02/23/15 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, welcome back.
It's the show, the Scott Horton Show.
It's our friend Andy Worthington.
He may be a Brit, but he's an American hero, author of the Guantanamo Files, which is really the files on all of everybody, 700 and almost 800 men who were ever held in the Guantanamo Bay prison.
And, of course, he also is the director of the documentary Outside the Law.
His website is andyworthington.co.uk.
Oh, and you can find him at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org as well.
But andyworthington.co.uk is his website, and he's now writing for aljazeera.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Andy?
Yeah, I'm good.
It's nice to be talking to you again, Scott.
Yeah, yeah, very happy to have you back on the show.
So really important good news here, I think, if I'm reading you right, of Guantanamo's military commissions.
The dismissal of David Hicks' terror conviction casts doubt on the future of Guantanamo's trial system.
So take us back.
Who's David Hicks?
What happened with his case, and why does it matter?
Well, you know, David Hicks is an Australian guy, you know, a young adventurer who had, you know, gone out to Afghanistan and happened to be out there, you know, when the U.S.-led invasion happened following the 9-11 attacks and was swept up in the dragnet of people out there.
And as a white guy, you know, there was obviously money available for him, I think.
He was then, you know, treated really pretty appallingly in custody, as the few white prisoners were, you know, I'm sure everybody remembers the American Taliban, John Walker Lynd, and how appallingly he was treated.
And then eventually when, after a number of false starts, the Bush administration was trying to prove the credibility of its military commission trial system, the one that they'd dragged out from the history books, instead of prosecuting people if they committed crimes in federal court, then they came up with the idea that they would try and do Hicks, presumably for being a white man in a foreign country at a time when that wasn't a good thing to do, because there was no evidence that Hicks had ever done anything to anybody.
And, you know, the best way when you haven't got any evidence against somebody but you want something to stick is to suggest that they would be better off with a plea deal, and that's exactly what happened in Hicks' case.
And in fact, you know, he had correctly figured that it was probably the only way he was going to get out of there and got a very lenient plea deal, in that he was almost immediately sent home to Australia in 2007, just after the plea deal in March.
Was he ever even accused of killing Americans or killing Northern Alliance members or anyone else?
No, he wasn't accused of killing anybody.
He was just accused of providing material support for terrorism, which, you know, in the context of the war on terror meant, you know, that he was in Afghanistan appearing to be supporting the Taliban.
You know, which in the hyped-up post-9-11 world is something that the U.S. wants to make into a war crime.
So, you know, so there's Hicks.
I mean, he got back, you know, in April 2007, was imprisoned for a little while, and then by the end of 2007 he was a free man, except, of course, you know, he'd been through this terrible ordeal, was regarded as a convicted terrorist in his homeland.
And, you know, this is a great vindication of, you know, what he's always said, which is, you know, how could I be a war criminal?
I didn't do anything.
As well as being, as I mentioned in the article, Scott, you know, another nail in the coffin, hopefully, for the military commissions.
Right.
OK.
So now what is this recent court ruling that has thrown out his plea?
Well, the court ruling actually took place in the fall of 2012, the first major ruling.
So what people need to know is that there have been eight convictions in the military commission since the war on terror began.
Two of those have been in trials, and the rest of them have been plea deals.
So eight in all, only a couple of those guys are still held.
The rest of them, you know, also like Hicks, found out that the only way to get out of Guantanamo was to come up with some kind of guilty plea.
And then you would actually be released while all the nobodies continue to be held.
So in the fall of 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court, so the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., kicked out the conviction against Salim Hamdan.
Now, he was a Yemeni guy who had been one of a pool of drivers for Osama Bin Laden.
So a man who knew nothing about anything but was working for a bad guy.
So, you know, they threw out the material support for terrorism charge.
And in fact, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, sometimes by their own people, had pointed out that making material support for terrorism into a war crime was a non-starter because it isn't a war crime.
You can prosecute material support for terrorism in a federal court, but there's no history of it being triable by marriage or commission.
And in fact, you know, many, many voices said, if this goes to appeal, it's pretty sure that you're going to lose.
