All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And just like I promised, I got Andy Worthington on the line.
His website is andyworthington.co.uk.
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 the movie Outside the Law.
You can find what he writes all over the place.
So the Future Freedom Foundation, uh, oftentimes at anti-war.com and, uh, the truth out, I think, and all kinds of things.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How's it going?
Hey, all right.
So how are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Uh, now, uh, I'm not certain the date on this.
So November 30th, 2010, uh, is this piece at FFF.org.
That's Jacob Hornberger and the Future Freedom Foundation there.
It's called The Irrelevance of WikiLeaks Guantanamo Revelations.
So, uh, what's so irrelevant about them?
What's so irrelevant about them?
Well, you know, that was it.
That was, uh, in some ways meant to be a deliberately provocative, uh, headline.
Um, but you know, but, but the fact is that what's mostly come out about Guantanamo in the, um, you know, this avalanche of cables that have been, uh, leaked to the world, um, is a whole load of horse trading between, between, um, the United States and, uh, and dozens of countries around the world in an attempt to find new homes for, um, prisoners in Guantanamo who couldn't be returned home because they would face the risk of torture in their home countries.
And I mean, that has been, you know, it's been pretty fascinating or having this revealed, um, you know, the amount of money on offer and, you know, the, there was one of the countries involved where, you know, it's like take a prisoner and we'll get you a 20 minute audience with president Obama.
And, uh, I mean, you know, like so much of what's come out, really, it's, it's, it's not necessarily been that surprising because, um, you know, people who've been studying any of these stories would kind of know what's been going on to have it actually spelled out.
Um, so clearly it's been quite fascinating, almost as though, you know, every consulate of embassy around the world has kind of had the front of it removed and we're all looking in seeing exactly what's been going on.
But, you know, I thought the main problem with the Guantanamo story is that is that the media for the most part picked up on, um, reporting all these various facets of the stories of countries in Europe and elsewhere and these negotiations, but didn't mention why the negotiations were required in the first place.
Um, and of course the reason for that is that, um, every body in the United States with power, um, had done their utmost to make sure that no wrongly imprisoned, uh, man in Guantanamo would ever set foot as a free man on us soil, um, would never be offered a home in the United States, um, when they couldn't be returned home.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, and now how many of them, uh, are there these, uh, Yemenis who are not allowed to go anywhere, even though the, the third branch of government says, let them go.
The Yemenis, there are, there are nearly 60, Scott.
I mean, the fact is that when the nearly 60, that is who've already been cleared for release, either by the military or by a habeas corpus judge, mostly, um, by the task force, the interagency Guantanamo review task force, President Obama established last year.
Now, you know, I mean, these are people from government departments, from the essentially a pretty, I would say pretty conservative cross-section of career officials who reviewed the cases of the prisoners.
And they made these recommendations, um, that over half of the guys who are still in Guantanamo were, um, approved for transfer.
They didn't say cleared for release.
Nobody uses the word, but, you know, they said, we've got, you know, we've got about 60 Yemenis here that we think should release that, that, that leaves about another three dozen that they don't want to release.
Yeah.
In Afghanistan, an attack is called a kinetic event.
You know, they actually, they actually came up with a very weird description of what to do with the Yemenis.
And they said, look, we think that about 30 should be released now back to Yemen.
Um, and another 30 should essentially only be released if the security situation improves to our satisfaction.
And what happened after they had made that decision was that the guy, um, the Nigerian guy tried to blow up his underwear on a plane.
Um, and, and then the backlash started against releasing any Yemenis.
So they all slipped into this category of not to be released until the security situation in Yemen improves sufficiently to the satisfaction of every raving, barking, mad Republican lawmaker, um, who thinks that Yemen is a country where every citizen is a terrorist.
So, you know, the guys are just stuck there.
They're just sitting there.
It's nearly a year since that moratorium, um, was announced.
It's obviously getting on for two years.
Um, in the cases of some of these men, since the task force of, you know, of, of cautious career officials, nevertheless recommended that these men should be freed from Guantanamo.
So I think they're, they're pretty much emblematic of how there is no political will in the United States to actually close this damn place by getting rid of people who are not terrorists, who are never going to face the trial, um, who are not, um, even the dubious category of people that the task force suggested should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, even though there wasn't enough evidence against them to try them.
They're really people who, if there were to be any will to close the prison should be sent home.
Uh, well, so now it started out, uh, what 700, uh, more than 750.
Um, and then I was wondering, you say there's 60 Yemenis who have been, uh, approved for transfer.
How many others, how many people are there that they actually think they have a case against or something, or really mean to hold on to?
Well, there are at the moment, I think 34 guys that they, that the task force suggested should be put forward for a trial at some point.
I mean, whether that would be a federal court trial or a military commission, they didn't decide that was up to the president.
