All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the heroic Andy Worthington, andyworthington.co.uk, and he put together, wrote and edited the book, The Guantanamo Files, on all of the 700 and whatever it was, guys who were in Guantanamo at the height of the thing there.
And also he produced the documentary Outside the Law, and he's absolutely an expert on every bit of what has gone down at Guantanamo Bay ever since, at the prison there, ever since George Bush invented it back in, I'm pretty sure it would have been December 2001 at the dawn of the terror war.
Is that correct?
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you doing?
Yeah.
I'm good, Scott.
Yeah, I think it was, really.
That was when the Marines started setting up the animal pens that were the first prison there, Camp X-Ray.
You remember those open air cages?
Yeah.
Yeah, we're nearly up to 20 years of it, so that would be a good time to get it closed, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
It should have been all along.
It's amazing that this thing is still around, especially when even the Bush team said we shouldn't be doing this.
Bush himself and Colin Powell, but not just Colin Powell, I think even Rumsfeld and Robert Gates and all of the worst of them said, we don't need this.
It makes us look like jerks.
We can't declassify the pictures of the tortures we put people through there because that could cause terrorism.
They've all been admitting that all this time.
Yeah, and then surprise, surprise, when Obama got in, then suddenly the Republicans all decided that they were actually for Guantanamo, just to make that difficult.
Four years of Trump, and now here we are, you know, 101 days into Biden and all we've had so far are a few little bones thrown out to suggest that they're conducting a review of it and they'd like to close it.
Yeah.
Well, how good a news is that?
Are they just BSing around or there's a little something there, you think?
Yeah, I think there is something there.
I don't think they are.
I think they mean it in the sense that, you know, what you get with a democratic administration is people within it who understand that the place is fundamentally wrong, that it always has been, but that certainly the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is to excuse its continued existence.
You know, the problem, as always, Scott, with the Democrats is, you know, how politically expedient is it for them to actually do what needs to be done?
And the answer is not very.
And so it doesn't.
In fact, so I'm glad that you brought that up, because I almost said this the last thing I said, and I'm glad I waited because it still fits.
Back when Obama came into power, there's a very important Washington Post article about how the Democrats in the Senate were waiting for the White House to come and say, OK, guys, here's the game plan.
Here's what we're going to do.
Let's do it.
In fact, quite a few of them had gone ahead and stuck their neck out and had started working on closing down Guantanamo and getting new legislation or, you know, forbidding the appropriation of money for it or whatever it kind of was.
And then they really realized that they were out on a limb and the White House was not coming and did not have their back.
And I remember Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece at Salon.com back then, which they still have his archive there, I'm pretty sure, about how look at this, that these Democrats, I think it was the House and the Senate, but especially the Senate, they were saying, look, we want to do this.
We're ready to do this.
But it has to be a White House led thing.
And frankly, let's go back to the year 2007 and 2008.
This issue helped get this man elected.
This was one of the reasons that the American people chose a black guy with two names that sounded just like our most recent enemies, Obama and Hussein, in his name was to repudiate the Bush legacy.
Now, they could have elected Ron Paul, who was also a white Methodist Republican politician from Texas, but was actually opposite of Bush on every single thing.
Instead, they went for form instead of substance.
And they elected Obama, but he said he was going to close it.
And that was one of the reasons that the American people supported him to come to power was to say essentially to the world, hey, sorry about that.
And especially for reelecting the guy and all that, which, yeah, they stole Ohio.
But hey, still, you know, we're going to make it up to we're going to show that we're trying to turn over a new leaf here.
You know what I mean?
That was why people voted for Obama.
And then he comes in and he didn't have the courage to do any of it.
And he could have done it himself.
You know, you talked about the Republicans tried to stop him.
He could have just done it.
He's the president of the United States.
He could have said, you know, Captain, you heard me.
Move.
Right.
He's the commander in chief.
I mean, let the Republicans let the Republicans impeach him for closing down Guantanamo Bay and giving fair trials to accused criminals.
What the hell are we talking about here?
And instead he rolled over.
