06/24/13 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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It's time for my friend Andy Worthington and our friend, the great Andy Worthington, the world's greatest chronicler of the horror of the Guantanamo Bay gulag down there in communist Cuba.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
The book is The Guantanamo Files, The Stories of 759 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.
The book is, pardon me, the documentary film is Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo and did I already say, AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
I'm all right.
How are you, my friend?
I'm doing good.
I really appreciate you joining us here today and I really do hope that people will go and dwell on your work.
There's a hell of a lot of it and it's a very high quality.
Here's the thing I want to start with today because it just happens to be bothering me.
I read this article about, is it Bin Atash?
Is that the guy?
Is that how you say it?
You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah.
Huh?
Yeah.
Waleed or his brother.
Yeah, one or the other.
This is an actual friend of Bin Laden and Zawahiri, an actual Al Qaeda guy, at least according to good journalism, not just what the government says, correct?
Yeah.
I mean, apparently, you know, the man's not been tried for it, but yeah, there does appear to be evidence to establish.
Right.
No, he's not just some poor Afghan sheepherder who was kidnapped by the Pakistani military and sold.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Right.
This is a guy who had been at a CIA ghost prison who was, you know, almost certainly tortures there.
Okay.
Now, so this guy, and then there was an article just like this about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who confessed to 9-11 to Yosef Fouda from, I'm saying it wrong, Fouda, from Al Jazeera with Ramzi bin al-Sheikh.
These guys both have been allowed to wear camouflage hunting vests to their bogus hearings at their bogus kangaroo trials down there at Guantanamo Bay as some sort of pseudo-military uniform, as though rather than the scum of the earth, lowest criminals in the world, they're somehow military officers in some battle among equals.
And my problem with that is that no criminal in the American court system gets to do that, and it's only because of what a farce this entire system is, how made up from scratch it is.
This is not any military court-martial from any time in the entire history of American law here.
This is all made-up, post-September 11 nonsense, and for whatever reason, the judge was in a position where he or she did not have the precedent to cite to say, hell no, you'll wear orange and you'll like it.
And instead, so now Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets to parade around like he's a general.
And it just bothers me, it's a little thing, it's nothing compared to all the people trying to starve themselves to death, which is what I want to let you talk about for half an hour, but I just want to start with that because it's a small thing, but it's annoying, that's all.
Yeah, well it's a sign, as you say, of what's happened in the war on terror, where instead of this being the pursuit of a number of criminals responsible for a criminal act of terrorism, it becomes a war.
So logically, you know, logically, these guys are the warriors that are set up against the warriors of the United States, and it fits the framework that's been established, but it's the wrong framework to have established in the first place.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and it's in our government's interest to pretend, as Jonathan Landay was just saying, to pretend that al-Qaeda is the Soviet nuclear arsenal, when of course they're not an existential threat to the United States whatsoever.
So it does them good to let these guys parade around as, oh jeez, I guess if he's a general, he must have a battalion out there somewhere, right?
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And then of course, it's great for, you know, just like our friend Jeff Huber wrote, Bin Laden dead and loving it.
It's exactly what he would have wanted, for the Americans to give the scum of the earth that piled around with him credit for being, they might as well be some big sultanate, some big caliphate on the march out there, in the public imagination.
You know, what a wonderful favor.
You know what?
It'd be like arming the Mujahideen in Syria or something.
That's like really helping them out.
Right.
You're on one today, my friend.
I'm a bit cranky.
I woke up to news.
Anyway, so listen, some massive proportion of the captives being held down there at Guantanamo Bay are attempting to starve themselves to death.
Please update us on what you know.
Well, you know, what I know is that according to the military's own figures, it's over 100.
The last I saw was 104 men are on a hunger strike.
That's according to them.
According to the prisoners, it's at least 130.
There are only 166 men still held at Guantanamo.
So it's even by the U.S. military's estimates, it's a pretty huge number.
More alarming, I suspect, is the number of people who are being force fed.
And at the last count, that was 44.
