04/17/13 – Jeff Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest today is Jeff Kaye from Truthout.org and from FireDogLake.
He's at Dissenter.
FireDogLake.com with this one, Judicial Ignorance and Bias, Doom, Ahmed Abu Ali to Decades in Isolation in Key War on Terror Case.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
So tell us, who is Ahmed Abu Ali?
Well, he's a young man, a U.S. citizen who has been imprisoned, actually convicted of multiple terrorism charges, material support for Al-Qaeda, that kind of thing, who was part of a major war on terror case that occurred back in the early days after 9-11, in the first few years when the U.S. government was going after Muslims who were shooting paint balls in forests and things like that.
And he was tortured by the Saudis by his own statements and also by the testimony of experts who examined him.
And the U.S. government refused to allow that evidence into court, and they refused to allow evidence into court that Saudi Arabia was a country that even did torture.
And as a result, the jury left with only the government's statements.
And this young man, who was a very scholarly young man, a valedictorian of his high school class, was convicted and sent to jail for what essentially amounts to life in prison under special administrative measures.
As if he were, you know, Osama bin Laden himself.
Now, what all did the Saudis do to Abu Ali in order to get this confession?
And then after that, what all did he confess to again?
Well, he confessed to planning an assassination of George W. Bush and of wanting to organize a 9-11 style terror group and or start an Al-Qaeda cell in America.
Of course, he was never actually linked to any actual plan of terrorist action.
These were all things he was thinking of, supposedly.
What they did is they held him incommunicado, the Saudis, who may or may not, we don't know for sure, have been arrested him at the behest of the U.S. government.
But certainly, rather than listening to his pleas to call the embassy or get an attorney, the Saudis immediately called the FBI by their own statements.
And the FBI began to feed their questions to Abu Ali through the Saudis.
At least that's the story that they admit to thus far.
And they kept him incommunicado in solitary confinement.
And then after a few days began the physical abuse, punching him, pulling on his beard, threats of killing him, threats of indefinite detention, which, by the way, came later from the FBI at Guantanamo.
He'd be locked away for life.
He would never see his family again.
And he was chained and suspended from the ceiling.
He was whipped and perhaps other things.
We know that a U.S. assistant attorney by the name of Gordon Cromberg told another attorney, who was a defense attorney in a different case, who was asking questions about what was happening to Abu Ali, this was back in 2003, that he wasn't going to be brought back to the U.S. for trial because he was, quote, no good for us here.
He has no fingernails left.
And the attorney, Salim Ali, actually made an affidavit to this effect in court.
So he was tortured.
He was tortured.
And then a few months later, they had a videotaped confession with him saying all these things about how he loves al-Qaeda, how he wanted to kill Americans and assassinate George W. Bush.
All right.
Now, there's so much different stuff here.
Yeah, I know.
Just, OK, first of all, on the confession itself, you're telling me that the confession even is that he had considered that one day when he went home to America, that he would do some things.
But they're not even saying that he ever discussed it with anyone else, that he had ever taken a single step down the path.
Did he even say, yeah, I had a really good plan, this is how I was going to do it or anything like that?
Because I know typically, yeah, or I don't know about typically, but I know at least sometimes a judge will refuse to accept a guilty plea from someone who's pleading guilty because he really wants to see the government prove the case about how this came about and that a confession alone is oftentimes not good enough because people for lots of different reasons that including just to get the hell away from their wives or just to be allowed to get up and go to the bathroom during their interrogation or who knows what people confess to things that they did not do all the time.
I mean, every day.
Yeah, but that confession is about all they really had in this case.
And then but but am I correct, though, that his confession didn't indicate anything other than he once daydreamed about shooting George Bush?
Yeah, that he had a plan in his head, which I mean, in the actual confession, which can be read online, that he thought of maybe walking by him and exploding a bomb or shooting him if he could get that close.
He wasn't sure which.
