Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at antiwar.com.
We need your help and here's how you can help.
Stop by antiwar.com/donate or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095 or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Right now we go to Andy Worthington, author of the Guantanamo Files and director of the documentary Outside the Law.
Also keeper of the website at andyworthington.co.uk.
You can read him at the Huffington Post and at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org and all over the place.
He is the great British historian of the American gulag at Guantanamo Bay.
Thank you so much for joining us again on the show, Andy.
Welcome back to it.
Hey, it's always a pleasure, Scott.
Well, I'm always very pleased to have you here.
There's always so much to cover about what's going on at Guantanamo Bay and so few people who are really on top of things.
I'd like to pretty much just give you the floor.
You have this article here, another desperate letter from Guantanamo and you kind of take the opportunity to just remind us where we are here.
Give us a good summary of what all is going on in the world of the Guantanamo gulag down there in communist Cuba.
Well, you know, the big problem with Guantanamo now, two years into Barack Obama's presidency, is that he's completely given up on any plans to close the prison.
And there are very good reasons for thinking that very, very few of the 172 men who are still held there are going to be released at any time without some change, some change of mind, some change of opinion that I can't really see on the horizon.
Pressure from the people would be good.
But as we know, sadly, people aren't that interested in Guantanamo.
And of course, far too many people still believe the absolute nonsense that was spouted by the Bush administration when the prison opened, that it held the worst of the worst and that these guys were all captured on the battlefield.
You know, the problem, there are many sides to this issue, but one of the things that particularly gets me is that of the 172 men held there, over half of them have, in theory at least, been approved for transfer.
Cleared for release might be a more transparent way of putting it.
Half of them, you say?
Yeah.
So why are they still there?
Why are they still there?
Well, the problem is that about 30 of these guys are from countries that it's not safe to return to.
And although 36 of them over the last couple of years have been taken in by 15 other countries around the world who very generously offered to give homes to people who have no connection with their countries, you know, because they couldn't be safely returned home.
And as part of an effort to help the president close Guantanamo, there are 30 left.
And I'm not sure how many more countries are left that are prepared to take any of these guys.
And a problem, of course, is that the United States itself has refused to take any of these people in.
And that's something that's come from the president himself, from Congress, and from the judiciary have all said, you know, absolutely no way should people seized by mistake be released into the United States.
I find that a little bit offensive.
There is actually a claim going before the Supreme Court on behalf of the last five Uyghurs in Guantanamo.
I mean, these are the guys who, you know, uniquely got the Bush administration to concede that they weren't enemy combatants, that they had been seized by mistake, that they had nothing to do with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
They won their habeas corpus petition in October 2008.
The judge said, look, thing is, you can't find anywhere to put these guys and their innocent men.
It's unconstitutional to hold them at Guantanamo.
So bring them here to live in the States.
And the Bush administration appealed.
The Obama administration upheld this position when they came into office.
The right wing judges in the appeal court said, yes, absolutely, it's not a matter for the judges to for the judiciary to decide on these issues of immigration.
And they have tried all kinds of legal routes ever since to to to say, you know, maybe the U.S. should have some responsibility for us.
In the meantime, the Obama administration found new homes for some of them in Bermuda, some of them in Palau, which, you know, quite often people have to look up to find out where it is.
It's in the Pacific.
And Switzerland took a few.
But these five guys are left and they weren't happy with the places they were offered.
They were they were frightened that if they were sent somewhere like Palau, the Chinese might still get a hold of them.
They turned down these this offer and an offer from another country.
And as a result, the U.S. government has said, well, you know, that's your fault, isn't it?
And they're stuck in Guantanamo.
But they are they are appealing to the Supreme Court.
And, you know, I have no great hope that anybody in a position of power anywhere is going to in the U.S. is going to say, actually, yes, why don't we take these guys in?
Because they're desperate not to have cleared Guantanamo prisoners living on the U.S. mainland.
And, you know, and that seems to be because of right wing pressure.
But I mean, I would say that it would be enormously helpful to have cleared Guantanamo prisoners on the U.S. mainland, because then we could start to beat back on the hysteria of the right wingers by by meeting these people and being able to see, hey, actually, these guys aren't terrorists at all.
They never were.
Maybe there's been a lot of lies and hyperbole about this place for nine years.
So, you know, that's part of the problem that got, you know, the other part of the problem is that the other guys who have been approved to transfer are Yemenis.
