10/02/09 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show is Andy Worthington.
He has a website at AndyWorthington.co.uk.
You can find his articles for Antiwar.com at Antiwar.com slash Worthington and Original.
Antiwar.com slash Worthington.
I haven't found a way to combine those together yet, but we will soon.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Oh, sorry, you're also the author of The Guantanamo Files, which is an excellent book.
I am, and as we talked about some time ago, Scott, I've also been working on a film.
Which is now out.
We're going to be launching it in the UK in a few weeks.
And I'm going to be bringing it over to the States to show it a few places while we try and see if we can sort out some distribution.
So I'm going to be in New York.
I'm going to be in D.C.
I'm coming over to the West Coast for a few days between about the 4th and 13th of November.
So I will keep you posted on that.
Well, I can't wait to see you when you come out to L.A.
Outside the law, stories from Guantanamo.
That's what it's called.
Outside the law, stories from Guantanamo.
Man, I can't wait to see that.
I bet it's awesome.
All right, well, everybody, Andy Worthington, we turn to him because it takes a foreigner, I guess, to take care of our police state problem for us, or at least, you know, cover it.
And I guess the first thing I want to ask you is about the headlines tell that Obama's government is leaking these trial balloons that Guantanamo won't be closed within a year, like he said, after all.
And I guess maybe if you can combine in that answer something about how they've dropped their plan to pass a new law for indefinite detention.
As Glenn Greenwald explained on the show, was it earlier this week or in the last week, they're simply going to rely on Dick Cheney's assertion of unlimited authority under the authorization to use military force to continue to hold people in military custody?
Yeah, well, that's right.
They are doing that.
And I mean, it's good that they worked out that trying to introduce new legislation would be a terrible idea.
It's, you know, then a short hop from there to realize that relying on the authorization for use of military force, as they are doing for, you know, the whole of their detention policies, really, is another thing and doesn't really take us to where we want to be with these issues.
I mean, every time it's mentioned, I'm thinking, you know, this is the founding document of the War on Terror that was passed by Congress, you know, just days after the 9-11 attacks, authorizing the president to, you know, seize and hold and attack anybody that he felt was responsible for the 9-11 attacks or those who harbored them.
You know, when are we going to start reappraising...
Well, in fact, you know, when you go back to the news stories back then, the Senate was controlled by the Democrats, and Tom Daschle and Carl Levin struck out a bunch of language, and they wrote their own authorization to use military force, because the one that David Addington had written said, and we can do anything to anyone forever and ever and ever in the damn thing, and they took that out.
Yeah, no, exactly, exactly.
You know, I mean, I have to say, Scott, that an interesting part of this story of them, you know, and let's be clear, you know, although the authorization for use of military force and their reliance on it still needs some challenging, it is so much better than trying to bring in new legislation.
But, you know, also in there was their admission that one of the ways of dealing with the prisoners is one that's already underway, and it's the one that's taking place in the courts with the habeas corpus petitions.
And, you know, that's quite a step as well, because...
By the way, what's the ratio there?
We're at, what, 30 out of 38, something like that, 32?
30 out of 38, that's right, yeah.
It's a pretty good success rate, I think.
That's 30 out of 38 who've been released when they got one chance to talk to a judge in a black robe.
Right.
Well, not necessarily released yet, but certainly...
Yeah, ordered released.
Ordered released, yes.
Those are two entirely different concepts.
They are, indeed.
Oh, goodness.
All right.
Well, so tell me about your latest article here, 9-11 trial at Guantanamo delayed again.
It's my opinion, I'm not sure what that's worth, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shib, and perhaps that guy, Qatani, although, boy, his level of guilt's got to be somewhat low, since apparently he didn't even know what his mission was when he got here, assuming that anything they say about him is true.
So it looks like apparently we've got, you know, what, between three and six actual guilty terrorists down there at Guantanamo Bay.
Is that about right?
You know, there may be a few more than that.
I've always tended to rely on the words of intelligence experts over the years, when they've been able to be located.
Not everybody who works in an intelligence agency fulfills the use of that word, but there seem to have been some smart cookies over the years who've checked out the prisoners at Guantanamo and who have left with the conclusion that somewhere between two and three dozen of all the people who were ever held, which is 779 men, had any meaningful kind of connection to any kind of terrorist organization.
Now, you know, we are slowly starting to get there.
