09/04/07 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and our guest today is Andy Worthington.
He's the author of The Guantanamo Files.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
Oh, hi, Scott.
Yeah, thanks for having me on again.
Well, it's great to have you on, and it's great to see this morning that you've got your first article written for antiwar.com.
We're very happy to have you, sir.
That's great.
Thank you very much.
And the article's about Padilla.
Now, does Padilla feature very strongly in your book?
Not particularly.
I mean, I do mention in the book the story of the American enemy combatants.
I mean, you know, the main issue, as I'm sure we're going to discuss, is the differentiation that's made between Americans held as enemy combatants and everybody else who's held as enemy combatants.
The important figure particularly, I mean, who I feature more in the book because he was held in Guantanamo for a while is Yasser Hamdi, who you may know the story of him.
He was actually born in America but moved to Saudi Arabia and was caught in Afghanistan, and as soon as the authorities realized that they had an American citizen in Guantanamo, they had to get rid of him as quickly as possible.
And he was then transferred to a brig, as was Padilla, but in Hamdi's case, they arranged for him to be sent back to Saudi Arabia and not to be held for three and a half years.
Because the court was about to rule that he was going to have access to the federal courts.
That's why they let him go.
Okay, well, yeah, I was just curious about that because I know the focus of the book is really on the foreigners, the victims of the ghost prisons and of the tortures and all this, and I guess, yeah, I sort of divide the topic the same way as you, I guess.
The domestic war on terror versus the overseas one, but it's good to see that you've put this focus, at least for this article's sake, and I guess somewhat in the book, on Jose Padilla.
And it is a story that I won't get over, and I don't even mind how redundant this interview might be from the one of Warren Ritchie last week or any number of other interviews I've done on this subject.
This is the most important thing ever, and here's why, Andy, and I'll tell you, and I think you already know because you wrote it in your article.
This kid was born in Chicago.
He is an American.
He was raised in Brooklyn, in New York State.
He was arrested, unarmed, by domestic civilian police in Chicago on American soil, and was held originally as a material witness.
This is a guy who, you know, I don't care what any judge or any general or any president says, this is a man who from day one it was clear deserved access to the American court system and was denied it.
Yeah.
I mean, that is the key here.
If they can do this to a guy named Padilla, then they can do this to Smith or Jones or Davis or anybody else.
Well, absolutely, and which I think is the point at which, you know, some American people who may think that all these kind of things are out there and they're just happening to foreign people who may deserve it.
I would take exception to that.
I mean, as I mentioned in my article with somebody British, you know, I'm not immune to the president snatching me if he feels like it.
So I think the secondary issue is that, you know, if you extend this outrage to foreigners, then they shouldn't be treated like that as well, but you're dead right.
I mean, the issue that should be confronting Americans first and foremost about this is this could have happened, this could happen to us.
And the story, as we haven't really discussed yet, is that he was then transferred to a military brig where he was kept for three and a half years under circumstances that look very much to me as though they would be defined as torture.
So, yeah.
And, you know, when we look at the domestic terrorism cases that have taken place in September 11, we have to really wonder about the guys at Guantanamo.
I know in the Detroit case and in the case of the Lackawanna six, these guys all got access to the federal court system.
In both of those cases, I guess in the Lackawanna case, they were actually threatened and in the Detroit case, it was at least passed around at Department of Justice headquarters that maybe we ought to treat these guys as enemy combatants because they're going to be so hard to convict because, of course, they didn't do anything.
And, you know, that makes me wonder, you know, they turn over people to the military when they don't have enough evidence on them.
What does that imply about the evidence that they do have against the people at Guantanamo Bay?
I mean, as we discussed last time, I think in one of these cases you said they tried in three different times until they finally got the verdict they were looking for.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, we did in several cases.
And, yeah, I mean, that in a nutshell, I mean, it's just one of the many examples that we could take.
But it's really it doesn't really fill you with great confidence that when any kind of quasi legal system that they set up where they go, no, it's the wrong result.
Try again.
No, it's still the wrong result.
Try again.
Right.
And it doesn't work like that.
That's not how you do it.
So, yeah.
Well, and I think in America and probably in Britain, too, we all just love ourselves so much that we think it's just fine.
