Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
Jeff Deist and all them, Mises Institute, are having me out to give a talk about media stuff.
And that's November the 3rd down there in Lake Jackson.
If you like Ron Paul events and you're nearby, I'll see you there.
Sorry I'm late!
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR!
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
They're with us.
They're with us.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been put with.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, we're killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Thank you very much.
Good to see you.
Thank you very much.
How are you?
All right, you guys, introducing Joe Margulies.
He wrote this very important article at the New York Review of Books.
It's called The Innocence of Abu Zubaydah.
And I was actually just writing about him yesterday for my next book that I'm working on about the terror wars, right when I saw this article.
We're running it on antiwar.com today.
And you are his lawyer, correct?
From the show.
Thanks.
Good to be here.
Yes, I am one of his lawyers, yeah.
And so I think to try to refresh people's memory, because this goes back to the Bush administration years, although it's still a situation, obviously, that continues.
But Bush invoked Abu Zubaydah's name at least a few times publicly to justify the abuses of the torture regime once the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and came out.
And maybe he had even invoked him before that for just the successes of the terror war, and claimed that he was one of the major leaders of al-Qaeda.
And there's an anecdote in, it's not mentioned in your article here, but I believe it was Ron Suskind, the journalist, who wrote about a situation where George Tenet, the head of the CIA, told George Bush that, hey, we were kind of wrong about that, sorry about that, but it turns out that actually that's really not true.
And that Bush said, you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you, George?
Because he had invested so much in citing Abu Zubaydah as though he was bin Laden himself, as though he was some great success.
And now you write this article here where, you know, this has been known, but you put such clarity to this, of just what Abu Zubaydah's role was in Afghanistan, what he did and did not have to do with Osama bin Laden, and the truth of all of that.
So could you please give us the rundown for those who aren't too familiar?
Sure.
Although I have to say, that was pretty astonishing, like in 45 seconds you just encapsulated the whole sad saga.
That's pretty impressive.
Not many people can do that.
Abu Zubaydah was the first person cast into the CIA black site.
He was arrested in a raid jointly conducted by Pakistani and U.S. forces on March 28th of 2002.
And at the time, it appears as though this was in good faith.
At the time, the Bush administration thought he was a very, very high-ranking person in al-Qaeda with a prominent role in al-Qaeda operations.
So they initially believed that he was a prominent figure in al-Qaeda.
He was variously represented as the third man in al-Qaeda, et cetera, and the head of their counterintelligence operations, et cetera, involved in all their prior plots, and so forth.
It turned out that that was simply mistaken.
The person he was was a mujahid who had been wounded in conflict with the puppet government installed by the Soviets in 1992.
He still has shrapnel lodged in his brain.
And after that, he lost the ability, really, to be a soldier.
He doesn't have the mental or physical ability because of the injury that he suffered, the head injury that he suffered.
And he became a kind of travel agent for a camp in Afghanistan called Khaldun.
He was responsible for bringing people into Pakistan and funneling them to the camp in Khaldun.
But Khaldun was ideologically opposed to al-Qaeda.
In fact, it was closed at the direction of Osama bin Laden by the Taliban in 2000, precisely because it was opposed to al-Qaeda.
He does not believe ...
He believes that 9-11 was contrary to Islam.
He believes, for instance, that ISIS is a gross, gross deviation from Islam and its behavior.
But they didn't know that at the time they were torturing him, or at least it appears they didn't know it.
And they kept torturing him because his protestations of ignorance about al-Qaeda's operations were taken as evidence that they weren't using aggressive enough techniques.
And so they kept ratcheting up the torture that was used, eventually culminating in the enhanced interrogation techniques that we know so much about.
Mm-hmm.
And now, so I guess part of the story, too, and you mentioned this here, was that because of his injuries and capabilities and this kind of thing, that he was sort of reduced to coordinating travel plans and including from people who were directly maybe al-Qaeda guys, too, and people directly related to al-Qaeda, people, their wives and children, to come and visit, this kind of thing.
Is that right?
Oh, no.
Or that much is embellished, too?
