11/14/13 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate you tuning in.
Next up is our friend Andy Worthington.
His website is andyworthington.co.uk.
He's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, the stories of 759 detainees in America's illegal prison.
And he's also the director and producer of Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you?
I'm good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing very good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Well, it's always a pleasure.
So listen, it's been, well, it's right around anniversary time, the 12th anniversary of the creation of Guantanamo and the legal regime really that created Guantanamo.
And you had sent me this link to this old story from 07 that you had written about Dick Cheney and his lawyers and the different men inside the different departments in the White House, the vice president's office, the Pentagon and the Department of Justice and the Office of Legal Counsel, et cetera, who wrote up this torture regime and the whole rationale behind it.
It's such an interesting story.
And I thought it'd be great if you could give us a retelling of that before we get back to more current news about Guantanamo, the possibility of closing it, et cetera.
Well, sure.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing is, Scott, that it was interesting because I think Colonel Morris Davis, who was the former chief prosecutor of the American Commission at Guantanamo, a man who had a fabulous conversion against believing everything that he'd been told about the war on terror and, you know, for the last six years has been an implacable critic of everything to do with Guantanamo.
He wrote an article on November the 13th this year saying that it was 12 years of Guantanamo, which, you know, I think triggered large parts of the media to pick up on it.
It's not the 12th anniversary of Guantanamo in the sense that the actual prison opened on January the 11th, 2002, and on November the 13th, 2001, nobody was doing any work on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo.
They were still tossing ideas around as to where they were going to hold people.
But the key document responsible for establishing that they were going to create Guantanamo, they were going to create this legal black hole on some location that belonged to America, but that legally they hoped would be beyond the reach of the courts, was this military order that was stealthily passed by, well, essentially, you know, Dick Cheney singlehandedly made sure that this thing, you know, started to get the wheels rolling on November the 13th, 2001.
And it's a document that at the time, I mean, you know, you've got to go back to two months after the 9-11 attacks, that most people were not being encouraged to scrutinize very closely what was going on with their government at the time.
But I remember reading years afterwards that when I first started really getting involved in Guantanamo, that Michael Ratner, the founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, had realized when he heard about this document how serious it was.
And I had a friend who passed away a few years ago called Charlie Gittings, an American friend who started a campaign and a website called The Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions.
The reason that he became obsessed with this issue was because of this military order.
And you know, and I found out about how stealthily it had been introduced by Dick Cheney in an article in The Washington Post back in 2007, which I wrote about by Barton Gellman and Joe Becker, and it was a series on Dick Cheney.
I believe that Gellman later had a book about Cheney.
And it was the military order which he basically got a couple of signatures in the dead of night from people in the White House and then, you know, made sure that it got out there without anybody really being able to question it, was this document that established that they were—that the U.S. government was going to create military commissions to try prisoners that were seized in the war on terror, if that's what they wanted to do.
And you know, and it was basically the document that set up the—not just the trial possibilities, but the detention possibilities.
And the military commissions were there if they wanted to try people.
But basically what Cheney was doing was saying, this is how America is now behaving.
We are going to round up whoever we want.
We're going to hold them for as long as we feel like.
If we're going to put them on trial, then what I've done is that I've ransacked the history books and I've come up with the military commissions that have been used at various times in America's history, and these are what we're going to—a version of these is what we're going to use this time around in our war on terror for trying people that we say are terrorists.
So, you know, a pretty major document.
Yeah.
Well, and it's funny the different excuses that they use, too.
And I don't know if this goes back to the original documents that you're talking about where—but it seems so thin when they said, well, you know, the Taliban aren't members of the Geneva Conventions.
But that doesn't have anything to do with what the Geneva Conventions say at all.
The Geneva Conventions say that everybody who is a signatory to it is bound to behave like in the deal.
It doesn't require that the people that you're up against are also signatories to the thing.
And it never did.
And it never had been interpreted that way before, right?
Well, no, I mean, the one thing that obsessed them was how they could create a category of human being that didn't receive any protections.
And, you know, and that's fundamentally misunderstanding.
But although, you know, although there are obviously different parts of the Geneva Conventions apply to different people in different ways and arguments can be held about exactly, you know, what applies to whom, it was never the truth that the administration wanted, which was that there were people that weren't covered.
But, you know, I mean, you know, you may remember, I'm sure, Scott, that in January 2002, the Wayne Guantanamo was being set up and paving the way for the memo that President Bush issued on the 7th of February 2002.
The official U.S. torture document, when he said, you know, the Geneva Conventions don't cover al-Qaeda and Taliban and gave some waffle about how, you know, to the extent possible, the spirit of the Geneva Conventions will be applied, you know, just rubbish.
