All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, check it out, guys.
It's the year 2020 and I'm still talking with Andy Worthington about the Guantanamo Bay Prison.
The great Andy Worthington, investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator, and public speaker, and he wrote the book, The Guantanamo Files, before Bradley Manning leaked The Guantanamo Files.
He already had it going on.
And also he produced the documentary Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
He keeps the great website at andyworthington.co.uk, andyworthington.co.uk.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andy?
I'm good, Scott.
Yeah, I've just arrived in the U.S. from London, so I'm in New York at the moment, heading down to Washington, D.C. tomorrow to join the, by now, the annual rally outside the White House calling for the closure of Guantanamo.
So this is actually the 10th January that I've come over because originally George W.
Bush unfortunately opened the prison on January the 11th, so that's why we meet outside the White House and every year call for its closure.
A whole load of different groups, Amnesty International, and Witness Against Torture, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, loads of other groups.
Close Guantanamo, which is the group that I set up with the attorney, Tom Wilner, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo, which is now eight long years ago.
So yeah.
Yeah, man.
Yeah, man.
Well, so, you know, one thing that's an interesting phenomenon about this show nowadays is that there are people who are way too young to know the first thing about this stuff, who now are old enough and interested and want to know.
So it actually really is a fair question to ask you, where is Guantanamo Bay?
What is Guantanamo Bay?
And who gives a damn?
Well, fair enough.
It's interesting.
I've done a few things with school kids and students this year in the UK, and I've looked at the audience of these young people and realized that so many of them weren't even born when the prison started 18 years ago tomorrow.
So it's on the grounds of the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which the United States has had since the very end of the 19th century and has had on this lease that can't be broken unless both the United States and Cuba agree to it and the U.S. doesn't want to leave.
So hence the naval base is there.
And when after the after 9-11 and after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, when the Bush administration was looking for somewhere that they could hold prisoners who would be beyond the reach of the U.S. courts, they looked around a variety of foreign locations that they had and decided that Guantanamo Bay would be good because they can do whatever they want there, but the ultimate sovereignty allegedly still belongs to Cuba.
And so we start off with a prison where your first question would have to be, why do they want a prison that's beyond the reach of the courts?
And the obvious answer to that is so that they can do horrible things to people and they won't have to be answerable to it.
And that's the fundamental foundational story of Guantanamo, is they set up a prison that was intended to be outside the law so that they could do whatever they wanted with these people that they rounded up in Afghanistan or crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion.
And as we later found out, of course, many dozens of people who weren't anywhere near Afghanistan or Pakistan, but who were rounded up in the CIA's global dragnet and the whole sorry story of the CIA black sites.
And that's the story of Guantanamo.
And I've been working on it since 2006 on pretty much a full time basis, trying to tell the world about it and trying to get it closed down.
Worked through all those long years of President Obama, of having to chip away at getting him to at least release prisoners, certainly not ever to fulfill the promise that he made right at the beginning of his presidency that he was going to close it.
But now we're three years into the presidency of Donald Trump, and what an absolute disaster and what a shame and a disgrace it is for the United States that in the last year, Scott, not a single prisoner has been released from Guantanamo.
And in Bush's three years, just one man has been released.
And he's a man who had agreed to a plea deal in his military commission trial, which meant that he was going to be sent back to Saudi Arabia for continued imprisonment.
Otherwise, Trump has done what he tweeted he was going to do before he even became president, two weeks before he was inaugurated three years ago.
I love that Freudian slip where he accidentally called him Bush just now, but it makes no difference.
He could have called him Obama.
They all look alike.
These guys.
No more releases from Gitmo, he said, and he's been true to his word.
So that's the sad situation that we're in.
Well, Obama had stopped releasing them a long time ago anyway, right?
He stopped for nearly three years when he faced obstacles that were raised by the Republicans and they were considerable obstacles, but he chose not to take on the Republicans, which of course he could have done.
He had the ability to do that.
He decided that it wasn't- He ran for president on that.
He ran for president on that.
I know exactly.
Exactly.
People forget that.
That was one of his things, was this thing is a disgrace and we're going to shut it down.
And you know, back in the Salon.com days, Greenwald had written about this and I'm pretty sure it was a Washington Post article that he was kind of highlighting, if that helps anyone find it.
But it's where the Washington Post had gone and talked to some Democratic senators and how they were all raring to go.
They were going to, you know, get rid of Guantanamo.
They were going to go along with him and they were already sticking their neck out.
