05/01/13 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is the great Andy Worthington.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk And of course he writes at the Future Freedom Foundation's site, FFF.org.
And he's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files.
Profiles of everybody who was ever held at Guantanamo, as far as we know.
And also the producer, director, the man behind the documentary, Outside the Law.
Welcome back to the show Andy, how are you doing?
I'm good, how are you Scott?
Welcome back to the show.
I can hear you fine, thank goodness.
I got an accent here, I was crossing my fingers and hoping it was going to work out.
Listen man, this article that you wrote at FFF.org is such a bummer, Jesus.
This thing, I don't know why, well maybe people are starting to care about this again Andy, but it's the Prisoner's Speak.
Reports from the hunger strike in Guantanamo.
And maybe that is part of the story here, right?
Is that it's taken this, in order to get people's attention again, about the injustice down there at Guantanamo.
What is this?
Explain this hunger strike.
Well, you know, I think the first thing I'd want to say, Scott, really, is that it's getting the voices of the prisoners out to the people.
That's starting to make a difference, I think.
It's backed up by the facts and figures that we'll discuss, but for too long, first of all the Bush administration and now the Obama administration has got away with hiding these people away from public outrage, because they're so hidden from public view and their voices are not heard.
So the fact that during this hunger strike, people's voices have actually started to be heard, and one guy managed to get an op-ed in the New York Times, and Shaka Armour, the last British prisoner, got his story in the Observer newspaper here in the UK.
And Jason's work, which I drew on for this article, Jason Leopold of TruthAid, this is hugely important.
Enabling people to see that, hey, these are real people.
They're not just the bad guys we were told.
They're not just faceless numbers.
They're real people.
So, you know, the hunger strike, well, it's nearly three months now, Scott, and we know that it started in particular because a new guard force, and presumably the commander of that guard force at Guantanamo, started behaving very aggressively towards the prisoners with aggressive cell searches and the abuse of their copies of the Koran, which throughout Guantanamo's history has been a way of enraging the prisoners and getting them to go on hunger strikes.
I don't know whether that was the intention.
But, you know, underlying it, and of course what has since surfaced and really become the dominant theme of this, is that these are men who are absolutely in despair because there appears to be no way that any of them are leaving Guantanamo alive under any circumstances.
Really, seriously, it's that bad.
None of them.
Now, you know, that would be bad enough under any circumstance, I think, that the United States, under President Obama, who promised to close the prison and failed to do so, is holding men indefinitely for the rest of their lives without charge or trial and that there's no way that they can get out of Guantanamo under any circumstances except in a coffin.
I think that would be appalling, however you look at it.
There's one category of these prisoners where I think the story has an added layer of injustice and I think that this is the one that people have been picking up on.
And I have to say that myself and human rights groups and lawyers groups have been pushing this since the 10th anniversary, 16 months ago.
Eighty-six of the 166 men still held at Guantanamo were cleared for release from the prison by a sober and responsible interagency task force that President Obama established when he came into office in January 2009 and when he promised to close the prison.
Eighty-six of them.
The United States government, in its own words, in its own careful words, has approved them for transfer.
But the bottom line is these are people that the president's own task force said it is not in the interest of the United States to carry on holding these men indefinitely.
And what's happened?
These men are being held indefinitely.
That's up front the real horror of what's going on.
And it's not really any less unjust for the other 80 men, but nobody has come around to their cell or given them a piece of paper saying, hey, we don't want to hold you anymore, but actually carried on holding them.
Right.
All right.
Now, so what exactly does the hunger strike look like?
Or what do you know?
What information has come out?
I guess the lawyers are the conduit.
As you said, two actual prisoners have been allowed to write essays and then their lawyers have been talking, too.
What have we found out about the situation?
Well, you know, what I think has come out is that the majority of the prisoners were being held in Camp Six, which is a camp where there are communal facilities, and they had been allowed to mingle relatively freely over recent years.
