All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and now our next guest is Andy Worthington.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
And, of course, he's the author of The Guantanamo Files and co-director of the documentary film Outside the Law and among the world's foremost experts on— well, really, the world's foremost expert on who all is at Guantanamo Bay and what are their stories.
There are others, I guess, who are probably more expert in specific laws on the case or whatever.
But as far as who's there and how that happened and are they ever going to be let go again and that kind of thing, Andy is the one, the historian for all future historians to keep track of.
All right, welcome back.
How are you?
Hey, I'm all right, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
You're not just a historian of all this madness of the secret prison down there— not secret, the illegal post-constitutional prison down there at Guantanamo Bay, Communist Cuba.
You're also an activist on the issue, and you just got back from Kuwait where you're trying to help to get two of the Guantanamo prisoners freed.
Is that right?
That's right, yeah.
Yeah.
And it was amazing because I haven't been before.
It's actually my first visit to a Middle Eastern country, so the hospitality was great.
So you get something firsthand from seeing the backgrounds of the people who are held.
Obviously, with the British prisoners, I would know more or less what that was.
But in Kuwait, I met especially the families of one of the two guys fired, Al-Kandari, who's still held there, his huge extended family, some of his relatives who look so much like him as you can see from the photos that were eventually made available, some Red Cross photos were made available in 2009.
And relatives of his who look so much like him, really lovely people.
And to get the knowledge that clearly here is an entire network of people who want him back and will be happy to look after him, which I think was a useful point in combating the hysteria amongst particularly lawmakers in certain parts of the mainstream media in the U.S. about how everybody who's released from Guantanamo is going to end up doing bad things to Americans, when that's an exaggerated story in the first place.
And it fails, I think, really to take into account maybe these are not, maybe what's being lost in this story is some nuances that may be also, as well as exaggerating the numbers of people involved, which I think is absolutely clear that these exaggerated claims just, you know, they're not backed up.
But also, you know, it misses the point of what about, what role did the United States play in making perhaps some of these men so miserable that they ended up, you know, taking their own lives, engaging in anti-American activities after their release?
I mean, that's missed out of the equation.
Look, the bottom line of Guantanamo from the very beginning has been the basic American precept upside down.
You're guilty until you're proven innocent, and that's if we decide we're going to give you a chance to prove you're innocent at all.
But so along those lines, I mean, how are you so sure that you're not accidentally providing aid and comfort to some guys who either were suicide bomber types then or are now?
Well, I mean, I think to be honest, I mean, I couldn't, nobody can categorically guarantee that after spending a long time in a place with as terrible a history as Guantanamo that some people may not, you know, be put in a precarious position as a result of it.
I don't think generally that's a very wise position to take when regarding releasing people from detention.
You know, if you apply that kind of thing to the domestic prison system, for example, with violent criminals who, you know, have had the luxury of a trial and a conviction, you would find out that many people would choose never to release anyone.
Now, you know, I happen to think probably the U.S. is geared up in the most punitive way to try and make sure that as few people as possible are released.
But people still do have sentences, serve them, and then they're allowed to go home.
And if we kind of spiral out of control with this paradigm, nobody ever gets released anywhere for anything.
But, you know, I mean, it's just not right.
But on the first point, though, you are convinced that these guys never were al-Qaeda and never were the droids the Americans thought they were looking for over there?
Yeah, I mean, that's the big problem is that I know the stories of these two Kuwaiti guys pretty well.
Now, both of these guys said that they went out to Afghanistan to be involved in charitable work.
And there's certainly what I think passes for evidence to demonstrate that that's the case.
But, you know, if in the most outlandish manner we are prepared to take some of the allegations against them at face value, you know, so many of the allegations against them are clearly, clearly unreliable.
They're made by notoriously unreliable witnesses.
The claim that Fayez, for example, who was in Afghanistan for a few months, had become the spiritual advisor to Osama bin Laden during that period was made by the most notorious liar in Guantanamo, the Misrani Asim Basadar Yemeni, who lied about, you know, over a hundred of his fellow prisoners.
His testimony was discredited even internally.
People knew how dubious he was.
You know, so there is the remotest possibility that, you know, the best that you can say is these guys said that they were involved in humanitarian aid.
There appear to be a few gaps and loose ends in their timeline.
So just conceivably, maybe they went and did some training.
Maybe they got caught up in something.
Maybe when they were leaving Afghanistan with everybody, they're in a position where some guy gives them a gun and says, you know, you might need this to look after yourself.
We're not talking about terrorists here.
We're not talking about people who ever were terrorists.
You know, they and other people who perhaps even more demonstrably were involved at some point in carrying a weapon or engaging in, you know, combat with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.
