12/29/09 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
First hour, we're going to start now with another regular guest and friend of the show, Andy Worthington.
His website is www.andyworthington.co.uk.
He's the author of a book called The Guantanamo Files.
And, well, basically, we have to rely on a Brit to keep track of, well, and I mean keep track, to keep total track, of who all has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, and why, and their stories, and all about them.
And he made a movie about it, and the reason we've had him on the show over and over again for all these years is because his principles are in the right place, and his information, too.
So, welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I'm good, Scott.
Hey, congratulations.
Eight years.
Yeah, eight years of Chaos Radio, man.
Pretty awesome, huh?
Yeah, no, that's really good.
That's paying attention right from the very beginning of all this madness, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, well, that was the thing.
For those of us who saw through all the lies and were in the depth of despair, Miss Bianca Oblivion wanted a place for us to be able to go and rock out and have a good time.
So my show is the exception to that.
My show is the bad times show.
Everybody else's show is the drink beer and have a good time playing punk rock show.
That's what Chaos is really about, so I'm really thankful that I'm allowed on here to do this.
Anyway, so, hey, listen.
There's this article at ABC News.
It's got Brian Ross's name on it, which means that everybody needs to grab their grain of salt to take this article with, because we all know that Brian Ross is a damned liar, and that when the War Party wants to use him to tell us lies in order to justify, well, mass murder, like, for example, trying to pin the anthrax attack on Saddam Hussein and the government of Iraq, Brian Ross is right there ready to go, ready to tell us any lie that the most powerful and most terrible people on the planet Earth want him to tell.
So we should never believe anything he says at all.
But then again, sometimes he breaks good stories that turn out to be credible and verified, like the CIA financing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's old terrorist group, Jandala, in Iran.
So, you know, sometimes he gets things right.
But now he's got this article here saying that two people who were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, their names are Mohammed Atik Alhabri and Saeed Ali Shari, are apparently involved in putting the Christmas suicide bomber who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit, apparently they're saying here that these two guys from Guantanamo Bay helped put this guy on the plane.
So I guess, you know, first of all, does that part sound credible to you?
And then maybe if you can get into detail and tell us who these guys are.
Yeah, well, you know, I'd have to say that there are a lot of ifs about all of this story, really, it seems to me.
I mean, I thought your appraisal there of Brian Ross was pretty accurate in some ways.
And I think what is useful to think about is that although sometimes, you know, sometimes reporters in his position sniff out good stories, other times they're, you know, they're used conveniently by the administration.
And it's other times, of course, as with all major networks and major newspapers, they're looking for something that will shock.
So, you know, here we have this rather inept guy who plot failed on an airline.
And then suddenly we're tying it all in, not just that he had a visit to Yemen, but hey, here's a good one.
What about if he was actually personally trained by these couple of guys who had come out of Guantanamo amongst these hordes of recidivists who'd rejoined the battle?
You know, and actually putting that stuff out without having any confirmation is just feeding exactly the kind of fodder that the most right-wing barking lunatics in your country need.
So I find it particularly irresponsible, actually, because what we're actually trying to do here at the moment, those of us who have any sense, is while criticizing President Obama for his many mistakes, is trying to find a way to help him to close this damn place down on the eve of its eighth anniversary, and attempting to suggest that a couple of Saudis, and I don't even have this story confirmed as to whether they're involved or not in this, are somehow connected with a mass of Yemeni prisoners who are held in Guantanamo, none of whom have ever reportedly returned to any battlefield, is just stretching credibility in all kinds of ways, and it's just really damaging.
And it's the kind of sensationalist crap, really, that I'd really rather not have had come from someone like ABC News.
Yeah, well, welcome to my world.
I'll tell you what, though, you know, like you're saying, I guess your prediction, it's already coming true here.
The House Homeland Security Chairman, Benny Thompson, a Democrat, is now saying that this guy, Abdulmutlaab, is that how you would say that, Andy, the attempted suicide bomber here?
Yeah.
