All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio on KAS 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And our guest today is Andy Worthington.
He's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, the stories of the 774 detainees in America's illegal prison.
And he's got a new article that ran on Antiwar.com just a couple of days ago, or maybe yesterday.
The 16 prisoners charged in Gitmo's military commissions.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
Yeah.
Hi, Scott.
It's really nice to be back.
Yeah, it's very good to talk to you again.
And mea culpa, I haven't interviewed you this whole time because I got the book and I was supposed to read the book and then interview you about the book and it landed in the pile and I haven't gotten to it yet.
And so I was putting off interviewing you until I got the book read.
But now I figured this article is so important, I need to just go ahead and embarrass myself and get you back on the show anyway.
Oh, well, that's all right.
I suspect we're talking about things that have happened since the book was written.
But you know, you need to put it near the top of the pile, Scott.
Yeah, man, the pile, there's not even a top or bottom to it, actually.
It's sort of a bizarro pile.
It just is kind of, you know, about the same shape as a pile of laundry, pretty much.
OK, the 16 prisoners charged in Gitmo's military commissions.
These are the sexy trials, right?
That they decided they needed to run to time to coincide along with the presidential campaign so that John McCain could point at them and say, see bad, scary people vote Republican.
Well, yes, in theory, I think.
But of course, they're a bit of a mixture between the apparently the worst of the worst and some very small fish.
It's an odd kind of mixture of quite what's going on.
Well, you know, I just read an article about David Hicks last week.
He's the Australian who was captured in Afghanistan, right?
Yeah.
And then in this article, they said that a news company had offered him a ton of money to do his life story kind of thing, and he didn't even know about it.
And when he did hear about it, he didn't want anything to do with it because they quoted his father saying he's just trying to get by and lead a normal life.
And he can't even revisit that topic right now at all in his head.
Sound like he's pretty traumatized from his experience there.
He's just trying to black it out.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, I think that I think that actually this is the case with the majority of people who have been released from Guantanamo is that, you know, they they actually don't want to go back there.
You know, there's a handful of people who managed to confront everything that happened to them and probably through some kind of therapeutic process.
And certainly the Western prisoners who've been released have been given access to two psychiatrists and specialists in the effects of torture and maybe can get to deal with it as part of the process of recovery.
But I think for a lot of other people, you know, they just get they get their heads down and get on with their lives.
And I mean, partly it's also because, you know, you leave Guantanamo, that taint stays with you forever.
I mean, it's not it's not just about, you know, the whole problem with the name and the place.
But it's also that nobody who's ever released is fully cleared by the US administration ever.
They don't admit that they released innocent people.
They always say that they're no longer enemy combatants or some variation on that.
Yeah.
And, you know, the David Hicks case, I think, is kind of a great example for the Guantanamo system of justice overall in that it's nothing but confusion.
I mean, they talked about this guy for years like he was Osama himself.
And then they gave him nine months suspended sentence time serve like night court and sent him home.
Well, yeah, exactly.
What the hell is that?
Well, I mean, that was a that was a political deal, I believe, wasn't it?
You know that what had happened was that for years, John Howard, the Australian prime minister, couldn't really care less about what happened to David Hicks.
But as David's father mounted such a campaign in Australia and galvanized so much of the population, then when John Howard last year was struggling for re-election, it became one of the issues where he thought this will do well for me.
And, you know, and when Dick Cheney came to visit, he said, let's cut a deal on this guy.
So, you know, that's what they that's what they did.
And they did it all round as a favor.
So nobody nobody pushed for a longer sentence.
And I mean, I have to say, after all those years, anything more would have been it would have been atrocious for David Hicks.
But yeah, so the whole deal was cut ready to do to do John out of favor.
It didn't work.
He he didn't win in the end.
Yeah.
Well, that's good, at least.
And it wasn't it part of the plea deal that he wasn't allowed to say anything about it for at least some period of time?
Well, he wasn't allowed to.
Yeah.
I mean, funnily enough, the nine months made sure that he remained in prison until the election took place.
And then there was some kind of gagging order that was in place for a certain amount of time, which I think has expired now.
So this is why, you know, I mean, in certain ways, the sharks are around him, you know, wondering if they can wave a large check at him and get him to tell his story.
But I mean, as you say, if he doesn't want to tell it, it's not because, you know, it's not because there isn't the interest or the money, it's because, you know, this is a deeply traumatized man who's been through something that few of us can imagine.
Yeah.
Well, who was David Hicks?
I mean, was he friends with Osama?
Was he just, you know, friends of the Taliban or was he friends of al Qaeda?
Well, you know, I don't know.
I mean, after all this time, you know, very little was established, really.
And when you know, you have a kind of plea bargain and everything's rushed through very quickly.
Who knows, really?
I mean, it seems from the story that he was in Afghanistan and that he had become interested in the Taliban.
So, you know, maybe a low level Taliban foot soldier or a would be low level Taliban foot soldier.
But this is a far cry from hanging around with Osama bin Laden.
I don't think at any point there was ever any allegation that he had met Osama bin Laden at all.
