06/08/11 – Paul Mutter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Uh, our next guest on the show today is Paul Mudder.
He's got a piece at foreign policy in focus, fpif.org.
It's called the war against Al Jazeera and Sami al-Haj.
This is a very important story.
We've touched on a few times, uh, over the years, I guess, here on the show, uh, Andy Worthington, especially he's had a lot to say about it.
Uh, but, uh, I think it's really important and, uh, you know, in context, I think, uh, means a lot more than just the personal story of, uh, Mr.
Al-Haj there.
Welcome to the show, Paul.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well today.
Thank you, Scott.
Well, uh, thanks for joining us on the show.
I really appreciate it.
And I appreciate this piece.
It's a very important that, um, especially now that, uh, as you write the WikiLeaks have come out with more information on this guy, that this story is brought back up because it's not just a war against him.
It's part of the empire's war against journalists and journalism in general, I would say.
Yeah.
And that's actually the starting point I had for writing the article.
I was just, I happened to be reading the Guardian, um, the end of April and I saw the Guantanamo files and I looked in there and I, I had not, I was aware of this, what had happened to him, but not, not really within, within conscious memory.
And I was like, oh, that's really interesting.
And then I read his, his file, which is the basis for my article.
And I saw that, oh yeah, it says right here that this is the one of the main reasons he was in prison was to learn about the Al Jazeera news networks training program, telecommunications equipment has news gathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the networks acquisition of a video of bin Laden and a subsequent interview with bin Laden.
And he had said in an interview when he was released that the U S told them, well, one of the main reasons we're holding is you as we think you interviewed bin Laden, we want to know how you got that interview.
And he said, I never interviewed bin Laden.
And he didn't, he interviewed someone from Al Qaeda.
It was like a low ranking guy.
And then the U S is like, oh, he said the U S basically told him, oh, well, we can't really let you go right now.
So yeah, that's laid up for six years, I believe on those charges.
Well, and as you write, they were trying to turn him into a rot rat.
They were trying to flip him and use him as some kind of infiltrator inside Al Jazeera or something.
Yeah, they want to basically use them as a mole or at least find out more about the intelligence gathering, you know, I mean that, but that fits in the Bush administration's approach to intelligence gathering, just, you know, legally wiretap everything.
I mean, you have to wonder, I'm sure that Al Jazeera's communications are being heavily monitored by the NSA or something.
So you have to wonder why they were so desperate with this one guy, but it seems they just were really convinced that he had gotten an interview with bin Laden because when you read it, the other interesting is the report that Wikileaks made available is very interesting because in the sections where it talks about his training and I guess his, his acquisition as an Al Qaeda asset, it doesn't mention who he was in touch with an Al Qaeda or how that happened to basically just described, these are all the places he went.
Uh, and he says he went to these places as a journalist and some other than personal reasons and to work out with a charity.
And there's never any mention of like, and so-and-so we confirmed that while he was there, he, you know, was recruited by Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood.
There was another charge brought against him that he was actually a member of the Muslim Brotherhood's governing council.
Um, we have, I mean, it just reads so strangely because it's an internal document and the section headings don't even match the content.
So it's like, why did they even bother writing it?
Yeah.
Well, that tends to happen a lot of times.
I think, uh, yeah, I mean, I've looked through the other ones in the coverage about how a lot of, well, we've, we've seen through the coverage that a lot of people who were picked up were basically just Afghan who happened to be in the wrong place in the wrong time.
Right.
Same for Sammy.
He was, he was trying to get out of the country because of the bombing campaign and the Pakistanis picked him up and then they turned him over to the U S and then the U S, uh, you know, speared him away to Guantanamo for the next couple of years.
Well, and really, you know, the Bush administration admitted as much when they released 500 and something of them.
Yeah.
I mean, they never said it, oops, or sorry, or anything like that.
Yeah.
It's just like, there's no accountability.
It's oh, we were wrong.
Uh, we're not really sorry, but you know, we're going to let you go now.