So these guys are strapped to restraint chairs twice a day, have a thing put up their nose into their stomach through which liquid food is pumped.
It's a pretty nasty experience all around, even if it were to be done in the nicest way possible.
And we're hearing stories that actually, you know, as we always have with the hunger strikes, it's not necessarily always being done.
And in the, you know, the most humane way possible.
So there have been complaints recently from one of the prisoners that many of the people responsible for doing the force feeding are either incompetent or, you know, are kind of taking out their issues on the prisoners.
So, you know, it's a pretty disgraceful situation all around.
And there's a lot of pressure being put on the Obama administration internationally from doctors, from representatives of the medical profession, even from some lawmakers in the United States taking on board the issues that the medical people have with the force feeding.
But underlying it all, Scott, the bigger problem is why are these guys trying to starve themselves to death?
Why is the United States ended up in this position of force feeding these people?
And it's because they legitimately have despaired on ever being given any form of justice at Guantanamo.
In the cases of over half of them, they despair at ever being released to go home to be reunited with their families.
Even though President Obama, when he came into office over four, nearly four and a half years ago, one of the first things he did was to put together a task force of serious and sober career officials and representatives of the intelligence agencies, people from the government departments who went through cases of all the prisoners and said that 156 of the men at the time should be released.
Now, President Obama has released dozens of them, but there are 86 still at Guantanamo.
86 of the 166 men still held are people that the United States says it doesn't want to hold, but it's still holding three and a half years after that was announced to the world and to boot is force feeding most of them.
So, you know, it doesn't get much worse, really, I don't think.
Well no, it's like a horror movie.
Yeah.
Yeah, like Saw or one of those, you know, or government propaganda about some other country.
Yeah, well, if it was another country doing it, Scott, you know, but, you know, all those facts, I mean, once you put them all together, they were told three and a half years ago, we don't want to hold you, we're arranging to get you out of here.
You know, you'll be gone.
They're still held.
And then three and a half years later, because these guys are so unhappy and they're starving themselves, they're being force fed in this horrible, horrible procedure.
You know, this procedure makes people vomit.
It makes people soil themselves.
And they're going through it, you know, twice a day.
You know, to add to that, up until when this hunger strike got really big, a lot of the guys in Guantanamo were being allowed to spend a lot of their time communally with each other.
There was a total clampdown once the hunger strike took off and everybody's now back in solitary.
So they're in solitary confinement.
They're pulled out every, you know, every 12 hours, have these horrible tubes shoved up their nose into their stomachs.
It is a horror movie.
It's a very appropriate description.
It's absolutely amazing, really.
And again, now, we're not talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shib and whatever, Tosh and his brother who get to parade around in camouflage hunting vests.
We're talking about the sheep herders who were kidnapped and sold.
We're talking about a bunch of nobodies.
We're talking about 86 people who've already been cleared for release by the government's own executive military process here.
Yeah.
Well, we're talking about them and we're also talking about a group of people who President Obama's task force either designated for prosecution or designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial.
You know, they came up with three categories of prisoners when they issued their final report in January 2010.
You know, so that was the time when over half the prisoners were cleared for release.
But of the others, 36 were recommended for trials and 48 were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial.
You know, what that meant was they thought these guys were dangerous, but there was no way that they would be able to establish that in a public and objective manner to anybody's satisfaction.
They couldn't put them on trial.
They don't have the evidence.
You know, that's pretty disgraceful in and of itself.
But when President Obama followed up on the recommendations from his task force and issued an executive order in March 2011 authorizing the indefinite detention of these men, he said, we will we will give you periodic reviews to so that we can find out whether we still think you're this threat that we can't describe, but that we feel, you know, deep down you are.
We'll give you these periodic reviews.
They haven't happened.
It's two years and three months since he made that promise, and they haven't got off the ground at all.
You know, and of the 36 men who were put forward for or were recommended for trial, Scott, you know, what we've what we've had is that eight people have been charged of currently of the population of Guantanamo, of those 166, eight of these guys are currently facing charges, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other guys wearing the camouflage that you're mentioning.