No.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, number two on your list here, Omar Carter, is that how you say it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Canadian.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, America has a Canadian locked up as an enemy combatant out there in Guantanamo Bay.
That must be an incredible scandal up there in Canada that they're not using every bit of their pressure to get him released and put back in some sort or for the first time in some sort of civilian court system.
Well, it's starting to happen.
I mean, you know, last week, I think the Canadian Supreme Court finally, you know, finally ruled after after many, many years that when Canadian intelligence agent went to Guantanamo in 2003, I think it wasn't interviewed Omar and handed that information on to the U.S. intelligence services.
That was illegal because the operation of the prison is illegal and they shouldn't have been involved in it.
Now, the complication to Omar's story is that he he's one of the sons of a man called Ahmed Kader, who is now dead, but who had been a fundraiser for the Mujahideen who were fighting against the Russians in Afghanistan and later certainly knew Osama bin Laden.
He took his family out there and they lived with the bin Laden family.
So Omar was certainly living in this orbit.
Now, the problem is that when Omar was was captured in July 2002, he was 15 years of age.
So he is a child soldier.
And by by any way of looking at it, by by all kinds of international treaties and international agreements, child soldiers are not treated as culpable for their action and should be should be rehabilitated.
And what's extraordinarily ironic, really, in the Canadian case is that the Canadian government has been such a pioneer in in authorizing and supporting the rehabilitation of child soldiers in other places.
So these terrible conflicts in West Africa, then they've been involved and, you know, in Sierra Leone.
It's like, no, no, no.
These are children.
When it comes to one of their own, that what they've done is that they've let they've let the way the stories have been told about Omar's background override the fact that, you know, what it comes down to is that he was a child.
And the horrible thing about the story of what he was supposed to have done is that he was accused of killing a U.S. soldier in the firefight after which he was caught.
And it was only recently revealed that the prosecution had been holding on to evidence for years, which indicated that there was another person alive at the time that the American soldier was killed.
So for years they said, oh, Omar was the only one alive, so he must have done it.
And then it finally was revealed that actually two people were alive at the time.
So there's no way of proving that it was actually Omar who did it.
Well, now help me understand the law here, because even if he was the only one who was around and it must have been him, if we accepted that, which we don't because it's a lie.
But anyway, if we did accept that, is it a crime?
It's a war crime to kill someone in battle if that someone is an American.
I'm confused about that.
I mean, we're not talking about, you know, he's accused of kidnapping an American and torturing him or something.
We're talking about a battle.
Is throwing a grenade at somebody or taking a pot shot at somebody on the battlefield a war crime?
That's murder.
Well, Scott, I absolutely understand your confusion.
And I think I think you're dead right.
And, you know, this is a crucial issue is why is it that, you know, when there's a war and there's a and battles are taking place, that's what's always happened.
But suddenly, in the context of Afghanistan, anybody who fights U.S. soldiers is not engaged in the war, but is actually a terrorist.
And it doesn't make any sense.
You know, they're not wearing uniforms, right?
Like difference between the definitions between what happened in Afghanistan, where the enemy combatants ended up in Guantanamo and Iraq, where nominally, at least, you know, and I use those words advisedly, that people have been treated according to the Geneva Conventions and they're prisoners of war.
And that's the generally accepted context.
But, yeah, it's completely insane to be putting people on trial for things that happened in wartime and claiming that they're kind of unusual crimes that are not part of what war involved.
Right.
I mean, and we all know that there's, you know, a dividing line in there if we're talking about the American soldiers, for example, it's not a war crime.
The Americans at least don't consider it a war crime for our soldiers to kill people in battle.
But if they massacre a bunch of civilians at Haditha, they might get put on trial, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, no, exactly.
Hmm.
OK.
This guy's 15 years old and does it look like he's ever getting out or what are they going to do with him?
I don't know.
I mean, you know, the hope, the hope always is that the Canadians will put enough pressure on to demand that he be returned to Canada where he can be tried and where presumably a lot of the things that you've just been discussing will come out and it will be, it will be said, well, you know, why is this guy still being held?
If he committed any sort of crime, he surely paid the time for it.
But, you know, it remains to be seen whether the Canadian government will do the right thing.
Certainly up till now, they haven't.
You know, and I think that really is a bit of a dark mark against the Canadians reputation for fairness, especially, as I was saying, when it comes to the issues of child soldiers from other countries.
Yeah, no, no doubt about that at all.
Let me play a clip here of George Bush referring to the Supreme Court decision in the case of the next guy on your list, Salim Hamdan.
This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court's ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the common article three of the Geneva Convention.
And that common article three says that, you know, there will be no outrages upon human dignity.
It's like, it's very vague, but it's okay.
I'm sorry.
It's a little bit off topic because it's more on the on the torture question.
But that was the case where the Supreme Court said, no, the Geneva Conventions do apply to everybody, whether they're wearing uniforms or not or what have you.
And yeah, it's a habeas corpus and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, which should be the case.
But clearly, yeah, I guess what they said was what they said, Andy, was that the president doesn't have the authority to make up this law as he goes along.
