02/13/14 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I won't be here tomorrow because I'll be hopping on a plane to Washington, D.C.
I'm giving a speech at the Future Freedom Foundation Conference Within a Conference at the International Students for Liberty Conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington this Saturday.
It's going on Saturday and Sunday, but yeah.
And Oliver Stone's going to be there, and Jeremy Scahill, and Stephen Kinzer, and Robert Higgs, and Sheldon Richman, and it's going to be awesome.
Jeff Tucker's going to be there.
All kinds of great folk are going to be there, and so it's going to be great.
That's in D.C. this weekend.
If you're not too snowed in, I hope to see you there.
All right, good.
So speaking of the Future Freedom Foundation, Andy Worthington writes for them from time to time, maybe even a bit more often than that.
They're at fff.org.
Andy's blog is at andyworthington.co.uk, and of course, he's the author of the book The Guantanamo Files, and he's the director-producer of the movie Outside the Law.
Stories from Guantanamo.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I'm good, Scott.
Yeah, yeah.
Nice to be back talking to you.
Good, good.
I'm happy to have you here.
So Guantanamo's still open, and I guess it was noted in the news the other day, well, you know, of course, Obama paid some lip service in the State of the Union, never mind that.
It was noted the other day that it's the anniversary, the 12th anniversary, of the Bush administration's abandonment of the Geneva Conventions.
So what's the big deal?
Well, you know, when you're at war, Scott, and you decide to hold people, take them off the battlefield, there are two things that you're supposed to do.
One is that you're supposed to ascertain whether you have the right people, which the Bush administration decided they didn't want to do.
The way of doing that is that if they're not wearing military uniforms, then you hold Article V tribunals close to the time and place of capture to find out whether you've got civilians or combatants.
The U.S. did that in the first Gulf War and held about 1,200 tribunals, and in 900 cases realized they got the wrong people and sent them home.
So they didn't do that.
They just rounded everybody up and said, we're going to have you anyway.
And then they refused to allow them to be held as prisoners of war with all the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
And the baseline protection of the Geneva Conventions, Scott, is that you are not allowed to torture or abuse the people in your control.
So by not doing that, President Bush was making it clear, really, that no rules applied to these men and that, therefore, the United States could do anything it wanted with them.
And pretty soon, of course, what happened was that they started torturing them.
Yeah, by the tens of thousands.
Anyway, we'll get to that in just a second.
But so the thing of it is, isn't it correct?
Is this the memo that says, yeah, but the Taliban, they didn't sign the Geneva Convention.
So screw them.
Isn't that the law?
If they didn't sign it, then we don't have to abide by it either.
Well, this is the race to the bottom theory of international treaties.
You know, it doesn't really matter, Scott, who you're up against and the way they behave.
If you don't adhere to the rules that you say are important and that are the kind of things that keep us away from being, from descending into barbarism, then you descend into barbarism.
So, you know, I mean, I think that's really one of the things that happened after 9-11, most fundamentally, you know, when the gloves came off and Dick Cheney, you know, was there boasting about how we were going to have to go to the dark side.
You know, what does it mean, the dark side, Dick?
Well, that means, you know, a place where we torture people, where we hold people indefinitely without charge or trial, where we disappear people, where we set up networks of secret prisons to torture people, where we, you know, we arrange for other countries to host these prisons for us because we can't do it ourselves, because it's illegal, all of this.
And, you know, what is the difference between this and a fully functioning, nasty, totalitarian place?
Well, I don't think there is any, really, is there?
Right.
Well, and the other thing is, too, is the dark side means we're making up all the rules as we go along.
And since they're all a bunch of nitwits, they end up ruining everything.
And they turn their own empire into a laughingstock.
I mean, it's kind of a bitter chuckle, but everybody in the whole world knows that Guantanamo is full and has always been full of a bunch of nobodies, a big publicity stunt of how evil America is.
What the hell is that supposed to prove?
Well, you know, I don't know.
I mean, what amazes me, after all this amount of time, Scott, is that people really don't get that.
You know, that this is a place that is primarily...
I meant to say six and a half billion people in the world get it.
Americans don't count.
But everybody else in the world knows from...
Well, you know, but I mean, it's interesting because partly, obviously, you're right, you know, this place is for show.
And people should realize that, you know, that a bunch of people are being victimized for that purpose, for scaring people, for putting up a front.
But it's also a place where, you know, most crucially, people who, you know, with a very small exception, a very small number of people are an exception to this.
But the majority of the people held at Guantanamo, you know, throughout its history, have been in two camps.
Either completely innocent people in the wrong time and place, you know, many of whom were sold because the Americans were offering bounty payments, huge bounty payments.