And of course the, what president Obama has now found is that, um, the left doesn't like military commissions.
Um, unsurprising really, because, um, you know, the, the, uh, recent example was of a former child soldier, Mark Heather from Canada, um, who had to confess to invented war crimes charges, um, so that they could proceed with a plea deal, um, an absolutely disgraceful case, of course, which we've talked about before.
Um, so the left doesn't like military commissions, um, nor it should be said, does anybody with any thorough understanding of the law like military commissions?
Cause the whole thing is set up on the basis of fictional war crimes.
Now, unfortunately the right doesn't like federal court trials.
Um, and so president Obama, from what we understand, it's pretty much just sitting on his hands and saying, well, okay, we won't bother trying any of them.
But in a way it's kind of hilarious when you figure that, um, he's ruining his own support, uh, from within by bowing to these Republicans.
When the reason he was elected was because he promised to undo all these things.
So even if, you know, he's just a real cruel guy and he likes locking up people indefinitely or whatever, it's really bad politics.
It seems like it's not like the Republicans are going to stop calling him a Kenyan terrorist or whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, to be honest, he's in a bit of a difficult position cause it doesn't matter what he does.
He gets attacked by, by, you know, by the right.
And, you know, as well as mirroring him for his birth certificate and his supposed, um, you know, supposedly being a Muslim and whatever else they came out with, they conveniently ignore all the things that he does, which are at least as Republican as what they would do if not to the right of what they would do if they were in power.
So, you know, I mean, the other guys that are, that are in, um, Guantanamo just, just to finish that bit off, you know, there are 48 people that the task force said should be held indefinitely without charge or trial.
Exactly what Bush had established.
Um, you know, nobody seems to be complaining about that.
The only people complaining about that are on the left saying, um, you know, why are you enshrining, um, this, this kind of policy when, you know, when the whole point we thought when you came in was that you are either going to release people or you're going to put them on trial.
Um, well, and you know, there was just a thing last week where they're talking about, they want to pass a law to legalize this, which I don't understand why they would even bother calling attention to the fact that right now they're committing a crime.
They need to legalize it.
Well, they've already got one, Scott.
The problem is they've already got one and it's very, um, it's so indiscriminating, um, that it's functioning as a, as a, as, you know, as detention policy that they can use for anyone.
And you're referring to the military commissions act of 2009 then?
No, the authorization for use in military force.
No, no.
Yeah.
Well, let's get right back to that.
When we get back from this break with Andy Worthington dot CO dot UK.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Sands high war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking here with Andy Worthington, uh, by the magic of the NSA's telephone lines, the other side of a whole continent and the ocean from here with hardly a delay at all.
It's 21st century.
It's a hell of a thing.
All right.
Um, and you know, in fact, we could even, uh, I could give you a chance to wax a little philosophic here, probably as we wrap up this first decade of the 21st century, this Guantanamo prison seems to be pretty symbolic of something or another, or what does it mean to you, Andy?
Um, what does it mean to me?
It means to me, it's the, uh, it's the still living and thriving legacy of, um, you know, the most outrageous, um, law breaking government that we've seen in recent times, the Bush administration.
Um, but you know, the, the, this, um, hideous monstrosity that they created, um, has proven very difficult to dismantle.
Um, what it suggests to me at the end of this decade is that the things that people should really desperately worry about, I think in the United States is, um, what a relentlessly negative campaigning force the Republican party seems to have become, um, something that has nothing positive to offer.
That is just constantly on the attack over everything, whether that is useful or not, um, and has kind of destroyed the ability to talk sensibly about Guantanamo.
Most of the, most of the rubbish that we're hearing coming out is pure Dick Cheney.
It's really as though, you know, we were in the heat and fear and paranoia, um, of, of those, those times immediately after the 9-11 attacks.
And we're not.
We're many, many, many years down the road, um, looking at this prison where people are still held as, um, essentially these non-human beings created by the Bush administration, these enemy combatants, um, alien, unprivileged enemy belligerent, as they now are.
Come on, sort it out.
What are these guys?
Are they terrorist suspects?
Put them on trial.
Are they, are they people captured in wartime?
Then they should be prisoners of war and they should always have been treated humanely.
Yeah, it really is amazing that it just rolls on.
I mean, you know, I think the benchmark really was the, uh, competing speeches between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney.
And I don't know if they just called each other beforehand or what, but Dick Cheney attacked him from the right and said, no, kill everybody and torture everybody to death.
And there is no law.
And the president is the ruler, something like that.
I'm roughly paraphrasing.
And Obama said, no, we have the constitution and the bill of rights and our sacred principles of the rule of law.
And so that's why we're going to pass a law legalizing all this madness.