And as they became mobilized, you know, they actually were able to, I think, basically start trying to run the show in the sense that they were obstructing the guards, they were hiding the surveillance cameras, all this kind of stuff, which, you know, in a prison environment where the people responsible for the prison have a very limited view of the world, it requires them to be in charge.
That's basically it.
Then it's setting themselves up for confrontation with the authorities, which is exactly what happened.
And, of course, you know, just a couple of weeks ago, the authorities responded by storming in in an early morning raid.
There was violence.
People were shot with nonlethal rounds, I believe.
And, you know, and they've put everybody, from what I understand, back into solitary confinement or into solitary confinement, you know, which I think is a cruel, cruel thing to be doing, when the reason they were agitating in the first place is because they're, you know, they're so sick of being locked up in a living tomb.
So it's really not an answer, you know.
As I say, within the ways that prison operates, it's an issue of them retaining control.
I understand that.
But they're not making the rules.
They may be, you know, dealing with the day-to-day rules of how the prison operates, but the bigger picture of the prison is that this is owned by President Obama, the president of the United States, and, you know, in its administration is also partly in the hands of the United States Congress, where lawmakers have done everything in their power to keep the prison open, and President Obama has done precious little to push for the prison to be closed, as he promised.
They're the people who are responsible for the bigger picture of why the hell this place is still open.
You know, and it's disgusting to be standing back and watching these men who are fighting for their rights in a way that all of us would understand.
If we could possibly imagine being deprived of our liberty for 11 years without anybody necessarily even telling us why, and certainly not feeling that they had any reason to justify it, I think we can sympathize with them and see that this is a huge political problem that needs to be addressed.
Well, now, on the question of the Congress and the president, I kind of like my own theory of responsibility is that the percentages don't have to add up since it's a qualitative thing and not really quantitative, so I think it's fair to say that the Congress and the president are all 100% responsible for this because as bad as the Congress is in trying to do evil and accomplishing evil, it's still all the president's responsibility.
He doesn't have that as a cop-out at all because this is the same guy who likes to just, you know, kind of wax on at press conferences about, well, geez, you know, if this or that happens in somebody else's civil war on the other side of the planet, my calculus will change about whether I want to invade that country or not.
He can do that.
He can just, you know, on a whim just sort of shrug his shoulder and say, well, you know, I'll decide who we invade and who we don't invade and based on my own criteria and blah, blah, blah.
Oh, no, but I'm just powerless before Harry Reid when it comes to closing down the communist military tribunal system and trial-less prison down there in communist Cuba, you know, where it's actually probably worse than on the other side of the wall where Castro's in charge.
In that case, all of a sudden, I'm merely the chief executive of the departments created by Congress and subject only to their will.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, it's very important.
I mean, you know, it is important that we don't underestimate the cynical extent of the obstacles raised by Congress because, you know, they are jaw-droppingly awful.
I mean, they, you know, have told the president twice in the National Defense Authorization Act, so passed at the end of 2011, at the end of 2012, that, you know, they will not allow a prisoner to be released from Guantanamo unless the Secretary of Defense is prepared to certify that that particular individual, any of these individuals, will not be able to engage in any kind of anti-American activity.
You know, by which they mean returning to the battlefield, recidivism, militancy, terrorism.
Who knows?
They might just mean, you know, having a bad word to say about what happened to them.
But, no, I think fundamentally they're saying we want to cast iron guarantee that these people won't be able to try and do us harm.
Well, that's not possible.
Right.
So, you know, that is a very high bar that's been set, an impossibly high bar that's been set.
But, as you point out, who's the president of the United States?
Is it the Congress?
No, it's not.
It's the president of the United States.
And in the National Defense Authorization Act is a waiver, a waiver that allows the president and the defense secretary, if they regard it as being in the interest of American national security, to bypass Congress if Congress insists on being so cynical and obstructive about things, but they determine that it's important that prisoners are released, they can bypass all of that.
And they haven't done it.