Yeah, well, I agree, it wasn't a it wasn't a very inspiring a lot of the things that happened, but I wouldn't underestimate how much the opposition was a problem, you know, to to close the prison at the time.
And maybe that's still the case.
He had to move at least some of the men who were held there to to some sort of facility on the United States mainland.
And, you know, and he he faced a huge amount of opposition to that on certain other points.
Obviously, there are a lot of points at which, you know, he sat on his hands or retreated when when he was faced with problems.
You know, I think the I think the 9-11 trial in New York was one of the biggest things, you know, he retreated on that.
He let Eric Holder go out there and announce that it was going to happen.
Then when they started getting flack for it, they pulled the trial.
But, you know, there are many things, you know, he caved on bringing some of the Uyghurs, some of the there were some of the Uyghurs that were going to be brought to live in the United States, you know, which I know we've spoken about that in the past, but it would have shown to the American people that not everybody that was held at Guantanamo was the worst of the worst.
Like they were told, you know, here are a bunch of guys from an oppressed part of the Republic of China who would, you know, have been happily shopping in an ice cream parlor in Virginia somewhere.
And the press would have come and seen them all and would have found out that they weren't terrorists at all.
Right.
But, you know, again, when when they faced opposition from Republicans on that, then they withdrew that as well.
And that that created enormous problems for them, because, you know, here's the United States made all these mistakes with all of these people held at Guantanamo.
But instead of acknowledging their responsibility and bringing any of these people to live in the United States, they ended up, you know, having to fly all around the world, bribing and coercing other countries to take prisoners that they couldn't return to their home countries for one reason or another.
And always, you know, always with implicit in this that this criticism that these other countries could have made, but probably didn't of like, so you're asking us to clean up the mess that you won't clean up yourself.
You know, so many so many shameful stories over the years, Scott, but really, you know, pretty much involving everyone who's had anything to do with it.
I do think there's a difference now.
I do think there's a wider recognition that that time makes something that has always been appalling and lawless, actually worse as as time proceeds.
And that wasn't the case until quite recently.
But I think with 24 senators recently writing to Joe Biden, telling him that, you know, he needs to close the prison and including in it their assessment that unless prisoners are charged, then they should be released.
We're actually moving into territory that we haven't been in before.
And we haven't been in it before because around Guantanamo, there has always been a kind of hysterical caution regarding the release of prisoners.
You can see it from, you know, when WikiLeaks released the files that Chelsea Manning had got a hold of.
The classifications for all the prisoners were higher than they should have been.
You know, there were no there were no people who were regarded as as totally insignificant.
The way the military viewed them, people were people were low risk.
Those were actually people who were no risk at all.
Never under any circumstance.
Right.
But we're called low risk.
Some go hurt or they got, you know, turned in for a bounty by the Pakistani army or something.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
And so, you know, medium risk would be people who are actually a very low risk and then high risk would be people who some of them may have been a high risk, but others were just were not.
But it was just a process of extreme overcaution, which has always typified the place and the way the way it's perceived by the authorities.
And so it's taken a long time to get to this understanding that actually it has always been wrong to hold people indefinitely without charge or trial.
And it isn't it doesn't justify it by somehow trying to claim that there are some kind of assessments available which suggest that these people may in some way pose some kind of threat to the United States.
That isn't how the law is supposed to work.
That isn't supposed to what's to be what happens to you if you're deprived of your liberty.
And so, you know, I'm I am hopeful that we're reaching a point where people who are not going to be charged are going to be freed.
But I don't know whether in the process of doing that, they'll decide that some of the people that they haven't charged to date, they need to charge now because they actually don't want to release them.
And I obviously wouldn't hold my breath at all in anticipating that there will be any swift resolution to the ongoing problem of how to successfully prosecute the handful of people held at Guantanamo who are accused of genuinely serious crimes.
I think that one still looks extremely problematical.
And as we may have discussed in the past, Scott, you know, the fundamental issue with the high value detainees, the ones who were held and tortured in the CIA's black sites, the ones who are, you know, five of them are facing facing a trial, supposedly at some point for their alleged involvement in 9-11.