We've had, you know, it's difficult to tell.
What we're getting, of course, generally, are strategic leaks that are made by people with an agenda to the major media as to quite where we're up to and how many trials they're going to have.
It looks like maybe they're thinking about somewhere between 50 and 80.
Eighty was the figure that the Bush administration left with.
You know, they said we're going to have 80 military commission trials for these baddest of the bad guys in Guantanamo.
I've read recently that that's been revised down to somewhere like 50, which is starting to get a bit more reasonable.
I would say you could chip away at it again.
The big question, of course, now is are they going to have the nerve to pursue these cases in federal courts, which not only have a history of successfully prosecuting terrorism cases, but they're also venues where genuine evidence presented, I think, is going to give them the result that everybody would like, which is that anybody with a genuine connection with terrorism is not going to be allowed to walk free.
Or are they going to persist, as parts of the administration seem to want to do, in reviving Dick Cheney and David Ellington's horrendous military commissions, which were such a shame and disaster for American justice over the time from when they were invented in November 2001, throughout the whole of the Bush administration, and which cannot be mended.
There was some extraordinarily good testimony by people who would know about these things in the summer.
In particular, I was impressed by Major David Fracht, who was the military defense lawyer for Mohammad Jawad, the Afghan teenager who was finally sent home to Afghanistan.
He's a man who knows more about the law of war than just about anybody going, and he delivered an extraordinary statement to a House committee in summer, demonstrating absolutely why this system, which was dreamt up so that it could ensure prosecution, is unmendable and unnecessary, because federal court trials are the places to put these people on trial.
So I'm hoping that we're going to see that, but there's so much in the air at the moment.
And it's not all Obama's fault.
We've just seen that decision, a non-binding decision, but the decision in the House yesterday, a majority of the politicians there, many members of the Democratic Party, pretty much voting to say, you can't do anything about Guantanamo, you can't get anybody out there if we have our way.
That's depressing.
And let's look back over the history.
We know who were the bad guys in the Bush administration.
We know about Bush, we know about Cheney, we know about Rumsfeld, we know about Addington, we know about all the people that were driving this policy of turning America into a torture nation and a nation where the laws no longer existed.
But who persistently backed up these people in their drive towards fascism?
Well, it was the people in the Senate.
Yeah, Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller, the leaders of the Democratic Party.
And they're still the same.
This is funny too, because I was about to go on this riff about how one of the problems that we had on September 11th was that George Bush was just so ignorant about the world in general.
He didn't really have, I think, any kind of theory of American civics really whatsoever.
You know what I mean?
In his first speech after September 11th, he referred to the pro tem, the longest serving member of the majority party in the Senate.
He read it off the teleprompter, the Senate President Pro Temporary, because he'd never heard of it before.
That was in his big heroic speech, his first big speech before Congress.
He didn't know what a pro tem was.
He had no theory of how law works or whatever.
So where you and I on September 12th would say, now listen, we all know that federal courts are perfectly willing to convict anyone that the prosecution wants.
There's no reason to abandon the rule of law here.
In fact, it would be wonderful public relations for a fight against terrorism if we grant our Bill of Rights to the people that we consider the very most heinous criminals on earth and show you how it's done with a real rule of law, and et cetera, et cetera, like that.
Bush, since he had no grounding whatsoever in how things are supposed to work, since he knows nothing about what the Justice Department even is or does or its separation from the FBI or what a grand jury is or any of these things, he was willing to just completely defer to Cheney and Addington.
But then what you just say about the Congress completely undermines my whole point, in a sense, because here's the entire Congress.
Maybe they're all as dumb as Bush.
These people are really afraid that the federal court system that convicted Ramsey Youssef and locked him in a supermax cell for the rest of his life in Colorado, in Florence, Colorado, will be unable to convict his uncle who committed the same act only times 3,000?
I mean, give me a break.
I mean, they're also, you know, I'm sad to note that the various Democrats yesterday were referring to the people in Guantanamo as terrorists.
Well, you know, these guys have not been charged or tried.
So, you know, the only people in whose minds these people are terrorists are the people who label them as terrorists without any evidence, which is Dick Cheney and everybody.
So here we have serving Democrats in a new administration still using the same language.
But the main issue about all of them is they're chronic cowardice.
Come on.
You've got maximum security prisons in the United States.
