Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, I'm in Santa Award Radio, I'm Scott Horton and uh, I don't know man, if it's just because I was raised on Star Wars the way I was or what, but I got a lot of heroes and well, geez, my job is getting heroes on the phone all day, so I guess it's not that much of a surprise, but uh, anyway, one of them is Andy Worthington, his website is AndyWorthington.co.uk and he's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, the stories of 759 detainees in America's illegal prison and uh, he also made a movie called Outside the Law, stories from Guantanamo, which I still haven't had a copy of yet, after more than a year or something, my head's gonna explode.
Welcome back to the show Andy, how are you doing?
I'm alright Scott, apart from feeling slightly guilty that I haven't got a copy of the film to you yet, but yeah, I'm good.
For uh, for uh, somebody, one of these guys' sakes, uh, give me a freaking DVD man, I wanna watch it.
I don't do that.
You pick, you pick your innocent Guantanamo prisoner for whose sake, we'll, we'll name that in.
Uh, alright, anyway, uh, so the reason I always turn to you Andy, as uh, many people in the audience know, is because there are no Americans who did the work, that was why a Brit had to step in and say, alright, that's it, I mean, not that you're not an individual or anything, but you live way over there on the other side of the ocean, and uh, so Andy, basically everybody, he had to say, alright, that's it, I guess I'll have to do the work then, and he did the work, and he profiled every single prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, with every single fact he could possibly find about them, and he now has this update, which is incredibly important, uh, I'm not sure where all it ran, but I know that you can find it at AndyWorthington.co.uk, I should mention, you can find Andy at the Future of Freedom Foundation site, FFF.org, of course at Antiwar.com, uh, I believe at Truthout, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Uh, and a couple other places, name them if you want there.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm working for, um, Caged Prisoners here in the UK, which is, um, headed up by Mozambique, former Guantanamo prisoner, um, and it's in conjunction with them that I'm doing this eight-part list at the moment that you, um, just mentioned there, of the stories of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo, that's 174 men, um, as we speak.
All right, now, uh, I don't know if this was really exactly the way you English people called it, uh, it's certainly a tradition that we've abandoned here, uh, the whole innocent until proven guilty thing, so I was wondering if you could tell us, are there any of these men that you presume are guilty?
Uh, perhaps, uh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Qatani, uh, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, how many actual friends of Zawahiri are locked up in that place at all, Andy, do you know?
Well, I don't know, obviously, um, you know, because it's, it's not possible, I don't think, really, to ascertain, um, what people, um, actually may have done, um, until it goes in front of some independent arbiter, um, and the closest that we've got to that, really, is the, uh, is the district court, um, in Washington, D.C., where judges have been going through these men's habeas corpus petitions for the last two years, um, but, you know, even there, where they've, uh, said in three-quarters of the cases, it's just about that they've come across that the government has failed to establish, um, its supposed evidence, um, there's a fight back going on in the D.C.
Circuit Court now, the government appealing these and coming up against a bunch of, um, a bunch of judges who, um, you could imagine sitting down for dinner with Dick Cheney any day of the week, um, who, uh, believe that it doesn't, that the government shouldn't really require much of the way of evidence to continue detaining people without charge or trial at Guantanamo, um, but to, to speculate from what we know of the stories of the prisoners as they've been presented, then, yeah, you know, there were fourteen high-value detainees who were moved into Guantanamo from secret CIA prisons, um, in September 2006, and those include the people that we can routinely describe as the genuine bad guys, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who were on record as, um, boasting of their involvement in the 9-11 plot before they were seized, um, and some other men, um, you know, who may also fit this description, although I'm not entirely convinced that all fourteen, um, are people, um, who they're supposed to be, um, and one of them in particular, Abu Zubaydah, who was, um, described as al-Qaeda's number three, the CIA torture program was developed for him in 2002, and it turns out that he was actually the mentally damaged gatekeeper for a training camp in Afghanistan that had little to do with al-Qaeda.
Uh-huh.
All right, well, now, hold on a second there, because there's a couple things.
First of all, isn't it the case that at a habeas corpus hearing in one of these federal courts as mandated by the Supreme Court, these guys get one shot, that's still, uh, just about the lowest standard of evidence possible, you know, basically equivalent to, does the cop have the right to open your trunk if he feels like it, or something, right?
This is, you know, the burden of proof is on them, or at least the burden on the state to show that there's a reason to believe that they want to keep holding this person is the most minimal kind of standard of evidence, right?
Not like a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt or anything.
No, the basis is very low.
Um, I mean, as in fact, um, a lawyer friend of mine, uh, told me the other day, um, it only determines whether there's probable cause for detaining someone, not that the person has actually done anything wrong.
Okay.
That's how low the standard of evidence is.