He needs to go to Congress and have them make up the law retroactively, justifying everything he's done.
And then that's what happened with the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
Well, absolutely.
That's what happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So.
So tell us about Hamdan.
He was Osama bin Laden's driver.
Well, he was a driver for Osama bin Laden.
I don't think I think that bin Laden had more than one driver.
And as far as the story is that his lawyers have been able to establish that that was it.
He was he it was a paid job.
The difference between the allegations that are being made and what the defense say is that the prosecution are trying to allege that he was actually in Al-Qaeda's inner circle and was therefore involved in the decision making and therefore can be implicated in the in the whole of Al-Qaeda's attacks on America and the 9-11 attacks.
But I do have to say that, you know, that my overriding impression of this is it's holding the Nuremberg trials.
And because you haven't got Hitler, you put Hitler's driver up there and then, you know, it's not it's not really in the same scale, I don't think, is it?
Yeah.
No, it doesn't seem to make much sense if if it's true, in fact, that that's really all they have on him, that he was, you know, taxi man rather than, you know, one of the conspirators.
Although that does sound like typical Justice Department legal theory, right, that anybody did anything, they can go ahead and prosecute anybody in the neighborhood for it at this point.
It seems like.
Yeah.
I mean, what his lawyers always said was, you know, obviously, you know, he was I think what Charlie Swift, his lawyer who was responsible for driving that court that that case that went to the Supreme Court throughout the first the first version of the military commission to the trial.
He did say, you know, basically, this guy worked in the motor pool.
OK, it was a motor pool for one of the worst guys in the world.
But that's it.
He's just a driver.
You know what?
Where's the where's the big story?
There isn't one.
Well, that's all right.
So if there's no law and we're making it up as we go along, then we can just call him a war criminal by the standard of whatever law we need to make up around that fact.
Well, yeah, exactly.
If that's what we're doing and that does seem to be what's been happening a lot, then absolutely.
Yeah.
Ex post facto and bill of attainder at the same time.
Very nice.
Yeah.
OK.
Mohammed Jawad.
Who's he?
I've never heard of him before.
I don't think.
Well, Mohammed was another.
He was a teenager as well at the time of his his capture.
So this is, you know, this is two guys that the administration has decided to put forward for a war crimes trial, even though the rest of the world is saying, you know, don't put teenagers on trial for war crimes, even if you could establish that these are crimes in the first place.
And Mohammed is accused of throwing a grenade at a U.S. military vehicle and wounding two American soldiers and an Afghan interpreter.
He says he didn't do it.
He says that there was somebody that he was with.
He did it, but he'd basically been caught up in these people, that he didn't throw the grenade and that he was tortured by the Afghan police to admit that he did throw the grenade.
Again, I'm not really sure what we're looking at here, that even if he did do it, so he threw a grenade during a military in a military environment in wartime, threw a grenade, didn't kill anybody.
It's being hauled up in front of the world as, you know, one of the worst of the worst Right.
That's the direct quote.
The worst of the worst.
These people.
Who was it that said they'd chew through their cables and kill every man, woman and child around here if they could.
That was, I think, Brigadier General Mike Lennox of the Marines, who was the first commander of Guantanamo.
Yeah.
Yes.
The very worst.
So that's two so far on our list who are minors or were minors, at least at the time.
And who's only the accusation against them, even if we presume them guilty, is that they were in a battle.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, the context that we can see clearly is that it was in a in a battle situation.
And it's going back to what you were saying earlier, really.
Why are we extrapolating cases of terrorism out of something that is war?
War is a different matter.
War has its own rules.
Why are we creating terrorism out of nothing?
Yeah, I have to admit, I've been living in this bizarre world for quite some time now, and I'm thrown for a loop again here.
It was the only time, haven't we?
You know, and the fact is that a lot of people have taken it for granted that the rules have been redefined.
And those of us who constantly question it and, you know, and sometimes wake up in the morning and sometimes in the middle of the night going, sorry, just run that by me one more time, you know?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
We're the we're the odd ones, I guess we're just supposed to take it for granted.
That's a good way to put it.
That is what hey, everything changed on 9-11 anyway.
So what's what's next on the list?
That's I guess the way most people look at it.
But no, I agree with you.
We always have to go back and question.
Never even mind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the rule of law.
But let's just actually try to apply common sense, you know, never mind what the Geneva Convention says.
Is it a war crime for a 15 year old in a battle to throw a grenade and miss?
No, it's not.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Gee whiz.
I'm sorry.
I just think that ought to be perfectly clear.
But anyway, I'll just say it five more times to make sure.
Ahmed Al Darby, a Saudi.
So he must have been one of the Al Qaeda guys, right?
An Arab Afghan.
Well, you know, I don't know that much about about him, to be honest.
I mean, Ahmed was actually picked up in Azerbaijan and was then rendered to Afghanistan before he ended up in Guantanamo.
How this is going to proceed, I have no idea, really, because because when you start getting to Ahmed and some of the stories that come, you're really up against people who have decided in the first place that they that they're up against the system which they regard as unfair.
