All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Andy Worthington.
Andyworthington.co.uk is his great website.
Of course, he wrote the book The Guantanamo Files, and he produced the documentary Outside the Law, and he has been at least among the, if not the, very greatest chronicler of American policy at Guantanamo Bay for the last 20 years.
Now the official anniversary, 20 years.
We had just the other day on, I guess it was the 11th.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you?
Yeah, I'm great, Scott.
Thanks.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
I see you've been very busy as well.
Yeah, man.
I can't keep up.
You should see Mount Laundry in the other room.
It's just out of control.
Spread way too thin.
Listen, so 20 years ago, I'll do it like this, man.
I was interviewed the other day, and they asked me, hey, what's Guantanamo, and what's the controversy?
You know, in other words, in the broadest terms possible.
What is it that's been going on the last 20 years there that you think the people might need to know about there, Andy?
Well, I think fundamentally what people need to know is that if you're going to deprive people of their liberty for any amount of time, there are only two acceptable ways to do it.
And if you don't follow those two acceptable routes, then what you're behaving like is a dictatorship.
So they are that either you charge somebody with a crime, and then you fairly swiftly put them on trial for that, or you hold them as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions until the end of hostilities.
And what we're still seeing with Guantanamo after 20 years is what happens when an administration, in this case it was the Bush administration, decides that international laws and treaties and norms don't apply.
Nothing applies apart from their right to say that they could take people to a prison that they put on a naval base in Cuba.
So they intended it to be beyond the reach of the law, where they would hold people forever if they wanted, literally without any rights whatsoever as human beings.
And despite all the very brave struggles that have been undertaken by lawyers over the last 20 years, which have all ended up for a variety of reasons being thwarted, even though technically the prisoners have habeas corpus rights, for example.
But what we still have after 20 years, Scott, is a situation where there is this prison, that there is absolutely no obligation on the United States to either put these men on trial or to release them.
That's the situation.
They are, if you like, political prisoners.
Another way of looking at it is that they are prisoners of the President of the United States and of the Congress of the United States.
They're certainly not people who are held in accordance with any legal norms whatsoever.
And the men who are still held there, 39 of them, are stuck there.
Yeah.
Now, it was 40.
Who was the remainder there?
One guy's been released, not under Biden, but under Trump, right?
One guy was released under Trump.
He was obliged to release someone who'd agreed to a plea deal.
And one man was released last summer by Biden.
So he sent back to Morocco a man who had been approved for release in 2016.
And then he hasn't released anyone else since.
So, you know, that's the bad news.
If you want the slightly better news, Scott.
Yeah, I do.
It is that basically Biden inherited from the previous administration six men who had been approved for release by high-level government review processes, two of them that were set up by President Obama.
And so the man that he freed was one of these six.
So that leaves five other men who he inherited who were approved for release.
Since he came into office, and some of this has happened literally just in the last few days, opportunistically, some of these announcements were made on January 11th itself, the anniversary, just to deflect criticism.
Since he came into office, the last of these review processes, the periodic review boards, which are a parole-type process, if you like, except the problem being that people who have parole hearings have normally been convicted of something.
But it's to decide whether it's safe to release these men, whether they're contrite and whether they can demonstrate that they wish to live peaceful and constructive lives after they leave.
Since he took office, 15 men now of the 39 held have been approved for release by his periodic review boards.
Sorry, 13 men have been approved for release by his periodic review boards.
So there are now 18 of the 39 men who have been approved for release.
Again, that's all very good.
But the problem is, if you approve somebody for release and then you don't release them, that's probably more cruel than if you didn't give them that hope in the first place.
And the problem is, where else would you be told that you're going to be released from a prison and then find that you're still languishing there, you know, possibly for years and years after that decision has been taken?
It's again another example of how Guantanamo just stands outside of the law and outside of all of the normal rules that apply to depriving people of their liberty.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, I'm sorry, because this is in the details.
And I do want to do some big picture kind of look at this thing, but I'm a bit confused on this.
I want you to help catch me up about what happened after the Supreme Court ruled in that these men do get a writ of habeas corpus hearing and that the judges can decide whether the government still has a good enough excuse to hold them or not.
