09/07/12 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

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For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, September 7, 2012, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.www.antiwarradio.com All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I keep my interview archives from this and my other radio shows at www.scotthorton.org.
Tonight's guest is Andy Worthington, America's great chronicler of the Guantanamo Bay Prison.
Unfortunately, we don't have an American that actually does the work.
Andy's a Brit, but I sure am glad we have him.
He's the author of the book The Guantanamo Files and the producer of the movie Outside the Law.
He keeps a website at www.andyworthington.co.uk and is a policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation at www.fff.org, where his most recent piece is Eleven Years After 9-11, Guantanamo is a Political Prison.
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 tonight.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
All right, so this is an article full of bummers.
I guess to start with, just like in the title, here we are 11 years later, and this Guantanamo prison, which everyone knows now, we've certainly covered this on this and other shows, this prison that started out really as a publicity stunt for the terror war to make it look like there were more than a couple of hundred terrorists in the whole wide world that we needed to be concerned with.
They just basically bought whoever the Pakistani military was selling for their bounty just to fill the thing up and pretend like there actually really was some Islamo-fascist caliphate out there with this army that had to be dealt with.
Now here we are 11 years later, and there are still people held there, some of them perhaps actually guilty of something, but many more, as you write in this article, have already been cleared for release and yet still are not released.
So I guess let's start with them.
Who are they, those at Guantanamo Bay, who have been cleared for release for this, that, or another reason and yet are still held there?
Well, you know, Scott, the majority of those guys, two-thirds of them are Yemenis.
The others are, we don't know exactly because the Obama administration hasn't deigned to let us have any information about exactly who they are, and lawyers are pretty much prevented from talking about it.
They're not allowed to say whether their clients are cleared for release or not.
That's all classified information.
Some of them are Syrians.
There are still a couple of Chinese guys in there, Uyghurs from China, but mainly, you know, the biggest group there are the Yemenis who have been cleared for release.
Some of these guys, military review boards under the Bush administration as long ago as 2004, said, you know, these guys can go home.
We're finished interrogating them.
We don't regard them as a threat to the United States.
That's eight years.
Eight years that they've been held since, you know, people in a position of power and authority said these guys can go home.
You know, President Obama continued the policy that President Bush had of being very suspicious of the situation in Yemen.
Basically, President Bush did release, you know, I think somewhere around 15 Yemenis.
Less than two dozen, certainly.
Compare that to about 100 Saudis that President Bush released, and they were roughly the same number of Saudis in Yemen as the Guantanamo.
And that's because the Saudi government is a great ally of the United States, and eventually the negotiations took place whereby the Saudis said, hey, we need our guys back, how are we going to do this?
Whereas that didn't happen with Yemen.
And under Obama, it didn't happen with Yemen either.
But what happened in the early, in the first year that Obama was in power, his administration started transferring some Yemenis back.
And I think seven guys were sent back in 2009.
And then at the end of that year, a Nigerian man called Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was caught trying to bomb a plane with a bomb in his underwear.
And there was a huge backlash because it turned out that he had apparently been recruited in Yemen.
Huge backlash against Yemen.
A kind of ultimatum from Congress to the President saying, that's it, you mustn't release any Yemenis from Guantanamo.
And instead of saying, hey, what have these guys who've been in Guantanamo for years cleared, some of them cleared by President Bush's people in 2004, what have they got to do with this supposed terror problem that we have in Yemen?
He said, yeah, that's fine, I'm not going to release any Yemenis.
And no one has been released since.
So, you know, we're now getting on for three years since the President put this moratorium in place.
Nobody really seems to care.
Nobody seems to want to do anything about it.
I think the only thing that's worse than holding people arbitrarily, Scott, is telling them that they've been through one kind of review process or another and that they're going to be released and then not releasing them.
I would rather be held arbitrarily by the bad guy who just says to me, you're not going anywhere, sunshine, that's the end, rather than have somebody who pretends that there are notions of fairness and justice and then flouts them.
And that's what the United States has been doing with the Yemenis in Guantanamo in various ways for at least eight years.
Well, you know, it's funny, I don't know all the exact statements, but I think if people go back and look at the campaign season of 2007 and 2008, they might remember that Barack Obama won not just on the position that he was going to close Guantanamo, which was certainly part of it, but it was really the entire package.