You say in the piece here that one of these guys was identified by a CIA analyst, I guess, as you got the wrong guy back in the summer of 2002, ten years ago.
Yeah, that's actually another of the Kuwaitis who was released a few years back.
Oh, I'm sorry.
But, you know, he was held until 2009, and he had to win a case in the U.S. court.
For seven years.
You know, seven years after a CIA agent came and said, you've got the wrong guy here.
Okay, I'm sorry for interrupting.
No, that's all right, Scott.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's just the gulf between what people are still encouraged to believe about these guys being the worst of the worst terrorists, and the fact that, hey, actually, only a few dozen of these people are ever accused of that.
What you've actually got with the rest is people who, you know, are accused of very, very little.
In the way of evidence.
I don't know exactly how you have, you know, the spreadsheet on your home computer or whatever here, but do you have, you know, the different people still there categorized by these are the people who never were even credibly accused of terrorism, who are on the list for never getting a trial but indefinite detention anyway, or the people who've already been cleared for release but now they can't be released because they happen to be Yemeni or Chinese and that kind of thing?
Not as such.
I mean, there are, you know, I have various categories that I know about that people fit one or the other.
I mean, you know, the...
Because, you know, people always rationalize that.
Whatever the most unfair situation is for anybody down there, it's what applies to Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed maybe, but to the rest of the people, you know, they deserve whatever degree of confinement they're getting is sort of the default position of the Americans.
And so the burden really is kind of on you to show how that ain't right.
You know what I mean?
Well, no, exactly.
And, you know, the Obama administration hasn't made public any of its decisions about who fits what category.
But, you know, the blunt truth is, Scott, because nobody's been released for the last 14 months from Guantanamo except two guys who are left in coffins, then it's actually becoming relevant whether they think that you're a threat or not.
That's the first obstacle that needs to be overcome.
And the third hurdle, you know, preventing the American people from understanding that something's still not right at Guantanamo is that over half these guys the U.S. government doesn't want to hold.
But it can't release them because, as you said, either they're Yemenis, and, you know, and the thing with Yemen is that, you know, the people of Yemen are perceived all to be either terrorists or terrorist sympathizers by the United States government, and therefore even prisoners cleared for release cannot be released there.
Just because it would be really bad politics for the Democrats if any of them ever shot anybody ever again.
Yeah, well, of course, but, you know, but that's only because somehow we've been allowed to spiral out of control into this fear-filled world.
Yeah, and help turn Yemen upside down with our drone war.
Not that it wasn't already upside down.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Andy Worthington, andyworthington.co.uk, The Guantanamo Files, Outside the Law.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Andy Worthington, great chronicler of the horrible abuse of individuals and justice and everything good and true down in Guantanamo Bay.
Andy Worthington, andyworthington.co.uk, again, is his website.
And I guess I kind of want to ask you about Bagram, but I don't want to change the subject too quickly from Guantanamo Bay, but could you at least address my assertion that I'm about to make, which is that Bagram is the exact same thing as Guantanamo Bay, and as soon as the Supreme Court made enough rulings that made it inconvenient to hold people in a forever unjust prison without trial down in Guantanamo Bay, that they would just do it at Bagram instead, because even though we won that war 10 1⁄2 years ago, it's still always a battlefield under perpetual occupation and martial law, and so therefore we just hold people in our ghost prison there, and it's presumed to be legal in Washington, D.C.
Is that basically right?
It probably is.
It probably is.
I mean, you know, I read a few years ago, Scott, something which, you know, I presumed that there was some truth in it.
It was an official, you know, it was an anonymous government official speaking to the New York Times, but saying, you know, actually, one of the things we tend to do these days is kind of send people back when we catch them, when they're from foreign countries.
In Afghanistan, say, for example, you know, and I can imagine that happening, but Saudis, you know, if you're a Saudi wandering around in Afghanistan these days and you get captured, they may just put you on a plane and send you straight back to Riyadh, bypassing all the inconveniences that were discovered under the bushes, in the same way that, you know, killing people by drones is another way of avoiding the messy complications of capturing and detaining people and all of that.
So Bagram itself, you know, certainly there is this undefined issue of what happens to foreigners captured and held there.
In terms of it being a frontline, you know, war prison in the occupied country and essentially Afghans being held there, I would say that the biggest problem there is that it demonstrates the conclusive victory of the Bush administration's decision to unilaterally rewrite the Geneva Conventions, or in fact to do away with the Geneva Conventions.
You know, I'm sure that everybody connected with the military will say about how people are treated humanely.
These days.
But, you know, the problem is that what you're supposed to do in wartime, as we all agreed over all these decades and, you know, and refined these rules after the Second World War, is to hold people off the battlefield until the end of hostilities end off.
