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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say and I say it again.
You've been had.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing the great Andy Worthington.
He is America's greatest chronicler of the war crime of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Of course, he's a Brit.
We do have some good Americans on this issue, but none like Guantanamo Andy, Andy Worthington.co.uk is his website.
The book is the Guantanamo Files and the documentary is called Outside the Law.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
It's really nice to be talking to you again.
Yeah, good times, man.
Very happy to have you back.
So listen, George W. Bush, it turns out is great because he's taking the side of the CIA and the Washington Post and the Democrats against the president by blaming Russia.
And I just thought this was great that Georgia was like, oh yeah, no, it's pretty clear that Russia meddled and nobody asked him.
Oh, yeah.
What's your evidence for that?
You're the guy who claims things a lot.
We know that.
This is just like when Bush said, oh, yeah, no, trust me.
Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
Ask Bill Clinton.
And Bill Clinton was like, oh, yeah, no, he totally does.
And people said, oh, yeah, no, that's how we know it's true.
Instead of, well, wait a minute.
That's all you need to know to disprove the claim that Saddam has weapons.
If that's what Bill Clinton says, he's known for being nothing but a liar.
His entire political lifelong slick Willie, the prevaricator at best, right?
Anyway.
Hey, if Bill Clinton agrees and George W. Bush agrees, then Putin's a villain.
And maybe George Bush ain't so bad after all.
What do you think?
Well, it's the last bit.
I mean, and you know, I'm not in the business of speculating about Donald Trump's business arrangements with various people around the world who presumably have spent some time investing large amounts of money in him.
And now there he is the CEO of the United States seems a bit compromised to me.
But you know, that's not really the issue of the hypocrisy of George W. Bush.
The issue of the hypocrisy of George W. Bush is just that.
Why should you listen to anything this guy says without going?
First of all, Mr. Bush, I'd like you to address the unindicted crimes that you committed.
So you know, that that was the the basis of me writing an article.
Don't fall for this Russia bullshit, man.
Yeah.
If they were talking about Saddam Hussein here, it would be the exact same level of credibility.
Look, everyone, a foreign enemy did a terrible thing to us.
Does that really sound plausible to you at all?
And even if Donald Trump is the most corrupt businessman in the world, which come on, he's just a skyscraper tycoon.
It's not like he's actually a banker.
He rips off bankers for a living.
You know, he's, he's scum among capitalists.
He's not really one of the leaders of that class at all.
And anyway, however, however many condos, Russian mobsters bought from him at inflated prices that doesn't have a damn thing to do with the Russian government intervening in the election or any of these things like in these fake accusations.
Hope you can see through that.
Yeah, that wasn't much of a parenthetical.
But anyway.
Yeah, well, who knows?
I mean, I think, you know, I think there are certain things that are that are worth looking at about the reach of social media, and the way that anyone with money can ask these, these operators of social media who have an enormous reach, but who are not regulated in any way, whether they can help them find the kind of people that they want to reach if they give them a large amount of money, which I think is a valid and interesting question.
But you know, we would if we carry on with this one, we're digressing from the issue really of George W. Bush, and why on earth it would be that anyone would want to rehabilitate the name of somebody who has never answered for the many crimes which he committed when he was the President of the United States.
Well, including picking a fight with Russia by continuing Bill Clinton's NATO expansion project.
Anyway, I'm sorry to continue to digress onto the Russia issue.
But a lot of this is George W. Bush's fault in the first place.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and also, Scott, you know, I was particularly remembering that there are a number of dates in the calendar that I think should always be marked as, you know, American national holidays of shame.
And one of them is February the 7th, 2002.
So, you know, I was planning to write about that.
And it just, I suppose it's a happy coincidence that it's turned up when, when Bush's, you know, thrust himself back into the news spotlight with whatever else it is that he's talking about.
Okay, so remind us then, what's the significance of that date?
To me, the key element is this, this was when he issued a presidential memo, informing the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and various other key figures in his administration, that the protections of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners seized in the war on terror to either Al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners.
So this was, you know, less than a month after Guantanamo had opened.
And if you don't offer the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and specifically Common Article Three, which prohibits any kind of torture or abuse, then you are in fact opening up the doors for torture and abuse to be practiced with impunity.
And, you know, that sadly, is what happened at Guantanamo.
You know, same thing, too, is really important in that same memo, was that the traditional military tribunals, field tribunals for determining who's to be held and under what category, that those were all abolished and reset with a new ad hoc process, which ended up meaning that, well, just round people up and ship them up the chain of command, and it'll be somebody else's problem to figure out who really should be held and who shouldn't.
While meanwhile, the people further down the chain of command or further up it, whatever, further down the chain of custody, would assume that whoever they were getting must be guilty of something or else why would they be getting them.
And so you had basically here, you've had a single, you know, US federal military going back 200 years that knows how to do this already.
And all of their procedures have been cancelled and replaced with made up nonsense.
So not only are people being tortured, but absolute nobodies are being tortured.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and then you get into the terrible position, which is kind of like the witch hunts, really, which is where you you know, when when you've got somebody, and you've decided that they must know something, and that if they're not telling you it is because they're hiding it, rather than because they're nobodies, then you end up torturing them, you know, convinced that they're actually, you know, so well trained by al Qaeda that they're hiding stuff from you.
You know, there's a guy Brandon Neely, who was a guard at Guantanamo, who I've talked to about this, and he was there at the very beginning.
And yes, and he talked about how, man, when they first got there, we were expecting these 10 foot tall terror warrior, you know, guys, and even when they came off the plane, and they were actually, you know, just sheepish sheep herders, bound and hooded and, and all of this, they chalked up their helplessness simply to the shackles and still imagined that yeah, what dangerous men these were, as the the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, if if we didn't have them, you know, tied down shackle the whole time on the way here, they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines to bring down the C 130 that they're on these terrible, a shameful bit of black propaganda on the part of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, really, I mean, such exaggeration.