Abdulmutlaab, that, well, this is reason enough right now to back off the promise of closing Guantanamo Bay, and of course, you know, the Republicans, I'm trying not to give any credit to the Emperor Obama himself, but he really, it seemed, did want to close Guantanamo Bay, has wanted to, not that his alternatives are necessarily, you know, quantifiably or qualitatively better in any real way, but it seemed like he wanted to at least get rid of that symbol of Guantanamo Bay and, you know, give trials to some of these guys or some, but the Republicans have done nothing but fight him on that this whole time.
Yeah.
The Republicans have taken a stand.
They hate the Fifth and Sixth Amendments so bad, they want to burn them and have them never exist ever, ever again, and they will fight Obama's slightest attempt to apply the rule of law to those in prison here, and so now, here's like his escape valve or whatever, here's his, well, gee, we really wanted to close Guantanamo and maybe apply the law to these people, but geez, and I guess this goes to the question, maybe you can tell us a little bit about these guys and their background.
Were these guys actual Al-Qaeda terrorist guys before or, I mean, assuming this story is true at all, which would be a mistake, I guess, but just for the sake of argument, if it's true, does this prove that Guantanamo turns people into terrorists or that you can just never let someone go because, well, even then, I mean, if it turns them into terrorists, I guess that means you can't let them go, even if they were innocent in the first place, right?
Well, yeah, that's the kind of horrible bottom line of all this, is that what people are trying to say is, look, there's a possibility that these guys might have been radicalized by what happened to them, even if they weren't radicalized before, therefore, you know, let's carry on throwing away the key that the Bush administration did, and let's have this amazing new setup where, because we suspect the people are, were, or might be terrorists, we have the right to hold them forever.
You know, isn't that a great idea?
Isn't that a real, real progress in the name of the law, from a country that was founded on the rule of law, and look what we've developed now as a new system.
I mean, it's absolutely, it's absolutely horrific.
Well, tell us about these two guys.
You've written a book, and they're in it, right?
Yeah, I mean, you know, if there's any truth to this story, this guy Muhammad al-Harbi, from what I knew of him, had been involved in a grocery business in Saudi Arabia.
Let's not forget, we're talking about Saudi Arabians here, we're not talking about Yemenis.
And, you know, and these guys now want not to release any Yemeni in Guantanamo, because of what they allege a couple of Saudi Arabians have got up to in Yemen.
You know, and also, I mean, I really do think overall the way that we should look at this is that, is that we're tiring all the people from one particular country by association here.
You know, moved on one place by the fact that they're not even Yemenis.
But one of these guys, you know, he'd been a grocer in Saudi Arabia.
Now, he said he was doing humanitarian aid work.
Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't.
The other guy was very young when he was seized in Afghanistan, I believe, al-Shiri.
I think that he was certainly under 18, possibly only 16 or something at the time that he was captured.
Now, you know, maybe he had been out there because he was, you know, fiercely jihadist at a very young age.
But I also, you know, have to say, what does the kind of brutal treatment that this kid received for all those years do to him?
And it seems very possible to me that in his case he was radicalized by what happened to him at the most fiery time of a man's life, you know, the late teens, early 20s.
He's stuck in this experimental monstrosity with all his horrors happening to him.
So maybe he is one of these handful of guys who comes out and causes trouble.
You know, but what everybody's missing here is that very few people have taken up arms against the United States after being held at Guantanamo, a tiny percentage.
You know, what we've had, and I'm sure that we've discussed this before, Scott, is that every few months somebody conveniently leaks a report from the Pentagon, which is not substantiated with any kind of evidence, which when the Pentagon is lucky makes it onto the front page of the New York Times in an unquestioning manner, alleging that one in seven of the people who've been released from Guantanamo have ended up taking up arms against the U.S.
It's nonsense.
The real figures are in single figures, maybe a dozen or something like that at most.
Out of what?
Out of 550 or more people who've been released?
That's an extraordinarily small rate of danger that the prisoners pose.
It's, you know, comparable, if you compare that to kind of recidivism rates for crime in the criminal justice system, it's almost nothing.