Hopefully it didn't impact your life too, too terribly.
Yeah.
I actually wrote the article for the Arabist, um, committees blog originally.
Uh, cause it was, it had just come out and then I approached foreign policy because I wanted to do a longer version of the article after bin Laden was killed because you have all of the Bush administration officials.
Uh, there's actually a really good piece on right web today.
Uh, that's kind of an overview of all of their, uh, post facto justification.
Now, when I wrote the article, uh, John, you had just come out in the wall street journal and said that, uh, you know, from Guantanamo to Abbottabad and basically said that everything's justified.
And, um, as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Gould have point out, he's, he might be in trouble for the justifications he's signed off on, so I can see why he would want to make that, you know, post facto, excuse what we did.
It totally got the number one bad guy.
And that's the rationale that we see now.
And it's well, okay.
And then there's the discussion of, well, did any of that actually work?
Uh, John McCain says it didn't.
Uh, Dianne Feinstein said it didn't.
Liam Panetta said it didn't.
Um, a number of other sources.
If you go to that right web article, same thing.
Right.
And now, uh, Sami was apparently not tortured, um, to any other than, you know, just having his rights violated for, for six years being kept, but apparently he was not waterboarded or anything.
I don't believe, but still he was, he was treated as a security threat because he was said to be uncooperative.
And I think I'd be very cooperative too, if I was, you know, in that sort of situation, I'll please and thank you.
Honestly.
Well, uh, is he, uh, back doing journalism or he's retired now the hard way?
I think he is back at Al Jazeera actually.
He's he's returned to his work there.
Um, I'm not sure what he's doing right now, but, uh, he was interviewed right after his release by Al Jazeera and they said they were happy to have him back.
So I think he's still working for them because they had always maintained that, you know, he wasn't listening to the charges and he and his lawyer finally proved that in 2008.
But at the top, like the good thing was with this was at the time, it was just Sammy's word against the U S government.
Cause the U S government, when releasing trial documents are evident and then this comes out and we see that, okay, there's a list, there's a kind of a grocery list of reasons about how he has connections to certain groups potentially.
And we need to investigate those, but then there's the one that really just sticks out that we want to know how Al Jazeera does its reporting because we could use that as a source of intelligence.
And as I'm, as a journalist, that's just really troubling because, well, what, what's, what's the next step then?
It can, I mean, he was a foreign journalist, so he didn't have, you know, the U S constitution protecting him.
He had the Geneva convention, but the Bush administration didn't really pay any attention to that, nor did they pay much attention to the constitution in some instances.
So you have to wonder, well, well, what's next?
I mean, you see that there's all sorts of enhanced attention, powers, enhanced, uh, striking targets.
There's that resolution in the house.
Um, I think it was HR 1932 that the ACLU is reporting on the one that was considered like a, a war powers extension clause.
Right.
And that was troubling.
Um, but, uh, to get Sobhana's credit, he said that, um, he's not, he doesn't like that.
He does not like that that was put in the bill and he's not gonna.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
But he said he saw it as an unconstitutional infringement on his power.
He's the guy who's still in Libya right now, which is basically the kind of thing that that law would legalize.
And he's saying, I don't need it.
Yeah.
Cause it's already, in a sense, this sort of thing is already de facto legalized to the, the deadline came in when, and we're still bombing.
Yeah.
Well, now in the case of, in the case of, uh, these documents about Samyel Hodge, did they, is there a document that says, wow, so this guy really didn't do anything or it's just that, uh, the documents that were the title claims that he's a terribly dangerous guy or the substance is really thin.
Um, no, the only document that I've seen is the one that WikiLeaks and the guardian made available.
And that is his prisoner profile.
They have, there's like 779 of those were released and it's, it's, it's usually a six page PDF, you know, secret top secret labels.
It's turned a lot like a, you know, a school report essentially, you know, then has sections, title headings, and all sorts of oddly drawn conclusions that I don't think, um, well, if you were in law school, I don't think they'd like those conclusions.