But this was his idea, according to the supposed confession, which really is a tortured confession and not valid at all.
So even that amount that they were able to get out of him via tortured confession did not.
There was no evidence that they had of any planning with anybody else.
What they did have on the material support thing is someone who he knew who he'd been a friend with even back in the United States, who he met in Saudi Arabia, supposedly asked him, gave him money to buy a computer and a cell phone.
And he bought the computer and the cell phone for this friend.
But there's no evidence that the computer cell phone was ever to be used for any terror activities.
If, in fact, he even did that, that was never presented.
Was the friend even ever convicted of anything?
Um, he was friends with a number of people, a few people who became associated with that famous.
That's the paintball, Virginia, so-called jihadists.
Yeah, another fake case.
Yeah, another huge case in which the people were arrested basically at the same time he was after there were, in fact, bombings, terror bombings of some sort in Riyadh in 2003.
And these guys were arrested and who they arrested were, you know, essentially guys in their early 20s who had never really been no evidence on any of them, including the paintball suspects, that they'd ever actually planned a terror attack in the United States, period.
Not Abu Ali, not the paintball jihadists, so-called in quotes.
And they were extradited back to the United States.
In fact, in early court filings, Abu Ali's attorneys made the point that these other people were extradited, whereas he was being held incommunicado and not allowed to go back to the United States, even though the Saudis did not charge him.
They never charged him.
And he was held for a year and a half in Saudi custody, while the FBI came and went and interrogated him or sat behind one-way mirrors while the Saudis interrogated him.
So there were people who claimed, anonymous people, a guy who, what was his name, like Reda, I think he was referred to in court, which is a pseudonym, for some guy who saw a picture of him while he was being interrogated by the Saudis and said, yeah, this guy, you know, had met with or was with al-Qaeda.
And of course, there was never any cross-examination.
We don't even know the actual identity of this individual.
And that's the only person who links Ahmed Abu Ali to any kind of al-Qaeda personnel or whatever.
All right, and now- It's pretty, pretty, pretty thin.
So much so that Amnesty International put out a special report expressing just how concerned they were with this case and how these kind of things would be used as a precedent against U.S. citizens going forward.
Well, I mean, and this thing has just been absolutely outrageous.
This is the thing that really bothers me.
And I know that there have been some legal groups and, of course, the CCR and the ACLU and a few others do a really good job.
And there have been bar associations here or there that wrote a letter of protest or put a letter in the newspaper or something.
But this is the kind of thing where, you know, like in Pakistan, you have all the lawyers out in the streets protesting and screaming and saying, we're not going to allow, you know, this threat to judicial independence go down or whatever it is that they're screaming about.
Where are all the lawyers of America when you have a judge allow tortured testimony, completely ridiculous torture testimony, and then refuses to allow the jury to understand the circumstances under which the confession was gained?
I mean, that is the kind of thing that happens in some crappy country that we're bombing and we're using that as the excuse for why it's OK for us to bomb them.
And yet that's how we are.
Yeah.
And where's the protest?
Where's every lawyer?
Where's all the other judges in America saying, what the hell, Gerald Bruce Lee?
Right.
No, absolutely.
Well, I mean, the professions in America in general, of course, I'm a psychologist.
And my profession and the medical profession, the psychological profession have also fallen down, as have the legal profession as a law, as a large whole.
Of course, as you well point out, there are very important organizations, you know, like Center for Constitutional Rights is the National Defense Lawyers, I think, Association.
But, you know, in general, yes, the law, you know, the law profession just says, OK, well, I mean, hell, they've got John Yoo as a tenured professor of law at one of the major law schools in the United States over there at Bolt Law School of Law at UC Berkeley.
Right.
So this is how well, you know, ensconced torture now is in a country which, you know, by all accounts truly has become a torture nation.
Torture is now considered an illegitimate part of the discourse.
You can argue it.
They'll allow you to do that.