Right, and so that's the whole thing, is that they barely have to prove to the judge anything, and yet they continue to fail, and that's the Bush and now the Obama Justice Departments continue to fail to make their case that they have any reason whatsoever to keep these people, mostly.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
Um, you know, and, and, you know, there's a good reason for that, obviously, which is that, you know, what purports to be the evidence in so many cases is actually, you know, um, information that was derived through the torture of the prisoners or other prisoners, um, or multiple levels of hearsay that, you know, that nobody's standing back objectively from it can really credit because, um, it's just too vague, it's too vague, and it's too unreliable.
And the other thing, this is more of just an assertion rather than a question, although you can comment on it however you like, but Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was basically Smithers to Colin Powell, no offense, Larry, he's a good guy now, and he's repented in a very sincere way, and, you know, I think redeemed himself quite well since the bad old days of 2003.
But anyway, he completely concurred with what you just said and said that, look, the fact that they closed down at least some of the secret prisons and brought actual Al-Qaeda guys to Guantanamo Bay was basically, that's all you needed to know to prove to you that the guys who were already at Guantanamo were nobodies, that that whole thing was a big PR show to keep everybody scared of orange jumpsuits and orange alerts and, you know, to keep our minds in a state of fear for the Iraq war when anybody who was, you know, Ramzi bin al-Sheib or something was being tortured in a dungeon deep underground in Thailand somewhere.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, definitely, you know, that's partly true.
I mean, I think it wasn't just meant to be a sideshow.
I mean, it also demonstrates, I think, to put it bluntly, the arrogance and stupidity of the Bush administration, that they were propelled by their presumption of the guilt of the people that they were capturing, rather than analyzing it and working out that if you are working with unreliable warlords, if you are handing out colossal amounts of money, if you are working with and supposed to be trusting the Pakistani government and the men that are coming into your custody, you're being told these are all these Al-Qaeda and Taliban guys, then you ought to be thinking twice about whether there's any truth to that.
But their presumption was not.
Their presumption was that they were behaving in the kind of macho way that was required in this war on terror, and that the traditional safeguards and checks on whether you were actually capturing people that you needed to or not, were unnecessary.
Yeah.
Well, that was the thing, right?
They already had, the military already had a battlefield process for determining who was who, and they completely abandoned that, put hoods on everybody and just shipped them off.
Yeah, exactly.
By the time the guards of Guantanamo, they're all 19 or whatever, have a brain full of whatever their football coach told them, they don't know, they show up and here comes a plane full of terrorists.
Yeah, exactly.
In fact, I remember, I forget which one it was, but I interviewed a couple of Guantanamo guards on this show, and one of them talked about what it was like the day that they showed up and how scary they were, and how the guys, you know, here they are in shackles and chains and hoods, and yet the guards were scared of them, like they could just blow up at any time and kill us all.
They believed it, Andy.
Anyway, hold tight right there, we'll get back, I'll let you talk specifically about some of the most important of these cases after this.
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Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
You can find the archives of all these interviews at antiwar.com slash radio and at scotthortonshow.com or streaming at chaosradioaustin.org and at lrn.fm as well as Anomaly Radio.
I've been on Anomaly Radio this whole time, my dear friend, my serious, very good friend Miles has been rebroadcasting this show this entire time, and I never give him credit and I never say the name of his radio network, I never have it in front of me to even get the freaking address right, and what does it matter with me?
It's Anomaly Radio, and then here's where my Google toolbar comes in handy, it's AnomalyRadio.com, just like it should be, and I've always been on Anomaly Radio, and I'm sorry to Miles and I'm grateful to Miles, so thanks.
And now back to Andy Worthington, he's the author of The Guantanamo Files, and he's the director and producer of the movie Outside the Law, I'm looking at his website right now, andyworthington.co.uk, and the piece is Who are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantanamo, Part 1, The Dirty 30s, so why don't you go ahead and tell us about some of the most important of these, Andy, if you could please.
Well I think the thing, where we're at now with Guantanamo is that nearly 600 men have now been released from the prison, so in terms of demonstrating that perhaps this place was not even remotely full of the worst of the worst, that's a pretty good indication that that's the case.
But as we're getting these numbers down, it seems to be increasingly hard to actually close the prison and to get rid of everyone who's detained there apart from these handful of people that we're discussing, maybe up to a couple of dozen, 35 the administration says it wants to put on trial, get rid of the rest of these people somehow.
And you know the big problem is still separating, I don't think separating the nobodies from the terrorists, but separating the innocent people, and there are still I think people who had nothing to do with anything who were in Guantanamo, them and the foot soldiers who were fighting against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan before 9-11.
Separating these people from the terrorist suspects, yeah, so we've got this small number of the terrorist suspects and the problem now is that because of the overbroad definition of who can be held at Guantanamo, which is part of the way that the Bush administration subverted the entire recognized detention policies of the civilized world, terrorist suspects and these people who were fighting against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan before the 9-11 attacks are all bundled up together as people who can legitimately be held still, neither as prisoners of war or as criminal suspects, which is what I think the most reasonable people amongst us think that terrorists should be, they're not warriors, they're criminals.