Well, President Obama, after his lovely words that he uttered yesterday, where he absolutely said what was wrong with Guantanamo, but didn't demonstrate that he actually was going to address it, the solution is either that he goes to Congress and says, you guys have got to get in line.
If he's not prepared to do that, he can leave them.
He doesn't have to deal with them.
He can do it himself.
He and the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, can begin to approve the release of prisoners from Guantanamo and get them out of there.
Which one is it going to be?
Even without defying Congress, you're saying.
But what I'm not prepared to let him do, and increasingly more and more of us aren't prepared, is to let him just waffle on a bit and sound great and then do nothing.
Right.
You're saying even without defying Congress in any way, he's already got all kinds of process for beginning to do the right thing anyway, if not closing the whole thing.
He has this waiver in the legislation.
It's very important.
He's not used it.
He's not used it because we know that he doesn't like rocking the boat politically, to be honest.
Well, look, I mean, the counterfactual is...
The Republicans and Harry Reid and members of his own party, if he does anything, and he's not prepared to do that.
The guy's too busy not having anyone rock his boat to want to be involved in something that will cause him difficulty.
But do I care about that?
No.
I mean, these guys are rotting in a completely unacceptable basis at Guantanamo, and every day I expect to switch on my computer and find out that one of these poor soldiers died because President Obama can't be bothered to take on Congress.
It's not good enough.
It's time for him to...
He said this stuff yesterday, Scott.
He said, you know, I'm going to have to go to the Congress.
I'm going to have to step up on this.
Do it.
Be as good as your words are, but don't expect that we're going to be fobbed off by you saying, I'm going to go and talk to Congress again.
Didn't I just say all the right things?
Thanks very much.
Right.
Yeah, it's sort of like Israel and Palestine.
It's a mystery why he even pretends like he's going to do anything about it.
We already know the last time that senators complained, Democratic senators complained to the newspapers that, man, we got started on the whole closed Guantanamo thing back in 2009, and we were working hard and we were going to get it done, and then we realized the president wasn't going to lift a finger to help us at all, to pressure anyone who wasn't already on board to join, to try to strike any kind of deal with the Republicans whatsoever, to do anything to lead on the issue at all.
And once we realized that we had mistakenly stuck our necks out on an issue that we were now destined to lose, we all backed down because what are you going to do, you know, push a losing issue?
And so he's the one who made the big deal about it in the first place.
And, of course, here's the other thing, too.
The politics as, you know, excuse, he's got a midterm coming up.
You know, there's always a midterm coming up and whatever.
But that's no excuse anyway because if he wanted to lead, he could kick the Republicans' ass on this.
Look, the Guantanamo Bay prison, like you said yesterday, he said it again yesterday, it's wrong.
It's creating enemies for us.
It has created enemies for us.
It's not.
It's what Castro might do.
It's the wrong thing.
Why are Republicans just like Tommy Castro?
I mean, he could beat them in a couple of sentences on this issue.
And so that whole, well, geez, someone might call me a wimp if I do the right thing, excuse, just it doesn't hang.
And by the way, he can count all the dead children and cite them for his toughness if he needs that, you know.
Yeah, I mean, the good thing I would say about what he said yesterday is that it's a good thing to hold him to about his eloquence about what's wrong with the damn place that he's responsible for keeping open.
It really is.
You know, it was a brilliant speech in the sense of articulating what was wrong with the place.
And he said it.
So, you know, he's going to have to be those words are going to have to come back to haunt him.
He has articulated an understanding of what is wrong, what is fundamentally wrong with Guantanamo, which, you know, he needs to beat the Republicans with that.
If they don't understand it, if they want to stand up and say, hey, you know, these Muslims are lucky that we're just holding them in definite detention and that we're not just taking them all out, you know, because we know that that's what some of these people think.
You know, the the bottom line of the war on terror, you know, the horrible truth about what happened after 9-11.
And this is what some of the men in Guantanamo are still suffering from is that the Bush administration intended to round up any Muslim that it regarded as a potential threat.
