Alright my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
That was some guar for you.
Okay, so first guest today is Andy Worthington, he's the author of the Guantanamo Files, the stories of the 774 detainees in America's illegal prison.
He writes for us at antiwar.com, you can find them all at antiwar.com slash o-r-i-g slash worthington dot p-h-p.
Sorry we need to get the shorter version of that link going here for Andy, but his most recent article, is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed running the 9-11 trials.
Welcome back to the show Andy.
Hi Scott, it's always good to be here.
Well it's good to have you here and it's really good to have you writing this stuff for antiwar.com, really helping me keep up with the stories of the Star Chamber trials down there at Guantanamo.
We talked with the other Scott Horton yesterday about one of the Guantanamo prosecutors who has resigned, that makes five now, who have resigned rather than participate in this.
Now, I'm sorry, clear me up, is he actually, he's not one of the guys from the current trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and them, is he?
The guy who's just resigned?
Yeah.
No, no, no, he's not.
He was the prosecutor in the case of this poor Afghan teenager, he was when he received Mohammed Jawad, and you know, the whole story there was that the potentially exculpatory evidence that would have cleared him was being withheld from the defense, you know, because this kid was basically, you know, was drugged at the time that this supposed attack took place, and somebody else, according to the Afghan authorities, had confessed to the crime for which he's supposedly being put forward for a walkout crimes trial.
And as I think we have discussed before, Scott, you know, the whole war crimes basis, in the case of Mohammed Jawad, anyway, is thin, to put it generously, he's supposed to have thrown a grenade at a jeep containing two US soldiers, and an Afghan interpreter in a war situation, and nobody died.
So I don't see the war crimes in the first place.
And, you know, as we're looking at this case, Lieutenant Colonel Vanderveld, yeah, he resigned because he was very upset that this evidence that the prosecution had was not being made available to the defense, thereby indicating what a rigged system everybody's up against.
Well, you know, there's a Supreme Court case, I don't know the exact title of it, but anyway, it's got Brady in the title, that's what they call that Brady material.
Material that the prosecution is bound by law to turn over to the defense.
Ah, but that's in criminal trials under the rule of law in America, this is, we're dealing with wholly made up process here, so I don't even know, is it a crime to withhold evidence from the defense in these tribunals here?
Well, seeing as they're not subject to the same rules, then no, it doesn't seem that that would be the case, because I think that you would find all kinds of arguments about how, oh, it was difficult to get hold of the information, oh, we didn't know this and that.
Anything really to avoid telling the truth, but, you know, that it is set up to secure convictions.
Well, and in fact, let's go ahead and skip back one to your previous article, government says six years, not long enough to prepare evidence.
And you talk about, you know, pretend this was you for a minute, which I think is an effective, a real effective way to set it up, and you've been kidnapped, you're being held by these soldiers, finally the court says, everybody gets a day, at least one habeas corpus, they get to go to federal court and challenge their detention at least one time.
And then, so, your lawyer sets you up and says, you know, alright, let's go to court and see about this habeas petition, and the government responds, sorry, we've been holding this guy for six years, but we're not prepared to show up in court for this yet, give us more time, judge.
Absolutely.
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
It is.
I got to tell you, you know, it does make me wonder, sort of like in the sitcom sense, like what's going on in the office there, like, who was supposed to be working on that folder and wasn't or what, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, no, absolutely.
I mean, you know, it's, it's a complete joke.
I mean, it's interesting as well, what happened, you know, in that case, because, you know, there was the government pleading, I mean, there's one, there's one hilarious line where they're saying, you know, look, since you said that we, you know, since the Supreme Court made this decision that these guys we've been holding for years have a right to know why we're holding them, you know, we've, we've been working day and night, trying to get this stuff together.
But, you know, it's just been a bit hard to, to do it in the time limit that you set.
So, but the judges were good, I thought, in that, at least, although they said, okay, look, we're going to give you a month extra.
And the deadline for that is actually today, because the initial deadline they broke was the end of August.
We'll give you this extra month.
But they were very careful in saying, you know, don't, don't take this as an indication that you can, you know, then come back to it and start whinging again and keep messing about, you know, we're not, we're not people giving you friendly advice.
We're a court making rulings, you know, that you are obliged to follow.
Well, and you talked about in your article how the judge actually, in kind of an oblique way, made a reference to the Military Commissions Act and the Detainee Treatment Act.
