All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm happy to welcome Andy.
God dang, I can't talk this whole week long.
Andy Worthington.
I would like to welcome him back to the show now.
Hi, Andy.
Hey, Scott.
What's happening?
Have you been overdoing it a bit on the indignation front that you can't even speak anymore, my friend?
No, actually, I'm trying to quit smoking cigarettes, and I'm pretty sure that I needed nicotine to make those neurons that do the talking fire correctly.
Okay, well...
I'm on, you know, seven out of eight cylinders here.
Well, it's a good idea to give up, Scott.
You know, I did that recently myself, only because I got ill.
Yeah, well...
And I'm not regretting it, I have to say.
I'm not even sick, man.
I just need the money.
You wouldn't believe the taxes on tobacco around here.
It's like communism or something.
All right, anyway, listen, everybody, here's the thing that's really important.
It's a website.
AndyWorthington.co.uk And this guy that you're hearing chuckling on the other end of the phone here is the most important journalist on the issue of Guantanamo Bay.
He's done the most work, the best work, the most comprehensive work on the American gulag down there in communist Cuba.
He's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, and he made the movie Outside the Law, and he writes endlessly, updating every facet of the story of Guantanamo Bay, and he's doing a fundraiser right now.
He's not asking for very much.
It looks here, the latest entry says, $800 more to help him reach his goal to continue his work.
I say that if you've got a little money laying around that you can afford to spare, this is certainly a cause that's worth it.
AndyWorthington.co.uk And there's a nice little donate button right there on the right-hand side.
So I'm glad I got a chance to say that.
I hope it helps a little bit there, bud.
Well, thank you very much, Scott.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it is interesting because, you know, I think, you know, websites like Antiwar.com are places that are trying to get a message across that is ignored by the mainstream or sidelined by the mainstream.
Part of the way that we're doing that is to challenge the kind of advertiser-funded model of the traditional media.
And, you know, we are looking at reader-funded journalism, and, you know, when people do like what we do and are prepared to help us out, it's giving us a great independence to put out an important message, I think.
Right.
I mean, wouldn't it be terrible if this was your job working at The Washington Post?
You were supposed to cover Guantanamo, and you had to deal with those guys in order to get your article out?
Who knows what they'd title it, what they'd leave out.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, I'm always, you know, I'm always very grateful when great stories do get out in the mainstream.
And, you know, I think that that does happen.
You know, it does happen with The New York Times, and it does happen with The Washington Post, but not always.
Well, I mean, the joke is they would never hire you to cover the story like this.
Well, you know, The Times hired me once and then dropped me immediately.
The who did what?
The Times let me work on a front-page story back in February 2008.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, and that afternoon publicly apologized for employing me.
Oh, that's funny.
I didn't know that.
They must have gone back and heard one of your interviews with me or something.
Well, somebody ragged about and said, you know, you can't employ this guy as a reporter because he has a point of view.
Right.
Unlike David Sanger or Michael Gordon.
It was the objectivity thing, you know.
You can write op-eds with opinions, but as a reporter you've got to be, apparently, strictly neutral.
Especially in The Times.
But, you know, it was an honor in a way, Scott, because, you know, that article came out and within hours somebody in a position of authority had said, we don't like you having employed this man telling this story about somebody who died in Guantanamo and how badly we treated this poor old man.
Yeah, that's a great badge of honor you get to wear there.
Yeah, you know, so...
Sounds like to me.
Alright, so listen, let's talk about this.
WikiLeaks.
The Unknown Prisoners of Guantanamo.
A five-part series, one more coming.
What unknown prisoners of Guantanamo?
Well, you know, these are the guys who even myself burrowing away at the furthest recesses of the internet over the years trying to dredge up stories of people that we'd never heard of before who had been held in Guantanamo.
Some of them had never, ever, ever surfaced before and they came out in this set of documents that WikiLeaks released about six weeks ago now and that I worked on the release of these documents with WikiLeaks.
And it's because, Scott, although the US government has been required since 2006 to make available documentation relating to the prisoners.
