Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I am very pleased to welcome our first guest of the day, John Glaser.
John is an editor, a news editor at AntiWar.com.
I never did quite figure out how they keep their titles over there.
I guess it's kind of just a nobody really cares kind of thing.
Everybody's contributing team spirit kind of thing.
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you doing today?
Pretty good.
Thanks for having me on.
Oh, hey.
Thanks for coming on.
I'm very grateful, and I'm sure the listeners are, too, to get your valuable knowledge and insight.
So I'm looking at the latest postings at AntiWar.com, and you got one that just popped up since I started doing the show, actually.
Just now read it real quickly, called Under Obama's Reign, Habeas Corpus Rights Wrenched Away.
And you're talking about the 2008 Supreme Court case, Boumediene v.
Bush.
Did I pronounce that right?
What's up with that case, and what is the significance of all that with regard to these Guantanamo detainees?
Well, the case was actually pretty important in 2008.
It ruled that Guantanamo detainees who had been caged indefinitely without charge or trial, many of them were picked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan immediately after U.S. invasion in 2001, and brought over there, and at the height of it, Guantanamo was filled with over 700 detainees.
Now there's only 169, but that case in 2008 said that those detainees could challenge their detentions in U.S. courts, basically granted habeas corpus rights, which should have been granted to them immediately anyways, but hadn't been.
Briefly thereafter, we saw a great number of these Guantanamo detainees released because there wasn't enough evidence for their guilt, and they had to be repatriated to either their home country or some third country.
And that happened with a lot, but that case was only in 2008.
Since Obama started pressuring his D.C. Circuit Courts and even the Supreme Court to stop considering Gitmo cases, the amount of people that have been able to go free or even have their cases heard in front of a court has gone considerably down.
Just in May 2008, the D.C. Circuit started hearing a bunch of detainees' cases, and they heard that detainees ended up winning over half of the cases that were heard.
And now it's about 8%.
So it's gone down considerably.
And what has basically happened is that the Obama administration has abandoned its earlier praise of the case that said habeas corpus rights do apply to detainees in Guantanamo.
And the only way that the rest of the 169 people that are in there now can get free or be released from Guantanamo in some sense is to die.
They can't go see a court.
They can't get it reviewed by a judge.
They have no chance to be repatriated.
They have very little chance to have their case even heard before a court.
So what they're left with is 169 souls, guilty or otherwise, that aren't given their chance in a court.
And so this idea that, I mean, nobody should be surprised by this point, but the Obama administration, of course, has adopted many of the worst of Bush's crimes and terrible policies.
And this is just another one.
The problem that we face is that the Republican Party doesn't object to the Democratic Party's embrace of George W. Bush's detention policies.
So this issue is going to be completely absent from the upcoming election year debate and so forth.
Romney is the nominee.
So when they start debating, they're perfectly in line on this issue.
So the American people won't get a chance to hear about it.
OK, let me make sure I understand you right.
And I'm going to try to make sure that I understand what you're saying.
I understand that for a time there was an ability to have a habeas corpus hearing for these individuals and that when that was allowed, they had a better than 50 percent chance of proving that, hey, not a terrorist, don't belong here.
And now somehow that process has been revoked, and there's no longer even the chance to face a judge and even argue, hey, I don't belong here, judge, let me go.
You just explained it, and maybe I just didn't catch it, but what changed exactly from the ability to have the habeas corpus hearings to now you're saying there is no ability to do that?
So there is still the ability.
It still exists.
Oh, OK.
I'm sorry.
Please explain.
I obviously don't understand.
Well, no, you're perfectly on the right track.
That case still stands.
It was decided by the Supreme Court.
Basically, the buck stops there.
However, the way that the D.C. circuits have interpreted the law under pressure from the Obama administration basically nullifies the Bouhidine case.
And it's not that the case doesn't still apply.
OK, I understand.
So you're saying basically that Obama, the way it's set up, they're choosing not to review any of these cases kind of thing?
Exactly.
It's more of an institutional interpretation kind of thing where they, you know, the administration has a lot of clout with the way that the court system works.
A lot of their nominees, the Obama administration's nominees are now serving as judges in the D.C. circuit courts.
And those are the ones that review these cases and the ones that actually end up, you know, if they go high enough and long enough to the Supreme Court.
Except they're not going that far because all of these Obama appointees, appointed judges, are dismissing the cases.
Sometimes they do it on states' rights, not states' rights, states' secrets grounds and all kinds of other grounds.
And the way that they're basically muscling through the way they want it to go in contravention of the Bouhidine case in 2008.
So the case still stands.
It's just that there's this bureaucratic gravitational pull far away from it to prevent these 169 souls from ever having their chance in court.