You know, our government, at least here in America, George Bush might as well be Superman or Jesus with the crown of thorns on his head or something to most people.
He just can't do wrong.
So if it's taking place and he's doing it and geez, he was democratically elected.
So that just kind of means everything that flows from there is right.
Even though when we just stop and think about it for just a minute, one of the things that Americans and English people have to be most proud of is the fact that we don't trust our government.
And that we we have grand juries and we have all these appeal processes and Magna Cartas and habeas, corpus, and and all these wonderful things, because we don't believe that the government is just right because they're doing what they're doing.
That, you know, that's the whole point of having a jury trial in the first place is that the prosecution might not be right here.
Well, absolutely.
But I mean, it's also the whole point, which is stated in a kind of unwritten way, but which is very explicitly stated in the founding documents of your nation, that, you know, that you had checks and balances to make sure that the executive couldn't behave as though they were not answerable to anybody.
I mean, that's, you know, the video story is yet another aspect of what, if you like, is an even bigger and more crucial picture.
That whether directed by the president himself or, you know, more emphatically directed by the vice president, Dick Cheney, and by advisors to him, people like David Addington, are people who want the executive not to be answerable under any circumstances to what it does to anybody.
You know, and the founding fathers are turning in their graves, I think, at the news of this.
You know, it's a crucial issue.
And the Padilla case of, you know, of the government deciding that they can put a man in a brig for three and a half years and subject him to total sensory deprivation, you know, to break him down, it was an attempt to mentally destroy him.
The fact that that can happen and that there's no check on it.
And as we can see from this, you know, he's been tried on something lesser.
He's been convicted.
We're going to see what happens on appeal.
But the fact that you can write off the whole of that thing that happened is, you know, that should be troubling.
Right.
It should be very troubling to all American people.
Absolutely.
And you point out in your article that at the trial there in Miami, basically, this whole three years that he spent in the brig in South Carolina didn't exist as far as this trial was concerned.
It had absolutely nothing to do with anything.
Yeah, I mean, the way that it appears to me legally, really, is that, you know, kind of he just disappeared for a few years and nobody's allowed to talk about it.
I mean, that's effectively what happened, isn't it?
You know, is that, you know, from from June 2002, when he was handed over as an enemy combatant and put in the brig until the time that he came to trial, he just disappeared off the face of the earth, you know.
And I guess the judge ruled that this wasn't any of the jury's business, huh?
Yeah.
Well, it would be prejudicial, I guess, one way or another.
If it was me on the jury, it would mean that, oh, this guy's walking and I don't care if he helped to hijack the planes on September 11th.
They tortured him.
I'm letting him go.
And I guess it would be prejudicial in the other sense, too, that, wow, if they turn him over to the military, he must be a really dangerous guy.
So I can see why, you know, perhaps on both sides they would have reason to not want to include that at the trial.
But but again, I guess you're still right that overall, what a what a strange situation.
It's kind of Twilight Zone situation.
Here's this guy's been disappeared all this time and it just doesn't come up at the trial in any sense.
Yeah, well, it's still part of the process of, you know, of the government sidestepping, by whatever means it takes.
Any kind of showdown in the core of the U.S. mainland that's going to deal with the issue of, you know, how do you how do you deal with the issue of using evidence that you have to admit was obtained in ways that is illegal under U.S. international law?
And it's still going around it.
They still haven't had to confront it.
But that that's what hides behind this conviction of Padilla is at some point this is going to have to be talked about.
And I mean, you know, I mean, we I think we spoke the last time because I'd I'd written an article where I'd raised questions about about some of the intelligence that had been produced as a result of, you know, the high value prisoners, the people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah.
Now, I can't honestly say one way or another what truth there is in Padilla's story, the one that we didn't hear, the one that was, you know, the dirty bomb plot, that certainly it looks like there's a certain amount of evidence, but this didn't come out in the case as to whether there is.
But the other man who was caught up in this, the British resident, Binyam Mohammed, who's held in Guantanamo, his lawyers are really, really convinced that this was this was something where he was fingered as an accomplice on this.
But this is based on nothing at all.