I mean, that was really Barack Obama's mandate, was undoing the last eight years of whoops, we all wish that really hadn't happened with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the Republicans.
So this was the American people's way of, one, apologizing to the world for that, and two, trying to undo it, trying to, you know, assuming I think a lot of people really did assume with all that hope and change and all that stuff that they really were going to see an end to these policies rather than an escalation of the power grab, where now Obama claims not just the power to kidnap and torture Americans like George Bush did with Jose Padilla, but even the power to murder Americans, as he's done with Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, and it's that symptomatic of what happens when something as unprecedented as the power grab that took place under Bush happened.
And instead of doing what you said you were going to do, which was, you know, we need to rewind the clock back to before all this began and behave in a much more responsible and acceptable and law-abiding manner, it hasn't, you know.
Whether it's been deliberate or whether it's been just as a product of not challenging what took place, it has in so many ways been a continuation.
And, you know, Guantanamo is certainly a key part of that.
I mean, you know, what's significant to me, Scott, has always been that, yeah, there's a handful of bad guys in Guantanamo involved with international terrorism.
We know there are people there allegedly involved in the 9-11 attacks.
We know from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who I spoke to a few years ago, that, you know, essentially he was told that when they transferred Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and this handful of high-value detainees into Guantanamo in 2006, that was the point at which, with a straight face, the administration could say, we're actually holding some bad guys in Guantanamo.
Because they didn't have anybody who was any higher than medium level in any terrorist capacity in Guantanamo.
And they only had a few dozen, at most, of these people out of nearly 800.
So, you know, the problem is...
Because anyone that they were really interested in, Andy, they were holding at a black site in Morocco or in Poland or Romania or in Thailand or Diego Garcia.
What upsets me, Scott, really, is not just that we've had innocent men in Guantanamo, and we still, I believe, do.
I mean, they're not dressed up as that.
The alleged evidence against them, extracted by all kinds of dubious means, suggests that they're not innocent.
But we also, fundamentally, we have people in Guantanamo who were fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance before the 9-11 attacks, because, you know, mainly because some sheikh back at home had told them that the Taliban were trying to establish a pure Islamic state, and they should go out there and fight.
Now, you know, we can discuss whether we think that was a good idea or not, but what it certainly wasn't was terrorism.
And after the 9-11 attacks, what the Bush administration got away with, and what hasn't been repudiated because these guys are still held, is this notion that, you know, the people that were rounded up in connection with the military invasion of Afghanistan 11 years ago, we're nearly up to the 11th anniversary of that, those people that were captured are somehow terrorists, when actually very few of them were.
What they were were soldiers in a battle that had nothing to do with international terrorism, and these guys should have been held as prisoners of war, but we know that they weren't.
They were held as enemy combatants.
They still effectively are that, even though, you know, President Obama dropped that designation.
Enemy combatants were conceived by the Bush administration as people without rights, and essentially the people who are still in Guantanamo find themselves in that unenviable and very disturbing situation where they are still essentially held without rights.
You know, they're not going anywhere.
They're not going anywhere even if they're cleared.
So it remains fundamentally disgraceful on that level.
And I think it's very disappointing that it just dropped off the radar, really, that things that people understood when Bush was in were wrong, they've kind of forgotten about.
Well, and you know, yeah, especially toward the end of the Bush years, it was finally getting through to people about blowback and about how history had begun actually back before September 11th, and there were, you know, real earthly reasons that we had gotten into this mess in the first place, and then people were, you know, hearing testimony from people like Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym of the American interrogator in Iraq.
He spent years there interrogating people and saying that other than the actual occupation of Iraq, the number two reason that anyone was, you know, especially the foreigners he was talking about, the Libyans, the Syrians, the Saudis, who were traveling to Iraq to fight our guys, why were they doing so?
It was because of Guantanamo Bay and because the pictures of the torture at Abu Ghraib.
And this was, this had replaced, Palestine had replaced the bombing of Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia as the number one, you know, suicide bomber recruitment tool on earth.
And the American people were finally, you know, or especially the liberal Democrats were starting to really, you know, figure this out and use that explanation, that talking point against the Republicans.
And yet somehow they decided to forget that as long as it's Barack Obama keeping it open.