But that's always been part of the problem, Scott, hasn't it is that, you know, we've ended up portraying these people as superhumans, when in fact, if what was what was supposed to be happening here was holding holding to account the people who were responsible for the 911 attacks, then what you're actually supposed to be doing is dealing with criminal scum.
But they never did that they portrayed them as superhuman terrorist masterminds, right?
And they portrayed the Taliban and al Qaeda as one in the same thing when the Taliban was a sovereign government of of Afghanistan and Bill Clinton, and had had cooperated with the Saudi and Pakistani interests in helping them come to power in the first place, just a few years before.
And they pretended that well, and in fact, it's it's a weird technicality where they said, Well, so Geneva doesn't apply to al Qaeda, but it does apply to the Taliban, but we're not going to apply it to them because of a separate sub excuse, which is they're not wearing proper uniforms.
Right?
Yeah.
And so now, can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Well, you know, I mean, you're very good on it.
But yes, that is the I wrote a book about it, you know, they want to battle on the battlefield wearing uniforms.
So yes, exactly.
On the basis that the Taliban weren't wearing, you know, hadn't hadn't chosen their kit from a 19th century imperial book of what you're supposed to wear on the battlefield.
They pretended that that made them, you know, not an official, an official army.
But you know, that's the whole, everything about the way that they approached the war on terror was was such a shambles, because they ended up, you know, having people who, who, who were allegedly involved in terrorism, but they didn't want to regard them as criminals.
So they themselves portrayed them as these kind of superhuman soldiers.
And yet, when they captured actual soldiers, who were people who'd been wandering around Afghanistan with an AK 47, either because they'd been pressed into service by the Taliban, or because they were, you know, the imam told them that they should go and help the Taliban, when they captured actual soldiers, then they wouldn't accept that they were soldiers.
So they basically treated them as terrorists who didn't have any rights.
The whole thing was upside down on every on every level.
And really, that absurdity, which I know you understand, and I know that some people understand.
But I would say that generally, that absurdity is something that people still don't really grasp properly, is that this this war on terror involved an absolutely stupefyingly idiotic confusion of terrorists with soldiers and soldiers with terrorists, and an absolute misapplication of the ways that anyone should end up being treated.
And of course, you know, the bottom line of this particular presidential memo was to strip people of any rights whatsoever as human beings.
And that really is, you know, was in place, fundamentally, and for nearly four and a half years, if you want to be charitable to john McCain and some other members of Congress, then the detainee treatment act at the end of 2005, restored America's obligation to treat any prisoner in its custody humanely, according to common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.
But a lot of people who've looked closely at that act say that it was so compromised by by amendments and ways that it was interpreted that it was really Hamden versus Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case in June 2006.
When the, the Supreme Court turned around to the Bush administration and said, common Article Three applies to everyone that you have in your custody.
And that was followed by within a couple of months, Bush shutting down the CIA black sites, and bringing 14 alleged high value detainees to Guantanamo, which the more astute people commenting on it suggest was the first time that anyone actually accused of any serious acts of terrorism was held at Guantanamo.
Because as you mentioned, Katani, but Katani was only there, because they didn't figure out who he was until after they got him to Guantanamo.
So it was only just a coincidence.
Otherwise, he would have been handed over to the CIA.
So this is an important point for people too.
And you and I both got to keep in mind that there are a lot of people who are really new at this, and who were too young to have known about this at the time, but are old enough to learn it now.
As time has passed here, that so anybody of value as you're talking about here, anybody of real value, and you know, direct ties to Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and plotters in the 9-11 attack, anything like that, they were turned over, and most of them arrested in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan in the first place.
They were turned over to the CIA to be tortured at their various black sites.
So I'll ask you to elaborate about that.
And then and then there's the question of Donald Rumsfeld and the military program and Guantanamo Bay, which they had, I guess their secret black site there, Penny Lane or Camp No.
And although I'm not sure when that was established, but primarily Guantanamo Bay is this military prison camp, and it was military personnel doing the torturing there.
So I'll ask you to take us through the history of how this memo turned into these separate torture programs that we know eventually then were migrated to Iraq War Two as well.
Right.
Well, you know, I mean, the CIA had its own directive, you know, straight after 9-11, which I believe the text of that remains classified.
But you know, authorizing the CIA to go after people and I know that, you know, someone who ended up in Guantanamo, but briefly passed through some black sites was picked up about a week after the 9-11 attacks in Pakistan.
And, you know, that's not really a story that's, that's very well known.
I suspect there's still much more to be done in trying to uncover uncover elements of the story.
Maybe part of that is because the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report, you know, hasn't been made available in its full 6200 page glory.
And all we've had is the extremely important but, but more limited 500 page executive summary, to tell this whole sordid story of how, in the end, around 120 people officially were put through the CIA's program.
But that's not the whole story either Scott, because the US government was also farming out people to be tortured by proxy torturers in other countries, Jordan and Syria, and Egypt, just the extraordinary rendition program.
Yeah, I mean, and this is, you know, this is, you know, I still don't think officially, we've filled in the blanks of exactly how many people were sent out to be tortured by other people on behalf of the United States.
It kind of in conjunction with the CIA's own program.
But yeah, and you know, and around 40 of these people who went through various black site programs ended up being held at Guantanamo.
And that Guantanamo, as you mentioned as well, briefly, the CIA ran its own black site within Guantanamo.
And I think that was actually Strawberry Fields.
Penny Lane was a later addition, also known as Camp No, which I think is the prison that we, we presume was where they tried to turn prisoners into double agents.
And where three men were murdered.