The judge said, listen, you've had all this time to prepare for it, not just all the time since you captured this guy.
You've had all the time since the Rasool case, which ruled that these people at least are going to have access to some kind of civilian remedy.
You should have had all this time since Rasool to prepare, which, in a sense, was kind of F.U. sort of, in a sort of way to the McCain's Detainee Treatment Act and Military Commissions Act.
Right.
Okay.
Which also as well.
I mean, you know, the judge was, I mean, you're dead right about that, you know, because in June 2004 was when it was when Rasool v.
Bush happened, when the first attempt to give habeas rights to the prisoners occurred.
And from that point on, that was the, I mean, that was the point at which the government first started to marshal whatever evidence it had against the prisoners.
You know, and as the long years have gone by, we've discovered through the testimony of people like Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham, who worked as part of the tribunal's process, that they were severely limited in what access to information they were allowed.
And for the most part, people who were very poorly trained and ill-equipped to do the job were responsible for putting together what constituted the evidence.
And the low evidentiary hurdle was how it was described as to what the tribunals had to look at to decide whether somebody was an enemy combatant or not.
So shoddy material in the first place, but that was collected to be put together against prisoners over four years ago.
Now, obviously, the reason they don't want to rely entirely on this is because of all the things that I've mentioned, that it's inadequate, it's so thin.
And as we actually saw in June, in the only case that managed to get into a district court, the case of Hufayza Parhat, a Chinese Muslim, a Uyghur, when the court had a look at the story of why he was being held, and now this is no liberal court, these are two conservative judges and a liberal, they were absolutely shocked at how the government had no evidence against this man.
They were making such appallingly tangential connections about what he was supposed to have been connected with, that they ended up quoting a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as an analogy with the government's pretense of evidence.
It was extraordinary.
Right.
I say it three times, and that's what makes it so.
Well, and this judge, back to this Judge Hogan here for saying, basically what he was doing when he was saying, you've had since Rasul to prepare, was he was implying that everybody should have known that the Detainee Treatment Act and Military Commissions Act were riddled with flaws and errors that wouldn't hold up, and that the Rasul case would still stand regardless of what the Military Commissions Act says, which is basically what the Boumediene case ruled, right?
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, no, and I mean, I was quite impressed, actually, by the way that, obviously, in terms of the way the judiciary was looking at history, that was such a significant decision.
And he was certainly hinting at what Boumediene did in June, the Supreme Court's decision that the prisoners had constitutional habeas corpus rights, which did strike down as constitutional those elements of those acts that you've mentioned, you know, which were passed by the politicians.
It was a big blow to the politicians, that one, and they deserved it as well.
They passed appallingly shoddy laws.
And yes, and I mean, another thing that the judge did as well was that even if you take the timeline of looking back to when the Supreme Court announced that it was first going to look at Boumediene, that was last summer, you know, they had the oral hearings in the Supreme Court in December.
And certainly from that point on, you know, it was a divided court, but it didn't really take that much investigation to think, hmm, maybe this isn't going to go our way.
So the claims that, you know, oh, my God, the Supreme Court suddenly sprung this thing on us, and now we have to get our act together is just pathetic.
Yeah, afraid so.
All right.
So this is something that came up yesterday in talking with the other Scott Horton, and it turns out I should have read your article the other day when we ran it on antiwar.com, but I didn't get around to it.
Then I read this, and you're talking just like me here.
You're saying, well, you don't quite, you know, set up the counterfactual, but in a way you almost do, and say, you know, think how different it would have been if they had just brought Khalid Sheikh Mohammed back here for a civilian trial.
I mean, hell, if you just go to the Al Jazeera site, you can see where this reporter, Fawoodi, I forget how to say his name, interviewed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shib of their own free will in a house in Karachi, Pakistan in, I think, late 2001, early 2002.
I'm sure that Al Jazeera reporter would have been more than happy to testify for the prosecution.
This thing would have been over.
We'd have proved to the whole world how superior the rule of law is to their backwards old world ways of doing things and locking people up without decent trials.
We could have given them the best lawyer in New York City.
We could have given them the fairest trial that they ever held, and we could have sentenced him to life in prison or the death penalty, locked him in a cage next to his nephew, Ramzi Youssef, and this whole thing would have been over.
