Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
So, yeah, Andy Worthington is a British freelance investigative journalist, author, and filmmaker specializing in Guantanamo Bay and the War on Terror, but also covering revolutionary movements in the Middle East and UK politics.
He's the author of the Guantanamo Files, which is profiles of all those ever imprisoned at Guantanamo, and also he, I guess, co-wrote, co-produced the documentary Outside the Law.
He writes regularly for newspapers and websites including the Guardian, Truthout, Cage Prisoners, and the Future of Freedom Foundation.
He also writes occasionally for the Daily Star in Lebanon, the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, Alternet, and Zenit.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Once again, Andy Worthington.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Well, you know, it's nice to be talking to you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, you know I haven't been that well.
I've been hospitalized with a problem, but I'm recovering, so that's the main thing.
None of it has actually stopped me from writing much, which is another good thing.
So, yeah, I'm okay, really.
You sound perfectly fine to me.
Yeah, the top of my body is fine.
The brain was not affected, and the typing hands were not affected.
So, you know, all of that is good, Scott.
Right.
Well, you know, it's been a really bad time for a lot of people I know are injured one way or the other.
I got a cast on my writing hand right now.
And you know, I couldn't even begin to recount all the friends and acquaintances of mine who are going through some kind of personal trauma or another right now.
Well, that's terrible.
It's a bad mood, man.
I don't know what it is.
Why is it happening to all the wrong people, Scott?
I don't know.
Only the good die young.
The evils seem to live forever, you know?
Yeah, right.
All right.
Well, so I guess you're doomed, because you do some really good work here, man.
Let's start with this one.law, judges rule that evidence is not necessary to hold insignificant Guantanamo prisoners for the rest of their lives.
Come on.
That's hyperbole.
Well, that's a wake up and pay attention kind of headline, Scott, isn't it?
But sadly, it really does tell the truth of what's been going on in the D.C.
Circuit Court, which is, you know, the main obstacle to anything resembling justice, I think, for the poor man in Guantanamo.
And you know, and it's happening there largely unnoticed and certainly unchallenged.
It's not causing any kind of waves in the United States at all, that what we have are some extremely right wing figures in the D.C.
Circuit Court who are taking these decisions that are being made about the Guantanamo prisoners in their habeas corpus petitions in the lower court, in the district court, and they're basically, you know, throwing back at the lower judges anything that resembles support for the prisoners claims are clamping down on any attempts to to to order the prisoners to be released because the government doesn't have the evidence or because the evidence that they have is tainted.
This has been happening since last year that a number of particularly notorious judges on that court have been pushing back at the limits of the evidence that's required.
And basically, you know, in a recent case, they basically suggested that, you know, if the government says something, that ought to be good enough for people to accept the face value that really any kind of probing of the of the supposed evidence is really infringing on their rights.
And it's all been designed to you know, these people are ideologically driven.
They don't want anybody released from Guantanamo.
Well, but let me ask you something, though, here.
And never mind Barack Obama's good intentions.
I'm sick and tired of even addressing that.
OK, it's the most violent guy in the whole world.
Bar none.
No competition.
OK, but what about the fact that in the Bush years, the Supreme Court three times slapped Bush down in Hamdan, Rasool and Bomediene and then particularly Bomediene struck down part of the Military Commissions Act of 2009 and said that if you're going to hold these people, they at least get one shot before a federal judge or I guess more accurately, a federal judge has at least one shot at seeing whether, you know, in a habeas corpus hearing, whether he thinks that the executive still, you know, has any convincing reason, a very low threshold of evidence, really, that there's any evidence at all that these people are enemy combatants.
And if they can't, then they're to be released.
Right.
So what's the hold up here?
The Supreme Court spoke, man.
Well, the problem is the Supreme Court didn't define a lot of the things that it was talking about as to as to what was required to be to be proven to justify a prisoner's detention.
And that kind of had to be decided amongst the lower court judges.
And, you know, and that's where they've run up against the problems with the district court that when these decisions have been appealed, some of the circuit court judges are taking a much different view of what the definition should be.
So, yeah, the Supreme Court was, you know, it was an extremely important decision.
But when you start to look at the details, they didn't provide enough details to kind of make this watertight.
And the result has been that, you know, the all meaning really of the habeas rulings has been gutted by these right wing judges.
But that's extremely disappointing.
And the worrying thing, Scott, is that, you know, those great decisions that took place in the Supreme Court, those three that you mentioned, took place when when Justice Stevens was part of the Supreme Court.