Not even an actual threat, but a potential threat or someone who might have a little bit of information about something that would help them to build up a bigger picture of who the enemies were.
You know, they really seriously would have rounded up and held indefinitely millions and millions and millions of people if they could.
We know that they held at least 80,000 across the various theatres of the war on terror.
You know, and most of those men eventually got released.
But, you know, that is the scale of the craziness that was going on.
And that's the scale of the craziness that is still present in some of the people who are elected representatives to the people of the United States who, you know, who's grasped on justice and fairness and a sense of proportion and not doing things that are flagrantly counterproductive.
You know, their grip on that is nonexistent.
All right.
Now, can you give us some anecdotes, some of the stories that are coming out of there about how people are suffering and sort of, you know, take this from imaginary and theoretical to some real human stories here so that people can, you know, maybe identify these men as human beings.
Deserving some mercy.
You know, I mean, I think that when we we managed to hear the words of, I mean, someone like Shaka Arma, who, you know, who is desperate to be reunited with his family after 11 years and says, you know, I just I just want to be with them.
I mean, I will.
You know, what do they what do they want me to do to to to leave this place?
You know, do they want to tag me?
Do they want to not let me have a passport ever in my life?
You know, whatever they want, whatever they want, they can do.
Just please let me out of here.
And, you know, he's spoken very eloquently about that.
And that was, you know, most recently in the off that he had in The Observer newspaper here in here in Britain, run by The Guardian.
But, you know, he he he's eloquent and an English speaker.
So, again, it's, you know, one of the most direct ways that we get the story.
And we haven't heard as much from from a lot of the men in Guantanamo about the ways they're suffering.
But it's the same thing.
You know, there are so many fathers in Guantanamo who have children that are, you know, that they've never seen or have children who the last time they saw them were babies who are now teenagers.
We have so many people in Guantanamo whose mothers, whose fathers, his relatives have died while they've been there.
And they've never seen them.
You know, and we have these people who can be so eloquent.
And, you know, and as we see, so frequently are eloquent when they're given the opportunity to bypass the whole censorship nonsense and speak to the world.
And yet these are people who, in some cases, are now so thin that, you know, one of the lawyers for Fayez al-Kandari, one of the Kuwaitis in there, whose story I've, you know, I've written about a lot over the years, a very principled humanitarian who, you know, has also been regarded as a troublemaker in Guantanamo because they couldn't break him.
They couldn't get him to tell lies about people.
And he's been locked up in solitary for much of the time because they regard him as a threat because he's eloquent and persuasive and they couldn't destroy him.
But, you know, one of the lawyers for him went to him recently and said, you know, he's so thin, you can put both your arms around his middle and your hands will touch.
You can put your hands around him, around his stomach, and your hands will touch.
That's how thin he is.
That's, you know, so like what?
Like a 60-year-old child?
Right.
And then to prevent them from dying, it's tie him down and shove a rubber tube up their nose and down their gut, which is, I'm sure, you know, well, I don't know, I'm sure.
But I remember from years back, this was very specifically described as an incredibly brutal procedure.
It's not like these are doctors hired by the prisoners who care about them and need their repeat business or anything.
They just jam that hose up their nose and go ahead and make it a sort of a way to get around the bans on torture.
Like, I get to beat you up somehow, you know, I'll beat you up with this hose up your nose.
Well, the thing is, Scott, I think, you know, I mean, there's a guy who's been in a hunger strike since the summer of 2005.
And they brought the first restraint chairs in in 2000, January 2006 to make it inconvenient.
The commander of Guantanamo said at the time that he's meant to be in a hunger strike.
And he has been twice a day having this thing shoved up his nose and into his stomach and force fed since January 2006.
You know, that's that's horrific.
Over seven years.
He's still alive.
So I think we can say that they're very good at force feeding people and keeping them stopping them from dying.
You know what the authorities are no good at doing is providing people with any reason to want to live.
That's what is really happening now with this hunger strike.
And that's the bit that isn't going to go away.