Or they make some lame excuse like he's only the most powerful ruler of the most powerful empire in world history and the poor guy is just helpless before the Congress that won't let him close it, which is such a despicable lie.
He can order a war in Libya without Congress, but he can't order the troops at Guantanamo Bay to move and close that prison down?
Please.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I absolutely agree, Scott.
And, you know, it undoubtedly is something that, you know, that still burns throughout the moving world.
And understandably, you know, people, you know, I traveled to Kuwait earlier this year and I met people there who, in a very, you know, they weren't being firebrand about it.
They were being very reasonable about it.
But, you know, they understood that something had gone horribly wrong and that this situation remained something that was horribly wrong.
And there's no way to go to a Muslim country and dress it up in any way other than the fact that this is a prison where the normal rules don't apply and all the prisoners are Muslims.
So, you know, it's a terrible thing to still have there.
And, I mean, you know, you are right that the ultimate responsibility lies with the president.
But I have to say that every branch of the U.S. government has failed when it comes to Guantanamo.
That both the major parties have failed when it comes to Guantanamo.
That the courts have failed when it comes to Guantanamo.
You know, it varies.
Yeah, the only difference there is the Republicans, you know, their voters are glad that they're horrible on Guantanamo Bay.
You know what I mean?
Where Obama supporters, they have to make excuses for him.
That the poor guy, he would love to close it if only it was up to him.
And he claimed that in an interview with Ben Swan, a local TV news personality, just the other day that, in fact, the way he said it was, I think it should be closed.
You know, it's his personal opinion.
But unfortunately, you know, Harry Reid and John Boehner, they hold all the cards on the issue, I guess.
Well, you know, unfortunately what it is is that, you know, he's being pragmatic.
You know, it's not a vote winner.
You know, sadly the situation, Scott, is that I realize that we first started talking five years ago, almost exactly five years ago.
We were talking about Jose Padilla at that point, and we may talk about him again soon because he's going to be resentenced.
But we've been talking about this for five years, you know.
Sadly, you know, I know that the majority of the American people don't care enough about the situation at Guantanamo, about the crimes committed by the highest officials in the United States in the war on terror.
They don't care enough.
So why would President Obama go out on a limb?
Well, he should go out on a limb because he said that's what he was going to do before he got elected, and because after he's gone, it will be remembered that he was the president who said he was going to do things that he didn't do.
Now, he may not care about his legacy.
I think that politicians do, though.
I think that presidents of the United States do care about how they're regarded, and I think that it's very sad that we're in a situation where we have to be talking about ways to try and put pressure on him as to how he will be looked at in the future because of what he isn't doing now that he said he would.
Right.
Well, you know, he always fulfills his promises when it's to do something horrible, like the regime change in Libya.
But somehow he has to lay prone on his belly before the Republicans in order to appear tough on, you know, so many of these other foreign policy issues.
We're talking with Andy Worthington.
He's the author of the Guantanamo Files.
That's profiles of everybody who was ever held at Guantanamo Bay, pretty much anyway.
And then also the movie Outside the Law, all about the treatment and the torture and the lawless detention, et cetera, et cetera.
He's a policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's fff.org.
And the most recent piece there is 11 years after 9-11.
Guantanamo is a political prison.
And I wanted to point out this short blog at motherjones.com that they've changed the Democratic Party platform.
Of course, Andy, there was a bunch of controversy about the status of Jerusalem and this and that in the platform.
Not as much news reportage about this where they have softened the language.
Well, I'm not going to sit here and read it to you.
Anyway, they have quite severely softened the language on Guantanamo Bay in the Democratic Party platform, not like it's binding anyway.
In fact, they could have just left it and still not done anything about it.
But the fact that they're actually even softening the language on the issue in order to accommodate the president's policy, I think, is really something else.
That's maybe the real story there.
Yeah, well, I mean, I agree with you.
Why not just say what you were saying before when you're not going to do anything about it anyway?
Right.
Just sit here and be honest about how dishonest you are.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, we've had so many years of it now of people looking earnest and saying, you know, we still do want to close it.
Or as you said, I don't know whether that was verbatim, but saying it's closed.
Put it in the passive tense, not even the active tense.
You know, I'm the president of the United States.
I can't seem to manage this.
