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Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
My own government.
He's the world's greatest specialist on this most horrible of issues, America's Guantanamo Gulag.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andy?
Yeah, I'm alright, Scott.
I'm alright.
It's very nice to be talking to you again.
Yeah, man, I've missed you.
Very glad to have you here.
And listen, you know what?
You wrote this very important thing.
It's about the hunger strikers and what's to become of them.
And, you know, I think you and I sat right here and complained about the vicious manner in which the Americans kept the hunger strikers alive.
Well, first of all, we shouldn't skip over what's provoked all their hunger strikes in the first place.
But anyway, now, so that's the thing about a hunger strike is you could die of one.
So should the Americans torture these guys by jamming rubber hoses up their nose and down their throats and force-feeding them insure?
I wonder what their contract looks like.
Or should they let them go ahead and protest to death?
Yeah.
Or maybe close down Guantanamo and give these guys an indictment or a no bill and let things work out that way.
Well, I have to say, what's interesting, Scott, while you were talking, I was thinking, yeah, who are these guys who are on the hunger strike?
And, you know, throughout Guantanamo's history, there have only ever been, you know, a handful of people who have been put on trial.
And as far as I know, these people are not known for being the people who've gone on hunger strikes.
The people who've gone on hunger strikes are basically people from the general population, so the, you know, the nobodies that were swept up in the United States' insanely inept dragnet after 9-11.
And maybe other people who, you know, who knew something about al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but, you know, but had no senior positions or anything like that.
And these are people who over the years have been hunger striking because they've been protesting about the circumstances in which they're held, which is the bottom line about Guantanamo.
This is a place where very few people get put on trial, and mostly everybody is held indefinitely without charge or trial, very possibly for the rest of their lives.
And that's what's happening again at Guantanamo, is that there are a handful of people on hunger strike.
We don't know exactly how many, because the last time that there was a very big hunger strike in the prison, which was in 2013, which involved a majority of the men who were held, the military reported how many people were on a hunger strike.
And as that hunger strike dwindled, they decided that they were fed up of the possibility of people understanding how terrible Guantanamo was by them releasing information, so they stopped releasing information about who was on a hunger strike.
And we don't know officially, but we know that of the 41 men held, some of them have been saying that the rules changed on September the 20th.
And so these guys who are on a hunger strike because they are endlessly every day saying, give me justice or let me go from this place.
If you've got something to charge me with, charge me.
Otherwise, bring my ordeal to an end, let me go.
These guys are saying that what happened until September the 20th was that when you lost a certain amount of your body weight, then they would force feed you.
And that the new instructions that have come from the Trump administration is that hunger strikers are no longer to be force fed.
In other words, that they should be allowed to die.
So what does the international law, what does the American law say about what hunger striking prisoners are supposed to do?
Or is there a law or it's just rules and regulations to be decided by the military, decided by the executive branch?
Well, I would say, you know, that the problem always is that the men held at Guantanamo are uniquely held as people without rights.
That was the way that the Bush administration first conceived of detention at Guantanamo.
And although, you know, all manner of decent people have fought for them to have rights for the last nearly 16 years, everything about their detention is still at the whim of the president of the United States.
So they don't really, honestly, fit into any category of prisoner who has been granted rights over the years by whatever types of bodies have said, you can do this or you can't do this with hunger strikers.
The understanding for prisoners who are mentally competent on a hunger strike under normal circumstances is that you are not allowed to force feed them.
That, you know, that force feeding is a form of torture.
I mean, if a person is mentally competent and wants to starve themselves to death, then you should let them do it.
And this has happened at Guantanamo, you know, throughout the prison's history.
And, of course, it's actually, honestly, very difficult as a human being to say, yeah, yeah, just watch this guy die.
I mean, you know, that's never really...
I've never been able to endorse that position, even though it's been right, technically.
But that's because these are people who have got another complaint, a very big one.
They are objecting to the circumstances in which they're being held.
And the best way to stop their hunger strike would be, as they say, put me on trial or let me go.
They should be released.
They shouldn't be allowed to die when they're hunger striking to protest on the basis that they shouldn't be held in the first place under the circumstances in which they're held.
All right, so tell us about some of these people.
You profile them.
Who are they?
Well, you know, they're people who fit into a category of prisoner that was described, I think, by Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald.
I think she came up with the phrase forever prisoners for them.