And I should clarify here, just for the record, in case anybody would be caused to be confused, that it's the other Scott Horton, the writer for Harper's Magazine, and professor of law at Columbia University, and lawyer in New York, international human rights lawyer, who did the work at Harper's Magazine, elaborating on a Seton Hall study.
And then eventually, there's a book by a guard at Guantanamo at the time, Sergeant Joseph Hickman, called murder at Guantanamo.
And it's about three guys who had supposedly all committed suicide.
And it was, I think, July 2006, when they were clearly murdered.
And, and there was a cover up all about that there.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, another another deeply shocking story in the long and sordid history of Guantanamo, which, you know, it was interesting, Scott, when you said, you know, there are young people who may not know this.
And then on the one hand, that I mean, that's obviously true.
But on the one hand, we're talking about Guantanamo as though we're looking back historically on things that have taken place.
I should have said, because TV hasn't talked about it in 10 years, not that they And yet the prison itself is still going.
It really isn't just a history lesson.
This is a history lesson that leads up to the present day and is still, you know, the place is still there.
Well, wait, so say that no, I want to get back to that, because that is important.
But now let's talk about Bush years some more.
You said something that sounded like hyperbole, but you're right.
And I want to prove it real quick.
And that is that you said, these people in this memo, they were denied all of their rights, their entire human rights.
And people might think, well, no, because I remember that they said, well, torture is fine up until the point where it's pain equivalent to organ failure.
And that would be bad.
And some of that is in there.
And yet, at the same time, it also has what's called the golden ticket that says and I'll have the exact language in front of me, but it is quoted directly in my book, that if you kill somebody in an interrogation, don't worry about it, that's covered too, because we know that you were trying to prevent a greater harm.
And so that's fine.
Yeah, up to murder.
No, I mean, it really is actually quite shocking when you when you do properly work out that this memo, stripped them of all their rights that you have no rights, because your, your your basic rights are, you know, as we understand it in our countries, and over the laws and treaties that have developed over a significant amount of time, is that you can't be deprived of your liberty, except through being convicted after a trial, or being held unmolested with the protections of the Geneva Conventions, until you know, somebody reaches some conclusion that there is an end of hostilities.
And you know, the Guantanamo prisoners have were were refused either of these protections, which means, you know, what are they, they are people without rights.
And when you realise that the Bush administration then, as well as holding them in open ended detention, possibly forever, and let's look at the 41 men still held, you know, who are actually held forever, unless something extraordinary happens to free any of them.
But while you're being held without any kind of due process without any kind of recognition, that you can't hold people for the rest of their lives without charge or trial, you are also not protected in terms of what your captors can do to you, that they can torture you, that they can do all of this stuff.
And as you say, they then also pass all kinds of little bits of legislation here and there to try and make sure that everyone knows that if the most terrible thing happened, and somebody died in your custody, you will not be held accountable for it.
It's really that bad.
And which is true.
And we know that there were at least two men, Abda al-Jamadi in Iraq, who was murdered at Abu Ghraib, and Ghul Ahmed, right, something Ghul, Ahmed Ghul.
Yeah, Hassan Ghul.
Hassan Ghul, I guess.
Okay.
At the salt pit torture dungeon.
Ghul Rahman, the guy who froze to death.
Oh, Ghul Rahman, that's right.
The guy, that's right, Ghul Rahman.
That's right, who froze at the salt pit torture dungeon in north of Kabul there in Afghanistan.
And they did when Obama came into power, to skip ahead a little bit here, but on this case, they had a preliminary investigation to see whether they would have an investigation into whether these guys broke the law.
And they decided that no, they didn't don't worry about it.
And that was it.
Yeah, that was that was the only criminal, you know, attempted criminal accountability for any of this that we've seen so far.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And you know, and some time ago, when Jane Mayer wrote about, about the guy who was who was killed in Iraq, you know, it appeared to be a story in which the United States had created a chain of command in which nobody was actually responsible for the fact that he was murdered in US custody, that it was impossible to reach a place where anyone could actually be held accountable for it.
Because the responsibility was kind of shunted around and, you know, made, made so that it was nobody's fault.
A man died, but apparently it was nobody's fault.
I mean, it's, you know, it's horrible.
Well, and it was a brutal killing as well.
And it's his corpse that's in a lot of those Guantanamo pictures with the pretty blonde girl smiling with the devil smile and the thumbs up.
I'm not a religious guy.
But if you actually turn that picture, rotate it 90 degrees and, and get a good look at her face, man, that's creepy.
Anyway.
No, absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, yeah.
And you know, desecrating people's corpses.
Oh, he's just some anonymous Iraqi to most of us or something like that, I guess.
But imagine if that's somebody in your family, and everybody's sitting there posing with his mutilated corpse after they murdered him.
People tend to, you know, never forget that kind of thing to coin a phrase.
Yeah.
And especially when you know, when I mean, this, it's not excusable under any circumstances, Scott.
But if you, you know, look at the tortured lies and logic that was required to suggest that America was in Iraq in the first place, because there was some sort of connection between the regime of Saddam Hussein, and the people who, you know, who allegedly had masterminded and were responsible for the 911 attacks from Afghanistan.
There was no connection.
You know, we know that we know that one of the key pieces of alleged evidence was came about through the tortured confession of a man that the United States held who ended up being sent back to Libya, where he was murdered by Colonel Gaddafi.
The United States, in Iraq, you know, conducted an illegal invasion, and once there behaved with absolute barbarity towards the people that they that if they were going to be treating them in, you know, when they captured them, they should have been treating them according to the Geneva Conventions.
And yet, the kind of barbarism that we saw at Abu Ghraib was actually widespread.
I mean, on every level, this is just, just so horrible.
And when you you know, then start looking at how some of the people were abused in one of the US prisons in Iraq to such an extent that they ended up being the kind of origins of Daesh, you know, what in the West we call Islamic State, then it's like, Oh, hang on.
