Hey everybody, how's it going?
I'm Scott, welcome to Anti-War Radio.
Scott Horton, that is.
Here's some websites for you to look at, lrn.fm, antiwar.com/radio.
How about my Facebook page, slash antiwar radio.
And here's one you ought to look at, I do all the time, it's andyworthington.co.uk.
Remember the great Andy Worthington, he's the Brit that I guess we hired to take care of Guantanamo journalism for us.
Since there were no Americans willing to step up and take care of business, we have Andy the Brit to fill in.
He's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, which is the complete story of the 700 and something innocent men in prison there.
And also he made the movie Outside the Law, you can find his articles at fff.org, that's the Future Freedom Foundation, of course at antiwar.com.
As I mentioned, Andy's website, andyworthington.co.uk.
And also he writes for Alternet, for the Huffington Post, and who knows who else, I don't know.
Welcome back to the show, Andy, how are you doing?
Hey, I'm good, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing really good, I really appreciate you joining us today.
That's no problem, always a pleasure.
So this guy, George W. Bush, who somehow used to actually be the President of the United States for eight years in a row, if you can believe that, has now released his memoirs, and among a couple of funny things, like hey, I was a dissenting voice on the Iraq War, and funny statements like that, Bush said to Matt Lauer in an interview about the book, I guess, from the Today Show, that you're damn right, I ordered waterboarding.
So I guess there's a couple of different questions I could ask there.
First of all, is he talking just about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or who else might have been waterboarded, or do you know?
Because I don't think too many people feel too sorry for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I think you understand.
Well, I do understand that, but at the same time, it's probably more of a test of people's respect for the law when it comes to doing things to people that you don't like.
It's still not acceptable, it's still unnecessary, it's still illegal, it's still counterproductive to have done that to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, even if he did do what is alleged he said that he did.
Well, he always builds in there, it was to save lives.
Yeah, well, you know, we have really kind of no knowledge of that, do we?
We've had this information touted by, you know, these claims touted by Dick Cheney, in particular, that, you know, that if people knew what he knew, but all the inside stories that have come from people pretty high up have suggested that that's not the case, that nothing of use actually came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And in fact, usually what the administration says are things like Jose Padilla and the Binyam Mohammed and the dirty bomb plot that never existed, some anthrax plot that didn't exist.
You know, what was it all for?
The thing that I've heard, Scott, is that, I mean, I haven't seen a copy of the book yet.
My colleague, Jason Leopold, has got an advanced copy, and he has told me that he also does talk about authorizing the waterboarding of Abu Dhabi, which would have been about a year, well, I mean, the year before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sometime in 2002.
I think we're all a little bit fuzzy still on who authorized what, when, in the summer of 2002.
But you know, I think the picture we get really is of George Bush being informed of everything that was going on and pretty much having to approve it.
I mean, it's kind of funny from his comment about Iraq that, you know, he seems to be kind of misplacing the fact that as the commander-in-chief, it was ultimately up to him that the invasion took place regardless of what he might claim to have been his opposition to it.
Pretty much the same thing goes for everything else that happened under his watch.
You know, he was the commander-in-chief.
So yeah, we have the former president of the United States embarking on a book tour tomorrow, having declared in the pages of his book that he is a war criminal.
Quite important.
Amazing.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
Well, there's a few things there, but I guess, first of all, it is settled, is it not, in the law that, because, you know, sometimes these anti-torture statutes are written really vague.
In fact, I have a clip somewhere of George Bush saying, well, you know, the Geneva Convention says there shall not be any outrages upon human dignity.
But what does that mean?
That's very vague.
And I think the other Scott Horton said on this show, he's the international human rights lawyer, that, yeah, it's deliberately vague.
It's supposed to be all-encompassing, man.
You're not allowed to torture them, even if you think of a clever new way or a clever new thing to call it.
That's why it's vague like that.
But then, is it actually a proven fact that waterboarding itself, that the act of tying someone down and drowning them like that, is considered torture in the law?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, we've got enough examples of it in the past of people being prosecuted for waterboarding to know that that's the case.
You know, I mean, a commander of the U.S. Army in Vietnam was prosecuted for waterboarding Vietnamese prisoners.
You know, that wasn't that long ago.
I can't see that waterboarding has fundamentally changed.
I mean, what's interesting is how semantically it's changed.
You know, that it used to be described as, you know, as torture.
It used to be sometimes called water torture.
