All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Hey guys, on the line, I've got the great Andy Worthington, and he wrote the book The Guantanamo Files before Chelsea Manning ever leaked the Guantanamo Files at WikiLeaks, and testified here in Assange's extradition hearing, and I've just been quite properly scolded by Patrick Coburn for being too pessimistic about Assange's prospects in court here, and that you shouldn't be defeatist, and we gotta keep fighting, and you never know, sometimes you can win, and so in that spirit, Andy Worthington also testified that, hey, you know what these guys have done, these people, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, what they have done has been so important for the people of Great Britain, the people of America, the people of the world, to find out the truth about crimes, which is the bottom line essential purpose of journalism, especially in England, as they call it, the great fourth estate check and balance against central power.
So, why don't you tell us a little bit about that, Andy, hi, how are you?
Yeah, I'm good, Scott, yeah, yeah, how are you?
I'm great, man, I'm so happy to be talking to you again.
Well yeah, so yeah, I got, I was obviously, I was, well I was very glad to be approached by Julian Assange's legal team earlier in the year about submitting a statement on his behalf against this terrible extradition case that's going on at the moment, where they're trying to get, the US is trying to get Assange over there so that he can be prosecuted on ludicrous espionage charges and be sentenced to 175 years in prison if all of that were to go ahead.
We're a long way from any of that actually becoming real, but the problem at the moment is that since Julian Assange was apprehended by the British police when he was, when the asylum that Ecuador had granted him ran out last year, he's been held in a maximum security prison here in London, which is supposed to be reserved for the most dangerous, physically dangerous convicted criminals in the UK.
And here's Julian Assange being held with them as well, when I don't think that anyone's ever accused Julian of being a physically dangerous individual.
It's what he's done in terms of journalism and publishing that is the problem as it's perceived by the governments of both Britain and the United States.
The extradition process between the US and the UK has been kind of massively simplified over the years so that you don't, neither country in theory really has to present anything of a case.
They just have to say, we want such and such a person.
And then this procedure takes place, which is kind of ill-defined in a way because it's not related to a trial.
It's related to some kind of nebulous notion of whether the extradition should go ahead, in which case when there are people who have legal backing, as people do get when these cases happen, because we have some very good lawyers who are interested in trying to prevent international miscarriages of justice like this, then they will argue the various aspects of the case to try and persuade, fundamentally to try and persuade the government that is going to extradite the person not to do so.
And that has happened in a few cases in the UK.
Notoriously, it hasn't really happened when the people that the US has requested have brown skin.
So Muslims accused of terrorism always end up getting extradited to the US, although there was famously a few years back a white man with Asperger's who had hacked into US government websites, and he was given a reprieve at the last minute by our prime minister.
But it doesn't look like any of that's going to happen in Julian Assange's case, of course, because he's a very high-level political target, even though what rules there are governing extradition are supposed to absolutely preclude political targets from actually being extradited.
So they're pretending that it's about something else instead.
And they're pretending that it's about him assisting in hacking to get information in the first place, and that he is also accused of having put people in harm's way by releasing these documents.
And on that latter point, Scott, I think it was pretty well established during the trial of Chelsea Manning that actually there was no evidence that the release of the documents had caused anybody harm.
So what we're dealing with really, it seems to me, is a very corrupt political process, which I presume is going to go on for many years.
And I can only hope that at the end, maybe we have a change of government here in the U.K. and they change their mind, or we have a change of government in the U.S. who change their mind, or we reach the point where this goes to the Supreme Court here in the U.K., and the Supreme Court has something to say about it.
Because as everybody paying attention has noticed, this is a case with profoundly disturbing implications for the freedom of the media to distinguish themselves in our countries from those that are openly declared as dictatorships, where inconvenient though it is for the government, what happens is that there is a constant process of people, whistleblowers and publishers and journalists trying to expose government wrongdoing, and not necessarily always being hurled into the dungeon for life as a result of doing so.
Right.
All right.
Now, so speaking of that journalism, you were already an expert on Guantanamo Bay and the people being held there during the Bush years.
And then you somehow learned a whole lot more from these WikiLeaks and that you were able to report to the rest of us.
So I'm really interested in hearing about what it was in there that was important to your journalism.
And I guess, you know, I could, I should have prefaced that, I meant to actually before I spaced out, with that the situation is just like with Edward Snowden and the programs that he revealed being ruled later by the courts to be blatantly unconstitutional.
You started out exposing this Guantanamo system before the Supreme Court ended up later ruling that they agreed with you, that this was all illegal, that Bush didn't have the right to do this, that this was all criminal.
So it's not just that the WikiLeaks aided your journalism, it's that the WikiLeaks aided your journalism about a project that the Supreme Court of the United States eventually ruled was against the law.
