For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Pleased to welcome back to the show, Andy Worthington.
He is the author of the book, The Guantanamo Files, and you can find his articles at Counterpunch, Raw Story, the Future Freedom Foundation, and at Antiwar.com slash Worthington.
And his newest article, January 24th, 2009, is For Detainees, Obama Off to a Good Start.
So, let's talk about this a bit here, Andy.
First of all, welcome to the show.
Good to talk to you again.
Yeah, hello, Scott.
It's great to be back.
And now, this is almost a dream come true type of thing.
These executive orders that Barack Obama has signed on, I guess, his second day in office are basically right along the lines of what Ron Paul would have done, I think.
Shut down the ghost prisons and ordered an end to the torture, ordered a closing of Guantanamo Bay, or the closing of Guantanamo Bay.
What else?
Can you take us through and explain to us what all were in these executive orders that Obama has signed?
Well, sure, yeah.
And I think you're dead right as well.
A week ago, we couldn't really imagine what was going to happen.
We all had high hopes, but the old crew was still there.
We were still waiting to see Dick Cheney turn into Dr. Strangelove as Barack Obama got inaugurated.
And, of course, he's come in and very swiftly moved to fulfill his promises.
So, to close Guantanamo, as you say, to ban the use of torture, to close the secret prisons, it's all great.
I mean, there are obviously provisos to some of it.
He has, I think, hedging his bets just so that nobody accuses him of breaking his promises, said that he wants Guantanamo closed within a year.
Now, those of us who have been looking at the cases closely for all these years can't see how it can take a year, really, to go through the cases of most of these prisoners, chuck them out, and let's get these guys free.
You know, there's a handful of dangerous people, several dozen.
The rest of them, we just need to get this thing moving.
I mean, actually, the U.S. habeas corpus courts, the courts that have been looking at the habeas cases, have been checking out cases at quite a rate over the last few months.
Of the 23 of the 26 prisoners whose cases they've reviewed, they've said the government had no evidence.
Well, I wonder about that.
Why do you think that he's mandated that it should take a year to review these cases when, I mean, how many Justice Department lawyers do they have?
How long could it take to go through and review and send all the innocent guys home?
Well, that's what I wonder.
I mean, I just wonder whether he's just making sure that nobody says, you told us it was going to take X and it's actually going to take Y.
I mean, you know, I do think that obviously he has to tread carefully.
He's got to tread carefully so that, you know, the right wingers who are already foaming at the mouth, I mean, I'm starting to suspect that some of them are going to spontaneously combust.
They're getting so angry.
To give them less to go on, maybe that helps to say, look, you know, we're giving it a year.
But I can't see why he can't do it within, you know, three or four months, to be honest.
Yeah.
And now, so let's get to this, too.
This is a very important point you make, that there are a handful of guilty people there, and I guess the only reason they brought the handful of actual terrorists to Guantanamo was to try to, you know, taint the pool, make it look like they all were.
But we know now that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is there, that Ramzi bin al-Shibh is there, that Qatani, who I guess he, from what I understand, he didn't really even know that he was going to be the 20th hijacker, but it looks pretty likely that he was, that kind of thing.
So we know that we've got, you know, what, four or five maybe at the most of the actual bad guys, but the rest of these people are just people picked up on the battlefield or sold by the Pakistanis to the Americans during the beginning of the Afghan war, right?
Well, yeah.
You know, that's who most of them are, and that's who, you know, the majority of the people that they're still holding are exactly these people, you know, which is why it shouldn't really be that difficult for it to be sorted out.
I mean, what isn't addressed in this is what Obama's relationship is with what the courts are already doing.
You know, because they've reviewed 26 cases and then 23 of those have said, you know, you haven't managed to come up with any evidence to justify holding these men.
You know, that's pretty impressive, and these cases are still ongoing.
So in some ways, you know, the courts are already dealing with it.
He hasn't explained yet how his review is going to mesh with this, if it is.
But, you know, I think that that demonstrates pretty clearly that going through these cases, it shouldn't really be very difficult to say you haven't got any evidence here for holding this guy.
Would you let him go, please?
So that's interesting.