And I mean, they're pretty justified in saying that they're up against something that's unfair because then they're not necessarily going to be allowed access to all the information against them.
And they there is the strong likelihood, shall we put it, that at the discretion of the judge information, evidence, supposed evidence that was obtained through coercion, coercion, let's not use the word torture, but through coercion will be made available to the whole system of trials and not corresponding to any other internationally recognized standard would not be acceptable in the U.S. court and don't even meet the standards that other legal procedures undertaken by the U.S. military that are required by that.
You know, Ahmed al-Dhabi has decided that he doesn't want to cooperate and has kind of put the administration in a difficult position, really, because it says that it will proceed with all these trials even though the defendant isn't there.
It's not going to look that great, really, is it?
No, it doesn't seem so.
And I got to tell you, I've got bad news for you.
In the case of Abu Ali in Virginia, in a civilian courtroom, not one of these makeshift star chamber setups that we have here, but in a regular courtroom, the judge in the Abu Ali case allowed torture evidence from Saudi Arabia where this kid was beaten into saying that he had a plot to kill George Bush and yet banned the introduction of any evidence that he had, in fact, been tortured and did not let the jury hear that at all.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, that's starting to creep into the British legal system as well.
And it's, you know, well, I mean, how worrying is that?
It's very, very worrying that the absolute prohibition on the use of torture and on the information obtained through torture is steadily being eroded.
You know, the world is not like 24 and, you know, we're in big trouble if we start taking this stuff seriously.
Yeah.
I'm so glad you said that, you know, in the book Torture Team, he talks about Philip Sands talks about how the guys at Gitmo loved 24 and that they really did watch Kiefer Sutherland on TV and say, that's a good idea on how to torture somebody.
Yeah.
We're going to try that out on, you know, Mohammed tomorrow and see what happens.
Well, you know, there's been a big report that came out last week, a Department of Justice report about the FBI's issues with the coercive interrogations and the use of torture by the CIA.
And the FBI agents talk about that as well.
Oh, yeah.
And their war crimes files.
They talk about the kind of party atmosphere that the guys were pumping themselves up to go and torture some guy.
You know, but I mean, Philip Sands and this FBI report, which is, you know, which is very detailed and fascinating, just keeps reinforcing the issues that, you know, that I know I've written about and spoken about a lot and which I think is of absolutely crucial importance to to to the American people, which is that the torture and coercive interrogations don't work, let alone the fact that we're getting these rather horrible images of people getting into it a bit too much, you know, getting into it a bit too much of causing great damage to somebody and and then believing what they're going to say, but that they don't work.
And that the FBI, which had this involvement in the terrorism trials that took place before 9-11, when they sat down and developed a rapport with with prisoners and got them to provide information and then built court cases and went through the U.S. court system and prosecuted these people as criminals rather than creating some abstract world in which you torture people, you don't have valid legal rules and you hope that your show trials are not going to be derailed and you can just bang up these guys and be done with it.
Which is where they are now having to basically drop the charges against this guy, Khatami, who's one of the, I don't know, 10 or 15 different 20th hijackers that they have around now.
Right, yeah.
And that's exactly why, right?
That's an interesting one, because, you know, I mean, his lawyers said that, you know, after he was charged in February, he became so depressed that he attempted to commit suicide and that his mental state is not sufficient to enable him to be able to present a defense in the case.
Now, that's one angle.
I mean, the other one that I thought when the story was announced was that the problem with Al-Khatami was that he was tortured in Guantanamo.
Anybody who has investigated his story slightly will realize that an interrogation log was leaked and published by Time two years ago, detailing hour by hour, day by day, the various ways in which he was tortured while he was kept awake for 20 hours every day over a period of several months.
Now, the thing is that the evidence against Al-Khatami is publicly available, and it took place in Guantanamo.
And the evidence of the interrogations against the other people who were supposed to be charged with him for the 9-11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al-Sheib and three other guys, theirs was in secret prisons run by the CIA and under the terms of the military commissions.
As I understand it, the judge is under no obligation to compel the intelligence agencies to provide information about what they got up to.
So the reason for dropping Al-Khatami is that the evidence of his torture is publicly available, whereas the evidence of torture against the other five, the presumption on the part of the administration is that they will be able to keep it hidden.
And of course, one of the things that they also did recently, which I know you know about, that whether everybody out there knows about it, is that they, having tortured these guys in secret CIA custody, they then sent in clean teams of FBI agents to re-interrogate them recently.
So to get them to repeat their confessions, but by giving them a Big Mac instead of waterboarding them and presumed that by doing so, they would be able to kind of wipe clean the history of torture, which I just find absolutely astonishing, really, you know, my jaw is dropping to the floor as we speak here, Scott.
There's no real better way to sum it up than making it up as they go along.
Oh yes.
We're coming back to that, aren't we?
Yeah, once you abandon the law and you start doing all of these things, it's sort of like telling a lie.
You have to keep coming up with lies to try to make it make sense, and it's the same sort of thing with this.
Well, I think it's absolutely true, actually.
I mean, it sounds a little bit flippant, but it is absolutely true.