And that's why we're basically going to pretend that we want to close it, but we'll never close it.
And everybody thought, all right, Barack Obama is going to fulfill his campaign promise to put an end to this madness.
I guess they weren't listening that closely, but it was a done deal at that point, wasn't it?
Well, I reckon, you know, I mean, I mean, we've spoken before about how, you know, White House counsel, Greg Craig, from everything that we've had reported was a man who took seriously the president's, you know, suggestion after he won the election that he wanted this sorted out.
And he, you know, rolled back the Bush administration policies thoroughly.
And he, and he stood up and defended rolling them back.
And, you know, with the best possible interpretation of what happened, they have really, really, really lacked courage to stand up and tell the American people that, that just because people shout loudly and advocate violence and intolerance, there is a difference between right and wrong, and things need to be done accordingly.
And, you know, the sad thing as a result of that not happening, I think is that is that we're back in, in, in the realm of shouty, intolerant, violent people defining the United States to the rest of the world, as though that were the truth.
And, you know, it's not the truth.
There are millions, there are tens of millions of American people who are much more reasonable and honest and believing in justice than that.
But that's not what we're hearing.
What we're hearing are these, these, these barking mad people, as though they represent the United States.
Well, and I think it's really important to call them barking mad, because, I mean, that really cuts to the heart of what the problem is, is that the, I guess, I don't know, the entire AM radio audience in America, the Fox news audience, the Republican rank and file out there, they've been lied to so thoroughly for so long in a row that they're really operating in a totally different dimension from you and me, to have an entire different set of presuppositions, not just about, you know, principles and the difference between conservatism and liberalism and libertarianism or anything like that, but just in what's even really true, you know, Saddam Hussein didn't do 9-11.
And the reason they couldn't find his weapons is because the Russians helped move them to Syria.
And the reason that we torture these people, we don't torture them.
We just torture them, but we don't call it that.
And we have to, to save lives.
And it doesn't matter how many people, how many times we hear that the torture in Guantanamo, et cetera, the number one recruitment tools, even worse than the Iraq war for recruiting new terrorists against us.
It doesn't, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a Sarah Palin world.
That's not based on facts.
It's based on, you know, Sharia law is going to conquer America any minute now.
And Andy, I don't have a single set of facts in my head anywhere that I could use to maybe defend myself from that idea.
I'm just, it sounds reasonable to me that there's a giant Muslim juggernaut bent on enslaving us all.
If we don't act this way, right.
It's just the, um, you know, it's the reinforcement of having to have another bogeyman, um, you know, which I think the long picture of it really is, you know, you could say this has been coming since 1989, when the United States should have had a peace dividend, it should have said the cold war is over, but let's look back to that time, Scott, and remember who was the defense secretary of the United States in 1989, Dick Cheney, did the United States get a peace dividend?
Did it reduce its defense spending?
No.
Dick Cheney arranged for defense spending to increase until he could find another enemy that the Americans could be persuaded.
For a while they had to settle for drug lords in South America.
It was ridiculous.
We have a whole cold war over the cocaine trade.
Yeah.
And then finally they could provoke enough Muslims through their genocide in Iraq in the 1990s, uh, from bases in Saudi Arabia, the land of Mecca Medina to, to create a real enemy that could at least get one real big, bad thing done for them.
But you would think really, in fact, that's another thing about this unreality.
You would really think that Osama bin Laden was the king of a giant Muslim Soviet union over there, that he was in charge of this massive landmass and all these resources rather than hiding in exile in the guest house in Pakistan, as some tribal leader in no man's land, you know, in the Hindu Kush mountains for crying out loud.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, and achieving, achieving one thing really.
And I mean, I think to look at, you know, I think what's particularly disturbing is that if you, if you look at how the American people were lied to, that this whole, um, this whole torture program was set up to prevent another attack and what we actually find out, this is the thing people really need to look at is that no, they decided pretty quickly that there wasn't going to be one, but they needed a reason to invade Iraq.
So they are torturing people.
They capture in the war on terror so that they can produce false confessions to justify the invasion of Iraq.
They did that with this guy, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who they sent to Egypt, tortured him.
He said, he said, Saddam and al-Qaeda are getting together to discuss chemical and biological weapons.
It was a lie.
And it was given to, it was given to poor old Colin Powell to stand up and say that it was the truth to the UN and it was a total lie.
Yeah.
And it wasn't just him either.
In fact, uh, McClatchy newspapers did a study where they, they don't call it torture, but everything else in that headline is correct.
That this is what the torture program was about getting, I don't know why they don't just make stuff up.
Why do you got to torture a lie out of somebody?
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Andy.
Everybody, please read Guantanamo files.
Check out the blog, andyworthington.co.uk.
Thanks again, Dave.
John, pleasure as always.