And then there was I know it was a complicated process because the Military Commissions Act, you know, still applies.
They are at Guantanamo under military control, not under American Justice Department jurisdiction or Bureau of Prisons jurisdiction or anything like that.
So it is complicated.
But I believe, Andy, that they were getting habeas hearings and they were being sprung.
But then Congress passed a new law.
Or was it the Obama government made a rule change?
I think it was Congress intervened and made it so that those habeas hearings don't have the power that they used to.
And the judges had a reduced ability then to set people free from there.
Do I remember that right?
No.
Actually, it was another branch of the government.
It was judges.
So after the Boumediene decision, there were two years, a period of two years there, Scott, when honestly American people could at least hold their heads up with some kind of dignity and say there is a legal route out of Guantanamo for the men still held.
So the lower court judges, the district court judges approved, approved over three dozen prisoners for release.
And as a result of that, the majority of these men were actually freed.
The law finally touched Guantanamo.
And then appeals court judges.
So the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., which was which was stuffed full of some really horrible right wingers at the time, decided to change the rules.
And in a number of rulings, they changed the rules regarding habeas, gutting it of all meaning for the Guantanamo prisoners.
They eventually decided that that everything that the government said about these men, however ridiculous, had to be treated as presumptively accurate.
How does a man who's stuck in Guantanamo with almost no connection with the outside world at all challenge the basis of what the government is saying about him?
So that from 2010, not a single prisoner until just a few months back, it's happened once.
But from 2010, habeas was gutted.
No one won their release from the prison through the courts, through the habeas process.
Most of the prisoners gave up on that.
Year after year, lawyers for the prisoners have attempted to interest the Supreme Court in taking back control of detainee issues, detainee issues from the appeals court in Washington, D.C., and the Supreme Court refused to do that.
So that's what happened.
That's why the men carried on being stuck at Guantanamo, because the law was broken for them back in 2010.
And since then, their release has relied upon these review processes, the parole type review process that I was discussing.
And actually, you know, under the review processes established under Obama, so he set up one at the beginning of his presidency that approved, you know, two thirds of the men for release.
And most of those men were eventually released.
And then the periodic review boards, he approved another 38 men for release through those.
And the majority of those were released as well.
But you know, all of this is administrative, Scott.
None of it is to do with the law.
And it is significant to me, and it should be to the American people, that the law has absolutely failed when it comes to Guantanamo.
The whole thing is just, it's almost unbelievable, and yet so believable at the same time.
Now, again, more on the weeds before we zoom out.
Sorry, but I'm trying to make up for the things that I don't remember right anymore.
Look, I mean, we're having this conversation in the future right now.
It's ridiculous.
It's 2022.
We're still talking about this.
So it's not my fault that I'm old and can't remember anything and all my hair is falling out.
Yeah.
Likewise, it becomes harder.
Right.
Got it.
Dang it.
Here's what I want to know.
What is the ratio or the count or give me a ballpark of the men there out of the 39 still held who the government claims at least one day will get trials versus those that they say outright are in this separate category where they're not even going to try to convict them even in their bogus military commission ad hoc thing that they set up here because they know they can't.
But they also say, you're just going to have to trust us that we know we're right of how bad these bad guys are, but we're never even going to test it even on our own little military tribunal.
Can you give me the the stats on that?
I can absolutely give you the stats on that, Scott.
So of the 39 men still held, 10 are currently in pretrial proceedings in this broken military commission trial system.
But, you know, at least I've been charged with something.
Two of them have already been convicted.
So that leaves 27 others.
Now, you know, what's been interesting this year is that amongst the many, many critics of the continued existence of Guantanamo, people in official positions, people who have had involvement with it in the past, people who are involved in the law.
The most significant thing, I suppose, politically in the U.S. has been that 24 senators and 75 members of the House of Representatives wrote letters to Biden.
He hasn't replied, but they wrote to him to say, you know, not only that Guantanamo must be closed, but also that they stated that it was intolerable that after 20 years, the United States was continuing to hold people indefinitely without charge of trial.