But in general, torture is here to stay.
Yeah, well, and, you know, as we discussed the other day with Jonathan Landay, we did kind of a 10 year anniversary of the Iraq war.
And here's a reporter, a mainstream reporter who got it right because he was talking to lower level sources than the highest level appointees and politicians.
And he was getting kind of the straight dope on it.
But he's also the guy that I think he proved the causation to the correlation that most of the torture under the CIA in 2002 and three was centered around getting people to tell lies about their Al Qaeda friendship with Saddam Hussein.
And it did work.
It worked wonderfully.
And Sheikh Ali, of course, is the best example of that, who claimed, you know, when they are torturing him, saying, tell us about Saddam.
Tell us about Saddam.
So he's like, all right, well, let's see.
One time me and Saddam went out to lunch and he starts making up stuff immediately.
And it was right before and right after the invasion was the two times where this, you know, was really peaked.
And it was clear what it was all about.
It was about getting a predetermined answer.
Yes.
Because any cop, I mean, a Sam Jackson character in a movie can tell you that for a cop to get the truth out of a criminal, you've got to make friends with them.
Like Ali Soufan did, the FBI agent, you got to make friends with him, offer him a sugar cookie, and maybe you'll pay for their wife's surgery.
They did this for one of bin Laden's money men back in the 1990s.
They paid for his wife's surgery.
Bin Laden wouldn't pay for it.
And the U.S. did and got all this great intel.
And that's how you get intelligence from these guys.
But if you want lies to justify the next war or to justify putting an innocent person in prison for the rest of his life, then you go ahead and beat it out of them.
You can beat whatever you want out of them.
Right, right.
Well, I do want to say one thing about Ali Soufan, because while no doubt some of his interrogations certainly went along classic rapport building lines where you do just sit down and you tell the person, you know, hey, here's your situation.
You're in jail.
We really want your cooperation.
Things will go better for you.
And sure enough, 90 percent of people will cooperate under those circumstances.
But that thing about having the cup of tea, which, by the way, was kind of referenced in an oblique way in the movie Zero Dark Thirty, if you remember, where they're sitting down with the terror suspect and they're having tea.
And then he lets slip some information.
But the similar thing happened with Soufan having supposedly tea with Zubaydah.
This only came after there had been essentially torture or at least cruel and inhumane treatment.
This even before Mitchell and Jessen got started in Thailand on Abu Zubaydah with the enhanced interrogation style torture that they were already subjecting him to sleep deprivation, isolation, shackling, et cetera.
And in fact, Abu Zubaydah, Ali Soufan admitted this in Senate testimony when he was asked specifically, albeit by a Republican GOP senator, Lindsey Graham, who was trying to score some points.
But nevertheless, Ali Soufan under oath answered honestly when he asked him, was your interrogation of Abu Zubaydah compliant with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention?
And he said, no, sir, it was not.
So there is obviously conflict between the FBI and their style, which often gets right up to the edge and crosses over into the land of torture, and the CIA, who has a completely evil research program about torture.
But the FBI is not just out there with cups of tea.
In this case right here of Ahmed Abu Ali is a classic one in which they literally stood by through closed circuit television.
I mean, excuse me, closed, one way mirrors anyway, or perhaps they occasionally use, I don't know, I know this happened in other cases, that closed circuit video to watch the interrogations done by other countries who use brutal tactics on prisoners while they observe.
And so, you know, the entire US government is addicted to abuse of prisoners, to lies, to injustice, and really, it's sad, the case of Ahmed Abu Ali is only one of many.
And of course, we have the example of Guantanamo, where the prisoners now are literally in some kind of desperate rebellion, trying to maintain a shred of their humanity as Obama's condemned them to a living grave of indefinite detention, and in many cases, under solitary confinement.
Well, let's see if we have a couple of minutes at the end, I'd like to ask you a little bit more about that to talk about that.