Now tell me about this, too, and believe me, I'm sure we'll be skipping around and getting back to Guantanamo and so forth, but the way I remember it, it was a pretty big deal when George Bush announced that he was abiding by the Supreme Court decision.
He was closing down all the CIA ghost prisons.
That's how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Sheib ended up at Guantanamo in the first place, was Bush said he was closing the ghost prisons and bringing anyone who was left in them to Guantanamo, and Barack Obama did not go along with that lie.
He came right out and closed the ghost prisons and ordered anyone still held in them to be, I don't know, brought to where, but he certainly acknowledged that they do still exist at this point and ordered them closed as well, right?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, this was the second of the three executive orders.
So the second one actually dealt with issues of how to deal with detainees, how to deal with interrogations.
I'm sure we'll go and talk about this in a minute, and also requiring the CIA to, quote, close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and telling them not to do it again in the future.
Now, obviously, there's going to be some kind of shakeup at the CIA underway anyway, but this is great.
It's great news, obviously.
Well, maybe that's why they think it'll take a year to review the cases because of all the people at the ghost prisons who've got to be brought somewhere, right?
Are they going to bring them to Guantanamo?
Well, I don't know because this statement in the order actually raises more questions than it answers in that we don't know what facilities the CIA is operating.
Now, all we really know is that a couple of guys were transferred into Guantanamo in the last 18 months after Bush had said that all the secret CIA prisons were closed, which meant that something was still operating.
And there are stories about prisons that have been or are operating in various parts of Africa still, still rumors swirling about prisoners being held on ships.
Somebody, we think, was held on the island of Diego Garcia until at least 2006.
So what has to follow on from this is a proper accounting for not only people who are in secret prisons if there still are, but what happened to all the rest of the people who were spirited away to other countries where friendly regimes were going to do the torturing on the CIA's behalf?
Because that's, you know, you can't just change the regime and say, well, I'm sorry, all those people who just got written off, we'll just forget about that, shall we?
Because that's dozens of people, probably hundreds actually.
Well, if we don't count anybody arrested in Iraq and we just stick with the, I guess, mostly rumored, in some cases documented, but mostly rumored ghost prisons in Morocco and Egypt, Thailand, Diego Garcia, ships at sea, as you mentioned, do you have any idea?
I mean, I guess if we count, I don't know if Kabul counts or not, I guess they take people from all over the world and bring them to Afghanistan where there's no law.
So it's not just people arrested in Afghanistan that are being held in Afghanistan.
So as far as those ghost prisoners, do you have any kind of idea what the numbers are?
Thousands of people?
Hundreds?
Well, I suspect that it's more hundreds.
I mean, I know that the CIA has mentioned at some point, I think Tenet might have mentioned at some point, that the program was used on less than 100 prisoners.
I'm not sure that he had the full account sheet when he was saying that.
I think it's probably more.
I would not think that it's in the thousands, but of course, you have just touched upon Afghanistan and Obama didn't mention this and hasn't yet.
The fact that thousands of people are being held there as well and are not held with even the little transparency that there is at Guantanamo.
You know, there are hundreds, about 600 at least held in Bagram.
Now, of course, that's regarded as a kind of wartime prison.
We're getting into maybe a slightly different issue, but we know also that dozens of people who are held there or have been held there were foreign prisoners basically in the same kind of situation as the Guantanamo prisoners who may or may not have done anything to have ended up there.
Well, that guy al-Masri, right?
The innocent guy that was abducted in Albania or whatever was taken there?
Oh, Khaled al-Masri.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
I mean, let's look at how many cases have surfaced of innocent people who've been transported to torture.
Al-Masri is one because he had the same name as the guy who apparently provided some information to the 9-11 hijackers.
You know, there's Maher Arar, the Canadian-Syrian, and several other Canadian-Syrians who were tortured in Syria.
We could go on.
I mean, there are others.
And these are just the ones that we found out about because they were released because somebody had made a big mistake somewhere.
So, yeah, I mean, it's going to be a lot of work, really.
And, I mean, I think for people in the field of human rights, it takes us in some ways back to those first few years of Guantanamo, scrabbling around trying to find information when no information had been made available.
But, you know, he's obviously...
