All right, everybody.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're starting off right now with our first guest.
It's Andy Worthington.
His website is andyworthington.co.uk, andyworthington.co.uk.
He also writes for antiwar.com, the Future Freedom Foundation, Huffington Post, I think, and Truthout and all kinds of things like that.
He's also, of course, the author of The Guantanamo Files, the story of 759 detainees in America's illegal prison, and made the documentary film Outside the Law.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How's things?
Okay, Scott.
All right.
Busy, I have to say.
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, you know, anybody, if you looked at antiwar.com this morning, you see the top headline is WikiLeaks Lits Lid on Guantanamo.
What's going on here?
Well, that's kind of it, really.
It's the disclosure of documents prepared by the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo for Southern Command, analyzing the status of the prisoners at Guantanamo in documents from 2002 until 2008, maybe even early 2009.
Basically, their recommendations on whether prisoners should continue to be held, whether they should be released or transferred, as they always put it, nobody to be released outright.
And, you know, and the basis of the reasoning, which is, I think, where the most interesting part of the documents.
I mean, there are a number of interesting factors.
There are health assessments, for example, which is not something we've seen before, but there are detailed analyses of how they've come about their decisions about, you know, how dangerous these prisoners were supposed to be.
And, you know, what's really been turning up in those analyses is basically a procession of unreliable witnesses, either people who we know were held in CIA secret prisons and were subjected to torture, or prisoners in Guantanamo whose stories have emerged at various times over the years, demonstrating that they are unreliable, they're informants within Guantanamo, they have been regarded as reliable on occasions by the military, but on other occasions, you know, that their reliability has been called into doubt by the authorities themselves.
And these guys just keep turning up, you know, as the only evidence against the prisoners in a lot of these cases, you know, which, of course, is not surprising for those of us who've been watching this story for many years, because the fundamental story of Guantanamo, Scott, as I'm sure we've discussed on various occasions, is that people were rounded up for money without being adequately screened on the arrogant basis that the US wasn't going to make mistakes, that there was no need to hold any kind of screening process sent to Guantanamo, and then once they were there, then the authorities had to begin to justify why they had these people in the first place.
Right.
I mean, we have known for years, I think, from the very beginning, since, you know, the end of 01, the beginning of 2002, it was already, you know, the word was out that they were paying bounties, and that people were just being kidnapped and sold.
And then, of course, we've known for years and years, we've talked for you on this show, for years and years about the lack of evidence against these people, the shoddy process that they went through, of course, the military already had a battlefield process for determining who's worth holding on to, and who ought to be set free, and they turned that off from the moment they invaded Afghanistan.
And then, of course, all the guys, and I've talked to the Guantanamo guards on this show, all the guys working at Guantanamo figured, hey, if you're getting off that plane, you must be a really bad guy.
And that was it.
There was no step anywhere in there where, you know, someone reasonable was saying, no, no, no, not this guy, not that guy, but maybe these two, or something.
There was no part of the process that was about separating the wheat from the chaff at all.
There never was.
No.
And, you know, what these documents reveal is that, you know, one of the things that's come out is, for the first time, is the analyses of the first 200 people who were released in Guantanamo.
These people were released in between 2002 and the summer of 2004.
And although some of these stories have come out, you know, through released prisoner stories or through media reports, no official U.S. documentation about these first 200 to be released has ever emerged.
And I'm glad to say that, you know, the media partners who've been working with WikiLeaks on these documents, The Washington Post and McClatchy in the United States and various newspapers in Europe, have been picking up on, you know, on the extent of, you know, the innocent and completely insignificant people revealed in these documents.
So, you know, we've had these analyses before in 2006, for example, when Seton Hall in New Jersey did an analysis of 500-odd documents released by the Pentagon of their allegations and went through those and said, look, of these guys, we've only got, you know, 8% who are even alleged to have had any involvement in al-Qaeda, let alone whether that's accurate or not.
That's only 8% who are alleged to have had any involvement.
And that wasn't even counting these 200.
So these 200 have turned up and these are all these, you know, these shocking stories, really, a lot of Afghans, a lot of Pakistanis, you know, the taxi drivers and the farmers who were rounded up, you know, and just an endless parade of these stories, because, of course, there was no screening process in place.
And, you know, and that kind of adds even more weight to what was already known about, you know, how few of the people who were supposed to have been seized actually ended up at Guantanamo.
So that's, you know, that's a big thing.
And I'm glad that it's been picked up on Scott, because it's filled in a little bit more of the picture for those who really want to know what's been going on.
And I hope people are going to pick up on that.
Yeah.
Well, I want to be clear here, because I think I'm confused.
Now, are you saying that there's 200 people in here that aren't in your book that were previously unknown to you?
Well, no, because I, you know, I managed to find out the stories of some of them for my book.
And I've and since then, I found out the stories of some of them and put them on my website.
