01/05/16 – Janet Reitman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We're live here on the Liberty Radio Network every weekday from noon to 2 Eastern.
All right, three great interviews today.
Brad Hoff coming up, Mark Thornton.
But first, Janet Reitman.
And she is writing here for Rolling Stone and contributing editor there at Rolling Stone.
She's the author of the book Inside Scientology, the story of America's most secretive religion.
That sounds interesting.
And she's written for tons of magazines, says here in her bio.
Inside Gitmo, America's shame, 15 years of pain and suffering outside the rule of law.
And why can't we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay?
Good question in the subtitle there.
Welcome to the show, Janet.
How are you?
Good, thanks.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Great work on this piece here.
Let's just dive in, I guess, to the trials themselves.
I think that's pretty much where you start the article as well.
It's kind of the story in the middle of just the absurdity of the process, the current military process for prosecuting the men accused of masterminding and organizing the September 11th attack on the United States.
By the way, for future historians, this is being recorded in January of 2016.
Okay, so go ahead.
Yes, we are about to start the 15th year of Guantanamo, believe it or not, at the end of January.
And, well, the first thing to point out is there has not been a trial yet.
These are pretrial hearings that have gone on and on now for a number of years and are mired in all kinds of delays and pretrial motions, none of which have anything to do with any of the merits of the actual case.
And they will quite likely continue for the next four or five years.
What I understand is this could go on until 2020 before any of these guys could actually begin an actual prosecution.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
The whole thing is it's taking place, at the moment, it's taking place offshore.
And, you know, if and when Guantanamo were to close, they would then have to move them, I guess, to the United States.
And I'm not sure how that would work because, at this point, the whole idea of having federal prosecutions for KSM and the accused 9-11 plotters was taken off the table in 2010.
And so, I mean, you know, this was a great goal of the early Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder to try KSM in New York in federal court.
And, you know, this was and there were lots of New Yorkers that supported that, you know, including myself as well.
That would have been very cathartic for people in the city.
It would have been it would have provided a sense of closure for people, I think.
But, you know, for a variety of political reasons, you know, mostly it was untenable.
And so they have turned to the military commission system, which is, you know, takes place out of sight of the American public and out of mind of the American public.
And but most of all, nothing has happened.
So it's a kind of and, you know, it's just it's a it's a comical almost experience because literally nothing has happened.
And you go down there and nothing.
You know, is it literally legally impossible now or just politically impossible now to go back to trying to prosecute them in a civilian court?
Well, I mean, according to the Congress has passed in the NDA, the National Defense Defense Authorization Bill for the past four or five years.
It is it is legally not permissible to bring anybody from Guantanamo to the United States for any reason, which is why, you know, there's been these discussions about whether President Obama would would go around the Congress, whether he would, you know, do an executive order, whether he would try to figure out some other way to close Gitmo and bring people there to the US by skirting around that law, because Congress has banned it outright.
They are not you know, they are not allowed in the United States for any reason.
And so it renders the whole situation kind of moot at this point.
There are some other kinds of, I guess, some fixes for this, that some attorneys who are much more schooled in all of this than I am in terms of legalities have suggested.
I mean, you know, a lot of the sort of defense type attorneys will come up with all kinds of ways that the president might be able to close Gitmo.
But but in terms of, you know, convincing the Congress, it doesn't seem likely.
And it certainly is banned in law.
And now.
So I want to go back to what you were saying about how we're still only in year 10 or whatever it is of the pretrial motions.
And we still have five more to go, whatever that kind of deal.
And so that reminded me of what I had been instructed previously by the other Scott Horton, the heroic international anti-torture human rights lawyer.
Right.
About how we'll see the American Republic has been around for a while.
And we have a rule of law.
We're in a federal courtroom.
All the precedent is not just set, but it's all known like the back of their hands by everybody in charge.
And so it's taken 200 years to refine the system to the way it is now.
Whereas in Guantanamo Bay, they're making it up as they go along.
And so you basically couldn't have imagined how many open questions there are.
And I think the one example was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said, I want to wear a camouflage hunting vest to court so he can pretend he's some kind of general in a war instead of some scumbag criminal.
And they said, yeah, OK, because there wasn't any rule that said, hell, no, you're going to wear a jumpsuit.
It wasn't already defined.
So, sure, you can dress up in fatigues, KSM, to come to your hearings.
And that was just one example.
And then, as you're saying, there could be years more of this ahead.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that I found really interesting about this piece of the Guantanamo story is that, you know, from my understanding, when these guys, we'll call them the 9-11 spy, which is what they call them, right?
So they were arraigned formally under the new military commission system.