And you know, and what we're also talking about is these guys were experimented on.
They were held outside the law.
They were in many cases tortured.
If not, then they were certainly abused.
And what we're looking at is that despite all of that, the vast majority of these people, you know, have led peaceful lives since they've been released from Guantanamo.
We've got a few examples that have been picked up on.
And of course, you know, these typical, you know, are these people scared or are they just complete political opportunists?
What game are they playing?
But these guys have seized on it as they keep doing.
And as you said earlier, Scott, you know, this is what they've been doing essentially since spring, when, you know, when right-wingers realized that as far as they could see, it was a no-lose situation to resurrect the whole Dick Cheney bullshit about how dangerous everybody in Guantanamo was and that they could just run with it.
Right, right, because literally, Andy, literally in this country, a Republican politician running on the platform of I'm scared is actually, that works really well.
Americans are inspired by that.
Crybaby, whiny, frightened, ultimately terrorized Republican politicians.
That's who represents the American people.
Yeah, I agree.
They love it.
Yeah, and I find it appalling that so many people think that that's, you know, that that's a decent way to behave.
That this kind of cowardly whining and crying is, you know, what's going on here, guys?
I thought you guys were supposed to be tough.
What is this?
This is the image that you're sending out to the world?
I'll tell you what it is.
It's a Republican Party run by Bill Kristol.
That's what it is.
A conservative movement run by Bill Kristol, run by the neocons, none of whom have ever even been in so much as a fistfight in their whole life.
Sure.
Well, no, that's right.
I think you will be able to look through all of these people involved in there and have great difficulty finding anybody who's actually had any military service.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's so many fun kind of ironies in all this.
I mean, of course, the whole thing's a disaster.
But here you have, you know, literally the dictionary definition of war crimes going on, committed by the people who have rounded up these people in the name of war crimes and have committed all these war crimes against them, who are committing war crimes just by the very nature of the way that they're holding them.
Even to this day, outside of the law, the fact that you have people like Doug Feith, who, you know, among the neocons is probably, you know, the sissiest of them all, who's the guy who's helping to engineer the most brutal of the torture methods.
All of these guys get to skate, no problem.
They get away.
But meanwhile, you have, well, things like people who are freed, even by the kangaroo military thing, while others who get civilian trials in the United States end up getting railroaded much harder than the people who were kidnapped and held outside the law.
Like, say, Yasser Hamdi, who was born in Louisiana and was an American citizen arrested on the battlefield in Afghanistan.
They probably tortured the hell out of him.
But then they sent him off to Saudi Arabia.
They let him go.
Whereas John Walker Lynd is due in 20 years.
And he was the same situation, only he was tried in federal court.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, absolutely.
Well, also, you know, this guy...
The whole thing is a real damn mess, isn't it?
Well, this guy that they hauled off the plane, I mean, you know, he's going to be tried in the federal court, isn't he?
I mean, are we hearing suggestions that he should be shipped off to Guantanamo as well, along with these people who are tenuously supposed to be connected to him on the basis that they're Yemenis, and here is a man who failed to set off a bomb on the plane, who visited Yemen, you know?
I mean, the connections here are just getting absurd.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I wonder whether there's...
Is there any rhyme or reason as to who gets a trial and who doesn't, other than kind of turf battles between the military and the Justice Department?
Because there's so many different examples that go all different directions.
Like, I can't seem to find the pattern.
Abu Ali supposedly was in Saudi Arabia plotting to murder George Bush, and they gave him a trial.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know why they've insisted on resurrecting the military commission, Scott.
I really don't.
I mean, there is no objective way at looking at setting up a two-tier judicial system, one which has dealt with terrorism-related cases for a long time and is capable of doing it, and another which is, you know, slightly more open on the use of evidence, you know, that that's been introduced.
How is it possible for anybody not to conclude that what they're doing is they're just establishing a rigged system and that they're looking at it up front and going, what is the best way for us to secure the results that we want?