But let's say the bulk of the people that were held were soldiers.
They were in Afghanistan.
They were involved with the Taliban one way or another, militarily or in a support way, fighting the Northern Alliance before the 9-11 attacks.
That then, you know, they then became involved in the...in a conflict with the United States after the United States invaded.
And yet, you know, the short end for these guys, for all of these 12 years that this nonsense has been going on, is that they're terrorists.
We have all been played by the Bush administration.
And Obama hasn't done enough to get rid of this notion.
But actually, people who are fighting against us are terrorists.
There appears to be no such thing anymore as soldiers.
But we're up against our insurgents, and insurgents are terrorists.
So, you know, that's what I find really disappointing.
You know, we've got a bunch of guys in Guantanamo, been there for 12 years, longer than the First World War and the Second World War put together.
We still have, you know, major players in the United States political scene who want to hold these guys forever.
And yet, they were never anybody in the first place.
They were guys who, you know, at the best were, you know, were part of some long-forgotten military conflict that had nothing to do with America before the 9-11 attacks.
It's ridiculous.
Right.
Well, and that's the whole thing, too, is they weren't even insurgents.
They were the government of Afghanistan, almost all of it, and the terror, or the foot soldiers of it, and the terrorists were the Commie Northern Alliance that, you know, America came and ended up backing that were on the verge of total defeat at the time of the 9-11 attacks and the American intervention over there.
So, they weren't even, they weren't even really, you know, unlawful enemy belligerents or whatever kind of, you know, technicality.
They were actually just foot soldiers of a government, one, admittedly, that the American government, you know, bombed and replaced, but still.
Yeah.
At that time, anyway, I'm not saying that would really, I don't think that definition might, or maybe it would count again now, but say a couple of years ago, you could get away with saying the Taliban is the insurgency and not the dominant force in the country or something like that.
Right, right.
But not back then.
Anybody who was arrested back in the fall of 01, they were the foot soldier of the government that was being defeated.
So, that makes them maybe a POW, but it doesn't make them a terrorist at all.
No, absolutely.
But, you know, that is the Alice through the Looking Glass world that we've ended up in in the last 12 years, is that, you know, things that, things that made sense and were logical and had a sense of proportion about them 12 years ago have gone out the window.
And, you know, and as I say, Scott, I find it depressing that far too many people don't realize what's happened.
I mean, they're content to do what the government tells them, which is to look the other way and to believe them when they say, you know, these are the bad guys.
You don't really need to know anything more than that.
Right.
All right, now, hey, in the last couple of minutes of this segment, maybe we can get one more question too, but could you talk a little bit more about those Article 5, I forget, that's the Geneva Convention Article 5 mandates, but then there's whatever military law that outlines how a military commission is supposed to work in the battlefield.
This isn't, you know, guilt or innocence.
This is, do we care about you at all to hold you or do we turn you loose because you're nobody?
And you were saying that that worked really well in the first Gulf War and that was the process that, you know, I guess has been developed since the American Revolution, which Donald Rumsfeld threw out the window in favor of pay the Pakistanis bounties for as many, you know, peoples that can turn over to us.
Yeah, well, they were, you know, they're called competent tribunals.
I mean, sometimes they get referred to as battlefield tribunals and they are specifically for making sure that if you're dealing with a non-straightforward military conflict, i.e. you haven't got two bunches of guys out in a field, both wearing uniforms and carrying national flags, that when it's slightly more irregular than that, that you, you know, you're prone to make mistakes.
You know, there's a guy wheeling a cart full of his farming stuff through the middle of a conflict zone and you pick him up and he says, no guys, I'm a farmer.
And, you know, you hold these tribunals to find out whether that's the case or not.
You know, it's amazing the results from Iraq where nearly three out of four cases, they held these tribunals, they got the wrong people, they sent them home.
You know, you can see why Guantanamo is full of nobodies, literally full of nobodies, when, you know, when you extrapolate those kind of figures, three out of four, to Guantanamo.
And, you know, and that pretty broadly fits with the kind of nonsense that was going on in that place.
That these were people who, had there been that type of screening, that type of screening which had been pioneered by the U.S., they would never have ended up being sent there in the first place.
You know, and these are the guys that, you know, Dunleavy, who was the, one of the early commanders of Guantanamo, you know, referred to the, you know, he was annoyed at the number of Mickey Mouse detainees who were being sent to Guantanamo from Afghanistan.
Right, yeah, and of course, you know, people might think now, yeah, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is there and all that, but they weren't even brought there until the CIA prisons were shut down, at least as far as we know, back in 2005.
Before that, it was nothing but nobodies, right?
They finally brought some guilty people just to dress the damn thing up.
