All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Andy Worthington.
His website is andyworthington.co.uk.
He wrote the book The Guantanamo Files and produced the movie documentary Outside the Law.
And he writes for the Future Freedom Foundation, and I forget where all.
Tell us where all.
Andy, welcome to the show.
Hey, hi, Scott.
Yeah, well, I write for the Future Freedom Foundation every week, and I write for caged prisoners here in the UK, and I write for Truthout sometimes and sometimes for The Guardian, and then my work is picked up and put all over the web by all kinds of other people as well, I'm glad to say.
Yeah.
I'm trying to remember if we have a separate archive for you at antiwar.com or if we just link to the FFF instead, that kind of thing.
There is one, but yeah, there is an antiwar.com one.
But quite often, I mean, I know that quite often the site is linking to the Future Freedom Foundation article, is that right?
Yeah.
Which is great.
Yeah, right on.
Well, so that's where you can find what Andy Worthington writes.
That's really the purpose of the show, Andy, as you might have figured out, is telling people what and where to go read if they want, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If they want to find out more, that's a good thing to do.
All right, so now tell me about your recent work about the secret CIA torture prison in Poland.
Well, yeah, I mean, I've just been over there for a week.
One of my friends and supporters organized this tour of five towns and cities in Warsaw with a subtitled version of the film Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo, which was, you know, a fantastic thing to do, really.
And I went out there with Mozambique, former Guantanamo prisoner and the director of cage prisoners.
He was there for a couple of days, I was there for the whole week, trying to do the usual thing that I've been doing for all these years, which is just to educate people about the truth about Guantanamo, that it wasn't full of the worst of the worst, it was actually some kind of abominable experiment that involved mainly holding people who were rounded up in a pretty random manner.
But also, because it was Poland, then one of the things that we hoped was to focus on the plight of men held in Guantanamo who've been cleared for release by the Obama administration, but are from countries where it's not safe to return to.
Poland hasn't taken in any of these people, and we were hoping that that might create some interest.
But also, of course, we were focusing on the story of the secret CIA prison that existed in the early days of the war on terror in Poland, and a really crucial and horrible component of this network of secret prisons that the Bush administration established.
And the one in Poland, we know that between December 2002 and September 2003, it held some of the most well-known, high-value detainees who are now in Guantanamo, people who spent up to four and a half years being moved around a variety of secret prisons before they were finally sent to Guantanamo.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and others that we don't have confirmation of exactly who was held there, although there have been many stories over the years.
But what we can say with absolute certainty, Scott, is that Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were held there, because in the last few months, and in fact, most recently, just a few weeks before I was out there, the public prosecutor in Poland, as part of an ongoing investigation into the complicity of the Polish government, the prime minister and the president, as they were then, in the establishment of the secret prison, has granted official victim status in these investigations to Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri, which would not happen were there not the evidence to exist, to demonstrate that these men were actually held in this facility.
So that's a pretty great example of an independent-minded member of the judiciary in another country, doggedly pursuing a case that, as we've seen in recent months from the WikiLeaks revelations, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have done their best to suppress in other countries.
Right, well, and that's why all the secrecy in the first place.
If I remember the story right, it was the president, or the prime minister, I forget which, in Poland, and the head of intelligence, and no one else in the government was in on the circle of people who were in on this plot to have these people...
Was it shown that they were actually tortured there, or just held there in between here and there?
Oh, no, I mean, that's definitely the time period when some of the waterboarding was taking place.
Oh, right, yeah.
Well, actually, see, I should read the headline right in front of my eyes, which is my girlfriend's piece, Larissa Aleksandrovna, with David Daszczyk, who was a former Polish intelligence officer, and they wrote this article, Soviet-era compound in northern Poland was site of secret CIA interrogations, detentions.
They were the ones who identified the actual facility, and she identified it, as well as being built by the Nazis, and then also used by the Soviet military in the days of the USSR, and then it was inherited by the Americans to torture people there.
Yeah, what a lovely story, eh?
Yeah, it's great, and I'm sorry that I forgot about the part about, when it gets in here, that this is where a lot of the torture took place.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, so it was interesting timing, because Abu Zubaydah was just granted victim status just a few weeks ago.
So, you know, that's quite fresh, and actually, you know, in Poland, the difficulty has been that the people who were trying to uncover this story were meeting a complete wall of indifference and hostility.