So they're men that, over the course of the years, as the prisoners' cases have been reviewed, they're men that the people reviewing them have decided, we can't put them on trial, but we don't want to release them either.
So when President Obama became president, he set up a high-level review process, the Guantanamo Review Task Force.
And they went through the cases of the 240 or so prisoners who he was holding when he took office.
And they decided that, you know, two-thirds of these people should be released, that 36 of them should be prosecuted.
In the end, we had nothing like 36 prosecutions.
They also decided that there was a group of 48 men who they described as being too dangerous to release, but they conceded that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial.
So, you know, what that should mean to anybody who's alert is that they didn't have any evidence.
If you have evidence, you put somebody on trial.
So what they had was something that they were trying to pretend was evidence but was obviously unreliable battlefield reports, for example, you know, immediately after capture when people would not have been treated in a manner necessarily that was acceptable for producing truthful statements.
And, of course, you know, throughout the whole history of their detention in the war on terror, they were subjected to torture, to other forms of abuse, to bribery.
You know, the prison authorities bribed people with the offer of whatever perks they wanted if they would tell them information.
So, you know, you've got this whole entirely unreliable setup of information.
These guys are essentially these people who have been thrown into this limbo in which they're not significant enough or they don't have evidence enough to put them on trial and they have, you know, very little evidence against anybody that's reliable.
But they didn't want to release them either.
So they said, you know, you have to carry on being held indefinitely without charge or trial.
And they encouraged President Obama to sign an executive order to formalize this.
So this was the only executive order that he issued where he took personal responsibility for saying to 48 men, you know, I am holding you without charge or trial.
To sweeten that pill, which obviously lawyers and NGOs took exception to, he said, but you will have periodic reviews of your cases and they will take place and they will be conducted within a year.
His executive order was in March 2011.
They didn't begin until nearly three years later and they took nearly another three years to be finished, the first round of these periodic reviews.
And as a result of those, actually, the process was a kind of parole-type process.
And as a result of that, over three dozen prisoners had their release approved, which was helpful for getting people out of Guantanamo who were, you know, basically pretty insignificant.
But the ones that are left are, you know, these people who were told by this review process, no, we still think you're too dangerous.
We don't think you're...
Mainly it's that they didn't think they had the right attitude, that they weren't contritious enough about, contrite enough about, you know, wanting to reform, not wanting to harm the United States, wanting to leave the prison and get on with their lives and do a job and marry and, you know, not hold anything against the United States for what had been done to them for all these years.
Well, in other words, none of these categories are actual legitimate member of al-Qaeda as opposed to the Taliban or just some schmuck who was rounded up by the general doctor.
Well, you know, the authorities claim that these people, that there is evidence that, you know, that ties these people together.
But because of the whole horrible way in which evidence was never adequately collected in the first place, then, you know, that's not necessarily provable.
And, you know, in a better world, which never happened, Scott, of course, these people would have been rounded up, they would have been held according to the Geneva Conventions, which allows you to take people off the battlefield and hold them until the end of hostilities.
And they would have been in the US courts for years arguing that you can't have a war that lasts forever, that the war in which they were seized in connection with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, which was intended to overthrow al-Qaeda and the Taliban, actually achieved its aims within a fairly short amount of time, and that they should have been released.
And it's not their fault that the United States then stayed in Afghanistan and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
And that, you know, the United States claims that it's involved in an endless war.
You know, that's not their fault.
So I think that had the detention operations been conducted in the way that detention took place before 9-11, they would have been out.
But no, they're stuck as a result of the idiocy that was introduced by the Bush administration and which nobody since has, you know, has managed to do away with.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Oh, hey, and you guys have seen foolserend.us, that really great site.
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Well, this is an important point that Wilkerson has made.
I forget the date of the memo, but it was a very specific memo where Bush, in 2002, where he suspended the usual rules for the battlefield commissions for deciding who's a spy, who's a noncombatant, who's a combatant, who's a POW, who's an illegal enemy, whatever the hell.
And then, yeah, you know, this is in the book, too, and I guess the audience might remember, but I interviewed a military officer, I think an Air Force colonel or something like that, Lieutenant Colonel Sterling Thomas, who was representing this guy who, I'm sorry, I forget the guy's name off the top of my head, but he had been a case of perhaps mistaken identity at first that he was a Taliban translator, in other words, noncombatant nobody, who had the same name as an al-Qaeda guy.
