07/31/07 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
My guest today is Andy Worthington.
He's a British historian and the author of the book The Guantanamo Files, the stories of the 774 detainees in America's illegal prison.
And he has an article just recently, you'll find it right in the left-hand margin at counterpunch.org.
It's called Gains and Losses at Gitmo.
Welcome to the show, Andy.
It's quite a good adventure story, isn't it, that Candace, you know, ventures to the heart of the beast to find out what the information is, and there's nothing there.
Yeah, that was really remarkable.
And that's one of the main points that you bring up in your article as well, is here there's this D.C.
Circuit Court that has said that the military must turn over all their information about the detainees because the court can't rule, you say, on whether the process is fair or not without the information.
So we should be happy for that, the court ruled that, but then you say, you know, all indications are that all the secret classified evidence is actually a bunch of nothing.
Yeah.
Is it just a bunch of, you know, goat herders from the hills of Toribor or whatever who are languishing in prison down there in Cuba or what?
Well, I can't say for certain what the classified evidence is.
I'm not sure whether there may be lawyers who could explain, if they were allowed to, that there may be additional information.
Most of what I seem to be able to gather is that what little there is there, you know, that was never shown or told to detainees in their tribunals was information that was obtained through a hearsay.
But what makes me think that there's really very, very little there is that if you actually go through the unclassified summaries of evidence against the detainees.
So these are the these are the kind of lists of claims that were made by the government that were compiled from various sources.
There isn't really room for that much more.
I mean, if you get the case of the high value prisoners, most of it, most of what they have against people is listed on those unclassified summaries.
And in the case of a lot of prisoners where they really, really had very, very little, that's all they have.
There's a list of a few allegations, you know, basically you were found in Afghanistan and you're not, you know, with the American army.
Therefore, we seem to think that we've got a right to hold you.
So that's what makes me think that there is very little behind it, just because I mean, I can give you examples of some prisoners who've been released, people who were very, very clearly innocent of any wrongdoing.
And when you look at the unclassified summary of evidence against them, it's full of wild, wild allegations, all of which fell apart in the end.
And, you know, and they were judged not to be a threat.
How many people actually have been released from the Guantanamo Bay prison so far?
I think we're on something like 410 now, something like that, yeah.
And so in your book title here, and I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but the stories of the 774, how recent is that?
Those numbers?
Yeah.
Well, there are actually 777.
They've transferred three more people into Guantanamo since that book went to press.
I see.
So the few hundred were released before your book came out?
Yeah, basically.
I mean, you know, it's an ongoing process.
We're expecting, I believe, that some people will be released this week, but nobody ever knows quite what they're going to do and when they're going to do it.
Well, this is a big deal.
The entire argument, basically, that our government has given us here in the United States is, look, look, I know that you people are concerned about the Bill of Rights and the rule of law and everything, but these people are the worst of the worst.
They're like the ones who knocked down those towers, and so you have to understand they are so bad, these people, that we don't give them the rule of law.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think what happens with that kind of story is that those were the same rights that were produced at the very beginning, and they're the ones that, you know, they're still prominent.
It's very, very easy to find these quotes from, it was actually an army officer who made it in the first place.
I think Rumsfeld then repeated it.
Within a few weeks of Guantanamo opening, they actually had kind of toned down the rhetoric, and you had Mike Leonard, who was the Marine commander of Guantanamo, saying, actually, we don't know who a lot of these people are.
They tell us different stories.
We can't seem to get their names.
They knew nothing.
I mean, one of the reasons that they knew nothing was because they hadn't caught most of them.
They'd been given most of them or sold most of them by, you know, their supposed allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so there was never a story, really, in a lot of cases, this presumption that they were the worst of the worst.
And Rumsfeld did very early on say, you know, they're the worst of the worst, but I don't even know who they are.
I couldn't tell you their names.
All I know is they are the worst of the worst without any evidence, and within about six months of Guantanamo opening, senior military officials, you know, off the record were saying that we've realized that actually most of these people aren't the worst of the worst at all.
