07/13/10 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, third hour anti-war radio for today.
Our next guest is Andy Worthington, he's the author of The Guantanamo Files and is the director, I guess you'd call it, of the movie Outside the Law.
Isn't that what it's called?
I still haven't seen it, Andy, welcome back to the show.
Hi Scott, how you doing?
I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me.
That's what it's called, right?
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, yeah.
Outside the Law, stories from Guantanamo.
Stories from Guantanamo.
Alright, cool.
So, welcome back to the show, I'm happy to have you here.
And I'm looking at what's called Guantanamo, the definitive prisoner list, updated for summer 2010.
And now this whole thing is full of live links to all the previous work that you've done on this subject, etc.
So what is it that you've updated?
What's new with the list?
I've just added all the most recent information.
I first published this list of all the prisoners with references to where you can find out more information about them last March, and then I updated it again in January this year with the latest information.
So what it includes is the latest information about prisoners who've been released, about prisoners who've had their habeas corpus petitions before the district court, you know, various other background information, that kind of stuff.
I mean, I'm sad to say, Scott, that we haven't had an enormous number of prisoners released during the last six months, just 17 altogether, which is, you know, it's not a lot of people really when there's 181 people still there, and the majority of those are people that the administration itself has said is prepared to release.
Well, you know, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was on the show two weeks ago, I guess, and what he said was that just even the fact that in 2006, I think it was, correct me if I'm wrong, George Bush went ahead and at least closed down the black sites that he admitted existed and brought Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others to Guantanamo, according to Colonel Wilkerson, this alone put the lie to the idea that anybody at Guantanamo was really a terrorist, other than maybe that guy Catani, who didn't even know what his assignment was when he got here anyway.
And that, you know, look, anybody who was actually a high-value person, or they even mistakenly thought was a high-value person, like Abu Zubaydah or something, they were in former Soviet torture dungeons or underground, deep underground in Thailand somewhere, not at Guantanamo.
Guantanamo was full of the people who had bags over their heads for, you know, strictly PR reasons.
Yeah, well, I mean, they certainly, you know, they certainly siphoned off, you know, dozens of people that they thought were significantly, extremely significant in some way or another.
And of course, most of them turned out not to be either, and didn't hold them at Guantanamo.
But I think, you know, I think that was an ongoing process.
And I would say that when the place opened in January 2002, you know, and the first people turned up, and then over the next six months, it built up to about 600 at that point.
I think there were plenty of people even in those early days who thought, we don't quite know who these guys are yet, but we're going to find out that there's some real bad guys amongst them.
You know, the whole thing was kind of topsy-turvy, really, if you think about it from a kind of detective point of view, you kind of know who you're going for, and you try and get them.
Whereas this was, let's round a load of people up and then see if we can find out whether they're still, see if we can demonstrate then that they are significant, even though, you know, the incredibly random way that it was done, random and stupid way that it was done, meant that these people weren't.
And I think we've probably discussed before, Scott, you know, what I find really distressing about that is that when these guys, you know, these missionaries, or these humanitarian aid workers, or, you know, the worst of the worst in Guantanamo, really, are guys who were fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, for the most part, or the completely innocent people who were picked up in Pakistan, the Afghans who were goat herders and farmers and taxi drivers, you know, all of these guys, when they didn't come up with the information that they wanted to come up with, there were people in the administration saying, the reason is that these guys have been trained to resist interrogation by al-Qaeda.
You know, we have to get heavy on them.
And, you know, and part of the rationale for introducing torture was to break people who they thought were resistant to interrogation, whereas the truth was that they knew nothing in the first place.
They never knew anything.
That's pretty distressing, you know.
I mean, introducing torture is a no-no at all.
It's not a good thing to do.
You don't need to do it.
It doesn't work.
People will tell you what they want to hear.
But to end up in a situation where you're doing it because you've got an innocent man, and you think that he's only pretending to be innocent, is, you know, that's witch-hunt stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Tie a rock to his chest.
If he can swim, then we know he's a witch or a warlock, and we'll lynch him.
But if he sinks, then he dies a good Christian death, and we were wrong.
Sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, cool.
Well, you know, it's funny, too, that, or it's not funny, but it's important to note, I guess, that, as you alluded to there, and as Colonel Wilkerson said on the show, as others, Scott Horton has talked about on the show numerous times, the American military already had a system for battlefield hearings to figure out who's who, and they've had it for more than a century, and it more or less works, and Don Rumsfeld threw it away and said, let's just take whoever we can buy.
Yeah, exactly.
And let's face it, as well, because, you know, you know, and people who look at my work will know what I say, which is that I'm not saying that everybody who was captured was innocent.