Instead, as you describe in this article, they basically turned over the Guantanamo trial process to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's making a mockery of it every single step of the way.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and yeah, I mean, in the article, I did just, you know, just go through the reports that have come out of what had happened over those days, and it's very, very typical of the military commissions that, you know, this is a skeletal system that was, you know, that was set up by Cheney and Addington to prove that, you know, if the executive, if the president wants to do something, he can damn well do it, and let's have no arguments about it.
They don't care whether it's fair or not, you know, it's just imposing the presidential will.
But when it actually pans out and this takes place, then you realize that the system that they set up is shoddy, and it's full of holes.
And I mean, we've discussed this before, you look at the history of it, every time they get somebody in a courtroom in Guantanamo and attempt to proceed with these cases, something farcical happens.
And with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, yeah, absolutely.
He's taking the opportunity that is presented to him to undermine the process.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, that is such an important point, too, that, you know, the tradition of Anglo-American legal process and all this has taken hundreds of years to develop.
Now these guys are going, oh, well, don't worry about me, I'm a genius, I used to work for the RAND Corporation or whatever, well, we'll just wing it and come up with this stuff, and it's a total disaster.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
You know, but I mean, the more fundamental point, I think, Scott, that you were making before is about the basis of, you know, of having an existing system that was able to try these people.
You know, and that's undoubtedly true.
And, you know, and the U.S. court system has been snubbed so horribly by the administration.
But you know, the other important aspect of that, and this is the one where the administration would fight back, would be to attempt to justify all this secret detention and torture that took place for years of these guys, and the wealth of information that they claim to have obtained from them.
And this, I think, you know, at the bottom, this is the big lie.
This is the one that discredits professional, hardworking, professional, skilled intelligence interrogators, who have to resort to this kind of violence.
You know, and that's what I mentioned in the article, and I mean, it's based a lot, and I think we've spoken about this before, but about some of the people there, in particular Jane Mayer has spoken to over the years, who are these skilled interrogators, who would take time in the background to build up a case, to do a proper investigation of what they're after on these guys.
These are people who, they don't hire in some kind of Arabic translator who might be a convenience store clerk.
You know, they get people who are skilled in the nuances of the language.
This might be the interrogators themselves, often is.
These are, you know, trained Arabic speakers.
And then go the next step to, when dealing directly with these people, is work out how to establish the relationship to get these people to speak.
You know, they're in prison.
They have huge egos on them, a lot of them.
Let's look at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, man, does he have an ego.
You know, the illusion, the one that was created by the administration, that these guys are so tough that they, you know, that they're trained, they'll never talk.
You know, this is a tough guy illusion that was set up by the administration.
It doesn't work like that.
I think any cop will tell you, too.
I mean, I remember this from just, I guess, you know, growing up in America, watching TV, you know, up through, well, before September 11th, I think, you know, it was sort of just a common understanding in this society that that is how cops get people to talk.
They sit there and pretend to be friends with them.
Here's some french fries.
Here, have a cigarette and a cup of coffee.
Now come on, man.
Tell me about, I know it was you.
You were the guy who did it.
And they go, yeah, it was me.
And it takes 20 minutes or something.
This is how you do it.
And everybody already knows that.
Well, it might take you longer than that, Scott, but, you know, you've got somebody in prison.
You've got a big advantage on them.
They're not going anywhere.
You're not letting him out.
There's no prison escape going on.
You know, they're not going anywhere.
One of the elements.
But yeah, you're right.
Yeah.
One of the other elements is, is that, you know, you can cajole them.
You can threaten people, but, you know, you don't have to go through all this stuff.
The illusion that these guys are so tough.
Is that right?
You know, it seems to me a lot of these guys, they like to talk tough, but they're cowards, really.
You know, my whole point about the moral high ground that was lost at the very, very beginning was that if you treated the Islamist threat the way that it should have been dealt with and had followed the rules of the law, you'd be in a position to actually stand on a pedestal and to say, and what is it about these guys who think they're so tough, you know, with their sending other people out to do their dirty work for them, you know, so what's so tough about these guys who send other people out to do suicide bombs, have a look at them.
Do you think these guys are cowards, really?
Yeah.
These guys are cowards and bullies.
Right.
And, you know, let's get down to that.
And I think that's what we talk about with a lot of these people.
These are not the masterminds who are so tough that, you know, that you can't crack them.
You know, that's nonsense.
Well, you know, it was funny.
I was in a debate with a terrorism expert who said, don't call them criminals.
That diminishes them.
And I don't know if I got a chance to rebut on that particular point, but isn't that what we want to do is diminish them?