So we created these guys through the torture program in the country that we were illegally at war with, where we were supposed to be absolutely bound by the Geneva Conventions.
And yet, you know, and would actually say publicly, you know, there is a difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iraq, we're following the Geneva Conventions, Afghanistan's a bit more complicated.
But in reality, all that happened after 911 was that the United States did away with the Geneva Conventions.
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Yeah, all right.
So now, a two part question here.
Could you please describe some of the tortures being used by the CIA here, the military there at Guantanamo in Iraq, Afghanistan and elaborate a little bit about that.
And then secondly, if you could get back also to, you know, the the military side of the program, we can talk more about the CIA side of the damn thing if you want to.
But on the military side, with the part that I'm really interested in, is what Tony Lugaranis said in the PBS documentary, The Torture Question, when he says basically, look, man, we tortured him on the side of the road, we tortured him in back of the house, we tortured him in the living room, we tortured him in our trucks, we tortured him back at the base.
We tortured 10s of 1000s of Iraqis, all of them, anybody who was even accused or even just swept up in in anti resistance sweeps, or however it was, they were all treated like they were Bin Laden night terrorists.
They had no rights at all.
And this went on for years there in Iraq, too.
Well, which is basically what you know, what I was just saying to you about how absolutely shameful and disgraceful it is that the that this is what happened when, when the necessary protections were removed that are supposed to, you know, ensure that there is some kind of humane treatment of prisoners in wartime.
And, you know, I think most people just never usually been exposed to the idea that no really 1000s and 1000s of people went through the torture system like it was some kind of meat grinder during the war.
It wasn't just a few guys that we know are responsible for 911 because they bragged about it being tortured in Poland because, you know, speaking for at least some substantial minority of Americans, if not worse, screw them.
But that's not the case here.
We're talking about Joe Iraqi who didn't do shit, you know?
Yeah, no, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, and once you once you understand the scale of it, it really is, you know, it's kind of difficult to come back to a normal analysis of things after that.
But you know, the specific issues that you're talking about, I mean, it's crucial for people to know that, that, you know, that the fundamental, the fundamental rule that you should not abuse people in your custody, was totally done away with after 911.
So first of all, in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, which is why I make this point of saying, there was only a tenuous connection between Afghanistan and Iraq.
And that was all entirely fabricated.
Yeah.
And it was on based on torture.
Absolutely.
And it wasn't just a Libby, you refer to a Libby there who was tortured into claiming that Saddam taught al Qaeda, how to hijack airplanes, and how to develop chemical weapons.
And he was clearly, you know, tortured, I believe in Egypt, with the CIA and the Egyptians going to work on them.
And it was as simple as, you know, say the name Saddam, dude, if you want the pain to stop, and he figured out real quick, that's what these guys want to hear.
And then they did the same thing to Abu Zubaydah, who was a whole that, that, that one guy who had everything that happened to him and all the background, there's a huge story.
But But simply, they tortured lies about Iraq, out of him.
And then they would, oh, wow, double, triple confirmation, everybody look.
Yeah.
And these are, you know, and there is also if you think, and, you know, and I think that Lawrence Wilkerson, Larry Wilkerson has been very clear on this.
So Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, that, you know, initially, after 911, they thought that there might be another terrorist attack plan.saying before even the end of 2001, they knew that this wasn't the case.
And when you really take that on board and you realize how much torture was taking place in 2002 and into 2003, then it suddenly starts to look like they're torturing people for a different reason.
And then it really is right because they said they said their narrative really was we're trying to prevent the next attack any way to prevent the next attack.
But this isn't a huge leap to say, actually, what you have is that somebody like, you know, like Dick Cheney, who it seems to me was the driver of this program much more than anybody else within the Bush administration.
Well, I'm not for a minute trying to, you know, to stop Donald Trump, Donald Rumsfeld having his responsibility as the Secretary of Defense for the separate torture programs that he implemented.
But that it looks like they were they were torturing to get people to lie so that they could justify their illegal invasion of Iraq.
And I think that is actually the case.
But we don't really hear very much discussed about how when Dick Cheney brings out a book talking about his life, he should actually be arrested when he turns up on a chat show rather than being lauded as some great statesman of the past, which is, you know, to bring us back around to where we started is what we've ended up with George W. Bush.
He's a grand elder statesman now.
It's like, no, he's not.
He's a war criminal who got away with it, as is Dick Cheney, as is Donald Rumsfeld, as are their legal advisors.
Well, and this is the thing, too, is that it's not just that you don't like it.
It's that that's the law.
And it's been the law in America for 230 years, which, you know, as I write in the book, not to quote myself or whatever.
Sorry, I know that's annoying, but I don't want to sound like this is an original thought.
But the thing is that it's not that the U.S. forces have not tortured in the past.
Of course, they've tortured really all along from the Indian wars all the way through.
But that's not to say that it was legal when they did so.
It wasn't.
It's clearly criminal.
And not that there's ever been a great history of accountability, but the law says that there should be.
Yeah.
Well, and also, you know, there are those particular novelties after the 9-11 attack, Scott, you know, which you which you were asking me to talk about, of how, you know, John Yu, who's a law professor at Berkeley, who was working in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the part of the Justice Department that ironically advises the executive branch on what is legal or not to do, you know, attempted to redefine torture so that torture could be practiced by the CIA.
And he's the one who came up with this, you know, claim that it wasn't torture unless it led to serious organ failure or death, you know.
And in the meantime, you have Donald Rumsfeld, who seems to be feeling a bit left out of the fact that the CIA is getting into all this heavy, heavy duty stuff and actually has legal legal advice about what to do.
So Rumsfeld, when he finds out that he's got this guy, Al-Qahtani, who was supposed to be the 20th hijacker on 9-11, then he gets his people to write their own torture program that he can use.