This is the Obama military commission system in 2012 is when they were formally arraigned.
And so that's when these hearings all began.
Right.
And they had, though, since I guess around 08, they had death penalty lawyers because, you know, in the in the late Bush administration, they decided they were going to try to put these guys on trial.
They were going to charge them with capital crimes.
And so they were they were given death penalty lawyers.
And these death penalty lawyers were and are just absolutely determined to litigate every single tiny aspect of their case in order to save their clients life.
And so, you know, I you know, my what my understanding was, was that, you know, were these military lawyers?
I think the government's assumption was that the military lawyers would just sort of salute and get this done quickly.
The military lawyers, the JAG lawyers I've interviewed said absolutely not.
I mean, the JAG lawyers are like actually heroic, completely heroic because they buck their own system.
They're actually they're bucking their own United States government to defend, you know, accused terrorists.
And it makes them, you know, highly unpopular, I think, when in the military.
But it makes them exactly the same as John Adams, the great American patriot who created our country and defended those accused in the Boston massacre.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
Except they're not they're viewed as the enemy.
You know, they really I mean, their view of themselves is that they are seen as the enemy.
And and, you know, I mean, I I think that they they are they're not treated very well.
They're looked at suspiciously, you know, and but I think they're you know, they're quite heroic.
These these officers who are defending these guys.
But but regardless, you know, your point is they are making up every single tiny aspect of the law as they go along, which they have to.
I mean, this is not just like for their health.
This is part of the litigation process.
Right.
And but it's delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed.
And, you know, I actually did not attend personally attend this 9-11 hearing.
I attended a different guy's hearing.
All right.
You know what?
I'm sorry to stop you right there.
And we'll pick it up right there on the other side of this break with Janet Reitman.
Sure.
This great piece inside Gitmo for Rolling Stone.
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All right, kids, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking here with Janet Reitman.
She wrote this really important piece.
I don't know.
It's five or ten thousand words or something.
Great piece of literature here.
Inside Gitmo.
America's shame.
One of many.
And I just wanted to read this quote real quick before we get back to it, where Guantanamo overall is by now nothing more than an elaborate theater piece.
Quote, If Abraham Lincoln rode down there on a unicorn, I don't think I'd even think twice, says the Navy commander about just the absurdity of the entire situation down there.
And where we had to go out at the break, you were about to, I'm pretty sure, describe the absurdity of the hearing that you witnessed when you were down there, Janet.
Well, I mean, one of the, you know, for example, I showed up.
I went down to attend a hearing of a guy named Hadi Al Iraqi, who pretty much no one right has ever heard of.
And he has nothing to do with 9-11 or any other major act of terrorism.
He is a Taliban commander who has, you know, like a lot of people, been somehow linked in with Al Qaeda.
Whether or not he was a member of Al Qaeda is very, very sketchy.
In other words, he was an Arab in Afghanistan.
Hadi Al Iraqi is an Iraqi who moved to Afghanistan in the early 1990s.
Good enough for me.
You know, fighting with the Taliban.
But as a non-Afghan, you know, is alleged to have been some kind of a liaison with Al Qaeda.
And all of this is, you know, up in the air.
But, you know, he is not accused.
He's accused of very sort of traditional types of war crimes.
And, you know, that we might see even as making him a kind of legitimate combatant.
I mean, a person who is serving in the armed forces, in a sense, of his country, his adopted country, under the then government of that country, which was the Taliban.
You know, whether or not we, you know, respect that or not, that is an argument.
That this was a legitimate government.
That these guys were serving, essentially.
But the United States does not recognize that.
And we consider anybody who fought with the Taliban as being an unprivileged enemy, as they call them, belligerent.
So they're not saying, they're not accusing him of murdering civilians or anything like that.
Just being part of it.
Yes.
No, no, no.
Well, that's part of his sort of war crimes.
Oh, well.
They accuse him of murdering civilians as part of, you know, not in a 9-11 sense, not in a terrorism sense, but in a kind of, you know, fog of war sense.
The kind of, you know, this is a civil war that they were fighting.
So, yes, there were civilians, there were U.S.
But U.S. forces were, or U.S. and other foreign forces, I think, are sort of the more dominant aspects of it.
I mean, there's several.
There's a long, long charge sheet.
It's like 35 charges.
But the point of it is that he's not a 9-11 guy.
When we think of Gitmo and we think of the prosecutions at Gitmo, we think only of the 9-11 guys.
There are only 10 people who are facing any kind of legal proceedings out of over 100 of them now at this point.
And several of those people, three of them, are just dealing with plea agreements and one challenge to a conviction.
