05/28/14 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest up on the show today is our good friend, Andy Worthington.
He's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, and also directed the movie, the documentary film, Outside the Law.
He keeps a website at andyworthington.co.uk.
And he is, well, there's some competition here, but he is, I think, pretty much beyond dispute, the world's foremost expert and chronicler of the perpetual American war crime down at the, well, collection of war crimes down there at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay in communist Cuba.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andy?
Yeah, I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
Good, good.
And you sound great too.
Yeah, good.
Yeah.
The Skype thing is working, I think.
Yeah.
I always had the worst problems with it.
So I became a very, you know, very Luddite about it and just decided to stick with the phone.
But I finally got somebody to help me figure out how to get it working right.
And so now I'm using as much as I can because it sounds pretty damn good.
Yeah, cool.
I think my problem was I started trying to use it when it first came out 10 years ago or something, and it wasn't ready for primetime yet.
And then I just, I didn't go back to try to make it work.
Anyway, let's talk about Guantanamo Bay.
A stupid president gave a talk today at West Point.
And it's so funny.
He says, I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of our being.
But then he says, what makes us exceptional is our willingness to affirm international law.
I don't even know what in the hell.
I don't think he even has any idea what in the hell he's talking about.
But then speaking of non sequiturs, here comes the next one.
Quote, that's why I will continue to push to close Gitmo because American values and legal traditions don't permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.
So my question for you, Andy, is how long has this guy been in office now as commander in chief of every branch of the US military?
Well, you know, far too long, really, to, to be demonstrating this kind of inability to understand that he has the power to do things.
And, you know, he's still choosing not to do them.
It's very strange that comment, isn't it about, about American values and legal traditions don't permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.
Does that mean that he's suggesting that within the borders, American values and legal traditions do permit the indefinite detention?
Right.
It's I don't think well, he's the one who signed the NDAA act into law New Year's Eve when everybody was out getting drunk, right?
Yeah, maybe that's just just reminding people of the NDAA.
Yeah.
That's what exceptionalism means.
No charges for you.
Well, you know, I mean, I have to say, Scott, that he's done, you know, he's done the same thing.
And actually, you know, we're going to talk about it soon.
But it's, you know, it's almost a year, just over a year since he made a promise to resume releasing prisoners from Guantanamo.
You know, every time he speaks about it, he sounds great, but his actions never match his words.
And so here, again, really is what he's, you know, he's, he's saying, you know, very briefly, some of the things that are that are wrong with Guantanamo, even if he seems to be slightly confused this time around about exactly what he means.
But you know, he's saying, you know, I will continue to push to close Guantanamo as though he's some kind of opposition politician pressurizing the president of the United States to do something.
And, you know, he is the president of the United States.
And there are certainly lawmakers who who would have a go at him if he really pushed for the closure of Guantanamo and did the things that he's able to do, but he's choosing not to, you know, up until recently, there'd been, there'd been more or less three years of opposition from Congress to try and make it very difficult for him to release prisoners from Guantanamo.
And obviously, you know, politically, when he's up against Congress, being in such a bullish mood, he was he was going to have to be up for a fight.
But he presented it to the public that Congress had totally tied his hands.
And in fact, he always had a waiver in legislation, which, you know, Senator Carl Levin, the head of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, had insisted on having in the legislation that allowed him to overcome these congressional obstacles and bypass Congress, if he regarded the release of prisoners as being in the national security interest of the United States.
And as we see, every time he talks about Guantanamo, closing the place is in the national security interest of the United States.
So, you know, we've got this kind of disconnect.
Right.
So let me make sure I understand you right here, Andy, because so it's not that Congress has said, well, I guess I'm confused, maybe it seems like two different issues here, whether he can close the base and move all the prisoners out of there, or whether he can let this one, this one, or this one go at any given time.
But you're telling me it's just one thing that Congress has done, and it applies to both cases.
And the president has every authority under that law to issue a waiver.
So if he wanted to send some Yemenis back to Yemen or some Uyghurs back to wherever, whoever's going to let them in, I guess they already took care of that.
