07/23/12 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Our next guest is the great Andy Worthington, American hero, even though he's not American.
He's a Brit.
But, well, there was no American who would do the work, so he did it instead.
The Guantanamo Files is the book.
Outside the Law is the movie.
AndyWorthington.co.uk is his own personal website where you can find, I think, everything he ever wrote.
And then also, of course, you can find his articles at the Future of Freedom Foundation, fff.org.
Bagram, Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners by Andy Worthington is the latest.
Welcome to the show, Andy.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
It's very nice to be here.
Well, good.
Okay, so the Bagram Prison.
That is at an American air base in Afghanistan, correct?
Yes.
And now, the Supreme Court ruled in the Bomediene decision that those held at Guantanamo Bay had the right to habeas corpus.
That means one hearing to tell a civilian federal judge that, hey, judge, they got the wrong guy.
You got to let me go.
That's been undermined pretty severely recently by the Supreme Court's refusal to hear an appeal about particulars of that.
But anyway, we can put that off for the moment.
Your article begins talking about a victory won in court by three detainees, I believe it was, in Bagram, at the Bagram air base, who have been there for as long as seven years, you say, where a district court in D.C. said that really the Bomediene decision ought to apply to them.
It's the very same logic.
It's an American prison, and they ought to have at least one chance to say, hey, stop detaining me indefinitely.
And now that's being reversed.
Is that correct?
Yeah, well, I mean, basically what happened was that in March 2009, when these three foreign prisoners rendered to Afghanistan from other countries, said, look, you know, we need to be able to ask someone in a position of authority why we're being held.
Then, yeah, the judge, Judge John Bates, in the district court in D.C., looked at their cases compared to the cases in Guantanamo and said, well, effectively, they're the same.
So if the Guantanamo prisoners get habeas rights, then these guys should get rights as well.
And I think he was exactly right in that scope, because there was a fourth man who took part in this legal process who was an Afghan who was actually captured in another country and rendered to Bagram.
He's the man that Glenn Carl, the CIA interrogator, wrote a book about last year or the year before, last year, I think it was, about a man who'd been held in black sites.
So these other guys had been held in black sites as well.
But they all ended up in Bagram.
And Judge Bates decided that an Afghan being in Afghanistan, regardless of where he'd been captured, was something that needed to be sorted out between the Americans and the Afghan government.
But in the cases of the foreigners, he could see absolutely no reason why the United States should carry on being able to hold them without any accountability when it was surely only some kind of administrative issue or perhaps something to do with different types of interrogators that meant that they had stayed in Bagram with no rights whatsoever, while everyone else had ended up in Guantanamo.
And you know, in 2009, some of these guys had been held for seven years.
So they've now been held for ten years.
The comparisons between Bagram and Guantanamo are very similar in this way.
Okay, now, when the Boumediene decision came down, I forget now, thinking back on it, whether it was already during the Bush administration or whether it waited until the Obama administration before they were openly using Bagram as a loophole and saying, oh, it's okay if the court rules that, you know, some semblance of law can apply down there at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba because we can just rendition everybody to Bagram, and it was pretty much just their open defiance of the court's ruling.
Was that in the Bush years, or did that wait until Obama to start?
No, Boumediene was in the Bush years.
No, but I mean that reaction, that, oh, well, that's okay, we have Guantanamo East, so to hell with you.
Yeah, I mean, no, to be honest, I think what they did at Bagram was that they decided that they, you know, again, it was almost like a fixed point in time like Guantanamo, so as far as foreigners in Bagram were, then, you know, a lot of these foreigners from other countries, apart from Afghanistan or Pakistan, were captured at other times.
I think they have been capturing Pakistanis and holding them there, and, you know, and their excuse for that is that it's a wartime prison, and it is located in a war zone, and if they were going to run that as a proper prisoner of war prison, according to the Geneva Conventions, then we wouldn't be having these conversations, or we might be having different conversations, but they haven't done that.
The problem is that they've always maintained that, you know, actually, after 9-11, they rewrote the rules regarding the detention of prisoners in wartime, so they did that in this particularly horrible way at Guantanamo, where they shipped them halfway around the world.
In Bagram, they didn't give them the Geneva Convention right, so they hold these guys for as long as they feel like it, and then they give them some review process that they invented to decide whether they're going to carry on holding them or not, you know, all of which has been invented, and, you know, it's a pretty disgraceful thing that it hasn't attracted the attention in Bagram, that similar things have at Guantanamo.
People don't really understand, I guess, or, you know, TV certainly doesn't make it clear that, you know, when you're fighting an insurgency like this, the former Taliban government that's trying to make itself the government again, and, you know, they're friends, whoever's, you know, in the resistance, that, well, they're not an army wearing uniforms, like they were in the German army or something like that, and they're not quite criminals, because, after all, they're the ones being trespassed upon by foreign invaders, they're just defending themselves, so what are they?
They're some kind of weird middle ground, and this is where they abandoned the Bushes, they wanted to torture people, so they abandoned them immediately, but the Obama administration has kept with this, where they're not prisoners of war, they're not suspects to be convicted in some kind of bogus court, even, they're just these sort of pseudo-insurgent enemy types who can be held indefinitely.