There's only a handful there, and you'll see, you know, if you kind of scour through press reports over the last five years, that these stories pop up every now and then, and the senior figures in the administration, not right at the top, but, you know, serving military officers are on record as saying, you know, there's only a handful of people that are dangerous in there.
And we have seen stories, really, since 2001 and up through even this year, I think, kind of a steady trickle of stories about Pakistanis and Afghanistanis just basically kidnapping each other and selling each other to the Americans.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he's an enemy combatant.
Pay me.
Yeah.
I mean, that happened on quite a large scale.
I mean, I think that's pretty clear that it happened on quite an enormous basis.
Well, and that it's still happening, right.
Well, it may well still be happening.
I don't know.
I mean, it's very, very difficult to get, if you like, Guantanamo is the most transparent part of this operation.
Right.
And, you know, and to be honest, even though it's relatively transparent and, you know, you can Google Guantanamo and you can find the names of the people that are in there because they were forced to release documents, there's still a phenomenal amount that's not known about so many of the people that are in there.
But behind Guantanamo is a secret prison system.
The prisons in Afghanistan, the main prison at Bagram Air Base, holds on average, I think, about 500 people at any one time.
It's Afghans who were released, it's foreign prisoners who, you know, there's very, very little information about them, but it's completely off-limits.
Right.
So the same things are probably happening, but it's very, very difficult to know.
And really, you know, these places need to be opened up to scrutiny in the same way that Guantanamo has.
Reports are, if we are to believe them, that they closed down the reopened former Soviet gulags in Romania and Poland and moved those guys to Morocco.
And then I guess if I have it right, at some point they announce we're closing all the ghost prisons and we're bringing everybody to Guantanamo, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and all of them.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, the ghost prisons are all shut down.
Quite a difficult question to answer.
I mean, when you mentioned at the start of this interview, you know, there were 774 prisoners who'd been held officially at Guantanamo when my book went to press.
I mean, it's not out yet.
It's not out until September.
But, you know, there's a process of getting it printed.
So at the time it was 774, but the Americans have transferred four prisoners from secret prisons to Guantanamo this year.
Now, they haven't done anything for a couple of months, but the feeling seems to be that they were planning on carrying on using Guantanamo as this kind of place where they could have a second tier judicial system, where they could try people without the kind of safeguards that they would get under the judicial system on the mainland.
Now, some of these people that they've transferred seem to be really quite minor figures.
But one of them, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, was reportedly close to Osama bin Laden and had an involvement with al-Qaeda activities in Iraq in the last few years.
And he's the one who they'd actually held onto him for about six months in one of the secret prisons that last September President Bush said they'd closed all the secret prisons, but they'd been holding him in one and transferred him into Guantanamo in April, I think it was.
It's difficult to know, you know, are they planning to bring more people in or how many people are held either in secret CIA prisons that reputedly don't exist or in the custody of other governments where the Americans are actually running the show.
I mean, there have been stories about new facilities being built in Pakistan to serve that purpose.
It's a very, very murky story and it really is something that whatever happens to Guantanamo in the next year, and it may well be that President Bush will find a way to close it before he leaves office, the rest of the story is something that hasn't even started to emerge yet.
Well, there's lots of different directions I can go from all that.
I guess I want to pick up on what you said about them choosing the base in Cuba to be the location for this so that no laws will apply.
And this is going back a couple of years, but I remember them arguing in the court cases that, well, you know, Cuba, the Guantanamo Bay base is not American territory, therefore American law doesn't apply to it.
And the judge is saying, well, look, you know, the fact that you're admitting that this is land stolen from Cuba under a, quote, unquote, lease left over from the Spanish-American war that Castro has refused to accept payment all this time, you're actually, you know, conquerors on foreign soil.
That's nice that you admit that, but as long as you control this base, yeah, it is considered American territory, or else what are you doing there?
That was a Ninth Circuit Court judge, I think, out in San Francisco who ruled that.
I mean, actually it was, you know, and that was what the Supreme Court decided in June 2004, you know, and that's over three years ago, and what should have happened since then is that everything was normalized at Guantanamo and, you know, the administration was supposed to have been struck down for saying that, you know, they had a second way of dealing legally with people that was separate from the mainland, but of course that didn't happen.