And the White House, I guess, had indicated, yes, we want your help.
You guys advance the thing and then we'll come and give you cover and we'll work together.
And then they'd never heard from him again.
And the Obama government just completely dropped the issue and never pursued it whatsoever.
And then all the Democrat senators who'd been, you know, interested in doing this, and it was a political risk, but they, you know, they thought this was part of the Obama agenda.
They were ready to do it.
And then they realized that they were all out there by themselves without him.
And so they turned around and went back and quit fighting for it.
And that was the end of that.
Yeah.
It was the kind of thing where he could have had it his way.
He could have had it your way like that.
But he gave up the chance for no reason in exchange for what?
He got John McCain to shut up for a day about something or something, right?
You know.
But, you know, and so, you know, as you so rightly point out, he didn't do it.
And that has repercussions beyond his own failure to fulfill the promise that he made.
Now, so let's go back to, you said about, you know, random Afghans getting rounded up in this kind of thing.
And so at some point when your book came out, even, I think we were up at 700 and something guys.
This was in, you know, the Bush years.
But before Bush was gone, actually, I guess it was 800, because before Bush was gone, he'd let 700 and something of them go.
He let go, I think it was about 530.
All right, then.
And it was about 200 that Obama let go.
But yeah, Bush, you know, Bush primarily responded to political criticism from certainly most immediately from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And these were all people who they had absolutely nothing on, which is not to say that everybody that they kept, they really do have something on.
But no, these really were, oh, come on, this guy's just some goat herd or let him go home.
This kind of thing.
Because they had they had no interest in ascertaining whether they got the right people or not.
You know, I mean, imagine, really, if people haven't thought about it, imagine the stupidity and the arrogance of saying officially, everyone that we have rounded up is an enemy combatant.
We don't need to you know, we don't need to go through any of these these quaint and old fashioned ways of assessing who we've got.
We're telling the worst of the worst, they said.
Yeah, exactly.
And in fact, they knew nothing about them.
And so they ended up sending all these people to Guantanamo.
The people at Guantanamo receiving them didn't know who they were and then had to set about a process of trying to find out who they were.
And then this terrible kind of thing like the like the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries comes in, where when people said that they didn't know anything and that they were nobodies, they were like, Oh, hang on, these guys have been trained by a high level.
Right.
That's right in the playbook is they say that they're innocent.
That's how you know they did it.
Yeah.
And so that but that's what actually happened at Guantanamo.
You've got a situation where they start torturing people because they think they're lying.
And actually, they're torturing loads of people who weren't lying.
They really were nobodies.
I mean, it's really it's it's it's shameful, Scott.
I do think that if we ever reach a point where one day this place is closed and one day, you know, the United States looks back on the history of Guantanamo in the way that the United States looks back on the history of some of the other terrible things that have happened, like the internment of Japanese Americans, let's say they will.
And the full story comes out of the incompetence and the cruelty.
It will.
It will really shock people.
But, you know, but that's one of the reasons why certain people have worked so hard to try and avoid the real truth coming out, because the real truth is such a shame and a disgrace.
Yeah, sure is.
And, you know, especially going back to Robert Gates and Colin Powell and George W. Bush said that they wanted to close Guantanamo and they didn't.
But George W. Bush himself had said, oh, yeah, we definitely need to get to work on closing that.
Then Obama ran on it.
All this time has passed and these guys are still sitting there.
They haven't accomplished a single trial yet down there, have they?
Other than David Hicks is a plea bargain, innocent Australian.
They did succeed in in one trial right at the end of the Bush administration, but it was a one sided trial.
So the guy that they put on trial refused to take part in it.
And he ordered his attorney not to represent him.
So he was convicted and he's got a life sentence for having made a promotional video for Al Qaeda in a trial where he didn't speak a word in his own defense and didn't allow himself to be represented.
So not really, not really exactly a fair trial, is it?
And actually, you know, the charges on which he was convicted and on which other prisoners have been convicted, mainly through plea deals.
Most of those have fallen apart when they've been challenged in the courts, because what Congress invented for the Guantanamo trials was war crimes that aren't war crimes.
It's really as simple as that.
You know, there are the most fundamental charge that they tried to apply at Guantanamo is providing material support for terrorism.
And they've tried to make that into a war crime, which it isn't.
It is, however, a crime that you can quite easily prosecute successfully in federal court.
But of course, they completely cut off the avenue for any federal court trials for the Guantanamo prisoners, which by the way, even if you're innocent, they can convict you in federal court.