And which is the, you know, I don't know exactly all the legal terminology and all of that, but that's what proves that this was valuable journalism.
It wasn't something that just hurt government arbitrarily somehow, and their precious authority over us.
It revealed wrongdoing, which is what journalism is supposed to do.
Yeah, absolutely, Scott.
And I think you put that very well to describe the Supreme Court as having recognized that.
That's not, that's not something that legal experts would choose as a way of presenting what happened.
But I think it is fundamentally true.
You know, from the moment that Guantanamo's existence became known to lawyers, you know, some of the good people started fighting back against what the United States government was doing.
And it took until June 2004 in a Supreme Court case called Russell v.
Bush for the Supreme Court to recognize something that is highly unusual, that prisoners who had reportedly been seized during wartime had to be extended habeas corpus rights because the United States government had refused to consider for a second that it was possible that they had captured somebody by mistake.
And if that person claimed that they had been captured by mistake, there was no process whatsoever that they could go through to try and secure their release.
So you're right, the Supreme Court realized that the United States at Guantanamo had set up a prison that there was no way out of.
You could be put into that prison, and then the United States had no obligation to charge you or to do anything with you that would result in anything other than you being held in this suspended state of arbitrary imprisonment for the rest of your life.
Now that was fought back against by the Bush administration.
It persuaded Congress to pass legislation that was designed to strip the prisoners of their habeas corpus rights yet again.
And it took until June 2008 for the Supreme Court again in Bermuda v.
Bush to reassert the prisoners' habeas corpus rights, to point out that they were constitutionally guaranteed, and to point out that Congress had acted unconstitutionally by attempting to strip them of those rights.
Sadly, Scott, as an aside, I would have to say how depressing it is now that the Supreme Court of 2008 could reach this conclusion, whereas the Supreme Court that we have now would never do that in a million years.
That's a very sad reflection on the state of the court now.
And I think of the often dangerous power of presidents to appoint judges who then end up having such a big influence over the law for decades, decades, far longer than the presidential, the presidents themselves had been in office.
But anyway, you know, this is what we had with Guantanamo.
And actually, Guantanamo has always been a process of, to find out what's been happening there, has been a process of having to drag out secrets that the United States government wanted to keep hidden.
Nothing has ever been easy.
The United States government has always wanted to hide evidence of everything that it has done there.
And let's not forget, everything that is done in this place where it fundamentally asserted from the beginning the right to hold people indefinitely without charge or trial.
And so one of the things that WikiLeaks' release of these files did through Chelsea Manning of these detainee assessment briefs from Guantanamo was that it provided names primarily of prisoners, in particular, who had told lies about their fellow prisoners.
And you know, I don't think that any of us should be in a position to necessarily attach blame to the people who did this.
We have to remember that people were tortured, some of them in black sites, some of them in Guantanamo.
People were otherwise abused.
People were bribed with better living conditions.
They were, you know, in a position where they had absolutely no rights.
They were presented with these opportunities to improve their lives.
I remember hearing about a former prisoner who had explained that they didn't break him in the sense that he was reduced to a kind of, you know, gibbering wreck of a human being.
But they woke him every night and took him to interrogations and asked him stupid questions that he didn't know the answer to.
And he said, eventually, I just couldn't, I couldn't do it anymore.
So I started telling them what they wanted to hear.
And you know, that that is one aspect of how the supposed evidence against the prisoners came about.
And we had, you know, seen this in the unclassified summaries of evidence that had had to be released in 2006, particularly when the Pentagon lost a freedom of information lawsuit.
And the documents released at that time had established the flimsiness of the supposed evidence.
But in a very kind of generic sense, it didn't actually name names.
And what these files did was they helped to verify things that that we knew from these documents but didn't have the names for.
And also that we knew from some, you know, from some very important work that was undertaken by by some investigators working for the prisoners' lawyers, and also by some journalists.
So I remember there was a story, I believe it was in 2006, about a representative of the prisoners.
So what happened was after the prisoners got habeas corpus rights, the Bush administration said, I'll tell you what, we have to let lawyers into the prison.
But what we're going to do is we're going to set up our own administrative review.
It's going to be called the Combatant Status Review Tribunal.
And we're going to pretend that there is something vaguely legal about this.
We get three military guys.
We get the guy who's charged in and we, you know, the prisoner in, not charged, but the prisoner.
And we say, you did this, this and this.
How do you what do you have to say about it?
And the prisoners would have no idea where this information came from.
And then fairly swiftly, their ongoing imprisonment as an enemy combatant would be rubber stamped by the military tribunal.
And that was it.
And then Bush and his guys were would then say to the world, as they did, you know, we're giving these people, you know, a fair tribunal here.