I mean, wouldn't have been the smartest thing to after September 11th, tell the American people that, you know, look, obviously this is tragic and terrible and all the grief and everything else.
But listen, what happened really is a very small group of criminals got really, really lucky, but they had to steal our planes even to wage the attack.
These people are the scum of the earth.
They're the leftovers of the people we used against the Russians.
That would have been the whole thing, right, is to play them down in every way, to deny them legitimacy in every way, rather than building them up to be this giant thing that they're not.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, I'm actually, I'm amazed at that comment that you've just reported to me that, you know, why, why, why would you not be trying to say, you know, don't give, don't give these guys any credit.
I mean, that's the thing.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been able to establish himself as a warrior.
You know, he thought that it was a war in the first place.
But you know, these guys pitched a war and the and the administration took that up and ran with it.
And it's a war.
So you create warriors.
You know, they're not.
They're criminals.
You're right.
In fact, if all of this happened and you're responsible as the story is being presented, then you're, you know, then you're just despicable mass murdering criminal.
There's no standing up and saying, I'm a holy warrior.
No.
Right.
In fact, you even quote Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in this article saying, yeah, your president Bush calls this a crusader war.
And Osama bin Laden says it's an anti crusader war.
And I'm George Washington.
I'm a military leader and all these things were really is a two bit gangster is really what he is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, no, exactly.
Yeah.
And and you know what, by the way, as far as, you know, singing like a canary and everything his nephew, Ramzi Youssef, who cooked the bomb for the first World Trade Center and in fact, who came up with the September 11th plot back in 95 with his buddy Murad, he sang like a canary to the FBI.
He told him everything.
And in fact, especially at his sentencing, gave a whole giant speech to the judge explaining every bit of of who he is and why he did it and why he hates us and all that.
Yeah.
And then you think this is a little bit more clever.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't want to give the the New York branch of the FBI or the Department of Justice, you know, too much credit, because I think that they really if you look at the history of of the police work done against the al-Qaeda and associates in the 1990s, I mean, they really just did nothing but drop the ball and then cover up how badly they failed over and over again, I think leading up to September 11th.
But that isn't to say that the rule of law doesn't work.
That just says the FBI doesn't work.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And so but yeah, I mean, basically what you said, you mentioned earlier, they just wanted to say that there's no law here.
This is a war.
We want to be able to to make up all this stuff out of whole cloths.
So I guess if that means tapping your phones here or torturing these people here or or, you know, making up a brand new definition for what an imminent threat means, then they can go ahead and do that.
You know, if you see how much of it has been dictated, you know, I would certainly suggest by a lot of motivation from Dick Cheney, but of a lot of rationale presented to Dick Cheney by David Addington, then, you know, it's absolutely all about about allowing the president to do whatever the hell he wants and not be answerable and to to face up to this threat, you know, with the toughest measures possible and with no account taken, still no account taken certainly, you know, from from Addington and Cheney, I think, as to whether any of these measures actually work.
And the depressing thing with the whole torture thing is that not only, you know, not only to be known as a nation that that that endorses the use of torture, you know, is that's a terrible position to be in.
And I know that so many Americans really appreciate that, but that, you know, that it doesn't work.
It was it was a ridiculous way to proceed because you end up you know, you don't just end up with the obvious that people will tell you what they think you want to hear.
You end up with a mixed bag of some things that were truthful and some things that weren't and how are you going to work out which is which well, then you have to start following up and everything and then you know, and then the chain leads on and you start rounding up more and more people who may be innocent, but have been part of the information that came out because somebody was being tortured.
And you know, and then you're employing more and more people to be treating these people so horribly.
And you can't pretend that that doesn't have its impact.
You know, I mean, when you read some of the stories of the people who've been involved in the torture of prisoners, I'm talking about US agents who've been involved and you know, you don't hear much of this because not reported that much, but when you do hear about it, you can hear some of these stories of people who are suffering from things that they were made to do.
Because sure, there are some hard nuts out there who can go and do a really nasty day's work on somebody and feel fine about it.
But there are plenty of other people who you've made them cross the line into into doing horrible things to another human being.
And you know, and that can leave psychic effects on people that you know, they're they're they're in trouble.
They're, they're having trouble sleeping, they're you know, they're they're suffering their own trauma from what they've been obliged to do by their own government that they shouldn't have been doing.
Mm hmm.
And you know, you take, I don't know the the toughest guys who are willing to go do a real nasty day's work in the US military.
