All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest on the show today is Almirindo Ojeda.
He is a professor at UC Davis.
He's the director of the Center of the Study of Human Rights in the Americas.
And he's got this piece in Truthout that I demand you look at.
It's called Death in Guantanamo.
Suicide or dryboarding?
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
How are you?
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Very important story here.
And, of course, it starts out with reference to the other Scott Horton, no relations, work in Harper's Magazine on the issue of the deaths of three men in, I believe it was July 2006, that the government at the time said was an asymmetric attack against us, like a suicide bombing, but in this case just suicides, to make us look bad.
And the other Scott Horton has written an article or two casting major doubt on that.
And so I was hoping you could give us a refresher course, first of all, on the official story, the problems with it, other Scott Horton's conclusions, and then maybe probably in the second segment we'll get to focusing on the case of Almirindo and what that means to this other Guantanamo story, as that sounds to begin here.
That sounds good.
On June 10, 2006, five years ago or so, three men were found hanging on their cells in Guantanamo.
Two days later there was a news release describing the deaths as suicide, self-inflicted, and, as you said, acts of asymmetrical warfare, so some kind of hostile intent in their killing.
The NCIS, the Naval Investigation Office, came up with a report a couple years later, and it was very long, over 1,000 pages long, but was redacted or censored more than half of it.
Moreover, there were a number of unanswered questions that the report raised.
For example, it said that the prisoners had their hands tied when they were found hanging in their cells.
Why would they do that?
Another question is, is it actually possible to even tie your own hands?
More tellingly, perhaps, the prisoners were gagged with cloth.
They had rags in their mouth.
Why would they do that?
They were going to kill themselves silently by hanging.
Why would they kill themselves twice, by suffocation and hanging?
They had also masks over their faces, surgical masks or mask-like contraptions around their head.
Very puzzling and also very difficult to explain how physically it will be possible to tie yourself, first gag yourself, then mask yourself, then tie yourself, and then hang yourself.
There was also a bloody T-shirt around the neck of one of the prisoners that was found hanging.
There was also rigor mortis starting to set in, which means that they were dead for two hours without the guards noticing, which is puzzling because, according to standard operating procedures, they had to be seen every 10 minutes, so that adds up to 36 because there were three prisoners in two hours, and they missed that in 36 inspections, and so on.
There's a number of unanswered questions, and when I read this, it sounded very puzzling to me, but I had no way to figure out what was going on.
Then came Scott Horton, the other Scott Horton's article in Harper some time ago, and he interviewed a couple of guards, one of them being Sergeant Joe Hickman, who was one of the guards at Camp Delta, the camp where these prisoners were, and he testified to Scott that a van had come and picked three prisoners and took them to a secretive facility within Guantanamo.
So it's a secretive within secret.
It was called Camp No, and it was called Camp No because if they asked you if it existed, you had to answer no, it doesn't exist.
Anyway, they took the three men there, and then about an hour before they were found hanging in their cells, the van comes back and seems to be dropping off something into the clinic, and Sergeant Hickman goes to the clinic and he is told there that the three prisoners had killed themselves by swallowing cloth, not hanging, but swallowing cloth.
And then there was also the testimony of a commander there that made a slip to the press and leaked that the prisoners had died by ingesting bowls of cloth.
So that made things very suspicious.
He also said that the media would be reporting suicides and that they should encounter the media's view.
So that's how things stood until my encounter with Mr. Almari's case, which you wanted to address separately.
Yeah, well, it all ties together, of course.
And now, Almari is a subject that actually we talk about on the show all the time, and it's kind of fallen under the radar, but he's a very important case because even though he wasn't an American citizen, he was under the law a U.S. person.
At the time he was arrested literally in Peoria, and then he was turned over to the military and presumably the CIA to be tortured, just like they did to Jose Padilla, and no more legally than what they did to Jose Padilla.
So this is a very important case.
But your article specifically talks about the method of torture of Abu Almari and what that might teach us about what seems to have happened to these three men at Guantanamo Bay.
That's right.
Mr. Almari was arrested in December 2001 as an alleged material witness to the September 11 attacks.
He was taken from Peoria to New York, back to Peoria.
He was held incommunicado.
Well, at this point he was held in isolation.
Then he was held incommunicado for some time.
President Bush had declared him an enemy combatant, so that means that he didn't have access not just to a lawyer or to his family, but not even to the Red Cross.
The International Committee of the Red Cross couldn't even see him.
And during this period, June 2003, October 2004, he was subjected to the usual—this happened in the brig in Charleston, the naval consolidated brig in Charleston.