Right.
Well, remember now, when he gave his big speech, and, of course, having Dick Cheney as your foil is certainly the best way to play your dialectic there.
He got up in front of the National Archives and said, you know, Dick Cheney wants to just take the law and torture it to death.
Well, I want to pretend that there's one for a little while longer.
But never mind that, really.
In practice, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have different tiers.
I'm going to give some people military tribunals.
I'm going to give some people no trial whatsoever.
I'm going to give some people maybe even a civilian, you know, black-robed court.
But if they're acquitted, then I'll still call them an enemy combatant or an unprivileged enemy belligerent or whatever kind of jargon and hold them for the rest of their lives anyway.
And this was his big I'm reinstating the Constitution after the eight horrible years of George Bush.
And so a lot of people just took it at face value.
You know, the picture on TV rather than the substance of what was said, that, you know, Dick Cheney was losing the argument here under the new leader.
But actually, Dick Cheney had won it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, that was a pretty crucial moment was that speech when he laid out everything that was going to happen, which was pretty much everything that had happened before.
Yeah, I mean, they wanted to move the prison north to Illinois probably just to satisfy some crony friend of Rahm Emanuel or something.
Well, there were arguments about that, Scott.
I mean, the fact is it didn't happen because of, you know, pretty much across the board opposition to moving those men.
And, you know, within the Guantanamo circles of the lawyers involved, it's a thorny issue as well because some people think that the worst thing that could have happened would have been for that to happen because it would have created Guantanamo-type conditions on the U.S. mainland as opposed to being on Guantanamo itself, which, you know, gets to be both America and not America at the same time.
You know, I tend to think that had they been moved, they would have been subjected to the kind of legal challenges that are much more likely to take place on the U.S. mainland than in Guantanamo.
Although Guantanamo justice might have polluted our domestic law that much more, too.
The fact is it didn't happen, you know.
And the fact is that with Guantanamo, if it isn't one individual or one group of people preventing any progress on closing it, it's another.
It's why, you know, I said earlier and I stand by it, every branch of the United States government has failed these men.
And both the parties have.
And, you know, the depressing thing is that nobody is showing any signs of really wanting to do anything about it, to say, you know, actually when we have the next inauguration of the president of the United States, we really need to sort this one out.
It's becoming the kind of permanent prison.
And, you know, that's a really depressing thought, actually, that really sincerely these people are prepared to let this thing go on forever.
You know, so, OK, most of the guys that are held there are being looked after better than they used to be.
But, you know, even so, how is it going to look?
One by one, they die of old age there.
And it's like, and what did, and sorry, tell me again what it was that they did to be held for the rest of their lives.
Oh, it's like, we don't know.
We don't know.
You had a hunch that they might be, you know, they might be, have got up to nefarious activities.
So you held them without charge or trial for the rest of their lives.
Let's forget, you know, everything that we set up as to how we're supposed to behave, how we're supposed to only hold people as prisoners of war with rights or as criminals and criminal suspects and give them a trial.
I don't know where that leaves the United States, Scott, when Guantanamo has been so casually normalized and almost entirely forgotten about.
And yet what is taking place there, outside of, you know, the generally accepted notion that it run more humanely.
But what's happening there is the people are being held without charge or trial for the rest of their lives.
That's really not a good thing.
If that was happening to U.S. citizens, I think it would look bad.
You know, I don't know the answer to that question.
But I mean, the reason that I don't know is that, you know, we haven't, we haven't gone that far yet.
You know, there are, there are hearings taking place in various military commissions for people who are, you know, regarded as the seriously bad guy prisoners, the ones involved in acts of international terrorism, the 9-11 attacks, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
You know, the trials haven't gone ahead.
And the reason for the government is that to have a trial that could possibly be regarded in any way as fair means that what has to be discussed is what happened to these guys during the many years that they spent in CIA black sites where torture was practiced.
And what the government doesn't want is for that to be discussed.
So, you know, we haven't gone that far.
That's really the key to a lot of this, keeping it open forever.
You know, it's also these men are represented by defense lawyers who need this to be discussed.
And so they're pushing and pushing and pushing the government and, you know, and challenging everything.
So what we're getting is things bounced around, you know, submissions, court submissions that have been bounced around.
And the whole thing is taking years and years.