You know, the New York Times back in the Second World War called it forced drowning.
But, you know, the way that it's always been mostly talked about in the media since 9-11 is a much more roundabout manner of suggesting that it's not torture at all, which is, you know, it's really helped to put forward this view that, you know, that it's not torture.
That this thing that the Spanish Inquisition had the decency to call Tortura del Agua is just some kind of, you know, enhanced interrogation technique that was legally approved by some very law-abiding lawyers in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
And, you know, it's no such thing.
Well, and see, that's the thing, too, is it seems like with the precedent set there, I don't know.
Well, whatever.
Political power is political power, and prosecutions can only reach so high without the political will to make it happen.
I think that's kind of the point that you make in your blog entry is that, yeah, Bush brags about it, but nobody cares.
And so if the American people were absolutely outraged and said, look, not only is this guy a torturer, but he says to us on TV, yeah, I'm a torturer, what?
It's now time for us to make sure that a court is convened and that he goes to prison for the rest of his life.
That's what happens to torturers.
And the fact that the American people don't insist on that is why he still lives in a mansion in Dallas instead of a Supermax next to Ted Kaczynski over there in Florence, Colorado.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, actually, I mean, according to the U.S. anti-torture statute, and, you know, there may be, I mean, this is my understanding of it.
You know, you can be fined or imprisoned for 20 years if somebody doesn't die during the torture.
You know, it doesn't have to be totally that severe, but, yeah, obviously the situation we're in at the moment is that a crime has been officially declared by the former president of the United States.
And the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle is somebody who gives a damn enough to actually do anything about it.
I mean, you know, it's clear that there is movement in other countries.
I suspect that, you know, that actually Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and various other lawyers and senior officials probably think twice before they get on a plane to various countries.
And, you know, and I think...
Meaning our allies in Europe.
I think the least that will happen, Scott, yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, you know, there are investigations going on in Poland, there is this case that has been launched in Spain that I haven't heard anything for a while, but I know that that's still ongoing.
I don't think that's the end of the story.
I mean, I think the bottom line is, you know, what happened essentially was illegal and unacceptable.
So it isn't as though everybody around the world can be hypnotized into pretending that it wasn't.
Well, and I'm glad you mentioned Abu Zubaydah there, too, because, you know, obviously I'm in agreement with you about, you know, if there's going to be a government at all, its powers must be bound by the rule of law and that kind of thing.
But when it comes down to it, people really don't care about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at all, man.
Screw him.
Let him burn in hell.
And if we can create a hell for him here before he dies and send him to real hell, then good, too.
But Abu Zubaydah was innocent.
And George Bush said to George Tenet, when George Tenet explained, you got to stop bringing up Zubaydah.
He didn't do anything.
Bush said, hey, I've been using him as an example.
You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
He hadn't done anything.
Now hold it there.
We've got to go to the break.
We'll be right back with Andy Worthington, y'all.
This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court's ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the common Article three of the Geneva Convention.
And that common Article three says that, you know, there will be no outrageous upon human dignity.
It's like it's very vague.
What does that mean?
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking on the phone with Andy Worthington from FFF and Huffington and Antiwar.com and Alternet and AndyWorthington.co.uk.
And now I have here a review, which you can comment whatever you like about that Bush quote.
I think it's funny if you want.
But first, this is a review of Ron Susskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine by Barton Gelman, who is the Washington Post writer who wrote the book Angler all about Dick Cheney.
And this is from the Washington Post.
He's quoting from Ron Susskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine, which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah.
I said he was important, Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings.
You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?
No, sir, Mr. President, Tenet replied.
Bush quote was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth, Susskind writes.
And he asked one briefer, quote, Do some of these harsh methods really work?
Interrogators did their best to find out, Susskind reports.
They waterboarded this guy, what, 80 something times, right?
83.
83 times.
Yeah.
And now this was a guy who, best we can tell, well, for example, from the FBI who questioned him without torturing him and read his diary and whatever, this guy was basically a travel agent for the wives and the kids to come and visit from Saudi Arabia and Egypt or whatever.
He was not a terrorist mastermind, despite the fact that Bush had invoked him as someone bad enough that he needed to be tortured over and over and over again.
When he got the truth, he said, yeah, but I don't want to lose face.
So let's just stick with the story that this guy was some terrible danger or that by torturing him, we learned truth that saved Americans' lives.
Yeah.
