06/04/14 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton and this is my show.
ScottHorton.org is my website.
Also, hey, join up the chat room, would you?
It's ScottHorton.org slash chat.
Anyway, to our first guest today, it's our friend Andy Worthington from Britain.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
And you can also find his writings at the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org.
And he's the author, of course, of the book, The Guantanamo Files, the complete profiles of all the men Bush and Obama have ever held there at Guantanamo Bay.
And also he directed and produced the documentary film Outside the Law.
And he's got this brand new article at PolicyMike.com.
It's called What We Should Really Be Talking About with the Bo Bergdahl Controversy.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
Great to have you on.
Yeah.
Hi, Scott.
It's great to be speaking again so quickly, isn't it, after our talk last week.
But hey, my pleasure.
Things have been happening.
Yeah.
Well, you're absolutely great on this.
And it's one of the world's most important issues or well, one of mine anyway.
It's right back in the news again.
I don't know.
I guess I'll start with the part that pisses me off the most.
And that is that people are actually pretending that it's some kind of controversy that the president let someone out of Guantanamo Bay prison.
Are you kidding me?
What is this crap?
Well, I mean, I think to some people, releasing anyone from Guantanamo, you know, is a problem.
I mean, you know that to those, you know, the rabid right wingers on Guantanamo, every single person who's ever been held there was the worst kind of terrorist imaginable.
You know, that's about as far from the truth as we can get, because they've only ever been a handful of genuinely dangerous people in Guantanamo.
Now, you know, these are people who some of them held senior positions with the Taliban.
So so obviously, you know, I can understand that people could get upset because people who might have actually done something are being freed.
But they're forgetting the context that, you know, the U.S. troops are going to be drawing down from Afghanistan at the end of the year.
And no lesser figure than John Bellinger, who was part of the Bush administration as a legal advisor, has been talking about this in the last few days and saying, look, you know, when this happens, when these men are withdrawn significantly from from Afghanistan at the end of the year, we will no longer have a reason to be holding senior Taliban figures, anyone connected with the Taliban, because the hostilities will have come to an end.
You know, this is a guy who, as I say, you know.
I'm sorry, just to be clear there, Andy, you're saying he was saying that anyway before this Bergdahl thing even broke, right?
No, this was his response to it.
This was pretty much his immediate considered response to it.
But he wasn't lying and just making this up to try to justify it.
It's clear that that was already the plan was, hey, when the war's over, we got to let these guys go because, well, you know, they've been trying to talk about this for two years, you know.
And I also think, Scott, you know, all this all this nonsense from people trying to criticize the president are also ignoring the fact that, you know, it's impossible towards the end of a war not to not for the different parties involved to be talking.
And in fact, I saw that Colonel Morris Davis has been talking about this is a man who talks a lot of sense on Guantanamo, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions who came to understand what a wretched and disgraceful place Guantanamo is.
So, you know, we've just got a lot of hot air coming from people whose whose main motive is to attack President Obama.
I'm just trying to step back from this for a minute, Scott, and think if it was a Republican president now, if the same circumstances were in place that there's going to be a major troop withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of the year and that, you know, responsible establishment figures are saying, yeah, this is going to mark the point at which it's impossible to carry on holding Taliban prisoners.
Are you negotiating with people?
Are you making arrangements?
Are things happening like this?
Yes, they would be happening.
And would the president be getting as much flack?
No, he wouldn't.
Well, and here's the thing of it, too, is I hate Obama and I'd catapult him right into the sun myself if, you know, I got to carry out the sentence after his fair trial and everything.
But it's the complete and total lack of the fair trials thing that to me makes the whole operation illegitimate and and, in fact, unconstitutional.
And so, damn any inferior law, the president's obligation is to enforce the law.
But that's starts with the Constitution itself.
And so, you know, some congressional mandate that he has to let them know if he's going to let them if he's going to actually move someone out of that prison or not, is that's not a crime at all for him to ignore that they don't have that authority in the first place.