And what happened was that one of the military representatives noticed that the guy that he had been assigned to advise, so they didn't get proper legal representation, representation the prisoners, but they did have someone assigned to them by the military.
And this guy realized that the person he'd been assigned to was very, very upset about a claim in the supposed evidence that he had been in a training camp at a certain time.
So he went and looked at his guy's file and he found out that, in fact, his guy wasn't even in Afghanistan at the time that he was supposed to have been at this training camp.
And then he didn't stop.
What he then did was he then found out on the basis of who this alleged witness was, he went and looked at other allegations that this prisoner had made about his fellow prisoners and found time and time and time again that the same thing had happened.
He had accused people of being in a combat situation or in a training camp or in a guest house at times that they were not in the country at all.
And so the files really, really helped to establish that.
You know, and there are there were within Guantanamo a number of I believe the media at one point after the release of the WikiLeaks files called them, you know, super informers.
A handful of people who had very specifically made false allegations about over 100 of their fellow prisoners.
But it was something that happened on a on a smaller scale, let us say, with, you know, with dozens of other prisoners at Guantanamo.
Once you start looking at the at the at the evidence that is revealed in these files because it contains the prisoners' names and what they said about their fellow prisoners.
And you know, some of these stories, Scott, are just very sad.
There were there were a couple of people who were witnesses who had been apprehended and in Afghanistan by the Taliban before the US arrived in Afghanistan.
And they had then been horribly tortured.
And they were broken people by the time that they thought that they were liberated by the United States.
But the United States insanely sent them to Guantanamo instead.
And then with these poor guys in this broken mental state, they then became people who made false statements about their fellow prisoners because of their precarious mental state.
So you know, I think these documents are an absolutely astonishing treasure trove of information about how disgusting the entire Guantanamo project has been and how there is so little that purports to be evidence that has any bears any relationship to who the people in Guantanamo are supposed to be.
It's really the evidence is a house of cards built on torture and abuse and bribery.
And I cannot thank enough Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange for having made this information available.
I just wish it had it had had more resonance for the US people in general.
Because as it is, Scott, after all these years of me and you talking, we're still waiting for one day, the people of America in significant numbers to understand just quite what monstrous things have been done in their name at Guantanamo.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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And as you said on the show a few months ago, there's still 40 people there when Bush and Powell and all of them in the first Bush junior term said they wanted to close it.
They didn't need it anymore, etc.
They only put it there to so that it would supposedly be out of reach of the courts, but the courts refused to go along with that.
So what was the point?
Yeah.
And that was 16 years ago.
Yeah.
I mean, it's astonishing.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it would have been open for 19 years on January the 11th.
Yeah.
You know, we are approaching something that the world's media will notice in January 2022.
The prison would have been open for 20 years.
And you know, no, no, there is still no prospect of justice for the handful of the 40 men still held who are allegedly responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
You know, that is a that is a Groundhog Day legal process that just goes round and round and round and never gets anywhere.
And that's not because because the defense teams are obstructive.
The defense teams are just trying to raise every objection to the process that they can to ensure justice for the people they're representing.
But there can be no justice in this broken military commission system at Guantanamo because it's the men were tortured and the and the government is still obsessed with hiding all information relating to the torture of these people.
But, you know, when once you've tortured somebody, you cannot prosecute them through the legal process.
You know, and that's the situation we're still in at Guantanamo.
And, you know, who knows what the way out is, Scott?
You know, I know that we've heard that certainly some people within the CIA are quite happy for these men to be held forever and for the trials never to take place, because then that means that they'll never be called to account.
But, you know, I would hope that at some point somebody will somebody will be in power who will try and finish what Obama started and, you know, did not have the did not have the courage to to follow through on, which is to actually get the damn place closed once and for all.
And, you know, and we'd have to think creatively for that to happen.
Of those 40 men still held, Scott, you know, some of them are still there because the only thing they ever did wrong was that having been apprehended by the U.S. and treated so appallingly, they didn't like the way they were treated.
They had a bad attitude.
They they went on hunger strikes.
They may be, you know, shouted at and threatened the people who were holding them and treating them so appallingly at Guantanamo.
There are still some of these people at Guantanamo after nearly 20 years just there because they because since they were captured, they had a bad attitude.
But, you know, the people that are accused of something, someone needs to think creatively about how to deal with this eventually if we're going to restore the rule of law, you know, whether whether it's possible to arrange some kind of plea deal with some of these prisoners so that eventually, you know, both sides can work out something.
That means that eventually this place will be closed rather than what we're currently looking at, which is that, you know, everyone's going to die there of old age and the place will remain open until the last of these men held has died there of old age.