You know, the ineptitude and the bounty payment wasn't 100%, but I would categorically say to this day that, you know, somewhere around half of the people had nothing to do with anything.
Of the other half, you know, I've always maintained some of these guys, you know, quite a lot of these guys were fighting the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.
Some of them were happy when that fight turned into a fight against the Americans.
Yes, they trained in places that had, you know, some Al-Qaeda involvement.
They will have watched lectures given by Osama bin Laden about jihad, maybe.
But you know, the majority of these people were not the terrorists that we've been led to believe this place was for.
And you know, and now, nearly nine years on from the 9-11 attacks, you know, it's still a big problem to me that this confusion at the heart of the war on terror is still there.
The soldiers in a military context in Afghanistan back in 2001, 2002, are being equated with terrorists, with the guys who, you know, did those terrible terrorist attacks on September 11th.
And you know, they're not the same.
They are really not the same thing at all.
And a military conflict in Afghanistan is not the same thing as a terrorist attack on the United States, which is a criminal enterprise.
Yeah.
Well, and even here, Attorney General Holder says he wants to give civilian trials to the guys who actually, you know, deserve to be hung, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And yet, they convicted just the other day, and boy, it was all trumpets blaring on the top of the hour news here, I'll tell you what, that they convicted some guy who used to be Osama bin Laden's cook way back in the day.
Yeah.
What?
In a military, in a trial by military commission.
Yeah.
Guantanamo Bay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you know, you notice that the way that they did that was that they got a plea deal.
They didn't decide that they were going to go ahead and do this through a trial.
You know, we're going to see more of this.
You know, they don't actually have the courage or the conviction to push these military commissions as far as they'll go.
They're going to try and do as many of them by deals as possible.
That will then make it look as though they've got results, but without having to bother with the awkward details, you know, because their heart isn't in it, frankly, I think, Scott, you know, this was a this was a system that when it was first dragged out of the history books, I mean, it had been used against German saboteurs in World War Two.
That was the last time the commissions have been used.
You know, and Dick Cheney and David Addington, you know, worked out, hey, this would be a good idea for how we can how we can have kangaroo courts for the for the terrorists is that, you know, we can we can use evidence obtained through torture.
We can rig the system so that we're guaranteed convictions.
You know, they wanted quick, quick, biased trials and executions.
And boy, they didn't get that.
You know, what they got was a system that that actually, you know, it was full of holes from the beginning and it stumbled along for a couple of years.
And then the Supreme Court said this is this is an unconstitutional insult, you know, and then Congress was persuaded to bring them back again, you know, and it looks good on Obama's birthday when he suspended the Commission, you know, I thought, OK, he's got it.
All right.
Hold it right there, Andy.
Hold it right there.
We'll get to Obama's role in this when we get back, you know, Andy Worthington, that CEO that UK.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest Liberty oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN dot FM.
All right, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio.
Thanks for listening.
Talking with Andy Worthington, he writes for the Future Freedom Foundation for anti-war dot com at his own blog, Andy Worthington dot co dot UK, I think at the Huffington Post, too.
Right, Andy?
Yeah.
And he's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, and the director of the documentary Outside the Law.
And both of them are available.
So go and spend your money on them.
I think, Andy, honestly, that this entire society owes you a debt of gratitude for doing our work for us.
It should have been an American, at least, if not a team of them doing this work.
But instead, it was left up to you.
And and you've done, you know, the authoritative study of Guantanamo and who's there and the history of all these cases and what's known about these people.
And it's really magnificent stuff.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Scott.
You know, I end up feeling that I'm some kind of expat, but I'm not American in the first place.
No, you're just picking up our slack.
You know, it's a shame that you have to, but I appreciate that you do.
All right.
Now, OK, so I'm looking at two important pieces here.
Guantanamo, the definitive prisoner list updated for summer 2010 and also just out the Guantanamo Files, an archive of articles, part six, January to June 2010.
And that's part of what I'm getting at with the authoritative sourcing here is that it's also well organized.
I mean, for hundreds of years in the future, assuming mankind makes it, they will be referring to this as the definitive history of what happened here, a major part of it.
Now, part of the reason I think you talked about the minimum number of people who have been released and yet there have been how many habeas corpus hearings where the judges have ordered these men to be released and why aren't they being released?
Well, they are being released in some cases because they're Yemenis.
I mean, in some cases it's because the government's appealing.
I mean, today, the government actually won in the Court of Appeals.
The Court of Appeals reversed a habeas decision from last August in which Judge Gladys Kessler said that this Yemeni guy, the government had no case and the Court of Appeals has reversed it today.
I haven't read it all yet, but you know, what people need to know is the main judge is Judge Randolph.