At some level, I think genuinely the CIA really doesn't care whether these people are ever tried and in fact would probably prefer if it never advances to the trial stage because their position is we want the torture program and everything about it to remain hidden.
We don't want there to be any risk of anybody being held accountable for anything that happened.
And and therefore, you know, we don't need a trial.
These guys should just be locked up forever.
And, you know, and I think that's an obstacle that still remains to be dealt with.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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I mean, all of this.
It's just so absurd.
I'm kind of at a loss of even which direction go.
First of all, I do want to highlight what you said there about the Guantanamo files released by Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.
A lot of times people don't even really give them the credit at all.
People don't remember just how important it was.
The State Department documents and the Iraq and Afghan war logs, these massive leaks.
So important.
Literally thousands, maybe more than 10,000 huge and important news stories have come out of those leaks or at least have had, you know, those documents back up an important point in them, some kind of thing like that.
But the part that almost never gets mentioned is the same name as your book, The Guantanamo Files.
Right.
That had all this other information about these people.
And then, as you said, went to show that the Americans, just to justify themselves, were all categorized as one level more dangerous than they really were, leaving the bottom rung being essentially absolutely innocent people.
And even to your point about, you know, Obama could have brought some Uyghurs to Virginia just to show that, look, these are just human men.
Get over it.
And the guilty ones will go to jail and it'll be fine.
That, in fact, he could have just said, hey, listen, there's a reason that George W.
Bush's government sent home six out of the 700 of these guys.
Right.
It was because they never were dangerous in the first place.
They didn't give military trials.
Right.
They sent David Hicks back to Australia with the promise that he not talk about what they'd done to him.
And otherwise they dropped all charges.
That was his plea bargain.
And the same goes for all the other goat herders in there.
Hundreds of innocent people who'd been sold to American forces in Afghanistan for local bounties, who had no tie to the Taliban, much less Al-Qaeda, had nothing to do with anything.
And we're just warm bodies in there making the prison look full.
So the American people believe there was an enemy out there that was still coming for him in that way.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, man, now I'm just rambling here.
But so talk about be more specific if you could break down those categories, because if I remember it right, in the Bush years, there were three major Supreme Court decisions slapping Bush down on all of this.
And it was, I think, the Bomettine decision that said that these guys do get habeas corpus and they should have hearings and it should be black robed civilian federal judges who decide whether they can still be held or not.
And they started holding those hearings, but then they stopped.
And that was, I guess, some federal court, some lower federal court had made some ruling that we don't have to do this anymore.
And then they just dropped it or something.
So now you have I think you're explaining this pretty well, but if you could kind of break it down a little more carefully about the people they say they're going to charge one day or they say they're going to try one day, the people who have been charged, but they're not really pretending they're ever going to try them.
And then the people who they say we don't have enough evidence to try them and we're never going to charge them or try them.
But we're still real sure that they're bad guys and we're going to hold them anyway.
And that doesn't include the people accused of the September 11th plot.
Those are all on the list of people who are supposedly going to get a trial one day, even though they're not right.
But yeah, do I have that right?
Are those the three categories and what separates them correctly there?
And it's 40 men left, I think you told me last time, right?
Yeah, more or less.
That's right, Scott.
I mean, there are 40 men still held.
There are 10 men currently facing charges.
And in fact, the crossover from Trump into Biden charges were filed against three men after all this time.
So that's what took it up to 10.
There are two guys who have already been through the process.
So there's one guy who's still still on a life sentence for four as a result of a one sided trial at the end of the Bush years in which he didn't even participate.
A publicist for Al-Qaeda.
And there's a guy who took a plea deal and he still hasn't had confirmation of what his sentence is.
So 12 altogether, that leaves 28 others.
Of the 28 others, six of them were unanimously approved for release by high level government review processes under Obama in five cases and in one case under Bush, right under under Trump, right at the end of his presidency.
So six guys who really should be released as a matter of some urgency.
And then the 22 others who are all in this category of forever prisoners.