This is what happened, is that they unmoored themselves, and you know, I don't know what your American vernacular term is for the equivalent of writing something down on the back of a fag packet.
I mean, that's a cigarette packet in the UK.
But you know, if somebody comes up with a really bad idea that they haven't put much thought into, they just write it down on the back of a cigarette packet, and it's like, hey, new policy, you know, and that's really how it started.
I think we use napkin around here, cocktail napkin.
Okay, yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, that's my whole feeling, really, about those crucial decisions that were made in November 2001, that they would set up military commission trials to prosecute the terrorists that were rounded up, and the terrorists were defined, the enemy combatants were defined as basically anybody that the president thought might be involved in 9-11, and the trials that would take place would, you know, would allow secret evidence, would allow evidence to become sealed from the prisoner, would be a whole new different system.
Bingo.
It's one bit of paper that was produced by Dick Cheney and David Addington, and it set the whole tone for everything that followed, and it really was not thought out.
And I mean, the history of the military commissions, which they started in 2003, they fumbled along every time somebody turned up, they were a laughingstock.
The Supreme Court threw it out in 2006, said it's illegal.
It was revised by Congress on a night when they must have all had far too many sleeping pills.
It came back to life, and you know, and the same thing has been happening now, is that every time they get the courtroom together, they get these people in there, something happens, it's like, do we actually know what we're doing?
No.
And we're back to the mantra, I think, Scott, you know, why do we not know what's going on?
Because we're making it up as we go along.
Right.
And wasn't there even a big battle over, I remember at one point a judge dismissed a bunch of cases and said, no, you have to go back and redo it because of the distinction between an unlawful combatant and an enemy combatant and an unlawful enemy combatant and like these guys, they're fighting over their made up terms, they can't even get straight.
Well, the great thing about it is that, you know, these are military appointed judges.
They're appointed to this brand new system of trials for terror suspects.
And what happens is that these guys, instead of being complete puppets, they actually look at what they're required to do.
So this was this was last June.
This was after David Hicks, the Australian was sent home, did a plea bargain.
We don't have to go into the details of a case.
Great.
First two trials come up.
It's Omar Khadr, the Canadian teenager, it's Salim Hamdan, the driver for Bin Laden.
And the trials are about to start, the administration's gunning for it.
And the judges have a look at the legislation and say, no, no, no, wait.
These guys are enemy combatants.
The tribunals that you held at Guantanamo to to decide that these guys were enemy combatants without rights, who could be put forward for trial by a military commission.
That's what they are.
Now, the legislation that you passed in Congress to get these major commissions going again, it said they had to be unlawful enemy combatants.
These guys are not.
There's a difference between between the terminologies here, and we're not in a legal position to go ahead with this.
So they called off the trials and then, you know, and then the administration freaked out and said, it's a semantic difference.
They said, no, it's not.
They said, OK, we're going to appeal.
And then they looked really stupid because the appeals court hadn't even been established in case of something like this happening.
So they got an appeals court together over the summer, last summer, and eventually after a month came back and said, no, you guys have the right to decide that you want to go ahead with these cases.
So off we go again.
So the whole lumbering monster comes back to life.
But really, each time it it just looks like a like a house of cards.
And it really is, because, you know, you should have faith in the legal system.
The Americans should have faith in the legal system.
Your country is founded so substantially on the rule of law and, you know, and that's been going on for over 200 years.
And you took so many of the elements of law from the English common law that existed for hundreds and hundreds of years before that.
This is an edifice that has a rich history, is not something that's just dreamt up in an afternoon and you try and implement it.
So it just goes on and on like that.
It could be said as well that one one good way to fight the war on terrorism would be to say, hey, look, world, we apply our Bill of Rights even to the terrorists we capture on the battlefield.
That's how much we believe in liberty and the rule of law.
And gee, if you thought we were an empire and you had to defend yourself from us, sorry, we were only trying to protect you from the commies.
We're only you know, we're bringing all our guys home now.
We didn't mean any offense.
We were only trying to be your friend.
But look at us.
We are the shining city on the hill.
And if you were to follow our example, you'd be a hell of a lot better off.
We can't make that argument now.
Not by a long shot.
Can you know?
No, there's no way now.
Well, no, I think so.
But I mean, that's why I hope that, you know, I hope that the change will be affected over the next year in the United States.
I really fervently hope that's got, you know, when I came to the States in March, I came for a visit and I was in New York.
I was in Washington, D.C.
I was promoting my book.
I was meeting a lot of great people.
And, you know, across the board, I have to say, you know, the the issues that were being discussed were that that the abrogating from the Geneva Conventions, the holding people without charge of trial, the setting up secret prisons, that all these things were were an insult to what Americans believe that their country should stand for.
And this isn't just, you know, high idealism.
This is the United States is a country that was founded by immigrants on principles and ideals and beliefs.
And these things are important, you know, and it seems to me that I mean, I don't know how it's going to pan out, but it seems to me that this is one of the things that Barack Obama is is is touching on is that he's he's appealing to people who want America to stand for something again, because, you know, anybody half sensible looking looking back at the ruin of what's been what's been happening to America's name over the last seven years really must want to change and must want to know what does it what does America stand for?