Well, he certainly, you know, he certainly knew a lot about the comings and goings of people and in particular to one training camp that was not, not affiliated with al-Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden.
You know, it's interesting that one of the FBI guys, you know, who I have enormous respect for because these are the guys who absolutely despise people who use torture.
And these are the FBI interrogators who helped build some of the terrorism cases by building rapport with terrorist suspects and which led to successful convictions in the US court.
And you know, one of these guys said about Abu Zubaydah, you know, why did they think that he was who they thought they was?
We knew already that he wasn't, this was a guy who was always on the phone, you know, which is one of the reasons why they picked up on him was because he was always talking on the phone.
He said, do you think a guy who's always on the phone, they're going to tell him anything?
No.
You know, I mean, this was just washed away in this sea of nonsense about how he was al-Qaeda's number three.
You know, and yes, it's clear that he was nobody.
And it's interesting because the, the most recent court case, which involves another man who was captured with him in Pakistan in 2002 has involved the government essentially dropping all of its claims about him being at all significant.
But now trying to claim that he was involved in having a militia at the time of the Tora Bora campaign at the end of 2001, and then helping fighters get out of Afghanistan into Pakistan, which is another, I think, lying little twist on the story, because it seems very clear that he actually was involved in just moving all manner of people out of Afghanistan after the US-led invasion, women, children, civilians, and yeah, some fighters as well.
But, you know, this is basically, it's actually part of the story, Scott, that I've never known how much to focus on.
You know, there are so many people in Guantanamo, for example, who were rounded up in house raids and are supposed to all have been terrorists, whereas actually, it seems that there was a lot of activity, which involved, quite understandably, I think, given the hostility that was around in Pakistan, you know, Arabs helping other Arabs to escape out of Afghanistan to try and get home, to try and not get captured by the Pakistanis or the Afghans in the Northern Alliance, who would sell them to the Americans.
Right, that doesn't make him a friend of Ayman al-Zawahiri, and of course, at Tora Bora, when bin Laden and al-Zawahiri escaped, it was because the CIA hired the rapist, murderer, hekmachar, war criminal, warlord hekmachar, to, you know, do their fighting for them, and he laughed, took the money, and helped Osama bin Laden escape, and later bragged about it and laughed in America's face about it, and of course, Seymour Hersh wrote the article The Getaway and The New Yorker, and there was a lot of follow-up about this, too, that they actually used American planes to help the Pakistanis get their guys out, and they did a massive airlift of nobody-knows-who, where, you know, so as long as Dick Cheney is opening up airspace to help the Taliban escape from Afghanistan and lord-knows-who else, then it seems pretty strange that they would go after, you know, some nobody for doing the very same thing, but, you know, you asked earlier kind of rhetorically, Andy, well, what's the purpose of all this torture anyway?
George Bush asked this question, too, here, according to Susskind.
Do these harsh methods really work?
And of course, the answer is yes, they work, but work to do what?
They work to get lies, and, you know, Sheikh al-Libi was tortured into saying that Saddam Hussein had taught al-Qaeda guys how to use weapons, mass destruction, chemical weapons, and whatever, and why?
Because his torturers were saying, tell us about Saddam Hussein, tell us about Saddam Hussein, and he was going, all right, fine, apparently you guys want to hear about Saddam Hussein.
This Washington Post article, this Barton Gellman review of Susskind's book here, says that under the torture of waterboarding, threatening him with certain death, withholding medication, and of course, a lot more has come out about the kind of treatment that this guy underwent, the Red Cross report and others, but it says here, under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty.
With each new tale, thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each target, and so, Susskind writes, the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap screaming at every word he uttered, but is that because Tom Ridge and George Bush and Dick Cheney are really that frightened?
No, it's because they're liars.
It's because they needed 100 orange alerts to keep the American people afraid in the run-up to the war against Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with the attack on our country.
Well, I'll tell you what, I mean, it's interesting because you mentioned Malibi, who was the guy who was also captured at the end of 2001, ran the Karazhan training camp, the one that was closed down by the Taliban because he wouldn't work with al-Qaeda, the guy that they sent to Egypt and waterboarded and got him to say that there were connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Now, the interesting thing is that this was early 2002, and you know, and it remains kind of the most monstrous thing to me, really, that let's look at the timescale here of what's going on and why.
Why did they want him to make these confessions?
Because I think it becomes quite apparent that almost while Tora Bora was happening in early December 2001, the Bush administration had taken its eyes off Afghanistan and was looking for Iraq and was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq.