And, of course, at the bottom of the pile is the most worrying category of prisoner of all, the ones where up front they've said, we've got these guys who we think are too dangerous to release, but we haven't got the evidence to use in any kind of court to try and convict them.
Now, why would that be, guys?
Would that be because your evidence has been obtained either through the torture of them or through the torture of somebody else?
Well, yes, it would be, wouldn't it?
So, you know, first of all, you haven't got a case, and secondly, you've got all these dozens of guys that you're talking about, and every time that you open your mouth, you spout on in this macho way about how they're too dangerous and you're going to hold on to them anyway without trying them, and you hardly ever mention to the American people that there is a process in place which is capable of objectively looking at the evidence or the so-called evidence against these guys.
These are the judges in district courts who are examining these prisoners' habeas corpus petitions, and they're the ones who are able to make an objective decision about what the state of the actual evidence is.
And if they claim that they're holding, you know, 40 or 50 guys that are too dangerous to let go, by making these macho statements, they're sidelining the courts.
The courts are still trying to do their jobs.
The courts will, you know, if they're helped by the administration, which keeps dragging its heels, if they're helped, these cases will go to a court and a judge will look at it, and they will then decide whether there is evidence to determine whether these people are dangerous or not.
And I really don't understand why they've been making such a big deal about their own, you know, interagency review of these prisoners' cases and consistently belittling what the judges are doing.
Because, again, to anybody looking at this from outside, the closest thing to justice that these prisoners have got, any of them, is when their cases have gone out before a district court judge who's looked through all the evidence.
And as we've seen, in 80% of the cases, those cases have been thrown out of court, because it isn't evidence that they've got.
Well, yeah, and, you know, it's really got to be emphasized, too, and I'm not the lawyer Scott Horton, that's the other guy and whatever, but we've been over this with him and with Glenn Greenwald as well, and I don't know exactly what the technical definition, what they call it is.
It's not really a technical thing.
It's a very, you know, shades of gray, your opinion kind of a thing, but really it's the standard, the so-called standard of evidence for a habeas corpus hearing.
I don't know if it's, you know, basically I think the standard of evidence is approximately the same for arresting someone.
I mean, it's basically an objective belief on the part of the officer, or I believe it's even less than probable cause, which is, you know, the amount of evidence supposedly that has to be, you know, qualified in order to have a warrant against somebody for a search or for an arrest like that.
But once they're already nabbed, the standard of evidence is way below what it would take to get an indictment, which is basically, you know, free.
They say you can indict a ham sandwich, right?
But officially the level for just an arraignment for holding on to the guy at a habeas thing is even lower than that, much less, you know, conviction level evidence or something.
And so, in other words, these judges are having these cases brought before them when they finally get a chance to the Supreme Court's mandate that no, each, everybody, regardless of Bush's will or the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress, each of these guys gets at least one chance in front of a federal judge with a rope.
And it's been 30, how many out of 30, how many, that have been set free because there's no evidence against them at all?
Yeah, well, it's 31 out of 39.
31 out of 39 have been set free by the federal judges because they say, where's the beef?
None at all?
That's it.
Free to go.
They're not all free, but apart from that, that's exactly right.
They've been ordered released, right?
They just haven't been yet.
Is that it?
Yeah, no, that's it.
Well, how does that work?
Well, I mean, that's partly, again, that's the problem of the lawmakers because they've refused to let any cleared Guantanamo prisoner who has nowhere else to go come and live in the United States.
I mean, this is the same guys who are jumping up and wailing and screaming and shouting and crying at the moment who are prepared to let men who have been cleared by the U.S. court rot in Guantanamo for the rest of their lives if no other country can be found that will rehouse them.
The Uyghurs, there are still seven Uyghurs.
The Chinese guys, they were never a threat to anybody.
Yeah, well, one more thing here real quick, too, Andy, which is that the Durham investigation is going nowhere and they probably won't even indict anybody in the original investigation about the CIA destroying the videotapes of them torturing people to death and much less any of the lawyers or any of the cabinet members who we know choreographed the torture of these people in certain circumstances.