How can we hold our head up proudly and say what we stand for?
Right.
Especially when the whole argument for why we're killing everybody is because we're so good that it makes it all right.
You know, it makes our excuse for all this aggression is wearing really thin here.
I want to go back to something that you said before about torture doesn't work.
I don't think that that's true.
I think that your premise that you didn't really say is if you want the truth, right?
But torture works great if, for example, you're trying to get Osama bin Laden's buddy Libby to claim that Saddam Hussein taught him how to hijack planes and make chemical weapons.
Well, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it's a very important distinction to make.
But yeah, I mean, I when I said it doesn't work, I meant it doesn't work in the sense that it doesn't deliver you the truth, right?
Or even what's come out in the case of somebody like Ali Sheikh Mohammed, which is that, you know, I know this is on record in various places that people who know about or were involved in the interrogation basically said, you know, we know Ali Sheikh Mohammed came up with loads of stuff.
Now, you know, the thing is that we know that some of it's true and we know that a whole load of it is a load of rubbish, but we don't know which is which.
Very helpful.
You know, right.
I mean, it's not helpful at all because, you know, the difficult story and I mean, this is what came out with Abu Zubaydah, who's another allegedly senior al-Qaeda operative who actually seems to have some mental issues and a split personality, according to the FBI, who who interrogated him before the CIA got hold of him and started giving him all the heavy stuff.
Was that, you know, Ron Suskind, who wrote a book about that, has a fantastic passage where he just says, you know, every time they every time they tortured this guy, he would come up with another fanciful plot, you know, and and then the the agents and the military would rush to the scene of this and they start rounding people up for another plot that's been uncovered.
But it's a plot that's been invented.
You know, how many innocent people are drawn in on this basis?
Yeah.
Well, and we have to also remember that all those, you know, orange alerts that came out based on what they tortured out of Abu Zubaydah were used as war propaganda in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.
It was that same timing that I remember one day.
One of the orange alerts was a school somewhere in Texas may be a terrorist target, so everybody be alert.
Well, I'm here to tell you there's got to be 50000 schools in Texas.
And based on what was that was one of these schools, a target based on a guy with five personalities that they were torturing.
And by the way, he's the guy that Bush routinely cited for years on end.
Oh, we had the worst of the worst, like that guy, Abu Zubaydah.
And according to Susskind's book that you mentioned there, when George Tenet explained to George Bush, the head of the CIA, when he explained to the president that actually this guy doesn't know anything, he's a nobody, he's crazy and everything he said was wrong.
George Bush replied, you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
That's a secret.
I already said he was a big deal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Man, oh, man.
I mean, that I hope that goes on George W. Bush's tombstone.
You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
All right.
I'm sorry.
Let's get back to our list here.
Number one.
Number six here real quick is Ibrahim al-Khosei, a Sudanese accused of being a bodyguard and driver for bin Laden and a quartermaster for al-Qaeda.
He was captured after crossing the Pakistani border in December 2001, previously charged in the first aborted incarnation of the military commissions.
Tell us more about this guy.
Well, you know, again, I don't know much about Ibrahim al-Khosei or Ali Hamza al-Bailu, to be honest, is the next guy.
They were both charged early on.
The administration seems to have pretty sound reasons for believing that these guys were a part of al-Qaeda, if not the inner circle, then part of, you know, what we what we would realistically be able to call al-Qaeda.
But you know, again, the issue is even with these guys, you know, they they I think have both been been subjected to torture over the years and they're being put forward for trial in in something that they that they don't believe is going to provide any kind of justice.
And they're both of these guys that boycott boycotting the the trial proceedings and don't want to take part, you know, as part of a process where this is happening with more and more of the prisoners.
It does seem to me it's not going to it's not going to be seen to be fair and to look like the kind of system that is reputable if they keep holding holding these trials with empty seats where the guy isn't there.
Right.
Again, with the ad hoc nature of this, they decide they want to run all the sexy cases next to the presidential campaign.
That could be a major mistake.
Well, it could be.
I mean, they're desperate, aren't they?
I mean, you know, that's why I think they're finally rushing into it.
I mean, in fact, that clearly is why they're rushing into it, because this is the whole basis of the misunderstanding, the conflict between Colonel Morris Davis, who was the chief prosecutor who was proceeding with cases that could that would not rely upon secret evidence that would not specifically would not involve the use of evidence obtained through torture and that, you know, when when he came up against a kind of new regime that was established last year.
So this is retired Judge Susan Crawford, who's the convening authority for the commissions.
We don't hear much about her.
She worked with Cheney in the first Bush administration.
She oversees the commission and Brigadier General Thomas Hartman was put in as the legal adviser kind of above Davis and started pushing for that.
These are the sexy cases that the press reports, sexy cases, people with blood on their hands where they would, you know, if it came to it, not be transparent trials and would would rely upon secret evidence.
And this is where the big push for the 9-11 trials came.
And this is where the push for some of the bigger cases is coming.