No problem.
So if these guys are really guilty, hey, yeah, well, you know, I mean, I'm not sure, Scott.
I mean, your readers, your your listeners, a lot of them are people who are fairly clued up about things.
Some of them, some of your listeners would have followed Guantanamo's history and will know, but a lot of people don't know.
One prisoner from Guantanamo was sent to the U.S. mainland and was put on trial in federal court.
Then the Republicans shut down the possibility of that happening again.
But you know, he got a life sentence and he's currently incarcerated in a supermax prison.
So the suggestion that, you know, the trial somehow have to take place at Guantanamo is just simply a nonstarter.
But it's never been allowed to happen again.
And Obama, when he at one point said that he was going to have federal court trials, when he got criticized as so often, he backed down.
But, you know, the main problem that we have now at Guantanamo is that we've got a bunch of guys who are, you know, some of them are accused of very serious crimes.
The people allegedly responsible for 9-11 are there.
They're supposed to be put on trial.
And it's a broken system.
It's like Groundhog Day.
It just goes round and round.
The trials never happen.
Because on the one hand, the U.S. government is trying to hide the evidence of all the torture that was inflicted on these men when they were in black sites.
And on the other side, of course, the defense lawyers working for the men are saying you can't have a fair trial if we don't talk about the torture that you inflicted on these men when they were held in CIA black sites.
And it goes round and round and round.
And you know, they're the only people who are involved in anything that resembles a legal process.
The shameful thing is that the other men who are held there are pretty much just completely abandoned, stuck in Guantanamo.
As far as Donald Trump is concerned, and if he gets his way, they will stay there for the rest of their lives, held without charge or trial.
They will die there 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, who knows?
No due process, no rights, no anything that resembles the law and the sense of justice that we're supposed to think that the American people believe in.
And this is Guantanamo still today.
This is what has happened as a result of a place that was set up by George W. Bush, that was maintained by President Obama, and has now been inherited by Donald Trump.
And it's almost entirely been forgotten, Scott.
And yet those fundamental truths about who are held there, how these people are held there without charge or trial, and that nothing will stop Trump holding them for as long as he is president, with no possible way that they can be released.
And you know, maybe Trump's successors will believe the same thing.
So in the American people's name, this place continues to hold people in a way that is totally unacceptable for all the standards that America claims to hold dear.
And nobody cares anymore, you know?
Yeah.
Well, it sure is.
You know, I actually searched Guantanamo in Google, and it didn't pull up news stories at the top at all.
It just pulled up the Wikipedia.
There were no news stories, or not, there were none.
There were so few that it didn't register as a news topic.
There's only Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times who, you know, is working with the Pulitzer people as well, and they're paying to send her to Guantanamo where, you know, she's frequently the only reporter there who's actually reporting on the trial proceedings and all of that stuff, which you know, need to be watched.
They need to be reported on.
But in general, as for the rest of the story of Guantanamo, nothing.
And in fact, that's it.
It's her.
It's her and military.com, which is just essentially a press release.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, and the stuff that I've been doing for so many years, Scott, that I keep doing for, you know, there is a small audience of people who are attentive to this cause and who care about it, and who have been with me all the way with this.
But as a general topic of concern, it has almost completely dropped off the radar.
And you know, the fundamental thing about Guantanamo has always been, you know, I worked hard on establishing the stories of the men held there, because the intention of the Bush administration was to dehumanize them.
And it's like, no, no, no.
These people who have been uniquely deprived of all their rights are actually human beings, and they deserve to have their stories told.
But the fundamental principle of it is what should still shock the American people, even if they don't want to care about the individuals.
The principle that the United States claims that it can hold people without charge of trial forever, without any sense of due process at Guantanamo, ought to be something that remains alarming to American people.
Because today it's the Muslims, for 18 years now it's been these Muslims.
While that facility remains open, what is to stop the principle from being taken forward that other people can be designated for this kind of open-ended, indefinite, arbitrary detention?
Well, Obama signed the law in 2011.
In the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, they authorize them to do this to us.
Yeah.
To American citizens, to U.S. persons.
Well, which he didn't do, though, and, you know- Right, he didn't exercise it.
So people objected for a minute, and then they said, well, it's probably fine.
And how much do people trust Donald Trump?
Because, you know, we know that he has said that he wanted to send new prisoners there.
He wanted to send ISIS prisoners there.