I mean, that didn't cover the fact that what he'd actually done is say, you know, we are free to torture these guys.
You know, from that date until June 2006, when the Supreme Court turned around to the Bush administration and said, by the way, you know, the case was about the military commissions, and they threw them out, said they're illegal.
Congress then brought them back.
But, you know, the Supreme Court also said to the president, you know, we think that you have forgotten that everybody who is in your custody is entitled not to be tortured.
The common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to everybody.
You know, it took four and a half years before the highest court in the land turned around to them and said, guys, there isn't a category of people who aren't protected.
You are not allowed to torture or abuse anyone in your custody.
You know, and that was hugely significant.
But it's, you know, it's deeply shocking that for four years and four months, essentially, the United States was officially torturing people.
Well, and then this is a big deal, too, that the August 2002 memo didn't come until after they figured out that, boy, we better write up a memo to legalize the torture that we've been committing against Abu Zubaydah, the guy we interviewed Jason Leopold about yesterday, who turns out wasn't really an al-Qaeda guy at all.
He just ran a summer camp.
Well, it was a training camp, but it wasn't really an al-Qaeda training camp there in Afghanistan.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, and it's always been one of those things, really, that, you know, they had him on the 28th of March 2002.
The U memo authorizing his torture was August the 1st, 2002.
You know, we've had Ali Soufan of the FBI saying that sometime in June, you know, he stopped working with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah because the CIA were starting to torture him.
You know, the U memo is the absolute golden shield, that if you look up the words Dick Cheney and golden shield, you will find that Dick Cheney permanently invokes that memo as protecting him and the other torturers of the Bush administration from accountability for what they did.
Lawyers told them what the lines were that couldn't be crossed.
The truth is Abu Zubaydah was being tortured for months before the phony memo was written that laid down the lines that apparently can't be crossed.
You know, that memo is wrong, but it's regarded as legally defensible.
Um, you know, but but they were torturing the guy anyway.
Yeah.
And now we got to talk to you about.
Well, there's so many things here.
First of all, I think it's so important.
And, you know, veteran listeners of this show, if you can call them that longtime listeners of this show, they're aware of this.
But I know that most people aren't because they just never talk about it this way.
But that is that it's not a few Al Qaeda guys were waterboarded here and there.
Tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis, maybe more were tortured under these loopholes and under the the impression that everybody got up and down the chain of command everywhere that none of our enemies here have any rights to be respected whatsoever.
And so all of the things that America prosecutes people for torture for, including, you know, mock executions and tying somebody up and beating the hell out of them or almost drowning them to death or the sleep deprivation and whatever, all of those things became, quote, unquote, legal, de facto legal, became part of the practice all across Iraq, not just at Abu Ghraib.
But remember, Tony Lugaranis in the torture question, the PBS documentary talked about, man, we tortured them in their living rooms in front of their kids.
We torture them on the side of the road.
We torture them in the backyard.
We torture them with a box and with a fox and everywhere and tens of thousands of them without limit.
Right.
So, oh, yeah, somebody got dunked in the water a few times.
Somebody who knocked the towers down got dunked in the water a couple of times.
Boo hoo's say the apologists.
But that's fine as far as it goes, which it's arguable as far as it goes.
But that completely ignores the fact of what happened to innocent men and women and children by the tens of thousands across the terror war.
And in fact, right now, at least most recent reporting in Somalia under American supervision as well, two different dungeons there.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, no, absolutely.
And, you know, and the real bottom line of that is that, you know, the military, our people, people in the military obey orders.
So the responsibility is for the people who give them those orders to set the parameters.
And the reason that all of this abuse took place everywhere that you're talking about, and it's very powerful and pretty truthful way of putting it, I think, as well, Scott, is that the people who were responsible for giving them their orders and that, you know, that's coming down from the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States and the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, abdicated their responsibility to tell these people what they could and couldn't do.
You know, and in a lot of cases, what we find out is that people were given leeway and, you know, in the notorious examples that we know about, people were told, you know, to make things difficult for people, make sure they didn't sleep well.
But across the board, what happened was that people whose job it was to be told what to do by their superior officers, to be told what was right and what was wrong, their superior officers failed them.
So, you know, you're right.
But who is to blame for this?
And, you know, and it's Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Absolutely.
And it's not just it's not any kind of negligence either.
I mean, when they they took General Miller from Guantanamo and they brought him to Iraq in order to get get the process, that was their words was they wanted to deliberately import that system to Iraq.