Yeah, and in Guantanamo, the problem that they've got is that they, you know, Obama inherited this group of people who fit those categories of, you know, what exactly are they?
What are we supposed to do with these people who were captured to be used for intelligence, either benevolently or violently, and that it wasn't about, and it wasn't initially about endlessly detaining them, it was about detaining them without rights to do what was considered necessary to extract this information that they were supposed to have, you know, and that's been the issue there, that the issue at Bagram is this, you know, is this weird situation of, if you were to have them as prisoners of war, you could hold them until the end of hostilities, but actually what you do is that you just kind of round people up, hold on to them for a bit, and then have a review process, as a result of which you're sometimes letting people go, who then end up coming back, you know, and being engaged in combat with you in one way or another, either because that's what they were doing before or because they're not happy about what you did to them.
I mean, there's actually a lack of logic in this new detention process that, you know, constantly makes me wonder, why do we not have proper high-level discussions in the media and in government about what happened to the Geneva Conventions and can we have them back, please?
Because, you know, the issue is not then constantly assessing whether to release people who might then come back and get you.
It's pretty straightforward.
You hold people, you don't molest them, and you hold them until the end of hostilities.
And what's always been the case is that we're not being allowed to discuss when the end of hostilities is.
And we're stuck in this, you know, what was the war on terror, the war on terrorism that became the long war, whatever the hell President Obama calls it.
You know, it's an endless war as far as they're concerned.
And you can't have endless wars.
You know, they have parameters.
And the situation that we have with, you know, with both Guantanamo and Afghanistan is that these people are still part of an endless war.
And, you know, we need to break through that definition somehow.
Yeah, at this point, if we went by the law and called them POWs, which I don't know what the Geneva Conventions say specifically about insurgents under a foreign occupation.
I guess we can pick that up on the other side.
But if we make them POWs in a permanent war, well, you can still hold them indefinitely, right?
They're better off being called criminals than at least getting a trial at some level.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We've got to go to this break.
But we'll pick those points up on the other side.
With Andy Worthington, andyworthington.co.uk, fff.org.
All right, Shell, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Andy Worthington from the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's fff.org.
Bagram, Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners by Andy Worthington.
That's the latest.
Also check out his website, andyworthington.co.uk and his book, The Guantanamo Files.
The movie is Outside the Law.
And so that's what I want to ask you about.
I'm sorry the heartbreak interrupted us there.
But I know little about the Geneva Conventions.
That would be the other Scott Horton who knows all about that stuff.
But I know part of the Geneva Conventions says, for example, that if George Bush invades Iraq, that now he has a responsibility to make sure that there's enough drinking water for everyone and whatever kind of thing.
And so I wonder if it's addressed in there, because you're saying they're ignoring the Geneva Conventions.
But does it say specifically in the Geneva Conventions that say, for example, if you're occupying Iraq or Afghanistan, that the people that your military kidnaps or abducts one way or the other, that they are to be treated simply as POWs, or they are to be treated simply as criminals for violating the law that says you may not rebel against the foreign occupation, or some kind of middle ground?
Or what does the actual law that's being ignored dictate about this situation?
Well, you know, I think there are probably all kinds of nuances to the categorization of prisoners.
But I would say that the two fundamental issues that are involved here is that you have the right to hold people until the end of hostilities, but you're not allowed to torture them or otherwise abuse them.
And that's actually the most crucial element is Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which mandates that prisoners must not be subjected to torture and must not be subjected to any kind of cruel or inhuman treatment.
And it's, you know, the Bush administration pretended that there were cracks through which prisoners, detainees, as they called them, fell.
And that's simply not the case.
There is nobody that you can treat inhumanely when they're captured during wartime.
So, you know, that's kind of the bottom line.
And, you know, it's interesting that from February 2002, when Bush issued his executive order saying that Geneva Conventions didn't apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, to June 2006, when the Supreme Court said, no, you're wrong there.
Common Article 3 applies to all prisoners.
You know, that was the period when America legitimized torture as far as the government was concerned.
And since then, that hasn't been the case.
Now, you know, there may well be all kinds of loopholes going on, but the main issues are there.
You know, and the problem is that we've moved on to a situation demonstrated both at Bagram and Guantanamo, Scott, where actually we're not dealing with the issue of the right to hold these people anymore.
We're dealing with the issue of what the hell is going on when these people go through processes that have been established by the United States government, which the United States government claims are legitimate, approves these people for release, and then doesn't release them.
And that's the Bagram story, is that these guys are back in the U.S. federal court trying to get their habeas corpus rights back, when in fact, they were all cleared for release from Bagram by U.S. military review boards in 2010.
What the hell are they doing there?
The same in Guantanamo.
Some of the men in Guantanamo were cleared for release in 2004, and they're still held.
Hey, they're serving time to prevent a Republican talking point.
It's as simple as that.
There's no other explanation for it.
It's because Obama is such a little sissy boy that he can't argue with the Republicans.