Certainly with, you know, the political parties there, actually, you know, putting up a veil of silence and ridiculing people who were trying to say that the facility was there.
I mean, they're still trying to claim that it never existed, that if there were flights going into the site, which we know there were, then they weren't going in there for that reason.
They were, you know, we've had idiotic explanations that it was a rest and recreation center for the CIA, which...
Yeah, well, you know, the president of Poland at the time actually held a press conference just to call Larissa a liar.
Right.
And say that she was just trying to help the Democrats in the election.
Yeah, well, there you go.
So I guess that's been the case ever since then.
They just try to ridicule anybody who brings this up, and yet, I mean, what are we talking about?
Torture at a former Nazi and then Soviet base, only this time by the Americans?
Seems like that's got the makings of a giant Polish scandal in it, no?
Well, yeah, exactly.
It does, although, you know, as we're seeing everywhere, even if the U.S. government doesn't particularly exert pressure on foreign governments not to investigate things, then the governments themselves are inclined not to want to investigate any of these things.
The problem is, you know, as we all know by now, people were involved one way or another with torture, and that isn't just something that's a slight difference of opinion with somebody.
It's actually a crime.
So, you know, that's why we have people skirting around it and not wanting to actually address it.
And it's also why, you know, what we need is independent-minded people with a respect for the law, and that's happened with senior judges in the U.K., for example, to press ahead with trying to expose the stories when everybody else is telling them to shut up.
Hey, I had Robert Baer on the show yesterday, and he confirmed all about the torture of Sheikh Ibn al-Libi in Egypt in order to get him to implicate Saddam Hussein in training al-Qaeda in the use of chemical weapons and terrorist hijackings and so forth before the invasion of Iraq.
Those are talking points from Colin Powell's U.N. speech justifying the war.
Very important so-called evidence.
Everybody hang on.
It's Andy Worthington.
AndyWorthington.co.uk.
The book is The Guantanamo Files.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Santa Ward Radio.
Talking with Andy Worthington.
AndyWorthington.co.uk is the website.
Also Truthout, FFF.org, etc., like that.
The book is The Guantanamo Files, and the movie is Outside the Law, Stories from Guantanamo.
And actually, I was thinking, Andy, maybe it was a bad idea for me to change the subject to Egypt already.
Did you have more to say about what you've learned about what's going on in Poland and any possible accountability, maybe, for the people responsible for cooperating with the CIA on this?
Well, I don't know how it's going to go.
You know, there will obviously be attempts to shut down this investigation, as happened in Lithuania recently, where they were conducting an investigation, but they closed it because they couldn't find anybody who would actually testify.
And they just said, OK, well, that's it, then.
Investigation closed, end of story.
You know, which is not really satisfactory.
But, you know, we're not finished with this by any means, are we, Scott?
You know, I mean, what happened also last week was that in Macedonia, they started hearings in the case of Khaled El-Masri, who's that poor German man with the same name as the man who allegedly helped the 9-11 hijackers, who was kidnapped as he went to Macedonia on holiday and then sent to a CIA secret prison in Afghanistan and then dropped off and abandoned in Albania months later when they realized they'd made a mistake.
You know, he got nowhere with the German government, but this is a case that's being brought in Macedonia, and people that I've spoken to are slightly more confident that Macedonia doesn't have the kind of walls that some of the more advanced countries can erect to prevent accountability.
So, you know, we may get somewhere there.
And, of course, the great news last week, which I was able to tell audiences in Poland, you know, because people in Poland were thinking, you know, this isn't going to go anywhere, this is hard work, and I had to tell them, well, yeah, it is hard work.
Nobody wants this kind of thing to happen, but you mustn't give up on it.
But the great thing to encourage them was that, you know, George W. Bush called off his trip to Switzerland because he'd been notified that CCR and a group in Europe were filing a torture complaint against him, a lawsuit which, you know, will be replicated wherever he attempts to go outside the United States.
So, you know, it's the opportunities for these people who organized and authorized and implemented the torture program are getting narrower rather than wider.
And I think, you know, I think we all have to take some comfort from that.
Yeah, at least the hypocrisy is being laid as fair as it could possibly be.
The rule of law means do what America says or we'll torture you to death and no matter what law says you can't do that here, we'll go ahead anyway.
Yeah, well, exactly, you know.
I mean, I think this lawsuit that's been put together against Bush, I haven't had the chance to really investigate it fully yet.