Obviously, Obama's made a first big move to establish that he won't tolerate this anymore.
So, you know, it seems plausible to me that the process of finding out what's actually happened in the process that he's shutting down will be possible, but it's absolutely necessary.
Well, you know, I heard an interview on, I guess, NPR News last night, and it was, I forget the exact name of the group, but 9-11 families for war, basically, type group.
And it was a mom of a firefighter who had died on September 11th.
And she was asked, well, the interviewer quoted the judge who decides the cases, who told Bob Woodward at the Washington Post that we cannot ever try Katani, the so-called 20th hijacker.
We can't try him in military court.
We can't try him in regular court.
We can't try him in a box with a fox.
We can't do anything with this guy because we tortured him.
That was her words.
And so the lady's response from the group was, well, you know, they ought to try him anyway.
They ought to admit, you know, torture testimony or whatever, I guess, was what she was trying to say.
But then she said, well, if that can't be, and if this man must be let go because he was tortured, then I think that whoever tortured him ought to be prosecuted for ruining the case against this September 11th guy.
And I thought, hey, I think she's finally on to something here.
That's really what Bush and Cheney have done, haven't they?
They've made it almost impossible for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shib, at least.
I mean, those two guys are guilty as hell in this thing.
They've made it basically impossible to prosecute those who deserve to be prosecuted and sentenced to at least life in prison for what they've done.
Well, there's a lot of things going on in what you just said there.
So quickly, I mean, the first one about this woman claiming that the people who did the torturing so that the case couldn't happen should be held responsible, I think she's on to something.
But I think the issue for me is very much like Nuremberg, if I may make that analogy, which is that after the Second World War, the U.S. prosecutors in particular decided that they were not going to go after the soldiers who had followed orders.
They were not going to try and do everyone for war crimes.
And I would really like to see only the people who made the decisions face the music.
And we know who we're talking about.
We're talking about Cheney.
We're talking about Addington.
We're talking about Don Rumsfeld.
The principals and their lawyers.
Absolutely, because they should be held responsible.
Now, to go on to the question of can anything be done with some of these guys, well, the answer is that yes.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Sheikh both bragged about their involvement in 9-11 to an Al Jazeera reporter several months before they were caught and subsequently tortured by the Bush administration.
Now, I know that it's not easy to go into a courtroom and draw a big curtain and say, listen, we're not going to talk about this.
And the way they tried to get around it in Guantanamo, which was ridiculous, was that they sent in clean teams of FBI agents to get the guys to make the same confessions they'd made under torture, although the impact of torture would not linger.
You'd trust that a man who was tortured would actually be able to tell you the truth.
Right, or be able to tell the difference between a CIA agent and an FBI agent.
Oh, you can trust this guy.
Go ahead and be honest with him.
Right.
This other guy, you have to tell him what he wants to hear or he'll put Cheney to the floor again.
Now, you know, I think, I mean, there's three other guys that are, you know, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, you know, let's leave al-Qahtani out of this.
I mean, the guy went to Orlando.
He said that he didn't go to Orlando to meet Mohammed Atta to become a hijacker, that he went to meet him for some other reason.
This is why he's told his lies.
Now, that just may be a lie, but he never actually became a hijacker.
You know, this isn't one of the really bad guys that we're looking at.
The bad guys are the ones who were involved in making it happen.
The three other guys that are being prosecuted, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Ashid, are supposed to have been involved in financing and facilitating it.
Surely there's some kind of trail of genuine evidence to establish this that isn't related to whatever stuff they came up with when they were torturing them wherever they were.
So, you know, we have some unfortunate precedents.
One of them in particular is the Jose Padilla case, where you have a trial in a federal court, you draw a big curtain over the stuff that you don't want to talk about, and you trust that, you know, that sadly it's not really how justice should work, but that a jury who can see the evidence from traditional routes that these are bad guys will ignore the stuff that they're told to ignore and will deliver the verdict they're supposed to do.
You know, and at the end of that you say, oh my God, please let us never do anything like this again.
But, you know, it's not plausible that somebody like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to his involvement in this before it took place, is going to be let go.
That's just ridiculous.
It's not going to happen.
But what's the least bad way forward?
That's what we have to find now.