You know, what we have at Bagram is a much modified review process that was actually imported by Obama finally from Guantanamo, which was found inadequate by the Supreme Court in the Boumediene decision that gave habeas rights to the Guantanamo prisoners.
None of this is mentioned anywhere in the Geneva Conventions.
You just hold people off the battlefield until the end of hostilities.
You don't give them a review somewhere down the line after you've rounded them all up and then decide whether you're going to carry on holding them or hand them over to the Afghans or send them home.
It's all been made up.
You know, this is what gets me.
And nobody cares about it, Scott.
Nobody cares.
It's all kind of made up in the first place, right, where the guys who were doing this, say, I don't know, buying prisoners from the Pakistani, you know, headhunters who were selling whoever they had kidnapped for bounties and all that, they were told, well, we'll sort out who's who further down the chain, so just give us whoever you got.
And then everyone else down the chain was told it was worked out already and everybody who's being sent to you is a bad guy.
And so everybody, even before they got on the plane in Afghanistan, anybody handling them was told these are already found to be bad guys.
By the time they got to Guantanamo Bay, they were treated as though they all had been in on the 9-11 plot, even though someone was just some sheepherder who happened to be kidnapped and sold that auction to the Americans.
Well, yeah, that's a great disgrace to Guantanamo.
I think what's happening at Bagram is just, you know, they're not rounding people up on the basis that they think they were all involved in 9-11.
I think we've kind of moved beyond that.
Oh, yeah, we're past that now.
Guantanamo's the place that's kind of frozen in aspic horribly.
But Bagram, you know, what's happening there just, you know, it isn't right that essentially what it allows the military to do is to be as random and indiscriminate as they like when rounding people up.
Oh, yeah, no, you know, I had a point, which was, so that's why the process is so ad hoc, because they had to make up an ad hoc process to fit the made-up stuff they were already doing.
That was basically the point.
They said all the old rules are off.
They started doing what they were doing, which was just, you know, capturing people.
So then they had to go back to make up a legal theory about what made it all okay, et cetera.
Yeah, well, exactly.
I mean, and it's, you know, it's not really helpful under any circumstances, is it, to be covering up the fact that you, you know, that your approach to rounding people up is so poor in the first place that, you know, you just collect people and then decide that you'll sort them out somewhere down the line, as though that isn't going to, you know, annoy the people who are being rounded up and their families and their extensive families who will then swear vengeance on you, and you lose hearts and minds from the word go.
It happened in Iraq.
It's still happening in Afghanistan.
You know, really, when is this going to be brought to an end?
Yeah, well, you know, the night raid, it's interesting because in America, I mean, I guess I just lived through the very end of the Cold War when I was a kid, you know, but that's like the defining, if you're America and you believe in freedom and the red, white, and blue and all that, the defining characteristic, above all, of a totalitarian society like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union was the goons that come and get you in the middle of the night, you know?
That's what it means that you live in a tyranny, is the goons that will come and get you in the middle of the night.
And then we turn right around and say, you know, the American eagle and red, white, and blue and all of this stuff, well, that's exactly what we do.
We send our Delta Force to do night raids every day in Afghanistan.
We wonder why they riot.
It's all about their belief in this book, you know, supposedly.
Their Islamic extremism causes them to riot, not the night raids we put them through.
No, well, that's what I think, you know, and I think that when you step back from it and look at that and when you step back and look at the, you know, the distortions that have been gone through to keep Guantanamo going rather than closing it down, I would say you look at it and go, well, you know, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld won, really.
You know, this is the world that they created and it has not been wiped out and eliminated and started again by a new administration.
It really hasn't.
And nor have the American people demonstrated that, you know, that sometime in the second term of Bush's presidency, people realized in slightly more significant numbers that something had gone horribly wrong and now they aren't bothered, really, in sufficient numbers.
And it lasted long enough, really.
I mean, once the opposite party comes in power and continues the same thing, then that's just proof it was the right thing, you know?
That's what people said about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was that even Bill Clinton said so, so you know it's true if Bill Clinton and George Bush agree about it, even though his defining characteristic was that he was a liar.
But anyway, the consensus is everything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, it's depressing.
There you go.
So, yeah, I mean, that's what happened right after Eisenhower came in, after FDR and Truman.
He didn't repeal any of the New Deal, you know, or very, very little of it anyway.
And that's what made it all permanent from then on.
And then it was unthinkable to repeal it after Eisenhower had ratified it all, basically, by being the opposition power to not undo it.
Same thing here with Obama.
And, of course, there's one person running for president that would undo it all as fast as he possibly could, but the American people aren't.
As you said, it's the people, too.
They're just not really interested.
We're all used to it now, Guantanamo forever, soon enough for our families, you know?
Maybe we'll meet there someday, Andy.
AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Thanks, man.
Thanks, Scope.