Do you know who the people are who filed the complaint?
I talked with other Scott Horton about this on the show yesterday and he was saying that both of them were Guantanamo inmates, one current, one former.
Do you know any more about them?
I don't know enough about it yet.
I just didn't have enough Internet access while I was away in Poland to really do the kind of research that I normally do on things.
Oh, that's all right.
I'm sure you'll catch up in no time.
I don't know what we'd do without you.
We wouldn't know one-tenth of what we do about Guantanamo Bay, I know that.
But, you know, Egypt that you mentioned is such an integral part of this story as well.
And, you know, even al-Sheikh al-Libi, of course, who may have been held in Poland, we don't know.
That was certainly a rumor at some point.
But, you know, because he didn't just go to Egypt where he was tortured to make this false confession about the links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which were used by Colin Powell at his U.N. presentation to justify the invasion of Iraq, you know, for which I think something that was clearly driven by Dick Cheney is an act of, you know, of treason, do you think would be appropriate to describe it as that?
I mean, he misled the American people while pretending on the one hand that he was saving everyone from another terrorist attack.
He was actually paving the way for an illegal invasion of another country by using information derived from the torture of a prisoner in a foreign country.
Whoa, that's pretty extreme, Dick.
Yeah, well, and, you know, last May when this guy was suicided in his cell, really around the world I don't think anybody said, oh, yeah, it must have just been a suicide if that's what they say.
Pretty much everyone thought it was suspicious that this guy all of a sudden died.
Yeah, exactly, in a Libyan prison where he was finally returned to.
Yeah, and how convenient it was for everybody, for the Americans, for the Libyans, and for the Egyptians, frankly, because, you know, they'd been greatly humiliated that such a lie had been exposed.
But, you know, what's happening in Egypt, I mean, you know, we haven't had inside information involving names of people involved in the torture of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, as far as I know.
But, you know, Omar Suleiman, now the Egyptian number two, the man that Mubarak, you know, wants to groom to be the successor to him, who has the support of Western governments, you know, the strong man of the Egyptian intelligence services.
We know that he was personally involved in the torture of an innocent man who was sent to Guantanamo subsequently and released, Mamdouh Habib, the Egyptian.
You know, a man whose peripheral knowledge of people involved in terrorism was what got him sent to Egypt in the first place, where, you know, where they tortured a pack of lies out of him as well.
And, you know, the Egypt of Mubarak and Omar Suleiman is almost like the, you know, the dark emotional heart of the U.S. torture program.
They learn all that stuff from people like the Egyptians and their torture chambers.
You know, they copied these techniques in the first place.
When they were too squeamish to do the torture themselves in the early days, they sent people to these countries so they could do it for them.
You know, it's absolutely disgusting to be hearing the kind of, you know, political discussions about the niceties of political power changing hands in a smooth and effective manner and all this rubbish when, you know, when the U.S. and other Western countries have been backing up these torturers for all these years.
Yeah, it's just sad, you know.
It's just sad, you know.
Think of what fun it would have been if Barack Obama was anything like his sales pitch that he told all the people who voted for him and that there was really going to be a rule of law and even, you know, possibly applying to these people.
He would have been a really great president if only he'd just put Bush and Cheney in the dock.
He'd have my support, you know.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I think we're living with the problems of what happens if you don't do that.
You know, which is not only does it lead to a situation where you gradually get weaker and weaker against people who decide that they're going to uphold and calibrate the kind of monstrous stuff that was introduced by Bush and Cheney because nobody's actually held anybody accountable in the United States.
So any idiot who gets into Congress can stand up and start going on about how great torture is and how useful it is and how necessary and how when you capture a terrorist suspect they should be sent to Guantanamo and waterboarded and all of this stuff because it's never been challenged.
But again, you know, that's the good thing about seeing stuff that is happening elsewhere in the world of people saying, well, you know, actually, you may not be able to sort it out there without seeing the former president of the United States come to our country because he's a war criminal.
You know, I don't see how it can really go on forever, Scott, you know.
Well, I sure hope to see more of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other Scott Horton was saying, you know, Henry Kissinger has the State Department negotiate diplomatic immunity for him so that he can travel even in his private capacity and that Bush and the rest of these tortured, you know, cabinet members, the leaders and their lawyers and all these people.
Eventually it's going to be like that, especially as the empire falls apart as we're seeing in Egypt as a result of all the torture that goes on in these countries at our own government's behest, you know.