So he pretends to be tough by imprisoning innocent people indefinitely.
Taking their one life that they have away from them.
He has his own tough policies, which is that he kills people in drone attacks, similar to American citizens.
What he also does, which was interesting, I didn't mention it when you were talking about Bagram and rendering people there.
He hasn't stated officially what the rendition policy of his administration is.
But we know from reports that came out in 2009, people who spoke to the New York Times during a few articles at that time, that the impression was that when the United States government, under Obama, captures foreigners in Afghanistan, so say a Saudi is found wandering around with an AK-47, they're not bothering with the U.S. detention side of things.
They're just sending that guy back to Saudi Arabia.
Now, you know, there are all kinds of due process issues involved here.
And this is not something that's ever really come up on the radar.
But they're cutting out the Bush problems of detaining people and then getting into the whole treatment issue, either by taking people out with drones or by just sending them back to where they're from.
There are issues involved there as to whether that's safe, whether sending somebody back somewhere could very possibly seriously endanger them, when they may be somebody who has an innocent explanation for why they were seized in the first place.
So it's another shadowy part of the way that Obama's been operating.
I think they should be released and given a house in Chicago.
Close to Rahm Emanuel.
Right.
Seeing as he definitely bears a lot of the responsibility for pushing for President Obama not to close Guantanamo and not to do anything that was going to, you know, upset the kind of voters that they were after and drifting into this ridiculous place where, you know, honestly, I mean, I hope that, you know, that the people listening to this, if they don't know, will act on it.
If they do know, will continue to tell their friends and everybody that they know that the United States government is holding people in Bagram and Guantanamo in significant numbers that it says it doesn't want to hold.
What's the problem?
Release these people.
Let's eventually reach this point where we're discussing whether the people that we've got are actually bad guys, you know, about which there are many disputes, but not where we're constantly having to bang on and say, look, you're holding people you don't even want to hold who are then going to court to try and get out.
What is going on here?
I mean, it really is ridiculous.
Yeah.
Well, it's probably also kind of a matter of no one in charge up there on this issue either.
Nobody wants to be in charge.
They'll pass it around to the deputies of the different departments and that kind of crap like you're reading a Woodward book, you know?
Yeah.
Anyway, let me say real quick here, I wanted to get back to something that you said about how this is all about torture in the first place.
Listen to this clip, just because it's funny, sort of.
And that common article three says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity.
It's very vague.
Now, this debate is occurring because of...
Be quiet, you silly thing.
Alright, now, the reason that's funny actually is because, as the other Scott Horton explained on the show, it's purposely very vague because it's meant to be a very catch-all thing.
Don't abuse your prisoners.
It doesn't say, you can do this, that, and the other thing, just don't rip out their fingernails.
It says, no outrages upon human dignity.
That's why it's vague.
It's to make it criminal, what George Bush does to people that his forces kidnap.
And, as you were saying before, the reason that they came up with this entire no-laws-applied theory was because they wanted to torture people.
And so, now, even though, except at least in Somalia, it's still going on, according to Jeremy Scahill's great reporting for The Nation, but mostly it seems like the black-site torture regime of the Bush era is over, and yet, indefinite detention, as you say, even for people who've been cleared for release at this point, the lawlessness of the entire thing remains the legacy of George Bush torturing people to death.
Well, no, absolutely it is.
And until those things are addressed, not dealing with them because it's politically inconvenient is not the worst political epitaph that you can have as a senior statesman.
But this will be noted in the history books, that somebody could not be bothered to address a grievous wound that America had created because it was politically inconvenient to do so.
That really isn't good enough.
You know, what was inherited from President Bush was a colossal mess.
President Obama has certainly shown that he has some seriously hawkish tendencies and a lot of points at which he clearly is content with the modified world that the Bush administration created.
But those of us who understand that there were important lines that shouldn't have been crossed and that were crossed after 9-11, you know, we've got to keep fighting to get this world back because they are lines that must not be crossed.
Once they're crossed, disaster ensues.
You know, torture I regularly describe as something that it poisons the body politically.
It's a virus.
And you can see that.
You can see that in the discourse of people who have transferred their violence, they feel, into justifying that the United States has to be tougher than tough and that if you're not, to paraphrase or to use the words of a CIA operative, I believe, in the Bush years, if you're not violating somebody's human rights, you're not doing your job properly.
You know, that's a disgraceful situation to be in and to be boasting about.
Yeah, well, and they do such a great job of spinning the most basic human decency as, you know, being weak and laying down before your enemies and that kind of thing.
And so, it persists.
And you're right.
I mean, this is part of the legacy of George Bush, personally, especially.
I mean, he said to half the country, you must now rationalize torture.
Okay?
Those are your marching orders.
Go and carry it out.
And they did.
And you're right.
I mean, we live in a different country now for it, too.
No doubt about it.
And now we've got to go.
Thank you very much.
Andy Worthington, everybody.
FFF.org AndyWorthington.co.uk Appreciate it.
The pleasure is ever, Scott.
Cheers.
Bye-bye.