It's anti-war radio 92.7 FM in Austin, TX and I'm so lucky I have Candace Gorman on the phone.
She's a lawyer for some of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Welcome back to the show, Candace.
Hi, I'm here.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
How are you today?
Can you hear me?
Yes, yes.
Good.
Okay, we're all set.
Please tell me about Sami Alhaj.
Well, as you know, Sami is not my client, but I've been following his story partly because of his health problems and partly because of the injustice in his case like in my own client's case.
And I just learned only two hours ago that Sami was released.
I'm out of the country right now.
The last I had heard about Sami was that he was told that he has cancer, and that was in a story from his attorney from a visit that they had with him in, I believe, February or March, in which the notes were just cleared.
So I'm very anxious to hear what his health condition is, and I'm anxious to hear if he's set free right when he gets home.
I don't know if anyone knows this yet.
Well, I just saw an Al Jazeera report, actually, and I'll send you a link in the email right after the show about his arrival in Sudan and his friends saying that he looks like he's aged decades and that he's quite sick, I believe, and has been tortured, of course.
Yeah, you know, Sami's been on a hunger strike for two years.
He has been forcibly fed through a tube down his nose and down to his stomach.
I watched the procedure that was done on Sami three times a day.
I watched it in a presentation by his attorney at Reprieve a year ago, and it is just a horrendous process, and to even imagine him going through this three times a day for these two years is just awful to think about, not only because of the process itself but because of how we made that process even worse.
When I say we, I mean our government, our military, by using a tube that is double the size of what they would use in a hospital, we were not using any kind of anesthetic, anything to dull the pain, and it was really to torture him and to punish him for being on this hunger strike.
Well, and have you ever heard of any allegations against him that have any credibility?
I mean, is it pretty much just clear now that he was sent to Guantanamo Bay simply for being an Al Jazeera cameraman, that that itself was the crime?
That is part of the crime, but probably the worst part of the crime was that he would not agree to be an informant, and one of the things that his attorneys learned when they first met with him was that every time he was being interrogated they told him he would be set free if he would agree to be an informant on Al Jazeera, and he refused, and he was being punished for that all these years.
And now how many different inmates at Guantanamo Bay, I don't know if that's the proper legal term for them, detainees at Guantanamo Bay, do you represent, Candace?
I represent two, and I refer to them as prisoners.
There's some term that the government made up to make it sound like they're just being detained, making it seem like it's not quite as awful as being a prisoner for six years without charges against you.
And now I believe last time we spoke you talked about how one of your clients has hepatitis and is dying and is being refused adequate medical treatment.
That's right.
Mr. Al Jazeera still has no medical treatment, and in the last letter I received from him two weeks ago, he cannot even write his letters now.
His eyesight is so bad.
That's one of the many parts of his body that is deteriorating from this lack of health care.
He can now no longer see.
He has to have his letters read to him by other prisoners, and now he has to have someone else write his letters or help him write them.
And what is he guilty of?
Being an al-Qaeda lieutenant and a friend of Ayman al-Zawahiri?
Well, for one thing, as you know, nobody in Guantanamo is guilty of anything, because no one has even had a trial.
Mr. Al Jazeera has never been charged with anything.
He is not accused of being anything.
He is in Guantanamo because he was picked up for a bounty.
The military's own tribunal, when they first were required by the Supreme Court to do an assessment of the men to see if they should even be held, the tribunal said he was not an enemy.
And he has been here all these years.
He will never have a charge against him.
He is a prisoner without being charged with any crime.
He is held in conditions that are worse than convicted felons in our own system.
It's an awful situation.
You say the tribunal has already decided that he's not an enemy combatant, but he's still being held anyway.
These were initial tribunals that were held to determine whether or not men should even be held at Guantanamo, whether they were enemy combatants or non-enemies.
Mr. Al Jazeera was found to be a non-enemy.
This was in November of 2004, and yet the government didn't let him go.
Instead, they conducted a new tribunal in violation of their own rules, and the new tribunal said, oh, yes, he is an enemy.
But they looked at the same, very exact same information as the first tribunal.
The second one was just done at the behest of Matthew Waxman, who was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State on detainee affairs.
He thought it was too embarrassing to have people held at that point for four years, two and a half years at that point.
Now it's six years.
He thought it was too embarrassing to have them found to be non-enemies.
So he said, let's do it again, and this time let's do it right.
Well, we've heard cases over the years.
Wasn't there a prosecutor named Carr and a couple of others who resigned because they said they just could not abide the idea of playing the role of a quote-unquote prosecutor in such rigged circumstances?
Yeah, and the most recent one is Mo Davis, who testified last week for one of the detainees about the political process that was put into place to make sure that there were convictions.
Along the way, we've had many whistleblowers from the military itself, and, in fact, one of the whistleblowers was Stephen Abraham, who did an affidavit in the Supreme Court in June of 2007, talking about how the tribunals were rigged.
And he only sat on one tribunal, and he talked about how the evidence against this man in the one tribunal he sat on was just non-existent.
It turns out that man was my client.
That was Mr. Al-Jazawi.
So, yeah, there's whistleblowers, and there's whistleblowers who have come out on my own client's case.
This guy shouldn't be there.
He's been there now for over six years.
I'm sorry, we're already out of time, but I just wanted to ask you one more question really quickly.
You referred me last time you were on the show to a study by, was it Columbia University?
No, I don't think it was.
Some university did a study.
No, it was Seton.
I'm sorry?
It was Seton Hall.
Seton Hall.
And they said that they, by their estimate, 92% of the people in there were wholly innocent of anything.
Is that right?
Yes, and that's correct.
And that assessment was done based on the military's own record.
All right.
The military's own record showed this.
All right.
I'm sorry, Candice, we're all out of time, but I really appreciate you making some time for us today on the show.
Everybody, Candice Gorman, she has her own law firm in Chicago, the law office of H. Candice Gorman.
She writes for The Huffington Post and In These Times.
Thank you very much for your time today.
That's all right.
It's good to talk to you, Scott.