No, no, yes, that's right.
There are some people who went to Khaldun who, after they left Khaldun, became involved with al-Qaeda.
But in fact, at one point, if they were al-Qaeda, when they came to Khaldun, they were asked to leave.
And if they wanted to be al-Qaeda, when they contacted him in Pakistan, he wouldn't send them to Khaldun.
So what they did after they left Khaldun is one thing, but not within his control.
But so in other words, the stories then that he was sort of a travel agent helping to arrange and facilitate travel of people to Afghanistan, that was still only to his camp.
It's only when you conflate his camp with Osama's camps that it becomes he's facilitating travel for al-Qaeda members.
Is that right?
That's correct.
That's exactly right.
And in fact, there were a group from Morocco, as I recall, that was involved in operations that were affiliated with or sympathetic to al-Qaeda, and they wanted to come to Khaldun, and he wouldn't let them.
They were very clear, Khaldun was a very distinct camp.
And the government now recognizes this.
The former emir of the camp was a guy named Nur Uthman Mohamed, who was arrested the same time as Abu Zubaydah.
He's been released.
He actually trained people at the camp, hundreds of people.
And he's home.
He was released about five years ago.
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So now at this point, this man that we're talking about, we're going to get back to the torture in just one second.
But just to make this current day, he's now Guantanamo Bay.
And is he being tried in the military system or he's on the list of people to be held but never tried?
The latter.
He's never been charged.
As far as we can tell, he never will be charged.
We have demanded that he be charged either in military or civilian court.
There's never been any charges filed.
And we don't anticipate there will be.
All right.
Now here's the thing.
If he was the one who, you know, parachuted out the last second but otherwise had done the September 11th attack himself, it's hard to imagine that he would have deserved the tortures that they put him through.
And this is according to, as you say, for example, the Senate torture report, I guess various other legal documents and inspector general investigations and everything else.
Please tell us, what was it that the CIA did to this man?
Well, there's a long litany and of course, contrary to what they represented, began with waterboarding.
It's worth stopping for a second and talking about that.
We toss around that word so casually now and it's so often linked to, quote, simulated drowning that people get a mistaken impression of it.
There's nothing stimulated about it.
He's strapped down to a board, his feet are higher than his head, his head is lowered under his, beneath his neck that is tilted back, a cloth or a plastic is wrapped around his head so he can't, wrapped around his face so he can't breathe, and water is poured up his nose and down his throat in a steady stream and he begins to breathe the water.
There's no alternative.
There's no choice.
You begin to breathe the water and therefore you begin to drown.
And then as he strains against the straps that are attached at his legs and his ankles and his waist and arms and hands and shoulders and chest and head, so he's absolutely immobile, he begins to gasp and drown.
And just at the second that he believes he's going to die, your brain convinces yourself you're going to die, that's when the board is raised up to 90 degrees, the person of his abator wretches out the water and whatever else is in their stomach, you vomit and gasp, and when you first get your first breath of air, that's when you're lowered again and it's repeated.
And that was done to him 83 times, that we know of, 83 times in the month of August 2002 alone.
And that's just the waterboarding.
He was also kept awake for seven consecutive days and nights.
And the thing about keeping someone awake, the body cannot physically stay awake that long.
As soon as you leave it alone, it will collapse into sleep.
And so the only way you can keep a body awake that long is to do what they did, which is basically, not basically, they suspended him from hooks in the ceiling and left him dangling there, and when he would drift off into sleep, you'd spray him with cold water.
He was held in a freezing cold room for weeks at a time.
That's another way to keep him awake, you can't sleep in those conditions, bombard him with noise, force him into cramped conditions.
We actually know the size of the boxes that he was, because they chronicled this in meticulous detail, we know the size of the two boxes that he was crammed into.
One was the rough shape of a coffin, just wide enough for his shoulders and just high enough for his body, and strapped in that for something like 180 hours in the course of his torture, with towels wrapped around it to block the flow of air, and left there to urinate and defecate on himself.
And another was called a dog box, and it occupies about the space underneath a dining room chair.
