12/10/14 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Yeah, we didn't do the break so well on the Land A interview there.
Sorry, live audience, but sometimes we just got to do what we got to do here.
I got Andy Worthington on the show.
Follow him on Twitter, Guantanamo Andy.
Check out his great website, andyworthington.co.uk.
There's so much content on there, man, seriously.
Andyworthington.co.uk.
He is the great chronicler of the prisoners down at Guantanamo Bay.
The book is The Guantanamo Files.
The movie is called Outside the Law.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andy?
Yeah, I'm good, Scott.
I'm slightly tired because there's so much going on, but that's better than nothing happening.
That sleep deprivation that got you suffering, huh?
Yeah, although not in a CIA style, obviously, because that involves, what did we hear?
180 hours straight.
God dang, can you imagine that?
I think about how tired I am just when I'm tired.
That's really tired.
It seems like somebody would just die if you kept them awake that long.
It's amazing.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think we one day, perhaps, will find out just quite how badly mentally destroyed some of the people were who were subjected to the torture program.
I'm thinking in particular about Abu Zubaydah, who I think it's pretty clear that this is a man who's physically and mentally wrecked by, you know, very severely destroyed by what happened to him, which has managed to emerge even though, of course, the U.S. government has an absolute ban on allowing lawyers who see these men to mention anything about them at all.
Right.
Well, yeah, you know, we were just talking with Landé, ended that interview with Zubaydah spending two weeks in a coffin, and even the CIA torturers crying over hearing him whimper and scratching, trying to get out of his coffin that they had him in.
And, you know, I was reminded of, there was another passage in there, too, about how the guys from the Bureau of Prisons were shocked at the level of sensory deprivation of people just kept so far, the prisoners kept so far apart from each other, no sound whatsoever, no light whatsoever.
Right.
No clothes, no nothing, sit there and then just leave them like that for such extended periods of time.
And then some of them, lights on all the time and white noise machines and all weird stuff.
And this is not survival, evasion, resistance, escape training.
This is Nazi and Soviet torture programs that were adopted by the CIA decades ago under the MKUltra program, as Alfred McCoy has written in his book, A Question of Torture.
This goes to their expertise of their no-touch torture, like they did to Jose Padilla, where you just drive them out of their mind with drugs and white noise and sensory deprivation, goggles over his ears and eyes, he can't ever see or hear anything for extended periods of time.
Can you imagine how mad that would drive a human being?
Jesus.
Well, no, it's absolutely disgusting.
And I think one of the things that has come out of this summary that I was reading last night, one of the things is imagining the large role played by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were paid $81 million for really pushing the absolute extremes that you're talking about.
And I was reading about Abu Zubaydah's case last night.
And, you know, to me, it's always been pivotal.
It's always one of the most central cases of just how shocking and terrible and pointless the whole thing has been.
And you read it laid down there, you know, objectively, forensically, about how Zubaydah was absolutely cooperating.
You know, this was a guy who wasn't resisting.
He was, you know, he was talking to his interrogators.
And then out of nowhere, you know, for no reason, they implement this disgusting policy of trying to destroy him completely.
You know, what were these people thinking?
Well, they're evil and they're hunting for lies about Saddam.
But, yeah, I mean, if you go back to just what anybody knows, just from watching old cop shows from the pre-Dick Cheney era, everybody knows that the way you win a guy over is you treat him nice.
And in fact, in the history of Al-Qaeda, this is how the first guy that ever betrayed Osama bin Laden for the United States was his accountant in Sudan, who knew everything about the entire operation.
And bin Laden was so stingy, he wouldn't give the guy money for surgery that his wife needed.
And the CIA, the Americans said, we will treat your wife.
And he said, screw you, Osama, and gave everything he had to America.
That's how you do business if you're actually interested in rolling these guys up.
Yeah.
