All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And now to our next guest, Andy Worthington.
He writes for the Future Freedom Foundation.
He keeps his website at andyworthington.co.uk.
I think you can also find him at the Huffington Post and at truthout.org.
And he's the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, profiles of the 760 something that were kept there during the entire time and also made the movie Outside the Law about the Guantanamo Bay regime there.
Again, the website andyworthington.co.uk.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I'm okay, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And before we get to your new Future Freedom Foundation article, Obama Turns the Clock Back on Guantanamo, I want to talk about the top headline at andyworthington.co.uk, and that is that you're doing a quarterly fundraiser.
That's it, yeah.
So I guess, well, you go ahead and say something, then I'll say something.
Well, that's, you know, every three months, I just ask the people who read my work and support it if they'd like to make a contribution to read a funded new media, I suppose is what it is.
You know, I have a few places that I write for who pay me.
Like a lot of us who work online in the new media, I do a lot of writing for free, so it's really just asking people if they'd like to help.
And I actually, I've started to think, actually, maybe it's a kind of model for one of the ways forward.
I just suggested today that people could sponsor an article that I've written that I wrote, you know, without getting paid for.
And now somebody's just taken me up on that.
It could be one way of people financing the work that they do, because, you know, we all know Scott, don't we?
Every little helps.
And when you've got things in your life that you care about, it's great to put the importance of things before money.
But usually somebody's coming knocking on the door, wanting you to pay some bills at some point.
Right.
Yeah, you gotta work things out one way or another.
Well, look, I gotta say, I'm the biggest fan of your work.
I think it's so important.
And, you know, history will have it that you are the chronicle of the tragedy of Guantanamo Bay.
And that, to me itself, though I sincerely thank you for it, is the tragedy that it takes a guy, you know, sitting over there in England to do the work that you do.
And I mean, there are a lot of great Americans who have done a lot of great work on Guantanamo, but not like you have.
And so I really do appreciate that.
And I do hope that, you know, English PayPal accepts American dollars or however that works.
All the conversions, no problem.
I sure hope people will contribute because it's obviously a very worthwhile effort.
We'd hate for you to have to go get a real job or, you know, a day job.
I'm definitely going to try and not do that.
I'm going to carry on doing this.
And the sad thing, of course, is, you know, I mean, it's great that you've been a supporter of what I've been doing for so long, Scott.
The sadness, of course, is that I'm having to do this.
Still, for so long.
I know, man.
You ought to be able to retire and go get a day job because you want one now.
But no.
Well, let's talk about Obama turning back the clock at Guantanamo Bay.
How's that?
Well, you know, it's the announcement this week that the military commissions are going to go ahead.
It's the issuing this week of an executive order authorizing the detention of 47 men at Guantanamo without charge or trial, but putting in place a review process which is supposed to guarantee that there will be some way out possibly for these people and that they may not be held indefinitely without charge or trial, because maybe this review process will come up with reasons why they no longer constitute the threat that they're supposed to constitute in the first place.
And I should point out at this point that I'm not entirely convinced that these men constitute a threat to anybody in the first place anyway.
But this is just part of the crazy Kafka-esque, Galaxy in Wonderland world of Guantanamo that we got used to, I think, under the Bush administration in so many ways.
I mean, not that we ever liked it.
You know, we used to speak back in those days and rail endlessly against the injustices of that particular administration.
But Obama has found himself incapable of addressing the idiocy, the lunacy of what he inherited.
He's found himself unable to rise above it and to do what should have been the right thing.
And it's just essentially reverted to Bush-era policies for how to deal with these poor bunch of guys who are generally absolutely not as dangerous as some people like to make them out to be, in other cases have persistently been mislabeled as enemy combatants or somebody connected to terrorism when they're not.
And, you know, and it's a really, really sad day when President Obama signs an executive order actually endorsing, albeit limited to these men, actually states, you know, I, the President of the United States, am authorizing the indefinite detention of men without charge or trial on the basis that I could not possibly put them on trial because I don't have the evidence to do so.
But you better believe me that me and my task force got together and we looked at this and these are bad guys.
So you'll have to trust us on that.
That just is disgraceful.
Well, I mean, what do they think, that these guys are going to be acquitted by the kangaroo pretend star chamber communist Cuba-like trial system down there at Guantanamo Bay?
I mean, what?
Like there's a, you know, they need, what, a two thirds majority on the all military officer jury to decide?
Well, you know, I mean, that's interesting because, you know, since Obama, I mean, you know, this idea that he's reviving the commissions is technically true because up until now, the cases that he's presided over that have gone to military commissions are actually ones that he's inherited from the Bush administration.
So he's now going to proceed with new cases.
But we've already seen kind of what it means under Obama.