And, you know, and he and so there are two parallel torture programs running here, one by one CIA program and one that the military is using.
And that was supposed to be just for Al-Qahtani.
You know, we then know that there was a specific program for Mohamedou Slahi, the now liberated man and famous author.
But, you know, we also know from people who've spoken about it over the years that, in fact, it became very widespread, the use of all this torture and abuse at Guantanamo.
And, you know, and then we've been discussing the bigger picture, which is that when you have stripped away the Geneva Conventions, then you end up in a position where, whether it's directed or not, you have encouraged everybody under your command to start abusing prisoners in a much more open manner than would have happened.
And that's what we've seen everywhere.
And the responsibility for that, again, clearly rests with all these very senior figures within the Bush administration.
All right.
Now, so I want to go back to what you said about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the, for three years, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State there.
And, you know, there was a big Guardian story, which I, as far as I understand, is accurate about his time in Camp Bukha in southern Iraq.
But The Intercept had a story, I believe it was John Schwartz, where they had the government documents and his prisoner number.
And he was registered as being at Abu Ghraib at the exact time that those torture pictures were being taken.
It was the guards on the night shift who were taking the pictures, not that they were the only ones doing the torturing.
And I don't know if he's in any of the pictures or not.
Because they were the ones who were told to soften up people for the interrogators and were given quite a lot of leeway into how they treated people.
And there's a big difference between that and what you get in these clinical CIA black sites, when, you know, when things were much more regulated.
And, you know, the techniques were obviously as, you know, stupidly brutal and counterproductive.
But there was, you know, there was the notion that this was all being conducted very responsibly and very clinically, compared to what happened in Abu Ghraib when the people responsible for actually running the cells were told, you know, these guys are going to be interrogated tomorrow.
So we want them not to have had any sleep, and gave them, you know, a certain amount of leeway, in fact, quite a lot of leeway, as to how they were going to do that, what kind of music they were going to play to keep them awake, what kind of creative ways they were going to come up with to provide discomfort to these people, because they had been given the license to do so.
And that's how we end up with, you know, you can see it in Guantanamo as well, when inexperienced military interrogators were given a certain amount of freedom to give people a bad night, and they came up with all this horrible stuff in Guantanamo as well.
Well, we know actually that at Guantanamo, they had low-level and medium-level staff sitting around talking about, did you see 24 last night?
Yeah, Kiefer Sutherland tortured a guy this way and this way.
Let's try that.
They were just making it up as they went along, like it was THX 1138, where there's just the banality of evil perfectly displayed there, you know?
Yeah, well, exactly, Scott.
So, yeah.
But, you know, once you step back and see the scale of it from, you know, those black sites where, you know, with horrible cynicism, the United States government was putting pressure on other countries to host a special torture prison, because they couldn't do it on their own territory, because it is so illegal.
And they were, you know, doing these deals with Thailand, and then with Poland, and with Romania, and with Lithuania, to host sites that were just illegal and wrong, you know?
And you've got that on the one hand, and on the other hand, this animal house on the night shift, I think, is how the general who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal mentioned it as at one point, that it was, you know, just these low-level people with no skills in interrogation, or in, you know, how to treat people humanely, who had been given this license to abuse them in creative manners that they saw fit.
The whole thing is just such a terrible and comprehensive indictment of the way that the United States treated people who ended up in its custody that, you know, people should be aware.
And, you know, isn't it shocking how many people aren't?
Yeah.
Well, and you know, there's a quote from Petraeus himself, and I would say this is against interest, but maybe he's just trying to acquit himself of any command responsibility for anything that was going on while he was there.
But he has said that, you know, Abu Ghraib lives forever.
I mean, he has said it in the most grave kind of terms, that, you know, this is a thing that happened, and it'll never be forgotten, and it lives on the internet forever, and it will continue to cause us serious problems.
Yeah, well, and so it should.
But it's, you know, I wonder how much that's supposed to feed into this kind of bad apples narrative that, you know, that it wasn't, that everything isn't connected, whereas, you know, once you look into the story, of course, everything is connected.
You know, the people...
Well, and it's pretty hard to deny the importance of the truth of that, when really what he's doing is confirming what, you know, lower-ranking people like Matthew Alexander, that's his pseudonym, I forgot his real name, it's right on the tip of my tongue, I've interviewed him a couple of times, but, you know, he said every foreign fighter he interviewed, and not just him, but I've heard this numerous times from different guys who were in Iraq War II.
I think Matthew Ho said this, too, from his time in Iraq War II.
All the foreign fighters, Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, anybody else who came to fight with Zarqawi in the Sunni-based insurgency, and they ended up being, you know, captured by the Americans and interrogated.
What are you doing here?
Well, I saw the pictures of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and so I came to die trying to kill you guys.
Right.
Simple as that.
That was what they were doing here.
They didn't say, like, oh, we hate the fact that you go to Methodist church in a skirt on a Sunday when...
You know what I mean?
That just wasn't ever their problem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, and, you know, the fact that photos came out of Abu Ghraib, I mean, to this day, have we seen abuse photos from Bagram and Guantanamo?
No.
The only photos that exist are this tiny little snapshot that, you know, that we know that cynical politicians tried to say was a bad apple scenario.
And, you know, and people have to dig down a little bit into it, unfortunately, Scott, because the photos aren't there to know that actually what happened to Abu Ghraib was directly imported from Bagram and that, you know, the techniques that were used in Bagram, of course, also migrated to Guantanamo and that the whole thing is connected.
That's the thing, is that when you see those, you know, those shocking images from Abu Ghraib, which I think, you know, must be seared onto the retina of everyone who's seen them.
But when you see them, they are an exemplar of everything that was happening in everything that the United States has done since 9-11.
And people should look at A Taxi to the Dark Side, the documentary by Alex Gibney, if you want a small portrayal of what was going on at Bagram Air Base around that time.
