All right, y'all, welcome back to this here thing, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is the great Andy Worthington.
His website is andyworthington.co.uk.
He made the movie Outside the Law, stories from Guantanamo and the book The Guantanamo Files, the stories of 759 detainees in America's illegal prison.
Welcome back, Andy, how are you doing?
Yeah, I'm good, Scott.
Nice to be talking to you again.
I'm very happy to have you here as always.
So there's some breaking news out of Guantanamo.
I guess the first one is for people who, you know, thought everything was fine and went back to paying attention to their own life and didn't really realize it's still open.
And Barack Obama never did a thing to close that prison down, did he?
Well, kind of, that's about right.
He made some encouraging noises at the beginning and then retreated from every option that he had of actually doing things that would have closed it, such as releasing people.
So, yeah, you know, we're in a depressing situation as the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison approaches, Scott, you know, which is only two months away now and no sign at all of it closing at any time.
Yeah, wow, 10 years.
It's amazing.
And especially it's been, what, five years since people like the pseudonymous Matthew Alexander came out of Iraq saying, wow, it turns out Guantanamo Bay prison in communist Cuba was the number one recruiting tool for the jihadists that I was interrogating, the captured resistance leaders in Iraq.
Yeah.
And we still got the thing going, even after we have people, these firsthand sources saying this is the number one recruitment tool for the people who want to kill Americans.
Well, absolutely.
But, you know, but also, you know, I mean, I think that's always been a powerful argument, but also, you know, regardless of its effect on other people, Scott, what is its effect on the rule of law that is supposed to be such a great part of the United States when here is this offshore prison where essentially, you know, these people who were described as illegal enemy combatants by the Bush administration and were intended to be held without any rights whatsoever, you know, where 171 of these guys are still held.
And I think what defines them as there seems to be no way that any of these people can leave the prison under any circumstances is that they are still the illegal enemy combatants who effectively have no rights whatsoever.
They've not been charged.
They've not been tried.
They've not been convicted of crime.
And, you know, and that's a disgrace that it's clipped off the radar and that they've just become a kind of, you know, a difficult legacy that everyone has chosen to brush under the carpet now and pretend doesn't exist.
Before we get too far from the subject of hope and change here, I wanted to point out Glenn Greenwald did a piece probably a year or more ago now, but it's certainly searchable where he highlighted some, I think, New York Times articles or whatever, where the Democrats said that there was no push from the president at all.
There were a bunch of senators and congressmen who were ready to work with the president on closing down Guantanamo Bay.
And he did absolutely nothing to push it.
And they actually had gotten going on it, thinking that he meant what he said and then realized he was leaving them hanging out in the wind, vulnerable to Republican attacks for being soft on terrorists or whatever, whatever, without actually getting anything done, because he wasn't going to lift a finger to put any pressure on any congressmen or senators at all to actually do this.
And they even had a direct quote from one of his little smithers is saying, well, what we want to do is we want the base and we want the foreigners to think we're trying to close it and that'll be good enough.
And so it was completely cynical and dishonest and manipulative in the first place.
And even if you don't believe the Obama administration's own words on the subject, as reported there, you just look at the fact that he's the commander in chief.
After all, if he can assassinate people and he can torture them and hold them out of illegal prison and give them bogus trials, he can certainly tell the soldiers there to close down the prison and transfer those prisoners to somewhere else.
And he hasn't done that.
He has done nothing to close this prison.
Well, no, absolutely.
I mean, he has done absolutely nothing.
And certainly, you know, we have we have in this particular year seen so little in terms of anything coming out of Guantanamo.
We've just had, you know, a bunch of provisions inserted into laws passed in Congress, including the latest threat to make military custody of all terror suspects mandatory, which no one with actually a functioning brain wants.
But let's not let that put anybody off in Congress from shouting for it.
You know, law enforcement officials in particular would find it rather perplexing if anyone who had committed the crime of terrorism was taken off their hands and placed into military custody.
I don't believe anyone higher up in the military has said that they want this.
I think this is something that has been dreamt up solely in the in the in the rather unfunctioning brains of Congress people, because it sounds tough, because it sounds good, because it sustains the the false notion that was started 10 years ago by the Bush administration that terrorism is a war and not a crime.
And we're still stuck with it, you know, and that's again, I mean, part of the problem here is that by not fighting back against these people, President Obama has allowed them the room to keep coming up with their ideas.
He's allowed the room for, you know, for all the torture apologists to maintain their disgraceful business of propagandizing about the effectiveness of torture, when, you know, clearly the people responsible for it should have been held accountable according to the laws of the United States.
Well, and at this point, you know, I think we're probably only a couple of yards down the slippery slope from the journalism that you do in some twisted way is supporting the accused terrorists.
And so you're guilty of providing material support yourself.
There's and guilty, of course, is a term that isn't really applicable as far as as a legal term, but just good enough for Obama's death panel, which is obviously Hillary Clinton, and the, you know, Leon Panetta, and I forgot Clapper, the National Intelligence Director, for them to sentence you to death.
Andy, we're a couple years away from that, probably, maybe?
Well, I hope so.