If you can imagine the space under a chair, and he was crammed into that for hours at a time, and of course then closed up with the towels wrapped around it, and just left there.
And then of course there was the more routine quotidian physical violence, the hand slapping, the shaking, the walling.
Walling is something where they would take a towel and wrap it around his neck and hold on to both ends, and whip him into the walls.
You just sort of whirl him into the wall, so he would slam against the wall.
And of course he's shackled, so he can't protect himself, he can't defend himself.
His head would bang into the wall.
And that went on for more or less 24 hours a day for about three weeks.
That was the most intense period.
The whole period of torture lasted for months, but the most intense period was this 24 hour a day savagery that lasted for approximately three weeks.
And then this also included the dry firing of guns next to his head and insects.
Was that him?
No, that was ... the insects I can't speak to, but the dry firing, the mock execution was Abdul Rahim al-Mashiri, who was the suspect.
He was also held in a black site, also in Thailand, came to Thailand after Abu Zubaydah.
That's when they put a gun to your head and then click, ha ha, you thought we were going to shoot you.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then you can't speak to the insects?
Why not?
Wasn't that him?
Wasn't that Zubaydah?
You know, I would be happy to.
I can only tell you that which is cleared for public information.
Confirmation of the insects has never been cleared for public information, so I cannot confirm or deny that.
I understand.
Everything else that I've told you is part of the public record, everything else is, but that's not.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I don't remember my footnotes anymore.
I could have sworn it was, but it's been a long time since I've read it.
It's hard to get it straight.
It's hard to ...
I know.
Okay.
Can't speak to the insects.
All right.
And then now, I'm glad that you say what you mentioned about the simulated drowning there, that kind of catchphrase about the waterboarding.
There have been a few kind of replications of waterboarding.
Christopher Hitchens was brave enough to admit that that is torture, that is way over the line when they did it to him.
But I've seen it, kind of tough guy, army guy saying, oh yeah, look, this is all it is.
It's no big deal, this and that.
And I saw one, a famous one on YouTube with millions of views, where they have six or seven layers of towels over the guy's face, where the water isn't even getting in, really at all.
It's basically a hoax, but to try to drive home this kind of point that AM radio audiences are supposed to swallow, that, come on, this isn't really anything.
It's just getting them wet, a little dunk in the water, as one radio host said to Dick Cheney, who laughed and agreed, that this is perfectly fine.
And as you're saying, and in fact, this was in, I forget, the Red Cross reporter, one of these from 08, something like that, about the death spiral, that's what the doctors called it.
They have the oxygen sensors on their fingers, and they would drown him until he's in the death spiral, until he's actually dying, and then basically bring him back to life with the slug in the gut, and make him puke up all the water and catch his breath again, like you're saying.
But in other words, the most brutal way that you could imagine that same thing, that was really the way it was.
You know, and moreover, all these folks who do it in order to demonstrate it's not so bad, they know that it's a demonstration.
They know that the person on the other end pouring the water will stop if things go south.
The whole point of Abu Zubaydah's interrogation was to convince him, and he was convinced, they made this very clear to him, they were not going to stop.
This was not simply an exercise.
They were prepared to let him die.
That's why it is significant that, in fact, they had made plans, this is part of the record, they had made plans about what to do with him if he died during the interrogation.
We have those cables from the CIA.
Have we made plans about what we're going to do if Abu Zubaydah dies during the interrogation?
So the whole thing you're communicating to him is that this is not a drill.
We're not taking precautions in order to protect you from long-term harm.
And in fact, on one of the occasions where they had him strapped down, they left him there a little bit too long.
And when they brought him up, he was perilously close to dying, or having died, and had to be revived by the medics who were there, which is why the medics who were there were objecting to it.
So likening it to these other mock exercises that were done is trivial in the extreme.
Trivial.
Well, now, so there's a situation that we find a lot of times in the media in America whenever the cops kill somebody, black or white or anything else, and that is, I think it was the New York Times specific language about Mike Brown in Ferguson, was, well, he was no angel.