And they include, you know, they include people like Abu Zubaydah, the stateless Palestinian who was for whom the torture program was invented.
The guy that they said was number three in Al-Qaeda and waterboarded him 83 times.
And then in the years since have walked back from all of that, he wasn't in Al-Qaeda.
He may not even have known about 9-11 in advance, but he certainly had no operational role whatsoever in anything to do with the 9-11 attacks.
And yet there he is, a broken man, demonstrably, you know, made ill by the torture that he was subjected to.
Never charged, never tried.
The CIA are on record as having said at the time, this man must never, ever, ever be released under any circumstances.
He needs to be released.
But, you know, as well as there being a handful of people against whom over the years allegations of involvement in actual terrorism have been applied, Scott, of these 22 men, the 22 men still include foot soldiers who have nothing other than a bad attitude.
Seriously, that's all.
You know, they were they were at most wandering around Afghanistan with an AK-47 20 years ago.
But since they got to Guantanamo, they have responded to the circumstances of their imprisonment by fighting back against it, by engaging in hunger strikes, by being a cellblock leader and trying to agitate for the rights of their fellow prisoners.
That makes them a perceived threat.
And that's why they're still on this list of forever prisoners.
There are people on the list of forever prisoners who, I would say, the overcaution label has applied to.
We don't have time to talk about it in any depth here, Scott.
But Saifula Paraka, the eldest man at Guantanamo, a Pakistani businessman, his son was imprisoned in the United States after a trial in a U.S. federal court for allegations of involvement with al-Qaeda for a plot in the United States.
But a couple of years ago that was thrown out of court and he was sent back to Pakistan as a free man.
His father, implicated in the same dodgy plot, you know, which which isn't based on facts, but is based on hearsay and some of it extracted in dubious means fundamentally.
He's still at Guantanamo because in Guantanamo the government doesn't care about about truth or facts or the law or reality.
He's still held there.
He should be released.
There are other men in Guantanamo who appear to be cases of mistaken identity who the government is still holding.
So, you know, I think it's really important at this point in Guantanamo's long sordid history that people who can be bothered to care about it really do focus on the story of the people who are not going to be charged.
And that's all of them, apart from 12.
That's 28 men in total.
And that we need to find ways to keep pushing those stories out there to get the Biden administration to recognize that what it needs to do is release these people, send them home or find new homes for them.
And then, you know, it will have only then to deal with the issue of the handful of people who are actually charged with crimes.
And let's put this whole sorry story behind us.
And I really do think that that's possible.
Yeah, it should be.
And, you know, the whole thing is just so absurd.
It's, you know, I guess the whole time we're talking here, I keep thinking about the people who are new to the show, maybe who are, you know, very young, who don't, you know, maybe they were born in the Bush years, who, you know, have no idea about this stuff.
And, you know, as far as especially raised in government school, it's all everything is taught to you with this, you know, patina of legitimacy over everything.
They wouldn't have done the things that they did if they didn't think that that was the right thing to do.
And they wouldn't have thought it was the right thing to do if it wasn't.
And because the democracy chose them as our best leaders and all these things just kind of go without saying.
But I'm staring, I'm looking right now at the page on my site where back in 2016, not so long ago, I interviewed an Air Force lieutenant colonel named Sterling Thomas, and he was a JAG lawyer who had been appointed to represent this Guantanamo prisoner named Abdul Zahir.
And he had been locked up in Guantanamo for 14 years without even being charged, much less tried.
Fourteen years without being charged, much less tried and convicted of a crime.
And they admitted that he was the wrong guy.
It's some other guy named Abdul something or other.
And the chemical and biological weapons he had at his house, it was Tupperware full of salt and sugar.
And actually, in a lot of these cases, Scott, what these people, you know, what some of the people at Guantanamo should have been were prisoners of war.
But because the US tore up the Geneva Conventions, that didn't happen.
So, you know, we would have been fighting for years to say, can you hold people indefinitely?
And is there a war that never ends?
I mean, what we've now got is Biden saying that the US troops are going to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September the 11th.