I hope.
But I do take your point.
Exactly.
I mean, you're not even an American citizen, and they'll kill an American citizen.
I read a thing yesterday.
That's funny.
We'll hunt down Saddam Hussein and give him a trial.
But that's not good enough for an American citizen anymore.
How far we've slid in just a few years.
Yeah, well, no, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, I hope that you just get kidnapped and we get to be cellmates down at Guantanamo Bay, rather than they just kill you with a drone, if that's, you know, any consolation to you.
Well, you know, I think I think staying in London is probably a good idea in terms of not, you know, I don't think they'll be trying to rain down drones on where I live.
I mean, because part of the problem with their whole drone story is that they claim that it's, you know, incredibly accurate.
Well, of course, it isn't incredibly accurate.
The collateral damage is huge.
So it's fine to do that, obviously, in places like Yemen and Pakistan and Somalia, where nobody's counting apparently.
But you know, they would run into problems were they to do that to a Western city, for example, which would be demolishing a number of blocks while claiming that they were, you know, after the dangerous enemy combatant journalist Andy Worthington.
But you know, it's, it's pretty disgraceful.
I think Scott that we you know, that we're encouraged not really to think that to think about exactly how people are being killed in these drone attacks, which, you know, which it must be said is President Obama's way of dealing with the difficult issues of detention that President Bush got himself into, which is let's not bother capturing them and interrogating them.
Let's just just murder them, you know, without any process whatsoever.
Yep.
Well, it is a lot more convenient compared to, you know, having Jane Mayer running around documenting your black sites and all these kinds of things, you know?
Yeah.
All right.
Now, very quickly.
Now we don't have time for it.
When we get back, I'm going to ask you about who's been convicted at Guantanamo so far and who's facing one of these, quote, unquote, trials anytime soon, those kinds of questions.
And, and I know there's a piece, I guess this week or late last week about a man who's been cleared since 2007, since the Bushes said he could go, who's still sitting in jail down there at Guantanamo Bay.
I want to ask you about that, too.
We'll be right back, everybody.
Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santi War Radio, I'm Scott Horton talking with Andy Worthington, and I was hoping you could give us a rundown of all the dangerous terrorists that have been convicted by this legitimate, illegitimate, semi-legitimate, whatever you want to, however you want to characterize it, process down there at Guantanamo Bay.
I mean, after all, the N's do justify the means and they're protecting us from really bad guys, right?
Well, you know, there have been six people who've had the military commission trials down at Guantanamo.
Most of those were settled with plea deals.
But, you know, first of all, under Bush, we had David Hicks, guilty of being an Australian in Afghanistan, who agreed to a plea deal, which conveniently shut him up.
And he was sent home to Australia, is now a free man.
We had Salim Hamdan, who was a driver for Osama bin Laden, who was paid a salary for being one of his drivers.
They tried to paint him out as a terrorist mastermind who knew what was going on.
And actually, a military jury decided that he didn't know what was going on and that he was just a driver.
So he went home five months later.
We had a man called Ali Hamzah al-Baloo, who made a propaganda video for al-Qaeda, and he refused to take part in his trial.
So he got the book thrown at him.
He got a life sentence just before the presidential election in 2008.
He's serving life in Guantanamo.
He didn't mount a defense at all.
Not a word was spoken in his defense during his trial.
And then Obama, you know, had a cook who I think cooked for a compound that was used by al-Qaeda people.
He got a plea deal last summer.
Then in February this year, we had another plea deal for a Sudanese guy who worked at a training camp in Afghanistan.
And of course, Omar Khadr, a year ago, accepted his plea deal that he was, although he was a child and although he was caught in a combat situation, he was apparently an alien unprivileged enemy belligerent who wasn't allowed to be in a combat situation.
And Khadr, of course, you know, was supposed to go home after a year in Guantanamo.
But it's a year and a week.
And we're still waiting for that one to happen.
And the Canadian authorities have apparently said that it may take them a year and a half to do the paperwork required to get him back to Canada to say of the last of his eight year sentence as a result of his plea deal.
You know, whichever way you package that up, I think it's very hard to see that it demonstrates, you know, a resounding success, either for the military commissions of the trial system in and of themselves, or the kind of people that are being accused.
You know, I think there has been more success in the federal court over this period, instead of, you know, this, this process that Dick Cheney brought into being, essentially, 10 years ago, that was ruled illegal by Congress, that was brought back from the dead by, sorry, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 2006, was brought back by Congress, was suspended by President Obama, and then was brought back again by President Obama with Congress.
We know we don't, we never needed this system, we don't need it now.
And, you know, today, the process started for what, what I think is going to be the commission's biggest test, really, in that it's a capital case, and it's a man called Abdul Rahim, Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, who has been a prisoner for nine years.
Today is the first time that anyone outside of the military has seen him, who was rather notoriously one of the three prisoners that the administration, the Bush administration admitted to having waterboarded, and the CIA Inspector General reported him to detainee treatment in 2004, also noted that while he was hooded and unable to see what was happening, he had a drill rev near his head, various other rather unpleasant things happened to him.