It seems like the ability of America to just flex muscles and say, well, you wouldn't dare indict one of our political leaders or something, we're not going to have that kind of stature anymore coming here very soon.
Well, I hope so.
I mean, it certainly looks like it.
But, I mean, I think that at a certain level, you know, and again it comes down to the independence of people that are involved in the law and because those people exist in other countries.
You know, I mean, the thing with the law suits against the Bush lawyers in Spain, for example, you know, which Obama did his best to snuff out, which is actually still ongoing, is that, you know, I know that part of that involved the judge in Spain being briefed, you know, by the guy here in the U.K. who wrote Torture Team, which essentially, you know, is a nonfiction book, a best-selling nonfiction book that actually presents the case for the prosecution.
And, you know, that was presented to an independent prosecuting judge in Spain who recognized it for what it was.
And, you know, that is going to keep happening around the world, is that once you can remove political interference from it, you are going to see judges examining evidence impartially and saying, wow, this is a pretty watertight case of very, very senior officials and lawyers in the United States government being involved in torture, which is a crime.
Well, and as we saw in the WikiLeaks, they had to resort to putting extraordinary pressure on the Spanish, the Germans, and I think the Italians, too, over the case of, I think, Al-Masri, if I got all my cards in the right order here, not that I have cards, but, yeah, it took a lot of influence to prevent those cases from going forward, those investigations from going forward in all those countries, and that's the influence we're running out of here.
Well, they failed in Italy because, you know, because the judges went ahead in Italy in the Abba Omar case, and, you know, they sentenced the CIA agents and a U.S. military figure.
You know, I mean, they're not going to go to jail for it because the U.S. won't extradite them, but, you know, that was an actual judicial sentence.
And I think what happened recently was the U.S. asked them to review it, and he increased the sentences, which I thought was quite funny.
Well, that is funny.
I hadn't heard that one.
All right.
Well, as long as I'm keeping you over time here, tell me this, Andy.
Is anything going on in terms of accountability for the secret prison in Romania, and how much is known about that?
Have they identified the building the way the Polish secret prison has been identified?
Well, you know, I've been meaning to have another look into that one, Scott, because we don't hear about it, and, you know, I think we don't hear about it because they've denied that from the top, from the very beginning, and they don't seem to have cracked on it.
Now, you know, I may have been missing something that's happened recently, but that's certainly the impression that I get.
I think, you know, I think, you know, with Lithuania, for example, where the investigation has now officially been terminated, you know, the illusion that creates is, oh, well, you know, we're losing one by one in places.
But as long as parts of this story stay alive, it isn't going to go away.
And the fact that it kind of, you know, it kind of spreads as well, I think, that, you know, the number of different chinks there are in the armor increase as time goes on.
You know, Bush's book being such a great example.
And, you know, so long as parts of the story stay alive, we're okay, and it will keep ticking over.
But, you know, Romania looks like they've just decided to clamp down on the whole thing, you know, which is idiotic.
I mean, you know, the flight logs that exist, you know, clearly demonstrate flights going there, clearly demonstrate flights going from Poland to Romania.
And in the last six or seven months as well, you know, the AP has been reporting more aspects of different movements of prisoners to different places, kind of making clearer that the network also involved, you know, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Morocco, and that prisoners were moved around between these various facilities.
And, yeah, I suspect more of that's going to come out as well.
I mean, you know, we never quite know when people who knew more than they were supposed to do speak off the record about things.
And, you know, I'm kind of confident that we're going to keep going on this.
Yeah.
Well, hey, wikileaks.ch, and I think you can just click the upload button there and get to work, right?
Yeah, right.
Calling all whistleblowers, just don't chat message Adrian Lamo about what you're up to and you'll be fine.
And then we can all know the truth and then still do nothing about it.
It'll be great.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Hey, thanks very much for your time, Andy.
You do great work.
I really appreciate it.
Scott, it's always great to talk to you as well.
And thanks for the opportunity again.
Cheers.
All right, everybody.
That is Andy Worthington, andyworthington.co.uk.
Ten million great articles all over the Internet.
The Guantanamo Files is the book.
Profiles of 759, I think at last count, detainees that were held at Guantanamo Bay.
Most of them, of course, have been released since then.
And also made the movie Outside the Law.
So check that out.
You could probably steal it off of the Pirate Bay by now.