None of them have the authority to keep anyone there at all.
So they certainly don't have any authority to add extra restrictions trying to prevent the president for moving people out of there.
And when, in fact, he prefers this diplomatic cover from them anyway.
Right.
He didn't want to really close the thing.
He never really tried to get the Congress to let him close the thing.
He just likes making it their fault that he can't.
Well, partly, Scott, I mean, we may be slightly different opinions on this.
Well, I mean, I remember Greenwald wrote about this at Salon back then.
They had all the quotes in The Washington Post of all the senators who said, oh, when the president said he wanted to close Guantanamo, we were like, hell yeah, let's close Guantanamo.
Come on, everybody, let's start working on it and whatever.
And then they found out that he was not helping them at all and that the president was not waiting on this issue whatsoever and that he would not.
And they got word from on high.
No, he will not make a phone call.
He will not ask a favor.
He will not send a staffer to ask a favor.
He will not participate in really trying to get Congress to get to push this thing through, which they were perfectly prepared to do in his first hundred days.
The son of a bitch.
Yeah, partly, I mean, and I and I agree.
Fundamentally, I agree with that analysis, Scott.
But, you know, the the the problem where the administration got caught up in a knot was that they they said they wanted to close Guantanamo and they didn't have any details of how they were going to do that.
And they found themselves unable to come up with any details of it when that was required.
And that's partly I think, you know, it's partly just that they they were a bit inept.
They didn't plan it very well because they, you know, President Obama established a high level interagency task force to review the cases of all the prisoners.
He wanted to know what that what his task force was going to tell him about the men he'd inherited from President Bush before he really made decisions about things.
And, you know, that's what that's I think that's largely the reason that he was so useless in in the first year and failed to take advantage of the position that he had.
I also don't think that Congress people on his side were very helpful either.
I think they they were very willing to fall into the trap that was laid for them by the Republicans, which was to say, you know, we mustn't be seen as being weak on national security.
And all this talk of closing Guantanamo makes makes us look weak on national security.
So I think the blame needs to be spread around.
And, you know, I think I think really this is the problem with Guantanamo.
Well, I'm sorry, because, you know, all the blame on the Republicans that just goes by default.
I mean, they were the ones who created this whole mess.
And of course, they're absolutely horrible on it.
But the thing of it is, and we've seen this, you know, a few times anyway, even Obama, who is, you know, he backs down on a lot of things.
But if he insists on something, he doesn't just win with his own party.
He wins with the whole Congress, basically.
I mean, he came out in the State of the Union address in January and said, hey, these extra sanctions that you're trying to put on Iran, knock it off right now.
And they said, yes, sir.
Mr. Leader, sir, because, you know, they worship him.
He's the he's the queen of America.
You know, he's generally, you know, I think that he's been, you know, you know that I think that he's been very poor on Guantanamo because, you know, when you listen to what he says, he says that he says things that are objectively true about how disgraceful Guantanamo is and why it must be closed.
But when it's come to him acting on it over and over again, he's he's actually refused to use the powers that he has and to override Congress.
Right.
And I'm sorry, because I talk too damn much and I did not mean to sound sexist there.
I was only comparing his sovereignty as dear leader to your queen.
I wasn't trying to call him a queen.
We'll be right back with the heroic Andy Worthington in just a second.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Andy Worthington.
Andy Worthington, dot CO dot UK.
Expert on Guantanamo Bay and the lawless prison down there in communist Cuba.
That Obama has failed to close, although, you know, I guess, Andy, it seems like if they don't impeach him and remove him from office for doing the right thing for once here, then that means he can go ahead and move all the rest of them without telling Congress to write and go ahead and close the damn thing down.
That's actually I haven't had a chance to look at the article yet, but it seems like that's the gist of this new piece by Glenn Greenwald.
The title is what excuse remains for Obama's failure to close Gitmo?
It turns out he wasn't so restricted by all those congressional rules after all.
Just like those of us always said, he's the commander in chief.
He can move those troops and Congress can go take a hike.