But then when they busted him, the evidence against him, they now admit, only last year, maybe it was the year before that, I think only last year, did they finally admit that the chemical weapons that he had made for Osama bin Laden actually was salt, sugar, and petroleum jelly in little Tupperware containers without proper corporate labels on them or whatever.
And this is sort of, maybe that's the argument ad absurdum, but it's real, right?
This is the level of the kind of evidence, the chain of evidence, the process of review for justice for these men, that they're only getting to the bottom of this.
And that guy's still not been released, as far as I understand.
He's been cleared that, oh yeah, no, you are a case of mistaken identity, but that doesn't mean he's free to go.
You're not even the guy we said you were that was the reason for holding you, not for anything you did, but even who you were, and you're not even who you were.
But anyway, you're still not free to go, pal.
And that's American justice right now.
The human rights organization Reprieve, which is the one that first publicized this story on Friday night in a press release, which I then wrote about, but then expected that the mainstream media would be pressing publish at the same time I was, but it took days for anyone to get onto it.
They're really not that interested, but it was two of their clients that they spoke to.
One is a guy from Yemen who followed a traditional path to Afghanistan that somebody said, you need to go to Afghanistan, help the Taliban.
A low-level foot soldier in this inter-Muslim civil war that was taking place in Afghanistan before the 9-11 attacks took place.
Really not a very significant person in any sense.
Another of their guys is called Ahmed Rabbani.
There were two Rabbani brothers who were in Guantanamo, and according to his lawyers, he was a taxi driver, but the U.S. mistook him for a major player in al-Qaeda.
So they kidnapped him and his brother.
He was then sent to the notorious dark prison that the CIA was running in Guantanamo, where they killed a prisoner and where the unqualified CIA operative who was put in charge of that prison dreamt up his own ways of operating.
So he actually had the prison plunged into darkness permanently, and he played permanent, incredibly loud music to torture the prisoners who were held there.
The notion of this place, which was also freezing cold, which was why a prisoner died there, the notion of this place as anything other than this horrendous torture facility is unimaginable.
I mean, how could it be anything other than that?
And so this guy, Ahmed Rabbani, who was a taxi driver who claims that he's a case of mistaken identity, he was held in this place for about a year and a half, tortured, horribly tortured, for the whole of that time.
They eventually took him to Guantanamo in 2004, September 2004.
So he's been there 13 years.
And, you know, they don't want to put him on trial, even though they claim that he's somebody.
And, you know, they appear to have no intention of ever releasing him.
So is it really any wonder that him, reprieves other clients, and the handful of other men that are on a hunger strike are on a hunger strike?
You know, they are in despair of ever receiving anything that resembles justice.
Well, and the thing is, at this point, I mean, just realistically speaking, I don't mean in spirit, but it's just suicide, because it's not going to get them anywhere, right?
American justice is not going to intervene to save their lives.
Yeah, well, I think that, you know, I think we've seen that, in that, you know, this week, there was a trial by one of the few prisoners to be convicted in the Military Commission trial system, a man called Ali Hamza al-Baloo, whose great crime is, apparently, that he made promotional videos for al-Qaeda, or maybe a promotional video that we know of.
And he was convicted of a load of terrorism charges back in 2008.
I mean, this is nine years ago.
And since then, his lawyers have fought these battles and challenged the basis on which he was convicted.
And in most of those cases, have had those charges thrown out.
So, you know, material support for terrorism, which is not a war crime.
The United States Congress, under George W. Bush, pretended that it was.
So most of his conviction has been overturned in various court decisions.
But, you know, one charge of conspiracy remains.
And so he has been...
He has been bouncing around the courts.
And he took it to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court, this week, said, no, we're not interested in looking at his case.
The Supreme Court hasn't looked at any Guantanamo cases since June 2008.
From 2004 to 2008, they had a great run.
They gave the prisoners habeas corpus rights.
They told the Bush administration that their Military Commission system was illegal.
They gave the prisoners habeas corpus rights for the second time after Congress had worked with President Bush to strip them of those rights unconstitutionally.
This was great, what was happening, in terms of the law attempting to address this huge power grab that the Bush administration had undertaken after 9-11.
But since then, also since Justice Stevens left the court, not uncoincidentally, I think, nothing.
They refused to take up any case.
And, you know, we've, over the years, got spoken about the habeas corpus petitions of the prisoners, which, for the first few years, 2008, 2009, 2010, judges got to look at what the government claimed was the evidence against the prisoners.