So that's what happened.
There then followed a similar dismissal of a conviction in another case against a man called Ali Hamza al-Baloo, who had made promotional videos for al-Qaeda.
Now, there is a little bit of complicated stuff about whether all the charges against him have been dismissed, which I won't go into.
It's almost impossible to understand unless you're very seriously into the law.
But that was basically, you know, the second conviction went on material support.
Conspiracy also seems to have gone.
So then in the new year, what happened was that a third conviction was kicked out, this time by the convening authority, who is the official responsible for overseeing who is charged in the military commission.
So that was against a Sudanese guy called Norutman Mohammed.
He'd been a sometime trainer in a training camp in Afghanistan, nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
He had got three and three quarter years for a plea deal, so he'd gone home at the end of 2013.
And now comes Hicks.
So of the eight convictions, four of them have now been kicked out.
So, you know, it's looking about as bad as it could do for the credibility of this trial system.
And deservedly so, Scott.
I mean, you know, this has been a farce from the very beginning.
Yeah, it has.
Well, and even, I mean, and I don't know about the law.
Well, what about attacking the Pentagon, attacking using hijacked airplanes to attack the towers?
Does that count as a war crime?
Or that's just a felony terrorism charge, just like any other.
Well, it's a crime, isn't it?
Because, unfortunately, if you make a terrorist attack, you know, however horrible, into an act of war, then you make the people who did that into warriors.
And you're kind of playing into their hands.
Now, you know, these guys are trying to make the argument that they're engaged in a war.
The mistake that the Bush administration did and that the Obama administration hasn't done away with is failing to understand that that's playing into their hands.
That what you need to get back to is just is treating a crime as a crime.
It's a horrible crime, but many crimes are horrible.
But it's a crime.
And that's what should have happened.
And that's obviously, you know, what I think needs to happen now is for the military commissions to be given up.
And that's not to say that they're not trying to prosecute these much more serious capital offenses within the military commission system.
And, you know, on paper, they're entitled to do that.
The problem, of course, is that these are all people who were lavishly tortured by the United States government and its representatives.
So every few months there's a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo in these cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other people.
And, you know, as well as I do, Scott, they've been going on for years.
And every time they get together, basically the defense is saying we cannot have anything resembling a fair trial unless, you know, unless we can have our clients be able to talk about the terrible things that happened to them when they were held in black sites.
And on the other side, you've got the prosecution saying under no circumstances can we possibly proceed with anything should these people be allowed to mention a word about anything that's ever happened.
Stop right there.
Stop right there.
We'll be right back with Andy Worthington.
Just one sec, guys.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking with the great Andy Worthington.
Listen, it's great to have you on where we were interrupted.
You were talking about how we can't even when the military commission is moving forward, it's moving forward at a snail's pace.
Every pretrial hearing is a disaster.
You've chart you've counted up their legacy of victory against cooks and innocent children like Omar Carter and the occasional chauffeur.
But when it comes to Ramzi bin al-Sheikh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who admitted and bragged to Al Jazeera that they did 9-11 before anybody ever tortured him into admitting so.
And plus all the great journalism that backs that up as well.
They just don't ever seem to get tried.
Every time they show up in court, their defense attorney makes a squeak and he's always got a great point.
And so everything ends up getting put off and put off.
And the judges find out that the CIA has been spying on him through the smoke detectors.
And they say, give us another six month extension now.
And it's a it's a farce.
It's not that it's just a kangaroo court in how unfair it is.
It's that it's a joke.
Andy, I think is what you were saying there before.
I am saying it's a joke much more than I'm saying it's a kangaroo.
Because the intention of the Bush administration, you know, and Cheney was really driving this was, was a kangaroo court.
You know, they wanted, you know, no due process.
They said someone was guilty.
They wanted, you know, compliant military judges to to to agree.
And, you know, from early on, you know, they had a number of prosecutors who wouldn't play ball.
And they also had judges who said, look, look, I'm not going to preside over a kangaroo course.
What I'm going to do is we're going to do this properly.
And there were a number of judges in the early days who made life very difficult for the Bush administration.