And ever since the Nigerian man tried to blow up his underpants on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, there's been a block on releasing any Yemenis.
Not for any reason other than it was politically inconvenient for President Obama to stand up and say to his people, well, listen, if we have a procedure whereby I set up a task force that reviews their cases and approves these men for transfer, then turning my back on that approval simply because of some hysteria from opportunistic politicians rather discredits the whole process.
But he didn't do that.
So he has discredited the whole process.
These men are now political prisoners, because what's the point of having a process that clears you if you're never going to be released?
And, you know, I'm hoping to to kind of mobilize various groups and interested people this year to focus on this a bit more, because nothing is going to happen at Guantanamo without finding particular avenues to chip away at this inability of the administration to do anything about closing it.
And one of the Yemenis whose case I think is, you know, I find particularly distressing and his lawyer, one of his lawyers, David Reams, has been making available over the last month or so, these desperate letters from this man in Guantanamo.
He's called Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif.
Now he's a man who was, he's always said that he that he went to Pakistan for cheap medical treatment, which is certainly what a lot of people in the Gulf States did.
And that he was then directed to go to Afghanistan.
Now he was cleared for release by the Bush administration back in 2007.
But they never got round to freeing him.
Because the Bush administration also had its fears about releasing Yemenis back to their home country.
So yeah, he sat there for years cleared for release, but still in Guantanamo.
And then he won his habeas corpus petition last summer, when a judge agreed with him.
And that really, I think, should have been the point at which the Obama administration put him on a plane and sent him home.
But no, they decided to appeal.
We're on the phone with the great Andy Worthington, andyworthington.co.uk.
And we're talking about Guantanamo Bay in general, and now specifically Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who was cleared for release from Guantanamo by a military review board in 2007.
And he's still being held there.
And now, Andy, I guess you're starting to tell us about these letters that his lawyers published here.
I was just saying that, you know, despite the fact that this man was cleared under Bush and was cleared by by the district court, through his habeas petition, the Obama administration has appealed.
And I don't think that it's coincidental that the Obama administration is appealing every single successful petition by a Yemeni.
It helps them to keep them all there, not to have to deal with any difficult political problems that might arise were they to actually want to release anyone from Guantanamo.
All the impetus toward getting that damned place closed down has just disappeared now.
All they're thinking about is the 2012 election.
All they're thinking about is, let's not go near that difficult topic, because it will just give the Republicans more ammunition to throw at us.
Yeah, it's like when Bush, when they asked him about Iraq, and, well, are we ever going to get out of Iraq while you're president?
Well, no, that's for other presidents to decide.
It seems like that's what Obama's doing here is saying, well, we'll just leave it to somebody else after my eight years are up.
Yeah, he's now passed the buck.
It now becomes somebody else's problem.
You know, and it's just profoundly depressing.
I mean, you know, I find it hard to think of something more cynical, really, than their dealings with this man, because Mr. Latif, you know, I looked at the transcripts of when he was, you know, they had these tribunals in Guantanamo to decide whether they were enemy combatants who could be held back in 2004, 2005, these Mickey Mouse tribunals.
And in the transcript there, this is clearly a man who was not well.
They asked him if he came from Al-Qaeda, if he was part of Al-Qaeda.
And he said, no, no, no, I am not from Al-Qaeda.
I am from a city far from there.
I am from Ordeh in Yemen.
You know, this wasn't a man in his right mind.
He probably has schizophrenia.
He went for medical treatment because of a deep injury to his head that he sustained in a car crash.
He has tried to commit suicide on numerous occasions in Guantanamo.
Why can this man not be released?
He can't be released because it would cause some political disturbance in the United States.
And President Obama has, you know, with this case, I think, absolutely categorically demonstrated that he doesn't care.
He doesn't care about closing this place.
He doesn't care about the injustice of it.
All along, he has taken whatever route is most convenient.
And he's found himself in a position where the most convenient position to be in is to do nothing, to do absolutely nothing.
So, you know, people are cleared for release.
They're not released.
What does it say about this place?
It means the detention there is at least as arbitrary as it was under President Bush.
And that ought to be a disgrace on a global scale.
And the only reason I have to say, sadly, that he's getting away with it, Scott, is that people in America don't care.
And frankly, the international community doesn't care enough either.
And I'm hoping that with, you know, with concerted effort from people who do care and from organizations who do care, we'll be able to revive interest internationally in the problems with Guantanamo, because I have no compunction whatsoever in saying that essentially the majority of the people still held there are now held as political prisoners.
