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Now, we've been covering the case of Gulet Mohamed.
The story broke last week by Mark Mazzetti.
And Glenn Greenwald did a follow-up, interviewed the kid.
And now Mazzetti's got a new one here.
This is his third piece on the subject, I believe, here in the New York Times.
The teenager held in Kuwait may be able to return to U.S. soon.
And now at Mother Jones by Nick Bauman.
Gulet Mohamed headed home.
And I didn't even bother trying to get Mazzetti on.
How the hell are you doing, Nick?
Great.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Please inform the people, who's this Gulet Mohamed and why ought to they pay attention to this interview?
So, Gulet Mohamed is this kid.
He was born in Somalia, but he's an American citizen.
He's from Alexandria, Virginia.
And basically, his family and his lawyer say that he went abroad in 2009 to sort of learn Arabic and get in touch with his roots.
He never knew his father, so he sort of wanted to get in touch with his father's relations, his father's family.
And during these travels, he made what now appears to be the mistake of visiting Yemen and Somalia, which are two countries that are associated with anti-American radicalism.
And so, after that, he was staying in Kuwait.
And when he went to renew his visa there, he was arrested by unknown assailants.
And he says he was sort of beaten and tortured and asked questions about Anwar al-Awlaki, who's this other American terrorist, alleged terrorist guy.
And so, he's this American citizen who's being detained in Kuwait, and the U.S. won't let him return home.
Well, and those two things are really the key.
Kuwait and the U.S. won't let him return home.
Oh, well, and the third thing, the third key thing there also being that they're asking him about this guy Anwar al-Awlaki, who the U.S. government has already said he's also an American citizen.
And they've already said they'll have the CIA or the military kill him at their first opportunity.
They're not even going to try to arrest him.
But so, those three things seem to indicate to me that the Americans are behind this.
I mean, the king of Kuwait wouldn't torture an American citizen without, I wouldn't even say permission, I would say the express request of the U.S. government, right?
That's what Mohamed and Ghalib Mohamed and his family and Glenn Greenwald and a lot of other people have said, obviously Kuwait's very dependent on the U.S.
And Ghalib Mohamed says that a lot of the questions he was asked while he was being beaten up were the same sort of questions that he was later asked by FBI officers who came and interrogated him, FBI agents.
You know, questions about al-Awlaki, very specific questions about his family and his time in the U.S. that would sort of require surveillance or, you know, someone watching him in the U.S.
It seems hard to believe that Kuwaiti intelligence agencies are spying on mosques in the U.S.
But now, so this has, this has, well, yeah, I mean, they kept trying to say, in his interview with Greenwald, he says that they kept asking him, oh, but, you know, Northern Virginia, you went to this mosque, you must know al-Awlaki.
And it was pretty clear, I mean, I'm not sure if he had a chance to listen to that interview, but it sure didn't seem like the kid was lying to me.
He seemed pretty exasperated that they just kept trying to get me to, you know, so-called admit to this, but, you know, didn't seem real at all.
But they're, like, determined to have him say he knows this al-Awlaki guy.
Yeah, it seemed, it seemed very odd.
You know, a lot of times when you have coercive interrogations, the goal isn't really to actually extract information.
It's to extract a confession.
That was traditionally always the goal of coercive interrogations, for example, that the North Koreans performed on U.S. soldiers.
So, you know, it's no surprise that he would feel pressured to, he believes, falsely confess to these sorts of things.
But, you know, things are moving in the right direction for him and his supporters.
His lawyer sued the government yesterday morning in federal court, and the judge in the case basically said that the constitutional issues here are pretty clear-cut.
The one sort of right of a citizen that really can't be taken away is the right to reside in the United States, and basically the judge implied he agreed with Gaulet-Muhammad's lawyer's argument that basically by putting Gaulet-Muhammad on the no-fly list just based on suspicion, the government was violating his constitutional right to return to the United States, which is what he wants to do.
Is there any word on what the prosecution or what the government argued in that hearing?
Well, basically they made two arguments.
The first argument was that they said, oh, well, you know, we're already trying to bring this kid home.
You know, you guys don't even have to worry about this because we're already trying to bring him home.
So that isn't something that they had said before.
You know, that's the first time they'd said it.
But they sort of said, we're going to bring him home, and the judge said, okay, well, prove it.
I want an update on the case on Thursday and sort of implied that if Gaulet-Muhammad isn't on his way home by then, he's going to order the government to bring him home.
That was the implication of ordering that hearing or that update for Thursday.