And in 38 cases, they turned around to the government and said, you haven't got a case.
You haven't proved, even to the low standard that this court is working to, that these people had anything to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
And, you know, what happened then was that the politically motivated right-wing judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., started chipping away at what the judges in the lower court were doing, and eventually ended up rewriting the rules and saying, honestly, this is what they said.
You have to believe, you have to presumptively believe everything that the United States government says about these prisoners, unless the prisoners can prove otherwise.
Which is an insane thing to say when you look at the many, many reasons why what the United States government claims is evidence is no such thing.
But, you know, they demolished habeas corpus for the Guantanamo prisoners.
They absolutely gutted it, of all meaning.
Not a single prisoner has got out through a habeas corpus petition since 2010.
The prisoners' lawyers, everybody had to give up on it.
They shut the door on habeas corpus.
And the Supreme Court was repeatedly been asked to do something about it, and they don't.
So, you know, there's a real problem going on here that there is no accountability for what's taking place.
And, you know, this recent decision in Balu just backs up the problem that the prisoners are highlighting at Guantanamo.
That they've been failed by every branch of the United States government.
That the checks and balances that are supposed to work, you know, on each other have actually all come together to conspire against them receiving anything resembling justice.
No wonder they're, you know, no wonder they're in despair and on hunger strikes.
Yeah.
And, you know...
I mean, especially, as you say, you have the lower courts basically undermining the Supreme Court's ruling that there has to be some process here, and they just completely take all that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think it's absolutely disgraceful that the Supreme Court hasn't put the appeals court in its place.
They've allowed the appeals court to completely undermine that ruling about habeas corpus that they made in 2008.
Completely.
Well, but you know what, just like with so many things wrong with our world, this is all because of the cowardice of Barack Obama, who ran on closing Guantanamo.
Part of why he won was the American people were like, jeez, we're really sorry for Bush.
He kind of stole the first one, but jeez, we're really sorry for re-electing him.
Although, yeah, they kind of stole that one too, but still, you know, we're going to make up for it by, you know, electing this guy who on the surface is the photo negative of Bush.
And one of the big parts of that was he was going to close Guantanamo Bay because it makes America look bad.
And he even had Bush and Gates and Colin Powell and plenty of officers and generals and whoever else he needed to cite to protect his right flank to do it.
And I know he had a lot of pressure in Congress to prevent it, but he could have just gone ahead and done it.
You know, commander, close that base.
Ship those men to Miami.
And then Department of Justice, boy, you guys better be ready to receive them because they're on their way right now.
And Congress couldn't have stopped them from doing that.
You know, troops move.
That's his job, is to tell troops to move.
You know, he fundamentally, Scott, lacked the political will to do what he was elected to do, which was to close Guantanamo.
And which is funny because the thing is, if he had done it, he would have gained so much politically for following through on that.
It would have been a huge win for him.
I mean, the problem as we see, not only did he not close Guantanamo, but he basically, you know, continued with, or in some cases amplified, the aggressive global military nonsense that the Bush administration was involved in.
And, you know, and behaved right until the last minute as though if there was any fine-tuning that was required, then, you know, Hillary Clinton was going to win and take over and, you know, they'd be able to resolve that.
He didn't behave in any way as though he thought, hang on, what happens if somebody really unhinged gets into the White House?
I've left all this stuff, which is open to, you know, to anybody who gets in there to do what they want with.
And I think that it continues to be an indictment of his failures to essentially challenge how out of control the military-industrial complex was when Bush was in, that he carried on and, you know, and in some ways was even amplified under him with the drone program, for example, and that he's handed the whole thing on to Donald Trump and must be, you know, must be held accountable for that.
Right, and so now here's the question, is, and I guess we don't know yet, but maybe you do, are they just focusing now, as in the Obama years, on doing as much rendition as they can and trying to not take custody of guys?
Because obviously they're still doing drone strikes and assassinations, but there've got to be some capture missions going on too, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think they have the odd thing.
So, you know, I don't think there's that much because I think they absolutely love killing people in drone strikes.
Because, I mean, what could be more fun, Scott?
You know, a guy who is thousands of miles away from the kill sites, who is in no danger of, you know, of harming himself at all, represents the United States government and just takes people out.
I mean, you know, what's not to like about that?
You know, it's awful.