You know, they introduced these dubious tribunals with evidence that could be obtained through all kinds of dubious methods and just pressed on regardless, so yeah, you're right.
I mean, actually there's quite a humorous incident in one of the tribunals at Guantanamo with an Algerian detainee who was being asked how long, I think he'd traveled to Afghanistan and he'd been in Europe and he'd been in prisons in Europe, and they asked him, you know, how long have you been in prison altogether?
And he said, do you mean, you know, throughout my life or in America?
And they went, you know, the whole total, so he told them the years and then the tribunal president said, you realize, of course, that you're not in America, I just want to make that clear that you're actually in Cuba, and the transcript goes on and he looks up at the tribunal and says, but you are not Cuban.
Yeah, well, we stole some land from them 110 years ago or so and we're hanging on to it for dear life.
Okay, now let's get back to the crux of the D.C. court case and this other article by Candace Gorman here that you recommend at the end of your article that's currently on counterpunch.org.
You say in your article, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, in that act, Congress gave the courts the power to review whether the military tribunal was set up according to the made up phony law properly or something, and this court has basically taken the opportunity to say, I'm sorry, I cannot determine that unless you give up all the information that you have on these people.
Yeah, that's right, yeah.
So that's kind of a heroic thing for a judge to do.
It seems like he could have gotten away with not ruling that, right?
Well, I think so, yeah.
The problem that administrations have with judges is that the whole process of determining the law and the slow grinding wheels of the legal system are that you get to lots of legal people who end up being very pedantic and they really want things to be done by the book, and in this case, having presented this opportunity of saying, look, this is all you get for determining the review, they've actually gone, well, yes, it's not very much, but you're not even giving us what we need, so we demand it.
I mean, to me, it's just them doing their job, but yeah.
Right.
Yeah, well, I guess when the judicial branch does its job in holding the executive in check, that's got to be considered heroic in this day and age.
Well, yes, I mean, it happens in Britain as well.
It's unlikely that, I mean, we have an unelected group of lords who are actually sometimes the people who stand between the elected branch of government, which seems to be out of control and the public, and quite often it's the law lords themselves who are turning around and saying, hang on a minute.
Right.
Oh, Anglo-Saxon law, there you go.
Yeah, yeah.
The best in the world.
Okay, so now, for the people who missed the beginning of the show and didn't get a chance here, you recommend at the end of your Counterpunch article, this article by Candace Gorman at the Huffington Post, she's the lawyer for one of these detainees, Al-Ghazawi.
Absolutely, Al-Ghazawi.
Right, and so basically they admitted in their first so-called conviction, whatever you call it, of this guy, that there's no evidence whatsoever that he's an enemy combatant, that he's tied to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or anything else.
Well, then, as she says, the war criminals in D.C. said, uh-oh, well, we've kidnapped this guy, probably tortured him and who knows what since then, so we better make up something.
So they just held the same review again and they pretended that they had new secret classified evidence that indicated that this guy was, in fact, enemy combatant tied to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or something, but because the judge made it so, when this woman finally got access to the paperwork, she looked and read it over and over, there it was, plain as day, nothing.
That's right, yeah.
There was nothing new whatsoever.
A unanimous acquittal turned into a unanimous conviction.
Yeah, they had to remove the three tribunal members who said that he'd done nothing in the first place to get the new decision and replace them with people who were supposed to have independent minds but who, you know, have largely been compliant.
I mean, what's interesting in this case is that in that particular tribunal, one of the members was Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham, who's been in the news lately, because he's the man who criticised in public the system in the way that we've been talking about.
He said, look, it relied upon extremely vague and generic evidence that would not have stood up in any courts of law on the American mainland, you know, and that basically it was just based on an innuendo and it was intended to force through the results that the administration wanted.
And, you know, my hope is that some of the other people who took part in this process and had their decisions, you know, their legitimate decisions refused and were told, thank you, don't take part in any more tribunals because you gave us the wrong answer.