And he's not actually going to let, you know, to date, he hasn't left any of these cases actually go forward to a trial.
That would be potentially disastrous on a number of fronts.
He's cut plea deals.
If he let it go to trial, he risked having exposed the fact that the entire legislation, the entire setup for the military commissions involves war crimes that were specifically invented by Congress.
They are not recognized internationally as war crimes as criminal activities.
Yes, as war crimes.
No.
And he also risked, you know, exposing some of the dark and troubling stories about how these men got to Guantanamo and what happened to them along the way.
And I'm not entirely sure what he's going to do on that, Scott.
I'm absolutely convinced that we're going to get a whole bunch of generally insignificant people who drove vehicles or cooked or were involved in this or that.
No major player will be cutting plea deals.
That's definitely going to happen.
And, you know, that could be that could be there are 30 people scheduled to face trial by the task force.
So it could be any number of those.
When it comes to the more heavy duty allegations against people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who they wanted to try in federal court, but ran up against a wall of hysterical opposition from their own party and from from Republicans.
I still can't see that they're going to want to do the military commission route, but maybe they will.
Maybe they will, you know, bow to the pressure yet again and say, well, we're not being allowed to have federal court trials.
Congress won't let us.
Maybe maybe we'll do that.
I'm not I'm not sure.
But we're going to see a lot of plea deals.
Yeah, well, so I guess, Andy, the question is, well, one of these questions is about the was it 47?
It was 48, but one died.
You say here the 47 people who are outright marked for just being held indefinitely without a military commission.
Some of these people, they say they're going to give military commissions for these guys.
They say that they're not.
Do you think that they would be pressured into pleading guilty to anything or they're just going to keep them completely outside the charging them even under the bogus law?
You know, that's an interesting question.
I'm presuming that they haven't they haven't kind of worked out that if they haven't got enough material against somebody to put them on the trial, then they can't really, you know, have a plea deal on hearsay.
Which is essentially what it amounts to, what they've actually got.
It would be the way I mean, it seems to be the only way to get out of Guantanamo is to accept a plea deal in a trial by military commission.
And, you know, if he actually does want to close this place, he better find a way to do it.
But no, it's you know, it's so wrong on every level to have designated this bunch of people as people who are going to be held indefinitely without charge as well.
Now, I understand that he's got a few problems, not 47 by any means, but he's got a few problems in that.
I'm pretty sure that of the few dozen people in Guantanamo who are alleged over the years to have had any genuine involvement in terrorism.
How many dozen?
Just a few dozen, you know, two or three dozen.
I mean, that's essentially what they admitted when they said, look, initially, they said, look, there are 36 people we want to put on trial.
So when you wrote your book profiling all these guys, would you say that there were two or three dozen that you would agree with them appear to be real friends of Osama Zawahiri type guys?
Yeah, not even that.
I mean, some of them would have to be from a few senior Taliban leaders, maybe a few people involved with other terrorist organizations.
Yeah, I would say you could stretch it maybe to three dozen.
Um, you know, it depends what they're talking about here, because anybody who was wandering around Afghanistan with an AK-47 fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance and then ended up fighting against America after America invaded became tied in with a terrorist story.
That's the problem.
The problem is, yeah, that's the criteria for killing him with a robot right now.
Yeah, well, there he is.
He's on the ground.
He's got a rifle.
He must be a bad guy.
Drop a hellfire missile on his head.
Right, exactly.
Or kidnap him and send him off to Guantanamo, buy him from a bounty hunter for a couple of grand.
But, you know, we don't we have to trust.
We're supposed to trust them when they tell us who these guys are.
Now, 47 guys.
Now, some of them are the ones, some of them who've lost their habeas corpus petitions.
You'll notice that there's no mention of habeas corpus here.
The Obama, the materials issued do mention it, but the truth is they sidelined the habeas process.
They weren't bothered.
They wanted to do their own executive review, you know, and now they've set up, you know, here we've got 47 guys.
Now, what we can tell is that some of the people who lost their habeas petitions are in this category.
Well, just about everybody who lost their habeas petition was a soldier.
That's it.
Just a soldier.
Not a big deal.
But soldiers didn't figure in Bush's war on terror, and they don't figure in President Obama's inherited war on terror.
He refuses to address the fundamental problem.
Listen, you could hold these guys, not indefinitely, but until the end of the conflict, and then we could argue when that is.
If you redesignate them as prisoners of war.
Well, it seems like that would make it easier for him, not assuming any good motive on his part, but, you know, just for the ease of the situation to maybe separate out some Taliban foot soldiers from, I guess these are the ones he wants to force to plead guilty as opposed to ones who aren't even going to have a shot at that.
Well, it would make sense, wouldn't it?