So what they did with that, you know, and what everybody who is campaigning on Guantanamo has been saying is you cannot continue to hold people who you are never going to charge.
Now, what's interesting is that, you know, these are some of these men, the people who aren't going to be charged are all eligible for the periodic review boards that I was just discussing, this parole type process, whereby now we're in this position where 18 of the 27 have now been approved for release by the administration, 13 of them under Biden.
So this is progress, Scott, so long as he actually is going to release them.
It leaves nine other men who haven't yet been approved for release by the periodic review process.
And what I do want to just share with you and your listeners, if I may, is the story that also came through on January the 11th, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo, that one of the men who has not been approved for release, his ongoing imprisonment forever without charge or trial was approved by this military panel.
And the news came out via his lawyers on the 20th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo.
It's a Yemeni man called Khalid Qasim.
Now, Khalid was never regarded as anything other than a basic foot soldier who happened to be in Afghanistan before 9-11 and then after 9-11 became tarnished as a terrorist when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan.
He's been held at Guantanamo then not on the basis of having done anything significant before he was taken there, but because in Guantanamo he has been over the years a hunger striker.
He has been an advocate for the rights of his fellow prisoners.
He has been one of those men who resisted the injustice which was meted out to him over all of these years.
He fought back against them.
And they have basically approved his ongoing imprisonment because they think that he has a bad attitude.
They don't think that he is constructively presenting to them a realistic picture of how he will be a peaceful person after he leaves Guantanamo.
So what they've done is that they've dehumanized and brutalized him for 20 years, and now they're blaming him for not coming to them in a position of contrition and humility.
It is absolutely disgraceful.
But if people want to find out a little bit more about Khaled, he was one of the artists that was featured in Art from Guantanamo, which was an exhibition of prisoners' art that was put on at John Jay College in New York a few years back.
Khaled is a really, really great artist, as well as clearly being somebody who stands up for the rights of his fellow prisoners, an intelligent man, and someone who has basically not been broken by the prison.
He is angry about what has happened to him, and as a result of that, they don't want to let him go.
It's absolutely shameful.
Yeah.
Now listen, so when it comes to the guys who are, well, okay, say the 29, or the 39, pardon me, how many of them are Afghans, or were rounded up in the initial kind of, you know, stage of the war, versus how many of these guys were former CIA black site captives who were later delivered to Guantanamo?
To sort of add a little patina of, you know, I won't say legitimacy, but the idea of some reasonableness to doing this at all, when they really needed a PR win there, because the consensus was people were starting to figure out that you filled this prison with innocent go-herders and cab drivers.
Right.
And certainly no one who had any kind of significant leadership role within Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or anything else.
Because those people all were turned over, not to, why would they turn them over to the army at Guantanamo?
Those people all went to the CIA to be tortured in Morocco and Poland and Romania.
So you know, there were 14 high-value detainees who arrived at Guantanamo in September 2006 from the black sites.
I mean, that's such a long time ago, isn't it?
Those are those are the men who, you know, I remember when President Bush gave his speech and said, you know, I've been telling you for all this time that there weren't any black sites, but now I'm here to tell you that there were.
But we've closed them down.
And here are the 14 men in Guantanamo that we brought from the black sites who are the worst of the worst.
Finally, you know, I mean, actually, all of those men, even those men don't constitute the worst of the worst.
One of them has just been approved for release by a periodic review board.
But there are 13 of them still there.
One of them was the only man who ever got out of Guantanamo to be sent to a federal court in the United States where he was convicted and is serving a life sentence.
So the 13 of the 39 are these high-value detainees.
Not all of those men have been charged.
So I think we can pretty much conclude from that that after all this time, some of their high-value detainees are not so high-value at all because they've never been able to put a case against them.
And thanks for clarifying.
By the way, I didn't mean to imply that anybody the CIA had was guilty.
Just that the CIA had all the guilty ones, which is, you know, a correlation without exact overlap there on the Venn diagram.
There are only two Afghans left in Guantanamo now.
One of them was one of the last prisoners to arrive in Guantanamo from a black site.