You know, my hope is that a few more of these people will step forward, talk about, you know, the problems they had, where you're supposed to be allowed to make an independent decision and you make the wrong decision and you find that, you know, you're not welcome anymore.
Yeah, I remember there were, I think in 2005, two or three prosecutors that resigned.
One of them was named Carr with two Rs, and there were a couple more.
They said, I don't even, I don't want to win in this kangaroo court.
This isn't a fair fight.
Yeah, right, exactly.
I think that was the military commissions, I think, wasn't it?
The special trials that they've tried to set up in Guantanamo, which have been stumbling from one disaster to another, ever since they first tried to convene them, which is getting onto three years ago, actually.
Right.
So they're the ones that were thrown out a few months ago because the judges presiding over them said, you know, we can't go ahead with this case.
You said that these, when you passed the legislation last autumn, that was a terrible piece of legislation in the fall last year.
The military commissions after 2006.
You said these were tri-illegal enemy combatants who had been through the tribunal process in Guantanamo, but actually the tribunal process in Guantanamo only said that they were enemy combatants.
It gets Kafkaesque.
I mean, it's completely mad.
But, you know, the judges did say, technically, we can't do these cases because, you know, these guys are not who you say they are.
End of story.
So the whole attempt to trial these people is stuck, you know, which leaves genuinely dangerous people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you know, just stuck.
I mean, I'm sure that nobody's really particularly disappointed that he's just stuck and cannot do anything.
But how are we going to end up being able to try this guy when, you know, they can't even set up a trial system?
They just can't do it.
Every time they do it, it's just shot down on all sides.
You know, she, Candace Gorman, in her article here, uses the term Kafkaesque.
And I guess people, you know, maybe they invoke that kind of language too often.
But this really does sound like something out of Russia or something where here they are, you know, pretending that there's a law, but they're just making it up as they go along.
Then they can't even get the law that they make up as they go along, right?
Yeah.
They're just, it's like the Keystone Cops version of Soviet Russia or something.
Well, it is.
You know, I mean, you know, I mean, perhaps it's fortunate that there's a Keystone Cops angle to it.
Right.
Otherwise, it is very much like Stalinist show trials where, you know, where the whole thing was a stitch up.
And the fact is that, yeah, there are loose threads on this and it keeps unraveling.
And, you know, it's very important to avoid travesties of justice if that's the case.
You know, my great sorrow about all this is that before 9-11, you know, the American government successfully held prosecutions in the United States mainland for people who were responsible for the African embassy bombings in 98, for the World Trade Center, the first attempts bombing in 1993.
Including calling Sheikh Mohammed's nephews rendered people to the American justice system, held trials, prosecuted, won the case, put them in prison.
You know, and this should have happened to people, but there was a kind of obsession with getting information out to people at all costs.
And that also seemed to involve in lots of cases thinking that torturing them would be a way to get the truth out to them, which seems wrong on every basis and produces false information.
And the kind of hole that the administration has dug itself into is a very difficult one to see how they're going to get out of it, I think.
Well, I don't want to see them get out of it.
I want to see them, well, in the dock.
I don't think they belong in Guantanamo Bay.
I think they should get fair trials just like everybody else, but this is criminal.
This is a crime directly against the Bill of Rights of the United States.
Yeah, well, absolutely, yeah.
Now, here's something that I guess it's on the scheme of things, it's not that big of a deal, but it's one of the ones that maybe, you know, hopefully people in the audience can relate to a little bit better.
And that is that these men are not allowed, they have lawyers, actually, American lawyers who are attempting to help them, but they're not allowed to communicate with them without all their letters not only being read, but being censored by the military.
Yeah.
A complete breach.
A complete dispute how much the military has been snooping on them, I think.
I mean, it certainly got much, much worse after there were three suicides in Guantanamo last June.
And it was in the wake of that that the, you know, the administration actually accused one of the lawyers of fomenting the hunger strike, of actually encouraging people to take part in it, which is an absolutely extraordinary allegation.
They're just extremely paranoid about the fact that the detainees were allowed lawyers in the first place over three years ago.