I guess I would like to think that on the average day, you know, even on the ground in Iraq, that mostly those most violent of characters are actually, you know, restrained by military rules of engagement, by law by training by orders, whereas what we're talking about in this case is unleashing them, we're telling them, go into this deep, dark underground, you know, dank, damp dungeon with this naked man and beat the hell out of them until you're done.
And yeah, and telling them to, you know, go ahead and embrace the very worst part of themselves.
And now, these are our professionals.
They're on the US government payroll, we have a whole I don't know, the 501st torture squad or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, also, you know, what happened in Guantanamo that may not have been, you know, not not the very, very darkest edge of the torture, but when, when, you know, that whole situation had been set up where they basically freed people up to imaginatively come up with what scenarios based on stressing people out and keeping them awake and humiliating them.
And, you know, and they just let loose a bunch of young guys who, who were effectively told do what you want to mess with these guys, you know, and but had no training had no notion of psychologically, what kind of ploys might have worked and no structure to it.
And the serious professionals from other agencies who were looking on, you know, they were, they were shocked and appalled at this kind of behavior, you know, really appalled because it was so counterproductive, it was so useless, and it was so morally repugnant, really, to, to, you know, watch other officers in other branches of their country's services behaving so brutally and so pointlessly, you know.
Well, you know, anecdotally, Jane Mayer, I guess, keeps coming up with her reporting has broken so much ground on this stuff.
She talks about how the FBI was doing great.
I mean, this is, you know, actual and one example, at least the FBI was doing great with Abu Zubaydah, and they were feeding him French fries, and he was being very cooperative and telling them all kinds of things and they they weren't finished with them yet or anything.
But then here comes Dick Cheney's goons, you know, take their gloves off and do what you want with them.
And he immediately shut up.
And then the next things that he had to say, were all a bunch of big bogus threats to create orange alerts in this country and the run up to the Iraq invasion.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I don't know whether they ever got a real fact out of him again after that.
Well, I mean, it's a good example, isn't it?
I mean, the same thing happened, from what I understand, with Mohammed al-Qahtani, you know, the one of the many supposed 20th hijackers, but the guy who was in Guantanamo, who was the one that they specifically cranked up the enhanced interrogation techniques for and time got the log and leaked that a few years ago of this day after day after day of 20, 20 hour interrogations and the humiliation that he went through and, you know, how they were so afraid that he was going to die, they had doctors on hand and, you know, his heart rate dropped horribly at one point, doctors are intervening, a nasty, nasty story.
But, you know, the FBI had started off with this guy and he, you know, he was responding to the way that they spoke to him, you know, and at one point there was a key exchange, I thought, which was that the interrogator said to him, you know, why did you go to Florida, which is where he tried to get in, but was turned away by immigration and had been apparently trying to meet Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and he said, I wasn't told why, and the FBI were thinking, this guy didn't know why, he's telling us the truth, you know, he was one of the people that Atta was looking for to be the muscle, the muscle hijackers, these are the guys who were told, this is jihad, this is, you know, the big, big jihad that you're going to do, don't ask us the details, we're not telling you them, you're just coming along and you're going to be the goon that, you know, that does that side of things.
This was probably the truth, he didn't get in the country, nothing ever happened, but, you know, there's the Pentagon and there's the White House, there's the CIA thinking, no, no, no, this guy actually knew everything about everything that was going on, so then they introduced this whole program, and how pointless was it all?
Yeah, well, and then they ended up having to not prosecute him, because they thought, holy, we tortured this guy so bad, we better just quit, and by the way, for people not familiar, if you just Google Qatani in Time Magazine, you can find the logs of his brutalization, I guess they call it, interrogation there at Guantanamo, the papers that got leaked out there.
Absolutely, yeah.
Okay, now, tell me, in the last few minutes we have here, well, we got nine minutes or so left, tell me about what's going on with this current trial, it's pretty obvious, well, it's not just obvious, I guess it's a fact, right, because somebody squealed that they deliberately put the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Ramzi bin al-Shibh et al. trial on right now, in the run-up to the presidential election, it's somehow supposed to make the Republicans look good, I'm not sure how that works, but anyway, keeping us safe from the devil and all that, I guess.
But we kind of touched on this a little bit before, but I was wondering if you could tell some stories about just the absolute mockery that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is making of this entire process, a man who I believe, by the way, is guilty as hell, no presumption of innocence for him from me, anyway.