It's a very heavy film, but it's very appropriately heavy, because, you know, at the heart of that film is Dilawar.
At the heart of that film is a hapless taxi driver in Afghanistan who was brutally murdered in Bagram by people whose responsibility was to treat him humanely and who absolutely categorically failed and murdered him horribly.
Yeah, well, and, you know, the most memorable part of the movie, to me, is the guy whose nickname was Monster, who had Monster tattooed across his giant barrel chest.
And he said his job was brutalizing the hell out of anybody in there.
But when it came, I forget if he's talking about Dilawar himself or if he was talking about Omar Khadr, who was also in there around the same time, at some point he drew a line and said, listen, this person is too young and small and helpless.
Nobody beat him up, at least while I'm working.
We can beat up everybody but him, something like that.
But he painted a picture of a torture dungeon straight out of a Farside cartoon or something in there.
Yeah, yeah.
And he was, you know, he was the good soldier who did what he was told, you know?
And at least, you know, he fessed up to it and was saying, yeah, let me tell you how bad it was.
It was pretty bad.
And the things I did, yeah, they were wrong.
He's very powerful in that film because he, you know, because he gives off his guilt.
You can feel his guilt, the responsibility of what he did.
And, you know, and we don't see that so much at the time.
You know, we see the fallout from what war does to people because they come home and they, you know, they shoot themselves in the head, or they, you know, terrorize their immediate family in their neighborhood.
Or let's look across the United States at what PTSD and what people have been required to do in their country's name.
What happens to them when they come back to their communities, hundreds of them all across the United States and wreak havoc on their families and, you know, and are destroyed themselves by what they were.
Yeah, get jobs as deputy sheriffs for the rest of us to have to deal with on the side of the road, you know?
Right.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and, you know, think of this too, you know, going back, the conflation with Iraq aside, I mean, this is just the most incredible thing that they were able to get away with this.
But just think about how criminal it is, the way that they conflated Al-Qaeda with the Taliban from the very beginning.
Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Taliban.
Monster, monster over there running the Bagram prison.
He had no idea probably that he ought to at least narrow down these brutal tortures to Arabs.
Never mind if they actually ever met Osama before or not, but the local people here didn't do it.
And yet the, and our government certainly knew that all along that, you know, even according to them, the Taliban were basically forced to suffer the presence of Al-Qaeda such as it was.
And we're trying to constantly, even before 9-11, negotiate bin Laden away.
Right.
You know?
And so they could have told the truth that, look, this is a war on Al-Qaeda.
We're going to get Al-Qaeda.
And Monster, look, if you find any Egyptians, by all means beat his ass.
I'm not saying that, but that's what George Bush could have said.
But if you find a local Afghan taxi driver, he couldn't, we're here to protect him.
That, you know, that was what they were selling us on TV.
Look, we're bringing them food aid.
We're here to help them and whatever the Afghan people, but the Taliban were the Afghan people too.
You know, I'm not saying they were good guys, but they weren't the ones who had attacked us.
And the army guys on the ground should have known that.
And they weren't told that, I don't think.
Well, you know, I mean, you know, we've been speaking since 2007.
You know, I'm still on this story of Guantanamo, which, you know, insanely has been open for 16 years.
And, you know, and Donald Trump now wants to reinvigorate it.
But, you know, you have then spent this huge amount of your time looking specifically at the story of Afghanistan.
And they're not really any different, are they?
Here we've got another 16-year-old story of insanity.
What happened?
You know, when I spoke to Anand Gopal, who wrote a great book about the U.S. in Afghanistan, and he told me, you know, the story of the U.S. in Afghanistan is that they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
And that goes back to 2002.
In 2002, the U.S. had basically won.
What the hell are they doing still there now?
What is this?
Why are we still in Afghanistan?
What is all this?
You know?
Well, and now, so this is really a big part of the story too, as long as we're at it, that because of all the controversy over Guantanamo, but the lack of controversy over Afghanistan, in the Obama years, and this isn't my phrase, I mean, this became like a common thing among NGOs and civil rights critics and stuff like that, that the human rights organizations and so forth, that Bagram became Guantanamo East.
And where they were taking people in the Obama years again now, they were taking people from all over the world who'd never even been to Afghanistan and sending them to the Bagram prison because they needed somewhere lawless to hold them without causing too much of a problem.
And so they needed to do this as Obama was making the shift toward more assassinations and less captures.
That was his solution to the problem.
Well, we'll just murder them instead of torturing them.
Well, and their solution to a lot of problems actually in both Afghanistan and in Iraq was to eventually reach these agreements with the governments of those countries that they would hand over their prisons to the responsibility of the home governments, which, you know, in both cases suddenly absolves the United States of all responsibility for anything.
And, you know, and the other issue really...
And we know that those governments in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to torture people.
Back in Afghanistan, they pretended to be upset about it.
Oh, no, the Americans.
Oh, no, the Afghan government is using torture.
And so now there's a problem if we hand the prisoners over to them, huh?
Right, exactly.
But I mean, it does, you know, it did in practical terms mean that the United States government was able to claim that it absolved itself of all responsibility for the treatment of prisoners because it handed over the responsibility for prisons to somebody else, as though everything they did didn't count.
And, you know, the other thing that interests me is that, you know, there have been efforts legally to, you know, to address the responsibility of the United States to have kept the sites that it held people in and interrogated people in and tortured people in to keep them, you know, and not to destroy them as that they're part of the evidence.
But obviously, what we've seen over the years is that things have ended up being destroyed.
And all those years that we talked about Bagram, for example, and there was a lot of focus on Bagram, you know, particularly under Obama in those in those early years.
And we've ended up with basically, you know, or in fact, the old Bagram, you know, the Russian prison that the Americans first used under Bush, when they were torturing people horribly in that place, the entire thing is gone, it's been destroyed.