But, you know, but the fact is, Scott, it isn't it isn't going to work, I don't think.
And it would, you know, it would be much more sensible for everybody, not least the people who are still hoping for justice, who, you know, lost relatives in the in those attacks such a long time ago for there to be trials.
And, you know, Eric Holder suggested back in 2009, in November 2009, that there would be trials for those people accused of the 9-11 attacks in New York in federal court.
And when when, you know, various people on the ground and positions of authority then started to push back against that, the Obama administration collapsed on the point, refused to back Eric Holder.
And, you know, we're stuck with the inappropriate trial venue.
You know, and I can only see that we're only ever going to get any kind of resolution by actually folding the whole thing, moving these guys to the U.S. mainland and putting them on trial in federal court.
Now, Congress doesn't want that, but, you know.
Which, by the way, would be a virtual 100 percent guaranteed conviction.
Right.
You hand these guys over to the Justice Department.
They're going to charge them with 150,000 felonies.
And the chances of them ever getting out of the supermax that they're locked in after that are nothing.
Nothing.
And it doesn't matter whether they've been tortured.
Even if you throw out all the torture evidence, it doesn't matter.
They want convictions in federal court of anyone.
They can have them.
Right.
I mean, who gets acquitted in federal court?
Nobody.
Yeah.
I mean, my suggestion would be that if they can come up with anything that resembles evidence against these guys, then then, yeah, a jury will convict them.
And, you know, it's a sad thing, really.
And that won't be hard for the actually guilty.
You know, it might be hard to get a conviction in federal court against Omar Khadr since he's innocent.
Right.
When it comes to convicting Ramzi bin al-Shih, that won't be difficult.
You know, even if you exclude all what they what he told them under torture.
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, I thought that, you know, I agree with you.
And all they've done to date is, you know, is waste everybody's time, humiliate themselves and end up with things like, you know, that that wretched plea deal, you know, in Omar Khadr's case, which was spoken about in the past as somebody who was a juvenile who almost certainly didn't even commit the act of which they're accused, which is, you know, throwing a grenade during wartime in a in a in a battle, which is not a war crime.
I mean, the whole thing, you know, what is what an absolute disgrace.
So, you know, we'll see.
I mean, my point of writing the article was just, you know, every time there's that kind of victory, I will, I'm sure, write something very similar saying, is this going to be what it takes to to destroy the credibility of the whole thing?
Because it's beyond time that, you know, we stopped having these farcical pseudo trials for people who shouldn't be on trial and actually got to dealing with the issue of the very small number of apparently, you know, genuine terrorists that have been held at Guantanamo.
Well, it really does go to the smallness of dear leader when, you know, he could make the most right wing argument for closing down that thing, beginning with I'm not afraid.
And no one should be afraid that we can't hold trials for these guys.
The Republicans in Congress would have us be afraid that if we hold a trial, that that'll provoke terrorists.
Oh, now terrorism has causes, huh?
Things like fair trials are the cause.
I thought it was just if you believe in Islam real hard, it makes you terrorists on Republicans.
Anyway, here's Colin Powell and George Bush and Robert Gates and every Republican that you need to name drop saying that Guantanamo Bay.
And in fact, here's the director of the Central Intelligence Agency saying that this is a security threat to the United States.
This helps with the enemies recruiting propaganda against us, etc., etc., etc., etc.
It's actually, you know, the Republicans in the House are a bunch of tiny crying cowards if they think that we should have to do it their way.
And Obama could win that argument in one press conference, never mind the fact that he's the commander in chief.
And so he can move those troops if he wants.
And Congress can't say anything about it.
He could challenge them and say, go ahead and impeach me if you want.
But I'm closing down Guantanamo prison and you can't stop me.
And and yet he won't do any of this stuff.
In fact, I'm sorry, I'm still going.
And I know the audience hates this, too.
But when he first came into power, Greenwald wrote this up.
And it was in The Washington Post where important, very powerful, important senators, I think Leahy and Levin and them were saying that they took him at his word.
He meant to close Guantanamo.
So they started to get the process going.