But if we can get back to, and it's my fault, I was way off track here.
But to get back to the situation of this guy, Abu Ali, who obviously is just some guy who got caught up in a government scam.
Maybe George Bush needed an extra orange alert that week to distract everybody or something like that.
But so as you said, this guy has an effective life sentence in prison, and under special administrative measures.
That sounds like English socialism.
What does that really mean?
Well, those are, you know, the Department of Justice has put forth the so called special administrative measures, which are just a really extreme form of solitary confinement, in which the prisoner is not only kept in his cell 23 hours a day, and not allowed really any contact with his family except, you know, perhaps, you know, once a month, or once every few months, it takes months for letters to go back and forth, just a simple letter from a family member to a family member.
If you remember the case of the attorney, Lynn, who Stewart, Lynn Stewart, yes, who was, in part, prison supposedly for violating from the attorney side, the med, these, these fans, these special administrative measures, which were only supposedly intended to last for no more than two to four weeks.
But apparently can be renewed indefinitely and are being renewed indefinitely and a number of prisoners who are so that they cannot talk to anybody.
They're essentially buried alive with minimal contact, even even minimal, according to what supermax isolation is even worse than that, if you can imagine.
And that's maybe the best way that the public can understand it.
It makes it something even worse than supermax solitary confinement.
Unbelievable, you know, it's funny about this particular case, too, is it didn't really get much press, right?
It seems to me when I think back, the only people who really paid attention to it were the critics.
But even the war party, which you would think they would love something like this, they didn't want to even really exploit the story that this terrible Saudi had a plot to kill our beloved leader.
They just kind of let it go, maybe because it was too obviously stupid in the first place.
Yeah.
You know, some of the right wing sites and, you know, would talk about it, you know, you know, but there was a little bit in the press.
The New York Times actually early on before while Ahmed Abu Ali was still in Saudi Arabia did a op ed, an editorial criticizing the case as it stood at that point.
But it got abandoned for the most part and was left to, you know, the human rights community and and some critics.
I, you know, I think it partly got buried because they're just so there were so many cases going on, but it did get taken up by Amnesty International and others.
And but, you know, it's amazing the power of the government.
You know, they wanted to get this guy.
They needed a body in prison that they could say was a major terrorist, even though he'd never done any terrorism at all so that they can frighten the American public.
Right now, it's interesting.
Anthony Gregory always points out the irony that somebody like John Walker Lent or this guy, Buhari, they get arrested overseas.
But for whatever bureaucratic infighting reasons in the United States, they end up in civilian court.
They all end up buried under the supermax, like you said.
But at least for those lucky enough to get a ridiculous star chamber kangaroo military commission trial down there in communist Cuba, oftentimes they're free to go time served.
I mean, assuming that they're not Yemeni.
And so really like you're better off abducted by the military than by the FBI nowadays.
Yeah, I don't know which is where I don't know if the people who are at Guantanamo right now would agree with that.
Well, they're the ones who have no hope of ever even getting a hearing, right?
Yeah, they've shut the door pretty much so that the only way out is, you know, some other people have pointed out seems to be only through a coffin.
But I guess I'm thinking like Hamdi, Anthony would have cited Hamdi, Yasser Hamdi or some of these others who they're free to go.
Well, right.
Well, early on, you know, a handful of cases, you know, and some people, of course, were released under very stringent agreements not to ever talk to anybody about anything.
When when some of them have dared speak out to break such agreements as David Hicks did, you know, the US got the Australian government to come down with him and seize his assets, you know, and drag him through the courts.
Most of these men are horrifically who left Guantanamo and I have confidential sources who have been in contact on a therapeutic angle with them are horrifically broken.
PTSD, which, of course, was an aspect of the case.
Oftentimes, one of the primary consequences of torture is the creation of a post-traumatic stress syndrome in the in the tortured victim.
And, you know, that one reason we, you know, they let them go is because they knew they'd already broken them.