Yeah, well, no, absolutely, I mean, I agree with you, you were mentioning the al-Jazeera interview that took place before he was captured, in which he and bin al-Shibh admitted their responsibility.
I don't know about the other guys, but certainly them.
Well, I mean, you know, one of the kind of ironies of this thing, really, is that when the military commissions were initially set up, there was no way that prisoners were allowed to represent themselves.
Now, what happened then was that the military defense lawyers who were assigned to the prisoners would come up against them, prisoners who would say, I don't want representation from you, I want to represent myself, and the lawyers would then be supposedly forced by the system to represent people.
Now, as a lawyer, you're not allowed to represent, forcibly represent somebody who doesn't want to be represented, so they faced being struck off, you know, as civilian lawyers, you know, they faced having to do something illegal to fulfill what the military was asking them to do.
So when the military commissions were booted out of existence in June 2006 by the Supreme Court, which, you know, in case anybody's forgotten, ruled that it was illegal, and when they came back later that year in an only very slightly amended form, when Congress, you know, which was sleepier than usual, let that one through, the obligation to be represented by a lawyer was removed, so that the prisoners were allowed to represent themselves.
So the whole reason that what happened last week happened was because of this, and if we'd been looking at what had taken place in the U.S. court, then this would all be much more strictly controlled, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have certainly had some opportunity to do things, but what happened in Guantanamo last week was it's called the Voie Dea process, and it involves the lawyer, so Mohammed's acting for himself, being able to ask the judge questions to decide whether or not he thinks the judge is impartial.
You know, and I've read reports of these before, and there's often a slightly farcical element to them.
Yeah, I mean, this is exactly what I was getting at, as far as, you know, drawing a picture so that the average person in the audience can ask themselves, wait, this is an American, you know, parenthesis, pseudo-court that we're talking about here, where this took place?
I mean, this is, in a sense, you know, I really wish there was video of this or something, I mean, it sounds hilarious to watch.
Yes.
Well, no, exactly, but I mean, that's why I've been, you know, in, because, uh...
No, no, no, tell him, tell him, tell us about the cross-examination of the judge by the 9-11 terrorist.
Well, I mean, he just, you know, he just started saying, I mean, some of it's funny, I have to say, Scott, you know, this is what I find disturbing about it, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knows how to talk, you know, but he's quizzing him on, like, you know, well, you're calling us religious extremists, so I'm going to have to check out whether you're a religious extremist, you know, and he's trying to find out whether, you know, whether he's, um, whether he's into Billy Graham and people, and he's asking him about what books he reads, and, you know, and the judge at one point is saying, I think you're trying to build up a psychological profile of me, I don't really want to talk about this anymore, and it, you know, it went on for several hours, I think, this whole thing, and it was just, you know, like I say, I found some of it funny, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you know, has a certain way with words, and that's what I find shocking, because I don't really want him to be put in this position, you know, my understanding, really, of a fair judicial process is that if somebody's hauled up for a serious crime, you know, they're going to be put in a courtroom, and that situation is going to be controlled, so that it doesn't really look like the accused is running the show, and then we'll see what happens afterwards, then you have a verdict, and let's say you've got a trial in a recognized court system, and turns out the guy is judged to be not guilty, afterwards he can talk about it all he wants, but otherwise, you know, I'm comparing this to the situation that's happening now in courtrooms, you know, all around Britain, all around America, all around everywhere we recognize a court system where people who are facing a trial for serious crimes, they're not getting a lot of leeway while they're in the courtroom, and if it goes badly for them, and it's like, yeah, you were the guilty dude, and you're going to prison, then it comes to an end, and they might have a little bit of time to say something before they're taken away, so, you know, this is Cheney and Addington's monster just coming back to haunt them and mock them, isn't it, that here's a man who is accused of such a serious, serious crime, who's parading around, apparently mocking the very system that's been set up to try him.
Yeah.
Well, on one hand, I kind of think the average American ought to get a chance to cross-examine the judge before they have to sit in front, in judgment, in front of them, but on the other hand, I mean, you're right, this is a guy who, his nephew did give a big speech right when the judge said, okay, now is the time for your speech, at his sentencing, after he had been convicted.
Right, exactly.
And really, frankly, I mean, people have a right to speak up in court like that, I don't know if they have the right to cross-examine the judge about his personal beliefs and all those kinds of things, but they have the right to go on and on, it's just that in American courtrooms, they have lawyers who say, no, shut up, I'll handle this, you're not helping.