And you know, and just last week or two weeks ago, we had the chief prosecutor of in Guantanamo, a man called Mark Martin, explaining to the world that he doesn't think that any more than 20 of the men who have been held throughout Guantanamo's history will ever be charged and tried.
Now, we've already had a bunch of guys who have been charged and tried, only eight as well.
That leaves four more people to face charges in Guantanamo.
So of the 166 guys still held there, General Martins is saying that a maximum of 12 are going to face charges.
And you know, I really think 11 and a half years into this dark, fast, this horror film that you're talking about, describing it as, Scott, it's time for us all to say, okay, you charge these 12 guys, and let's get on with that.
But let's send everybody else home, please.
It's really, you know, time we got back to behaving in a responsible manner, in which when we hold people, it's either because they're criminals, or because we, you know, we remember what the Geneva Conventions are, and we're holding them as soldiers and giving them all the rights that they're supposed to have.
Man.
See, I'm thinking it's going to be the other way, where we just start having district attorneys across America arguing that I don't care what the judge says, or what the jury says, I think that this guy's too dangerous to release.
They just start refusing to release people.
Because after all, that's what Obama wants, right?
He's the guy who wants to hold these people indefinitely without charge or trial.
At the same time, he's saying he wants to close Guantanamo Bay.
He's not trying to abolish indefinite detention.
He's trying to import Guantanamo justice to the USA.
And it might already be too late for that anyway.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's arguable the extent to which all of that's true, I have to say, Scott.
I mean, I think, you know, he's certainly unwilling enough to demonstrate that he wants to bring it to an end.
I think that you'll find within the administration that there are a range of opinions.
Well, I guess I'm just saying within the argument that, within Obama's argument, well, correct me if I'm wrong about this, let me state my case a bit more clearly without so much venom a minute, that his claimed program is to close the prison and to bring it here and to continually hold people, to continue to hold people indefinitely.
That that part of it won't change, he just wants to do it in Illinois or something.
To enable him to close Guantanamo, what the administration is trying to get to is a position whereby yes, a certain number of the people held in Guantanamo will be moved to a facility on the U.S. mainland.
So, you know, on the face of it, that is moving Guantanamo to the U.S. mainland.
Now, you know, so long as he maintains, as he always has, that he's not adding to that population, then it's still a legacy issue, which it is at Guantanamo.
The question is that if he does that, will that make it easier or more difficult to close Guantanamo and to bring to an end these horrible, horrible aberrations to the law that have taken place since 9-11?
And my suggestion, Scott, is that there are many, many more rights available to people detained on the U.S. mainland, especially people detained without charge of trial, which, you know, doesn't actually happen.
You know, you have to be tried.
Now, you might be tried in a horrible, horrible biased court with a biased jury and a biased judge, and you know, you will do if you're a Muslim accused of terrorism in the United States.
You don't get a fair trial.
But there is a system, there is not a system for saying, hey, these guys are enemy combatants.
We don't even, we're not even going to tell them what they're accused of.
We're not going to prove it to anybody.
You move them from Guantanamo to the U.S. mainland, and suddenly there are legal challenges available to these men, I think.
But you know, we can't even get to that point, Scott.
You know, all that happens is that every year, and we're seeing it in the House now, you know, this bunch of aged lunatics who claim to represent the United States political system in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, you know, they all start saying, well, you know, we don't want anything happening.
We need these guys locked up in Guantanamo forever.
We want nobody releasing any of them under any circumstances.
We want them all to die there.
So, you know, we've still got a long, long, long way to go before we can even establish quite how bad President Obama appears to be, or is.
Well, you know, Andy, maybe there's a point that I am just missing, because, you know, Lord knows I miss a lot of points sometimes.
But I have yet to see a reason to believe that what Congress says about this means anything at all.
If Congress had told George Bush to close it, he would have said, no.
So I know what you mean.