Well, a few years ago, I spoke to Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff, and he told me exactly that.
He said, you know, that this is the thing, really, is that, you know, when they moved these guys to Guantanamo in September, 2006, so they could actually say, hey, you know, we've got some terrorists in Guantanamo, because before that, they didn't.
Right, that was Colin Powell's right-hand man there.
He was the Secretary of State at the time, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who's told me on this show before that he would be perfectly happy, years ago, he told me, he'd be perfectly happy to testify against Dick Cheney in front of the grand jury for the torture spree back then.
And we'll get back and talk a little bit more about Guantanamo, well, a lot more about Guantanamo and torture and the rest of it with our friend Andy Worthington, andyworthington.co.uk.
Back after this.
All right, all right.
Here's one of my favorite George W. Bush clips ever, everybody.
Turn down this dress in 45 percent here.
And that common article three says that, you know, there will be no outrageous upon human dignity.
It's very vague.
Yeah, poor guy.
That's after the Hamdan decision that said that, no, the president does not have the authority to suspend participation in the Geneva Conventions, and they do apply.
And it's funny that Bush's complaint there is that, oh, come on, no outrageous upon human dignity, that could mean anything.
And we get all this stuff that we like doing to these people.
And what's funny about it is he's right that it's vague, but it's written like that deliberately, of course, to be all inclusive.
If you think it might be over the line, you cannot do it to your detainee.
Get it?
That's the point.
And poor Bush is saying, oh, come on.
I mean, that includes things that are only half torture and two thirds torture too.
And an outrage upon human dignity.
I like outraging human dignity.
Anyway, so that's his game.
And so at some point, they finally did stop torturing people, but not before tens of thousands were tortured.
And this is a little bit off of just the Guantanamo beat, Andy, but I know you're well aware of all this history and the so-called legalities behind it and the rest of it.
But ultimately, somewhere around tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans were tortured in those wars.
And basically, what happened was the legal theory from Afghanistan and from Guantanamo Bay kind of just filtered its way through different chains of command into the battlefield in Iraq, where then any Iraqi resistance fighter all of a sudden was under the same rules as the Taliban and al-Qaeda in over there near the Duran line, fighting it out with bin Laden.
And so what they ended up doing, it was during the entire occupation of Afghanistan, particularly Iraq, is just completely lawless.
And as Tony Lugaranis put it to PBS Frontline, he said, look, we torture them on the side of the road.
We torture them in their front yard, in their living room and in their backyard and in front of their wives and in front of their kids.
And sometimes we killed them.
And you want to know how we tortured them?
We tortured them this way.
And that electrified cages and whatever crazy stuff they could come up with.
And not all just top-down CIA-type torture, but just the average grunt out on patrol was told the same rules as the CIA and special forces in Afghanistan was that grab whom you must, do what you want.
The gloves are off.
All these people knocked down the towers, man.
Just go out there and get them.
And so tens of thousands of people were tortured.
And meanwhile, the American people, I think if you surveyed them, would say, well, yeah, I heard that they dunked one guy underwater three times or something like that when this was a gigantic regime of torture on a massive scale and for years on end.
And then sometimes they'll maybe mention the outsourcing of torture to the Bata Brigade in Iraq and that kind of thing.
But that's only the fringes of the discussion, if you ask me.
The center of it is the top-down regime from the president, the vice president, and all the way through the intelligence services and the military.
And I guess that's what the 6,000-page torture report that they just won't release is about because they're afraid that if the American people really had any idea what was in there, that this would be enough maybe to bring those Republicans back to DC, to Virginia for trial.
Very well put, Scott.
You know, there is one thing that I should add to that, which is that on the very same day that George Bush stood in the White House Rose Garden saying, you know, we, you know, those secret prisons that I told you we didn't have?
Well, we did, but we've closed them.
And now we're sending those guys to Guantanamo, these 14 high-value detainees.
The very day that he announced that the black sites were closing, the Army field manual was reissued containing an appendix called Appendix M, which I encourage listeners to look up, Appendix M of the Army field manual.
It contains a list of torture techniques which can be approved for use by high-up officials in certain, you know, when it's called for.
It's not specified when it will be used, but it's basically as soon as the torture program came to an end, it migrated to an appendix of the Army field manual so that it can continue in some form or another.
You know, we certainly don't see that it's on the same massive, massive industrial scale as it was when those two hideous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at, you know, at maximum impact.
And as you've so well expressed, Scott, you know, tens of thousands of people were tortured who had nothing to do with anything.
But it's still there.
It's still there as, you know, as an official part of U.S. policy.