Well, he has you know, he's had a waiver in the legislation that's existed for over two years now since Congress imposed a lot of restrictions on the release of prisoners.
He was always able to use the waiver to bypass them if he thought it was in the national security interest of the United States.
And when you listen to what he says about Guantanamo and its continued existence, it's always in the national security interest of the United States to get prisoners out of there and get the place closed down.
So, you know, he didn't do it because it was it was politically inconvenient.
It was going to cause a stink with the Republicans and with some members of his own party.
And he wasn't prepared to do it.
So, yeah, you know, maybe maybe the sign from this is that he means business, that he is going to accelerate the release of prisoners.
But, you know, I'm not holding my breath until we actually see that, Scott, because clearly, you know, I think that what's what this is specifically about, as I said at the beginning, is, you know, the kind of negotiations that go on when you're drawing down troops at the end of a long military conflict.
Right.
And that goes right to who these men are, is, you know, people are saying I saw even Judge Napolitano was saying, oh, well, this is material support to a terrorist group.
Well, the Taliban is not a terrorist group.
They're not a bunch of Arab Afghan bin Laden nights from Cairo and Riyadh.
They're the Taliban.
The Pashtuns, they're from there and they're the former.
These specific men are former government officials in the Taliban.
You might say they are once and future government officials.
Now that America has lost another humiliating defeat over there and they have to withdraw and these guys are obviously coming back to power within a very short amount of time from now.
You know, these guys will probably be, you know, meeting at the U.N. in New York in a little while.
How the hell does that make them a terrorist group?
I mean, is this all or is this all just semantics with no actual connection to reality?
I mean, it seems like, yeah, I think the courtroom, a judge would insist that words have to mean things or else we just can't proceed this way.
Well, I think this is what you get when, you know, when a government decides that it's going to capture anybody, civilian soldiers, a small number of actual terrorists is going to call them all enemy combatants and claim that they don't have any rights.
And, you know, what we've seen in the 12 years that this has been going on is that the shorthand for enemy combatants has become terrorists.
These are all terrorists.
That's never been true.
And the majority of the people who have been held, if they're not just, you know, completely innocent civilians, were people who are engaged in some kind of military context, which means that they should have been prisoners of war and that, you know, America's ended up in this pickle with people losing all all of their relationship to reality because they've become seduced by the nonsense that was established by Bush.
All right.
Now, let me let me make sure that I understand you here, right, because I think I got this right.
But in other words, what you're saying is there are two choices to do this under Geneva, under the law, under sanity.
They're either prisoners of war or they're criminals.
So either hold them for the duration of the conflict until they win and drive us out and then let them go so they can come back to power or you convict them in a court of law.
And what's happened here is that we're still living in David Addington's world where there is no law and the U.S. government.
That's Dick Cheney's lawyer, everybody, where it's sort of a state of war, but it's an undeclared one.
And the entire world is a battlefield, even the bottom of the ocean and et cetera, et cetera, including the homeland here.
And so.
In other words, I guess if they had just gone with the rule of law, these guys would have either already been convicted or they would be POWs now and then that would be perfectly within the authority of Barack Obama to trade POWs.
Right.
Just like when they traded communist prisoners for John McCain back when.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, and I think the Obama administration has taken the position from the beginning when they were looking at the legal basis for holding people that they were holding them in, you know, according to the international rules of war.
So, you know, while not actually saying, yeah, OK, we have prisoners of war here, you know, they've kind of been acknowledging that that's more or less what the situation is.
And I think it's now coming becoming clearer that that's what we've got now.
You know, all the people who are saying the president shouldn't be doing any deals under any circumstances.
How can you release these terrorists?
Blah, blah.
These are people who have completely lost touch with the reality.
What John McCain said, they were the worst killers in the history of the world.
But what what we do need to look at is, OK, well, if he's doing a deal and acknowledging that he's going to release soldiers, then then how many of the men that are still held at Guantanamo, the ones who aren't cleared for release, the men who are cleared for release, which is over half of them, should be put on a plane and sent home or to another country tomorrow.