And the big problem is that you know quite a lot of these guys who are held there clearly were out there fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance before the 9-11 attacks, they'd been at training camps, they may, some of them at some point or other have seen Osama Bin Laden stand up and give them a lecture, but they were not involved with the terrorist activities of Al-Qaeda, if you like they were the part of Al-Qaeda which was supporting the military activities in Afghanistan of the Taliban.
In other words, they were Arab-Afghans so-called, but not necessarily taking orders from Bin Laden and Zawahiri.
No, absolutely not.
And you know, I mean, and that's what I think that we're, we're not there yet.
And as we keep digging away at this story, and there are habeas petitions, these guys who are losing their habeas petitions in the courts, they're not losing them because the judges are saying the government has somehow managed to suggest with its evidence that this guy, you know, knew Osama Bin Laden and was connected to terrorist plots and activities.
No, they're a bunch of foot soldiers who were, you know, who didn't, didn't somehow manage to disappear from Afghanistan the moment that Operation Enduring Freedom began.
They didn't manage to...
Bush gave them a head start of a four or five weeks, you know, seems like they could have got out of there.
Well, I mean, actually, that is, that is some of the argument against them.
But I mean, I think actually, it was pretty chaotic, and not necessarily that easy to do.
Oh, I'm sorry, I was just being facetious.
But you know, I think, I think the big issue really is when is it going to be questioned the entire, the entire basis for holding these people?
Because it seems very clear to me, that these guys who, you know, who were the foot soldiers, should be held as foot soldiers, they should be held as prisoners of war, they should be held according to the Geneva Convention.
Now, you know, nine years down the line, maybe this seems like quibbling.
I mean, the war is apparently going on forever anyway, which was President Bush's plan, capture people, hold them forever, say that you've declared a war that has no end.
But you know, we could start quibbling about, is there an end to this war?
Are the circumstances in which they were captured, something specific in time?
In other words, start obeying the law now, when it comes to this, and then figure out the other part later.
But at least in terms of these prisoners, they ought to, I mean, hell, we've had a court system here for 220 years, 30 years going on.
Really, before that, before the revolution, there was a court system that this is just the fruition of.
So it seems like we ought to be able to handle it.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, I don't think this is really to do with the courts.
The courts have been called in to evaluate whether these guys should be held or not, because of the failure of the Bush administration to set any criteria for holding people.
You know, I mean, their whole purpose was to say, we don't make mistakes.
Everybody we say is a bad guy is a bad guy.
Can we review it?
Absolutely not.
Under no circumstances are you allowed to question the President's right to hold whoever he feels like.
You know, nine years down the line, nearly, we've got a bunch of foot soldiers.
And the least that we should be discussing now is stop allowing, you know, all the right wing people to keep talking about these people as terrorists when they're clearly not.
You know, what we need to focus on, and everybody would agree, are the genuine terror suspects.
The rest of the people are mislabeled.
You know, they're held in Guantanamo still, apparently forever, a place that is inevitably and inexorably going to be associated with terrorism.
And they're not.
They're soldiers, they're prisoners of war.
Well, and most of them are condemned anyway, because you send them home, everybody's going to assume that they're a rat for the CIA now.
Well, I mean, the fact is that a lot of them are Yemenis and there's no way that they can go home because President Obama won't let any of them go home.
Even if they win their habeas corpus petitions in a court, he won't allow any of them to go home.
And that's because after the underpants bomber, he got a load of flack about Yemen is now a country where everybody's a terrorist sympathizer.
You can't send anyone back there under any circumstances.
And he buckled under the pressure.
And that's disgraceful.
It is essentially telling the Yemeni people that we think they are all terrorist sympathizers.
You know, that's a pretty, pretty rude way to be treating 20 million people that you're supposed to want to be convincing to be on your side.
Yeah.
But you know, they released one guy, Scott, as I'm sure you remember, they released an innocent student who was seized by mistake, because there was an uproar about it.
But recently, you know, it's now getting on for two months.
A guy who who probably is schizophrenic has tried to commit suicide in Guantanamo on numerous occasions.
And in his habeas petition, the judge agreed that the government had come up with no evidence to disprove his story that he had been told to travel to that part of the world to seek medical treatment for this damage to his head that he'd suffered in a car accident.
They're not letting they're not letting him go.
They're actually still debating apparently whether to appeal the decision.
Judges said you have nothing against this man.
He is horribly ill.
Send him back to Yemen.
No, we're not sending anyone back to Yemen.
Well, you know, you mentioned well, the whole thing.
That's another great example.
But it's almost like every example is the quintessential case.