I mean, the book Torture Team's been published and The Dark Side has been published.
We know who these men are and how guilty as hell they are.
And yet the actual war criminals are going to get away scot-free.
There's no public pressure.
You've got to admit, politically, the American people are not at all, apparently.
I mean, other than, you know, me and Glenn Greenwald or something.
Nobody is insisting that Dick Cheney and the rest of these men go on trial for torturing people to death.
I mean, virtually no one is demanding that.
And so this Durham investigation is just going to go away.
Simple as that.
Well, it appears to be the case, you know, Scott, and I really don't know what can be done about that.
I mean, you know, on paper there are a significant number of Americans who don't like what happened, but the fact is that nobody cares enough in sufficient numbers to actually agitate to make something happen.
Now, I understand that, you know, I understand that even with the most positive spin on the Obama administration, he's been desperate to work with the Republicans on certain other key issues.
Well, yeah, he needs their votes to pay for killing more Pakistanis and Yemenis and whoever, you know.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I would think that next year is a good time for people to tie up, you know, the escalation of war in Afghanistan with all the rest of the nonsense that's going on and to realize that, you know, that even with the best will in the world, you know, even if this man's intentions are not malevolent, then he's going in the wrong direction.
And it's up to the American people to agitate.
You know, I mean, I'm still concerned that the only thing that's keeping the Republicans from a swift victory the next time in the presidential elections, which, you know, we're only three years away, is that they don't at the moment have a credible leader.
Oh, man.
But I think that if they can figure that one out, then, you know, then this is just going to be like a whiff of smoke, these four years of Barack Obama.
Yeah, we're doomed, because I'm here to tell you right now, it's going to be General Petraeus, man.
Well, you know, maybe you're right.
Maybe we should start taking bets, Scott.
Yeah, maybe we should start making plans to flee America before, you know, the border fence is there to keep us in, before they turn this whole country into Bagram lawless torture prison.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, at the moment, I'm still pressing ahead on the cases of these guys.
At the moment, you know, these prisoners in Guantanamo, the Yemenis, for the most part, are being slandered by these unprincipled politicians who are forgetting that the bottom line story is that when the judges have got to look at the cases, you know what, they've figured out more than ever, more than any other fault in the supposed evidence that's been presented to them.
And the more cases there are, the more this comes out, is that essentially the Bush administration rounded up people, it paid bounties for them, it had no idea who it had in its custody, and it then set about trying to build a case against them.
It's the equivalent of being arrested, not for anything, but just being arrested by a policeman, put in a cell, and say, we're going to hold you there until we can figure out what we're going to charge you with.
Well, now, do you think that they knew that, do you think that's just because of total incompetence and the way the incentives for having people arrested and brought to Guantanamo were set up, or do you think that the Bush guys really just decided, hey, look, we know that there's only a few dozen Al-Qaeda guys left alive on Earth after the Air Force got to them, and there were only a couple hundred in the first place, so let's just kidnap a bunch of innocent people so it looks like we're doing something between now and the time we have our equipment in place to invade Iraq?
Well, you could say that, but I credit them with rather more incompetence and arrogance than that suggests.
There is certainly this angle on it that looks as though they populated it with people who were nobodies and then tortured them to try and create the impression that, hey, look, we've got all this amazing information out of them.
I really don't think that.
I think that they were so obsessed with the fact that the world was swimming with terrorists and that anybody they picked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan was going to be guilty, that they ignored the fact that they were paying for these guys.
They were paying five grand, which is worth a huge amount of money in that part of the world.
What do Republicans know about markets and capitalism and incentives?
Nothing.
Yeah, and then they didn't screen them according to the Geneva Conventions to work out whether they had the right people or not, and then horribly they ended up torturing these people to get them to either make false confessions against themselves or against other people to create this illusion, but they were constantly driving for what they thought was the truth.
I mean, what is at the bottom of this is that if it comes to Afghanistan or Pakistan, or in fact any other part of the world, a Muslim man with a beard is somebody who the Bush administration regarded as a terrorist until they could prove that that was the case.