And in some cases, we can imagine, too, that they had turned them into agents, which is another, you know, assets for the US government, you know, is another reason that some of these people were let go.
Well, you know, in some cases, of course, their refusal to become informants is what gets them in so much trouble in the first place.
Remember, it came out.
Nobody even cared about this really or paid much attention.
I'm sure you caught it when someone one of these FBI agents finally admitted about Jose Padilla.
Oh, we thought he was harmless.
We tried to use him as an informant, but he refused.
So instead, they turned him over to George Tennant and Donald Rumsfeld to be tortured half out of his mind.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they just gave him the Randy Weaver treatment.
What do you mean you won't become a snitch for Uncle Sam?
We'll show you.
The same thing just happened.
Remember, I'm sure you saw the case of the guy who builds trap doors in cars and the feds just prosecuted him for a conspiracy like he was a kingpin of a drug cartel just because he built a trap door in the car of a guy who was part of some very low level drug ring.
And that was their thing, too.
It was pure vengeance.
Again, decades in prison.
Pure vengeance because he wouldn't become a rat against a bunch of people who he had nothing to do with anyway.
Yes.
Yes.
Don't know what they do in their parlance.
And it's not it's funny talking about how language is used in covering all this one term that is used by the government all the time, particularly by intelligence, is the exploitation of prisoners.
That's the word they use over and over.
How can we exploit them?
But, you know, this is we want to break them so that we can exploit them.
And when you open up that what that word means, it means a number of things.
It means get them to give false confessions, right?
Get them to be someone who puts on a show trial with them, as they did with not too long ago at Guantanamo with Omar Carter, right?
Whose brother was, in fact, captured and made an informant by the CIA and put into Guantanamo on that basis.
It's just like the manipulation of language when it comes to government policy.
It's amazing what happens.
We talked with Nick Turse about this, how and I had no idea this.
It just blew me away when I found out that to the average G.I. running around the countryside in South Vietnam, search and destroy meant go to a village, search every hut and then destroy the whole place.
Yes.
Whereas I thought search and destroy meant go and seek out the enemy and destroy him, right?
Right.
But no, it means do a house to house search in a village and then destroy the whole place.
That's what it meant.
It's an entirely different thing.
In Vietnam, you're saying?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, Nick Turse wrote a fantastic book about that.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's but it's that kind of thing where, oh, I'm sorry, I don't think you understand what that means the same way I do.
Right.
We're just the turn of phrase exploit a prisoner all of a sudden because you're using the term exploit for at least at the beginning, pretended legitimate reasons like get him to testify against someone who's worse than him or something like that becomes exploit them in horrible ways because that's what exploit really means is use them to do dishonest things and to get away with things that are crimes and stuff like that.
Or even use them as I've reported before, although here the evidence becomes even harder to assemble, but as guinea pigs when need be, which is in many ways what happened, of course, at Guantanamo, where they were made guinea pigs for certain kinds of forms of interrogation and or, you know, control of prisoners or how to exploit them, you know, how to control them.
And now with Obama's new neuropsych thing, which a CIA agent when an agent CIA behavioral scientist tried to put into place at Yale University that got pulled back because of outrage about racist implications.
But that's going off track here.
Well, I'm sorry, because we're actually all out of time.
So I'm just going to have to talk about.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
It's such a huge case.
And you do such great work on this.
I hope people will catch up with you.
Thank you.
Thank you for all your great work, bringing all of this to the American people when the major media just usually clams up.
Well, I'm trying, but we'll have you back soon to follow up because, again, we've only just begun this discussion, really.
Sure.
OK, thanks very much, Scott.
Thank you, too, everybody.
That's the great Jeff K.
He's over at FireDogLake to center dot FireDogLake dot com to center dot FireDogLake dot com for this one.
Judicial ignorance and bias doom Ahmed Abu Ali to decades in isolation in key war on terror case.
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