That's the bit that people really need to focus on more than more than the stories of the horrendous force feeding, which I, you know, which I understand how awful it is.
But the bigger political problem is the most pressing thing.
Why are these men doing this?
What is the despair that they feel?
They they have lost their reason to live.
They are hopeless beyond belief.
And that is the fault of the United States government.
This is not some dark, foreign power, some tyrant that we can portray easily as such and dismiss as somebody who has no humanity.
This is the United States of America.
This is President Barack Obama, who is who is depriving these people of their rights to an extent that, you know, frankly, you know, Dick Cheney would have approved of.
When Bush and Cheney set up this place with Rumsfeld in the first place, the intention was to hold human beings with no right.
And I think the right not to be imprisoned indefinitely with no way of getting out of that situation is a right that these men need to be given back.
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, Dick Cheney is very specifically on the record invoking this.
Well, first of all, praising this policy, one of many policies of Obama's on national security that he approves of.
And, of course, he also takes it as confirmation that he was right all along, because even Barack Obama has endorsed policy A, B, C, D and E, including Guantanamo.
And so that proves it.
Yes.
Once you get the power and you have to take responsibility, then you know you have to do the right thing and keep a communist, ridiculous kangaroo prison system down there in Cuba.
You know, and so, yeah, it's not just that he would approve.
He does approve and he cites it as proof that he was right all along.
Yeah.
And he's, you know, anything that will help him help him evade the people who are calling for his prosecution.
And you know what?
I got to tell you, obviously, I'm hell bent in a lot of ways, but I was not raised by ideologues, my family or my neighborhood, my friends, parents when I was a little kid.
Anything like that is very run of the mill kind of a situation, sort of a neighborhood.
And yet still, I was raised understanding that, hey, if they can do it to this guy, then they can do it to you.
And so the American principle is all, even if he's the worst guy in the whole wide world and everybody knows it, we still give him the fairest trial we possibly can.
So as to always preserve fair trials for ourselves in case we are falsely accused or accused based on a misinterpretation or whatever, because after all, we've all seen Matlock.
We all know that even the most well-meaning police and prosecutors sometimes make mistakes.
And you know what I mean?
This is very, very basic American sort of a thing.
You can't even have a red, white and blue flag without acknowledging this.
That was exported from 13th century England and Magna Carta, the principle of habeas corpus, that you can't be locked away indefinitely without charge or trial without having had a judge be able to ascertain whether it's legitimate for you to be held or not.
That's the absolute linchpin of our ability not to be arbitrarily detained by an executive, whether that's the king or the president of the United States.
And that's what these men have lost.
Practically, they lost that through the decisions that were taken by conservative judges in the D.C. Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., who told the lower court judges after 2008 when they'd been impartially going through the government's evidence and regularly turning out and saying, This is a joke.
How dare you put this case in front of me?
You have no evidence that this man was part of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
They couldn't stand that, so they told the lower court, You've got to believe everything the government says, unless the prisoner who has no access to anything can refute what the government says.
Outrageous political decision which stands, which the Supreme Court hasn't taken on, which for the Guantanamo prisoners and the Guantanamo prisoners alone, of the people held by the United States on territory that is America, which Guantanamo is effectively, that they are the only people for whom habeas corpus doesn't count.
You do not get the right to have a judge decide whether you're entitled to be held.
They have been deprived of this fundamental right.
And not only did the judges do that, but President Obama and the Congress, either through their inaction or through their actions, have also reinforced this notion that habeas corpus is a quaint provision that may well apply to the rest of us, but under no circumstances applies to the men in Guantanamo, whether by accident or design.
These men have no right to say, Excuse me, I told you many years ago that you got the wrong guy or that you really think that I'm somebody that I'm not, but you're not allowing me to have that objectively looked at.
You have told me I'm stuck here for the rest of my life and there's nothing I can do about it.
You know, it's so it's so awful.
We've been talking about it for years.