And since he retired last year, we've now got Elena Kagan, who, you know, is not allowed to take part in any of these cases because she was Obama's solicitor general.
She was involved in standing up and defending all this all this kind of stuff on behalf of the government.
So that makes her opinions rather suspect anyway, but she's not allowed to rule on them because of her previous involvement, which means that where we've gone from where we were under Bush extraordinarily is that we've seen the Supreme Court effectively move to the right.
Here's the thing, man, I'm still confused.
I mean, I know the government can do anything to anyone that they feel like and whatever, but I'm I really am confused about the Bometting decision and the habeas corpus and all that.
I mean, how vague could that ruling have been that Obama can get away with saying, OK, but if you're Yemeni and the court has already said we got nothing on you, we're still never letting you go just because you happen to be Yemeni.
Are you telling me there's a loophole that big in the Bometting decision that they were that vague?
No, no, there isn't.
And I'll come back to that just in a sec.
I'll come back to the Yemenis.
Remind me.
But I mean, just to finish on Bometting and what we were saying before, the really horrible thing about the situation that we're in now is that with Justice Stevens retirement, you know, and he was the driver of these great rulings that were made under Bush.
And with Kagan, who has to recuse herself, we end up with split decisions should any of this stuff end up in the Supreme Court, which looks like it can't be won.
None of this nonsense can be reversed.
So, in fact, the decisions about detainees under President Obama are now being made by people like Judge A. Raymond Randolph.
Ask people to look him up.
Look up Judge Randolph.
He's so right wing.
He backed all the legislation under Bush that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.
But now he's the man the buck stops with.
It's people like him and his colleagues.
And if we had someone to break the tie on the court, it would be Elena Kagan, who is not allowed to participate because she was arguing Obama's position on each of these arguments.
Exactly.
Incredible.
So I don't know how this ends up judicially.
I mean, this needs to be taken on as a political thing there, which probably feeds into what you were saying about the Yemenis.
There's nothing in Boumediene.
There's nothing in anything the judiciary has said to justify President Obama capitulating to criticism after the failed Christmas Day bomb plot in 2009 when, you know, when everybody started saying, oh, dangerous Yemenis don't release any Yemenis.
And he immediately capitulated and said, yeah, you're right.
No Yemenis are going to be released from Guantanamo.
You know, that was 15 months ago.
This isn't lawful.
This was just a knee jerk reaction to fears of Yemen, to the favor rattling about Yemen, you know, that we've seen build up on various fronts in the United States.
And these guys are political prisoners and they are still held there.
And, you know, and what's actually worrying, I think, Scott, with the recent upheavals with the varying degrees of success of what's been happening in the Middle East, from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, is that for none of these guys in Guantanamo who are from these countries where there have been problems, I don't think any of this looks as though it's going to make it any easier for them to be released.
So, you know, the Yemenis, there's an unrest in Yemen that's not going to help.
You know, if President Saleh falls, I can imagine that the right wingers in the States are going to say, well, who's going to fill the vacuum?
It's going to be worse.
I can imagine, you know, there are a bunch of Tunisians in Guantanamo who some of them couldn't go home because their dictator would have tortured them, Ben Ali.
Well, now we've got rid of Ben Ali.
But, you know, this hasn't been challenged yet in the States.
But I can easily imagine that if somebody proposes that these guys can now go home because their dictator has gone, then we'll have right wingers say, yeah, but we don't trust Tunisia.
We knew where we were with the dictator.
We now think Tunisia might be a kind of rogue nation into which, you know, terrorists are going to, they'll start seeing terrorists appearing left, right and center again.
And I find that really disappointing because I think the one thing that has been happening in the Middle East is that this is, these are movements that have come from young people that are, you know, connected with the rest of the world.
This has come from working people, from trade unions, from all these people who've been suppressed for so long.
They're the ones driving these movements.
These movements aren't driven by, you know, by fanatical Islamist groups.
In fact, the Islamists have been keeping in the background and they're not playing a major part in these.
This has been a triumph of people power in the Middle East.
And what it should have done is do away with all these spurious arguments about the war on terror.
It should actually expose, I think, how the time for that wretched narrative is over, you know, of, you know, we're all in this terrible battle against terrorists and therefore we must back torturing regimes in the Middle East.
We must all be torturing people.
If you're not torturing people, you're not doing your job properly.
All of this, let's forget it, where there's no sign of these people in the Middle East.
This is a rebellion of ordinary Muslim people and the fanatics are not in sight.