But we're in, you know, we're in a different, we're in different circumstances.
If Obama said to those generals in the Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, pack up those prisoners, put them on boats, and sail them to Miami, and await my further orders, they would have to do what he said, or what?
Go to jail themselves.
Right?
I know, but it's not just him, is it?
You know, there's a whole administration, there's a whole political party that doesn't want to spend political capital.
I'm not...
Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I'm just talking about what's actually possible.
If it was Ron Paul, Ron Paul would say, those are your orders, Admiral.
I agree with you, but I don't understand him.
Huh?
But, you know, Congress also has, the impositions that they've put in place, which means that, you know, he and the Defense Secretary have to certify to Congress that there will be no possibility that if they release a prisoner, that that prisoner will be able to do anything to engage in hostilities against the United States.
These are requirements put in place by the Congress.
Now, that puts the onus onto Obama and the administration, that if they release somebody, and if anything happens, anything, with any single prisoner that is released in future, bingo, that's one nil to the Republican Party.
They have set it up that way.
Now, you know, that's part of the unfairness of it.
It doesn't take away from the fact that President Obama's key word when it comes to Guantanamo is cowardice, which can also be spelled political pragmatism.
You know, it doesn't take away from the fact that he speaks well, but does nothing.
But it does add another layer of explanation as to why he's so useless, which is that Congress is playing him into a corner that's very difficult for him to do anything about.
You know, it's a mess all across the board.
You know, I don't want to remove the blame from the third party in this, Scott, which is the United States Judiciary, you know, right up to the highest level in the land, the Supreme Court, you know, who gave the guys habeas corpus rights five years ago.
They gave them nine years ago, then Congress took them away.
They gave them five years ago, and there were habeas corpus cases where several dozen prisoners won and were released from Guantanamo through legal means.
But then the D.C. Circuit Court, this conservative-dominated court in Washington, D.C., started rewriting the rules, saying, we don't like people being released.
In future, you've got to believe everything the government says, unless you can prove that it's wrong.
You know, that hilariously inept information must now be regarded as accurate.
And the Supreme Court, in two years running, has been given the opportunity to seize back control of the issue of detention in the war on terror from the D.C. Circuit Court, and they refused.
They wanted it.
You know, last year, that was so severe that they did that in June, and one of the guys whose cases they turned down, who had been cleared for release for many, many years from Guantanamo, he died.
He died in Guantanamo, Adnan Latif, this Yemeni guy.
The Supreme Court has washed its hands of everything, and, you know, that's unacceptable as well.
And he's a guy who you've written about who's completely innocent, who was only in Pakistan because he'd been in a car wreck and he had a headache that wouldn't quit, and so he was seeking medical attention, never had anything to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban or terrorism of any kind, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
But, you know, while we're on that, Scott, you know, hardly any of these guys had anything to do with terrorism of any kind.
Let's say you didn't have your head, you know, trashed in a car wreck in Yemen, and you ended up looking for cheap medical treatment.
Let's say you did get caught up in the big Taliban adventure.
Let's go and fight with the Taliban against their enemies.
Who are their enemies?
The U.S.?
No, their enemies are other Muslims, the Northern Alliance.
Let's say you did go and, you know, train in a training camp and, you know, and maybe you even made it to the lines where the fighting's taking place, but you probably didn't.
You're probably on the back lines.
You know, a lot of people are helping out in the kitchens.
You know, people are helping out with logistics of things.
All of these people, what the hell are these?
These are terrorists?
None of these people are terrorists.
These people are soldiers.
Soldiers from some inept, pointless war such a long time ago that America went in and bombed the hell out of them in a few months, replaced the Taliban government, won.
America won.
You know, and what did America do with that victory in Afghanistan?
Well, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over the years that followed by, you know, continually sending people to Guantanamo from Afghanistan who had nothing to do with anything.
You know, alliances with untrustworthy warlords and sending people to Guantanamo who were actually on their own side, on the Americans' own side, but were sent to Guantanamo because they didn't know who was who.