He can do that.
He can not just waive the restrictions on individual prisoners, but on the whole island prison.
Is that correct?
Well, no, it's not actually.
I'm sorry if I was unclear there, Scott.
He can't actually.
Well, it's much more difficult for him to actually close the prison.
He doesn't have legislation that allows him to do that.
There is no waiver in the NDA that allows him to do that.
But as the president of the United States, he could he could do something exceptional.
He could issue an executive order and move all the men from Guantanamo to the U.S. mainland.
You know, his original plan was to bring Gitmo justice to American shores as well and to go ahead and say, yeah, no, we still mean to hold these men without trial if we think they're guilty.
But we know we can't prove it.
We don't care.
We'll hold them without charges or trial forever.
But we should just do it in Illinois instead of in Cuba.
I mean, I don't actually believe that.
I mean, I actually think that if you move the men from Guantanamo to the United States mainland, you would suddenly find that there are a lot more reasons why why courts would be saying, sorry, we don't actually have a tradition of holding people indefinitely without charge or trial on the United States mainland.
Well, that was the original scam of putting it in Cuba in the first place was that the U.S. law can't reach us here.
And the first time the Supreme Court heard a case like that, they said, no, you're wrong.
Exactly.
But, you know, the Congress has has, you know, continues to block him from closing the facility at Guantanamo by bringing men to the United States mainland for whatever reason to be to continue to be held indefinitely, to be put on trial, whatever.
Although couldn't he just completely ignore that?
I mean, here's he's Mr. Signing Statement, no less than George W. Bush.
You can start a war in Libya.
Can't he just order the military men at Guantanamo close the prison, bring the men here?
Don't worry, Congress will figure out what to tell you to do with the prisoners by the time you arrive in Miami.
But I'm telling you, move, soldier, move.
He's the commander in chief.
You know, that's what I'm saying, Scott.
And, you know, and I think that, you know, the pressure is going to be on him from from those of us who care about this, you know, more and more as the as his presidency wanes.
But the main issue at the moment is that half the men in Guantanamo amended that his administration, you know, that a task force and review boards set up by him, high level people have said, you know, half the guys at Guantanamo, 77 of the remaining 154 men are people that we do not want to carry on holding indefinitely.
We don't want to put them on trial.
And it's those people who he has the ability to do something about every moment that we talk about it.
He has the ability to do something about it, regardless of whether or not Congress is particularly supportive.
And it must be said that Congress was persuaded through, you know, through the entreaties of high level people like Senator Carl Levin at the end of last year to ease their restrictions on the release of prisoners.
It has never there has never been a better time in the last three years for President Obama to release men from Guantanamo than this this moment in time.
But since he promised to resume releasing prisoners one year ago, one year and five days ago, when he you know, when when he was responding to the outrage that had been felt internationally about the prison-wide hunger strike and the men's despair, and he promised to resume releasing prisoners, he appointed two envoys to help.
And we have had 12 men released in the last year.
Now, don't get me wrong.
You know, I'm very glad to see those 12 men released.
But 77 of the remaining men are still waiting to be freed.
And the majority of those men were told in January 2010 that the task force that President Obama had set up, high level task force, had looked at their cases, but the U.S. wasn't interested in holding them forever or or putting them on trial.
And I'm sorry, we're going to hold it right there, Andy, and go out and take this break.
Can you hear the music?
Yeah.
OK, we'll be right back after this, everybody, with the great Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington, dot co dot UK.
And by his book.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with the heroic Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington, dot co dot UK.
The book is Guantanamo Files.
The movie is outside the law.
You can find his writings also at the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF dot org.
And so let's see before the break that we're talking about how many of these men have already been cleared for release and are still being held anyway.
And now.
So you said it was about half, Andy, and 77 out of 154 or something like that already cleared.
Now, what about the rest?