Unlike Padilla, who had been wandering around trying to meet people, Binyam Mohammed, the story seems to be that no, he wasn't, he was just he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And when the photos start going around in the prisons, do you know this guy?
Have you seen this guy here?
He gets caught up in the whole thing.
And when he wouldn't admit anything, they took him to Morocco and tortured him.
So this whole story is yet to come up that ties all these people together and where is the real evidence and where is the stuff that's obtained through torture and how much of it is actually truthful and how much of it is completely unreliable, you know, which is the point that, you know, you shouldn't be allowing evidence obtained through torture.
It's because it's unreliable, however much you might viscerally think, you know, let's just beat this guy and get the truth out of him.
It doesn't work.
So I think this whole murky story that's lying behind all this is quite who did what is just still it just vanished in a puff of smoke and it all has to be addressed one of these days.
Well, and there's a lot of reason to be concerned about anything that this guy, Abu Zubaydah, has said.
If I remember right, it was Ron Susskind in the one percent doctrine quotes George Bush after George Tenet, the former director of Central Intelligence, explained to George Bush that this guy's a bait as a nobody.
And he was in charge of arranging flights for the women and kids to come to Afghanistan to visit and so forth.
But that he wasn't really, you know, an actual high level Al Qaeda guy or something.
And Bush responded, hey, you're not going to make me lose face on this.
Exactly.
As though Bush has any face to lose.
You know, give me a break.
But but he's announced over and over what a what a success it is that they captured Abu Zubaydah and how much great intelligence they got out of the guy.
And then, you know, he basically deliberately instructed George Tenet, you're not to tell the people anything other than that because you're going to make me look like a liar because I am.
Yeah.
And also, you know, you've got to keep going at this guy because, you know, it was basically also Bush saying, I don't believe you.
You know, he has got information to apply some innovative new techniques and see what we're going to get.
And, yeah, I mean, with Zubaydah and with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the amount of information that's come out, how much of it is reliable?
Well, clearly not very much, I don't think.
But but unraveling the story of where all these, you know, confessions have actually led and then how many people they've led to who actually are involved in anything is a huge story that still remains.
To be unraveled and that's what concerns me is that it's still not happening.
You know, the administration is still managing to avoid having to answer these really very difficult questions.
You've tortured people.
As a result, people have come up with a load of rubbish and other people have been caught up as a result of it.
How are we going to separate the genuinely dangerous people from all these other people who've been caught up and have done absolutely nothing?
And now I'm kind of puzzled because, you know, this isn't really my mindset, but I guess if I have to put myself in their shoes, they like torturing people because they think it's really fun.
You know, Dick Cheney and David Addington.
But I can't figure out any other excuse for the policy of torturing people.
I mean, do you remember, Andy, the case of the kid who was charged with being a terrorist because a security guard at a hotel in New York City lied and said that he found an airplane radio in his hotel room?
And the kid ended up being accused of being a terrorist until the guy who actually owned the radio came looking for it.
And the kid ended up being like, oh, this is in the very end of 2001, beginning of 2002.
But the thing is, that kid confessed.
He said, oh, yeah, I'm Al Qaeda.
I'm part of the Egyptian military.
Yeah, that's where I stole the radio from in the first place.
And yeah, I'm part of this plot.
And they didn't lay a hand on him, really.
What they did was they threatened the safety of his brother at college in upstate New York and of his family back in Egypt.
And they said, listen, you're going to do what we say or we're going to bring harm to your family.
And he said, that's right.
Me and what's-his-name Mohammed Atta?
Yeah, he's my best friend.
And he admitted to everything.
I think that's the thing that a lot of people don't understand.
I mean, I don't personally understand it.
It's never happened to me.
But when people are put in, even in police custody, and a lot of pressure is put on them, from the outside people think, well, if you're innocent, why would you ever lie?
But what people don't understand is that psychologically it's been demonstrated that it doesn't take that much pressure for innocent people to start trying to get out of the position that they're in by lying.
It seems ridiculous, but it happens.
So yeah, it seems incomprehensible, but people crack under not that much pressure in general, I think, is what we should always look at when all these techniques are applied to people.
So to go back to Padilla, I mean, these stories that he spent weeks on occasion in this completely blacked-out cell with no communication whatsoever, the human beings who were responsible for guarding him made sure that he got no human contact.