The crime scenes of US torture and abuse worldwide have been destroyed.
In that way, you know, Guantanamo is still a place where it's like, no, you still got this, you've still got this prison, you're using more modern blocks than what you started with, which was Camp X-ray.
But the physical crime scene is still there.
But then the great irony is that, you know, as I mentioned, you know, the great crime scene is now in the control of a president who would love to reinvigorate the crime scene, you know, because there isn't enough crime happening there in Guantanamo now, instigated by his own government under his control.
Yeah.
All right.
So yeah, now take us up to the present day.
George Bush, correct me if I go off the story here, sent about 700 of these guys home.
The previously mentioned Lawrence Wilkerson says they knew immediately that almost all of these guys were innocent.
And they after a little while, they started the process of repatriating almost all of them.
So how many guys are left?
There's two or three different categories of prisoners there.
Please take us through and and get us up to date.
Yeah, sure.
Well, I mean, I think it was, you know, a little over 530 that were that were released by George W. Bush.
And most of that was through political pressure.
I wouldn't claim that he ever understood or would acknowledge any of these people would acknowledge the extent to which they filled that prison with nobodies.
But you know, it was mainly that he got political flack from from his allies.
The reason that you know, the majority of people that were left when he left office hadn't gone home was because they were Yemenis and nobody ever cared about people from Yemen.
They were never politically significant.
You know, Obama released nearly 200.
There are 41 men left in Guantanamo.
Five of these men were approved for transfer out of the prison by review processes that were established by President Obama that that Donald Trump shows no willingness to acknowledge, you know, that he should be tied to these decisions.
Now, they weren't legally binding, but they they were taken by high level US government review processes.
And they really should be followed up on, but he doesn't care.
He's also holding 10 men who are, I would say, kind of perpetually stranded in this broken loop that is the military commission trial system, which is incapable of delivering justice.
And 26 other men who Obama's second and last review process, the periodic review boards, which was kind of like a parole system, decided should continue to be held because they still constituted some kind of a threat.
Those reviews are supposed to take place, keep taking place, that they're reviewed administratively every six months.
And then every few years, the prisoners with their lawyers can seek to make a fresh case about why, as is appropriate in a parole system, they would say to the US government, you know, we are reformed people.
We are sorry for what we did.
We want nothing more than to go home and see our wives and kids again, stroke, marry somebody, you know, embark upon meaningful work and never say a bad word about America again.
And now wait, so these are the guys who, okay, so there are two different kinds of guys who have been cleared, right?
One category, they've been cleared for release.
This is the, I think, the five, you said, who've been cleared for release, but they quit moving on that in the Obama years.
And it's pretty obvious Trump isn't going to take it up.
But then there's another category, guys, who I guess maybe cleared isn't the right word, but the government has had to admit we actually don't have anything on these people that we could ever prosecute them with, even in this rigged military tribunal down here.
But we're going to hold them forever anyway, right?
They kind of fudged it.
So what they had is that they had some, you know, some low level guys who were guilty of wandering around Afghanistan with an AK-47, but never commanded anything, you know, really, really low level foot soldier types.
But they had people who, you know, had misbehaved since they had been detained by the Americans, either by threatening them, or by embarking on hunger strikes.
That's what they've got.
That's what part of this group of 26 is still to this day, there are nobodies there who have just misbehaved badly.
Because guess what, Scott, they didn't like the way that they've been treated since they were first apprehended.
And human rights organizations across the world, and, you know, psychologists and psychiatrists and anybody with a shred of humanity's got to understand, even if you think that under whatever circumstances, somebody deserves this kind of thing, you got to admit, solitary confinement itself is torture, and prison, when you know that you're never going to get a trial.
And even if you got one, it would be fake, and you'd lose and you'd be held here forever anyway.
But you're not even going to get a chance to really defend yourself at any formal process of accusation.
That's the Americans that are doing this to these people.
And then that's where we and that's where we still are with it, Scott.
So you know, of those 26 guys, you know, Abu Zubaydah is one of them.
Some of the guys that are described as high value detainees are amongst these people.
These are people that the United States alleges.
And there is public, you know, documentation available in most cases about these people, claiming that they were involved in actual acts of terrorism.
And yet, these are people that the United States isn't going to put on trial.
And largely, that's because they tortured them.
But you know what, you have to also wonder, in this opaque, in this opaque world of, you know, of evidence, whether some of these people that they've bigged up as terrorists in the past actually aren't the people that they thought that they were.
And they've admitted that that's the case with Abu Zubaydah, where they say he was number three, the whole, this is what runs through the whole story of Guantanamo and the war on terror.
And every minute detail of everything that you were talking about before of how in Iraq, they were torturing people by the side of the road.
I mean, you know, the number of people that have been considered to be something more significant than they are, is immense throughout this whole story in which 10s of 1000s of people in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the black sites in Guantanamo have been tortured and abused by US forces, that, you know, that it was still not be surprising that of those 40 more men in Guantanamo, some of them they've described as significant when they're not, you know, to go with, like I say, if people are looking for the, the, the, you know, the shocking mundane truth of what indefinite detention without charge or trial means in modern America, is that there are people in Guantanamo whose only crime is that they've been very upset about the way that they've been held so lawlessly and abused so openly over the last 16 years.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so there's a guy, I think his name is Abu Zahir.
And I interviewed his lawyer, Colonel Sterling.
Something was I forget if that was his first or last name.
I'm sorry, man.
Anyway, and this guy's thing was mistaken identity.
He was not an al Qaeda guy named this.
He was a translator for the Taliban, right?
With the same name.
And when they busted him, they had him with a container of salt, sugar and petroleum jelly or three containers full of salt, sugar and petroleum jelly.
And they said, Oh, yeah, this is chemical weapons.