Not one of the 14, but an additional black site prisoner that was sent in 2008.
I think he's the last man to arrive at Guantanamo.
And the other has been approved for release.
He's an Afghan who actually was living with his family in a refugee camp in Pakistan.
And now the Biden administration is trying to work out how they can send an Afghan back.
Does it involve dealing with the Taliban?
How are they going to do that?
But, you know, all the rest of the Afghans are long gone from Guantanamo.
And they initially made up something like, you know, 30 percent of the total number of men who were held at the prison.
And just to add, you know, most of them were Taliban foot soldiers and quite a lot of them were Taliban foot soldiers under duress.
You know, they turned up in their village one day and said, you have to come and fight with us.
And the next thing they knew, they were in Guantanamo.
Yeah.
Hey, here's the proof of that is the answer to this question.
How many people originally were held there and how many had been released by the time George Bush left office on January the 20th, 2009?
Seven hundred and seventy nine men, Scott, have been held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo since it first opened, and two thirds of those men were released under George W.
Bush.
Five hundred and thirty two men were released under George W.
Bush.
OK, hang on just one second.
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So there is no narrative that, oh, yeah, that's because the wimpy liberal Democrats came and let all the bad guys out.
Instead, the only possible narrative there is that George Bush admitted that he kidnapped 500 innocent people.
Yeah, well, basically, I think that I think, you know, that that's maybe at the one extreme end of explaining who it was that he released.
They weren't necessarily innocent.
It depends what you how you would define innocence.
You know, I were Al-Qaeda terrorists guilty of war crimes against Americans.
That's who they weren't.
No, absolutely not, Scott.
But it's possible that some of those people held leadership positions in the Taliban, positions in the Taliban, for example.
And it's possible that a few of those people disguised who they were or maybe they were, you know, so brutalized by what had happened to them.
You know, again, only a few of them were minors.
Those people, Omar Khadr is certainly innocent, but you're right.
You know, I didn't mean but, you know, that's kind of the the government's old saying is, hey, nobody's innocent.
But the question is, well, wait a minute, convicted of the thing or guilty of the thing that they're being accused of in this case to the degree to which they deserve the punishment they're getting.
That's what we're talking about here.
Not whether, you know, they ever, you know, cross the age of majority and had their first relation with a woman or whatever, you know.
Yeah, well, there were there were definitely, you know, at least two dozen juveniles that were held at Guantanamo.
But, you know, the bottom line.
Wait, how many dozen juveniles?
Two dozen.
Sorry, go ahead.
Who were under 18, you know, when they when they were seized and sent to Guantanamo.
So they were clearly innocent in the real sense, but and in both senses, but anyway, I mean that you are not you are not, you know, legally responsible for your actions when you're when you're a juvenile.
That's that's the thing.
Anyway, I'm just trying to point out, too.
I mean, the important point here is that the fact that Bush sent all these people home was Bush conceding that he never should have grabbed them, that he had no business grabbing them in the first place, that essentially whoever they were, they may not have all been goat herders, but many of them were.
And, you know, and a couple of Taliban people were in there.
That's fine.
But the Taliban didn't do 9-11.
And so that's still completely beside the point.
Yeah, I mean, what I've you know, what I've concluded over the years, quite accurately, I think, is that only a few percent of the people ever held at Guantanamo can be genuinely be alleged to have been involved in any kind of way with leadership positions in Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and that the rest of them, everybody was either a civilian seized by mistake or a foot soldier.
One of the great problems of the war on terror and of Guantanamo was that the U.S. government equated being a foot soldier on the ground in Afghanistan with being a member of Al-Qaeda.
And that was because people trained at Al-Qaeda affiliated camps and stayed at Al-Qaeda affiliated guest houses.
And guess what?
Osama bin Laden once came to the camp and made a pep talk.
Soldiers are not terrorists.
There are clearly, you know, differences.
And what's and the even graver problem, Scott, is that they dressed up soldiers as terrorists.
And then the people that are actually accused of terrorism, the handful of people that are actually accused of terrorism, they pretended that they've allowed them, if you like, to be presented as warriors instead.