You know, the defense don't want kangaroo trials for these guys.
The prosecution don't want any of the information to come out.
How long are these?
How long is it going to take before anything happens?
I really, really don't know what the answer is.
Now, for everybody who is accused of something less significant or who, like Omar Khadr, the Canadian and former child prisoner who, you know, he had to plead guilty to being an alien, an unprivileged enemy belligerent in wartime.
That meant that in a country that was at war with the United States, him being there was a war crime.
When until that point, war crimes had to involve you doing some really pretty horrible things that were outside of what normally takes place in wartime.
Like what's being done to these men at Guantanamo Bay.
That's war crimes.
But, you know, so him and a handful of others have accepted plea deals.
Plea deals is the administration's preferred way forward for the cases of all but the most serious guys who are very, very seriously tortured.
Anybody else, if they can get a deal, then they don't have to go through that whole difficult process of having to try and justify the military commission system and, you know, and having to, as with everybody, try and suppress the information that they don't want to come out, which will explain what happened to these guys during the Bush administration.
Haven't they heard?
Eric Holder just passed out a license to torture to death to all government employees the other day.
Yeah, well, I mean, he certainly, well, he certainly said whatever any of you did in the past is OK.
But that's what President Obama has pretty much been saying from day one.
I'm not trying to encourage the LAPD or anything, but.
Yeah, well, you know, but President Obama basically said that even before he was inaugurated, when he said, you know, we're looking forward, we're not looking backwards.
That's what he meant.
I'm not going after anyone for what happened before.
And, you know, and frankly, if you don't go after anyone for what happened before, and I know there are reasons and I know there's a point at which, you know, at which Americans sit on one side of the line or the other.
You know, hey, what happened 11 years ago was so bad that, you know, that things may have happened which were out of order.
But it was all to try and keep America safe.
If you believe that, you know, then you have a very flexible attitude to the to the laws that govern how people behave, right up to and including the president and the vice president of the United States and the defense secretary and their lawyers, the most senior people.
Right.
And, you know, those people committed crimes after after the 9-11 attacks.
They have not been held accountable for them.
Right.
Well, and it's, you know, the Convention Against Torture, for example, which was created by the Americans and pushed on the world through the United Nations treaty process by the United States, specifically says necessity is no excuse for anyone anywhere in the chain of command.
Don't even try it.
And that's the law in this country, too, because our federal law is implementing that torture convention, anti-torture convention, which the Americans have signed.
And on top of that, it's not even true and not by a long shot.
You know, McClatchy did that study where they concluded without any doubt that all of the worst torture went on right before and right after the invasion of Iraq, when Dick Cheney needed the most lies about Saddam and Osama and that somehow they were the same guy or kissing cousins or something.
And that was when they were torturing people like Sheikh Ali, who said under duress that Saddam had taught them how to hijack planes and make chemical weapons and all these things.
And, of course, then he was renditioned off to Thailand and then to Gaddafi to be tortured to death in his cell by America's sock puppet allied dictatorship, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya just a few short years ago.
Well, absolutely.
Yeah.
And, you know, a very important thing to mention.
And, you know, and with especially with Human Rights Watch having just produced a new report about that, which, you know, which I encourage your readers to go and look for.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's just out.
And people can find the links for that on Antiwar.com as well.
I always recommend checking them out.
All right.
We're way over time.
I got to let you go.
Thank you so much for your time, Andy.
It's great to talk to you again.
Well, Scott, you know, I very much hope that we won't have to do this in a year's time.
But sadly, I think we probably will.
You know, we have to keep we have to keep fighting, educating, campaigning for America to to return to the rule of law, essentially, and to hold people accountable for grievous human rights crimes, regardless of who they who they are or who they were.
Absolutely.
All right.
Thanks again, Andy.
Okay.
Cheers, everybody.
That's Andy Worthington, America and Britain's great chronicler of the criminal prison down at Guantanamo Bay.
He's the author of the Guantanamo Files and the director of the movie Outside the Law.
He's a policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation.
You can find his brand new article at their website, FFF.org.
It's called 11 Years After 9-11.
Guantanamo is a political prison.
That's it for Antiwar Radio this week.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Find all my interview archives from this and my other radio shows at Scott Horton.org.