But, you know, those are those are issues of kind of the smaller figures that that that Colonel Davis wants to push forward.
Now, some of these are the ones that I think we've been discussing is, you know, these guys are not terrorists.
What on earth is this about?
But the case is that that Crawford and I mean, this has been coming from the from kind of the top level, Crawford and Hartman pushing these these bigger cases.
You know, those are tainted as well, because these are the ones where where the evidence of torture is right.
And, you know, I can't I can't see that these can proceed smoothly through the commission system either.
Hmm.
And what a disaster.
You know, it seems like, you know, if we take six, seven and I guess number eight on your list, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed there, and just go ahead and presume them guilty that these guys really are, you know, bin Laden's friends, whatever.
I personally have plenty of faith in the jurors of Fairfax County or say, I don't know, Manhattan, the District of Manhattan or whatever, to put these guys on trial and convict them.
After all, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew is doing life in a supermax without parole right now.
Right.
Yeah.
But I mean, you know, do you not think that that's what it's going to come down to, Scott, is that this whole thing is going to collapse and these guys are going to have to be moved to the mainland.
And and in spite of the torture that took place, the jury is going to have to, you know, be told, you know, this is the story we have against these guys.
I mean, when it comes to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Rashid, you know, both these guys spoke to spoke to a reporter before they were captured by by U.S. forces and claimed their responsibility for the 9-11 attack.
Right.
I don't know about the other guys.
You know, I never heard anything publicly that they that they spoke before they were captured.
You know, and all these guys are held in secret custody for years.
Well, you know, that's the price we pay.
It seems like that's the price we pay.
I think that I would agree with you that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed conviction should be a slam dunk.
There's plenty of evidence against him and Ramzi bin Rashid, for that matter.
These other guys, you know, I don't know if if all they had on these guys is what they tortured out of them.
Well, maybe they should be set free.
I mean, this is America after all.
Well, it's very difficult to know, isn't it?
The claims against one of the guys is that he transferred money to the 9-11 hijackers when they were in America.
And now I've read the transcript of what he said in Guantanamo.
And he said, listen, you know, this is what I did.
I transferred money to Arabs who were in the States.
Nobody told me what the money was for.
And don't for a minute imagine that me transferring 50 grand to somebody was a big deal.
You know, he said regularly I would have guys who I was sending 200 grand out to because they were buying a Ferrari.
I was dealing with young, young men from the Gulf countries who had money.
And that was my job was to transfer wire money to them.
You know, is he telling the truth or not?
I don't know.
Would it ever become clear?
I don't know that either.
But, you know, there's certainly a story there.
Well, it's certainly clear that if you just held a trial in federal court, you have a lot better chance of actually getting to the truth.
I think it's probably too late now.
As you say, these guys have been tortured.
Now, what good is their word now?
Well, I mean, that's the worst thing about it, really.
The worst thing about it is to go back to those issues that we were discussing before.
And I always come back to this, to go back to the old school FBI agents who sat down and built up a relationship with people for years.
And, you know, quite often the last thing they expect is that you don't beat the crap out of them.
They know that, you know, in all various various regimes that they've had experience with, that's exactly what they do to you.
And, you know, very often it's easier than you think to build a rapport with somebody with a huge ego where they know they're not going anywhere, they are never going anywhere, and you are sitting down with them and going, how do we find a way to talk about it?
Come on, let's talk about it.
You know, and you build up these cases.
The FBI spent ages building up cases before 9-11 with people building a report so the stories that they told could then be investigated and turned out to be the truth rather than this mixture of truth and fiction that you get when you torture people.
Right.
You know, that whole thing was laid out to be done.
And, you know, and this is an appallingly complicated and corrupt and soul-destroying route that has been taken.
And you know, I mean, my greatest desire would just be to see that the people who are running the show are going to say, we are absolutely not doing this anymore.
We are, you know, we are closing down the secret prisons.
We are reining in the CIA in the way that we behave.
We are getting back to the root of law and we are trusting ourselves that we are equipped with talented people who can, you know, that when we apprehend somebody, we can sit down with them and we can build a report with them without waterboarding them.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny because a lot of the real experts who aren't, you know, just shills for the war party, but people who are actual terrorism experts and so forth, they almost always say that the actual war on terrorism, such as it is, you know, if you take off the ironic quotes and you just get down to the core of, you know, the actual battle against al-Qaeda and so forth, that it's a battle to be won by cops and spies and that basically what you do is you find the people, you capture them if you possibly can, and you bring them back for trial.
It's a law enforcement matter, treating it as a war, you know, talking about Osama bin Laden like he's the premier of the Soviet Union only builds him up into something that he's clearly not.
Well, no, absolutely.
I mean, it is a problem that, you know, that it was never a war.
It was a case of dealing with criminals.
And that's what it's always been, you know.
And that's what happened, you know, in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's tribunal at Guantanamo last year when he compared himself to George Washington and he was talking about, you know, the English would have made George Washington an enemy combatant.
And if, you know, he's got into the, you know, he's got into the glory of war that he's being presented with, you know, what's the bottom line here?