And then the other argument the government made in this one I think is particularly amusing was that Gaulet-Muhammad had not exhausted the normal procedures for contesting one's presence on the no-fly list, and basically the quote-unquote procedure that they offer for that is that you send a letter to the TSA, which isn't even in charge of maintaining the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security, which aren't even in charge of maintaining the no-fly list, with your biographical information sort of complaining about the fact that you think you may be on the no-fly list.
And then 30 days later they send you a letter back telling you, well, if any action was appropriate, we've taken that action.
And that's the entire process.
So it's sort of a pretty ridiculous semblance of due process.
It's not really anything at all.
Right.
I mean, it's unheard of in America that someone would be exiled or banished, but that's what's happening in effect here with this no-fly order.
And you note in your article here that Kuwaiti deportation officials attempted to put him on a United Airlines flight on Sunday, but he was not allowed to board.
Yeah, and I don't think Gaulet-Muhammad, he understands the government may suspect him of doing something.
He and his lawyers said, if you guys want to sit me in between two air marshals, if any security you want to put me under to go back, that's fine.
I'm fine with that.
So I don't see really why the government has a right to stand on here.
And the judge saw it the same way.
Yeah, well, we can always count on that.
That's the thing, actually, that scares me about these things is when the judges, you know, when it comes to them, when they rule in favor, we were just talking about right before you came on, the two out of three judges on the panel apparently were very skeptical that anyone would have the right to sue Donald Rumsfeld for torturing them.
I mean, come on.
And once they rule that, well, that's kind of the end of the road, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, Gaulet-Muhammad is lucky in a sense that there's so much sort of legal precedent here.
You know, pretty much many of the circuit courts and the Supreme Court have all ruled about the rights of Americans to reside in the United States.
And there's just a lot of precedent here.
Even the most aggressive government argument on this is not going to focus on the idea that they can banish someone.
What they would try to argue is they'd say, well, you know, he has other ways of getting home.
Right, but that's not true, of course, right?
He's not allowed to fly to Canada or to Mexico either.
Yeah, Kuwaiti law requires that he be deported by a direct flight.
Yeah.
All right, well, we have more.
I see that you have another piece here about the FBI's interrogation of the young man as well.
We're talking with Nick Bauman from Mother Jones Magazine.
He's got a couple of great pieces here about Gaulet-Muhammad and his ordeal in Kuwait.
We'll be right back.
Man, this is something else.
I'm reading, lawyer, FBI illegally interrogating Gaulet-Muhammad by Nick Bauman in Mother Jones Magazine.
That's at MotherJones.com.
And Gaulet-Muhammad is now, I think, 19 years old, turned 19 in custody.
Is that right, Nick?
Yeah, he either at the very beginning of his custody or just before.
I'm not quite sure, but he recently turned 19.
And he's an American citizen.
And so just to recap real quick, he went to Yemen and then he went to Somalia and then to Kuwait, all visiting family and studying his religion and so forth, apparently.
And they nabbed him in Kuwait.
He was beaten, or he says he was beaten on his palms.
And the soles of his feet hung from the ceiling.
His mother was threatened.
He was threatened with electrocution.
I believe, I don't think he said they did electrocute him, but they threatened to.
And he said some of his interrogators in those circumstances were speaking English, but they never did identify themselves.
So now he's out of his torture dungeon and he's being held, what, in the local jail down there?
He's being held in actually a deportation facility.
The Kuwaitis have told his family repeatedly that they want to deport him.
They want him off their hands.
Obviously it's embarrassing for the Kuwaiti government as an Arab and Muslim nation to be holding a Muslim teenager, especially when it's allegedly on behalf of the United States.
So they want the Americans to sort of deal with this.
All right.
And now so we were talking about it looks like the American government is probably behind this all along anyway.
And one of the indications of that is the FBI's behavior now that he's out of his dungeon and he's in this deportation facility.
And you have a pretty shocking story here at Mother Jones.
Lawyer, FBI illegally interrogating Goulet Mohamed.
Tell us what you found here.
Well, basically Goulet Mohamed says that he's been visited multiple times by FBI agents while he was in this sort of deportation detention cell.
And that when they visited him, he sort of quite reasonably said that he would like to have his lawyer present and that he didn't want to answer their questions, especially since he claimed that he had just been beaten and asked very similar questions by people who he didn't know and who had blindfolded him and thrown him into some jail somewhere.
So normally when you say that under sort of U.S. law and the Constitution, custodial interrogations are supposed to stop and they're not supposed to bother you again until you get your lawyer.
But that's not what happened according to Goulet.
He says that the FBI came back.
They kept asking him questions.