All the guys that Abu Ghraib on the night shift said, hey, we were softening them up for when the intelligence guys arrived.
Did anybody doubt that that was true, that that they were told that that's what they were supposed to do was get these guys, you know, looking forward to someone else coming to question them for a minute before the special forces arrive?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you're forgetting you're forgetting that, Scott, that actually, you know, the Bush administration decided that it was a few bad assholes.
I'm joking.
That's right.
So it's all fine.
Well, now and here's the other thing is Obama's his mandate in the Constitution to enforce all the laws and his mandate under the anti-torture statute that there's no discretion here.
In fact, discretion is deliberately excluded from the possibility of things to be considered.
There is no discretion.
If anybody tortures anybody, you have to prosecute them, it says.
And that's an American law that America forced on the whole world anyway, which is good.
But I mean, that's where it came from.
Yeah, well, what we what we find out, Scott, is that in the end, there is a little clique and it's the clique is called the United States government.
And some of those people are Republicans and some of those are Democrats.
But it turns out that when the chips are down and when difficult decisions have to be taken, those difficult decisions won't be taken.
You know, now, you know, we can all discuss who put pressure on whom, where and when and at what point to make sure that this wasn't going to happen.
You know, it wasn't immediately obvious, you know, in 2009, when Obama became president, that all the doors to accountability were going to become shut.
But it happened pretty swiftly.
And, you know, and that's what happens.
You know, presidents don't don't go after the crimes of previous presidents.
You know, this is a very small and select club of people who, you know, who don't actually prosecute each other for whatever it is that they do.
But, you know, the knock on effect of that has been has been horrible because, you know, I think the acceptance of of of torture is a poison.
It functions essentially like a like a poison in the bloodstream of a country.
And I think that that the acceptance of torture has poisoned America's soul.
I think that, you know, there's no exaggeration to say that, you know, everywhere that everywhere that you look, there are there are right wingers, maybe people of other beliefs who you know, but who are, you know, ferociously endorsing the right to torture people, the need to torture people, the obligation to torture people.
You know, it's infected America.
And, you know, until that's cut out, until it's addressed, it's a huge, huge problem.
Yeah.
And, you know, the CIA and America's sock puppet dictators around the world have always tortured people.
But still, it's the abandonment even of the pretense now.
And, you know, I remember when Abu Ghraib first broke on conservative Republican Texas talk radio, in fact, San Antonio talk radio, one of the most militarized towns in America.
And the unanimous conservative consensus was, whoa, America doesn't go around torturing its captives.
What in the hell is this?
That's the kind of things that countries we attack do.
In fact, that was one of the excuses for attacking Iraq.
Saddam's a torturer.
What in the hell is this?
And they were really upset about it.
But you know what?
After a few years of arguing, turns out it's actually pretty debatable.
And now after a few years of that, we've lived in a country where torture is perfectly debatable.
I don't really believe in souls and collectives, really.
But you're right that this society has become sick in a way because of that.
But anyway, more with Andy Worthington right after this, y'all.
And that common Article 3 says that, you know, there will be no outrageous upon human dignity.
It's very vague.
Yeah, indeed it is.
We're talking with Andy Worthington.
AndyWorthington.co.uk.
He's the author of the Guantanamo Files.
He's the world's greatest chronicler of the crime of the Guantanamo gulag down there in communist Cuba.
The American side of the wall, but same difference, basically.
And you also wrote up this thing, Andy, very recently here about Omar Khadr.
And I was hoping you could tell that story about this young man who dot dot dot.
Well, you know, this is Omar Khadr's latest attempt to to get the United States and Canada, his home country, to accept that, you know, he has been treated in the most appalling manner since he was shot in the back in a firefight in Afghanistan as a 15-year-old where he'd been taken by his father in July 2002.
You know, and the story of Omar Khadr really is, you know, it's as bad as it gets in terms of in terms of the breaking of laws and making a child the repository of all your kind of vengeance and racism on the part of both the United States and Canada.
You know, because this is a kid who was, you know, he was in a compound that was raided by U.S. special forces one day in July 2002.
Now, they say that he threw a grenade that killed a U.S. special forces soldier.
The story seems to be that this that actually the story, the accounts were fabricated afterwards that that Omar was actually shot in the back and was unconscious under a pile of rubble when when he was supposed to have been throwing the grenade.
But even if he had thrown the grenade, this is wartime and this is the kind of stuff that happens.
But, you know, he's then, you know, 14 or 15 at the time.
It's 15.
So, you know, there's an optional protocol to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in Armed Conflict, which both the United States and Canada have signed.
And that obliges the countries that have signed it to rehabilitate and not punish juvenile prisoners.