Everything about it is wrong.
Yeah, good point.
Well, and first of all, they let all the bad guys go and they did this bait and switch where they let Osama and his friends escape and instead took the war to the Taliban in no uncertain terms.
We decided it was more important to focus on the Taliban.
What?
And then so they needed a public relations win for the American people since they let bin Laden escape.
Well, we got to fill a prison with somebody and make it look like we're doing a great job here, right?
Like, you know, making you stay home will stop a respiratory virus from spreading around.
We're doing something.
Look at what we're doing.
Actually, Scott, you know, they simply didn't know.
I mean, you know, they rounded people up.
Most of them were sold to them.
They sent them to Guantanamo.
They wouldn't let people on the ground in the prisons in Afghanistan screen them in any meaningful way.
They got to Guantanamo.
The first commanders of Guantanamo said, my God, we don't we don't even know who you sent us.
But we have a strong notion that the majority of them are not who you claim that they are.
And we don't have significant people here.
Well, just to oversimplify it, but it's legit, right, is are they Arabs or not?
That'd be step one.
If they're local Afghans, then the chances that they have the slightest thing to do with bin Laden in them is infinitesimal.
OK, if they're Egyptians and Libyans and Syrians and Saudis, then OK, well, we would like to know how they got there and what they're doing there, at least.
OK, but come on, when they're just rounding up people who are Pashtuns from the Helmand province, who've never even been to Kabul before in their life.
Come on.
It ain't fair, man.
And they knew.
But you also have to remember people what people need to remember, Scott, is that no one arrived in Afghanistan after 9-11.
They were all there before 9-11.
What was happening before 9-11 was an inter-Muslim civil war.
The people who had been sent there by their by their religious leaders or whatever in the Gulf countries to go and help the Taliban establish this pure Islamic state were fighting against other Muslims in the Northern Alliance.
America was not involved.
Now, sure, you know, I mean, there was a ruling by a by a judge who approved this is going back over a decade, approved the ongoing imprisonment of one of the men who had had his habeas petition being looked at by the judge because he couldn't magically teleport himself out of the country after the US led invasion.
So he so he said, well, you know, he didn't get out of the country.
So therefore, when it morphed into something else, a war against the United States, you know, after the US led invasion, then then he's implicated.
I mean, it's it's absurd.
Same thing happened with John Walker Lind, who is, you know, this Californian who was a hippie turned born again Muslim who is in Yemen studying religion and then went to go and fight for the pure Islamic state on the side of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.
And then because of the government's immediate conflation of the Taliban with Al-Qaeda was treated as the worst traitor to America when the Taliban were sort of reluctantly hosting Al-Qaeda, but they were far from the dominant force in the country or anything.
John Walker Lind may have never.
Well, I forget the rumors of the time.
Maybe he had seen bin Laden before or something, but he certainly was not under bin Laden's control or working directly for or with Al-Qaeda factions in the country.
But that just didn't matter.
It was a great piece of stone, you know, to exploit that.
Yeah, I know it's it's yeah, what a mess.
I mean, that's the thing, isn't it?
We've been talking about it for nearly half an hour, Scott, and you know that we could talk for for hours more going into the detail of every aspect.
Why don't you tell us about the torture at Guantanamo Bay, Andy?
Sorry, say that again, Scott.
Tell us about the torture.
Well, you know, there was there was a period in the early years of Guantanamo's existence when when all kinds of horrible things were happening to the prisoners, they I mean, quite really quite like what happened to Abu Ghraib.
So people who, you know, people were told, you know, make make sure these guys suffer, make sure they don't sleep, you know.
And so a bunch of untrained sadists were basically given free reign to come up with all kinds of ways to, you know, to to make life as miserable as possible for the men at Guantanamo, you know, many of which crossed over from forms of abuse into outright torture.
I mean, there's a former guard at Guantanamo who, you know, who a National Guard guy who turned out to be quite clever.
So they they assigned him the frequent flyer program, which is what they called the process of moving a prisoner from cell to cell every few hours to make sure that they couldn't sleep, which they did for days, months.