They'd be like, where's your logic for, um, they know not, not the document doesn't say anything like that.
It, it just asserts that, okay, here's what the detainee says he did.
Here are the sources we have from the outside and the sources they had that were accusing him of things were actually, um, unnamed intelligence sources from the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan.
Those aren't named in the documents.
They're not even blacked out.
It just says unnamed.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Paul Mudder who writes for the Arabist and for a foreign policy and focus fpif.org the war against Al Jazeera and Sami al-Haj.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Paul Mudder.
He's a graduate student at the Arthur L.
Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, and it contributed a foreign policy focus, a shorter version of his article, the war against Al Jazeera and Sami al-Haj appeared also at the Arabist.
And now one of the things I really liked about this article, Paul, is that at the end, you really get to the point about how, you know, all this taking advantage by the Bush administration and using September 11th as the excuse to claim that everything changed and whatever was only to America's detriment.
They didn't get ahead in the world one bit.
All they did was overreact in exactly the way they were meant to react by the people behind the attack in the first place.
And I guess I'm just kind of thrilled to think that that, you know, message is really finally getting through to people, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, just a friend of mine, actually, from Rutgers University, Robert Campana.
Well, I told him I was preparing the article and I said, I, you know, I want to talk about Bin Laden and about, for three years, I worked as a media research assistant at Rutgers for a professor named Deepa Kumar.
She's working on a book on U.S. foreign relations in the Mideast.
And I had done, at that point, I did a lot of research on the Middle East and Islamist groups, and, you know, through that research, I came to see that, well, they wanted, they wanted us to do that.
They wanted us to give them an existential conflict to frame it that way.
And we went and did that.
I mean, we called it an existential conflict.
That's exactly the language they wanted us to use.
So it's just like, so it is mind boggling how we just played right into their hands in that sense.
And I was, I, so my friend sent me a, see the CNN article that I quote, and it plays the Bin Laden audio tape where he says, we're going to bankrupt you.
We did it to Russia.
We're going to bankrupt you.
And he concludes the tape by saying, in the end, the real loser is you.
Now in that tape, the context he's talking is, you know, the, he says the American, you know, economy, you know, you Americans will lose economically.
But the other thing he did was the moral bankruptcy.
And that's why, you know, we are the real loser because there's Americans.
I have, um, yeah, it's, it's from a quote from a book, a work of fiction, uh, world war Z.
Um, I used that in another article I wrote about civil liberties and in that book, the, the U S you know, it's a zombie apocalypse novel and the vice president at the time says, we don't need elections.
We're under a crisis.
We can't have elections.
And the president at the time says, no, we need elections because as Americans, we don't have a shared, we do not have a shared, you know, ethnicity.
We do not have a show long history.
We do not have all those things that would, you know, Europe and other Asian, Asian countries would have.
And what he says is all we have is what we want to be.
And when I read that, that really a few years ago, they really struck a chord.
And I was thinking, yeah, that, that is, that's America.
We have what we want to be.
And in doing this, we're, we're trading away parts of our identity for negligible increases in security.
I mean, the other comparison I made was look, look at, um, Russia under Putin with the Chechen separatists.
They've, um, they had terrible attacks on them and you know, the Duma has successively given Putin more power and Russia's really not any safer.
They still have terrible attacks.
And as a civil society, there's being strangulated.
So it's like, you know, it's not a good precedent to just, to just bargain away constitutional freedoms for, for security.
I mean, there's legitimate security threats, of course, but don't, don't just, you know, turn everything away with a debate, but the way the Patriot act just got, you know, renewed that, that was, that was just, uh, that it actually, you know, the procedural backdoors, it went through and really in the Senate, some Democrats in Rand Paul were really the people saying, no, we have to debate this.
We can't just turn everything into, you know, no, no, we're not.
We got to get this through because we can't let the security lapse.