His food arrived without him even seeing so much as a human finger pushing it into his cells.
A couple of weeks of that, and I think what Richard said recently, people would think, oh, you'd get a bit bored in that kind of scholarship confinement.
No, I think what that kind of scholarship confinement can do to people, you know, with the exception of some really, really, you know, people who have reversed the draw, which are quite remarkable, is that people can't handle it.
You start losing your mind in that kind of situation, you know, and this is what we're looking at here.
And we know that Padilla was a pretty weak-minded individual in the first place.
Well, exactly, yeah.
I mean, I don't think any of the stories of what he may have been trying to do by hooking up with Al-Qaeda is really anything more than this former gang member trying to get in with some of the big guys and not really having much of an idea of what he was doing.
I mean, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that he shouldn't have been tried properly for the things that he may have done.
But that whole big story that was concocted about him is clearly not fulfilled by who he was whatsoever.
You know, he was not a major operator.
Well, let me ask you this.
I guess, you know, I haven't written a book about it, not yet, and I have a lot of research to do, but I don't believe I've ever seen any actual evidence or heard of any actual evidence that this guy ever left Egypt, that he even went to Afghanistan.
Is there any actual proof that this guy was even in Afghanistan at all, Andy?
Well, to be honest, I don't know.
You know, I mean, the problem with all the evidence that never ends up properly in front of a courtroom is that, you know, it's never really dissected properly to find out what the truth is.
And I mean, that's why, you know, there's a paragraph in the article that you're talking about in anti-war today where I just, it came to me that there are actually all these allegations that are being made against other people, by all these people, none of whom is kept in, you know, in what we would recognize as proper, legally safeguarded custody, are all making these allegations about these plots.
And actually, if you start to dissect all that, where's the truth at the bottom of it?
It may be there, but it could equally be that the whole thing's made up.
I mean, you know, that's ridiculous.
How can you have this as a basis for any kind of justice?
Okay, now help me out.
It was 2005, right, or maybe early 2006, that the Supreme Court was about to rule on the Padilla case.
They had ducked the issue once on technical grounds, jurisdictional grounds, but then they were about to hear the Padilla case at the Supreme Court, and they were going to rule that this guy gets access to the court.
So rather than risk the Supreme Court ruling against them, the Bush administration decided to go ahead and tack him onto this indictment of these two other guys, and began a criminal trial in Miami.
Is that about right?
That's right, yeah.
I mean, the story, from what I understand, is that when it was first thrown out in, I think it was June 2005 or something like that, the opinion seems to be that the majority of the justices, five of the nine, were going to come down on the government for what they were doing, and it was a technical glitch.
It was in the wrong court, which was why it was put aside in the first place.
So yeah, as soon as it started to come back to the right court, then the majority opinion looked like they were going to turn around to the government and say, look, you can't do this.
So yeah, they dropped it, and they tagged him on rather feebly onto another case.
And from the trial, that seems to be clear that that's what happened.
But yeah, he knew these guys.
I mean, I wouldn't presume to know particularly about their guilt.
But they've been monitored for years, and there are only thousands of transcripts of them allegedly talking in code about what they were up to, and that Padilla himself is only heard on seven messages out of all of them and wasn't speaking in code on any of them.
You know, I wonder, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, I wonder whether they only indicted these two guys so that they could have an indictment to attack them on the end of.
I think you're right when you say they were monitored for years.
Didn't I read somewhere that these guys had been monitored for 13 years or something, the FBI had been monitoring these guys and not doing anything about them?
It might be that long.
I mean, I've certainly heard that it was eight years, but I mean, it may have been longer than that.
Which might suggest to you and me that maybe they didn't have much on them, don't you think?
Yeah, like maybe they just needed an indictment to attack Padilla on to the end of, so that's how these guys ended up on trial, too.
The whole package looked more attractive all around.
And as you say, oh, these guys are speaking in code, and soccer ball means explosives and whatever, but they never accused Padilla of speaking in any of this code, right?
No, they didn't, no.
So he was very much tagged on to the end.
I mean, there also is another issue about Arabic translations and people speaking in code when a football means this and that, and there have been plenty of examples of the intelligence services mishearing things, and yeah, it doesn't fill me with a great deal of confidence about the whole issue.