And they've done everything that they possibly can to interrupt that process and to, presumably, to listen in on everything.
I mean, nobody has any confirmation of, you know, whether when the lawyers meet their clients, they're actually being left alone or whether they're actually being snooped on.
And I'm sure they are being listened in on.
Listening in on people seems to be a very, you know, popular thing with this administration.
You know, I think some more shocking developments that, you know, there was a proposal earlier this year to only allow lawyers to meet with their clients on three occasions in total.
Yeah.
Now, these are people who, they have no contact with anybody.
You know, they're not allowed family visits even if their families could get out there.
I mean, half of them still don't have lawyers, so they have never seen anybody outside of the US military, apart from, you know, the occasional visit by representatives of the Red Cross who aren't allowed to talk about anything.
But, you know, people who haven't been tried, charged or tried of anything and have no contact with anybody.
And in some cases, it is only their lawyers that provide them with the kind of, you know, lifeline sanity, if you like.
So, yeah, they're constantly interfering on this one.
And on occasions, the lawyers have tried to get the administration to back off.
But that's pretty difficult when they kind of control every aspect of Grand Panama from top to bottom.
Yeah.
I mean, just imagine, you know, going up against the local state district here in the United States on a criminal charge, having the state of Texas versus you or something.
That's incredible odds.
And, you know, there's a reason that we give all the benefit to the defendant and we let him have, for example, secret conversations with his lawyers that the prosecution can't get into.
Because if the prosecution, I mean, think about it, people in the audience, it's you on trial here.
And it's not only the state of Texas.
No, it's the military.
It's the American empire versus you, an individual.
And any communication that you try to have with your lawyer, persecutors, I won't call them prosecutors, are in on all of your strategy.
They're in on everything you're trying to communicate with your lawyer.
You cannot win in a situation like that.
Yeah, right.
Well, exactly, yeah.
I mean, it's like the New York Yankees versus some five-year-olds on a T-ball team or something.
It's not a fair fight.
No, exactly.
Well, I mean, you know, the military commissions that I was talking about earlier that they've been trying to hold in Guantanamo, when they had the last lots of military commissions that failed because the judges threw them out, somebody who was writing about it, you know, commented on the fact that the prosecution, you know, the side that's working for the government had an entire floor of offices.
You know, each of the lawyers had, you know, had about half a dozen staff working for them.
Whereas all the defense lawyers had one room, you know, one tiny room with three computers in it and no staff, you know.
And that was the setup to try and achieve these results where, you know, they wanted the show trial just to pass smoothly.
So, you know, that's rigged.
You know, you give 95% of the resources to the prosecution, you know, almost nothing to the defense and claim that that's going to be fair.
What I find particularly worrying, you know, I mean, I don't know whether you know much about some of the pronouncements that were made by our recently departed Prime Minister Tony Blair, but Tony Blair spent a long time in power trying to smooth the legal system to operate in a way that he believes that it should do.
He believes that far too many guilty people were being released, you know, were not being found guilty.
And he actually genuinely stated, look, we need to make it a lot easier to put bad people in prison.
You know, we need to just make this process much easier.
And what he was really trying to say to the entire population of Great Britain is, you know, we need to get rid of some of these checks and balances.
Well, we know people are guilty.
We really ought to be able to just put them away.
Now, that's the kind of worrying thing.
And you can see that if you could get away with that with, you know, with Arab terrorists in the United States, then you could start subverting your own domestic justice system as well to start removing checks and balances.
And I think people say, you know, it's terrible, really.
The legal system is dominated by these bleeding-heart liberals.
All they want to do is keep criminals out of prison.
You know, it's our job to really break this one down and start putting people away because we know they're guilty.
It isn't the evidence.
We know they are.
You know, that's a worrying, it's a worrying trend.
Well, it's the turning of our so-called ideals completely upside down.
I mean, hadn't it been in you guys' history since 1215 that the king is not allowed to just run off with folks without explaining himself to an independent judge?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, 1215!
Yeah, yeah.
God, we're going to overturn that.
Yeah, quite a lot of history to overturn, isn't it?