They did it for months to people.
Can you imagine sleep deprivation for that long?
You know, and he'd been given this job because he was good at working out the logistics.
And then eventually he realized what he'd been made to do and was absolutely appalled by what he'd been made to do.
But they did all of that stuff of like, you know, using using extreme heat and extreme cold, shackling in painful positions, use of nudity, shaving them, playing them loud music all the time, setting dogs on them, sexually abusing them.
I mean, you know, the list goes on and on.
And that came to an end.
And that really, for the most part, came to an end when the when the prisoners first won habeas rights, which Congress then took away for four years and lawyers were allowed into the prison.
That was that broke the veil of secrecy that allowed all this horrible torture to take place for the first two and a half years of the prison's existence.
But over the years, Scott, you know, these men have so many of these men have embarked on hunger strikes and have then been brutally force fed, which, you know, you are you are not legally allowed to do to people who are, you know, of sound mind.
And also, you know, I always I always mentioned this back in when Guantanamo had only been open for less than two years.
A representative of the International Red Cross spoke openly and they're not supposed to do that, but said, you know, we are worried about the effect of open ended arbitrary detention on the mental health of the men held at Guantanamo.
But still the situation that prevails now, arbitrary, open ended detention, 20 years since the prison opened, that is a form of torture.
You know, if you if you've been convicted of something and you're sitting in a prison somewhere, sure, you can be annoyed if you you know, if you were wrongly convicted.
But you have been given an end date.
Even if the end date is for the rest of your life, you will stay in this prison cell.
At least, you know, that at Guantanamo, people can wake up every day not knowing what's going to happen to them.
And, you know, that that, again, is completely unacceptable.
Yeah, it's the whole thing is completely nuts.
I got to add here just real quick that somebody recommended this to me forever ago.
And I finally last night watched the making of Jihadi John from the Brit who was the ISIS guy beheading people in the war in Syria there in 2014.
OK.
One of the things they have extensive interviews in there with two of the guys who were captives, a Frenchman and I guess an Englishman who were captives along with the people who were murdered, the Americans mostly who were murdered.
There was actually some Brits were were killed, too.
But anyway, one of the reporters who was imprisoned with, you know, the the murdered talks about how Guantanamo was such an influence on ISIS and how they would dress them all up in orange and they would lock them in stress positions and they would do the frequent flyer program.
They would force them to stand, you know, for 72 hours or whatever at a time and all these kinds of things that they were.
It was ISIS was copying America's torture program.
Yeah.
And using that against, you know, the Americans that they and these others that they had captured there and especially the ones who eventually were beheaded there.
And that was something that actually goes back to Iraq War two as well, where they would dress people in orange jumpsuits and then cut their heads off and stuff.
Little symbolism that pretty obvious symbolism, if you're paying attention, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely, Scott.
But, you know, the bottom the bottom line is, you know, as I said at the very beginning, when you asked me, you know, why is it that people should care about Guantanamo?
Is that because whatever other stuff, you know, our countries get up to that they aren't supposed to do because we're claiming to be high and mighty and all of this, which is, you know, which involves so much hypocrisy generally.
But, you know, fundamentally, we do we do tend to abide by the by the rules regarding deprivation of liberty.
You have to be tried or you have to be a prisoner of war.
And, you know, the fundamental thing about Guantanamo is these guys are still held in in a complete, completely horrible legal limbo.
Yep, that's some of it now.
OK, one last question here, which is what are the chances that Biden's going to cancel this thing?
Finally, it seems like there's you know, I was on the show last night.
They were asking me about this.
And one of the things that they mentioned in their question was back in the W.
Bush years and early Obama, this was a controversy.
But in 2022, who even knows about it?
A few people maybe take notice on the anniversary like we're doing now.
But then what, you know?
Well, I'll tell you what I think.
Genuinely, I genuinely think that that, you know, the administration has taken on board the widespread establishment recognition now that the time has run out for attempting to justify holding people indefinitely without charge or trial.
So, you know, the fact that we now have 18 of the 27 forever prisoners approved for release, you know, they are going to have to release them, you know, and it will leave eventually.