Yeah, exactly, and it's another example of one of the things that they, one of the many, many things that they haven't really worked out properly, and I mean, it's fundamentally quite simple to me, really, Scott, and it's that inventing a military system, inventing a trial system after 9-11, as Cheney and Addington did, is just so emblematic of their arrogance.
Now, I've read a lot about these guys, you know, now I know that technically we're not talking about stupid people, you know, Addington is a man who, you know, apparently has an encyclopedic knowledge of the law.
Cheney's lawyer, you're talking about.
You were talking about Cheney's lawyer, yeah, but politically, you know, I really don't think a man who acts with any kind of wisdom, and I think, you know, it's arrogance, it's hubris.
It's the presumption that you could overturn what's taken 200 years to establish and refine, and that, you know, overnight, you could invent a whole new legal system, and have it function well.
I mean, why would you even presume that in the first place?
Only because you're being blinded to the realities of what it's really going to be like, because all you're thinking about is, you know, this is just some kind of puppet formality that we're saying, you know, bash, bash, just get in there and do these guys in an unfair process, because that's what we decided we want to do, you know, unreal.
Yeah, well, and I'm trying to remember, well, better details than I am able to recall right now about the anecdote about where the military guys wanted to set up a process very early on for, and they already, in the military, they have, you know, at least a couple of hundred years worth of tradition and practice doing this, and they had a system for setting, for determining on the battlefield whether we really want to hold this guy, or no, okay, I guess not, and it was Addington who came and said, no, the president has decided they are all enemy combatants, that's that, no more reviews.
Yeah, these are Article 5 tribunals, they've been used, you know, ever since the Geneva Conventions were, you know, the post-Second World War Geneva Conventions.
They are absolutely crucial, like you say, Scott, because they would take place close to the time and place of capture, they would enable, you know, people to come and say, you know, look, this guy that you've got here, that you, you rounded him up with the soldiers, you know, that's my dad, he's a farmer.
You know, the statistic that I always think works particularly well when people might be thinking, yeah, well, why would it make any difference that you did this, is, you know, every war, it happened during the first Gulf War, and there were something like 1,400 people that they rounded up, and held these tribunals, and three quarters of them were sent home afterwards, because they'd caught the wrong people in the heat of battle.
So yeah, but you know, and the fact that it comes from Addington is very crucial, because whenever anybody criticised him for the, for the grey areas that had actually emerged from the reality of his arrogant insistence that the President can do this, the President can do that, you know, this is, this is what's happened so much, and it's very clear in that example, you know, there is no question about the innocence or guilt of these men, because the President has decided they're enemy combatants, end of story.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
Yeah.
All right, now, I'm sorry, is it okay if I keep a couple minutes over time?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Scott, yeah.
One thing that is really important here, and you mentioned this in your most recent article, again, I guess I should say, for people tuning in late, it's Andy Worthington, he's the author of the Guantanamo Files.
The blog is AndyWorthington.com, right?
Dot, co, dot, UK.
Oh, dot, co, dot, UK, there you go, co, dot, UK.
His antiwar.com archives, right, antiwar.com, slash, or ridge, slash, Worthington.php, and we're discussing the Guantanamo situation, all this.
We're also running an article, your last article mentions this, and we're also running another article today by Joanne Mariner on the topic on antiwar.com, and it's about how Ramzi bin al-Sheib, who, again, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, confessed to his role in this, and was part of the leaders of the Hamburg cell of the pilots, best buddies with Mohammed Atta and all that, and they tortured him to the point where he's absolutely batshit crazy now.
Is that about right?
Well, I don't know, actually.
I mean, I've read Joanne's article, and I'm really impressed with it, because she certainly honed in on this whole issue of his mental state, because, you know, he wants to represent himself, but his lawyers, who are trying to make sure that he doesn't just go through a show trial of saying, look, we actually, you know, we've looked at the background of the story on this guy.
We actually don't think that he's fit to represent himself because of everything that he's been through.
So what it revolves around is that he's certainly being prescribed some heavy-duty drugs, which seem to be associated with schizophrenia, I think, and it may well be that there's some truth in these.
I mean, you know, when bin al-Sheib, the stories go that when, you know, when him and the other guys were held in the secret prisons, and they were waterboarding them.
Now, you know, General Hayden of the CIA admitted that three people were waterboarded in February, he said that.