But anyway, yeah, no, they were, I think, you know what, I read all about the ass rape unending here, and I'm thinking this has got to go to Dick Cheney and David Addington and George Tenet and some very weird perversion of theirs.
That's not, you know, former Delta Force guys, former special forces guys working as kind of paramilitary CIA goons.
Is that their focus?
I don't think so.
I think that goes to something from the very top that, like, I want a special focus on their bottoms, said Dick Cheney.
Well, if not, then certainly the people involved in whatever level it was decided at are people who, you know, and certainly Cheney and some of the people around him were responsible for this.
They were people who deliberately wanted to know what would happen when you crossed the line.
You know, I mean, Cheney has spent years saying we were told, we were told carefully, you know, what line, where the line was that we weren't able to cross.
But that was only because he got John Yoo to write a memo saying that what he was doing was OK when it wasn't.
But the reality is when Dick Cheney said after the 9-11 attacks, we will have to go over to the dark side, if you will.
You know, that is where the fantasies began.
What did that mean to you, Dick, to go over the line to the dark side?
What did it mean for all those other people, for all these sadists who came in and started doing this stuff?
And, you know, we know, we know more from this report that there were, you know, professionals involved in the agencies and the various departments who were sickened by what was happening.
You know, it's good to hear that not everybody went along with it.
But certainly the people who were involved in it and who managed not to be so sickened that they, you know, had to leave it, are, you know, full-blown sadists, I think.
Yeah, this is absolutely incredible.
And, well, man, I'm sorry to get off into this, but I bet you probably have something to say about it, too.
The right-wing reaction to this in America is the same as it ever was.
Yeah, so?
We like torture.
Torture's fine.
I don't care what you say.
George Bush is great, and he saved us, and so shut up, and that's it.
It doesn't even matter.
It's just a partisan issue.
Everybody knows Dianne Feinstein is a cranky old Democrat from California.
The whole thing, that's it.
It's not even supposed to be a big deal at all.
The last time this really came to the fore was, you know, back around the time of the death of Osama bin Laden and the stories that, you know, the right-wing promoted to say that it was torture that had led to bin Laden when it was, you know, it was patently untrue.
And John McCain, I'm glad to say, who has spoken out very well about the need for this to come out, at the time was on that one as well, was exposing the lies.
It wasn't through torture that the courier was found that led to bin Laden.
It was exactly not through torture.
It involved a handful of individuals, some held in black sites, some not, but none of the information was produced while people were being tortured.
And yet the right-wing took the story and completely, you know, dispensed with the facts and said, look, hey, we need to keep Guantanamo open.
In fact, we need to be adding to it because, hey, look, torture works.
So, yeah, you're right, Scott.
What can be done about these people?
I think what can be done about these people is that there needs to be a high-level prosecution of people who are responsible to say to people, hey, guys, you think it's funny to advocate the use of torture.
You seem to have forgotten what the rules are and what the implications are.
But here, here, we're going to prosecute somebody who is in a senior position to show you and to show the rest of the United States that actually it's illegal.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing of it.
And, you know, it's funny, it seems like that's kind of left out of the debate here, is that this is a challenge to the very theory of the American system at its absolute core, which is that this government was created by law, right?
Like your government over there was created by the divine right of Solomon's Temple and the divine right of the king and this and that crap and the parliament.
And I know you had some civil wars and whatever.
But over here, the theory from the get-go with this constitution was that free men were allowing it to exist by passing a law, right?
It is bound by law.
And what these guys are saying is, no, all the constitution says is we exist and we can do what we want.
And so which is it going to be?
It's got to be one or the other.
And look where we're at.
All right.
Sorry, I'm sermonizing.
One sec, we'll be right back.
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All right, Shell, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Andy Worthington about the torture report, the torture regime.
Let's talk about torture at Guantanamo Bay.
It's kind of a complicated mess exactly who was tortured and who under what authority and for how long there.