The only fanatics that are in sight now are the ones that you can see in the United States when you swivel your eye back over to what's happening there.
Yeah, well, and the few that the CIA are backing in Libya right now.
Right, yeah.
Well, we can't go around letting these innocent people go because after all, we tortured them and they'll go back to Libya, Tunisia, wherever, and become terrorists.
Well, that's always been the argument, hasn't it, is that, you know, if there's no other reason that you can't release people, it's that, you know, you've radicalized them through what you did to them and therefore it's...
I mean, I'm just, you know, how fed up do you have to be of the whole thing, Scott, really?
You know, there are a handful of bad guys in that prison.
Can we not just get to the position of, you know, of just having trials for those and get rid of everybody else?
You know, it's just depressing.
I've spent five years working nonstop on this story, as you know, and it's depressing to have discovered that five years in, you know, two years into Obama, we're actually in a position where it's more impossible than it's ever been to get this place closed down, to have a decent conversation about, a meaningful conversation about the perceived dangerousness of the people who are held there.
And it's more difficult than ever, to be honest, to engage people in any significant numbers about it.
It's just the rotten, disgraceful, disgusting prison that everybody seems to have forgotten about.
But it's not.
It's still there and it's still out there beaming its malevolent message about what kind of country America is, really, and what kind of treatment America is happy to dish out to people that are not American and how it's happy to hold people forever without charge or trial, you know, so long as they're not American, you know, still pumping out that message.
And that's unacceptable and it's a dangerous message.
Well, now, MSNBC is reporting that Eric Holder is to announce later today that never mind all that about giving trials to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
And I guess we already knew that, that they had basically put that on the back burner and turned the heat off on it.
But now is the official announcement today that, yeah, never mind all that, which I don't really understand, because it seems like they could make a great show trial out of it, pretend that there's a rule of law and all that.
But meanwhile, they could do the same thing like they did in Gilani and just announce that, don't worry, even if he's acquitted, we'll still hold him forever anyway.
Yeah, well, I mean, which they already said they would do when they announced that they would have trials.
But, you know, the only reason that they put those guys forward for trials was that they were confident enough that they had material that wasn't tainted by torture.
You know, the people who turned against them are the ones who, you know, who bear the initial responsibility for this rather shameful backsliding, if that's what's happened.
And, you know, and I can well believe it's true.
The pity is that, you know, there were there were interviews with Eric Holder about this where I believe this, you know, he said, look, I think historically it's quite important for us to do this properly.
These are supposed to be the genuinely bad guys and we should have them in a federal court.
You know, and he he ran up against problems that when when everybody started criticizing this and, you know, and then the carrots came out and when we can't, the al-Qaeda will fly planes into our courthouse, you know, all this just abject nonsense, really scaremongering rubbish that the administration didn't stand its ground.
Yet again, it was President Obama who just caved in instead of standing up and saying, what rubbish are you talking about?
You know, we want legitimacy for this.
Let's have a trial and say again to his critics, we already told you we're confident that this trial is going to be won.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be going ahead with it.
Do you think that we want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to walk?
No, we don't.
The only reason we've put him forward for trial was because we're absolutely sure that we're going to win.
And, you know, and I would have said that as well from a different perspective, Scott.
I would say that if the remotest shred of evidence is placed in front of an ordinary American jury, that these guys accused of the 9-11 attack, if the remotest shred of evidence is put in front of the jury, they don't care what else is the rest of the story.
One bit of evidence will be enough for them to say that's it.
These guys are guilty.
Hey, I can victim Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Ramzi bin al-Sheikh sat and gave an interview to Youssef Fouda of Al Jazeera and bragged about it, took what they considered credit for it.
So try them and convict them.
You don't need any of this ridiculous.
Well, it's not really ridiculous.
If what you're interested in is justice, you don't need the system at Guantanamo Bay.
There's, you know, plenty high conviction rate in the federal court system that we already have.
Yeah, well, no, absolutely.
You know, but I mean, you know, is this officially been announced?
Then Scott, then they're not going to they're going to have military commission trials or what?
They don't say that.
Well, I'm not exactly sure.
I got it on mute.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye that right at the top of the show.
Oh, what's this about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
And it was, you know, later today, holders going to announce they're not doing the civilian trials after all.
That was all I got out of it so far.
OK, well, I'll go to Google News and fill in the audience on more detail after this after this break.
Thanks very much for your time, Andy.
I always appreciate it.
Yeah, well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you as well, Scott.
Cheers.
There you go.
Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