What is the least bad way forward?
Well, and that was one of the things that they were talking about on TV was that they basically, they're reviewing these cases in such a way that basically they don't want to turn any of these men over to the federal court system for trial until they're 100% certain that they're going to win.
Sure.
And, of course, it all does come down to, after it's been all this time, it comes down to what information or evidence is included or excluded at that trial.
But, yeah, I'm pretty sure that even if, you know, some crazy New York jury decided they were going to acquit Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Obama would just have the military arrested again or something, wouldn't he?
I mean, they're not going to let him go no matter what.
Well, they're not, no.
And, you know, no, they're just, it's not going to happen, is it?
I mean, you know, and to be honest, it would be ridiculous for something like that to happen.
Well, at that point, though, it's almost ridiculous to even hold a trial for him if it's kind of just a bogus trial because we all know the outcome anyway.
Well, you know, I think that we have to trust the system and know that it has its own failings rather than chucking out the system and replacing it with something which would be even less justifiable.
Right.
That's, you know, I mean, so people are talking about, let's legislate for a preventive detention policy.
Let's set up a whole new trial system.
They're both terrible ideas, you know.
A legislated preventive detention policy, isn't that what Bush wanted?
And a brand new legal system to deal with terrorists.
Well, that's exactly what Bush tried to set up as well.
And they're both, you know, total failures.
So, you know, the best that we have are the existing legal systems and they're not always perfect, you know.
Sometimes people who are innocent, the result goes the wrong way and vice versa.
And sometimes the procedure itself is messy and doesn't, you know, standing back and looking at it, it's like, really, this is not very good.
But it's the best we've got and it works.
Nothing is going to be perfect.
But, you know, it's the best we've got.
Well, and, you know, I think this is one thing too that we can be grateful for is that Obama, I mean, certainly he understands the Constitution in a much different way than I understand it.
But he at least seems to be abiding by the theory that Article 2 creates his job position and that he's bound by it and that he's bound by the law, which is, you know, wow, this is like the sun coming out after a dark storm of basically Bush and his crew pretending that he's king and that that commander-in-chief clause means that he doesn't have to obey any law at all.
That's the only clause in the Constitution during wartime.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, you know, it's all happened so quickly that, you know, it is, you know, your sunshine analogy is great, I think, because every now and then you just become aware, oh, my God, it has, it's changed.
You know, we are back in a country that abides by the rule of law and that has a man at the head of it who understands that, is steeped in it, and understands his responsibilities.
And I think, you know, his limitations as your country is set up to have a balance of powers, not a king.
And actually I have one regret, though, which is that this means, I guess, that there's zero percent chance now that George Bush and Dick Cheney will be sent to the salt pit torture dungeon there outside of Kabul, which, frankly, is too good for them anyway.
But now, you know, at the very worst, these men will have to face regular civilian trials in federal court.
And if there are any terrorists in the world who don't deserve the rule of law, it's them.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah, we've just got...
That's just my personal grudge, you understand.
Well, I mean, let's see whether, you know, whether the confession that you spoke about, you know, the convening authority of the commission's mate, Susan Crawford, who decides about the cases, you know.
I mean, that was extraordinary when she said, you know, we can't prosecute al-Qahtani because we tortured him, the first senior Bush official to admit to torture.
You know, and to go back to that, I mean, it was interesting when you were talking about it as to what was she about, what was her, you know, what was her motive.
Because this is a close friend of Dick Cheney and David Addington.
Surely not just had a conversion and seen the light.
Was she trying to suggest, well, you know, what do we do with somebody who's dangerous but we've tortured?
Was she trying to pitch for a new preventive detention or a new detention policy that would be remarkably similar to the one that's been existing at Guantanamo for all these years where you just bang people up and don't let them have a trial?
Maybe she was leading that way.
But, you know, she's admitted to it and that triggers automatically the responsibility of the authorities and this is Barack Obama and the new administration to follow, pursue those responsible under the UN Convention Against Torture and prosecute them.
I don't know how it's not going to happen, you know?
Well, in the very acts that she describes as torture are, you know, on the specific individual in question here, Katani, George Bush and Dick Cheney both have in recent interviews admitted, directly confessed on television that yes, indeed, they ordered the torture of that guy.