And then they realized that he was having them stick their neck out, but he wasn't willing to help at all.
And the White House was absolutely unwilling to ask anyone on Capitol Hill to go along with the project.
And so they very quickly backed down because they realized they didn't have his support.
And that was from the very beginning.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, unfortunately, you know, the situation we're in now is still that he's facing opposition.
And, you know, and it remains to be seen if he will tackle it robustly enough.
I mean, you know, he has he has done things in the last few months.
He has released, you know, over two dozen prisoners.
And that was an achievement.
But, of course, nothing's happened for over a month now.
Getting on for two.
So now we have to question whether whether he's got the resolve to keep pushing when he's up against, you know, a hostile Republican controlled Congress.
And clearly, you know, I mean, to to not to criticize him on this point, because it is worth acknowledging he's up against something, even if he refuses to take his own responsibilities serious enough to have those bunch of senators recently, including I'm sad to know, John McCain, who's now the chair of the Armed Services Committee and a man who should take his position responsibly to have these people proposing a piece of legislation, which has been now been passed by the committee.
But, you know, we have to wait and see whether Congress will pass it, which is called the Protecting America from Terrorists Act 2015, you know, which sounds current and serious.
This is about not letting the president release anyone from Guantanamo under any circumstances during the rest of his presidency.
Protecting America from Terrorists Act 2015.
These are people who mostly have never been accused of terrorism.
Fifty four of the guys that are held there have been approved for release by a high level government task force of extremely responsible officials.
So to have these guys cranking out some bit of fear mongering legislation and unfortunately looking like they may get support for it because of the kind of wretchedly irresponsible nature of Congress is pretty depressing, actually, Scott.
Yeah, well, people should remember, too, that virtually everyone there was a nobody until 2006, when the CIA closed down the black sites and brought the actual somebodies to Guantanamo, which was just another PR stunt.
We were talking about the supposed bad guys, Scott.
You know, that's what people need to know.
The number of people in Guantanamo who are facing trials or have faced trials is 10 people.
There are 122 men left in Guantanamo.
Now you ask a right winger and they'll tell you, yeah, yeah, they're bad guys, though.
The rest of them, they may not be quite up at the level of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but they're all very dangerous people who mean us harm.
And it's like, no, no, no, no.
First of all, 54 of them, nobody wants to hold apart from Republican lawmakers.
The government wants to let these people go because it says they're not a threat.
The 58 others, the ones who are not cleared for release and are not facing trials.
OK, let's examine the cases of these people to find out how genuinely dangerous they are, because you know what?
It turns out that when you start examining the supposed evidence against them, the files of information that Wikileaks released in 2011 with the information about other prisoners coming up with wonderful stories about their fellow prisoners, about how they were here and there and they did this and they did that.
Turns out most of that's unreliable because, hey, these people were not questioned non-coercively.
They were tortured.
They were abused in other ways.
Some of them were bribed.
They were given comfort items.
In other words, instead of instead of being in a wretched, empty cell and having nothing, they were given things.
They were given food to eat.
They were allowed to watch films, whatever they wanted.
If they would answer questions about their fellow prisoners, that they could put them in a file and look like they had evidence and look like they knew what they were doing.
And that's what, you know, most of the guys that are still held in Guantanamo, that the right wingers will tell you are dangerous.
When you examine this, it goes up in smoke, Scott.
This isn't evidence at all.
This is a real, real example of the monstrosity of Guantanamo.
This is a house of cards built on torture and abuse.
And that's what the supposed evidence is.
All right, so that's the great Andy Worthington.
Thanks so much for your work on this.
Scott, thank you.
It's great to talk to you.
And one of these days, maybe we'll be looking back on it.
But we're still up there, my friend.
Yeah, well, I'll keep working on it if you do.
Well, one one millionth the percent that you do.
But, you know, thanks again.
We'll do.
That's our friend Andy Worthington.
He's at AndyWorthington.co.uk.
AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Get his book, The Guantanamo Files.
Watch his movie, Outside the Law.
And also read him at the Future Freedom Foundation and Al Jazeera.
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