I mean, it's no wonder that, to their credit, although they haven't been able to do this thing properly to close it down, the Obama administration, the senior officials keep saying, you've got to be aware of how much of a recruiting tool this has been for the people who hate us.
We are not doing anything constructive as a result of Guantanamo and the whole of the regime of the Bush administration, and I think that remains true.
When you actually examine who did they get, and on what basis did they get them, and why did they do this stuff to them, it was because they basically thought, look, every Muslim guy with a beard is a terrorist.
We'll round them all up, and then it's just a question of proving it.
And it's absolutely disgraceful.
I mean, that's still the thing that gets me, Scott, that, you know, what is this, this is nearly eight years since it opened?
You know, I didn't get into this at the beginning, but I've been doing this for nearly four years now, and the whole thing that I do is say, look, look behind the rhetoric.
Start examining the basis of the stories of these people, and you will realize that the majority of them are not who the administration claimed that they were.
It's as simple as that, and yet, you know, and yet, as we see today in this whole frenzy in the U.S. media, it's so difficult to tell a subtle and complex and true story, and it's so much easier to beat people over the head with scaremongering propaganda that is a disgrace that no rational-thinking adult should be able to swallow without thinking about it.
And yet, yet again, this is what we're seeing happening, and it's just depressing.
I've got to tell you, Andy, I don't think we're any closer to policy being made in, you know, on the basis of reality and what's right at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century than we were back eight years ago when this whole thing started.
I mean, I don't know if you saw this clip.
It's, you know, tangentially related to this discussion.
Ron Paul was on CNN last night, and he said, look, man, we've been bombing Yemen the last three weeks, y'all, and they even said, if you believe any of what they're saying here, they said, look, we sent this guy to blow you up in retaliation for you've been blowing us up just the last few weeks.
And Ben Stein and Larry King and Sheila Jackson Lee all went, what, Ron Paul?
Oh, come on.
What do you mean that somebody would try to attack America in revenge or in response or as part of a battle that we were fighting against them first?
That couldn't possibly be real.
He is kind of a silly old man, that Ron Paul, anyway, and everybody knows that history began on September 11th, and everybody knows for that matter that history began on New Year's Eve, man.
There's no, nobody ever did any, no one in America was ever responsible for anything bad ever happening to anyone in Yemen or the whole Arabian Peninsula or all of Arabian culture, for that matter, ever.
And they just, those mean, satanic people, they just won't stop attacking us.
Poor, little, innocent old America, like, you know, like this whole empire is just little Shirley Temple, a harmless little girl, being attacked by some terrible menace from overseas, the 12-foot-tall demons.
And, you know, literally, we have made no progress at all in getting through this line of bullshit, Andy.
So, you know, pretty soon you and me will be in the same camp, and, you know, it would be nice to have you as a cell.
You seem like a decent chap, but we're screwed.
That's it.
Yeah, no, I mean, there is a bigger picture behind this that is particularly depressing, which is that, you know, that there are warmongers amongst us in considerable numbers, and, you know, and it's not an illusion to say that, you know, either through madness or simply through, you know, their insane ideas of how to maintain full-spectrum dominance.
You know, they want more wars.
After all of this, they still want more wars because you're dead right, you know.
Yeah.
You know, we've been bombing Yemen.
You know, we've been...
Oh, and Obama said yesterday, well, we're going to Somalia, too.
He won't stop telling the Somalians that we're coming after them again, you know, as though we haven't been bombing them this whole time since Christmas of 2006.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to go, man.
I've got my next guest, and I've already kept you over time, but you're awesome.
Everybody, it's AndyWorthington.co.uk.
The book is called The Guantanamo Files.
Tell me again the name of the movie real quick, Andy.
It's Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
Angela, if you're listening, give me a copy of that, would you?
Andy, thank you.
I'll talk to you again soon.
Okay.
Cheers, Scott.
Bye.
Okay, everybody.
That's us celebrating eight years here.