All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Since I wore radio, I'm Scott Horton introducing Andy Worthington.
Andy Worthington dot co dot UK is the website and the book is the Guantanamo Files Complete Profiles, at least with as much information has been released and gathered so far of the seven hundred and fifty nine detainees who've been through or still are in Guantanamo Bay in communist Cuba.
And he's also the producer director of a documentary film called Outside the Law Stories from Guantanamo.
Welcome back, Andy.
How are you?
Hey, I'm good, Scott.
It's really nice to be talking to you again in a few months.
Yeah, yeah.
It has been a while.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And basically I just ran out of patience.
I can't get a hold of the people from you don't like the truth.
Four days in Guantanamo Bay.
And now it's Friday and that's it.
I got to talk with somebody about this dang thing.
And so I call my man who knows everything that there is to know about the Omar Cotter case and and about Guantanamo Bay.
And again, I want to mention the name of the movie is You Don't Like the Truth.
Four days inside Guantanamo.
And you can find their website online and figure out how you can view it in your neighborhood or or whatever like that.
So give them their due.
But I have to tell you, Andy, I was quite upset watching this thing.
It seems like somebody ought to be tried for war crimes for the trying of this kid for war crimes.
But yeah, that's just me.
Well, no, I don't I don't think it is just you, Scott.
You know, I mean, we we discussed this.
It's nearly a year now, isn't it, since since, you know, President Obama on his watch, you know, put a former child on trial in his kangaroo court military commissions that he inherited from the Bush administration.
It's not just him.
It's Congress.
They were all in on this.
They all think that this is a satisfactory way to proceed, that this, you know, this former child prisoner was was put on trial, had to sign a huge statement to say that he was an alien, unprivileged enemy belligerent so that he would get this plea deal a year in Guantanamo, which is nearly up and then apparently seven years in Canada, very much hoping that the Canadians will find a way of releasing him.
But this eight year plea deal on the basis that he was an alien, unprivileged enemy, belligerent, whatever the hell that is, you know, and that he had to sign a letter saying this thing, saying that he was entirely responsible for his own actions when he wasn't.
He was 15 and that he had no right under any circumstances to be in a combat situation with any or any representative of the United States military, you know, criminalizing warfare for one of the parties involved, which is not the Americans.
Absolutely ridiculous and, you know, very depressing.
But I mean, I think really, Scott, the harrowing thing about this film is to watch this poor kid in Guantanamo abandoned, not not just oppressed and abused by the American government, but abandoned by his own government.
This man, this young man is an American, is a Canadian citizen.
And the Canadians have done nothing to to help get him back.
And I've said all along, it's essentially because they projected the perceived sins of his father, who was a supporter, apparently a supporter of Osama bin Laden, who had lived with his family in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They projected all that onto this kid, made him bear the burden of the perceived sins of his father.
And that, you know, that's a terrible indictment of the way Canada has behaved as well.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, a few things there.
First of all, when you say it's a it's a kangaroo process there at Guantanamo Bay, I believe your point there is one I was trying to stress on the show earlier, which is that there is already 200 and something years worth of tradition in the evolution of the law of American military courts and courts martial.
They already know what they're doing.
That has all been thrown out and replaced by this new ad hoc thing made up partially by David Addington, partially by the courts, partially by who knows who, but only in the last 10 years.
And it really is a giant farce, isn't it?
Can you explain a little bit about the process of, you know, assuming that he had, you know, faced the charges and up to 70 years in prison for what they were charging with the war crimes?
Can you explain the process a little bit about, you know, the pressure on him to go ahead and plead guilty?
Well, sure.
I mean, I mean, to that extent, I have to say that it's probably not dissimilar from what would happen in a federal court when somebody was faced with a gigantic sentence for, you know, for material support for terrorism, let's say, and would be encouraged to make a plea deal that would enable them to not spend the rest of their lives in a prison cell, you know, in many cases for not very much at all.
I think, you know, we have a problem in the United States with material support for terrorism charges and the fact that people are getting put away for a very long time for very little indeed, often for, you know, not actually having done anything.