Yeah, it's really incredible.
And you know, here, the premise, I am not saying this is really true, but the premise here is that free people allowed the government to exist out of nothing.
They created it.
And all the rights are in the people.
We all have the same divine right of the king as King George III used to have or whatever, as individuals, every single one of us does.
And we allow this government to exist to protect our liberty.
And the Bill of Rights is really a list of restrictions against government power put on it by the free people who created the government power in the first place.
That's our whole premise.
Now, I don't know if England's ever really had a revolution in the form that came out that way, but you talk about turning the system upside down.
Here, you know, the Bill of Rights is a gift to you from the government if you're lucky nowadays.
Yeah, well, exactly.
It's not a list of restrictions on their power at all.
If anything, it's a mandate somehow.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, you know, it's very important when this lot has gone, try and make sure that it doesn't happen again.
You know, there have been some dubious presidencies in the United States before.
I mean, you know, Richard Nixon, which, of course, you know, it was under Nixon that Cheney and Rumsfeld first gained their insight into how politics ought to work, which was very bluntly that the executive ought not to be fettered by anybody or anything.
And this is the way that Dick Cheney still behaves.
And the way, you know, that this administration does not behave as both answerable to the people whatsoever.
We had the same kind of problems, we had the same kind of problems, really, with Tony Blair in this country, but we don't have a Bill of Rights or a written constitution the way you have.
You know, and he trampled over understandings that have been part of the British state for hundreds of years.
But it ended up that he, you know, that he was abusing his executive power as well.
But in the streets, you've definitely got it, you know, you've got it written down, you've got it in stone.
You know, you are answerable to other people.
You cannot do whatever the hell you feel like just because you thought it was a good idea.
Let me ask you this about just kind of the public mood over there in the United Kingdom.
Is the average guy running for the House of Commons running on a restore your liberty ticket at all, or is he basically parroting the Tony Blair line?
Well, I think that what happens is that, you know, most politicians just, you know, just want to hold on to their jobs.
So they just tend to follow whatever seems, won't rock the boat too much.
I mean, that's generally what happens.
Right, it'll really take a shift in public mood to make it so.
Yeah, I mean, there are, you know, there are very worrying things that have been happening, you know, in Britain.
Not just Britain's complicity with the American Secret Services in abduction, extraordinary rendition.
But, you know, we have had a mini Guantanamo here where we have also imprisoned people without charge of trial.
We were prevented from doing that.
So then the government decided basically to kind of tag them and keep them under house arrest.
But these are people who have not been charged and have not been tried.
You can't do this.
You cannot even start doing it, but they have.
So, you know, we're all in on it.
You know, this is supposed to be the way forward and it just clearly isn't.
You have to find a way to charge and try people or the whole thing falls apart.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, it should be very worrying to the American people that, you know, what guarantee is there?
What safeguard could there possibly be now?
Not just for the American military, but for any American civilian who travels anywhere in the world and is abducted by people who say, I tell you what, I'm not going to hold you without charge of trial forever because, you know, this is what you guys do.
This is the way we do business in the 21st century.
Right.
And, you know, it won't even be long before it's our own government doing it to us.
It's already happened in a couple of cases.
Yeah.
It won't even be a matter of the foreign backlash.
This is the point that Charles Johnson makes so eloquently in his book Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic, is that, look, you have a choice.
You can either live as a subject of your own empire or you can give it up.
But if you have an empire where, you know, basically you have one man making military decisions about everything that is to be done, well, guess what?
That's going to apply to you, too, and you're going to lose your liberty.
Yeah.
It's republic or empire.
You can't have it both ways.
It's only one or the other.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I can't wait till this book comes out.
It's October it comes out, right?
The Guantanamo files?
Yeah.
I mean, maybe we might bring it forward to September, but at the moment it's October, yeah.
Okay.
Well, I really appreciate your time today, everybody.
Andy Worthington, the book coming out this fall, The Guantanamo Files, the stories of the 774 detainees in America's illegal prison.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Appreciate it.
Well, that's been brilliant.
Thank you.