So the tribunals and the review boards at Guantanamo, the allegations against them, I mean in the first instance just their names and their nationalities because the Bush administration kept a lid on everything for four years.
And since then there's been a certain amount of documentation about all the prisoners apart from the first 200 to be released.
So that's over a quarter of the 779 men held, and boys, held throughout the prison's entire history.
So with my research I've managed to find out something, sometimes quite a lot, in other cases just small bits of information about, well, roughly half of these guys, but the other half were completely unknown.
So they've come out in these WikiLeaks documents, the detainee assessment briefs that were written by the military, their recommendations about what kind of threat they thought the prisoners constituted, what they should do with them.
And it's, you know, it's just I'm going through them, I'm putting them in a format that people who care about these things can, you know, find it all in one place.
And it's just a pretty sad succession of stories of mostly Taliban conscripts, so people forced to join the Taliban, Afghans, Pakistanis who may have been encouraged to go and fight the jihad against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
But, you know, I'd say over half of these stories are Afghans.
And it's just phenomenally depressing, really, that when you add all these stories up you just really do get to see how actually the U.S. military pretty much did round up all kinds of wastes and strays in Afghanistan, having let most of the serious dudes actually get away.
And, you know, they're just people who didn't want to fight with the Taliban, ended up, you know, guarding some building somewhere, then they, you know, tried to run away when the whole thing came crashing down, got caught up, got sent to a notorious prison run by the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan in a lot of cases.
They had to survive being transported there in a convoy of container trucks where, you know, thousands of people we think died on the way.
If they managed to get through all of that, then, you know, they're stuck in this horribly overcrowded, vile prison and every now and then U.S. forces would turn up and pluck some of them away from there, take them to Kandahar, send them on to Guantanamo.
It's a really, you know, it's a dispiriting collection of stories, but it's very important, I think, for ramming home again the truth about Guantanamo, which I've tried to make clear over all these years.
But, you know, this is not a place that held the worst of the worst.
It held the least of the least in so many cases.
Yeah, well, I mean, the whole thing was really a set piece, like the Crawford Ranch that Bush bought during the primaries, you know?
It was, look, everybody, there really is a bunch of terrorists out there that want to kill us, not a couple of hundred and we already killed half of them.
Right.
But, so, I want to make sure I have this right.
Now, none of these guys, the unknown that you're just finding out about, they don't appear to be CIA ghost prisoner types.
These are people who were arrested or turned over by the Northern Alliance or the Pakistani military to the U.S. back in 01, maybe early 02, or something that they've had at Guantanamo for so long, and somehow they've just completely gone undocumented until these WikiLeaks?
Do I understand that right?
No, these guys were all released.
They were the first 200 to be released.
Mainly in 2003 and 2004.
There were 200 people released.
Okay, so they were held for like a year or two.
Yeah, they were held for a year or two.
Three years in the cases of quite a lot of them, nearly.
You know, who were captured at the end of 2001.
There were a lot of people released in the summer of September 2004.
So, you know, they had a good while in U.S. custody.
The vast expense of transporting nobodies from Afghanistan to Guantanamo.
I'll hold it right there.
I'm sorry, man.
We've got to take this break.
Hang on just a minute.
We'll be right back, everybody.
It's Andy Worthington .co.uk Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Andy Worthington.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk Writes for the Future Freedom Foundation, the public interest, and all kinds of things all over the place.
Antiwar.com And he's the author of the book The Guantanamo Files.
And is always digging through all the new information about Guantanamo Bay.
And now, one of your articles here is about how the military commission system down there in Cuba is re-announcing the what, re-indictment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in them?
Or the re-beginning of the prosecution that was called off before?
Something of these guys?
What?
Yeah.
As you all know, there's at least, like, six guys down in Guantanamo who are actually bad guys.
Right.
What's going on with that?
Well, that's just, you know, that is really just revisiting the past.
You know, these are the guys who were, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged co-conspirators who were, you know, finally charged under the military commission system by President Bush in February 2008.
And, you know, when Obama came into office, he said, no, we're going to freeze the commissions and have a good think about them.
And having gone away and thought about them, he brought them back.