But yeah, Padilla was tagged on, wasn't he?
I mean, yeah, he seems to be.
And you know, it's funny, like, never even mind speaking in code.
I was thinking of the conversation you and I had right before we went on the air.
A couple of misunderstandings back and forth.
We have an Atlantic Ocean between us, after all, and half a continent.
Yeah, I'm not used to your accent yet, mate.
Slow down.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And you know, I say, so Andy, are you ready?
Okay, well, that could mean anything, right, if we didn't all know that we're about to go on the air.
And that wasn't a code.
Ready wasn't a pre-agreed term between us.
It was, you know, I didn't really finish my sentence because I figured the rest of the sentence was understood.
Are you ready to go on the radio, you know?
But if an FBI agent was overhearing that, oh, see, are you ready?
They're talking about this or that, and they can just plug any conspiracy theory in the world into our conversation and try to make it fit.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, I have read some of the transcripts where there is something that is along the lines of, you know, are you ready?
And you're right, and that's a bit open-ended and vague, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it really could mean anything.
It could mean anything.
Are you ready for what?
Yeah, let the FBI agent guess.
And see, now here's the thing, too.
I want to try to give a little bit of devil's advocate or something here to the state.
We're dealing with people who are suicide bombers, right?
You can't threaten a suicide bomber with life in prison and think that that's, you know, going to dissuade him.
We're talking about people who are trying to commit spectacular attacks in Al Qaeda network, and so the whole doctrine is basically preventive law enforcement.
We have to stop these people before they attack.
That's right, we all wish that someone had stopped Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi before they were successful in the attack on September 11th, et cetera.
But then the question is, you know, how far do we go down the path where we're simply trying people for what they are alleged to have thought?
You know, we're not even talking about conspiracy to commit a crime as much as, well, look, you know, this guy said that he would commit violent jihad one day, and that's a crime, right?
You know, just in and of itself.
Well, no, that would be, I mean, there are elements of that, obviously, in a lot of the things that are going on.
But I think more what this revolves about is the fact that they wanted intelligence out of him, they wanted to know what he knew, and they spent a long time trying to get out of him what he knew.
And as I say in the article, I'm not sure that we've seen very much of what he actually came up with over all these years, and possibly one of the reasons that we haven't seen any of it is because there's nothing there.
It doesn't seem to me that he would have very much information to impart, not really, you know, not being a part of Al-Qaeda, as he was presumably considered at the beginning.
And if there's any truth in all of the stories, you know, the best that he was was this outsider who was really quite inept, but who wanted to get in there, so he could say, well, I met these people and I talked about this.
Three and a half years of trying to get information out of him, what could he possibly have had?
It's all about getting people and not trying them, but holding them and guessing what intelligence you can get out of them.
And, you know, and then when you get back to the torture story that not following established procedures, which were, for example, established by the FBI over many years, which is that you build a human relationship with people, even if you hate them, you sit down opposite the table with them and you work out what combination the flattery and intimidation works and you get them to talk.
And as, you know, one of the key lines for that to me is that if you're up against these kind of big criminal types, usually they've got a big ego on them as well.
And you can find your way, if you're an expert in interrogation, you can find a way to get them to talk.
They didn't follow that route.
In pursuit of intelligence, they started working out how they could drive people to the edge of their mental sanity.
You know, and that's not, I don't think, a successful way to do things.
So, yeah, I think the big issue is instead of pursuing a legal course, which presumably could have been done with Padilla in the first place, they decided there was a bigger story there.
He knew more and they followed this procedure then as to how they were going to do it, which is duress, extreme duress, whatever much, you know, that could be a euphemism for torture, in the purposes of intelligence, which of course is what most of Guantanamo and Bell's secret prison network is about as well.
It's not about law enforcement, it's about extracting intelligence from people.
And it was something that started without really an end point, which is why so many people are being released from Guantanamo, because, yeah, in some ways they've exhausted their intelligence value because a lot of them didn't have any.
But there was no ending put in place.
You know, what do you do with these people?
You're just going to hold them forever and keep pumping them for intelligence?
They haven't got any.