So it's not as though, you know, it's not that the courts are perfect either.
They're really not.
But they're not, what they're not doing is trying to transform things that aren't war crimes into war crimes, which is essentially what's happening with the military commissions, which is that, you know, Omar Khadr was involved in a firefight with US special forces in Afghanistan during a military occupation.
And yet this has been transformed into a situation whereby, you know, that combat becomes illegal.
How on earth is that possible?
Well, it's possible because it's part of the fundamental problem with the war on terror, which is that, you know, we were dealing with a massive terrorist crime, but it was, it was regarded as a war, uh, by the Bush administration.
And as a result of that, a military occupation in Afghanistan, um, led to soldiers being mixed up with terrorists and everybody's rights being removed and everybody being enemy combatants being sent to Guantanamo or other prisons having no rights whatsoever.
Um, and we haven't cleared up that mess.
So that's the problem that we're really left with is, um, you know, attempting to create war crimes, um, in trials at Guantanamo when they're not war crimes at all.
And, you know, legal experts, experts in, um, the legal processes involved in warfare told the Obama administration that as they'd previously told the Bush administration, you know, you don't want to be doing this because these are not real war crimes.
Um, but you know, it was Cheney and Addington who first brought the military commissions back from the dead in November, 2001.
The Supreme court then kicked them out in 2006 but Congress brought the military commissions back and brought them back for a second time under Obama and within the military commissions approved by the United States lawmakers worthy, you know, bogus war crimes, Congress invented them.
They essentially tweaked what Cheney and Addington had come up with, but they're not real crimes.
And so far they've got away with it.
They have their own course of reviews that they set up to review whether they think that what they're doing is, um, is accurate in the few cases that are actually proceeded to any kind of result.
And they decided so far that yes, everything's fine.
But I think objectively, you know, this whole edifice is, is built on sound.
All right.
And now, um, well, we have very little time before the break here, uh, Andy, but, uh, I was hoping you could explain real quick about the actual accusations.
I mean, really it shouldn't matter at all.
The kid was 15 and that means he's not guilty by reason of, man, he was in some circumstances and his free will wasn't really at play, but it doesn't even seem like he threw the grenade they say he threw.
And, and basically the whole case against him is a bunch of nonsense, regardless of even the ridiculousness of the process.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, in the statement they made him say, um, you know, essentially, um, overlooked the fact that I was 15.
I did it of my free will.
No, you didn't.
You were put there by your father.
They made him say, I threw the grenade.
Did he?
I've absolutely no idea whether he actually did or whether he had to say that because they told him.
I do have an idea that, you know, he didn't, there's no way.
You know, in that movie, they show Andy a picture of him that I think it's the Toronto star that unearthed this picture of this kid laying within, you know, an inch of being dead in this ditch covered in dirt and filth and whatever.
He'd been shot multiple times.
He didn't pop up out of some ditch and throw a grenade over his head like some Rambo movie or whatever.
They're liars.
They put all those words in his mouth and with torture too.
That's the part we're going to pick up on when we get back from this break with Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington.co.uk.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Andy Worthington about the movie.
You don't like the truth.
Four days at Guantanamo Bay.
Andy has nothing to do with it.
It's just that he knows everything about it and I can't get ahold of these people.
So good enough.
Now, Andy, I apologize to you and audience.
I apologize to you.
I didn't really set this up right at all.
I should have said at the beginning of this thing, Omar Cotter was 15 years old.
He was in a house that was attacked by the Delta Force.
His almost dead body was found and carted off.
And when he awoke, he was informed that he had thrown a grenade that had killed a medic.
Well, he wasn't, you know, B.J. Honeycutt saving someone's life when the grenade was thrown at him.
He was a Delta Force operative with a gun.
And it probably 90 percent, based on all reasonable information about the thing, chance it wasn't Omar Cotter that threw the grenade at him in the first place at all.
Then he was taken to Bagram prison and subjected to.