But, you know, there's other evidence from former CIA operatives who said that, no, actually, most of the 14 high-value prisoners who went to Guantanamo in September 2006, it happened to them.
But the story with bin al-Sheib has always been that it didn't happen to him.
He couldn't handle it.
He bottled it.
You know, and the impression that comes from that is of somebody who's actually quite fragile.
Now, they may well not have waterboarded him, but they sure as hell held him for four years in secret CIA custody before he ended up in Guantanamo, you know, subjecting him to the whole heavy-duty isolation and other forms of torture stuff.
So it does seem very plausible to me that he's, you know, that he is not fit to stand trial.
And, you know, and like I say, I was impressed with John's article on that, but whether there's any truth, I don't know.
You know, the way it's being manifested now is it's a battle between the right of somebody who may not be mentally competent to represent himself and, you know, and the struggle of his lawyers to try and force him to take counsel because he's not capable himself.
Well, and this cuts back to the whole thing about just, well, where the right tactic against terrorism is proving them wrong, you know, proving that, no, we're the good guys.
You're the aggressor.
We're nice guys.
Even no matter what you do to us, we're still going to give you our bill of rights because that's how great we are, is the way to handle this.
You take them to the deepest, darkest dungeon.
Again, Jane Mayer's book, the police in Thailand said, well, you know, we have this prison with this real deep underground dungeon and the CIA like that.
And, you know, we go doing, you know, locking people in coffins and, and I shouldn't throw we around too loosely, but our government goes locking people and, you know, basically burying them alive, torturing them, crucifying them, hanging them from the ceiling and on all these things.
And all they do is, you know, quote unquote, you know, in the perception of it's got to be millions of people prove that the people who attacked us had a point and that we really are the monsters that it may be that they don't agree with that tactic, but at least, you know, agree with them that we are the monsters that they say we are.
And, and to nail that down specifically, both in the history of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is still free as we'll be talking with Gareth Porter about in the next hour here, later here in just a few minutes.
These men both were tortured and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, you know, Mujahideen fought in Bosnia and all this stuff.
And I forgot at which point he was tortured, but it was after he was tortured that he became a real killer and a real terrorist.
And the same thing for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was tortured by the Jordanians and Zawahiri who, you know, is the operations man, uh, running Al-Qaeda, uh, the former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad or whatever, who did his mob marriage with bin Laden.
This guy was a peripheral, like, you know, three degrees of separation, four degrees of separation removed from the plot to assassinate Sadat back in Egypt, back in the day.
They tortured him and now he's Ayman al-Zawahiri for Christ's sake.
This is so counterproductive and, and, uh, anyway, I'm just going off all over your interview, but it does come back to the point of this, you know.
Well, you know what I find disturbing about this, I mean, and we, you know, we don't have evidence of Guantanamo previously having been used as a torture prison, although, you know, it did have a not pleasant history in the nineties for the Haitian refugees, but that's another story.
Um, you know, the prisons that were used in Afghanistan, Bagram and Kandahar, you know, no previous story there.
Um, you know, Bagram was a, was a Soviet workshop.
The place where this story really came home to me, I think Scott was Abu Ghraib prison, which was, you know, Saddam Hussein's torture prison and the Abu Ghraib scandal happened.
And then you're looking at torture in Saddam Hussein's torture prison and you're just thinking something has gone really horribly wrong here, hasn't it?
Because it's the same building.
How is it possible to be presenting yourself as the answer to the problem when this kind of stuff is happening?
You know, I just think the resonance of that is just, it's just still is extraordinary actually.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder if things would have been much different if at the time of the Abu Ghraib photos, when they came out, if the, the Republicans had failed to, uh, in their attempt to spin it as well, it was just the night shift at that one place going crazy rather than the real truth of the, well, the role that David Addington and Dick Cheney played and the rest of these guys, as Rice has admitted this week and how widespread it was as, as we found out in testimony, uh, in front of the Senate last week.
I think it's just taken a long time and it's still going on for this story to unfold and really for the, um, for the, the impact to sink in, um, you know, throughout America that, that being tough is one thing, but, um, sacrificing moral authority, um, and, and destroying the foundation stones of the United States to, um, to create a presidential role with unfettered executive power, um, is, is as wrong as it can get.
Yeah.
Well, and, and we see what it gets us, you know?
All right.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show today to share your insight with us as always.
Yeah, Scott, it's been a pleasure as ever.
So until the next time.
All right.
Thank you, my friend.
Cheers.