OK, well thank you for that clarification.
I do appreciate it.
And wow, that's still incredibly disgusting.
Oh my goodness.
I mean, so these people have to wait to either just die or hope that some other American president will get elected and decide to send a different newsletter to his judges saying something different?
Talk about hopeless.
Wow.
That's just soul crushing.
It is.
And it's bad.
You know, it's nothing new.
It's nothing really too new.
It was in 2009, at the end of 2009 I believe, that the Obama administration came out and just admitted it.
They said, for the remaining detainees, they are to be indefinitely detained.
Even the ones that are now facing trial, like the supposed mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and like four other guys, supposedly high-level Al-Qaeda, former Al-Qaeda members.
Now they've been detained for a decade.
But they're actually having a trial.
But what the Obama administration has said for them and many others that are trying to face trial, that are in Gitmo, that even if they're found not guilty, the Obama administration will keep them detained.
Because, you know, it's the same old excuse there.
Too innocent to try, because they could be released, and too dangerous to release.
So those people will be facing indefinite detention for the foreseeable future, unless a miracle comes along in which an administration, this one or the next one, whoever it is, decides to apply the law.
You know, there were some moves by the Obama administration, of course, to close Guantanamo.
That is like a relic memory that we can't even think about.
But he's totally abandoned all of those moves.
Yeah, and honestly, in my personal opinion, I don't think he was all that genuine about them in the first place.
We can talk more about that, more about other stuff, other news.
On the other side, this is Antiwar Radio.
Guest host, Zoe Greif here, talking with John Glazer, news editor at Antiwar.com, learning all kinds of things.
More on the other side.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm your interim fill-in host, Zoe Greif.
And my guest on the other line is John Glazer, news editor at Antiwar.com.
And we were just talking about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and John just explained how there is a legal framework for these guys to get a habeas corpus hearing.
And when these hearings are held, there's a greater than 50 percent success rate as far as these guys in Guantanamo Bay saying, hey, judge, I don't belong here.
Let me go.
And the judge is like, well, okay, you proved it.
I'm going to let you go, like 50-plus percent of the time.
But John also explained how the Obama administration has used political pressure or sent a secret newsletter or whatever to the point where no one is using this process anymore.
These hearings are not occurring anymore.
And so for these 159, I believe, souls that are stuck in Guantanamo Bay, whether they're good, bad, or ugly, guilty, or innocent, they have no redress.
They have no chance to even hope that they can talk to a judge and try to get out of there.
Is that correct, John?
Did I sum it up more or less?
You summed it up perfectly.
But there's another leg to this that is becoming a much more part of the primary debate in this country because people have largely forgot about Gitmo.
The new issue here, and yes, there's 169 people who will never get redress and never get a chance to defend themselves in court.
But the new issue is that Obama doesn't even give the people the chance to go to prison anymore.
He doesn't want them to sit and rot in prison for the rest of their lives and never see a judge.
That's politically embarrassing, isn't it, like we're talking about right now?
Much easier just to drone strike them off the face of the earth in the first place.
That's where you're going, isn't it?
That's precisely where I'm going.
Obama has now expanded both the drone war in Yemen and in Pakistan, but they're called signature strikes.
We can target people that we don't even know the identities of.
And the identities are never – what the Obama administration has said, and this was revealed in a recent New York Times article, is that all military-age males that are found within a strike site, so wherever we happen to land our bombs, any guys around are automatically considered combatants.
Retroactively, right, after the fact.
The great example that comes to my mind is they bragged about drone striking this guy in a bakery.
And yeah, they got him, but they also got the baker and whoever else was around.
And so you're saying that the baker who sold a donut to this terrorist guy is classified as an enemy combatant by the mere fact of the fact that he got blown up in the first place, right?
Right.
If we killed them, then they're combatants.
The only way that they are proven – that the Obama administration accepts that they might have not been combatants is if they are posthumously proven innocent.
So if somebody gives evidence after these people are already killed that they happen to have been civilians, then the Obama administration will count them in their civilian counting of dead bodies.
But otherwise, everyone is considered a combatant.
That's why every headline for the entire duration of the first term of the Obama administration has said nine militants killed in Yemen drone strike.
Two militants killed in – everyone's al-Qaeda.
Everyone.
There was a joke around the State Department and the CIA.
This was also revealed in the New York Times article.
But jokes all have an element of truth in them, and that's why this is important.
There was a joke circulating around the State Department and the CIA regarding the drone strikes, which said that people doing jumping jacks could be mistaken for a training camp.
But it gets even more serious than that, because these are places where – Pakistan and Yemen, where the state does not necessarily have a monopoly on the use of so-called legitimate force.