Bit of a bad idea, that one, I think, because it led to having two systems.
You know, federal court trials they wanted, but they also had military commissions, and it enabled the critics of the trial, of the federal court trials, to push for military commissions.
They should never have brought them back.
But they did, and so eventually when there was such an uproar about their plans to prosecute these guys in federal courts, which Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009, you know, then it went on the shelf and just sat there really all of last year with Holder kind of occasionally saying, it's out of my hands, the White House took it off me.
He, to his credit, said, you know, we will be judged by how we handle this.
It's the most important thing in my time as Attorney General.
But he was overruled eventually, and, you know, the commissions came back.
So really, we've just wound the clock back to February 2008 with this proposal to try these five men in a trial by military commission.
You know, which is what the most furious right-wing Republicans always wanted, you know, because it reinforces the problems at the heart of their beloved war on terror, which is that terrorism is a criminal activity, and what they have are criminals, but they desperately want them to be warriors.
So, you know, we're back to square one, really, on that front.
And it's depressing, really, because I really don't think for something as important as this, the military commission system has the kind of internationally regarded legitimacy.
Plus also, every time that we've seen them try to proceed with a trial rather than to reach a plea deal, which is what they've done to date, and they're really not going to do that with these guys.
Every time they've actually tried to proceed with a proper trial, it's been revealed that this is an inadequate system that's full of holes.
And the last time they did it, frankly, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you know, was standing up and making a mockery of the entire system, which is not really what they want to do with this man if he is genuinely guilty of what he's accused of.
And it always seemed to me at the time, and this was in 2008, you know, the end of Bush's term in office, it seemed to me it would have been much more sensible to have had these guys in a federal court where there would have been much more opportunity and tradition to stop them from kind of taking over a broken system and running it as they felt like it.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's such an important point about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed making a mockery out of things.
He got up there and he basically claimed responsibility for every terrorist act since the time of his birth and for, you know, the Obama presidency and Hurricane Katrina and everything else is his fault.
And so, you know, and they've admitted that they drowned him to the very edge of death 183 times in a row.
And so, even though he bragged to Al Jazeera before he ever got arrested and tortured that he did it, and everybody knows he did it, and just read good journalism on the story, you know, he did it, but so, I mean, how is this thing, I mean, do they have any kind of decent plan for carrying out even this bogus trial here?
Or is the whole thing just going to fall apart like the case against Thomas Drake a minute ago?
Who knows?
You know, I mean, they, you know, they do have a case.
They had, you know, what Eric Holder described as a, you know, as a very, very solid case to be pursued in federal courts.
So, you know, can they transplant that to a military commission system?
Maybe they can.
It would seem to me that what they would like to do in a politically expedient way, and I think that all that really matters now up to the next election is political expediency.
If they can get this underway and be seen to have done something before the next election, then maybe they're hoping they'll get, you know, another bounce like they did with the Bin Laden bounce, which apparently has worn off already.
But, you know, I would think they would want to make political capital out of it.
I just think, you know, I think it's pretty depressing that it's, you know, it's nearly ten years.
These guys have been in U.S. custody for a huge amount of time and yet it seems to be impossible to actually put them on trial.
And I think we spoke before, didn't we, Scott, about how there is a longer history of this case which reflects much better on the United States in the 1990s than the United States post-911 in that, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Yusuf, who was apparently the mastermind of the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, you know, his indictment was the first in a series of indictments culminating in the 9-11 indictment.
But whereas since 9-11, when you put the words Guantanamo and terrorists together, people just lose their senses.
In Ramzi Yusuf's case and in the case of the African Embassy bombers from 1998, they were brought to justice in the United States.
They had a federal court trial.
They were found guilty.
They're serving life sentences in prison in America.
You know, what has happened since 9-11 is not something of which the American people should be proud.
And, you know, that really seems to me, on national security issues, what's happened is that President Obama has behaved without any spine and has let his policies be dictated by the most kind of shouty, cynical, scaremongering type of old men in Congress that you could imagine.
And that's really, you know, not good for America.
I know that it plays very well to the sections of America itself.