So while you had primarily Dick Cheney, but you know, the administration as a whole, but Dick Cheney, I think, is the driver.
Andy, hold on for a second.
We got to take this break.
Can I keep another 10 minutes?
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Good deal.
Hang on.
So I don't know where he is, nor, you know, I just don't spend that much time on it.
I repeat what I said.
I truly am not that concerned about him.
Bin Laden, that is.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, botulin, VX, sarin, nerve agent, Iraq and Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Iraq and Al Qaeda, terrorism, cyber attacks, nuclear program, biological weapons, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, chemical and biological weapons, Iraq.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm talking with Andy Worthington about how Dick Cheney and George W. Bush tortured some innocent, some somewhat guilty men into implicating Saddam Hussein in cooperation with Al Qaeda.
If you could have been made to believe that he actually did 9-11 or the anthrax attack, then so much the better.
But that's what this whole torture regime was really all about, wasn't it, Andy?
Well, yeah, I mean, that's what I was saying before we went to the break that really is that, you know, I still think the single most disturbing thing is that when you realize that by the end of 2001, they were looking for an excuse to invade Iraq.
And when you had all that rhetoric throughout 2002, about about all the things that they were doing that they couldn't tell us about, that was to keep us safe, that was to stop another attack, that it was the fear, the fear, the fear of another attack.
They'd completely given up on thinking that there would be another attack.
They were cynically torturing people to find an excuse to invade Iraq.
Right now, for those of us who never believed in these people for a minute, it was it was crazy to watch for.
I mean, really, from right after September 11th, the neocons sent the letter to Bush.
You know, William Sapphire wrote a thing in The New York in The New York Times saying the big mo the big momentum just now that we're at war, go ahead and hit Iraq, too, and whatever.
From the very beginning after September 11th, the neocons were talking that way.
And from the very beginning of 2002, the Bush administration was talking that way.
And they basically said, look, we're going to Iraq and we're going to tell you any lie that we need to tell you to keep you afraid between now and the time we're ready to go.
So ready, set, go.
Here's a bunch of lies.
And then Orange Alert after Orange Alert, as though there were 500000 al Qaeda in the world, all of them on their way here every day.
I remember driving down the road and hearing the top of the hour news say there's a new orange alert, a new terror alert, a school somewhere in Texas could be targeted.
Well, Andy, there's got to be 50000 schools in Texas, man.
But they go, oh, no, be afraid, be very afraid.
And this is, you know, like February or two or something.
You know, they might blow up your kid at school today.
Don't you think we need to have a war against Iraq?
Yeah, well, you know, and they're still trying to make people scared.
That's the thing.
You know, we we haven't really spoken today.
It's got the background Panama, you know, which I've been studying all these years where 174 men are left.
But, you know, it's grown to a halt.
A couple of guys were freed in Germany.
Well, must be a couple of months ago now.
But nobody's going anywhere.
Nobody's leaving.
Nobody wants to find a way to get anybody to leave.
I recently was reading about how a couple of senators, Jeff Sessions and Kit Bond, Kit Bond is retired now, but Jeff Sessions is still there.
They sent some of their staffers to Europe to see if they could find any problems with the prisoners who'd been released in Europe.
How cynical is that?
No prisoner has been allowed to be released by President Obama without that prisoner being vetted by Congress.
Congress actually holds on to prisoners for two weeks, which is illegal.
It's unconstitutional.
They are held as congressional prisoners for two weeks, whether they want a court case, whether the executive has decided they can leave.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Congress gave itself the right to hold these people for two weeks before they're released.
So everybody who's been released in Europe, they know it's not a threat.
Well, OK, I'm completely ignorant about this part of it.
Congress has no police force.
At least the judges have the marshals.
But how does Congress order someone elected arrested?
They just don't let them go.
Basically, the executive of the courts can say we are going to release this man.
We have a country that we're going to send them to.
They may have won their habeas petition.
The executive may have decided that they can be released.
Congress said, no, we want the right to have two weeks to decide what we're going to do.
Well, it comes down to the purse string that we won't pay for his release until we're satisfied.
Is that it?
They could.
They could argue with the purse strings if it was in the case of somebody who had not been not been declared innocent.
But they've done this with people who, you know, I mean, they did this with the Uyghurs as well, essentially.
So they've done it with people who have been cleared, you know, innocent people who were wrongly held at Guantanamo.