And people do carry around guns.
I mean, they're big sort of Second Amendment people.
It's part of their culture just to have a Kalashnikov, right?
It's part of their culture.
They have to defend themselves.
They can't call 911.
They don't have the firefighters and the police and the NYPD in the ship.
So yeah, they have to defend themselves.
It's very normal to have a gun.
And so this loading stuff onto trucks or whatever it might be could be farming, could be doing work, could be target practice, could be a regular scuffle between a bunch of civilians.
But if we see it, or if our drones rather see it thousands of feet up in the air, in fuzzy pictorials and videos, then we can kill them.
And the thing about it is that if we kill them, they are combatants.
There is no deliberation.
There is no saying, okay, who are we actually killing?
And another great example is this case of al-Libi.
Just the other day, last week I believe it was, the Obama administration announced, in a sort of patting-itself-on-the-back sort of way, hey, we killed the al-Qaeda number two.
His name was something, something, something al-Libi.
He was actually said to have been killed by the Obama administration in 2009 as well.
Yeah, this guy's like a cat.
He has nine lives or something like that, right?
Right.
He keeps turning up after the U.S. says that they've killed him.
And that seems to have been the case this time around as well, which obviously leads to the question, well, who did they kill?
Who was the victim of that drone strike they thought might have been al-Libi?
And this just proves how murky this whole business of killing people by video game and by drones very high up in the sky, how murky that is.
It's not the sort of precision murder that we hear about in the halls of power.
Well, let me ask you quickly, let's say they hit their militant and there are eight other men around, so that's nine insurgents, but what if there were five or six women and children around?
Would they classify them as enemy combatants, or just not mention the fact that they were killed at all and not include them in the number?
Or do you know?
Well, the way that they get around this is that they keep the drone program technically secret.
So if a bunch of women and children get killed, yes, they would count that in their internal numbers as civilians.
But when people ask them about it in the press, they say, I can't confirm or deny the existence of a drone program.
Yeah, that reminds me, when Jason Ditz, your colleague, heroically debated Richard Perle, the first thing he said was, I can't technically acknowledge if there is or is not a drone program.
And then they talked about the drone program for ten minutes.
It was ridiculous.
Right.
It's the world's worst kept secret.
And not only does it allow the Obama administration to avoid admitting that they've killed a bunch of civilians, but it also allows them to talk about and brag about and pat themselves on the back about this warrior president, Obama, who's killing all these militants.
But then when it comes time that the ACLU or somebody else wants to investigate or do a FOIA request or bring the Obama administration to court in the context of these drone wars, the Obama administration says, well, this is classified.
Therefore, we can use state secrets privileges and dismiss the case out of court and never be held accountable.
So the fact that it's secret allows the administration to get around a lot of these, cut these corners in terms of innocent men, women and children or never getting themselves into court.
Wow.
So we may never know the full extent of what kind of tabs they're keeping as far as who they're killing or what.
Is that what you're saying?
I mean, even a FOIA request apparently is not going to work in this case.
That's right.
It won't.
So long as the people in power, the people in charge want to keep this secret, it will remain secret.
And trust me, they want to keep it secret because it's pretty ugly.
Even the amount of press reporting and investigative reporting that we do have has shown that it's ugly enough to the point where it's still classified.
We don't know the full extent of it.
But what we do know is that it's ugly as it is.
And so they won't allow a full investigation or a full airing of grievances or a release of any of these secret documents.
And by the way, we should note that in places like Yemen and Pakistan, what we're doing is just laying the groundwork for more blowback.
We're creating so much anti-American hatred by consistently bombing and breaching the sovereignty of these countries and killing innocent civilians that people are bound to strap another bomb on themselves or hijack another plane and harm a bunch of Americans.
There was a former CIA agent, and this is notable because he was a CIA agent under the Bush administration, who was then promoted to the head of the Counterterrorism Center, which is a Bush administration bureaucratic thing trying to take care of terrorists.
His name is Robert Grenier.
He told The Guardian last week that we're not only killing too many civilians in a drone program that is overly indiscriminate, but we're provoking anti-American hatred, and he said it could inadvertently create terrorist safe havens, which is precisely what we're doing in Yemen and Pakistan.
You've got a great article up on AntiWar.com, U.S. drone strike kills nine in Yemen.
I wish we had more time to talk about it, but you're absolutely right.
Blowback, blowback, blowback.
Anti-American sentiment, dead children.
It's all bad.
I thank you for your time on the show, John Glazer, news editor at AntiWar.com.
Thanks again.
I learned a lot.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
All right.
It's AntiWar Radio.
I'm your host, Zoe Greif.
More on the other side.