Fortunately, he was surrounded by, at that time, I don't know whether this is still true, at that time he had people who advised him that it wasn't helpful.
Guantanamo is not a helpful place to send anybody if you want to deal with them in any way that involves anything legal.
If you've got somebody who's committed any kind of crime that has a terrorist association, don't mess about with Guantanamo.
Send them to federal court.
You will almost certainly have a successful prosecution.
Right.
Of course, you know, the FBI can frame up anybody for anything and get a conviction.
So again, the guilty ought to be no problem.
And speaking of crime and guilt, there's a CIA black site at Guantanamo.
They called it Penny Lane, or Camp No.
And a guard named Joseph Hickman blew the whistle.
And the guys from Seton Hall University and then the other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine and Columbia University, wrote up a giant thing called the Guantanamo Murders, about how in July of 2006, they murdered three guys there at Camp No.
And how up until this day, they got away with it.
And Hickman even wrote a book about it.
And so when they talk about how, guess who, John Durham, the guy who's now in charge of getting to the bottom of Brennan's attempted coup against the sitting president and the Russiagate hoax here, he's the same guy that Eric Holder had brought in to lead the cover up and allow the CIA to get away with, first, the obstruction of justice and destroying all the torture videotapes.
And then secondly, he narrowed down all the torture out of the question and said, hey, they had a memo.
They can torture.
No problem.
Forget the law.
They had a memo.
But there were two murders, Gul Rahman at the Salt Pit torture dungeon in Afghanistan.
And then I think it's Abu Jamadi in Abu Ghraib, who was murdered by CIA in Abu Ghraib prison, hanged from the ceiling by his arms behind his back until it crushed his chest and suffocated him.
But they always leave out the three at Guantanamo Bay at the CIA black site there.
And there's just been no accountability for your outright murder of these guys.
Oh no, they all accidentally died by choking on a rag or some kind of thing that, oh yeah, no, but nobody stuffed that in there down their throat or anything.
Yeah.
Well, no, absolutely Scott.
And you know, not just those guys.
I mean, there are, you know, there are some serious question marks about some of the other prisoners who died in the years after that.
I mean, I'm amazed in a way that no one has died at Guantanamo since 2012 unless they're, you know, covering something up, which they could be.
You know, some of the men at Guantanamo don't have any kind of legal representation at all.
You know, they could disappear off the books completely.
Who's able to really ascertain what's going on there?
But if we take it at face value that everyone there is still alive, I think it's remarkable that no one has died at the prison.
I'll tell you, I interviewed John Kiriakou and he said he'd be amazed if it was that few people that he was at CIA headquarters, essentially receiving these intelligence reports and that he thought there was plenty of room in there for people to have just been disappeared and their corpses buried somewhere and nobody ever recorded who they were, how they died.
But there are plenty of murders.
There must've been, he thought.
And that's, that's excluding the military.
That's the CIA guys at the black sites.
And it's terrible how, you know, some, we talk about this and so much of it sounds like, just sounds like ancient history now.
I mean, I don't know whether you saw it, Scott, but I thought the report was, it was actually quite a good film and I would encourage people to.
Oh yes.
It's absolutely great.
And you know what?
I hate the new Star Wars movies and so I don't like the guy very much, but still, he was a bit redeemed because that movie was so damn good.
He's really good in it, isn't he?
The report, it's the torture report, but torture's redacted.
So it's just the report.
So you know, I mean, that's, that's, that's been a brave effort to try and keep this story alive.
But I do really feel that a lot of the time we're talking about things that, that, that don't appear to have a contemporary connection anymore.
They sound like ancient history and it's like, they're not, this hasn't been resolved.
This hasn't been cleaned up, you know?
And that's the thing really with Guantanamo, with this anniversary tomorrow is like, is like police people don't forget this place still exists and all the long embedded crimes that are associated with that prison are still alive, horribly alive under Donald Trump.
You know, these 26 guys who are the majority of the 40 men who are held were made eligible for a parole type review process under President Obama in his last few years.
And you know, that was his attempt to overcome some of the obstacles that had been raised by Republicans that a parole type process would allow the prisoners to express contrition for what they're accused of, regardless of whether they did it or not.
And to, you know, contact their family members and establish that they were going to construct these meaningful lives after Guantanamo and would never hold a grudge against the United States.
And it allowed him to release several dozen men, low level prisoners who there was no good reason to hold, which happened before he left office.
And he left this process in place, the periodic review boards, which now continue under Trump.