As, uh, as I think Glenn Greenwald said that, um, for the seven hours that the Patriot act would not be enforced that day, he was going to be hiding under a hotel bed in Boston with plenty of bottled water and packaged goods.
I mean, nothing happened, but that's just the sense that if, you know, we, we accept as Americans that living in a democracy, we, we take certain risks with our freedoms by not having a police state, because we realized that something approaching a police state, you're more or less trading one danger for another.
And the, the danger you're trading is okay, external or internal terrorism for state terrorism.
Right.
Well, and you're also right that it changes.
It really does change who we are after especially years and years of this.
He got, um, you know, supposedly all the tough guys, the conservatives, uh, cowering under their beds and, and, uh, trying to convince the rest of us that we all ought to be so frightened that, uh, some people in exile in Pakistan somewhere can somehow, uh, you know, reach out and crush America way over here in America, you know, uh, and, and at the same time, uh, we also get that whole, uh, you know, everybody take off your shoes and look down at your socks.
So they don't pull you out of line at the airport kind of attitude and whatever where we become Eastern Europeans, you know, when everybody's scared to check out a library book, cause it'll be on their permanent record, they're scared to go to anti-war.com cause then somehow would have, uh, an employer, the state somehow at some later date wants to check and see what websites they looked at and whatever people are afraid sources, uh, you know, and this is part of, uh, the detention of all Hodge here, uh, is, uh, you know, all the prosecutions of the sources for the best journalists in the country going on right now is, uh, certain to chill, uh, the, the number of people who would be willing to stick their neck out to leak some whistleblower information to some reporters, you know, it really is changing who we are.
It's, it's the homeland now, not the USA.
Yeah.
And that, that's, that's just not a good line of thinking to have, especially when you're, you're so consumed with, with security concerns that you won't debate anything because, you know, oh, you're debating it.
Then you either support the terrorists, you hate America.
It's your, yeah.
Like he, like George Bush said, you're with us or you're against us.
So yeah, not, not a good mentality.
I mean, in terms of, you know, being, uh, recorded and listened to, I'm, I'm sure ever since, you know, I started my work at Rutgers, I've been on several lists with the books I checked out for my research purposes and my current employer, the culture project.
Um, I would like to mention them because they've been very supportive with my, um, my reporting and especially on the civil liberties work.
Um, they actually, I do a lot of the social media stuff for them now.
So for our blueprints for accountability and, um, that, that's really helped me get a lot of story ideas and a lot more perspective on this because I've gotten exposed to a lot more sources, uh, of media, like, uh, for instance, you got, um, I've, I've heard of you before, but now, you know, I was doing some, you know, expanding our Twitter presence and I came across your network and funny enough that happened like a few weeks before you, um, asked to interview me.
Um, and again, it's important, I mean, just to go on in terms of information, it's important to have those sources because, you know, you have the mainstream media, um, but you also need foreign news and you also need alternative news.
And that's why I was, I'm very grateful that I can write for foreign policy and focus at NYU.
Most of my stories have been Metro news articles and they don't, they don't get picked up.
Uh, the foreign policy and focus has been really good in, in all, in, and you guys and the Arabist and culture project and all sorts of other places that I've, I've been trying to get in touch with and interviewing people from.
Well, it's a good thing you're doing it, man.
I mean, if you don't prove it, but like, well, if they can arrest a journalist and there's supposedly the, you know, the sacrosanct, well, you know, we don't arrest journalists and for interviewing people because they're journalists, it's their job, but they went and arrested Sammy Price precisely because that was his job.
Yeah.
It's a slippery slope.
I think we might already be at the bottom of it.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We got to go.
We're all out of time here, but I really appreciate your time.
Uh, everybody it's Paul mutter.
The article is the war against Al Jazeera and Sammy.
I'll hide.
You can find it at the Arabist and at foreign policy and focus FPIF.org.
Thanks again.
Yeah.
And you can follow our coverage of this sort of work on culture projects.
So thank you again very much.
Right on.
Thanks.