They're the envy of people who are fans of prisons around the world.
Yeah, I mean, those supermax cells are poured as one solid concrete piece.
And you have convicted terrorists and convicted dangerous criminals locked up safely in the United States.
And yet the hysteria that is stirred up by politicians of both parties about the great grave dangers of bringing any of these guys over from Guantanamo to be imprisoned on the U.S. mainland until it can be decided whether they're going to be freed in some way or whether they're going to be put forward for trials in some way.
It's an embarrassment.
I mean, it's an embarrassment.
It is.
It's horrible.
And especially, look, I mean, we've had convictions of, what, hundreds of people, at least people who we all know are innocent who've been forced to plead, the ones that have been high-profile trials.
There hadn't been a real terrorist convicted in this country since Moussaoui.
Man, we've got nothing but bogus prosecutions everywhere.
Remember, they even tried to frame up Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer they didn't like, and try to implicate him in the train bombing in Spain.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those lousy kids, the Spanish federal police who refused to go along with it.
Well, yeah, right, exactly.
But, you know, having said that, you know, if we're saying that the conditions are ripe for dubious terrorist prosecutions in the United States in federal courts, which is kind of what you're saying, but, I mean, I actually think that there's a pretty good history of the courts and everybody involved in the courts of having a good record of dealing with these kinds of cases, of dealing with the kinds of evidence that are involved.
Certainly better than the military and the CIA, I guess, huh?
Yeah, well, you know, to me it's part and parcel with what the courts are doing in the habeas corpus petitions, and that's the most important bit, because these are the guys who, after being held for eight years with all kinds of spurious allegations being put against them, are having the very basis of their detention tested in the first place.
Essentially, you know, essentially the equivalent of being pulled into a police cell by the police and finding out that actually nobody gets around to charging you for eight years, and after eight years you get somebody to check through the file and say, actually, you know, you haven't got any reason to hold this guy beyond your idiotic belief that you're still holding to that whatever was conceived in the president's brain eight years ago was accurate, without the need for evidence.
So, you know, let's get the guys that they need to get on trial over to the U.S. mainland.
I don't know how it's going to happen.
What's going to happen now with the kind of caliber of politicians that we all have to deal with?
Yeah, I don't know.
I think our job is just calling the score, man.
There's nothing that's going to be right about any of this.
In fact, speaking of which, headlines.
Blair, maybe three weeks ago, Obama to extend the rule of law to those held at Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
And then I read further into the article, and I'm not quite sure it described exactly what that headline implied.
Can you fill us in there?
Yeah, well, what's happened is that, I mean, this is a very important story as well.
You know, what's happened at Bagram has been from the beginning one of the prisons that was used, first of all, in the processing, what little processing there was, of the prisoners who went to Guantanamo and has been for all these years the main U.S. prison in Afghanistan.
And throughout that whole period, these guys have essentially had no rights.
Now, you know, what we need to understand from the beginning is that if you're capturing people during wartime, then you're supposed to be holding them as prisoners of war and holding them humanely according to the Geneva Conventions.
The Geneva Conventions were shredded by the Bush administration and have never been re-implemented.
That's the problem of what's going on here.
So these guys have been held at Bagram for years, no rights.
At the same time, what's been happening at Guantanamo is that those guys there eventually got rights.
The Supreme Court has now made three enormously important rulings on behalf of the prisoners to establish that they have rights, not because the Supreme Court generally hands out rights to prisoners seized in wartime, but precisely because they were stripped of all rights by the Bush administration.
So, you know, we've found out over the years that a number of foreign prisoners are held in Bagram, possibly as many as 30, who were captured outside Afghanistan and were subjected to extraordinary renditions and were sent to Guantanamo.
Now, some enterprising attorneys managed to find out who some of these men were and brought habeas corpus petitions on their behalf.
And in March, when Judge John D. Bates of the District Court got to look at the case, he said, well, yeah, you know, these guys who are the foreigners rendered are, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same as the prisoners who ended up in Guantanamo.
Now, the way I put it is that it was only some administrative error that prevented them from going to Guantanamo with the rest of the guys.
The guys at Guantanamo have got all these rights.
The guys at Bagram have got absolutely zero.
These guys who've been there six years, some of them, when they say the same thing that the Guantanamo prisoners said, which is, you've got the wrong guy here, but I'm given no means, no venue in which to try and establish that, that is the case.