Because as far as well, I mean, I'm not completely familiar with each and every one of these guys, but it makes sense to me that when they finally close at least some of the CIA black sites and they brought Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Sheib and a couple of other of these extremely guilty 9-11 conspirators to Guantanamo that, you know, it made sense that they would be held somewhere that they were actually, you know, deserved to be held under some circumstances or another.
But if anything, it really just went to show how innocent everybody else there was.
But so now when you're telling me it's about half and half, I wonder about that because it seemed like, you know, the really guilty, the real friends of bin Laden that they grabbed were only what, a dozen, maybe two.
Yeah, well, you know, and possibly less than that.
I mean, the thing is, Scott, of the other 77 men, the majority of those men have been put forward for what are called periodic review boards.
So these are men who when the task force that President Obama established when he took office for the first time in 2009, when they looked at the cases of all the prisoners, they designated them for prosecution, for release, or for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.
That last one was the really, really dodgy one where they said, you know, these guys, we think they're too dangerous to release, but we haven't got the evidence to actually put them on trial.
So that means there are fundamental problems with the evidence.
But anyway, what happened was that President Obama issued an executive order approving the ongoing imprisonment of these men, it was 48 of them, two of them subsequently died.
So 46 men, he personally said, I'm going to go with what the task force told me, these guys are too dangerous to release.
But we haven't got the evidence to put them on trial.
So I'm going to sign this executive order, and we're going to hold them.
What we're going to do is we're going to give them periodic reviews to see whether we see we think that they're still too dangerous to release on an ongoing basis.
Those took nearly three years to establish.
And last year, they finally began to take place in the fall.
There's only been a handful of them so far.
But almost all of the other men that are still held are supposed to get these periodic reviews, not just the ones designated for indefinite detention by the task force.
But the majority of those who were designated for prosecution by the task force, because guess what, the prosecutions at Guantanamo in the military commission system, the appeals court recently told the government that they're invented war crimes, and that they're not allowed to do that.
And they actually dismissed two of the only convictions that they ever achieved.
Can you believe this, you know, Congress invented war crimes that they inserted into the Military Commissions Act, and they and the courts eventually had to turn around and say, Oh, yeah, what I can't believe is that the courts ever made them stop.
I mean, we, we talked for years about how ridiculous it was that these war criminals who, you know, for example, are torturing children are then charging the children that they tortured and are and held for years without charges of war crimes.
You know, come on pot kettle black.
I mean, it's not even that right.
It's like, you know, Cotter, he was the worst thing he was guilty of is the non crime of self defense against foreign invaders.
And you know, the rest of this material support this and that.
I'm amazed that a judge said no, you can't do that.
Actually, the law is a thing written on a piece of paper, not your will being exercised however you feel like whoever heard of that in the 21st century.
And so you know, so what we've got is that, you know, we've got these review boards that have started recently, and they've, they've actually approved two men to Yemenese for release.
So they're added to the list of all the clear prisoners waiting to go.
But if you look at how many people are facing these reviews, and how many people are cleared for release, then who are the people who are not, you know, who are not included, who are the people who are so genuinely bad, allegedly, and that there is no system in place that's going to lead to their release, and that they're going to be put on trial.
It actually is the six men who are currently charged.
And it's, and it's two other guys who have taken plea deals.
And it's one other guy who's serving a sentence that he was given under the Bush administration, even though his is one of the convictions that was overturned by the by the appeals court.
That's it.
That's actually nine of the people left in Guantanamo, nine of the 154 guys are people who categorically the US government has said, you know, there's no there's, there's no way that these people are going to go through any kind of review process and be told that they will be released.
And what can what can I say, Scott?
Is this what we're left with?
I mean, the periodic reviews have have already judged the cases of three men.
And as I said, two of them were cleared for release in the in the third case, the review board, which is, you know, high ranking people in various government departments and the intelligence agencies decided that the man should still be held.
It's pretty disgraceful, really, there isn't actual evidence against him demonstrating that he remains a threat to the United States.
But you know, as I know that, you know, that the common sense and a sense of proportion have never been been things that have taken place at Guantanamo.