The others, there's only seven of them that are currently in a trial or a pretrial process.
And of that group, only Hadi Al-Araki is kind of moving towards something in a sort of sense because he is not facing the death penalty.
So he doesn't have those kinds of challenges.
And he has, in some ways, it's seen as a little bit more of a straightforward situation because these are sort of more traditional war crimes.
And this is a war crimes tribunal, right?
This is very complicated, by the way.
I mean, it took me a long, long time to figure all of this out and sort of understand how to write about it.
But your point about him is that.
I hope I'm making sense to you because it's not.
I mean, what I want to ask you is your point about this guy is the absurdity that he's at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rather than not that he's some innocent guy who just got rounded up like some innocent sheepherder that Bush already sent home.
But this is somebody who very well may have done something.
But why is he in Cuba instead of in prison in Afghanistan?
Well, no, I mean, no, that's not really.
You know, why would he be in prison in Afghanistan?
I mean, he was he's, you know.
Well, you're saying that was where he committed his war crimes.
He committed it.
Yeah, but I mean, that wouldn't have been a I mean, we didn't have a you know, there's that's not we consider him as a war criminal.
OK, then I'm not clear on your point about this particular point.
I mean, the point of it, the whole point of it is, is that there's only a handful of people that are even facing trial.
The point of the whole story, to be honest with you, is that, you know, these trials, however monumental it will be to see if and when it happens, the 9-11 case, you know, that's not what Gitmo at this point is really about.
Gitmo at this point is about warehousing a bunch of other guys that you've never heard of before, a number of whom will never be charged with a crime, will never be tried and have been there in a kind of purgatorial state for in many cases for 14 years now.
That's what Guantanamo is.
That's the that's the aspect of it that, you know, highly un-American.
I mean, in terms of Hadi al-Araki, you know, he's he's a person who, you know, we don't really know anything about.
The military has spent a tremendous amount of money, you know, and just in trying to try the guy, we actually wound up flying down to attend the hearings for him that were supposed to be like a week.
And then it was shortened to three days.
And then the trip was delayed by a day for reasons that were never explained to any of us.
And we all sort of turned around and went back home again and turned around and came back the next day to fly down to Guantanamo.
Who knows what what cost to the United States taxpayer?
And, you know, for essentially what was a 45 minute hearing.
And, you know, that's that's that's what goes on.
That's what goes on.
You fly down to get mail for 45 minutes, essentially, or an hour.
You spend three days there, though.
And there's just there's a lot of delay.
And a lot of this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
But but, you know, the other aspect of it that that I think is, you know, really dramatic is that there are people there that you don't know anything about and that have been there for a long time.
And we're not even sure why, in many cases.
Yeah, they just came out with one a week or two ago saying, oh, yeah, this guy, he was mistaken identity.
We've been holding them all this time.
Right.
I mean, maybe Andy Worthington knew of the guy or whatever, but the rest of us heard of him.
Right.
I want to get back to what you were saying earlier, too, about the power of the president to close this place.
You know, he could start a war in Libya without Congress, but he can't order his troops on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to move.
Of course he can.
And and what can Congress do about it other than impeach him and remove him from office?
But if he wants to if he wants to say the prison is closed, put those men on ships in Salem to Florida and the DOJ better and the Bureau of Prisons better meet him at the shore.
Then what's Congress going to do about it?
I mean, that's certainly an argument that a lot of military people say.
Defense attorneys will say, you know, he can, as a commander in chief, say, tell the military, we I would like this prison closed.
You're going to close it and we're going to move these guys to the United States.
But it's obviously it's much more complicated than that.
It's there's, you know, very complicated politics involved in all of that.
You know, Congress has passed this law.
There are some lawyers who an analyst who would challenge whether that law is really whether Congress really has the power to do this, to bar these people from coming to the U.S.
Which, by the way, all in the legal area.
Do they have a proof majority for this legislation?
Is that why he keeps signing legislation that says he can't do this?
No, he he says, I mean, this isn't this is part of the larger defense spending bill that he signs every year.
And, you know, it's yes, it's widely unpopular.
The idea of bringing Gitmo prisoners to the United States is seen as, you know, a hugely risky.
I mean, this is all, by the way, in my view, hugely overblown.
I mean, the risk of any of these people after 14 years, I really, you know, I don't know.
But but the Republicans have made it a talking point for many, many years that these are the worst of the worst, quote unquote.
And there's a tremendous amount of fear.
And it's, you know, used and exploited very well.
And as soon as it comes up that way, wait, we might close Gitmo.
You know, you have Paul Ryan or someone else saying, no, no, no.