He was subjected to the usual interrogation regime that we see in Guantanamo.
So he was kept in isolation, put in stress positions, had the dark, the loud noise, the sensory deprivation, the whole works, to this legal residence that entered the country legally.
Now, in this period, June 2003, October 2004, he was interrogated, or we would say tortured, by this method of dryboarding.
This is a term that was coined by Mr. Elmari's lawyer, Andy Savage.
Dryboarding is a torture procedure that involves stuffing the victim's mouth with cloth and then, in his case, taping it with duct tape.
In general, it would be to cover the mouth in some way so that the cloth can't be thrown up, spit out, pushed out, relieved of it in any way.
Now, what happened in this case was that the tape was painful for Mr. Elmari, so he tried to loosen it with his lips, and he succeeded.
Then the interrogators noticed this and re-taped him even more tightly, at which point he started to choke to death.
So the interrogators pulled the duct tape out, pulled the cloth out, and narrowly saved Mr. Elmari's life.
So this procedure of dryboarding raises an unavoidable question for Guantanamo.
Is this what happened to the three prisoners?
There, notice, we would get explanations to all our unanswered questions.
Why there was cloth in their mouth?
Why there was a mask-like contraption?
Why were their hands tied?
How could their hands be tied?
And so on and so forth.
Well, we're going to have to hold it and take this break right here.
I'm sorry about that.
But when we get back, I'm going to ask you or give you a chance to answer.
How did they kill three in one night the same way like that, though?
It seems like they would say oops after the first one or else just shoot them.
I don't know.
I'm confused.
Hold it right there.
We'll be back.
Look at Death in Guantanamo, Suicide or Dryboarding at Truthout.org today.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Almerindo Ojeda.
He is a professor of linguistics at UC Davis, and he's the director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas.
He's got a very important piece at Truthout.org called Death in Guantanamo, Suicide or Dryboarding.
And if it's all right with you, I'd like to try to sum up real quickly where we're at so far.
I got it wrong.
You correct me.
It was June of 2006.
Three men died at Guantanamo Bay.
The military announced that they had all hanged themselves in order to make us look bad.
And then the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer and writer for Harper's Magazine, wrote his piece called The Guantanamo, quote-unquote, Suicides, and a few follow-ups on his blog and other places about all the indications that there was a massive cover-up about what happened to these men and that perhaps they were, in fact, murdered at Camp No by others unknown to the grand jury, I guess.
And then the other part of this is that this guy, Abu Almarri, was kidnapped and tortured by Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet.
And he's now, they went ahead and gave him a plea deal in a regular so-called court of law anyway and gave him 15 years.
He's now at the Supermax in Florence, Colorado.
But his lawyers have put forward all these papers describing the torture that he endured and part of it sounds a lot like what happened to these pretty obviously murdered men at Guantanamo Bay.
That is, rags stuffed down their throat, suffocating them to death.
And now I forgot what Scott Horton, other Scott Horton, no relation, said when I asked him this before, but maybe you have a good answer.
How could they do this accidentally, three guys in one night in the same, you know, few hours at one torture facility, they're going to stuff a rag down this one guy's throat in order to torture him.
Oops, he dies.
And then they do it two more times?
Yeah.
Or that was the point, was let's go murder these men with socks down their throat?
Or what is going on here?
Yeah, there's lots of questions we don't know the answer for.
And that's why I'm calling for a real thorough, independent, and transparent investigation into this.
There's several possibilities that could be.
One of them is that this procedure is so dangerous that it leads to death unless you know exactly what you're doing.
And even if you do, it's still potentially lethal.
Another possibility is that there was intentionality in the final outcome, either by the people doing it or by the prisoners themselves.
So it's still a possibility that they killed themselves by swallowing it once they were being tortured.
So if the dry boarding scenario is true, it would be a case of multiple loss of life in the course of torture, be it by accident, be it by design, be it by suicide.
It would still be death under torture.
But my point is not that I make an accusation or a claim.
My claim is just that we need more investigation and we need an independent investigation of this because the people that have given us the answer are the same people who run the prison.
So we need thorough, independent, and transparent investigation.
Or at least 2020 or somebody to do some journalism for a change because we're more likely to get an independent legal investigation in communist Cuba or something on the other side of the wall.
Well, yeah, there's all sorts of options that we can go for.
We could have a regular federal court trial look into it.
We could have a truth commission.
We could have a presidential or congressional commission, blue ribbon, grand jury.
There's all sorts or straight journalism, as you're suggesting, that would do it, but not the people who are going to look bad from the outcome.