But the Obama administration resisted it.
Now, what's been happening at Bagram is that they have a terrible kind of review system, which is even worse than the one-sided one that they had in Guantanamo, where, effectively, the prisoners are allowed to make a statement, but they're allowed to make a statement before they're even told why the government thinks it's holding them.
I mean, that's absurd.
And Judge Bates recognized this.
Now, the Obama administration said they've had an overhaul of things, and they're going to give them some kind of Guantanamo-style review, which will give them a few more rights.
Now, first of all, they did this to try and cut off Judge Bates' ruling, because they appealed it.
And so what they're essentially trying to do is to keep the courts away from meddling with the foreigners in Bagram, the rendered prisoners.
The Afghans captured in the war zone in Afghanistan, that's kind of a different matter, and Judge Bates didn't extend rights to them.
So it was an attempt to play something at the right kind of time that might help the appeals courts come down on their side.
But, you know, the whole problem with this issue is we're talking about a prison in a war zone.
A, you don't have any right to go against Judge Bates on behalf of these foreign prisoners, but when we're talking about the prisoners captured in wartime, why are you talking about seizing them, holding them for an undefined amount of time, and then introducing a tribunal based on Guantanamo to review their cases to decide whether to hold them or release them?
Forgive me here for my ignorance.
Where's the Geneva Conventions, you know?
Well, I thought that when Obama took power, he said, okay, Geneva Conventions apply, and that that would mean that everybody in Afghanistan is a prisoner of war, just like in the law.
Yeah, well, so did I.
But, you know, what he certainly meant was the Geneva Conventions apply in terms of Article 3 for the humane treatment of prisoners.
Clearly what he didn't mean, and, you know, I don't know how much he's got an eye on this, or how much this is just the military saying, you know, actually, we quite like things how they are, and the intelligence agency's talking about it, and coming to these various parts of the administration and saying, actually, you know, so long as we treat them humanely, of course this works better, because what they're doing is that they're holding on to them, and they're using them, they're milking them for their intelligence value, rather than removing soldiers off the battlefield, which is how it operates in wartime.
That's why the Geneva Conventions were developed.
Now, you know...
And it must be worth it, right?
It must be worth it to milk them for their intelligence this way, even though we saw, you know, in plain black and white in Iraq, how treating people without dignity and without law is what created more and more enemies to fight the whole time.
That couldn't be why the resistance in Afghanistan is now as strong as it's been since the occupation began eight years ago.
Sure.
Well, you know, the Afghans don't like the fact that the Geneva Conventions don't apply.
And, you know, and I have to say, you know, we're not dealing with soldiers in uniforms here, so it takes a little twist to imagine how would this be the other way around.
Right.
Well, it's like Bill Hicks said.
Bill Hicks used to say a war is when two armies are fighting.
This is the American army fighting against civilians, against people in their country.
They call it counterinsurgency.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, it doesn't matter how you dress them up.
But, you know, my example of saying, is this appropriate behavior, because this is not how the Geneva Conventions work, is let's say you've got some Americans who were captured by somebody.
Now, let's say that they're special forces or something, so they're not wearing uniforms, so that we can do this Geneva Convention thing, which is all about if you don't wear a uniform, you have to have a tribunal to screen you at the point of capture, to check you're not a civilian.
And then you're allowed to be held, and it's got to be humane, and it's not supposed to be about introducing weird tribunals somewhere down the line to decide whether to hold you or not.
You're supposed to be held until the end of captivity, and the end of hostilities.
You're allowed to do that.
If this was happening to a bunch of American special forces who were seized by some enemy of the United States, and instead of the Geneva Conventions applying, they said, actually, we're going to hold these guys for an unspecified amount of time, and then we're going to give them these Mickey Mouse tribunals to decide whether to hold them or release them.
How would that go down in the U.S.?
Well, jeez, at this point, I don't know.
I might just get away with anything.
I'm sorry, we've got to go.
I'm over the time here.
I called you late.
I really apologize.
I love your work, everybody.
Please go and look at AndyWorthington.co.uk.
Look at Antiwar.com slash Worthington and Original.
Antiwar.com slash Worthington.
Your work is absolutely invaluable, man, and I hope I can have you back on the show sometime soon.
Okay, Scott.
Nice to talk as ever.
Cheers.
All right, everybody, Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back after this.