I think, looking at it from abroad, these people look like a bit of a laughing stock, to be honest.
Well, yeah, it's certainly a bunch of bad precedents being set.
If only, well, not if only, but certainly part of it is just how long it's gone on.
Where basically now, might as well just be a permanent part of America.
From now on, we'll have this, you know, prison outside the law down at Guantanamo Bay.
Why not?
You know, why ever bring it home now?
Well, there are certainly people who want that, you know.
And I think that, you know, there are two camps on the right of what to do with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-accused.
You know, we seem to now have ended up with the decision to proceed with the trial by military commission.
But I think that the way it had been going over the last couple of years was that some of those guys were thinking, actually, you know, maybe we don't even need the trial at all.
Why don't we just hold them forever?
Why don't we establish a precedent clearly with some, you know, notably accused bad guys?
But let's forget it.
We don't believe in the law anymore.
Let's just hold them forever, and then we've got a great precedent for holding forever anybody that we want.
Well, and you're so right about how easy it would have been to just do it right.
To just say, hey, and in fact, think of what a great counter-terrorism tactic that would have been.
To say, hey, look, world, we give fair trials, real, like, American Bill of Rights style fair trials to our very worst enemies.
We're not afraid to give these guys to a New York jury.
Just wait and see what they do to him.
And it would have been fine.
And they had plenty of laws that made it illegal to blow up the World Trade Center, you know?
Right, exactly.
Alright, well, anyway, so here we are still getting deeper and deeper into it now, I guess, you know?
Yeah, well, it doesn't go away, does it?
And we are ending up with a kind of default permanent Guantanamo.
Very different, really, under Obama's ownership to what the Bush administration had.
Because the Bush administration actually, you know, their biggest problem was that they didn't think about what they were doing.
So they set up, you know, all this offshore prison nonsense where they could torture people if that's what they felt like doing to them.
They were obsessed with their actionable intelligence, with breaking all the pansy rules that had been laid down about how you treated people.
They had no idea of how their project was going to come to an end.
They might have entertained the notion that it was permanent, but they hadn't really thought about it.
And sure enough, you know, when they started getting a lot of international criticism, they had to back down on a lot of this stuff because, you know, they just made it up and it was outrageous.
You know, President Obama has ended up having promised to close it and having failed to do that with a place that looks much more institutionalized, as though it is a permanent fixture.
He owns it, you know, and I'm already getting fed up of the easy ride that he's given.
I don't know whether you saw recently, Scott, but he came over to Britain on the first state visit.
And, you know, I don't mind saying that I look at the guy and think, well, he seems like an intelligent enough guy, pleasant enough company.
That's not how I want world leaders to be judged.
I want them to be judged on whether there are some, you know, stinking messes that they've left in their policies.
And clearly there are, but he came over here and he was treated like something close to a god.
Not a murmur of criticism, not a mention of, you know, you've got one of our British guys doing Guantanamo.
By the way, you remember that closing Guantanamo bit?
Well, I know it's a bit inconvenient for you because you're getting opposition, but it's quite important that you actually do do this.
Because otherwise you're setting something up that's permanent.
And you will be the person who gets the blame for that in the end.
But nothing, no criticism of him at all.
Just, you know, just adoration.
So, you know, I kind of think that it's going to be up to the international community to maybe start trying to separate the image of the man from his policies and criticize him.
Yeah, well, good luck with that.
It doesn't seem to be working, you know.
They show pictures on TV of him walking with his family and whatever, and it's just like the royalty.
You know, he's the head of state.
He's not just, you know, the chief executive of the Article 2 departments or whatever.
He's us.
You know, he's Mussolini on the balcony, man.
That's what he is, you know.
And, you know, what's funny here, too, is you look at all the reforms going on in Cuba right now, at the rate we're going, they'll have fairer trials in Cuba than, you know, in communist Cuba, regime Cuba, than on our side of the wall.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're really running neck and neck with Castro on this one here.
Yeah, well, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm just trying to figure out what angles to take on this, you know, and I am talking to people here in Europe, and I'm talking to people in the States about, you know, is there any leverage that we haven't thought of here?