The very beginning of the torture regime was down there at Guantanamo where they were experimenting on this guy, Catani, who they said was one of the three or four different people they said would have been the 20th hijacker had they not arrested him.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, actually, as you were speaking there, Scott, I thought it was just worth mentioning that the CIA had a black site within Guantanamo just for a little bit in the early days.
But yeah, Catani was the guy they thought was the 20th hijacker.
So Donald Rumsfeld, not to be left out of Cheney and the CIA program, developed his own torture program for Catani, who was just horribly abused and subject to sleep deprivation for months.
And that was something that spread, of course, within Guantanamo.
So something that was designed for one person.
Then these techniques involving forced nudity and extreme use of heat and cold, very loud music, all this kind of crazy stuff that was going on.
Reports from people who worked there suggested that it was about one-sixth of the population that was subjected to this.
So at any one time that could have been 100 people or maybe more.
We know that it happened to all the British prisoners.
We know that it happened to anybody that they thought was a little bit difficult or was withholding information from them.
Anybody they just didn't particularly like.
The people who were responsible for it were kind of crazy, out-of-control people who weren't trained.
It was a horrible, horrible thing.
And I don't think people necessarily realized the extent to which that took place.
It came to an end with the Supreme Court ruling in 2004 that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights and the arrival of lawyers at the prison, which finally broke the veil of secrecy.
For two and a half years, they've been able to do whatever the hell they wanted.
But it's not to say that torture's gone away, Scott.
The fact is that persistently at Guantanamo, the prisoners have resorted to the only method they can find to protest their unjust detention, which is hunger strikes, and the U.S. has responded to that with force-feeding, which medical experts are pretty clear is abusive and can rise to the level of torture.
And I think just the one thing that I think is particularly most important about Guantanamo is that this is a place where the prisoners are not held like normal prisoners are held.
They haven't received a trial and been convicted and been given a sentence.
They are not held off the battlefield until the end of hostilities in any meaningful sense and protected by the Geneva Conventions, because we haven't even really begun to argue about when the conflict in which they were seized comes to an end.
So they do not know when, if ever, they're going to be released.
And that form of open-ended, arbitrary detention is monstrous and unjust and profoundly damaging, potentially, for the people subjected to it.
Absolutely.
Back in October 2003, if I could just say this, Scott.
Yes, sure.
Back in October 2003, a man from the International Committee of the Red Cross called Christophe Giraud spoke openly about it.
Now, they don't normally speak openly, but he was so worried that he did.
And this is over 11 years ago.
Guantanamo had been open less than two years.
He said, we are particularly worried about the impact on the mental health of the prisoners of this open-ended detention system.
That's always stuck with me, that particular phrase.
And year after year, I think, and how much worse is it for these guys as the years go by and they're still held every day, waking up, not knowing when, if ever, they will be released.
Seriously, if you think about even being sentenced to 40 years, at least you can get your head around how long 40 years is.
You know what it is, even if it's decades, something like that.
And it's not just that it's open-ended.
It's that they keep jerking them around and telling them, oh, yeah, you're free to leave.
No, you're not.
You got a habeas corpus hearing.
The judge says he doesn't see any reason to hold you.
The DOD, the DOJ, the CIA, the FBI, they all say that you're cleared to go.
Oh, you're from Yemen.
You can't go.
And this kind of crap, no wonder they're trying to starve themselves to death.
That's where Obama has his opportunity to torture them, is they're trying to starve themselves to death.
They can't hit their head against the wall hard enough to kill themselves, so they're trying to starve themselves to death.
So Obama is torturing them by cramming these giant tubes down their throat and force-feeding them, I'm sure, a huge government contract, over-billed contract, to supply the sustenance to keep these guys alive just so they can be tortured longer.
Yeah.
Well, no, exactly.
That's America in the Barack Obama years, halfway through Term 2.