I mean, you know, I'm enormously relieved that today I can say to you that Colonel Morris Davis, who was the chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantanamo, a conservative who resigned when he was placed in a chain of command under under Jim Haynes, the Pentagon's chief counsel, a man who advocated for the use of torture, was one of the lawyers instrumental in constructing the Bush administration's torture program.
He resigned when he was placed in a chain of command under Jim Haynes.
He's since become, you know, one of the great outspoken critics of Guantanamo.
And yesterday, after President Obama delivered his speech, he set up a petition on change.org to close Guantanamo Bay, tell President Obama to close Guantanamo Bay.
And I'm very pleased to say, Scott, that in less than 24 hours, that petition has got 70,000 signatures.
Wow.
That's that's a huge, huge sea change, really, in the in the way that Guantanamo is being understood and perceived.
Well, now, you know, we've been talking about this for years.
And as far as petitions go, Andy, you know, interested over the last few years.
And suddenly we've got a movement of people who at least are prepared to click a button and say, you know, I really don't think this is right.
Well, now, and, you know, when as far as petitions go, if I had made this thing or if 100 other peace activists had made this thing, it wouldn't really matter so much.
But this is the one.
In fact, there probably already are petitions out there like this.
But this is the one put up there by him, Colonel Davis.
And so that's what makes this the one that, you know, we could expect to get already.
I'm sure have a lot of professors, you know, important people and mucky mucks and establishment type signing on and that kind of thing.
So I think it's also a sign, Scott, that, you know, behind the scenes as well, there are you know, there are people, you know, who don't have an activist background or who are not, you know, known for their perpetual dissent against the state and the status quo.
But there are you know, there are proper professional people in all of these walks of life who are, you know, deeply talking to people within the administration if they can get to them or trying to get to them to say, look, you know, we really have to talk about this.
We have to do more than talk about this.
We have to act on this.
This is this is an injustice that can't end.
And, you know, that's why President Obama spoke yesterday.
He you know, I'm sure that it could have been arranged that the guy who asked the question could have been told not to ask the question.
You know, he he he set out the response.
Finally, I mean, God, you know, it took nearly three months that these guys have been trying to starve themselves to death.
Took nearly three months for him to deign to give them a response.
But, you know, he has.
And that's it.
That's indicative that pressure is coming at him from all directions.
So not just from the international NGOs, not just from the usual human rights groups and the lawyers groups, but sustained attacks from, you know, from the liberal establishments, from The New York Times, from The Washington Post, which just published an editorial.
The New York Times has had two very critical editorials now in the last few weeks.
You know, the pressure is on.
And the the whole the whole nonsense about Boston, which, you know, which I have to say, looking at it from afar, showed how how utterly beneath contempt most of what passes for TV news is in the United States.
It didn't manage to persuade people that they would embark on another renewed witch hunt against all the Muslims.
And, you know, it would be out on the streets demanding that Guantanamo was was open forever and getting Mitt Romney and saying, let's double it, let's triple it, let's, you know, let's go crazy on the Muslims again.
It hasn't led to that.
It's, you know, Guantanamo hasn't gone away.
Guantanamo remains an issue that that is reached.
It seems to me it's reached the tipping point in terms of the people who are responsible for helping to shape decisions about the way people think about things.
And I just, you know, I don't see where it goes from here except for President Obama to get out of his comfort zone and actually do something difficult.
Yeah.
Well, so much for that.
All right.
Now, listen, one last question here.
I know a hawk who says, you know what, they should have just done this the old fashioned way and called anybody that they were calling Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or close enough calling them prisoners of war.
And you have the military commission decide whether they're guilty enough to continue, you know, quote unquote, guilty enough to to continue to hold them until the end of the war or not.
And then it's the same old process they developed over 230 years of having a so-called constitutional republic and all of that.
And then you avoid all of this made up.
I mean, that's what we're dealing with here.
Right.
Is is the aftermath of David Addington and Jim Haynes imagination being put into practice there after September 11th?
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that it should have happened.