This is nothing even to do with the facade of justice.
They are political prisoners.
And, you know, and I think that ought to be a source of great and enduring shame, especially over nine years after this place opened.
Well, as far as people caring, even if they can't put themselves in the shoes of the kidnapped down there, at least, you know, our own selfish, you know, unenlightened self-interest, I guess I should say, would require that this thing be undone.
I mean, on one hand, we have the testimony of Matthew Alexander, the interrogator from the Iraq war, who said, look, these guys all came in saying, yes, I was sitting in my house in Libya or in Saudi Arabia, and I was watching pictures of Guantanamo Bay on TV, and I decided I was going to go join up the holy war in Iraq against the Americans.
Time and time and time again, they said that.
And this place, just the images, the whole, you know, spin worldwide about Guantanamo serves the exact opposite of the interests of the American people.
Simple as that.
And then secondly, of course, if our government can act in this lawless fashion, kidnapping and torturing people and holding them, as you call it, outside the law, and especially indefinitely like this, and from one administration, from one party to the other administration or the other party and so forth, then eventually, at least, they're going to be able to do this to us.
And as you say, political prisoners, it's only because Congress doesn't like, you know, this or that is determining how law is to be applied to people.
Well, let me give you a warning as well, Scott, because it isn't just Congress.
It's also the DC circuit.
It's the appeals court in Washington, DC, which has a number of particularly unpleasant and very, very right wing characters serving on it.
And, you know, the great hope from from people who believe in the law was that when the prisoners got their habeas corpus rights in June 2008, it would lead to some kind of attempt at a fair evaluation of who was held there.
But what's happened is that since last year, the circuit court has been pushing back, saying that, you know, there doesn't really there shouldn't be any detailed proof about the involvement of the prisoners in Al Qaeda or the Taliban, that what should be that all the government has to demonstrate is a very loose association with with any of these activities, to the extent that what we're really looking at, we're getting back to do you remember those early days in the war on terror when somebody said, you know, material support for terrorism could be a little old lady in Switzerland, who inadvertently raises the money for an organization that is then accused of involvement with terrorism?
Right?
The Bush administration argued that to a federal judge?
Yeah, well, this is what actually the DC circuit court now here and now February 2011 is actually putting forward and getting away with as the as the standard of proof that's required to continue holding people forever in Guantanamo.
That's very easy to see how such an open and liberal interpretation of material support terrorism could spread.
And how easily you know, who What if we start to slightly change the definition of terrorism?
Right?
Well, and change, you know, material support already means anything they want.
And we already know, as does anyone who's ever heard of the international law anywhere in the world knows that material support terrorism isn't a war crime anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But this is being I mean, this is being used within the legal system in terms of these men Fabius petitions, and they have absolutely shut the door on the on the legal possibilities.
And they haven't been challenged yet.
I don't know when the challenge is coming.
And the problem, you know, again, is that under Bush, what we at least had was, was Justice Stevens, who, you know, actually swayed that court towards making these incredibly important and momentous decisions in terms of the law regarding the Guantanamo detainees.
Well, he went and he was replaced by Ilana Kagan, who is not allowed to vote in any of these things, because she was the you know, working on these cases, on behalf of Obama, she has to recuse herself.
The court split for four, there's no way it's easy to imagine a majority of the Supreme Court being in a position to to address any of these problems.
So the decisions on Guantanamo legally, and now being made by a handful of very right wing judges in the DC Circuit Court, they're dictating policy.
And again, where is the Obama administration?
Well, they're just sitting back, they don't care.
But it's actually fundamentally undermined any credibility that there was, in terms of the Supreme Court opening up an avenue for the prisoners to have some kind of fair legal evaluation of whether there was any reason to hold them.
You know, and it's like everything else, we're back to the dark days of Bush and Cheney, really on Guantanamo.
And yet, here we are, it's the 10th year of operation.
And as you say, as well, you know, I think this still, this still has an incredibly bad effect around the world on how people perceive it.
Yeah, I mean, I hate to try to appeal to such, you know, just selfish based kind of things.
But, you know, seems like maybe the only thing that could be used to get Americans to care about it at all.
And apparently not even then.
But anyway, thanks very much, Andy.
I appreciate your work.
A lot of people do.
Yeah.
Well, thanks, Scott.
It's always good to talk to you.
All right, everybody.
That's andyworthington.co.uk