I think a particularly terrible thing that you mentioned there, Scott, is the fact that these people have been through multiple review processes, and half the guys that are still held there, it's actually 67 men now out of the 136 that are held there, have been told at various times, most of them five years ago, that the United States didn't want to carry on holding them, and yet they're still held.
And as you say, the majority of these men are Yemenis, so having been told they can go, they're then told they can't go because the entire U.S. establishment doesn't trust the security situation in their home country, which is frankly unacceptable.
But if I could also mention another man, which is Shaka Amr, the last British resident in the prison, there appears to be no understandable reason why this man has not been freed, because he was given indefinite leave to remain in the U.K., he's a permanent legal British resident, his family are all here, the U.S. told him in 2007 they didn't want to hold him, they told him again in 2009, the British government has been asking for his release since 2007, and yet he's still held.
We are your greatest ally, it should be no problem for him to come back.
I'm just involved in a campaign that's been set up called We Stand With Shaka, Shaka is S-H-A-K-A-E-R, and we're trying to put pressure, particularly on the British government, to get this man home, because we think that behind the scenes there is a collusion between the intelligence agencies who don't want this man released, not because he's done anything, but because he has always fought for the prisoners' rights since they were first captured, he has always tried to tell the United States that they're not upholding the values they claim to believe in, he knows things that have happened over the years, probably some terrible stories, but as we've seen, and as we've seen with the torture report, it's one thing for evidence of wrongdoing to be aired in public, and it's another thing for anybody to be held accountable, and both the British and the American governments are still very good at preventing anyone, apart from very lowly people, being held accountable for anything that happens.
In other words, you're telling me they're afraid he's going to go on a crusade, they're not afraid that he's going to give an interview or two like David Hicks, they're afraid that he's going to go back to England and create a foundation that is centered on making a big deal out of this every day for the rest of his life, and that's what they're terrified of.
Well, maybe, maybe.
I mean, I think all that Shaka Ama wants to do at this point is try and resume his life, to be reunited with his family.
I'm sure he'd be happy to keep his head down and not trouble anybody if it meant that he was going to be a free man.
I think their fears are very exaggerated, as they have been all along, and as we can see with the torture report again, the way that Bush and Cheney are trying to defend themselves.
Actually, deep down, these people are either just seriously deluded, violent people, or if they have any self-awareness, they are trying to hide the evidence of their wrongdoing.
I'm sure some of these people know that they crossed a line, that they broke the law.
And so much of this seems to be about trying to hide that.
It's the signs of guilty people trying to hide their guilt.
Right.
Yeah, it sounds like he's the kind of guy who'd be a great witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or whatever, that kind of thing, Shaka.
Yeah, I think so.
You said it's standwithshaka.com?
Standwithshaka.org.
.org, I'm sorry.
No, that's all right.
That's why I double-checked.
It's like Shaka, so S-H-A-K-E-R.
Westandwithshaka.org.
Great, and everybody can find the links, of course.
They can find that, and we'll also actually be able to send in photos of themselves holding up signs that say I stand with Shaka, so if you support it, please come and join us and get involved.
That's cool.
The more good-looking, the better there, everybody.
Of course.
Yeah, man.
All right, well, we've got about a minute and a half or two left.
You can take this thing whichever direction you want.
In fact, I like to call the action stuff, man, other than the stand with Shaka.
What else do you want people to be involved in here, Andy?
Well, I think that people obviously need to be focusing in the new year on the anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo on January 11th.
President Obama has about two years left, so he needs to fulfill his promise to close the prison and he needs to get on with releasing all of these cleared prisoners, and as we were saying, most of those are Yemenis.
So people who are concerned need to really keep a focus on that.
But I'd also like people to watch what's developing in response to the torture report.
Calls for accountability.
It's absolutely essential that senior leaders are held responsible.
Bush, Cheney, and the rest of those guys.
And the full torture report is released.
Thanks so much, Andy.
That's the great Andy Worthington, everybody, .co.uk.
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