07/21/16 – Sterling Thomas – The Scott Horton Show

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All right y'all, introducing Lieutenant Colonel Sterling Thomas, U.S. Air Force, and you can find this press release at GitmoWatch.com.
The headline, almost unbelievably, Abul Zahir, mistakenly detained by U.S. for 14 years, cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay.
Welcome to the show.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
I am pleased to be here, and I am pleased to say on Abul Zahir's behalf, whom I spoke to this morning, that he is ecstatic about the result of this PRB.
However, his lawyers, we are dismayed that our government took 14 years to recognize their monumental blunder.
Yeah, and mistakenly detained, meaning mistaken identity.
He's just the wrong guy altogether, huh?
That's right.
Apparently there was someone who had a similar name that may or may not have, we'll probably never know, been engaged in a bomb making in the area near where Abul Zahir lived.
And acting, I guess, on some sort of tip, they picked up Abul Zahir, who had a similar nickname, but had never been engaged in that kind of activity.
And what they did was, when they came into his home, he has sort of a big courtyard where he and his family might be congregated while taking water from the well or working on their home or their crops.
He was standing outside, they pull up machine guns out, they fire a few rounds to get everybody to comply.
They go in the house, they seize a canister, and in Afghanistan, it's not like you have tupperware laying around, and they take the canister, which was a propane tank, I believe, and they find a powdery substance inside.
Now, six months after they detained Abul Zahir, they finally get around to testing the substance.
What's been happening for those six months, I'd like to talk to you about later.
But the results of that test, sugar, salt, petroleum jelly.
All in one canister?
Well, I would say there might have been additional canisters, but we're talking about a place that doesn't have a Zip Mart right around the corner to get the latest in tupperware.
But yeah, in the canister were those sorts of substances, and that's what he was suspected of using to create whatever type of bombs they were looking for.
I mean, that sounds...
But that's not seasoning, seasoning is bitter.
Yeah.
Is part of your theory, or I guess it doesn't matter either way, whether that determination that sugar, salt, petroleum jelly were explosives was honest from the get-go or not?
I mean, it sounds like kind of a makeshift excuse for kidnapping a guy rather than an honest blunder.
Yeah, you know, I think that that could be one way of going about it.
I would say that I try and start off from the perhaps they just made an error in judgment and then they just didn't follow through with a good investigative opportunity.
And then that led to this guy being stuck there for whatever length of time.
And then next thing you know, they're shipping him off because he was a translator for what was then recognized as the government of Afghanistan, claiming that is somehow support to terrorism.
So but then that was all they had on him.
It was just his translator job.
It wasn't that he was the liaison between bin Laden and company and Mullah Omar and friends.
Yeah, that's it.
I think there's one other thing that is the subject of much contention.
I spent a number of years going back and forth with the prosecution about this case.
I've been a long-term prosecutor in the military, so it's what I mostly did before I came to the defense here six years ago.
And I spent a lot of time saying, well, hand me the discovery so I can assess this case and you can stop pestering me about my client and getting him to plea.
We'd rather go to trial.
I never received what would in the normal military court or in a normal, say, district or state court would be discovery.
I got my client's medical records.
That's about it.
Discovery would have told me long ago that this was, in the vernacular of the street, a crap case.
I got the sense that it was because they wouldn't provide the documents that would explain why they wanted to charge him.
One of the things that they would tell me is, well, we think he was involved in an attack on civilians.
It is unfortunate that Ms. Catherine Kenna and some of her colleagues, who were reporters from Canada, were in a vehicle that was, indeed, the subject of a hand grenade attack.
And the government tried to hang that on Mr. Abdul's ear.
Now what's interesting is that he never accepted that responsibility and said that he was not involved in that and that he actually actively sought to have the people who did it not do it.
And Ms. Kenna and the other survivors of that attack said they don't have any idea that anyone else was deceased.
So if you have only a person who's been in prison for 14 years mistreated to the level of torture and confessions that come out of that, if that's your evidence, plus all the other conflicting evidence that I just pointed out to you, I'd say that the charge is going to go away as well.
But I didn't want to leave anything out that you might have heard about from some other source about Mr. Abdul's ear.
But yeah, they tried to paint him with that as well.
But, well, you're his lawyer, I guess you can't say, but, you know, if you have any qualms with it.
But you're saying there's no evidence that he's the one who threw the grenade?
Absolutely.
Absolutely not.
In fact, there's more evidence that he was like, why would you even think of doing that?
All right.
And again, and you said off the air there real quick at the beginning, you're on the line from Guantanamo, which is why the audio quality is a little poor, but it's all right.
We can hear you fine.
And now so I.
And now as soon as you finally got whatever the prosecution finally turned over to you, it was apparent immediately that this was simply mistaken identity.
Is that it?
It was pretty evident.
In fact, the summary, Abdul here and I have talked about this as a potential issue because we've had to go through this Abdul Bari, aren't you Abdul Bari thing that the government's tried to get him to agree to for years now.