And Trump can claim that there is still a robust review process involving the military, the intelligence services, looking at the cases of these men.
They do still carry on, Scott, but not a single prisoner has been approved for release since Trump took over.
Because of course, the commander in chief is saying to the periodic review boards, you're doing this in a context where I've said there must be no releases from Guantanamo under any circumstances.
And so no one has been released.
You have to look quite closely at the contemporary history of Guantanamo this last year to realize that all the prisoners know that this is now a sham.
They have all, they're all boycotting their hearings.
They're not having anything to do with it.
They have concluded that they have all been abandoned in Guantanamo and that they're, you know, destined to die there at some point in the future, that there is no justice anymore.
And the whole thing is crazy that we're talking about the USA here.
If you went to American government school, not you, because I know you're a Brit, but for the rest of us, you go to American government school and you learn all this stuff about truth and justice and all this stuff.
You got these guys sitting there where you got one group of guys who are awaiting a trial that they'll never get and is always postponed and is always some ridiculous hoax.
And occasionally they embolish the entire system and start it over from scratch again and all this garbage.
Then you have another group of guys who, as you say, they go to the hearings, they're cleared, but then they still can't go home.
They're held indefinitely.
And then you have a third group of guys who they've already been told, we know we don't have any evidence against you, but we still don't like you and we're going to hold you forever anyway.
We're not even pretending that we could prove it even to a hearing, much less a trial.
We have nothing to demonstrate your guilt, or at least that we didn't torture out of you or somebody else, but we believe it and we hate you and we're keeping you.
And that's it.
They're not even told they're getting a review or a trial of any kind, much less a legal constitutional one.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, you put it like that and then you try and imagine if that was to happen in any other context.
You know, I'm not saying there aren't colossal problems with the whole of the U.S. judicial system, because there clearly are, but in terms of this isolated camp and these foreigners who are still held there, this notion that any type of objective review that has any meaning can be allowed to exist, that really just at the whim of the president and lawmakers, and then are just held forever on the basis that, you know, they're not good people.
Don't trouble us with things like evidence.
You know, that's, that's a bit quaint and old fashioned.
This is really exactly the same thing that was set up by the Bush administration all those years ago, when in fact people like Alberto Gonzalez, Bush's lawyer, and David Addington, Dick Cheney's lawyer, were writing these memos in which they were making their plans to strip the prisoners of any rights whatsoever, which is still fundamentally the case for them.
But, you know, and they were talking about the quaint, the quaintness of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, which couldn't apply.
We haven't moved on.
Eighteen years on, we haven't moved on.
And yet these poor guys that are still left there are almost entirely forgotten.
Could have been Ron.
You know, twice Ron Paul ran for president for a major party nomination, twice.
And yeah, nope.
The American people said, no, thank you.
Silver platter.
Here, you want to undo everything wrong that we're not supposed to be doing?
Here you go.
And they said, no.
We'll go with style over substance, they said.
And so they did.
And here we are.
As you say, it is 2020.
And you know what?
The Bush and the Obama eras are long gone past.
They might as well be the, you know, Eisenhower years or something, man.
It's a whole new decade now.
And whether Trump is reelected this year or not, it's still, there's a major break in the calendar.
You know what I mean?
2020 and everything.
It just hits a dividing line in a way that really does quite unfairly make all of this seem old and out of date and irrelevant.
And you know, I'm writing a book about the terror war and it does seem like I'm fighting the last war, but hey, the war is still on.
It's not over yet at all.
It's going on all over the place, but you know, whether you can get people to still think of it as being important and mattering in this time or not, I don't know, but I guess we've got to stay at it.
Well, exactly.
That's the thing.
You know, like I was saying to you, if not for the sake of the fact that these are individual people with stories, the principle alone is enough that someone has to keep saying this is both wrong and dangerous for the United States government to be allowed to get away with the fact that it has an offshore prison where it holds people without charge of trial, without any kind of due process.
You know, for 18 years, it's been Muslims, who's to say that tomorrow it's not going to be some other group of people.
All right, man, well, listen, please stay at it, Andy.
We need you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thanks for taking the interest on the anniversary, Scott.
And, you know, I'll talk to you next January if we don't find an excuse to talk sometime this year.
Yeah.
Hey, thanks again, man.
Really appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Nice to talk to you.
See you later.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Andy Worthington.
He's at andyworthington.co.uk.
The book is The Guantanamo Files and the movie is Outside the Law.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