And so that's really a big part of your article here, too, is whether Zubaydah was innocent, Hollywood innocent, whether he was just some guy completely caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, or whether he looked enough like bin Laden that maybe some of this is okay and this kind of thing.
And you try to really take that on and say, let him be as guilty as he actually is of whatever it is he supposedly did, which makes him no angel.
But what about his human rights anyway?
How about that?
Yes.
And look, there is this tendency to see things in these Hollywood characterizations of black and white, and things are almost always more gray.
The fact is, he was this travel agent for a camp that was vehemently opposed to everything Al Qaeda stood for.
But he was not just some sort of Joe Schmoe off the street who happened to be a tourist from Muncie, Indiana, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And if people think that what he did is a crime, come on, we'll see you in court.
And that's why he's not, quote, Hollywood innocent.
But he didn't do anything that justifies A, what was done to him, or constitutes a crime.
And this fixation on the only category of innocence that matters, the only category of behavior that makes it utterly unjustifiable is he was just wrong place, wrong time, is really idiotic.
He had this role in Calvin, which was not an Al Qaeda facility.
It was closed by Al Qaeda.
He's opposed to Al Qaeda.
He has said that from the very beginning.
They no longer maintain that.
They admit that they were mistaken in this regard.
And if you think that makes him such a bad guy, that the United States has the right to savage him, well, then we just disagree.
Yeah.
Well, and now, so here's the real bottom line, too, is that there really is no hint of progress.
I mean, you and I are having this conversation far in the future, in the year 2018, when this should have been resolved a long time ago.
And you're writing this article in the New York Review of Books because, as you put it here, he's on the list of people to just be held indefinitely without even charges in the frankly bogus Guantanamo military court system down there with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the guy that you mentioned with the dry firing there, I forget his name, from the coup d'etat.
Al-Nashiri.
Yeah, Al-Nashiri.
Right.
So what's going to, I mean, is there any power, one powerful senator on your side?
Is there any news to report here?
I am not a fan.
I do not put my faith in the American political system.
I think that that's the most charitable way to put it.
At this point in our history, one ought not put faith in the American political system.
It's hard to take a candid look at events in Washington, D.C. now and come away with a different conclusion.
Well, I mean, but is there anybody left to sue in court, either?
I mean, in other words, the civilian courts have already ruled on enough of these issues that — what, did he get a chance at a writ of habeas corpus there for a minute after Hamdan or not?
We have a petition pending, and we have had motions pending for years, and they have not been acted on.
We have claims — right, so we have invoked the courts.
The courts have been thoroughly emasculated by the decisions by the D.C.
Circuit, but we are litigating nonetheless because we will go to the venues that are available to us.
But no, these are exceedingly dark times, if you believe in the rule of law in the United States.
Exceedingly.
Exceedingly.
Will it always be that way?
I don't know.
I guess it depends on how pessimistic you are.
But it's hard to look at it now and say, oh, this is glass half-full, glass half-empty.
This glass is pretty damn near empty.
Yeah.
Well, but, yeah, I mean, never mind having faith in any of it or whatever, but just technically speaking, you do have current petitions on file.
There are still, you know, things to be done.
It's not completely over yet.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And even if the court denied it, and they said, no, we have a right to keep holding them, et cetera, we will continue to speak in the court of public opinion.
That's why I write what I write.
And I think, the way I think about it is this.
Look, you may have his body, but you don't have his mind.
And you don't have his soul.
And if he can't speak, then I will speak for him.
And I will go where I'm allowed to speak, within the limits.
I don't say anything that hasn't been cleared.
And I will do my best to make sure that there are no disappeared in American life.
And right now, what their hope is, is that Abu Zubaydah will just disappear and be forgotten.
And it is my job to make sure that that doesn't happen.
And if I can't do that in court, I'll do that where I can.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, great work.
Thank you, Joe.
Appreciate it very much.
Not at all, Scott.
Take care.
All right, you guys.
That's Joseph Margulies.
He's in the New York Review of Books, The Innocence of Abu Zubaydah.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Go to libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