At one point he thinks they tried to take the cell phone that he's been using to communicate with the outside world from his detention cell, sort of a cell phone that had been smuggled in there.
They were shouting at him.
At one point the Kuwaitis actually came into the interrogation room and told the FBI agents to calm down and to not sort of treat Goulet that way.
What I thought was really remarkable was that he says that they told him that his request for a lawyer was irrelevant because he was subject to Kuwaiti law.
And that's of course not the case.
FBI agents anywhere in the world are subject to U.S. law and to constitutional restrictions and have to abide by those.
And actually when I called the FBI to ask them about this, a spokesperson there sort of tried to make the same claim to me.
He tried to say, oh, well you should ask the Kuwaitis what the laws are there with regards to a lawyer.
And I sort of argued with her for a bit and she admitted that they were subject to U.S. law.
Well, I kind of think it's nice to have that little anecdote that under Kuwaiti law, under the kingdom of Kuwait that America supports, you don't have a right to a lawyer there.
That's just a little footnote for later.
So they actually try to use that excuse on you, but you're saying that this was their argument to the kid at the time.
No, you don't have a right to a lawyer, they told him.
Even though they admitted to you that, yeah, of course he does.
Yeah, that's basically what happened there.
So now assuming that all this attention in the times that Glenn Greenwald's blog and here in Mother Jones and on anti-war radio, which everybody pays attention to, once he comes home because of this, is he going to be able to sue them for all the things that they've done to him, which are in direct violation of the law after all?
Kidnapping him and torturing him and denying him a lawyer and trying to steal his cell phone and the rest of these things.
It's going to be hard to sue for that stuff.
It's going to be hard for him to prove that they were in sort of a courtroom level of proof that the U.S. was behind his beatings.
But one thing that he can do is, we were talking earlier about the fact that his family bought a ticket for him to return home, and then he was denied access to the plane.
So that's like a $1,500 ticket, and that's obvious damages that you can sue on.
If they want to continue the case, they can sue on that behalf and try and get discovery to find out, to find more documents and more evidence for the other things.
And I suspect that they may try to do that.
After all, this really is sort of a pseudo-extraordinary rendition, right?
They didn't really kidnap him and take him to another country.
He happened to already be there.
They just called up the local friendly government and said, grab this guy and beat on him for us.
That's what sort of civil libertarian groups, the ACLU and so on, call it proxy detention.
And one of the important things to recognize here is that extraordinary rendition as practiced by the Clinton and Bush.
We don't know about any Obama renditions, but I assume they're still going on.
As practiced by those administrations, mostly, the vast majority of those were non-citizens.
And the difference with this proxy detention practice is it's almost all citizens of the United States that are being subjected to this, mostly Muslim Americans.
So that's an interesting distinction.
Even citizens now are being subjected to this sort of treatment abroad.
All right.
Well, and this guy, there's no charges against him, right?
Once he comes home, he's free to go because they're not even pretending that he did anything wrong.
They weren't even trying to beat a false confession out of him so much as trying to get him to implicate somebody else, right?
Yeah.
He says they were trying to get him to be an informant and so on.
But there are no charges against him in either country, in either the Kuwait or the U.S., and the United States government has not publicly made any allegations of any wrongdoing on his behalf.
Amazing.
Well, and now with the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the guy they're trying to get him to incriminate, there's all kinds of assertions by usually anonymous government officials in the media that, oh, we're certain he's a really bad guy or something, but there's no criminal charges against him either, right?
Right.
The interesting thing about al-Awlaki is that basically Al Jazeera reported that al-Awlaki was convicted in Yemen recently in absentia to a 10-year sentence for influencing someone to kill another person.
And it's clear that this person killed the other person, but all the evidence at trial suggested that the murder was because of personal animus and the guy hated the other guy.
But the government argued that it was because of al-Awlaki.
Al-Awlaki incited this guy to murder.
Yeah, they just grafted the al-Awlaki narrative onto this murder that happened to happen.
Yeah, it seems like that may have been what happened.
Well, and even then they're saying to influence him is not quite the same as hiring him as a hitman or recruiting him as a terrorist or anything like that.
It's a very overly broad definition of inciting violence, right?
The kind that wouldn't stand up in court in America.
Yeah.
That's why they have the Yemenis doing it under their so-called law.
Yeah.
Amazing.
This really is amazing stuff.
May you live in interesting times and all that.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for your time, Nick.
I really do appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Everybody, that's Nick Bauman at Mother Jones keeping track of the Ghoulette Mohammed case for us.
This is Antiwar Radio.
We'll be back soon here.