They didn't use the word torture, but they admit their role in ordering what she calls torture.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I'm sure that they would try and get off the hook by saying, look, we had no idea that when we packaged up all these different techniques which, you know, individually might be regarded as quite abusive, but hey, you know, this is a bad guy.
We didn't know that when they were all put into practice simultaneously that it was going to become torture.
Well, of course they didn't because they were, you know, they were attempting to redefine torture as nothing really other than death or being a vegetable.
But, you know, that's their interpretation.
The way some of the rest of us are looking at it is it doesn't matter that you didn't know that that was what was going to happen.
That was the case.
You know, and what's bigger about this is that although Al-Katani got the worst of it, the whole kind of humiliation, isolation, use of extreme heat and cold, nudity, dogs, all this stuff which came from the fear techniques from the tortured military schools that train people to resist interrogation.
You know, they were practiced on not just Al-Katani.
Like I say, he got the worst of it.
But at least 100 prisoners in Guantanamo were subjected to the same kind of treatment.
And it was Crawford herself who has admitted, look, bundling these all together, they amount to torture.
So, you know, it's not an isolated case.
It's not just, oh, well, we did this to Mohammed Al-Katani.
No, you were doing this as a general policy.
This is the kind of stuff that was going on in Abu Ghraib.
This is the kind of stuff that was happening all over the prisons in Afghanistan.
And that also happened to at least 100 of the prisoners who were held in Guantanamo.
And you've got to answer to it.
Let me ask you, what's the footnote for at least 100 at Guantanamo?
Well, how do I know that figure?
Yeah.
Well, there's somebody who worked at Guantanamo, an intelligence official who spoke to the New York Times about it.
In late 2004, it was actually, but who was talking about the implementation of these policies and said it wasn't everybody, but it was applied to around one in six of the prisoners at Guantanamo in this period, 2003 to 2004.
Now, at that time, there were somewhere around 650 prisoners.
So, you know, therefore that means it's about 100, 110 people.
And, I mean, it's very clear from looking at the stories of the prisoners in detail, not who all of them are, but, you know, it happened to all the Europeans, for example.
It happened to anybody who spoke English.
It happened to anybody who'd lived in America.
They thought they were part of a sleeper cell.
You know, it seems to happen randomly to some people.
I mean, there were random Afghans, and, I mean, I really do mean random, who were subjected to this kind of stuff, you know.
There's one of the prisoners who was captured with Dilawar.
Now, Dilawar, I'm sure you know the name, is the taxi driver who was beaten to death in Bagram.
Yeah, the subject of the documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side.
The subject of Taxi to the Dark Side.
Now, Dilawar was the taxi driver, and in the back of his taxi were these two passengers.
Well, they were lucky.
They didn't get beaten to death in Bagram, but they got sent to Guantanamo, and they spent about a year and a half there before they were finally released.
And one of these guys, after he came out, was talking about all this stuff that they did to him, the isolation cells, the heat and cold.
What on earth were they playing at, you know?
They should have known from the beginning that, you know, the taxi driver of the murdered innocent guy was really not somebody who should have been there.
But, you know, he was one of the, as I say, the 100 or the 110 or whatever the exact figure is.
These people who were subjected to this combination of abusive techniques, which Crawford herself, I think, really has admitted rose to the level of torture.
Well, and we know from that movie that the only reason that this guy, the taxi driver Dilawar, and his passengers were arrested and Dilawar tortured to death and his passengers sent to Guantanamo is because a local warlord, they call them, on the American payroll in Afghanistan, was shelling his own base so that he could say, oh, no, I'm being shelled.
Give me more money and more guns.
Absolutely, yes.
I think it was the son of the warlord, actually, who eventually ended up in Bagram.
I don't know what happened to him in the end.
But him and his father are responsible for the false imprisonment of quite a number of Afghans in Guantanamo.
I think they've all been released.
I can't be absolutely certain about that, Scott.
It's funny.
There were six prisoners released just days before the Bush administration finally left office, and one of those was an Afghan, and he was an Afghan who had been working for the Karzai government and had been betrayed.