And he would consistently say, I am not who they are describing.
That's not me.
Some other guy must be this individual.
And then what's most striking about the summary, the public summary that the government released from the period of periodic review secretariat is this is the kind of language that is about as strong as you're going to get.
And now.
So talk about the torture.
You mentioned.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
The assessment that the detainee was probably misidentified as the individual who had ties to Al Qaeda weapons facilitation.
I mean, as a prosecutor, going back to government agencies myself, that's about as strong an indictment of their own apparatus as you're ever going to get.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems like pretty strange overlapping roles, if it's certainly provable that he was a translator for the Taliban on one hand, and then he's supposed to be the arms procurement official for Zawahiri on the other or something like that.
Yeah, it sounds preposterous when you actually say it out loud, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Well, it was pretty apparent from the beginning they were rounding up, you know, whoever they could pay a bounty to get somebody to point a finger at.
Not much science behind who ended up in Gitmo in the first place, although they did let go, what, 700 and something people before your guy.
So why is that?
He was in some different category than all the ones that Bush and Obama set free to begin with.
You know, the best I can surmise, and this is from having had run ins with prosecutors and pushing hard for his release because of his tangential, if any, connection to this whole mess, is that they had hopes that somehow he knew something about someone else.
So they were hoping they could roll him for something by threatening him with these spurious prosecutions.
Yeah.
Well, and think about that, just still holding out, see if they can make him an informant after all these years, a decade and a half here.
And now, so going back to the beginning, I guess, before the Mora report and so forth, can you talk about his initial treatment at the hands of the CIA and or military?
What I can tell you is that he has described to us what can only be described in my vernacular as inhumane treatment.
When he was detained in Afghanistan, in our most recent conversations, he talked about being beaten, about being deprived of normal amounts of nutrition and giving his brother what little food he had so his brother, who he hoped would be released and eventually was, would be healthier because his brother didn't have the same, he wasn't much younger.
He was like, I'd say, six years younger than Abdul Zaheer.
So that kind of thing where you know that, okay, he's getting a low calorie intake, he's in a cold place, he's getting beat up, he's getting the treatment, trying to get him to say something that he knows is not true, I mean, why am I here?
He got that while he was in Afghanistan until he was transferred, one of the first, one of the earlier transfers to Guantanamo.
And it didn't really change much.
Now, we haven't talked much about the heavy details of how it was for him in the early Guantanamo years, and there's a reason for that, Scott.
It was so, when we asked him to begin detailing his treatment so that we could use that in our case against the government's allegations, so we were preparing as if they would someday litigate this matter, it took him, as many traumatic experience survivors will, a great deal of effort, mental energy to just put it down and explain it to us.
And after about, let's say, a month's worth of visits, you know these visits, they occur over a space of time, you could see that his ability to even talk about it was causing him to have difficulty concentrating, staying with it.
And I'm authorized to say this because my client and I have talked about it at great length, but ultimately, he had a psychotic break as a result of having to reflect upon the horrors of his experiences at the hands of his captors.
I lost contact with my client because his health was so broken, his mental health was so broken, that for at least a year, and I believe it's a bit longer than that, he couldn't recognize me.
He didn't, he thought at some point that he was in a camp and was wondering why he didn't just go home.
He couldn't recall basic facts that we had established as a team, like how many family members he had, who were his children, things like that were gone from his mind because of how mentally broken Guantanamo had made him.
And just to clarify, to make sure I understand you right here, Colonel, you're saying he had a psychotic break years later when you asked him to recall to you and explain to you what happened.
He'd been getting by blocking it out.
Once he started telling you the story, that was when, or again, maybe, I don't know, but at that point, he had a psychotic break.
Yeah, he lost touch.
That's the correct recapping.
He lost touch with us and the reality that was in the room as a result of having to try to recount this so that we could make his case.
And that's extremely difficult.
I will tell you, I've been through a few things, 17 years in the military, seeing a person who you forged through difficult circumstances, a relationship with, just blank out like that.
I stood up in a meeting during which this occurred and I flipped the switch saying, I need a doctor in here now to see what's going on because this is not how my client, who's extremely sharp, speaks four languages, is witty, is a personable, genial, peaceful guy, this is not who I've been talking to.
Something has happened.
And you know, one of the first reactions I got was, well, he's faking.
Now fortunately, I've got just enough training to be dangerous, had the good fortune of marrying someone smarter than me, so we were able to go through a couple of questions that established this person's not present, they're not understanding where they are, who they are, what's been happening in the last hour, common questions that, you know, unless you're really good at faking, a doctor should be able to work around.
And that's when they began, they, the doctors began to say, okay, well, maybe not in my presence.
And you flip it around for a second, okay, sure, show me the, someone who was tortured who doesn't have mental problems, give me a break.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you know, that's, that's a sort of a dismissive mindset that says a lot about how some of our population are just willing to accept this kind of behavior in our legal system.