I'll let you describe the treatment there with facts and details instead of characterizing it myself, Andy.
And then he found himself at Guantanamo Bay facing this corrupt trial.
And then, of course, the interrogation, the four days worth of video footage of his interrogation by Canadian intelligence officials in this movie.
You don't like the truth.
So now that being said, could you please tell us what you know about Omar Cotter's treatment while at the American prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan?
Well, you know, I don't think he was treated very well there.
I mean, the stories that have come out are that, you know, he was interrogated while he was still extremely ill because, you know, he had been shot, as you say.
You know, I mean, you said before the break, you know, I said maybe he did throw it, maybe he didn't.
And it does look as though he didn't.
But maybe he did.
But it's wartime.
He was very badly wounded, whatever happened.
And, you know, the stories are that he was interrogated while he was still pretty ill in Bagram.
And he was riddled head to foot with shrapnel, too.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, one of the guards, Damian Corsetti, who was, you know, who was actually put on trial for the abuse of prisoners, but wasn't found guilty of that and has since become quite a serious critic of the things that soldiers were required to do.
You know, he and other prisoners have confirmed this.
He actually looked after Omar Cotter.
You know, he didn't believe that he was this terribly, badly wounded kid.
And, you know, the kind of pressure that he was being put under.
So, yeah, you know, he was abused there.
He was abused in Guantanamo.
And, you know, part of this, Scott, is really the absolute refusal of the Bush administration to regard children as children.
You know, as far as the Bush administration was concerned, you know, there was no age at which you were young enough not to have made your own decisions about what you did.
Whereas, you know, in general, the rest of the civilized world regards people under the age of 18 as being responsible, even if you were to make it under the age of 16.
You know, Omar Cotter was 15.
So, you know, what are we doing here?
Why?
Why has all this happened?
And, you know, there were at least 22 prisoners in Guantanamo who were juveniles when they were when they were seized.
And only three of these, and these were some very young boys who were Afghans, only three of them were ever held separately from the rest of the prison population and treated with anything resembling humanity and decency.
Whereas Omar Cotter wasn't.
He was just kept with the rest of the people and abused as much as the rest of the adult prisoners.
Well, you know, I'm glad that you brought up Damian Corsetti.
He's featured in this movie, Four Days in Guantanamo.
You don't like the truth.
And they describe him and they don't show it, but they say he had monster tattooed across his chest.
Here's a guy who's, you know, six and a half feet tall or more and 300 pounds of muscle.
One of those guys on TV that throws logs and log throwing contests and stuff like that, that kind of bill.
And he said, you know, I I fulfilled that role of monster.
If you were on my cell block at Bagram, forget you, man, you're in deep trouble.
This guy was, you know, and he said we were acting out all of our anger from September 11th on these people and whatever.
But when it came to Omar Cotter, this guy, the monster, the self-described, admitted, confessed monster says, oh, no, no, no.
This kid is 15 and drew a line at protecting him.
But he was pretty much alone in that.
Yeah, well, I think so.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, that's what that's what I understand is that generally people weren't treating him any differently.
And, you know, nor were they nor were they in Guantanamo, you know.
And, you know, I find that, you know, that's just particularly depressing how the amount of time that that has been involved in this, you know, and actually, you know, there is a there's a U.N. optional protocol on the rights of the child in wartime, which the United States administration signed under President Bush.
Now, they weren't signatories to that at the time that Omar Cotter was initially seized and sent to Guantanamo.
It came in, came into effect right at the end of 2002, the start of 2003.
But, you know, that is the document that requires signatory nations to rehabilitate rather than punish juvenile prisoners, those under 18 at the time their alleged crimes took place.
And, you know, America may as well not have signed that really, Scott, because, you know, what have we seen?
Well, we've seen nothing of the kind.
And again, you know, I do have to say, you know, Canada, which is a country that has reached out around the world in defending the plight of child soldiers in various other countries, you know, completely burned its own alleged child soldier when it came down to, you know, an act of immense hypocrisy, I believe.