You know, it's a pathetic story, really, of ineptitude and incompetence that has been feeding in for all these years of soldiers who are treated as though they're terrorists, you know, and that's simply not true.
Right.
I mean, geez, it was 2005 or 2006 when they finally closed at least most of the CIA ghost prisons and brought the guys who even had anything to do with this at all to Guantanamo from the torture prison in Poland or ships at sea or Morocco or Thailand or Romania or wherever the government had been holding them.
So up until then, there was like, what, one or two guys at Guantanamo, Katani and I don't know who else, had anything to do with Al-Qaeda at all.
Yeah.
Well, there were a few people who were allegedly involved in a kind of, you know, medium, low to medium level.
There were no leaders.
Essentially, that's, you know, that's the crucial point.
There was nobody in a leadership position at Guantanamo in Al-Qaeda before those secret black sites were closed down and the guys sent there.
And I spoke to Larry Wilkerson a few years ago, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff.
You know, and he was telling me about that.
He said he was told by somebody very trustworthy, you know, the reason that they brought those guys to Guantanamo in September 2006 was so they could say to the world with a straight face, we're holding terrorists in Guantanamo.
You know, that's it really.
You know, that's kind of what you need to know about them, about the story of Guantanamo and how, you know, from the beginning, the absolute majority of the men held there, nearly all of them, are people who were nobodies or were very low level people involved in the military context in this civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, you know, and had nothing to do with anything.
That's it.
And, you know, and we're still stuck to this day, sadly, Scott, with far too many people thinking, yeah, but they're all terrorists.
You know, that's one of the horrible things about it that has happened since 9-11 is that soldiers have been turned into terrorists.
I mean, let's look at the case of Omar Khadr, you know, the poor Canadian kid who was sent to Afghanistan by his father.
He's a kid.
He's not responsible for his actions.
You know, he gets dumped with these older men who then get attacked by a U.S. Special Forces party.
And they fight back, you know, as you do in a war zone, you know, and Omar Khadr gets captured.
He gets sent to Guantanamo.
He's abused.
Horrible things happen to him for years and years.
Eventually they put him on a fake war crimes trial in Guantanamo and they accuse him and convict him.
They convict him.
They make him sign the paperwork so that he can go home and he's still in prison in Canada.
But just to get out of Guantanamo, he has to sign the paperwork saying, yes, I committed a war crime when I threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in a war zone.
Yeah.
Well, it's not even believable that he threw it at all, obviously.
No, I know.
But even if it was, Scott, I know, you know, when it's throwing a grenade at a soldier, a war crime.
Guantanamo Bay Prison is the war crime.
And last little note here real quick.
I just think it's almost funny, but not quite.
It's an important thing.
Jason Leopold recently went on a tour there and he was on the show last week and talked about all the new speak and how they control so carefully the terminology so that nothing can be, you know, compared in context to anything else that you already know.
And right.
And just, you know, just the guilty conscience that that displays.
Right.
Like, boy, we better start coming up with lies for every part of every word of every sentence we say to just confuse every issue to try to make it look like we're not the Soviets in this one.
Well, well, exactly.
You know, and actually what's happened is that after 9-11, the United States took the worst from a lot of people's history, you know, not only from strands of its own dark and brutal history, but from terrible things that have been done by the Soviet Union, terrible things that have been done by the Chinese, terrible things that have been done by Israel, terrible things that have been done by Britain.
It's almost like they went through the book of terrible things done by countries and, you know, and picked out what would make a particularly lethal, lethal and abhorrent cocktail for the 21st century.
You know, and it is it's rank on every level.
It's disgraceful.
It's disgusting.
And, you know, one of these days, Scott, I hope that we can be talking about it, you know, in the past tense.
But we seem to be a long way away from that still, my friend.
I know.
I'm afraid so.
Thanks very much, Andy.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for your interest as ever, Scott.
Cheers.
Everybody, that's the great Andy Worthington.
The Guantanamo Falls, Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
See you tomorrow.
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