They said, no, we still insist on our right to review their case for two weeks before you can do what you want to do.
Well, and this is how how it has been.
Now the Republicans are in charge of the House of Representatives starting in January, Andy.
I mean, you know, everything that Obama didn't do while he had the chance, he now is going to have no chance of doing whatsoever.
So are we going to see 9-11 trials for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and these guys?
I don't think so.
Are we going to see any more people released when anything can be dressed up in a vaguely contentious manner?
I don't think so.
You know, these these nearly 60 guys from Yemen who Obama's task force said, you know, these guys should be repatriated.
They're not going to go back.
It was Obama himself who said that they weren't going to go back.
Is that going to go on forever?
Yemen is sitting in Guantanamo being blamed for whatever is happening in Yemen when they've been in Guantanamo for the last nine years.
I mean, what have they got to do with any of this?
Well, and, you know, no less than Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's right hand man at the time, said on this show that it's so obvious that everybody at Guantanamo was basically innocent until they closed down the secret black site torture prisons, supposedly, anyway, some of them anyway, and brought the actual few, you know, real bad guys like Ramzi bin al-Shaib and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Guantanamo.
And in fact, the fact that they, according to him, the fact that they closed down those secret prisons and finally brought these guys to Guantanamo in, I guess, 2006 was proof that all the guys who were already there were nobodies.
And in fact, Andy, didn't it just break that they at one point had brought these guys to Guantanamo, but then they were afraid of a court ruling or something, and they took them back away from Guantanamo and back to their CIA torture prisons again or something like that?
Oh, yeah, they did.
They did that in 2003.
They brought them in in September 2003 and then moved them out in March 2004 because the Rasul case, the first habeas corpus decision in favor of the prisoners, they could tell that was coming.
So, they had to get them out before the court could get anywhere near them.
So, yeah, I mean, that was verified in the summer that there was a secret prison within Guantanamo, a secret CIA prison, which had been, you know, known about for many years, but we hadn't had confirmation.
So, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's what happened.
Yeah, well, you know, there's been a really terrible precedent set, and it's something we've been talking on the show about for a long time, Andy, you and I, and also, really, especially I associate this kind of argument with the other Scott Horton from Harper's, who I've been interviewing since about 04, maybe 05, I think 04, and what we talked about back then even was that, you know, John Yoo and David Addington and Dick Cheney, their boss, these guys had this theory that they wanted to test, basically.
They wanted to declare war on the theory of the rule of law.
They wanted to draw every line they could just to cross it, and now, like, it's easy to come to mind, you know, tapping without warrants and using the state secrets privilege to keep entire cases out of court, which was unprecedented at the time, that kind of thing, but there were a bunch of little things, too, where it just seemed like they were trying to prove a case by drawing a line and then crossing it or recognizing the line and then crossing it, and then the question really is, if there's law, if there's accountability, then Bush and Cheney would have had to have been impeached and removed from office, and that didn't happen, and now Barack Obama comes in and says, we're not going to look backwards, as he sends Hillary Clinton around the world to lecture everybody how they need to look backwards and have a rule of law and so forth, and so now the impunity won.
I mean, it's not just that they were able to torture more than 100 people to death, it's that they're getting away with it.
It's that everybody knows they did it, everybody knows it was illegal, but what?
I guess the American people have a stomach for some trials of some politicians, you know what I mean?
Hell, if you put George Bush on trial, probably start a war of all the people rallying to his defense at this point or something, and so what do we have now except Obama and the next guy and the next guy have unlimited power to do anything they want, and there is no accountability.
The precedent's been set, the line's been crossed.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's, you know, you mentioned this state speakers doctrine, state speakers privilege, which was first used, I think, particularly in the 1950s, which Bush used to base, in which Obama has now, you know, that's the wall that he puts up whenever anybody tries to get anywhere near a courtroom with a case that involves anything that happened under the Bush administration, or increasingly under him.
I mean, you know, he's using this as his cover for the planned assassination of US citizens anywhere in the world without charge or trial, without due process, which is being challenged in court again today by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, what, you know, where are we?
We're not, we're in a place where everything that was established by Bush is essentially carried on, and, you know, and how are we going to get accountability now?
I don't know.
Yeah, especially, we certainly need to.
There's just no political pressure for it.
That's the worst thing.
It's like the poll said, 12% of the people believe in the Afghan war, but what small percentage care enough about it to really oppose it, you know?
Or how do we do that?