So they're going to go through these periodic reviews, and they're going to, you know, maybe two, one out of every three, they're going to say, No, we have to keep holding these guys.
But the number of people that they claiming the ability to hold for any reason, because they actually a significant threat of any kind, is a is a dwindling figure.
And I really wish that we could somehow get this message out to the American people.
But I honestly think that, you know, most people still aren't aware of quite what a disgraceful failure of intelligence and abject exercise of cruelty Guantanamo has been for the last 12 years.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm confused, too, because who cares if they don't have any evidence, they can convict anyone they want of anything they want in federal court.
Yeah, accuse them of mail fraud or something, put them away for life without parole.
I don't think that the federal prosecutors have ever lost a case in federal court, federal jury will put anyone in prison for as long as they're told to with, you know, point zero zero zero zero zero zero point 1% exceptions.
And never in the case of a terrorism case, is a jury going to nullify and say hell no, and set someone free.
They never have certainly not in the 21st century, they haven't, they could convict any of these guys of anything just by pointing at them and saying to the jury, first of all, just look at them.
You can tell that he believes in this Allah crap.
Come on, give them a point, Scott.
But I think the problem is that, you know, what they've actually got in Guantanamo for the most part, you know, beyond the innocent people who were absolutely nothing to do with anything.
And, you know, many of those have been released, but there are still some there.
But what they've largely got in Guantanamo now people who were demonstrably involved with the Taliban, to some extent, either as foot soldiers or in some notorious cases as chefs.
But you know, these were people who were captured in a military context.
So what we should be talking about is like, you know, are we really going to hold people forever in this military context?
Or does the point come where we should let them go?
These are not people that if you put them in federal court, you've actually got any kind of crime.
It's like, what the most you've ever got against this guy is that he went to a training camp.
Basically, they're POWs.
They're not even accused criminals or POWs.
But because they were irregulars, you know, supposedly under the dogfight theory, Geneva doesn't apply.
POW rules don't apply.
So they just hold them in this, you know, legal black hole.
Well, that's what I think.
I think they are essentially misplaced prisoners of war.
And that was a deliberate, deliberate mistake on the part of the Bush administration.
And, you know, and that's what upsets me when you read the kind of knee jerk responses to any discussion about Guantanamo from people on the right who, you know, just call them terrorists.
You know, they were sold that message by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and George W.
Bush, but they have swallowed it.
And nobody has sufficiently challenged them in all these years to say most of these guys never had anything to do with terrorism.
Right.
Well, and let me go ahead and ask you now, is there any way I could keep you past the top of the hour and do one more segment in the next in the next hour?
Yeah.
How long?
Yeah, sure.
OK, because I got more questions and we're almost out of time for this segment.
But I wanted to bring up here real quick, since we're talking about the prosecutions and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and all them have come up that.
And this is a point that the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer, has made on this show for nine years now or something like that, is that we already have laws and we have 200 and something years worth of experience of putting people in prison for whatever we be in the U.S. government in this case.
And what what Addington and Bush and then later Congress, after the Supreme Court said you had to include Congress, what they did with this ad hoc thing is they created a mess and they don't know how to control it and they're making it up as they go along.
And that's why it never works.
And that's why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is now allowed to show up in court in a camouflage hunting jacket as though he is some kind of general in Al-Qaeda's army rather than the lowest scum of the earth, two bit criminal, which would never be allowed in federal court.
But that's because of how illegal the whole process is now.
I'm sorry we're out of time, but I'll let you comment on that if you want.
And we'll be back at six after.
It's Andy Worthington, everybody.
The book is The Guantanamo Files.
Hey, I'll Sky here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the dang thing here, man.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton show.
Hey, let's do business.
You own a business or a political group or something advertised on the show.
I'm Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
Let's work something out.
I'm in a capitalistic mood right now.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm on the line with the great Andy Worthington, the heroic Andy Worthington.
He's at the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF dot org, at Andy Worthington dot co dot uk.
The book is the Guantanamo Files.
Really, biographies are, you know, as much as could be known at the time anyway about each and every one of the detainees there at Guantanamo Bay and then plus the documentary film Outside the Law.