So then, yeah, how do we get rid of them now?
We've avoided all the legal stuff.
You can go home.
Right, and you know, it makes me wonder how many of these guys were just, you know, simple goat herders or whoever who got kidnapped and sold by the Northern Alliance.
You know, basically innocent people.
How many of them are terrorists now?
I mean, a pretty simple perusal of the history will show you that Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi both became the terrorists they became because they were tortured by the governments of Egypt and Jordan.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a good point.
And I mean, you know, what I would say to that one is that, you know, from the evidence from a lot of the people who've been released, I'm actually, you know, I'm amazed at people who were wrongfully imprisoned and treated in the way that they have been for so long.
But a lot of them, you know, have the kind of profound religious belief that doesn't encourage them to want to, you know, join al-Qaeda.
It's actually the kind of profound religious belief that encourages them to believe that, you know, that their god knows best what's happening and that it is not their position to get wound up about this.
And the people who remarkably, you know, are released from these kinds of situations and do not bear victimness against the people who've done this to them and, you know, and don't want to attack them and don't want to become terrorists.
I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever of anybody who's been released to Guantanamo taking that route.
What I think has happened, and the military has played on this one enormously, is that a handful of people, mostly people that were involved in the Taliban already, that they failed to work out that they were with the Taliban because they didn't talk to the right people in Afghanistan.
But some of those have been released and have rejoined the battlefield, as the military likes to put it.
But, I mean, some of the people that are released back into Afghanistan would be maybe people that are coming from a certain background where, you know, there's a lot of rivalries going on and a lot of low-level warfare and stuff going on.
And it's not really as simple as they've made out.
But it seems to be that if there are any examples, it would be Afghans.
And like I say, you know, the part that the military doesn't mention is that quite often they did release Taliban commanders out of Guantanamo because they said to them, I'm a rug merchant, and they believed them.
In Afghanistan, there were plenty of people who knew the Taliban who were saying, why did the Americans never talk to us about this?
Not at any moment did they say, come to Guantanamo and see who we've got.
When they released them, they didn't say, look, just before we release these guys, would you like to have a look and see whether you know any of them?
So it was actually the authorities' own fault that they did that.
Yeah, it's just nothing but total incompetence and torture from one end to the other.
It's just incredible.
And like you say, their thing with Padilla, they weren't frightened of them.
They wanted intelligence out of them.
And I love this quote.
I need to really memorize it.
Maybe I'll get it tattooed on my arm or something.
Special Agent Russell Fincher, I didn't want to arrest him.
I needed his cooperation.
They wanted to set up a sting operation and use Padilla.
And he refused to go along.
And boy, you know, there's a negotiating tactic you don't usually hear about.
But when you talk about the FBI and the way a professional is supposed to negotiate with somebody like this or interrogate somebody like this, there's kind of an extra brass knuckles in the back pocket there.
Look, kid, cooperate with me or I'll turn you over to Don Rumsfeld.
And he'll hang you upside down from your toes and beat you.
So please, by all means, why don't you become a snitch for us?
Boy, if you're really trying to convince me to become a snitch, at least mention that you're going to turn me over to the military before you do.
Give me one more chance.
Come on.
I don't know.
Poor guy.
I don't know how guilty this guy is of anything.
But I have to tell you, if it was me on that jury, I would not have gone back there for a couple of hours and come out with a conviction.
I'd have gone in there and I'd have told the rest of those jurors, I don't care what you people say, this guy's getting acquitted or deadlocked on all charges.
I'm not finding him guilty of anything.
Well, it was a very swift decision, wasn't it?
I mean, you know, it was almost no time at all that they took after a three month trial.
And I think what you mentioned earlier must undoubtedly be a part of this.
But when you've got a story of somebody like Padilla who was so kind of notorious in the States for so many years before this, trying to get a jury who had absolutely no idea of any of the back story, I would suspect is almost impossible, really.
And even if it was, even if you did, I think by the time the prosecutors had managed to do all that stuff they did in the trial, you know, like showing a film of Osama bin Laden, you know, why they were allowed to do that is beyond me.
I mean, what was Osama bin Laden and the speech by him got to do with the case that they were looking at?
It hasn't.