If this was the guy who did it, you man, you're not an enemy, you're not an enemy combatant in some glorious war.
You know, you are a despicable criminal.
This is a criminal act.
You did.
This is not warfare.
Right.
Instead, they affirm what he says.
Yeah, that's right.
Is it OK if I keep you on longer here and ask you about the rest of these guys?
Yeah, do.
Yeah.
Who's this guy?
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.
He's another one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephews, actually.
I mean, he's I think he might be the guy I was talking about.
There are a couple of them that are accused of kind of money transfers to the 9-11 hijackers.
I think he's one of them.
And maybe the next guy on the list is as well.
Who do you got there?
Well, next on the list, I have Waleed bin Attash, a Saudi who lost a leg in Afghanistan before 9-11.
He's.
Yeah, I mean, he actually claimed in his tribunal last year he was one of the few there was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who said I was I was responsible for 9-11 and Waleed bin Attash said I was responsible.
I was involved in the African embassy bombings in 98.
I was very involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
Seems to be, you know, straightforward confession, but, you know, when when it comes to it, we're going to find out about a lot of other stuff that happened along the way.
Again, another one of these cases where, you know, if what they say is true at all, you know, this should be a slam dunk for federal prosecutors who, after all, lock up innocent Americans in prison all the time and might as well, you know, turn their attention towards some actual criminals.
And again, the kind of thing where, you know, just because even even if everything he says is true, he helped bomb the coal, etc.
There's nothing about the case on its face that would require turning them over to the military rather than over to the Justice Department.
There's plenty cruel.
No, absolutely.
I mean, you know, yeah, we we the more we get into it, the more we end up just wishing that we could roll back time of it and handle this differently, don't we?
Yeah.
I mean, that's certainly the impression that I got, you know, with this FBI report that I mentioned earlier, which I would encourage, you know, I would encourage anybody who hasn't more than a passing interest to go and really have a look at the at the testimony of the FBI, of these people who wanted to do this the old fashioned way, you know, and who had to back off when when the CIA and various DOD representatives were muscling in and dying.
Yeah.
The fact that the FBI is open to kind of random violence, you know, and they just backed off.
It was like, you know, not only did they back off because, you know, because they didn't like it, they backed off because it it was impractical.
They backed off because they knew that, you know, that that if you're trying to build a criminal case against somebody, this kind of random nonsense that was going on, you know, at the very least, the random nonsense, I mean, you know, without the extremes of violence that were involved, but that it was just useless.
It was counterproductive on every level.
Yeah.
And well, they started building back and do that differently.
They started building a criminal case against the interrogators for war crimes.
Not the not the detainees.
And it was apparently the highest levels of the Justice Department came and shut that down.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that is a hell of a scandal.
And again, to be clear, you're talking about the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn Fiennes report on the FBI agents that came out, which is on The New York Times website, which you can find online easily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's really worth checking out.
I mean, it really is, because you also get a little bit of insight there as to how how many branches of the government and the agencies were involved in various levels that kind of discussing, you know, where are we going, what are we doing and, you know, and seeing who who eventually succeeded in steamrolling ahead with which ways of behaving that, you know, got into the mess that we're in.
Yeah.
And, you know, they're real detailed about how the FBI agents were winning them over.
Like you I think you mentioned, give them a Big Mac or something facetiously.
But they were they were even going so far as to clean up a man after he had had an accident on himself while shackled.
And they were actually really go on the extra mile to win these guys over.
And I just I don't know, I saw a lecture the other day of a cop talking about how easy it is to get people to talk and how you can just trick somebody and to spill in their entire guts.
They just want to talk.
All you got to do is sit with them in a little room for 10 minutes and they'll start blabbing their mouth about every little thing.
Well, people need to know that, you know, people don't.
They don't understand the, you know, the pressures that are put on people when they are in prison.
And it's like, you know, there's no door open to go and they don't understand the psychological games and they they don't understand any of this.
You know, there are too many people have been seduced by the the violent bullying techniques that, you know, you've got to be tougher than tough, you know, and as you say, I mean, it's not true.
And it's important to hear the voices of these people because these professionals, you know, they really do know what they're talking about.
You know, they're not Hollywood scriptwriters.
These are professionals.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, so there you go, everybody.
Andy Worthington, I think you've made your point.
America has abandoned the rule of law and tortured a bunch of people for nothing.
And that actually, as soon as we abandon this and try to get back to the Bill of Rights, the better off we all are and the more actual terrorists will go to prison and the safer we'll all be.
Sounds like, you know, let's hope so.
All right, everybody, that's Andy Worthington.
The book is The Guantanamo Files, the stories of the seven hundred and seventy four detainees in America's illegal prison.
You can find quite a bit of what he's written at antiwar dot com slash or ridge like or IG short for original slash Worthington dot PHP.
And anyway, you can just go to more viewpoints and find his most recent article, which is the 16 prisoners charged in Gitmo's military commissions.
And the blog is Andy Worthington dot com, right?
Dot co dot UK dot co dot UK.
OK, there you go.
All right, folks.
That's Andy Worthington.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
It's been brilliant.