Two-thirds of the British people don't want to be in Afghanistan, but how do we get the British army out of there?
Yeah.
Hey, you know what?
Can I keep it till the top of the hour?
Yeah.
Okay, because I want to switch to that subject too, because now there's the new British Abu Ghraib and all this in the news.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Anders in the chat room was joking, Bush is on a book tour.
What, are you kidding?
Oh, I get it.
He finally finished reading My Pet Goat, and now he wants to go around and tell everybody about it.
All right, well, I'm talking about it with Andy Worthington.
He's at andyworthington.co.uk.
He wrote the book, The Guantanamo Files, and he made the movie Outside the Law about the disgrace of the bogus system of not even military law there in communist Cuba, only on our side of the wall.
And now, you know, we're talking about accountability and the lack of it, but what about there in merry old England?
I keep hearing that, oh yeah, there's an investigation, and there's a preliminary investigation, and a secondary one, and this guy's mad, and Lord, somebody or other's going to hold an inquiry, and is anybody getting in trouble over there for this?
Well, you know, there's a variety of things happening or not happening yet, Scott.
I mean, we had the Chilcot inquiry where lots of people kind of filed in and spoke about crimes that had been committed in the run-up to Iraq, but actually nobody seems to be responsible, which, you know, is more transparency than we've had in the U.S., but that's not exactly very helpful, is it, when Tony Blair walks in and walks out, and nobody, you know, arrests him at any point and takes him off to be held accountable.
I mean, what is happening that's probably much more serious is, you know, court cases into British abuse and torture and murder.
I mean, there's been a long-running and pretty deep inquiry into the death of, the murder of a hotel worker, Bahamusa, in Iraq by British soldiers, and, you know, the weekend this story came out, which has been tagged the UK's Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and I think, you know, that's probably a good way of tagging it when what we're talking about here is 200 former inmates of this prison talking about how they were abused in ways that we would recognize from Abu Ghraib.
Well, now let's see the memos, right?
Did Tony Blair say, oh yeah, they're enemy combatants, they're terrorists, and so the prisoner of war statutes don't apply anymore?
Was he happy to go along with Rumsfeld's plan to Gitmo-ize the Iraq war?
Well, do you know, I don't think that we've ever, we've quite got to the bottom of it yet, but the fact is that all of the stuff that, you know, that we, that's so familiar to us from the war on terror, all of the hooding and the humiliation and the abuse and all of this stuff was banned specifically by the British military, you know, several decades ago, and yet, lo and behold, it suddenly turns out when we both go into Iraq together, it suddenly turns out that the standard operating procedure that the British operating under is the same as the American, so, you know, who told them, who agreed it, how exactly did that happen?
I don't, we haven't got to the bottom of that one, but, you know...
You guys must have a FRAGO 242, instruction to the British soldiers in Iraq that pay no mind to the Americans torturing people and pay no mind to them helping the Iraqis torture people, too.
It's got to be there in print somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would think so, yeah.
I mean, and I think, you know, I think what happened in Iraq is probably quite different to what happened in Afghanistan, where, you know, I actually met somebody a couple of years ago who served as, you know, quite high up as an officer in Afghanistan and said, you know, the problem we had in Afghanistan was when we captured people, what the hell were we supposed to do with them?
We couldn't trust the Americans and we couldn't trust the Afghans, you know, and NATO forces have had this problem for years in Afghanistan.
They don't have their own prisons, which, you know, if they wanted, it isn't if, but if they wanted to abide by the Geneva Conventions, they didn't have anywhere to put people anyway.
You know, it's, what can I say, you know, we were, we were the closest allies of George W. Bush, and this is what you get, you know, and I mean, I would, I would like to say that, that things are proceeding, you know, more in this country than they are.
But you know, we haven't really heard anything more about this torture inquiry that was announced by David Cameron in the summer, before the before the new government decided that all they were interested in was cutting budgets and jobs.
But what's happening behind the scenes at the moment is that they're, you know, they're essentially trying to do deals with former prisoners to see if they will accept compensation and thereby they can avoid having any deep and dark and difficult proper inquiry into what was involved after 9-11 in being the closest ally of the Bush administration in the war on terror.
Yeah, boy, times have changed.
It used to be we fought all our wars on behalf of England and you fought yours for us.
I think we handed the baton on, didn't we, sometime, you know, around 1946 and went, look, you know.
Right now it's the American Anglo establishment.