You know, you mentioned Abu Zubaydah earlier when when George Bush was forced to admit what a torture he was, of course, he said, we do not torture.
And then he admitted torturing people.
But then he invoked Abu Zubaydah and said, look, this guy, Abu Zubaydah is this terrible guy.
And he was a terrible terrorist and he was going to kill your little kids if we didn't stop him and if we didn't torture him and all these things.
And that was his excuse.
But then, according to Ron Suskin, George Tenet, the head of the CIA, told George Bush, look, man, that's really not true.
This guy, Abu Zubaydah was a nobody.
He was a secretary, a travel agent.
And he was out of his mind, freaking crazy with at least five different personalities.
And Bush said to Susskind, you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
That's right.
That's that's where this whole thing comes from.
This is all justified because of Abu Zubaydah, Andy.
Well, Abu Zubaydah, I mean, you've mentioned how Ron Susskind was the first person to expose these stories.
And, you know, what's happened since then is that the FBI interrogators who were responsible for talking to him before he was taken off their hands by the CIA, who went through his notebook, said, look, we found we found multiple personalities in which he's been writing obsessively in these diaries.
Clearly, this is not a man with his head screwed on, you know, and they talked to Jane Mayer, right, in her book, The Dark Side.
That's what you're referring to.
Well, yeah, I mean, I know Jane covered it in the story as well, but a lot of it has been made publicly available in the years since.
And the government has officially walked back from all of these claims.
You know, all around the world, this is the really disturbing part of the story as well, Scott, is that all around the world, people have been, you know, in Canada, in the UK, who knows exactly where we don't know how far this web goes.
But people who were apparently implicated by Abu Zubaydah when he was tortured, and you know, in this country have been held without charge or trial or under house arrest or, you know, being the government's trying to deport them on the basis of secret evidence, to countries where they face the risk of torture.
This evidence is coming from Abu Zubaydah.
And they've been walking back from all of it because they've realized that they waterboarded him 83 times and he lied to them.
He didn't know about this stuff.
You know, one of the FBI agents, his line about Abu Zubaydah was, they knew that this guy was crazy.
And they knew that this guy was always on the phone.
Do you think anybody important is going to tell him anything?
I mean, you know, that's just, that's it in one line, right?
Here's a guy from the FBI, figuring out that, of course, Abu Zubaydah wasn't the person that they thought he was.
Now, you know, what gets me really, really about this is that had they not done this, had they followed the law enforcement route, I think Abu Zubaydah could have been the most amazing informer for them.
He's a gatekeeper, people came passed through, he was responsible for getting people in and out.
He knew everybody, they could have used that.
But you know, what's really horrible about what the war on terror has done is that it's even crushed the ability of the United States to think that informers are useful.
You've got a couple of guys in Guantanamo.
One is an Egyptian who was involved in a training camp in Afghanistan.
And the other is Mohammed al-Salahi, who's in the news because the government is appealing his habeas petition.
He won his habeas petition a few months back.
He was in Germany, he's peripherally involved.
He knew people involved with al Qaeda.
But the judge said, look, there's nothing here to demonstrate that he knew anything that was going on or had any involvement.
Yeah, this is really essentially kind of guilt by association.
The government's appealing.
They want his habeas petition quashed.
They want to hold him in Guantanamo forever.
Now what's weird about this story is that when you ask the administration about Salahi, who was tortured, I mean, he was tortured in Guantanamo.
They took him out in a boat in the bay, they threatened to kill him.
They did all kinds of horrible stuff to him such that his proposed prosecutor, a man named Stuart Couch said, I can't go ahead with this case.
I cannot do it.
They went through all this stuff.
They broke him eventually.
And since then, they explained that he has become one of their most reliable informants in Guantanamo.
Him and this Egyptian.
There was a Washington Post story about it several months back.
He's become one of their great informants who has told them so much great information that they're relying on.
Now, there are intelligence officials with their heads screwed on and saying, what are we doing holding this guy?
We should put him in a witness protection program.
We should allow him to live somewhere and change his identity for all the help he has given us.
What's happening now is that it doesn't matter how much you help, you still get punished with being held indefinitely in Guantanamo, you know, for the rest of your life, whether you help anybody or not.
It really doesn't make sense.
All right.
You know what?
You know, as well as I do, we could go on like this for hours and hours, but I got to go.
I got Elaine Castle coming up and we're going to talk about the recent Ninth Circuit Court decision about Binyam Mohamed's case, which, of course, is very parallel to what you just said about Abu Zubaydah and all the lies that were tortured out of him.
I'm sorry to cut you here, but I'm sure, as you well know, we'll do it again soon.
That's all right, Scott.
Thank you very much.
It was great to talk to you.
Everybody, that's the heroic Andy Worthington, AndyWorthington.co.uk.
The book is The Guantanamo Files, and the movie is Outside the Law.