Are there any new angles that we can take just to try and raise this as an issue?
You know, I really think it will be troubling if we get to the end of Obama's presidency.
I mean, his first term, maybe he's going to win his second term, I don't know what's going to happen then.
But if we get to the end of this presidential term without any resolution on these issues, you know, and I think the same about the war as well, the wars, the huge and unstoppable military presence.
I think something needs to have happened positively by the end of this presidential term.
Otherwise all this stuff, to me, seems to end up being written more in stone than anybody would have thought.
And that, you know, that's kind of worrying.
It's kind of worrying the trend of Obama having ended up as some kind of right wing enforcer, as much by accident as by design.
Yeah, well, I don't know so much about the accident.
I mean, he's continued, hasn't he, George Bush's policy of putting people at Bagram now, so they're even further beyond the reach of the law.
Well, I don't know whether there's new people at Bagram.
I mean, I think, you know, I think a lot of the problem is, you know, legacy issues that he refuses to deal with and that nobody wants to talk about.
You know, the problem in Afghanistan, it seems to me, Scott, is that nobody like Obama rolled up in Afghanistan and said, you remember that guy Donald Rumsfeld and the way that he tore up the Geneva Conventions?
Well, we don't agree with that.
We're going to re-implement the Geneva Conventions so that we screen people when we capture them so that we don't end up holding hundreds of people for no reason for months and years and then coming up with a kind of lame review process and maybe letting them go or handing them over to the Afghans or continuing to hold them.
Where did this come from?
This isn't in the Geneva Conventions.
This came from Rumsfeld.
This came from the Bush administration.
They rewrote the rules of law and of war.
And, you know, it hasn't changed.
He hasn't got the, you know, he hasn't got the will or any kind of intention to save the military.
This is how we need to be doing things.
Well, and the joke is, of course, this was his entire mandate.
This is why he was elected.
The American people were like, alright, great.
He's a black guy with a Muslim-sounding name, and that's going to be our way of telling the world, hey, sorry about that whole George Bush thing.
That was a mistake.
We're trying to get back on the path of being the nice guy again and whatever.
We're going to undo Guantanamo Bay and the wars.
This is his whole mandate, was to give us a return to normalcy, not to double down on every bit of it in the budget, too.
Yeah.
Well, no, I agree.
And the fact that, you know, the fact that some of the worst excesses of the Bush administration are over is not a positive enough reflection on him to say that he's fundamentally any different.
You know, I don't think that he actively embraces the same mindset as Dick Cheney, for God's sake.
That would be hard.
But that's what I mean.
In his ability to deal with the legacy problems and to say, not only to say to the people who voted for him, I am addressing your concerns, that you voted me in for, but in his inability to deal with it, he's leaving, he's reinforcing those legacy problems, and he will be counted as responsible for them.
I kind of think it's pretty urgent over the next year.
Well, don't let him off the hook either.
I mean, when he gave that speech, the dueling speeches with Dick Cheney, they might as well have arranged that together on the phone beforehand where Cheney comes out and goes, and does his Darth Vader thing, and then Obama goes, well, some people we might give trials, others we'll give military trials, others we'll hold forever without trial, but we're going to try to do it all in Illinois instead of Guantanamo.
I mean, he is no different than Cheney from the very get-go there.
I mean, you know, I think that in some sense he is, but if the manifestation of those different points of view ends up looking almost identical, then it doesn't matter whether the intention was different or not.
You know, what we can judge somebody on is what they actually achieved.
And he said some great things and failed to do anything about them.
And he has noticeably lacked courage in a way that George Bush didn't.
When George Bush was getting a load of flack, he actually, eventually, on occasion, put his hands up and said, yeah, okay, all right, we won't do that anymore.
You know, not this guy.
We're asking him to do the right thing.
There's always a good reason not to do the right thing.
It's always going to be a bit politically difficult.
I say, I don't care.
You're the commander-in-chief.
You're the president of the United States.
Nobody else is, but last time I looked, you know, you're supposed to have the final say on this.