You're the guys now and we will, you know, we have, we have some advice from our experience that may come in handy.
Right, how to subjugate people in the third world.
How to be an evil empire, the kind that we once declared independence from.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well, all right.
So, speaking of bogus star chamber trials in the British Empire, we do have that same thing going on down there in communist Cuba.
And this kid, he was a kid, and we talked in depth with Becky Akers last week about the whole story, as we've talked with you about it before, of Omar Cotter, who was obviously innocent of what they claim he did, which isn't a war crime anyway.
And he just was coerced into pleading guilty, tortured you might say, into pleading guilty and accepting a plea deal of eight years prison time.
But then I read in the papers, Andy, that it was one of the Guantanamo guys, I think, or maybe it was one of Obama's politicians, used the phrase publicity nightmare to describe what they were wiping the sweat off their brow and, and saying, you know, this is a great thing for us.
So we don't have to deal with this being in the news, this war crime, the, the kangaroo star chamber trial of this kid for something that ain't even a war crime anyway.
Oh, well, they got it out of the way in a week and nobody was supposed to know it.
That's right.
And in fact, let me add one thing to that.
And I'll get your judgment on this, because I'm sure you do know at least some about it.
Becky Akers on this show said that Omar Cotter has a really good lawyer, a really brave stand up guy who has just done the yeoman's work on this thing and you know, gives into nothing and that he told Cotter take this deal.
It's the best chance you got.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, I think by the time it reached, I mean, we can see, you know, the military did prosecution in the this truncated one week of hearings that they had after Cotter signed his deal, where he admitted to doing everything.
You know, that he that he couldn't possibly have done and that even he wasn't allowed to do.
I mean, that that plea deal is full of repeatedly, they say that he knowingly consciously did this, that and the other.
It's like he didn't, he was 15.
When you're 15, you and you have been taken there by your father, you are, it is your father's responsibility for what you what you do.
He was not an adult, he was a child.
But yeah, I mean, you know, the prosecution after 25 years, the military jury gave him 40 years, I'm sure that that almost Canadian lawyers knew what was going to go down.
And you know, and hopefully, what will happen is that a year from now, and the poor guy has got to spend a year in solitary now.
You know, because at Guantanamo, they insist on keeping the prisoners who've been through trial completely segregated from the rest of the population.
So he's got to endure a year in solitary, he'll go back to Canada.
And I'm very much hoping that these great lawyers that he's had will be able to, you know, get him out.
I think this kid has served enough.
But you know, the joke is the bitter, horrible, dark joke is on the United States and is on the Obama administration for having prosecuted a former child prisoner who should have been rehabilitated for invented war crimes, for actually committing to print and getting him to sign his name to it that there was no circumstance under which he was allowed to be in combat, that he was an alien, unprivileged enemy belligerent, who had no right under any circumstances ever to fight back against United States soldiers.
And when he did that made him a war criminal.
It's like, I'm sorry.
But I thought that Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland was a very long time ago.
But this is, you know, this is rewriting the rules of war.
All right, now, here we have, we have David Hicks, who is the Australian, and he was given, you know, $50 in time served like night court and let to go back to Australia was let back.
I can't speak English, but you know what I'm trying to say.
And then now there's this kid who else has actually successfully been prosecuted?
And, you know, released or held, I forget anymore.
What's the score on the cook?
And we've got or was harmed on the driver.
And one more.
Yeah, well, the two more Ali Hamza Baloo, who made a propaganda video for Al Qaeda, who didn't want to mount a defense and therefore didn't mount a defense and was convicted after being silent for a week.
And what can only really appear to be a one sided show trial.
And in the summer, Obama's first great achievement was a plea deal for Ibrahim al-Khazi, who was a kind of sometime handyman for the Al Qaeda entourage.
That still hasn't come out publicly, but we think that he's getting two years in exchange for capitulating to whatever demands are made on him.
So we got, you know, we got the driver, the handyman, the videographer and the child.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And what's interesting as well, Scott, is that, you know, after signing his life away on this thing has no right to challenge any of it.
But Hicks's deal was for providing material support to terrorism, which isn't a war crime.
And so was Salim Hamdan.
Yeah, well, I say we tear the whole damn thing down brick for brick and abolish the state.
Absolutely.
I'll go get over there with you with a flotilla with you.
This time we'll need the British's help to overthrow.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
It's a pleasure as ever.
Cheers, Scott.
Bye.
Everybody, that's Andy Worthington.co.uk.