It's amazing that that was allowed at the trial.
Yeah, I mean, I think it is, yeah.
And I think you say in your article that the prosecution, over a hundred times in his opening arguments and in his closing arguments, too, mentioned Al Qaeda.
Yeah, mentioning Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, you know, I mean, he might as well have been standing there ringing a really huge bell, I think.
Now, see, I don't know.
I like to imagine that if you get 12 people at random deciding your fate, that one of them is going to have some kind of BS detector.
One of them is going to be able to say, now, wait a minute, don't patronize me and don't try to brainwash me with Osama bin Laden footage.
You know, he's not the one on trial here.
Seems like somebody out of 12, you get at least one person in there who would be determined to hold on to some reason.
But, no, what was it, you know, three or four hours or something that came right out or the next day that came out with this conviction?
Yeah, and I mean, you know, from what I understand, the major thing was, you know, this story that apparently his fingerprints were on this application form for a camp.
But, I mean, if we're going to go back to all the kind of doubts that we raised earlier as to how much truth there is in the whole of the story that, you know, the whole of the story that didn't go to the trial.
But that has been discussed and was put out by the Department of Justice years ago about what they found out about what Patir was doing here, there and everywhere.
If it comes down to that all he did was that he was going to apply to a training camp, does that make him that dangerous?
I mean, you know, quite early in the article, I just put this point that having once been put across by the government as, you know, the most dangerous man in America, at the end when he was convicted, he wasn't actually accused of having raised a finger against a single US citizen.
And that seems to me, you know, that's not quite right.
But, I mean, this probably gets us into those more difficult issues like the Lackawanna Six that I know that you mentioned earlier on, who, you know, these young Yemeni-born Americans who had gone out to a military training camp in Afghanistan but had no other involvement with anything whatsoever.
I mean, if you look at that from the point of view, and this is contentious, but as a, you know, as a rite of passage for certain young Muslim men, then what do you want to do?
You want to imprison every single person who ever went to a military training camp in Afghanistan?
And do you have a cutoff point?
Because if you go back 20 years ago, the American government was directly funding those training camps when it was training the Mujahideen to fight the Russians.
Sure, and in fact, you know, even in 1999, using them as shock troops in Serbia and Kosovo.
Well, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll tell you, you're absolutely right, and this is the slippery slope we start going down when we're talking about preventive law enforcement.
You're under arrest for something you might do.
You're standing in the front yard with the keys in your hand and you've obviously been drinking.
I'm going to go ahead and arrest you for driving while intoxicated now because it seems like you're probably about to.
And that's the level, and now see, here's the other thing about this too, and never even mind, you know, enemy combatant status in military tribunals.
In federal court now, this is the standard of evidence that can get a man convicted.
You know, this guy one time went to a place where other people hate America, and then that's a crime.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I find it very shocking as well, and you know, yeah, I mean, really shocking.
And I mean, I think it's something that, you know, you ought to keep going on about, Scott, actually, is that, you know, are you aware of people that, you know, that we are getting to a position where, you know, we are convicting people on thought crime?
Right.
I mean, frankly, I mean, for anybody who listens to this show and know how much I hate the government, I guess it wouldn't be hard if, you know, if someone who's a regular member of this audience uses their imagination, why they might be able to come up with a scenario where I would do something violent.
And so now what?
You're going to put me on trial?
You know, I hate this state.
There, fine, quote me on that.
But now apparently that's enough, I guess, if they want to say that I have some sort of intent to someday do something violent to someone.
Yeah.
Which, you know, this is far beyond, you know, a conspiracy charge, which is usually, you know, too vague for my standard anyway.
Well, you know, and I think probably one of the reasons that it doesn't bother most people is that they think, they think that it's only, you know, people that they're not that it's happening to.
So, I mean, clearly, you know, if you're not a Muslim, then you have plenty of reason to think that, you know, nobody's coming after you because so much energy is being directed about, hey, look at that Muslim guy that he might be a terrorist.
You know, they're not looking at you and thinking you might be a terrorist.
But I'm sure there are other minority groups in the United States who are getting tackled in exactly the same way that you don't hear so much about.
I mean, you know, I know that in this country, for example, the anti-terrorism laws in this country have also been used against animal rights protesters.