I'm sorry, I have to bring up to the irony that this is on a stolen piece of property in communist Cuba where the rule of law is just about as operable and that where the Americans, you know, of course, in the war against Spain, they gangsterized the lease for this thing, which since the communists took over the country in 1959, they have refused to accept the payment for the lease and have insisted America leave.
And America acts like there's no kind of sovereignty or independence for Cuba whatsoever.
It's the only reason they even have this base.
The entire basis of the base is crazy.
But never mind that.
I just had to point that out.
But what's important, though, is that did I already know that you had worked with WikiLeaks on the publication of the Chelsea Manning leaked Guantanamo files as I'm reading here in this testimony that I got from Kevin Gosselaar today?
Did you know beforehand?
Yeah, I don't think I knew that.
I well, I don't know, Scott.
I mean, I would be surprised if you didn't, because it was I swear I got what Biden's got.
I can't remember anything anymore.
But usually stuff like that, I would remember, I think.
Yeah, but let's let's just have a look at this.
This was nearly 10 years ago.
So how much has happened in all of our lives to not necessarily be able to remember?
And Scott as well.
This was a big deal.
But for precisely one week, that was all.
You know what?
I don't think I honestly don't think I did a very good job of covering the Guantanamo files when WikiLeaks put them out.
I don't know what was going on with me that week.
Can I give you can I tell you why it was only for one week?
Yeah.
Tell me when it was.
Remind me when exactly, because it was the last of the big Manning leaks.
Yeah, it was the last week of April of 2011, 24th, 25th was when the files were released.
But just one week after they were released, the United States suddenly had to assassinate Osama bin Laden suddenly.
And you know what?
This was right when I was moving from L.A. back home to Austin.
Well, right when that was.
But so what happened then?
That's my excuse.
The cheerleaders for torture then lied very, very prominently, lied about how it was detention policies after 9-11.
And the use of torture.
So the existence of Guantanamo, the use of torture in black sites, the whole malignant apparatus of detention and interrogation in the war on terror that had led to finding the location of Osama bin Laden.
So the United States told a lie.
It was a walk in the Wild West style.
And, you know, and suddenly the information in the Guantanamo files was was history and nobody talked about it anymore.
Now, that's really too bad.
And that, of course, was a complete hoax that torture had led to bin Laden.
It was the bounty that had led to him in a walk in that handed over everything as well.
And it was also, I think, interrogation of of prisoners that had taken place when they weren't being tortured.
So some information did come from, I believe, two high value detainees or maybe three.
One of them never got anywhere near Guantanamo, but some of the others did.
But it was specifically it didn't happen when they were being tortured.
They even made that the premise of that movie Zero Dark Thirty, too.
So that's the official history that everybody learned was don't make me torture you again.
OK, OK.
Follow the courier.
His name is Bob.
Whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's such a shameful, such a shameful film.
I remember when it came out, Scott, because it came out in January.
It was many years ago now.
I can't remember which one.
You know, we've been doing this for so long.
And, you know, and I saw the cues.
I was staying in Brooklyn and I saw the cues outside the cinema to go and see this, you know, this hot action thriller about the CIA and the war on terror.
And it was just so dispiriting that so many people were queuing up to pay money to be brainwashed about what had happened.
Hashtag the war on terror is over then.
Right.
Oh, no.
Oh, OK.
Listen, I'm so sorry, Andy.
I could talk to you all day about this.
I have so many more questions about what happened with your testimony here and about Guantanamo and all of the rest.
It's I got to go because now it's Jeff K.
Another guy's done great work on Guantanamo Bay.
Only this time it'll be about bacteriological warfare in the Korean war.
But I'm late for it.
And so I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Say hello to my friend, Jeff Scott.
I sure will.
One of the good guys.
Listen, any time you want to talk more about this, you know, I'm here.
Great.
You know what?
I have you in mind at all times.
All right, guys, that's the great Andy Worthington.
Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
He's written a ton of stuff for the Future Freedom Foundation.
And, you know, anytime you're writing new articles, make sure I'm on your email list, man, because I can't keep up with everything.
But I do have you bookmarked here.
I try to keep up sometimes.
But if you have an email list, please put me on it.
Do you know, I don't and I really should have.
Yeah, man, you're independent enough that, yeah, you could really use one of those.
It would really help me.
And and seriously, if you wrote a thing and I didn't know it and therefore couldn't link to it from antiwar dot com and so forth, then I would feel terrible.
Let's do that.
Make sure we get good communication here.
OK, and with that, I got to run.
But thank you so much, everybody.
The book is The Guantanamo Files and the WikiLeaks are also The Guantanamo Files.
Thanks in part to our buddy Andy here.
Thanks, Andy.
Thanks, Scott.
Bye.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