You know, these these are the worst of the worst.
And then you have governors and representatives from various states saying, you know, not my backyard, literally.
And so it becomes this whole political football.
Where are you going to send them?
Nobody wants them.
Are you going to build something for them?
What are you going to do with them?
Well, Obama could have done this in 2009.
And I remember there was a Washington Post story, I believe, which Glenn Greenwald had written up as well at salon dot com, where they had all these quotes from the senators saying they were geared up, ready to go.
But they had no support from the president of the United States to push this agenda whatsoever.
And they had completely believed the hype during the campaign.
And they thought this is for sure something we're doing.
And he had signed the executive order on his first full day in office.
And then he did nothing to pursue it whatsoever and left them sticking their neck out.
And so they decided to drop it.
And that was back in 2009.
So, you know, he had made a serious effort.
Then things would have been different.
I think there was a great opportunity that was missed at that point and for a variety of reasons.
But I just it just was not ultimately a priority, the priority that it had been made out to be.
And by, you know, within that year, it slipped and slipped and slipped down on the priority list.
And then by 2010, when the Republicans took the Congress, it just then it was not able to become the priority that I think the president wanted it to be.
So it's a shame.
But, yes, he had he had a year.
There were a long series of mistakes or missteps, shall we say, that that were made during that time that made closing Guantanamo increasingly difficult.
And, you know, Charlie Savage and Dan Clayton are two really wonderful authors who have written books that really go into great depth about this.
I will plug both of their books, which were very helpful to me.
But, you know, there's there's been there's quite a lot of literature out there on that.
Exactly what happened during that year of 2009.
You know, my story is not about that, by the way.
My story is about what is happening right now in 2016.
Right.
After all that time.
So it's something that's worth mentioning here.
I'm sorry.
I'm recording you into the break here for just one minute, but it didn't get mentioned.
But it deserves some kind of prominence that at least some of the prisoners were tortured down there at Guantanamo Bay in the early years and that there is ongoing, you know, human tragedy in the form of the various hunger strikes and suicides and attempted suicides and so forth of these people who are being locked up without charges for life.
Just even being, you know, going through a process of review where they, you know, these are people who've been there since, say, you know, two or three.
And then, you know, they're reviewed in 2009 or 10 or, you know, and they're and they're said, OK, you know what, you're cleared to go.
And then they don't leave when they're going to leave.
You know, this happened with a lot of the guys from Yemen.
There's a huge number of them that are from Yemen and they can't return to Yemen.
This is also part of the NDAA.
They can't return to Yemen.
There's several countries that, you know, they will not be able to be transferred back to.
And Yemen is one of them, Syria is another one.
But, you know, you have a number of them.
I mean, I think a large majority are Yemeni and they can't go home.
And so they have to find a country, a host country to accept them.
And, you know, as a number of really, you know, very good recent reports have noted, the Defense Department, this is what I heard in my reporting as well.
The DOD has, you know, had a long pattern of trying to block these transfers.
And so you have these guys that for one reason or another will have their transfer, you know, or release delayed.
And they'll just sit there and languish.
And, I mean, that is an unending sense of torture, if you can imagine that.
You're told, I mean, that is truly, you know, I hate to use that word Kafkaesque, but it actually really is.
I mean, that is, you know, you can go, but you can't go.
And that's been the situation for, you know, for these people who are considered the low level.
These are people who may not, you know, have done really anything other than be a foot soldier or something like that.
You know, then you have the guys who like, you know, Hadi Al-Araki and particularly, you know, KSM and the others and another group of them.
There's about 14 who are considered high value detainees.
And these are people who were in CIA detention initially.
And so they came to Guantanamo between 06 and 08 from the CIA black sites and, you know, all underwent something.
I mean, to what degree, you know, they were all tortured, you can read it in the torture report.
But it goes into quite a lot of depth about a number of them.
But, you know, these guys are, have endured a tremendous amount.
And they're just, you know, locked away in a secret prison, actually, that none of us can see.
Or their attorneys can't even talk about it or else, you know, without risking their security clearance.
And, you know, we don't even know, we didn't even know it existed officially until a few years ago.
And that's where they live.
And they, these are the people that will likely never be released, you know, unless some kind of deal is brokered.
All right.
With that, I'll have to leave it short.
I'm sorry because I have more questions for you.
Great piece of journalism here.
I really appreciate your time on the show, Janet.
Thanks so much.
All right, Shell, that's Janet Reitman.
And here she is in Rollingstone.com, Inside Gitmo, America's Shame.
And we'll be right back with Mark Thornton in just a second.
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Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here.
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