So thank you again very much for joining us and for holding through that long top of the hour break there, Andy, because I still had a couple of questions for you here.
Oh, I guess.
But before we went out to break, I was on my little rant there about what a disaster the actual trials are and the process of the trials for those who actually are even getting them.
And pardon me, because trials should go in ironic quotes there.
I meant to say it in an italicized sort of tone of voice there.
The ones of them who are getting trials, their trials are seem to be a total joke to me because it's all made up ad hoc crap.
What do you think?
Well, I think the main problem is that these men were tortured and torture is inadmissible in U.S. courts.
So the problem is that the prosecution is constantly trying to suppress all mention of the fact that these men were held for years in in black sites run by the CIA and subjected to torture.
And in fact, you can't have anything resembling a fair trial without raising these issues in the first place.
My feeling, Scott, has always been that if these cases were transferred to federal court, then so long as they could come up with something that resembled evidence, an average American jury would overlook all of these issues and would convict them if if anything resembling evidence was provided.
Well, look, I mean, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shih both bragged to Al Jazeera that they're guilty before they were ever captured.
So, yeah, well, there's no question about who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is here, regardless of what he said under torture.
I know he took responsibility for every criminal act since Hitler's suicide under torture.
No, I think so.
But, you know, but I'm wondering whether we're ever going to get to this point, Scott, where, you know, where we where these trials are going to go ahead.
You know, I mean, that's what I think.
I think that the Obama administration said they were going to try these men in federal court in New York City and then back down when they got criticized, which made Eric Holder look really stupid.
But I think also, you know, was was the disemboweling of what remained of the law in the in the Guantanamo years and that they didn't go ahead with the only way that they could have done it.
These pre-trial hearings are going to drag on and on and on and on endlessly at Guantanamo, I think.
And essentially what's happening is that these men are being held indefinitely and may continue to be held indefinitely for the rest of their lives without the trial ever actually taking place.
So I would think at some point it would make sense to move them back to New York as they as they wanted to do, have these trials in the best way possible.
And when mention of torture comes up to use that as the as as an excuse for saying as a reason for saying is an opportunity for saying we know how tainted these cases are, but we have evidence that we that has come from other sources to demonstrate that what we're saying is true in the case of these people.
And we promise in front of the world that we will never, ever go back to the dark side, as Dick Cheney insisted we had to do after the 9-11 attacks.
We will not torture.
That's what I'd like to see happen, Scott.
But I think it's a mile away from that.
It's a pretty common principle.
But is there anything in Anglo-American law that actually says if you were tortured, then you've done your time and you're free to go now?
I mean, it would be horrible to see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed released, but then again, they shouldn't have tortured him.
Well, no, and I don't know anything that, you know, suggests that.
But I don't.
That just seems like fair, you know, kind of practice, right?
If they tortured you, then you're free to go, man.
You've done.
Well, you know, I think that if the things that he is supposed to have done, he did do, then I can't see anyone actually suggesting that he should go free.
I think the default position, the one that the Bush administration established after 9-11 is, hey, let's tear up all the rule books and then imprison a load of people.
And, you know, and they didn't care whether any of these people were ever going to be released.
We have the problem at Guantanamo, the place is stuffed full of nobodies who can't get released.
You know, it's the prison without end.
So the Bush administration has set up the kind of perfect system for holding people without rights for the rest of their lives.
And the default position for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the rest of those guys is that whether the trials go ahead or not, they are staying there forever and will not be released.
You know, the question is whether after the fact, some American government or other can come up with a structure that will enable them to go through a process to justify it.
I don't know whether that's going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, so can you tell me this?
How many people are on hunger strike right now?
I know they quit covering it.
They quit covering it.
And what we have is the terrible stories that are coming out from the prisoners themselves, including, you know, this this Syrian man, Abu Wael Diab, who's been cleared for release, like many of the hunger strikers.
Why is he hunger striking?
Because he was told four years ago that the U.S. didn't want to hold him anymore and that he'd be going home soon.