They shouldn't be doing the investigation themselves.
Well, you know, it's funny because a lot of people try to attack other Scott Horton for his piece in Harper's, but at the New York Times they do what they do best, and that is just lie by omission.
Not that they don't also excel at telling outright lies too, but there was a funny little episode there where Ken Silverstein, the editor of Harper's, criticized the New York Times for not even mentioning the existence of other Scott Horton's extremely important article that he ended up winning the National Magazine Award for, and then the New York Times' response to that was, oh, boo-hoo, Ken Silverstein is complaining that we never write about Harper's Magazine in our newspaper.
Yeah, well, that's ridiculous.
We need to look into things seriously.
It's a very serious charge or a very serious alternative explanation, and somebody needs to look at it objectively and fairly.
Well, and Truthout.org has run numerous pieces by Jeffrey Kay on this subject as well, and it's a good thing too, and I'm glad that you're joining him over there writing about this because, at least the best I could tell, it seemed like solid journalism, and I heard and I'll recommend to people there's a radio interview that I believe they'll be able to still find online where other Scott Horton is joined by his one of six named sources or five named sources in his article, Sergeant Joseph Hickman, who you mentioned before, and they're interviewed together on Australian radio, and he gets to speak for his own self there about the implications of what he thinks he saw that night and all that are, and it seems like an extremely credible and extremely important story, but really we do come back to the fact that Eric Holder is the Attorney General of the United States, and people like John Boehner and Charles Schumer run the Congress, and so we're doomed, and basically there is no justice for anything like this, no matter how obvious it is that they're lying about murder.
The problem didn't end with President Bush.
I mean, the torture of Mary is still an ongoing crime as far as I can see.
Nobody has disputed that it happened.
There were government representatives at Del Mar's trial, and they seemed to agree that it took place.
They agreed that it was beyond the Army field manual method, so that makes it a crime.
Why isn't anybody being prosecuted held to account for it, or maybe it is.
Maybe he or she has, and we haven't heard.
We need transparency here.
Well, and when it comes down to it, at least according to MSNBC's weekend documentaries, being locked in the Supermax facility at Florence, Colorado, isn't much better than Guantanamo Bay or even Bagram Prison.
Twenty-three hours a day locked in solitary confinement after years on end of solitary confinement, as you write in your article here, is torture itself, obviously.
Yes, absolutely.
Solitary confinement is torture.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit having an unarmed conflict on the most extreme kind of violence you could have legally.
It prohibits more than 30 days of solitary confinement.
So that's if you kill somebody in prison, you would get 30 days of solitary confinement.
But these people are just, you know, months and months on end, years.
Well, and I guess I don't really know the history of this, but it would seem like the law should say that if you were tortured, like say you're arrested by the local sheriff's department and the deputies torture you, well, whatever you were accused of, you've done your time, you're free to go, because otherwise, you know, it's like the exclusionary rule for illegally obtained evidence.
There's got to be some incentive for the government to not torture people, but obviously they'll never be prosecuted for it.
Right, the forbidden fruit.
At least their victim could be sprung on account of it, you know?
Yeah, well, there was a little bit of that in Omari's case.
He was given some credit for time served and for the harshness of his treatment.
So there was a little bit of that.
Well, that really did come up at his sentencing in that way.
That's right, that's right.
Still 15 years.
But how do you measure the harshness of the driver boarding?
It's hard to give a time amount to that.
Well, you know, I think when I was a small child, I learned from a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something the phrase, a fate worse than death, and then that brought up the question, well, what could that possibly be?
And there's really one answer for that, torture.
Torture is the fate worse than death, and I've known that since I was watching Bugs Bunny cartoons when I was 4 or 5 years old.
And this is, you know, ought to be what we all agree isn't right.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's a consensus in this society that we don't really look too kindly on the Ku Klux Klan.
Well, that's pretty much about the same consensus we need about torture, right?
I mean, how is this even a question?
We need a huge education campaign, Scott.
The view of this country has slid enormously towards tolerance of abuse and torture.
If you look at the blogs, I mean, the level of virulence and violence people express there on these issues is appalling, people saying things like, well, there's three down, more to go.
What happened to us?
I don't know.
All right, well, I'm sorry we have to leave it there.
We're actually already over time.
We've got to move on to our next guest, but I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Everybody, that's Almirindo Ojeda.
He's got a new piece at truthout.org.
Death in Guantanamo, suicide or dryboarding?
And again, he's a professor of linguistics at UC Davis and director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas.
We'll be right back.