The rivals of his who were affiliated with the Taliban had told a pack of lies to the U.S. forces about him, and he ended up in Guantanamo, and it's taken until all this time for him to be released.
So these kind of travesties of justice still linger at Guantanamo.
There are still, to be blunt, completely innocent men imprisoned in that wretched place.
Yes, and Time magazine, I guess in 2006 or something, published the logs, the torture logs, from Qatani.
This is where they basically go through and where the torturers kept notes on what tortures they were doing.
I'm not sure if it's mentioned in there, but something that we've been hearing about more and more is the frequent flyer program where someone is moved from a cell, solitary confinement cell, from cell to cell to cell to cell, like less than once every hour, or more often, I mean, than once every hour to keep them from ever being able to get any sleep, etc., like that.
That's torturing.
I think it averaged somewhere between three and four hours that they stayed in one place before they were moved.
But this was over a period of weeks, months in some cases.
Yeah, clearly.
I'm sure we've discussed this before, but the problem for a lot of people is that they think sleep deprivation is like, yeah, yeah, make you a bit grumpy.
It's like, no, no, no, come on, just think about this one.
Every three or four hours, two and a half, three, four hours, they come to the cell that they just put you in.
They wake you up again.
They move you to another one.
It doesn't last for a few nights.
It lasts for weeks.
It did happen.
I think that it happened over the course of months for some of the prisoners in Guantanamo.
We're not talking about the stuff that happened to people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
We're talking about this happening to people who were either completely innocent or they may have been foot soldiers for the Taliban who'd gone out to fight some other Muslims before 9-11.
What did they know about anything?
The thing is, too, is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserves to be locked in a cage and have to pace back and forth, but even he doesn't deserve to be tortured.
I mean, Jesus Christ, man.
I thought the whole point of this thing was protecting Western civilization or something.
We do that by becoming barbarians?
Well, no, that's the thing, isn't it?
The thing is that you always have to be very careful not to go over to the dark side, you know, where Cheney deliberately took the United States.
But, yeah, I mean, if you embrace the techniques of your enemy, you become your enemy.
So let us hope that we're now back in a place where we have somebody who respects, you know, the greater things about the United States and not, you know, open the Pandora's box of the most monstrous things imaginable, which is what, of course, we've all been having to put up with for the last seven years.
Well, I'll bring up this.
I read in the New York Times last week that, or over the weekend, I guess, that one of the released from Guantanamo Bay has gone and become a terrorist leader in Yemen.
And they say he was involved in a car bombing already and that the intelligence guys say, like, yep, there he is.
Do you know who it is that they're talking about, whether those accusations are credible at all?
Or, you know, I guess if they are credible, what do you think of the implications?
Well, you know, I'm slightly suspicious of the timing, and it may be this is an accurate story, but there's no evidence being put forward to prove that this is the case.
The thing is there is, there was a guy called Saeed al-Shiri in Guantanamo.
He was released from Guantanamo at the end of 2007.
I don't know.
I don't know whether it's the case.
The timing strikes me as really quite suspicious.
At least the link in the story.
There was nothing in his story to suggest that he, you know, that he had particularly militant tendencies.
But, you know, maybe he was one of a small number of people who were radicalized by their horrendous experiences in Guantanamo.
You know, people always ask me about this.
And I say, well, you know, it's remarkable really how many people who are not, you know, people who are into militancy and people who are people of faith can manage to go through the Guantanamo experience to come out the other end, not baying for the death of Americans, you know.
Right.
Yeah.
That really is remarkable in itself.
But, I mean, maybe this is the case.
Or maybe it's the case that they didn't know who he was and they, you know, and they let go a guy who was one of the bad guys.
Now, you know, what we also had a couple of weeks ago was this pack of lies from the Pentagon about how 61 people had returned to the battlefield.
You know, totally untrustworthy because in the past the Pentagon has described returning to the battlefield as speaking out about what happened to you while you were in Guantanamo, writing a book, making a film.
Talking to Scott Horton on the radio would be one.
Now, you know, so this is all a farce.
But, you know, I would like to just get to the bottom of one thing here, which is that any prison system has a failure rate, has a recidivism rate, you know.
You put people in prison for a certain amount of time.