I think it will, you know, obviously it will leave the 10 men that are charged.
Maybe they're going to find a way to charge a few more.
I doubt it.
After all this time, they're stuck with some real problems with people like Abu Zubaydah, you know, the first victim of the torture program, who who they alleged was all kinds of things that he wasn't, who has never been charged and who is also stateless.
I mean, he was he grew up in Saudi Arabia, but, you know, he wasn't his parents were from Palestine.
So he doesn't have Saudi nationality and the Israelis won't allow anyone back into Palestine from Guantanamo.
So he's genuinely stateless.
What are they going to do with him?
But I think they will.
I think Biden will move and hopefully sooner rather than later towards emptying the prison of all but the people who are going to be charged.
Now, the question then, Scott, is whether he can justify something that costs half a billion dollars a year, staying open just to hold these 10 men, because one thing's for sure, the trials that they're undertaking in the military commission system don't work.
And they absolutely aren't going to work on death penalty cases, which is what they insist for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other men accused of 9-11.
So do they send them to federal court so that they can finally shut the Guantanamo facility?
Or do they do what's probably the more grown up thing, which is to come to some kind of plea deal arrangement with them that would involve, you know, very substantial prison sentences, but that again would also allow them to close Guantanamo.
Otherwise, you know, we will be talking, Scott, if we're both alive in 10 years, 15, 20 years about this endless process of the military commissions at Guantanamo that can't deliver justice because the system is broken.
There is no way it's going to work, especially for death penalty cases, because the standards are so much higher in those cases than they are, than they are when you're not proposing to take somebody's life at the end of the process.
Yeah.
Who would have thought that something that was based in such cynicism and dishonesty in the first place would also not work out well, you know?
Well, you know, at least we knew.
But, you know, Scott, I mean, I have to say at the end of this, you know, of this session with you, and thank you very much for taking an interest, as always, you know, I'm really focusing on the case of Khalid Qasim that I mentioned to you earlier, that after all of this, where we see Biden moving towards approving people for release and eventually they're going to release, here is Khalid, who is still held at Guantanamo because they think he's got a bad attitude.
And, you know, I'm with him.
Why would he not have a bad attitude after everything that they've done to him?
And he really does strike me as an extraordinary individual.
And he's one of the people that's mentioned in Mansoor Adefi's book.
And I don't know whether you've come across that or whether you've interviewed Mansoor yet.
Mansoor was one of the prisoners who fought like hell against the injustice of Guantanamo.
And Khalid was one of his friends.
And Mansoor was resettled in Serbia in 2016, where he's, you know, essentially living quite an isolated life because the Serbian authorities regard him as a terrorist fundamentally.
His book is absolutely brilliant.
You will never read anything quite like it.
It is devastatingly harrowing.
And yet at the same time, it is unbelievably funny.
And Mansoor has an astonishing humanity and sense of hope about him.
It really is brilliant.
But Khalid is one of his friends.
You know, they were young Yemenis.
They were all, you know, 1920, 21 when they first went to Guantanamo and they resisted.
They fought them.
They went on a hunger strike.
You know, five of the men who died at Guantanamo were amongst this group of young Yemenis, Scott.
Did they die by their own hands?
Were they killed?
You know, and and now what we're looking at.
Three of them we know were murdered at the CIA camp.
But Khalid is basically, I think, the last one of those guys who's still held.
And, you know, they don't want to let him go because they don't like his attitude.
How dare they do that after 20 years?
How dare they?
Seriously, and on that last note, people Google use my name and search for the Guantanamo suicides, but it's not me.
It's the other Scott Horton who did such a great job writing that up for Harper's magazine, the law professor from Colombia.
And they were murdered at Penny Lane Camp.
No, they're those three guys.
And they called it suicide, of course, Arkansas style.
But listen, I'm sorry.
I'm out of time, man.
I got to run.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show.
It is so important.
And I'm glad that you're so single minded and focused on this issue after all these years still.
So we can all turn to you to get the real lowdown.
It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
All right, you guys, that's the great Andy Worthington.
He's at Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
