the computer DIMMS record.
And in fact, they did.
And in fact, it was noted in an official government report, but their conclusion about that was that it was insignificant, that that was an insignificant finding that within Guantanamo, this very high security setting, that someone, we don't know who because it's anonymous, they didn't sign their name to the headcount, would enter a false headcount of who was there.
Why was that done?
Of course, to cover up what was really happening.
So better to just, if weird things are happening, next time if you're DOD, or you're the kind of people who are involved in nefarious deeds, you're going to make sure that that system just isn't there.
And then it got even weirder, Scott, because I filed my Freedom of Information Act request on the death of Al-Hanashi in 2012.
I would have thought after three years, or nearly three years, that the investigation was over.
I just assumed it was done and it was time to FOIA that.
And I only found out later that, in fact, the investigation wasn't done.
It was still going on, after three years.
And that subsequent to my requesting, suddenly the computer records for DIMMS, the entire day that Al-Hanashi died, and the following day, had disappeared.
They were gone.
The document where DOD admits that is placed with the rest of all the files I got, by the way, at GuantanamoTruth.com.
GuantanamoTruth.com.
All your listeners can go and you can read all the NCIS documents.
And I'm placing some other things on there as time goes on.
And they can read the documentary record for themselves.
And now, this one, this guy really did kill himself.
This wasn't just like at Camp No, where they were murdered and spun as suicides.
Al-Hanashi?
Right.
Al-Hanashi?
Well, I do believe he probably did, although I believe it was facilitated.
What that means is, yeah, if I know you're trying to kill yourself, and you're in a lock-up psych ward, and then I give you the materials to let you kill yourself, and I turn away while you do it, that's murder.
Right?
And that's what happened in this case?
They made sure he had the materials to kill himself?
I think so.
For instance, he was wearing, he supposedly, this is pretty grisly for your listeners, I'm sure, but he supposedly was found having ripped or somehow taken the elastic band off his underwear and got that off and took it and wrapped it around his neck and twisted it and twisted it and twisted it and strangled himself to death.
That's what the Department of Defense says he did.
Except, guess what?
Those type of white cotton briefs were not standard issue at Guantanamo.
And that was mentioned on a number of occasions, including in the press and the government documents.
And he had nothing to hang himself from.
He just did it with his own hand and just twisted it and twisted it?
That's right.
Because it seems like he would at some point pass out, his hand would release its grip, and then he would be able to breathe again.
Yes, that's what you would think.
And unfortunately, they never described how he secured the cloth, how he secured the ligature.
I mean, I guess it would be possible for him to tie it in another way if he wanted to.
Tie it, turn it tight enough, and then just try to tuck it in, I suppose.
But the point being that they were responsible for him, so even if he killed himself, it was on their watch when he was supposed to be under suicide watch in a suicide-proof condition.
Yes, and he had made tons of suicide attempts just in the past weeks before he finally died.
I mean, he was clearly suicidal, and he had made many attempts at suicide.
So another observation arises, why wasn't he under closer watch?
And in fact, he was in a cell in the BHU, these cells where people can look in.
They're supposed to be either videoing you constantly and or looking in on you within every three minutes and then spending literally 30 seconds to a minute looking at you to make sure you're okay.
One of the interesting documents I saw in which they took the report of a guard said, yeah, we looked in on him every three minutes.
We would stand there and look at him for anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute.
And then you can see they crossed that out.
They said, yeah, we looked in on him and we looked at him for a few seconds.
They changed it, I guess, so they could plausibly say, well, we only looked for a few seconds and we thought he was alive, but he wasn't.
A lot easier to say that, oh, we looked in and we saw he wasn't moving and his face was purple and he was probably dead.
Because the SOP, the standard operating procedure, is to look until you see some notion that the person is alive, how they're breathing, small movements, right?
And this, not just any old prisoner, but a prisoner who had made multiple suicide attempts in the weeks and days prior to the day he died and who was in fact in a locked psychiatric hospital at Guantanamo for noted suicidal behavior.