So I don't think often they're interested in actually capturing people, because they learn under the Bush administration how messy it is to pick people up and then not either put them on trial or treat them according to the Geneva Convention.
So, you know, occasionally we have people getting through the fog of this.
And, you know, to be honest, when they do, then there's a pretty well-established process of bringing people to the United States and putting them on trial for terrorism-related offenses.
And, you know, and that's very successful.
I would say that perhaps it's too successful, because, you know, I don't think that the federal court system is, you know, objective and unbiased in terms of throwing the book at Muslims who are accused of terrorism.
But at least that is a route that involves things that we understand.
And, you know, between...
Between the...
Well, it's the drone killings, really, isn't it?
I think that it's, you know, it's a monstrous problem.
It's out of control, and it's such a huge thing that President Obama expanded and has left as one of his great legacies.
The bastard.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and, you know, it's just going to get worse with this, you know, guerrilla in there, I mean, God knows.
And, you know, he could turn around the drone policy and say, no, you know what?
I want to go back to capturing them so we can torture them, because...
Well, you know, I mean, to be honest, at least when he got in and he said, you know, I think we should be capturing people and torturing them.
Yeah.
He said, even if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway.
Pretty much most of the establishment, though, you know, did turn around to him and say, you know, yeah, we've tried that, and it really didn't go very well.
Yeah.
You know, which is a lesson that I think has been learned by most of, you know, the United States establishment.
And, you know, I mean this in a bipartisan way, really.
But it didn't work.
And I think, you know, hopefully, that means that we're not going to see a huge resurgence in the use of torture.
But if what you're doing instead is just saying, you know, let's in a fairly random way just decide that because it's so easy for us, we're just going to take out anybody that we say is a bad guy, I don't think that's an acceptable replacement for it.
And, you know, and I have...
Obviously, I have very, very good reasons for believing that, Scott, which, again, we've spoken about over the years and I mentioned today.
When it comes to trusting the United States to accurately assess who is a threat to them and who isn't, the United States, certainly since 9-11, and, you know, we could go back in history and find the same thing.
But, you know, in the sphere that I've been looking at and in the world that we live in and have been living in for the last 16 years, the United States, at every level of the government, has shown an absolute inability to deal with the perceived threats to it with anything resembling any kind of intelligence, integrity, responsibility, trustworthiness.
They are unbelievably inept.
So, you know, seeing as they filled Guantanamo with a bunch of nobodies and pretended that they were somebody, why on earth would we trust them when they're drone-killing people all around the world, that their intelligence is any better than it was when they were sending innocent people to Guantanamo?
They are killing civilians.
Every time that they're doing these things, I'm sure every now and then they hit a bad guy, but most of this is a process of killing civilians, you know, which has got to be counterproductive in terms of increasing the hatred towards the United States.
But it's also wrong, it's immoral, it ought to be illegal, it's unjust, it's such a waste of everything.
Well, it's absolutely true.
I mean, their own documents prove it.
It's in the drone papers leaked to Jeremy Scahill and Devereaux and them at The Intercept.
They published the book, The Assassination Complex, where they published these documents where this is the highest-level special operations forces and CIA officers tasked with these drone strikes all across the region.
And they're, oh, yeah, they do nothing but kill innocent people all day.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, listen, man, I'm sorry I got to go.
It's great to talk to you again.
It's such an important story, and I don't care how long it's going on, it's not diminishing in importance.
Unfortunately, it takes some kind of major change, in this case, for the terrible, for the much worse here, to bring our attention back to this limitlessly important story.
Yeah, well, I mean, I hope it does actually manage to shine a light on Guantanamo and help to get to the position of people understanding yet again that just because it's been swept under the carpet doesn't make it any less despicable that this place exists.
And obviously, we all know it's a massively uphill struggle to convince Trump of the significance of anything.
But to at least have a little light shining back on Guantanamo through this, what sounds like a pretty horrible situation that's been set up there of letting prisoners die, hopefully it's going to wake people up to it again.
Yeah, well, I guess we'll see what happens.
All right, man, thank you again.
All right, Scott, lovely to talk to you, thanks.
Oh, yeah.
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, and he's written thousands of great articles.
You can read them at the Future Freedom Foundation and all over the place.
And this latest is called New York Times Finally Reports on Trump's Policy of Letting Guantanamo Hunger Strikers Die.
Rest of mainstream media still silent.