Or if not home to Syria, then the U.S. would find another country for him.
But he's still stuck there and he's been on a hunger strike.
He recently won a court case where he persuaded a federal court judge to put a stay on his force feeding.
That didn't last.
That stay has been dropped.
But she did insist that the United States government provided videotaped evidence of him being force fed and of him being violently moved to be force fed when he didn't want to leave his cell.
This is this is certainly something of a breakthrough.
And I hope that it's putting pressure on the administration, because, you know, here is a man who's being force fed, who, you know, he's actually been offered a new home by President Mujica of Uruguay.
He is offered to take six men who can't be safely repatriated.
And Mr. Diab is one of them.
So as far as I can see, President Obama could put this man and five others on a plane and send them to Uruguay tomorrow.
And I don't know why he doesn't do that.
And by the way, for people not familiar, it isn't like Uruguay is some rogue state out there.
They're perfectly compliant and would do everything up to American specifications for keeping an eye on these guys or whatever, whatever.
Well, I mean, actually, he said, no, we're not going to we're not going to subject them to to any kind of, you know, obsessive scrutiny, because we want them to have a new life, which I think is the fair thing to say, because the problem with Guantanamo.
That's why Obama is not releasing them, then.
Well, you know, he doesn't want to have to go through that problem of having to tell Congress, look, these guys are not a threat to anybody.
That's why we decided that we're prepared to release them.
So I don't know.
But, you know, he's one of this guy.
Mr. Diab is one of the hunger strikers.
He's certainly not the only one who hasn't been cleared for release, who's been cleared for release, but is still held, who is being force fed.
The numbers, as you say, Scott, are difficult to know exactly because the military stopped reporting them in December because it was attracting too much attention for the prisoners.
But from what I understand, it's probably up to up to a couple of dozen of the men are on a hunger strike and being force fed.
All right.
And now I read a thing.
Last question here.
I read a thing last week, I guess, that said that they had this new trick going on in the Congress.
You know how they do with it.
Nobody wants to vote for a pay raise.
No congressman does.
So what they do is they make the pay raise automatic unless they vote against it.
Right.
And so they never do.
Well, they passed a thing that would basically make closing Guantanamo automatic unless they pass a new thing stopping it.
And that was supposedly, you know, maybe a way that Obama had figured out to get Congress to go along with this thing and give them a safe out so that these Republicans can tell their idiot Republican constituents back home that I tried to stop them without really trying to stop them.
Yeah.
Think of that.
Is that true?
Well, I mean, certainly, you know, again, this is Senator Carl Levin.
I think, you know, I think I have the utmost respect for the way that Senator Carl Levin genuinely has accepted that Guantanamo is a stain on any claim that America might try to make to be a country that respects the rule of law.
And, you know, he's certainly been pushing more than the administration has, as far as I can see, to try and bring an end to it.
Now, what needs to happen is that is that parts of Congress need to be persuaded that their absolute ban on bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland for any reason is dropped.
And last year, part of the deal that was made in Congress was that Republican lawmakers, for the most part, would ease their restrictions on the release of prisoners.
But in exchange, they they insisted that the absolute ban on bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland for any reason was maintained in the legislation.
I can't see that they're going to want to give up on that and that they will find their way around this nice little trick.
And we'll, you know, yet again, put this into the NDA to try and make sure that Guantanamo stays open.
But we'll see, Scott.
You know, I mean, what we're really, again, waiting for is much more of a demonstration of leadership from the one man who is supposed to have have the ability to deal with these things, which is the president of the United States.
Right.
Well, anyway, thank you very much for your time, as always.
It's great talking, especially if you're staying over with us here.
Yeah, well, that's been great to talk for all this time, Scott.
Thank you very much.
I sure appreciate having you.
That's the great Andy Worthington, everybody.
He's at Andy Worthington dot C.O. dot U.K. at the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF dot org.
And get his book, The Guantanamo Files and his movie Outside the Law.
And we'll be right back.
The military industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
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