So those are people who are under 18 at the age that their alleged crimes take place.
Well, you know, neither America nor Canada did that.
And, you know, and what happened was that, you know, Omar was then, you know, abused, taken to Guantanamo, held there, horrible things happened to him at Guantanamo for years.
And eventually...
Well, wait a minute, Andy.
I mean, this kid must have been a real terrorist child prodigy to be in Afghanistan at the age of 15, right?
He was taken there.
He was taken there by his dad.
Scott, you know, when you're when you're a child and not responsible for your actions, you'll, you know, it is the whoever is generally is your parents, are the people who make the decisions about your life.
It's not you making the decisions.
But, you know, the worst part of the story to me, Scott, is that eventually, you know, America tried to put this guy on trial in one of their military commissions, as though he was one of the worst of the worst.
And eventually they said to him, look, you're not going to go home unless you agree to a plea deal.
So in his plea deal, he had to he had to admit that over and over again that he was responsible for his own actions.
He then had to admit that he threw the grenade, even though it seems pretty certain that he didn't.
And that and by doing that, he had to admit that he was a war criminal for having allegedly thrown a grenade that killed the U.S. Special Forces soldier in wartime.
So, you know, this is the this is the great shame is that President Obama presided over a plea deal in which a former child prisoner said that it's OK what the Americans do in wartime, but if you fight against them, that's not war.
That's a war crime.
War crimes are traditionally atrocities involving civilians.
And war crimes have never, ever been engaging in combat in wartime in an occupied country.
But that's what America did with Omar Khadr.
Not only did they do that to to this guy, but they did this to somebody who was a child when captured.
You know, I mean, how could it get worse than that, really?
Well, let's go back to the grenade for a second.
Why is it that you're so skeptical he threw the grenade?
Oh, there are reports, you know, reports that were written about it were altered after afterwards that emerged in the very long and protracted pre-trial hearings.
That's all the reasonable doubt you need right there, Your Honor.
Case dismissed.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Well, in fact, it even didn't they say, Andy, that oh, yeah, and he like pulled a pin with his teeth and he threw it back over his head like some TV show over the wall.
Yeah, I mean, yes.
Yeah, this thing was obviously made up by whoever made it up, even if it wasn't Khadr who made it up with a gun to his head.
Right.
No, I mean, you know, it's it's such a horrible story.
But, you know, he's now trying to to get his his conviction thrown out in the U.S. and he's also trying to get the Canadians to treat him, you know, like a human being, because his plea deal in 2010 involved an eight year sentence, one year to be served in Guantanamo and the other seven in Canada.
And Canada dragged their heels for nearly a year.
So he was in Guantanamo for nearly two years until he went home.
And he's still banged up in a maximum security prison in Canada.
And the Canadian government, you know, constantly portrays him as, you know, this monstrous, violent jihadist and confessed murderer, ignoring the fact that, you know, it wasn't a fair trial that he had and that they they themselves, you know, violated all their obligations towards him because the Supreme Court of Canada decided that a few years ago that Canadian agents had been to interrogate Omar Khadr at Guantanamo when he was just 16.
And the Supreme Court ruled that they had violated his rights.
But the Canadian government doesn't care because the Canadian government is only concerned with being as racist and xenophobic and Islamophobic as possible.
And, you know, and telling that repeatedly to the Canadian people, which is pretty horrible.
Um, now, I'm sorry, in your movie, do you focus on Khadr at all?
No, no, no, because I wanted to I wanted to recommend to people that documentary, do you happen to know the name of the documentary offhand about Khadr?
Because it's so powerful.
You don't like the truth.
Yeah, exactly.
You don't like the truth.
That's him protesting to his interrogator.
Come on, man.
I tried that the truth.
I gave up trying to tell you the truth a long time ago.
You got to take a look at that, everybody.
It's insane.
Yeah, no, it's a very powerful film, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's really something else.
Um, well, and now I'm sorry, because we have only like 20 seconds.
But can you tell us some of the tortures that this young man endured?
Who Omar Khadr?
Yeah, well, you know, they gave him the whole the whole thing where they, you know, where they isolated him, they put him in painful positions, they subjected him to nudity to loud noise.
And there's one point at which I think they they sprayed pine disinfectant in the room that he was in, threatened his family to write so that he then urinated and then they used him as a mop to clean it up.
Now, they used him himself as a mop.
Oh, my God.
And they threatened his parents, didn't they?
Or threaten his mother died.
But we got to go and I'm sorry, Andy Worthington dot co.uk.
Everybody appreciate it, man.
Always good to talk to you, Scott.
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