And I think that even at this point, it would be you know, it would be theoretically possible to, you know, go through the cases of the guys who are held and say, actually, you know, there's a whole bunch of people here who are.
So we're going to hold us prisoners of war.
But I would say, you know, the time is running out for that, because time is running out for for a mission accomplished flag to be flown that has some significance regarding Afghanistan.
I don't mean, you know, I don't mean to say that the United States is leaving Afghanistan, but there is going to be a point, I believe it's next year when there will be a handover of forces.
And remember, most of the prisoners in Afghanistan have now been handed over to the Afghan authorities, most, not all.
But there will come a point where it's no longer legitimate for the United States to claim that it is involved in an endless war.
You know, these guys at Guantanamo were picked up during the the the actions mainly related to the initial invasion of Afghanistan and the, you know, the rather horrible blurring of borders that happened afterwards, where the Bush administration thought he could pick people up anywhere.
But they were mostly picked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They're connected with a conflict that that honestly is long over.
But but seeing as the US still has a major presence there, they could technically argue that they're still at war.
What's going to happen next year is, I think, going to push them into an area where they can't actually say that anymore.
And they're going to be put in that position where, you know, as used to happen at the end of conflict, the other party in the conflict would then be released.
You know, we've shifted the parameters to such an extent because of what Bush did that it's no longer possible for people to think, hey, that's what happens in war.
You know, afterwards, everybody shakes hands and goes home.
Well, you know, we've ended up in this crazy place where, you know, you know, with Guantanamo, the hysteria that has been deliberately manufactured by cynical people who love the idea of holding people indefinitely without charge or trial.
It's such that, you know, if you mention the word Muslim and terrorist, you start getting people quaking in their boots.
If you mention the word Muslim, terrorist and Guantanamo, you can get away with anything.
That's how it's been for years.
You know, that's the combination of words that encourages supposedly intelligent people to glaze over and say, you can do what you want because you're obviously protecting us from the kind of threat that I can't even imagine, even in my deepest, darkest nightmares.
Whereas the truth at Guantanamo is that there are a small number of people, there have never been more than a few dozen at most, of people accused of any crimes that are significant in terms of international terrorism.
And the rest has been encouraging people to glaze over and quake at the notion of what?
At the notion of a bunch of people who may have spent a little bit of time in a training camp in Afghanistan and then were fighting with the Taliban in a civil war against the Northern Alliance, who were Muslims, as part of some idealized notion of an Islamic state, that all of this was happening, you know, 11, 12, 13 years ago.
But these guys are deemed to be, it's deemed to be acceptable that they can be deprived of their liberty forever.
No, it's crazy.
You know, but these words also were something that Obama said yesterday.
So, you know, there was some careful scripting that went on about understanding some of the fundamental things that are wrong.
And it's pushing him on those things.
He said them there.
All right.
Listen, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all the work you do.
And, of course, your time on the show.
Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you as always, Scott.
You know, I mean, I'm glad to say I'm getting calls from all over the world now from people that have never spoken to me before.
But, you know, I always remember who my friends are and the people who have been doggedly pursuing this story for many years.
And, you know, you're up there with the best of them.
Well, listen, I mean, you are the single leading source for information on the situation in Guantanamo Bay and the world.
I mean, Carol Rosenberg is right up there with you, of course, from McClatchy Newspapers and there are a few others.
But, I mean, you know, the importance of what you do can't be overstated.
So that's enough of telling you how much I like you.
Bye.
Thanks, Scott.
And also FFF.org.
This one is called The Prisoners Speak, Reports from the Hunger Strike in Guantanamo.
Check out his book, The Guantanamo Files, and his movie Outside the Law.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
First of all, thanks to the show's sponsors and donors who make it possible for me to do this.
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And thanks.
Hey, y'all.
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Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war party's relentless push to bomb Iran, and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in justifying it all.
The Council for the National Interest works tirelessly to expose and oppose our government's most destructive policies, but they can't do it without you.
Support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights?
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of here.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet and it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
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Hey, guys, I got his laptop.
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At libertystickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
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