I really want listeners to read my book and see just how much evidence there really is of terrible goings-on around the deaths of these individuals and how, in fact, this has been covered up from general knowledge by both the government and, sadly to say, you're an exception, Scott, a big exception, an important exception, but by the press.
Who don't, you know, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil of the US government isn't talking about it because, in fact, then they'd have to do something about it and they don't want to do anything about it.
Even the liberals, they would be happy if Guantanamo were shut down, the prisoners sent on their way, just as they are now.
They go to Saudi Arabia, they go to Qatar.
What's happening to them in those other countries?
Every once in a while articles leak out about just how awful it is for some of the prisoners in these other countries.
Some of them were taken and put almost immediately in prison themselves.
Well, and we only really talked about one of these and there's two more.
Yeah.
I guess if we're only able to do the one, then tell me about this incident, which I guess is a repeating thing, where this prisoner tried to tell the psychiatrist that, hey, they're torturing me.
As soon as he started to say that, the psychologist walks away and refuses to even engage with him on the subject.
What's going on there?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I can't know what was in that psychologist's mind, but this wasn't just a psychologist.
He was the chief of the behavioral health unit.
It sounds like a policy more than just a decision he made, right?
Well, I don't know if it's a policy for the unit or the prison, but it was certainly his policy, and he made that clear in his statement.
Whenever people, these detainees, because this wasn't the only time someone apparently had protested about being tortured, and he said, it's my policy to just immediately walk away.
But you know how al-Hanashi responded.
We have his own handwritten, of course it's in Arabic and translated so, but in his own writing that he was shocked when this happened, that he felt that a psychologist is supposed to be, as he put it, humanitarian.
And that I guess it means he was supposed to care.
And instead, the fact that when he complained he was being tortured, the man simply turned literally on his heel and walked away from him, led him to, he wrote, he says, I realized then that there was no solution except death.
And you would think that the doctor would at least, you would think that the psychologist would at least lie and say, well, I know for a fact that no one's being tortured, so if somebody says that, they're lying and trying to manipulate me or some kind of crap like that.
Instead, just on the face of it, it sounds like, I'm trying to maintain deniability, so don't tell me any details.
Well, I think they just become morally numb, Scott.
You're working in a site where people are held in indefinite detention, which is a form of torture already and breaks people down.
You know for a fact that terrible things are happening.
You'd have to be insane not to know.
And I've seen, you know, Steve Miles made this point about, you know, he said, where were the doctors at Abu Ghraib, right?
You've got to know, you've got to see people coming in, and you can tell that they are anguished or they've got scars on their head.
In fact, al-Hanashi had multiple scars all over his body and his head, that they are injured, that they are pepper sprayed, that they were, you know, had so-called water treatment, forms of waterboard, you know, having hoses stuck down their throats and turned on.
In Guantanamo, I've documented this.
Well, and kept awake for weeks.
Yeah, that's right, kept awake for weeks, moved from cell to cell.
One of the people I talk about in the book, we obviously don't have a lot of time to talk about here, was Adnan Latif, a young man who was tortured and finally killed himself, if indeed he did kill himself, but seemingly OD'd or was given the drugs to kill himself in Guantanamo, had been moved from cell, you know, never stayed in the same place twice for longer than maybe a couple of weeks, for 10 years, for 10 years.
You could never settle down and call a place your own.
And this while held, not knowing what in the world would ever happen to you, no access to an attorney, right?
Well, actually Latif did have access to an attorney, but the other two did not.
People can check the archives, by the way, because I've actually interviewed Jason Leopold all about that case.
I may have talked with you about him.
He did a lot of good work.
He really was the primary reporter, I'd say.
That's in the archives at scotthorton.org if anybody wants to check on it.
Listen, I'm sorry to stop you here.
Let's follow up.
We can do a whole other interview about the other half of the book if you want.
Sure.
Let's do that.
But everyone, please go and check out Jeff Kaye's new book.
It's called Cover Up at Guantanamo, The NCIS Investigation into the Suicides of Muhammad Al-Hanashi and Abdulrahman Al-Amri.
And check out guantanamotruth.com, where he has all the FOIA documents that he based this work on.
Great journalism as always, Jeff.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
All right, y'all, and that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.