I mean, some of them, you know, Tom Lester, McClatchy reporter, went to Afghanistan and Pakistan a few years ago for an award winning series where he tracked down a lot of former prisoners and spoke to them.
Some of them are those guys, you know, they have some of them spoken before, you know, some of them spoke to the media on their release.
Some of them were approached afterwards by human rights organizations and spoke about what happened to them.
By my reckoning, you know, and you know, how meticulously I've tried to keep count of everybody and tell what's known of their stories got about 85 of these are completely new.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, these were just names.
These were just names of Afghans, Pakistanis released, you know, 2003 2004.
Nobody knew anything about them.
Then here we've got them, you know, and you know, and it starts with these guys.
These are all described as low risk.
There is no, there's nothing less than low risk.
You can see how it's built into the whole system.
People are low risk, medium risk or high risk.
But if innocent people are low risk, you can see how devalued that whole, the whole way of assessing people is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If innocent people are low risk, what does that make medium risk?
Possibly somebody who's totally insignificant, right?
Well, yeah, as long as it's all arbitrary and capricious and everything, by the way, I want to take a one minute here to pick on Charlie Savage.
Um, and you could say it's not fair cause he's not here to defend himself, but he won't come on the show anymore now that he works for the New York times.
He's too cool to come on anti-war radio, but he's got a piece at the New York times today where he just completely picks up and runs with the Pentagon lie that these men who were the three of them probably looks like murdered, uh, in July of 2006, um, just like the Pentagon says, uh, committed suicide to make us look bad and pretends, or at least his editors pretend that the other Scott Horton never wrote a giant investigative piece about this in Harper's magazine, that there's no reason to doubt whatsoever.
These three guys committed suicide on the same night just to hurt America asymmetric warfare, the time says this morning.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Andy Worthington, the author of the Guantanamo files and a producer, director, writer of the documentary outside the law.
His website is Andy Worthington.co.uk writes for the future freedom foundation and a lot of other places as well.
And, you know, uh, Andy, before this giant WikiLeaks story broke, uh, yesterday, uh, there was a piece in the Washington post late last week, maybe Saturday, I forget, uh, about why Guantanamo didn't close and there's a bunch of nonsense.
It's a really long article and it goes on and on and on, but it was a very instructive there.
A couple of paragraphs were quotes of Democrats in Congress saying we wanted to close it and we were going to do it.
Nobody from the white house ever came here to help us out at all.
They put no weight on any congressman to do it.
They put no weight on any congressman to do anything about it at all.
They twisted no arms.
They made no signs whatsoever that this was a priority for them and we'll be damned if we're going to stick our necks out just to have them cut off.
So forget it.
So this is all Barack Obama was lying when he said he wanted to close Guantanamo.
He did not want to close Guantanamo.
He was not thwarted by the Republicans in Congress who wanted him to not close Guantanamo.
Barack Obama is a Guantanamo monger, period.
Well, it could be the case, you know, I think he ought to be locked in Guantanamo.
There's a lot of blame flying around all over the place.
Well, it's all his fault.
He's the one sitting in the chair.
It's as simple as that.
It was you or me or Ron Paul in the chair.
They would all got trials or been set free by now.
Period.
Exactly.
And that's, you know, and that's what I think we, um, you know, we have to hope will be the renewed pressure of these documents being released is that, you know, that it demonstrates, um, just when everybody was falling asleep and forgetting about it and thinking that it was absolutely appropriate for 171 guys to be held forever.
Um, actually no, it's not.
It never has been.
Um, you know, what we're dealing with is that is a few dozen people, um, who have, um, who have an involvement with, um, terrorist activities, allegedly.
And the rest of these people, we can see from the documents that being, uh, it's kind of what you have is foot soldiers and they're being pumped up.
They're trying desperately to, um, to, to make them into terrorists.
And, um, you know, and there's simply not the evidence there.
And I think really Scott, it just strikes at the heart of the nonsense that was established under the Bush administration that has been maintained under the Obama administration.
I mean that his refusal to deal with, um, has led us into this mess, which is that you don't declare a war on terror and then mix up soldiers and terrorists and pretend that they're all the same bad guys and scrap the Geneva conventions.
Um, and then start torturing people when you don't like what's going on.
Um, you know, all of it's wrong.
All of it needed to be addressed.
The failure to address it has led to, um, you know, to a bunch of lunatics taking over the airwaves.
It seems to me in the United States and proclaiming, um, how tough they are because they torture people because they no longer respect domestic or international laws.
None of this is the right way to behave.
What is the point of having a prison that Guantanamo that doesn't hold, um, America's enemies holds a bunch of nobody's holds a bunch of people who went to fight a civil war in Afghanistan 10 years ago that nobody remembers anymore.
These are not terrorists by all means.
Prosecute the 36 men that the Obama administration taskforce recommended for prosecution.