And they held him for 14 years before they were finally forced to admit that, okay, yeah, that's just salt and sugar and not so much chemical weapons.
Although too much salt in your diet can be a problem.
But anyway, so but now I wonder whether, you know, if that guy is still sitting there or not now that they've conceded their mistake, or have they finally let him go?
I think the guy you're talking about had, if it's the one I'm thinking of, he'd actually been accused of being involved in a bombing that took place in a marketplace.
And Thomas, that's the lawyer's name.
I'm sorry.
It's it's because his name should be Thomas Sterling, but it's not.
It's the other way around.
I'm sorry.
Was it a guy called Abdul Zahir?
Right?
Does ring a bell?
Yeah, yeah.
That's the guy I'm talking about.
Yeah.
I think I think it's him.
So I think they first of all, they thought he was involved in this bombing in a marketplace in which a Canadian journalist was was wounded.
And I think and under Bush, he was initially going to be charged in the military commissions and they dropped it.
Then we never had anything about it again.
And I think eventually, yes, I think he, you know, as with a lot of the people there, even many, many years down the line, it turned out that that the United States government ended up, you know, as quietly as possible admitting that maybe there were issues of mistaken identity.
And I think he was released, Scott.
But I think this was he I don't think he was sent back to Afghanistan, because in the last few years, the Obama administration, having had its hands tied by Congress on this, didn't send anyone back to Afghanistan.
So lawmakers over the years, came up with various lists of countries that they wouldn't allow anyone to be returned to.
And everybody agreed that no one could go back to Yemen.
And Afghanistan was added to that list at some point.
So some Afghans ended up in other countries, you know, dotted around the world in regimes that would take them in, you know, so I think some of them may have ended up in the United Arab Emirates or in Oman, which okay, they're Muslim countries.
But you know, if you're Yemeni, and they put you in Oman or the United Arab Emirates, it's the at least it's, you know, bear some kind of similarity geographically, you know, you're back in the Gulf area.
I don't know what on earth it could be like if you're a kind of rural Afghan nobody, and your freedom from Guantanamo means that you are, you know, then deposited in a Gulf country with no family.
And, you know, and somehow expected to get on with your life again, it sounds like that would be rather difficult.
All right.
One last thing is the future here, man.
There was a quote from Pompeo, the director of the CIA right now, who was implying that they're going back to torture now.
Well, you know, what can we do about that?
The good thing is that when you know, when Trump took office, and then the then the leaked executive order came out, you know, suggesting that he enthusiastically wanted to reestablish torture and the black sites, pretty much the whole of the establishment came down on him and said, you know, you need to stop talking now.
And I wouldn't be so foolish, Scott, as to think that they did that because they recognise the immorality of engaging in torture.
I think what they recognised is, and this is by this, I'm talking about the right, the more, you know, the more right wing ones.
I think there are plenty of people within the US establishment who have looked at the facts and have had established to as they should have, that the the Senate intelligence torture report demonstrated that not only was it brutal, that the rules that as such that were set were broken, that the CIA lied regularly to everybody about how much they you know, how they were what they were doing, and how useful it was.
But then also it nothing was produced as a result of that, that needed torture to be used.
If you wanted to get information out of people, you don't torture them.
I think that that has become clear to anyone with a functioning brain.
I think that people who are still wedded to the nonsense of, you know, the Wild West and the vengeance that they want.
I think even they have generally been scared, because the Senate intelligence report came very close to suggesting that crimes had been committed for which people should be held accountable.
And, you know, and I think they know that.
So there are people who are advising Trump also on the basis that, yeah, we'd love to do this.
But it turns out that there are people who don't like us doing it.
And they are quite dedicated to trying to make sure that we don't.
So all round, it's not a very good idea.
Now, that isn't to say that they won't be doing stuff on the front line.
And I think they've been doing that all along.
But so basically, if you're out, if you know, if the United States happens to actually have boots on the ground somewhere, rather than just bombing people or dropping drones on them, then if they capture actual enemy combatants, as they would describe them, then they hold them in a forward operating base, and they do what they like with them for a little bit of time.
But not for too long, because they don't really want anyone giving them that much scrutiny.
I think that's happening.
I would really, really hope that no one is going to suggest that any kind of formal program of, you know, of secret detention and torture is going to come back.
But what do I know, Scott, you know, the reason that I presume that more than anything else, is that particularly what happened under Obama was that everybody said, detention's a bit messy, and we've been getting into all these problems.
How about with these newfangled drones?
If we just kill everybody that we think might be a threat anyway, and everybody went, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
Let's do that.
Yeah, no appeals that way.
No, no, nothing.
And so long as you can pretend that you're getting away with that, because you know, because the innocent people that you've killed, and God knows how many of them there are, but the relatives of the people who you know, who were at a wedding party or who were nobodies, because there are always nobodies, there are always these terrible civilian casualties, you just have to hope that they're not going to get so upset that they're not going to come after you.
And I think what we've learned after all this time is that quite frequently, people refuse to accept peaceably the way in which they have been so horrendously abused and murdered by the United States.
And in some cases, you know, that that is what motivates them to fight back.
Yeah, it's all self created.
In other words.
All right, you guys, that's the great Andy Worthington.
The book is the Guantanamo files, the stories of the 759 detainees in America's illegal prison.
The movie is outside the law, you can find that at your favorite search engine online.
And check out his great website, Andy Worthington.co.uk for hundreds of great articles about this going way back in history, 10 or 11 years for us here.
Thanks very much, Andy.
Again, appreciate it.
Thanks very much.
All right, you guys, the great Andy Worthington and you know me, I'm scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash Scott Horton show for the full archive there now YouTube project finally done. poolsaren.us for the book.
Libertarian Institute and anti war.com for things you should read and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton show.
Thanks.