You know, it's disgusting that those men are still held there who have done nothing.
Nobody insignificant people when when significant people can get released because they're valuable enough to be part of a prisoner swap.
That's not acceptable.
But there are you know, there are 60 or so other prisoners at Guantanamo who who, you know, the government has said over the years that it thought were too dangerous to release that some of them that it wanted to prosecute.
His trials have fallen apart.
It's now set up a review process to look at the cases of these men.
And what I'm saying is, let's look at these cases of these men properly then.
And let's find out how many of these foreigners who went to Afghanistan and trained in training camps and fought or supported the Taliban in any way.
What are we looking at here?
I'm saying that what we're looking at here is that these men were soldiers engaged in military conflict as much as the Taliban were, and that they were not al-Qaeda.
They were not international terrorists.
And that because they went to a training camp where every now and then Osama bin Laden turned up and made a speech does not prove what the Bush administration wanted to prove in the first place, that that you know, that it basically turned warfare into terrorism.
That's what's happened since 9-11 is that the U.S. establishment has regarded any attempt to confront it militarily.
And I don't mean in terms of terrorism, but militarily as terrorism.
And that's how we've ended up with, you know, the disgrace that we've spoken about many times of the United States convicting a child for war crimes in the case of al-Qaeda, which is completely unacceptable.
Right.
Which I was just about to bring up, because in that case, their accusations against him on the facts were clearly lies.
And they clearly had tortured these lies out of this poor kid and threatened the worst crimes against his family and all this when he's only 15 years old.
And then the crime that they accuse him of committing, throwing a grenade in self-defense at an attacking Delta Force officer, that they called out a war crime when by no definition of war crime anywhere ever before.
Is that a war crime?
Throwing a grenade at a soldier who's invading and attacking the country you're in.
And especially when now we're talking about a 15 year old who is not even his own agent at all.
His father was the boss of him and dropped him off with these guys in the first place.
Yeah.
The whole thing is absolutely insane.
And I guess he's back in Canada now, but still in prison, right?
Yeah, no, that's right.
But, you know, I mean, you know, just to get back to who's still in Guantanamo, I do think, you know, and I hope I hope to be writing about it, having a look at it in more detail.
I'm sure I will be over the next few weeks.
But, you know, we get we are going to see clearly we've got you know, we've got the lunatics think they're in the ascendancy at the moment.
They're going to be throwing all kinds of mud at the people held in Guantanamo and hoping that some of it sticks.
But I really do think that it's time to start raising this question because it's been obscured for all these years, ever since 9-11 essentially, that, you know, you can't you can't throw away the key for people that you're holding who who never did anything apart from something in a military context and just bandy about these claims that they're all terrorists.
Exactly what you were saying with John McCain, you know, he isn't briefed very well, Mr. McCain, if he doesn't look at the cases of these five men and understand that there is no way that all of these men have blood on their hands.
Certainly, it appears that some of them well, it's alleged that some of them did.
That is Afghan blood on their hands.
I don't think there's a case that can be made for any of these men directly having been involved in the deaths of Americans.
They weren't interested in Americans.
These were Taliban guys who were involved in a conflict in Afghanistan amongst the various factions of the Afghans.
And, you know, we're just seeing lazy, lazy lies being being thrown about, you know, right enough to the high level of people like Senator McCain.
Yeah, exactly.
And he's talking about these Taliban, you know, one or two of them maybe are implicated in this massacre.
Fine.
That that makes them, you know, even war criminals.
But again, not against Americans.
And this is the same John McCain in the U.S. government that they're backing a government that has general skin them alive after you rape them, dosed them as their secretary of defense over there right now.
I mean, this guy's a worst war criminal in Central Asia.
And if they thought these guys were bad, Scott, maybe they should have signed up to the International Criminal Court and sent them there.
Yeah, sounds good to me or somewhere.
All right.
We're out of time.
Thank you, Andy.
Appreciate it.
Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
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