And of course, he was part of this whole network of black sites, he was held first in Thailand, was then taken to Poland, and shifted around this whole network that involved other countries.
And here he is, being put forward for trial in the military commissions, and obviously, I think there are grave doubts about whether justice can can actually be done.
Well, you know, it's funny, I don't have the details on me, maybe you know more about the guy.
But somewhere in there, it occurs to me that I've read some journalism about how this guy Nashiri, al-Nashiri, actually was one of these al-Qaeda guys on the level of bin al-Sheib or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that he ran around in those circles and may have actually been in on the plot.
And so that being said, his trial, I mean, if we assume that any of that's true at all, then his trial down in Guantanamo Bay makes me just as mad really as them prosecuting the cook and the driver.
Because, you know, that makes me mad because who are you kidding with this thing?
Like, it's all just a big PR stunt with these men's lives in the balance.
But then if this guy actually was guilty, then the way that we get the truth in the society, you know, traditionally is the man gets a trial and everything comes out and is subject to cross-examination and the adversarial process.
And then we get to know this is when I was just a little kid, I learned, you know, that it was such a shame that Oswald got shot for whatever reason, Jack Ruby shot him because he never got to be tried.
And so we never got to see the whole case.
That kind of thing.
And so, you know, don't those people whose loved ones died on September 11th deserve the chance to have a fair trial so they can get their end out of it?
The truth of what happened to the people that they cared about, you know?
Well, I would think so.
I would think so, Scott.
You know, and there are obviously there are many people out there who are relatives to the people who died on 9-11.
And, you know, maybe relatives to the people who died of the U.S. assault, coal bombing and other attacks who, you know, who are asking that very valid question.
Why is the traditional system of, you know, of a criminal prosecution of a trial not the way forward in this case?
And clearly the answer is that a situation that was manipulated by the Bush administration to create a situation in which people could literally be held without rights, as I mentioned before, literally no rights whatsoever.
You know, it's something that lives on.
And it's partly because Obama hasn't repudiated it.
It lives on in the sense that these cheerleaders for a military trial, you know, they want these people to be warriors in their glorious war on terror.
They don't want to admit that actually terrorism is a crime.
You know, why are we looking at a war issue here when it's going to be incredibly complicated in Al-Nashiri's case?
Because no matter how much it benefits Al-Qaeda to pretend that they are this gigantic juggernaut and give them all this credit, quote unquote, that they don't really deserve, it serves the American empire's interests, too.
And that was really the point of Guantanamo in the first place.
Right.
That's why they suspended all the battlefield rules for deciding who's who.
They wanted to fill it with goat herders just so it looked like it was full of a bunch of terrorists because the American people needed to be made to believe somehow that Al-Qaeda was more than a few hundred men, most of whom got bombed to death before the army even got there.
Well, there's certainly some truth in some of that, Scott, at least.
I mean, you know, I do think that when you start examining the details of the interrogations that have taken place over all the years at Guantanamo and all the money that has been spent and the time that has been spent on analyzing it and trying to build cases against people, you know, there's an element of stupidity involved that isn't as cynical as you're trying to make it out to be, that actually capturing people randomly, but then not actually using them as part of a manipulative game, but actually thinking that your goat herd is not a goat herd and is actually somebody significant.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
I've spent months going through these military files from Guantanamo and they just they don't reveal that kind of cynical, clever ploy.
They don't.
They actually reveal, oh, hey, these are the bad guys.
Let's set about proving it.
I mean, you know, it's like once one guy hands another guy off, then the second guy assumes that, well, I guess he's guilty as hell or else what am I doing with him?
Yeah, I mean, you know, here with Al-Nashiri, we've got somebody who allegedly, you know, masterminded this actual attack on a U.S. warship, you know, something that we're supposed to be able to work on.
But what happened?
We've already got fundamental questions about how can he be done for these crimes when they took place before the United States was actually at war?
You know, is that going to be a problem?
Yeah, I think it is actually going to be a problem.
You know, and then we've got the whole issue.
And I find this the most disgusting, really, that we've had questions asked about, well, what would happen if he's acquitted?
To which the Obama administration has ummed and ahed a bit, typically, but has basically said, well, we would be able to carry on holding him.
I mean, this has always been the case with the war on terror in Guantanamo, is that there isn't actually a legal process there.
What happened to our ability to be confident enough to say we have to respect the law as it works?
And what happens is that, you know, generally, if somebody gets acquitted, it's because there wasn't the evidence to prove that they did what we said that they did.
And, you know, and since 9-11, we've actually ended up in a world where we say, no, actually, we say they're guilty.
And we don't trust a legal process that might end up acquitting them, because perhaps there isn't any evidence.
And perhaps what that actually indicates is that the person didn't do the damn thing that we said that they did.
But we are no longer big enough or brave enough or have enough respect for the law to actually believe that position.
Andy Worthington, this generation owes a lot to you, I think.
You stand apart from all other journalists on this issue.
And, you know, even Carol Rosenberg at McClatchy and all of them, man, you're the best.
Thank you.
Andy Worthington dot CEO dot UK.
Scott, brilliant to talk to you.
Thanks.