They've also been used, this is the one that particularly is sticking with me, they've been used against protesters who have been protesting at arms fairs in London.
It's a big arms fair every two years in London, you know, which is where all the major arms manufacturers and the government get together to check their billions around, you know, on buying weapons of mass destruction.
And protesters there were intimidated and arrested using anti-terrorist laws.
Now, wait a minute, this isn't right, you know.
But if you enable your government to be in this position where they can, as you say, start basically, you know, arresting people for what they might do, then the issue is are you going to sit back and think it's not going to happen to me?
Or are you going to take the rather bigger issue is that when you start empowering governments to do that, who is to decide that next year they don't decide, you know, they don't just go, actually, we don't like these guys as well, so why don't we include those?
Right.
And suddenly that could have been you sitting on the sidelines and the next year it's you and they're coming and saying, yeah, you're about to do this and we're going to have you.
Yeah.
And, you know, here's the thing that really gets me about this, too, beyond the injustice that's being perpetrated upon these individuals.
It's what's happened to our culture where we're willing to just disregard lessons that we all learned as children.
We all know that it's better, what's the old saying, right, Blackstone or something, right, to let a thousand guilty men go free rather than put one innocent man in prison.
Or, you know, if they can do this to this guy, then that means they can do it to you and it's the principle of the thing.
You know, we all learn this as kids in elementary school.
And yet if our government tells us, nah, forget that, this is, you know, a crisis, so we're going to do what we want, we just roll right over for them.
Yeah.
It's just incredible.
But, I mean, I think, you know, I think in two particular instances, you know, and as an American and a British person talking to each other, we've both got issues with this which, you know, which should make us uncomfortable in our country.
You know, the first one is that your country imprisons per capita, you know, disproportionately more people than anywhere else in the world.
Absolutely.
You know, far, far, far too many people in prison.
Not really doing your society any good by having that many people there because people don't come out reformed the way the system's set up, so it's more trouble.
Well, I read recently that 25...
We have the biggest per capita population, prison population, in the whole of Europe, in Britain.
And to me that ought to be a bit of a shame, really.
It ought to be addressing it differently.
You know, all these people, are you telling me all these people are that dangerous?
If they're not dangerous, shouldn't we be finding another way of dealing with this that isn't quite so destructive to society?
Or is it all just about punishment?
Is it all just about vindictiveness and short-sightedness as far as society goes?
And, you know, it should be a bigger issue for both our countries than it is, really.
Yeah.
You know, I read a statistic recently, I'm sorry to interrupt terribly.
I read a statistic recently that had it that 25% of the prisoners in the world are in American jails.
Right.
I mean, we have 300 million out of 6 billion people on the planet and we have a quarter of the prisoners?
I mean, that is just... you're right, this is a symptom of society gone mad or something.
You know, some sort of advanced state of decay where people are willing to just get up and go to work every morning knowing that that's the case and continuing on.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just insane.
It is.
Well, I suppose it has a knock-on effect, doesn't it?
Which is that, you know, if you don't allow ex-convicts to vote, then you start rigging your system when you've got that many people who've been in prison.
You know, which is another bit of a subtext to the American prison story, isn't it?
Is, you know, how that's been played by the administration.
It's like, well, none of these guys can vote.
There's a huge number of people who can't vote.
Great.
Because they were all going to vote against us if they could.
Right, well, and see, that's the thing, is they'd all just vote Democrat and that wouldn't do us any good anyway.
All right, anyway, you're a great guy, man.
I really appreciate this and I can't wait to read your book.
It is now in print, is that right, Guantanamo Files?
Well, the copies are coming back from the printers this week.
I dare say that review copies will be going out in the next couple of weeks.
Wonderful.
It's still another month until it comes out, but yeah.
Okay.
We are getting closer, Scott, so we'll have to talk again in a month, yeah?
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
I can't wait to get my hands on this thing.
It's the Guantanamo Files by Andy Worthington, and you can look up his blog, andyworthington.co.uk, and he's got a great one today on antiwar.com.
Jose Padilla, more sinned against than sinning.
Really appreciate your time today, Andy.
That's brilliant, Scott.
It's always great to talk to you.
Cheers.