It is unsatisfactory on any level that we would mistreat people in order to try and get information out of them.
And I mean, I'd agree with this person on every level, but Senator Kaine said it well within the past couple of years, torture does not lead to good information.
People will say anything to make it stop.
Yeah.
There's no question.
This is the one thing he's consistently good on.
Not Guantanamo itself necessarily, but torture for sure.
No, the torture.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so has he been part of the hunger strikes and the various campaigns of protest to try to get out of there?
To some degree, but mostly on, um, I'm trying to get you guys to just stop mistreating me level.
So no, he's not been a part of the, the, uh, the big hunger strike.
I think that was 2013 or any of that.
But you talk about a guy who has been so mistreated, had so much trouble until he managed to make his comeback.
And I want to, I want to get around to this in just a moment.
He focused on, let me get away from these demons of this torture and focus on the future and what's positive about what I can control.
And that led him to honestly, uh, while he's still got some deficits, he is a long way back to the guy that I know.
Um, I'm pleased to say that when I spoke to him this morning, he was a sharp, happy, witty guy who was focused on reuniting with his two children, his three children and his two wives.
And, you know, if Utah has a slot, I think he might fit in.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's good.
A little bit of hope for getting out is a lot better than knowing you'll never get a fair trial, but you're just going to sit and rot in there anyway.
Um, so it must be a great relief to know that he's been cleared.
And by the way, first of all, tell us who cleared him, uh, just so that we understand exactly how important it is, this clearance, because there are different levels of people being cleared.
It has and has not done them any good, uh, over the years.
So I'd ask you to specify there, is he actually even going to get out just because they say so?
You know, I hope so.
And that's one of the reasons I'm going to be working with counsel and, um, the state department to try and get an expedited release, because who knows what's going to be happening in the coming months and over the next year or so in our administrations.
Right now, there seems to be some momentum that has been picking up to get these men who have been long lingered here and faced injustices home or to resettle.
Now, who in fact, uh, released him, uh, oh, excuse me, cleared him, it's called the periodic review secretariat.
Uh, they put on the periodic review board.
The members of the periodical review are not released by name or by agency, but there are at least six, uh, bodies that sit as reviewing intel agencies or administrations that hear the presentation of the, uh, detainee, his private counsel and his personal representatives and the detainee himself.
Uh, in this particular instance, Abdul Zaheer had private counsel.
Um, we worked very hard to have our habeas slash military civilian military defense counsel because they don't allow military lawyers to go in there.
Apparently, we're too threatening.
Um, civilian counsel showed up and did a great job and his name was David Slay.
Um, he is a Vermont lawyer.
He and Bob Ginsberg and I have worked together on this case for almost six years.
Um, the personal representatives are military members who are on a one year tour and it's their job to help the detainee put together a case if the detainee wants to build a case.
Normally, it's letters of support, um, family letters, things like that.
Yeah.
Um, all right.
Well, listen, uh, I guess before I let you go, I should ask, is there anything important I'm overlooking here that I can't help but think that, um, uh, there's an important question I'm forgetting to ask.
It's okay.
And if you want to call back, uh, I'm going to be here on Gitmo until the 29th of July.
Uh, your assistant can reach back out to me and find me.
But I just want to say that I'm really pleased that, uh, Abdul Zahir is going to, uh, hopefully someday be reunited with his family.
We don't know how long that will take.
Uh, there are at least 30 men here who have been cleared that have not made it to a resettlement, but he's in a better position than many and that they did not specify he has to go to X place.
So we will be able to work with a number of regions and, uh, potential receiving countries to get him there.
Uh, the other thing I would say is it is extremely appreciated that, uh, shows like yours are keeping an eye on Guantanamo and focusing some attention on what for many people is a backwater issue that many people say, isn't that thing over with yet?
Down here is where the rule of law is being challenged by our own government.
And it's men and women like yourself, Scott, who by speaking up and saying, look, the rules have to apply to all and fairly to all in order for us to have equal justice under the law and to support the rule of law.
It is very much appreciated that, uh, you're paying attention and yes, do continue to listen to get my watch.
We are putting out a feed there that gives you a head of front row seat on the nine 11 commissions, which I'm also a part of as defense counsel for a Mario Baluchi.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Well, I definitely got some more research to do on that angle then.
Yeah.
And look, my co-counsel, James Cannell would love to talk to you guys in the future if you want to call back.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Well, we'll definitely be keeping a close eye on getting my watch there.
Um, all right, y'all.
That is Lieutenant Colonel Sterling Thomas, US Air Force representing Abdul Zaheer.
The government has finally admitted that, ah, case of mistaken identity.
No harm, no foul, no hard feelings, right buddy?
Just 14 years of, uh, torture and imprisonment down there at Guantanamo Bay.
Uh, good work you're doing there, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm proud to do it.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
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