You release them.
What happens?
Some of these guys go and do crimes again.
Now, even with the most ludicrous figures that have been pulled out of a hat by the Pentagon, the recidivism rate is still less than 10%.
Now, you know, I'm not backing up the Pentagon.
It's a load of rubbish what they're talking about.
What we're talking about is a few percent.
But that is so much more impressive than, you know, the legal system on the U.S. mainland, for example.
So what's getting to people here?
Is it that they wish that no prisoner should ever be released under any circumstances who may commit a crime?
You see where this is going?
Yes.
Anybody who commits a crime should be in prison forever.
That's the logical extension of this.
And, you know, what we're talking about is the fact that there's no absolute guarantee that somebody that you free isn't going to cause trouble again.
But, you know, we have a world in which certain types of crimes somehow seem to be considered normal, and then there are the terrorists.
So you've got a guy who, you know, has this guy ever killed anybody?
Well, I don't know.
But what happens within the legal system?
People get sentenced.
They serve a sentence.
They may be a murderer.
They may be released from prison.
They may murder somebody again.
If we follow the kind of drift of punishment and detention like this, then really we're just talking about, you know, oh, well, let's be very careful and just bang everybody up forever.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Well, and it cuts back to the issue of torture because I don't think I've ever heard of, you know, a regular common criminal in America who went to prison and hated the prison so much that they decided that they were going to keep being a criminal just to get revenge against the people who had imprisoned them or something.
I mean, that's what we're talking about when you're talking about a torture dungeon.
And, you know, in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright and Zarqawi by Loretta Napoleone, they talk about how both of these guys were nobodies until they were tortured.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was the, you know, father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate of some guy who was involved in the Sadat assassination.
But he got rounded up with all the rest of them, and then they tortured him in prison.
That is, the American puppet dictator, fascist, Islamo-fascist dictatorship there in Egypt tortured him.
And then he became Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Islamic Jihad and eventual partner of Osama bin Laden.
Yeah, sure.
No, absolutely.
And Zarqawi was just a two-bit rapist.
He was a nobody until he was tortured in prison in Jordan.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, no, I mean, absolutely.
I agree with you.
I mean, as I say, that's what impresses me about the fact that the majority of the people who've been released in Guantanamo have not been transformed in that kind of manner.
The fact is that, you know, somebody who was fulfilling what they thought was some obligation to help the Taliban fight, all these hundreds of completely innocent people who were held in Guantanamo, you know, it was their faith that got them through this.
It was not anger that got them through this.
It was their faith.
You know, and that's an extraordinary thing.
And I've been deeply impressed by it on the occasions when I've met people who clearly have been, you know, to hell and back, but don't bear malice.
You know, I'm amazed.
How many of them have you interviewed personally?
Well, I mean, I've personally met, you know, kind of several dozen or had communications with probably several dozen of the released prisoners.
Wow.
Now, do you have any of those on audio or video, or these are all just for your notes for writing articles?
Well, no.
I mean, there's some that, you know, yeah, some of them I've interviewed actually, Scott.
I mean, I'm close to finishing a documentary, which, you know, maybe it will stand as an epitaph of Guantanamo, but it involves interviews with some of the released prisoners.
It's an attempt really to tell the story that I tell in the book about the, you know, the chronic and colossal failure of the Bush administration to do anything that it set out to do, which was, you know, to bring to justice the people who were actually responsible for what happened, and the 95% of people who they shouldn't have rounded up but did, and, you know, and how appallingly they were treated, and as I say, how so many of them came out the other end, you know, remarkably lacking in bitterness, really.
Well, let's take this time to celebrate the progress that has been made.
It's not over yet by a long shot, and we'll certainly be keeping up with your articles at antiwar.com slash Worthington and on this show until the last of this is resolved.
Thank you very much for your time, Andy.
Scott, it's a pleasure as always.
Cheers.
All right, everybody, that's Andy Worthington.
He's a historian based in London, the author of The Guantanamo Files.
He writes for Raw Story, FFF.org, the Future Freedom Foundation.
For Counterpunch and for antiwar.com, his antiwar.com archives are at antiwar.com slash Worthington.
His own personal website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