Well, man, I want somebody to WikiLeak that Senate report because that 6,000-page report, I mean, after, look, it was put together by Dianne Feinstein's staff and, you know, she's actually been pretty good on the torture issue.
I don't know every detail.
There may be caveats to that going back, but lately anyway, but you can't expect her staff to really tell you everything you need to know.
This would still be, if not a whitewash, a very mainstream Senate committee version of what happened, but still they are scared to death of releasing this thing.
And they claim they're quibbling about some details of fact here or there, but it's the release of the entire report, which I guess some who have seen it are saying that this is like the Pentagon Papers of the torture program, man.
There's so much in here, you know, I guess it could really take over the entire political discussion for a little while, like the NSA stuff, and they're just scared to death.
24 hours, maybe.
I mean, can you imagine a 24-hour news on a 6,000-page report like that?
People will read the press release and they'll talk about it for 24 hours and then Kim Kardashian will be wearing a new top, you know, you know how it goes.
That's quite true.
Yeah, I hate to overstate it.
The evidence is already out there.
You know, people can have a look at the CIA Inspector General report from 2004, which was finally released years ago.
They can have a look at the Senate's report into detainee treatment.
That was the Senate Armed Service Committee's report into detainee treatment, which came out 2009, I think.
It was the very end of the Bush administration, actually.
That's a 300-and-something-page analysis of how exactly the systematic torture of prisoners developed.
It's an absolutely fantastic document.
You know, this is all public knowledge.
You know, the sad thing is that the case for the indictment of the senior Bush administration officials and their lawyers and everybody else who helped, you know, is actually out there.
The problem, of course, is that, you know, there's no willingness in the corridors of power to pursue it.
That said, I would dearly love to see this report and as unredacted as possible.
Yeah, well, good luck to us all on that.
I don't know.
I mean, hey, these are the days of WikiLeaks, and it can be done.
I mean, look at what Edward Snowden got away with downloading and liberating for the people.
So somebody's cousin is a staffer on that Senate committee.
Can you get us that thing?
Put it on the Pirate Bay.
Come on!
All right.
And now there's another thing I wanted to ask you here real quick at the end was about the hunger strike and how many people are still on it and how's it going and what's being done about it?
Well, the last I've heard, Scott, is that Shaka Armour, the last British guy in Guantanamo, has said that there are 34 guys on a hunger strike now.
17 of them are being force fed.
And, you know, that's just an increase of one from a report from him from about a month ago.
So, you know, it's not taking off in a major way, but that's still a significant number of people.
And of course, you know, the horrible thing is that for the guys who are being force fed, they're strapped down to the restraint chair twice a day and the tubes pumped up for their nose.
And, you know, it's a pretty disgusting process.
Shaka Armour and a couple of other prisoners have a longstanding legal challenge from last summer in which they're trying to get judges to tell the government that they're not allowed to force feed them, which the district court had to turn down because of a legal precedent, you know, whereby Congress told the courts, you know, anything to do with the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror is not for us to interfere with.
But they appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, a formerly notoriously right-wing court that seems to be mellowing slightly these days.
Judges there had heard the case in the fall and have just delivered a ruling saying that although they can't order the government to stop force feeding the prisoners, they think that there is enough to the case to send it back down to the district court for them to have further investigations into what the rights of prisoners are, the extent to which prisoners may be able to challenge the ways in which they're treated by the government.
So, you know, this all seems very abstract and it's not led to anything immediate, but legally it's actually quite significant that judges in the generally known as the Conservative Court of Appeals are actually saying, you know, I think we need some oversight here on the way that prisoners are being treated.
So, you know, there's progress there.
The main area that we're looking for progress in, though, Scott, is that, you know, since the big hunger strike last year that forced President Obama's hand, he said, I'm going to start releasing prisoners, I'm going to appoint some envoys, we're going to have some movement here.
Well, yeah, we have had some movement.
He has released 11 men.
There are 155 men still in Guantanamo and 77 of those men are men who have been cleared for release.
All but one of them over four years ago when Obama's interagency task force reviewed the cases and said, look, these are guys that we don't want to put on trial and that we don't want to carry on holding.
These are guys that, you know, we want out of here.
And yet they're still held there.
So we're waiting for action from President Obama, more than 11 men.
We want all the rest of these people to be released.
And what people really need to be aware of is that the majority of these 77 men, 56 of them are Yemenis.
And no Yemenis have been released from Guantanamo for years.
And, you know, because Yemen is regarded as a nation that's a host of terrorism.
Yeah, well, they're afraid of the headline, the politics of the headline.
They have to get over themselves and release prisoners to Yemen.
It's time for them to come to an end.
Thanks so much.
AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Thanks, Andy.
Okay, thanks, Scott.
Bye.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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