I don't know whether listeners know his name, but Judge Randolph in the Court of Appeals represents, you know, one of the, frankly, pretty right wing judges that make up a pretty right wing court.
He actually approved all of the Bush era nonsense relating to Guantanamo and prisoners that was eventually overruled by the Supreme Court.
So he's one of the people sitting in the Court of Appeals reviewing these habeas rulings that have been made by the judges in the district court who, you know, have ruled for the prisoners in 37 out of 51 cases to date.
And they just reversed it.
I mean, you know, this is a guy called Mohammed al-Adahi who had had an office job in Yemen for 20 years or something.
He took his daughter, I think, or his sister to be married to somebody who I think was, was, you know, I think it's pretty clearly established that the person that she was marrying was somehow involved in the Taliban with connections to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But, you know, a woman's not allowed to travel alone in Yemeni society.
So he took her out there.
And in the meantime, you know, he fires a gun at a training camp.
He gets he gets expelled from the training camp for not behaving as they wanted him to.
You know, he basically takes a little holiday to take to take this relative to get married to somebody who may, for all we know, be a bad guy, you know, and then as he tries to leave the country, he's actually arrested in Pakistan on a bus, you know, and then and then afterwards in U.S. custody, they dig up all this story.
Well, you know, I'm sorry, but this is guilt by family.
I mean, this this guy was not a member of al-Qaeda.
He had nothing to do with any of this stuff.
He just took his relative to be married.
The Court of Appeals has overturned it.
You know, they just said, no, no, no.
What he did demonstrated that he was involved in the apparatus of al-Qaeda.
You know what I mean?
What are we doing here?
Yeah, well, what we're doing is we're going after nobodies and cooks and drivers and people who if you play the Kevin Bacon game with your supercomputer long enough, you can connect them to somebody else who, you know, guilt by association nonsense.
And but in the meantime, you know, this innocent student that we spoke about the last time who was in a guest house and who everybody has conceded had nothing to do with anything is still there.
Well, I want to ask you about the Yemen thing.
You're saying if they're from Yemen and the courts have said and these are, I guess, habeas petitions that have not been appealed or are not just awaiting a higher court ruling, but they fall under the category of prisoners from Yemen who may never go home because they're from Yemen.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the thing is that I know that in the administration they're now discussing this because they put this moratorium in place in January after a Nigerian who tried to blow up a plane was allegedly trained in Yemen.
And so everybody agreed that just being a Yemeni was sufficient to tie you with the association of terrorism.
So, you know, the president said, OK, we're not releasing anybody for the foreseeable future.
That was six months ago.
Now, you know what?
We know what's been happening because we've had good reports on it over the last few weeks is that, you know, the administration have been told you are going to keep losing cases in the district court of these habeas petitions of Yemenis because the administration's own task force has already concluded in loads of the cases of these men.
There is no evidence to hold them, but because of the moratorium, they're not releasing them.
So the insane thing that is happening now, Scott, is that the Justice Department is putting forward cases to the district court going ahead with cases which they put a hold on because the task force had said we're going to release them.
Now that there's a moratorium in place, they can't stop some of the habeas petitions going ahead.
So they're going to a judge and trying to defend the detention of somebody that another part of the administration has already concluded.
There is no reason to hold.
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alice in Wonderland is that.
Yeah, well, and it gets worse because the headline this morning is about the military commission of Omar Khadr.
I mean, they're really going after the big fish here.
Tell us very quickly about Omar Khadr.
Well, Omar's a 15 year old Canadian, 15 when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan.
There are claims that he threw a grenade that killed an American soldier.
There are also claims that he was facedown unconscious under a pile of rubble at the time the grenade was thrown.
You know, he's a kid, so he should not be prosecuted.
You know, the the he's kept on trying to put him on trial for years, you know, and this poor kid who is now essentially a child trapped in a man's body.
I mean, he's 23, but he was 15 when he was the you know, he the only thing that he can do, the only power that he has in this powerlessness, powerlessness of his is to stack his lawyers.
He's just stacked his lawyers again.
He just says, I don't think anybody's going to give me any kind of justice.
And they're trying to go ahead with his trial starting in a couple of weeks.
You know, the third time that they've tried to have a trial by military commission for this guy who, you know, we've spoken about this before.
He was engaging in warfare in a war situation.
So what is this nonsense about him being a terrorist anyway?
You know, now this is a story that doesn't just involve the U.S. government and their decision to do what they've done to this child in their custody.
But it also does involve the Canadian government persistently washing the hands of them.
And, you know, I'm still hoping that some deal will be reached to get him home.
Yeah, well, don't hold your breath, but to keep writing about it, Andy, we're counting on you, bud.
Thank you, everybody.
That's the great Andy Worthington.
Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.