But let's stop the nonsense about the rest of it.
Let's stop pretending that there are 48 men who are too dangerous to release, but there's no evidence to put them on trial.
That means it's not evidence.
Yeah.
And one of the things that comes out in these documents and that I hope people will be able to look at and see for themselves is that no, it's not evidence.
They're not too dangerous to release.
Where is the evidence?
It's not.
It's a bunch of, um, very, very dubious allegations made by these men, fellow prisoners, uh, when they were either held in secret prisons or were held in Guantanamo in dubious circumstances.
It's time to bring this fast to an end, Scott.
Yeah, well, it's a way, way past time.
Um, it's kind of fun to hear your optimism that maybe this will change the conversation a little bit or something, uh, you know, good luck with that.
Uh, now tell me about, we've talked before about this, uh, Al Jazeera reporter who was kidnapped by these thugs and tortured, and there's just a couple of throwaway lines.
And I think it's one of these guardian pieces today, uh, where this guy doesn't even get his own news story.
But yeah, uh, just like you taught me on this show, I don't know how many months ago or a year ago or something, they were torturing this guy.
They weren't, they didn't even pretend for a moment to believe that he was friends with Ayman al-Zawahiri.
They were torturing him and interrogating him about Al Jazeera.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They wanted inside information on Al Jazeera.
The fact is it's all over these documents, Scott.
You know, first of all, they pretend that they took them there for a reason.
So in the, in the document, it says, you know, why would they transfer to Guantanamo?
And then he says, oh, so that we could gain information about this and that.
All of that is a lie.
We know from Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of an interrogator, that everybody went to Guantanamo.
There was no reason why it just, everybody that came into us custody was sent there.
So they invented the reasons afterwards and, you know, and they basically, you know, they were exploiting anybody for anything, you know, they had, uh, people who were connected with organizations that were not blacklisted.
So for example, Jamath al-Tabli, which is a huge missionary organization with millions of members worldwide.
And they decided it was a fund for terrorism.
It's got 3 million members worldwide.
Have you come across a terrorist organization with 3 million members?
Oh, the U.S. government.
It was not on, you know, it was not on a, um, on a terrorist watch list or a banned list of any kind.
And there are many of these organizations where just within Guantanamo, they were regarded as terrorist organizations, but nowhere else.
You know, I mean, that, that's, that's just, you know, so Family Al-Hajj, yeah, they wanted to, they regarded Al-Jazeera as a terrorist organization.
But let's get this guy and let's see if we can get him to, you know, rat on his colleagues and see if we can find a way to destroy Al-Jazeera, um, by doing this.
I mean, that's the bottom line here, right?
Is that there's no rules at all.
It's just the Lord of the flies or whatever.
Come on guys.
We heard Don Rumsfeld said, the gloves are off, grab whom you must do what you want.
There is no law anywhere in the world.
Now the whole world's a battlefield and, and we're all soldiers.
Yeah.
Well, you know that, and here we go here, we've got, you know, more of it revealed.
God, it's really, you know, it's worth people looking at.
It really is worth, worth it for people to look at this.
Yeah.
These documents, you know?
Well, absolutely.
And, and they can, if they just go to antiwar.com right now, we've got, uh, the five or six most important ones, uh, right at the top of the page there.
And, uh, of course, I'm sure you'll have lots of coverage coming up for us soon at, uh, Annie Worthington.co.uk and FFF.org and, and where else?
Yeah.
Uh, you know, who else is working on this?
Who are you going to tell me, or are you asking me?
I'm asking you.
Oh, well, there's a whole bunch of newspapers working on it.
I mean, you know, the Washington post and McClatchy, um, uh, partners, um, with WikiLeaks in this, as, uh, as is the Telegraph and, um, El Pais and Le Monde and Der Spiegel, um, Aftonbladet, which is a Swedish newspaper and La Repubblica and L'Espresso in Italy.
Uh, I think that's pretty much everyone covered.
Um, so yeah, I mean, there's going to be a lot coming out.
So then anti, uh, pardon me, andyworthington.co.uk will be how to find all the most important pieces of all that journalism and all those different places.
Right.
I hope so.
I hope I get the time.
We know we can count on you, Andy.
All right.
Well, listen, uh, music's about to start playing here in a sec anyway.
So let me go ahead and thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Really appreciate it.
It's brilliant.
It's always great to talk to you, Scott.
And it's good to have an opportunity on this occasion.
I mean, I'm sure my, you know, mild optimism there is misplaced, but you know, without hope, I'm not sure what we can do.
You're right.
And I'm sorry for teasing you.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, man.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Andy Worthington.
Andy worthington.co.uk, FFF.org, truthout.org.
Uh, and the book is the Guantanamo files.
The movie is outside the law.
Go check out the top anti-war.com right now.
And we'll be right back.