And he's not a man who has ever demonstrated his intention of having the final say on anything.
Right.
It was funny.
I was talking with Seymour Hersh and I was asking him about, there's these track-two negotiations that Hersh writes about in his article.
Thomas Pinkering and some others, another State Department guy, are trying to negotiate this thing with the Iranians.
And I said, so they can't get an audience with Barack Obama?
And Hersh says, well, you know, he's so isolated, I don't even know if he knows about this.
I could just see him up there, like, the emperor all shut away.
He's only allowed to talk to, like, Hillary and one or two other people.
He's not allowed to go on the internet or anything.
Well, it's quite an interesting image, isn't it?
Yeah.
That's it, you know.
He's just got a lot of peer pressure to deal with, Andy.
It's depressing in the reality of how to do this stuff, you know?
And that's why, you know, I keep hammering away trying to provide the education that's there for people if they want to understand what went wrong.
The problem is that a lot of people don't want to understand what went wrong.
You know, I don't know.
I don't know whether things, if things economically get worse, as I suspect they are going to do globally or certainly for the West, whether that will make people wake up or whether it's actually going to drive people into further kind of dumbheaded stupidity.
You know, my fear is that it will be the latter.
Well, it'll be some of both, no doubt, I guess.
The question is how far out of control will the out-of-control side be?
And I tell you, there's reason to be pessimistic around here.
I saw a poll not long ago, I don't know, maybe half a year ago, that said that...
I like the first part.
American people don't trust the government at all.
Not the Congress, not the courts, not the presidents, not the bureaucrats, not anybody.
They don't like it.
They're sick and tired of it.
But who do they like?
The generals.
Now the Pentagon, they can get things done.
And how do I know?
Because I watch football every week and they advertise during football every week.
These are the only people, the only institution, the only permanent institution in America that people trust is the military.
So if times get too bad, I think it'd be a little too easy for some of those guys to just say, well, hey, you know, who's going to distribute the bottles of water if not us, you know?
Right.
I think the American people might just go for it.
I don't know.
Depends on how bad it gets, really.
But yeah, you know, I mean, that's the whole thing about it is, you know, all conspiracy theories about everyone being rounded up and thrown in FEMA camps or whatever, notwithstanding, they're basically setting up the law and the practice where they can do that.
There's basically no limit on their ability to do that to us now.
It's only a matter of, you know, their will.
How many people do they want to entrap?
Right now they like to go around and trap Muslims into bogus terrorism cases.
How long before they're going around and entrapping all kinds of Americans into the same ones?
Why not at this point?
There's nothing stopping them.
No court's going to stop them.
Well, I think the problem is, you know, I mean, and I see the same things happening in Europe as well.
We're seeing, you know, a drift towards, you know, lawmakers and politicians who they don't, they very clearly, even more than going back 10, 15 years, have the concerns of the people at the heart of what they do.
It seems to me they're starting to strike more and more people off their radar completely, that they have no intention of helping out whatsoever.
And, you know, there are so many different ways of looking at this.
There are so many different philosophical and political points of view, I think, of how you can see how badly broken and self-serving the system is.
That it's just, you know, will enough people come together in different ways to say, hang on, you know, from all kinds of different backgrounds, these guys are serving, it's not us.
Because I think we need that kind of change.
Well, it ought to be possible, you know, because the problems are pretty simple, right?
You've got the world empire, you've got the war against the old Bill of Rights, the old law that protected us from the government's powers, and you have the corporate welfare state, the military industrial complex, bailout for bankers state.
And these are the problems that, you know, left and right, conservative or liberal about it, you're either in on selling bombs to the Pentagon for a living or you're not, you know?
It's us versus them, plain and simple.
So, should be, I don't know.
It should be possible.
I guess we'll see.
It's already happening, you know, in some ways.
And you're helping.
Thank you, Andy.
I appreciate your time on the show, as always.
Well, thank you, Scott.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
All right, everybody, that's the great Andy Worthington.
AndyWorthington.co.uk He's doing a fun drive, too.
Chip in, y'all.
Best work in the world on Guantanamo Bay.