Because otherwise we're still stuck with the Bush era, with confusing soldiers with terrorists, with actually they're all enemy combatants, with encouraging, you know, idiotic, manipulative lawmakers and media figures to wheel out the terror factor whenever they feel like it.
But this was a bunch of soldiers, which it is.
If we were clearly designating them as that, you know, maybe we could bring the hysteria down a few notches.
But as it stands, it's just business as usual.
It's the right wingers are going to spout the same nonsense.
You know, these guys are sitting here and we don't actually we don't know who some of these people are.
You know, what right does the president have to set up a task force to decide 47 guys were going to be held indefinitely when some of these guys have got pending habeas corpus petitions in front of district court judges and the district court judges were empowered by the Supreme Court after a long, long legal battle to decide whether these men actually constitute a threat or not.
Not a bunch of 60 officials that Obama gets in when he comes into office and says, actually, guys, we're going to do our own appraisal.
We actually don't care much for your way of doing things.
That's a little bit insulting to the judiciary, I think.
Well, I mean, the Supreme Court is the is the organization that said to the Congress and the president that the Military Commissions Act of 2009 was unconstitutional, at least insofar as it denied any habeas corpus review.
And so they've had it since then.
Is there any hope that the court would intervene and say, hey, we meant that about the habeas corpus thing?
You can't undo that.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, there's a case of the Uyghurs, the Chinese guys who can't get anyone to take him in, even though they're innocent, going up in front of the Supreme Court, which is going to get back to addressing the whole point of the Boumediene ruling giving the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights in June 2008, where all these rulings are now being overturned by the very right wing D.C. Circuit Court.
And the argument that's being put forward is, look, the Supreme Court intended habeas to have its historical meaning.
It has to have a remedy.
It means nothing now.
It's been gutted of all meaning.
But will the Supreme Court, as it's currently constituted, address the issues that the Supreme Court with Stevens in it did under Bush?
I don't think we can be guaranteed that that's the case.
I think that what we have is a more politicized, more compromised and therefore fundamentally more right wing Supreme Court than we had under George W.
Bush.
Yeah, that's got it wrong.
So I don't know.
But in the meantime, here are these guys in Guantanamo.
They've got their new review, the periodic review board.
And, you know, I mean, seriously, Scott, you know, you have a look at this.
These guys are going to have they're going to present be presented with an unclassified summary of the allegations.
They're going to have a personal representative.
They won't have a lawyer.
They'll be able to refute the charges if they want, but they won't be able to draw on much to do so.
There's going to be this evidence.
These are Bush's combatant status review tribunals brought back from the dead.
This was the process that the Supreme Court found inadequate in Boumediene.
He's just brought it back and he slapped it onto these guys.
And it gives him the illusion.
There's a fig leaf of respectability about holding people forever without charge or trial and without providing any evidence that, you know, what you say about them is actually true through a review process that resembles a really, really warped and unjust process that George W. Bush first initiated back in 2004.
We're going nowhere.
What is this about?
Well, yeah, and I guess for whatever reason, all the all the pressure in Congress is to keep this thing going.
It seems like and maybe I'm crazy or radical or something, but it seems like if a politician said, hey, this is un-American, man, we can we'll find the guilty ones.
We'll put them on trial and convict them of stuff.
And then the other ones will set free because that's the way it's supposed to be.
Everybody knows that.
And then that would be the end of that.
Everybody would support that, right?
What am I living in a bizarre world or something?
No, I don't know.
I mean, but I mean, you look what's happened.
There's already Republicans in Congress saying that this doesn't go far enough.
I mean, they're just you know, they're rabid.
These people what they've got, everything they wanted.
They've made it impossible for anybody pretty much to be released from Guantanamo under any circumstances, you know, and nobody cares.
And, you know, that's just pretty disgraceful, really, Scott, that, you know, it's disgraceful that nobody cares.
There's something that's going on this long and it's so unjust doesn't actually get any less than just the longer it goes on.
It actually gets worse.
And so for anybody who can be bothered to either empathize with these people, some of whom should not be there, you know, these are not all bad guys, but also anybody who actually thinks that, you know, about the law and the significance of the law in the United States and how that was, you know, so messed about with and treated with with utter disdain by the Bush administration.
And to see this just going on and on and that, you know, here we've got another administration that can't deal with it.
And we've got a Congress packed full of people who couldn't care less what the law is, what due process is, what fairness is.
It really is, you know, it's a sign of these people desperately out of touch.
I wonder if the Guantanamo prison will outlast communism in Cuba, you know?
I wonder if they'll outlive us, Scott.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Andy.
Appreciate it.
AndyWorthington.co.uk.
He's the best on Guantanamo.
Y'all check it out.
Donate.