And, you know, that is already encouraging lawyers to start filing submissions to the US courts to say what you have at Guantanamo is people who seized in connection with that conflict.
And that conflict is now finally going to have to be considered over so that people who were dragged out of their house in the middle of the night 20 years ago in connection with some Tupperware that they thought contained traces of something deadly, you know, that you cannot carry on holding those people.
And actually, some of the people in Guantanamo are still fundamentally not really any more significant than that.
You know, there's an Afghan guy who was living in a refugee camp in Pakistan who they thought was somebody that he doesn't appear to have been at all.
His family is still living in a refugee camp in Pakistan.
What the hell is he still doing at Guantanamo after all this time?
You know, and and and what what are these foot soldiers doing?
Since when has anybody since the laws of war were developed and the Geneva conventions were developed, since when has somebody bare faced said to the world, we're holding these people until the end of hostilities.
But 20 years on, the hostilities are still not over, my friend.
You know, wars used to last a finite amount of time when we were younger.
We went to school and we studied the wars of history that defined the 20th century that we grew up in, you know, the four or five, six years that the First World War and the Second World War lasted.
The what's what's the general analysis of how long Vietnam was?
10 max.
I mean, the reality is much longer, of course, but 10 is usually the number, I think.
Yeah.
And here we are, 64 to 74, nearly on 20 years with this goddamn supposed justification for the existence of Guantanamo.
And you know that there are people buzzing around in the corridors of power still who don't want any notion that this thing is going to end, as I believe the title of your book says enough already.
It is.
I mean, these people should be in prison.
Listen, I just finished interviewing this lady about the genocide in Yemen and not to be too commie collectivist about it or whatever.
But it's kind of inescapable in a sense that what are we doing right now?
It's not like it's you and me.
We've been against this this whole time and trying to do what we can.
And same goes for our innocent neighbors who don't really have anything to do with this.
And yet at the same time, like, hey, if everybody in our society cared about this and refused to accept this, then it wouldn't be this way.
And forget the damn flag.
I thought we all pledged allegiance to liberty and justice for all.
And instead, we're waging a genocide against a bunch of helpless Yemeni babies, deliberately starving them to death.
To accomplish the political goals of some prince in some foreign land.
You got we got people locked up for two decades without being even charged with a crime.
And and it's like that because we all know that our politicians and military men and CIA men know that they're innocent.
And so they're just covering their own ass.
And we all know it.
And we just let it get away.
I mean, this is the famous story about Russia, right?
Kafka and Americans get to feel good about ourselves because look at what a back ass with society they have over there in Russia, even before the Soviet Union.
How crazy it was over there.
Well, who are we to talk?
Right.
Yeah.
That Ayatollah Khamenei, he has a very flawed republic.
Oh, he does.
Yeah.
Tell me more about that.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, Scott, absolutely.
But haven't they done a good job of encouraging the majority of our fellow citizens not to pay attention to what's actually happening?
Oh, by the way.
Yeah.
And now I have to go because I'm overtime because my next interview is about how they want to spend a trillion dollars on a new generation of hydrogen bombs and put missile silos next to your town to be this is what they call it.
The nuclear sponge to deliberately lure the Russians into attacking the Midwest and the northern states in order to spare the coasts, who, of course, are going to be spared anyway.
They're just going to make sure to get everybody in the middle of the country killed for all the stupid crap that they believe in.
Shameful.
So there you go.
That's business on a Friday around here, man.
Mainly old white men still in charge of too much, aren't they, Scott?
You know, you know what?
I'm not sure that that's the defining characteristic of what's so bad about them, but they're certainly very bad.
And we certainly are.
All right.
Thank you, Andy.
It's great to talk to you again, buddy.
And I'm sorry I'm out of time here, man.
Otherwise, we just go on here.
There's so much more.
But listen, everybody, go to listen.
He's been at this for 20 years.
Read his great book, watch his great documentary and go and read everything he ever wrote at Andy Worthington dot co dot UK.
And thank you again, my friend.
Thanks, Scott.
Bye.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com.
Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