So, you know, really, you know, very critical conclusions about both the United States and Canada when it comes to the case of Omar Cotter.
Well, and now back to this movie a little bit, some of the footage in here, there's it's pretty clear he basically comes in telling them what they want to hear.
Oh, yeah.
I met Osama bin Laden at this wedding one time and whatever the same story he's rehearsed for the CIA.
And then the next day he says, listen, I want to tell you something, but I'm afraid and whatever.
And finally he says, listen, all that stuff I told you wasn't true.
I only made that stuff up because they were torturing me and I was trying to get them to stop torturing me.
The truth is, I've never met Osama bin Laden.
You know, you say what you want about my dad, but I don't really know.
And the attitude of the Canadian military intelligence official is he doesn't even want to hear the lie.
He assumes immediately this is a lie.
Oh, this is the liar, Omar Cotter.
Where's my friend Omar Cotter from yesterday told me what I wanted to hear and whatever.
He doesn't even want to hear the lie to just to even try it out.
What do you mean you were tortured?
Oh, come on.
The Americans wouldn't torture you.
You're fine here.
Have some McDonald's and whatever.
And the kid breaks down crying, screaming for his mother, screaming, let me die.
And it goes on and on for like 20 minutes.
This 15 year old kid screaming, let me die.
Let me die.
Yeah, well, you know, he's just faking it, you know.
No, no, no.
I mean, it's really, you know, it's genuinely very, very depressing, isn't it?
And I think, you know, the power of it is broken.
His human personality, his spirit, whatever you want to call it, he is a broken person.
This 15 year old kid.
Well, absolutely, Scott.
But let's, you know, let's just focus on this footage that we have here and why it's so significant.
This is the only footage to come out of Guantanamo.
So, you know, how many other people broke down?
But we haven't seen the tapes of that.
You know, maybe not not all of them, maybe not just the 22 children in Guantanamo who I'm sure all at some point broke down crying.
But the men who broke down crying as well because of the terrible things to which they were subjected in Guantanamo, the reason that, you know, one of the reasons this is so powerful, you know, it would always be powerful in their own terms.
But it is the only footage that we've got.
We've only got this because because the Canadian court demanded that it was that it was made available.
We've never seen any other footage of anybody else suffering or being abused in Guantanamo.
Well, we know a lot of people there had it a lot worse than Cotter did.
Right.
Well, exactly.
You know, I mean, they really did, at least for a time there, Guantanamo Bay go through the full range of approved and not so approved, some copied from Fox TV type tortures down there.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
Well, Omar Khadr says that, you know, that he was kept held in a room, chained up until he urinated on himself.
And then the guards came along and got some pine scented disinfectant and used him as a mop.
So, you know, and this is at the same time, a period that lasted nearly two years from what I can understand, where, you know, people that this was a this was a regular way of getting people ready for interrogation or just generally messing with their heads was, you know, lock them up in a cell for a very long time, turn the heat up or make it very cold, short shackle them in painful positions, leave them there until they had to go to the toilet.
But there's no toilet to go to, you know, humiliate them, all this stuff, you know.
And I know Omar Khadr says that these things happen to him.
Well, why really, given everything else that we know, should we disbelieve it?
Yeah.
Well, and now, you know, the punch line here is the Canadian government is being urged by Amnesty International to arrest George Bush, presently the very same Canadian government that refused to do a thing for this kid this whole time.
Yeah, well, I'm sorry, but we're over time and I have to leave it there because I got to get Ray McGovern on the phone, Andy.
But I can't tell you how much I appreciate it, how good it is.
Talk to you again.
And I hope we can do it again sooner.
It's a pleasure, Scott.
Yeah.
And have and say hi to Ray for me.
I sure will.
OK, all right.
All right, everybody, the heroic Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington, dot co dot UK outside the law stories from Guantanamo is the movie and the Guantanamo files, the profiles of everybody as much as he could get a hold of.
And it's all online at Andy Worthington, dot co dot UK.
Please go and look at it there.
And we'll be right back very shortly.
