05/06/09 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, it's my pleasure.
Welcome back to the show.
Andy Worthington, he's the author of the Guantanamo Files.
He writes for Counterpunch, for the Future Freedom Foundation, for us at Antiwar.com.
That would be original slash antiwar.com slash Worthington, and probably a bunch of other places I forget to mention.
His website is andyworthington.co.uk, and he's the expert on Guantanamo.
And it's, I'm not sure what you're supposed to call them, detainees.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you?
I'm alright, Scott.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I make a point of not calling them that.
I call them what they are, which is prisoners.
Well, see, I was thinking that calling them prisoners implied that there was some sort of legal framework, like that's an actual term, where what they really are is, you know, kidnappees outside the law.
Well, I guess, I don't know, I guess, are they outside the law at this point?
Maybe not.
They are and they aren't, to be honest.
I think, Scott, there's a little bit of conflict going on between the Obama administration and its interdepartmental review that was established, you know, when Obama came in, and the current habeas corpus cases which are proceeding through the court.
You know, both of these things are happening simultaneously, which takes precedence, I don't know.
There have been some ferocious complaints recently from lawyers, sorry, from judges in the district courts who are dealing with the habeas cases that the Justice Department lawyers are dragging their heels inconsolably in presenting evidence that's necessary for the defense.
You know, why would that be?
Because it seems that the Obama administration wants the fate of these men to be dependent on its own review, you know, which has nothing to do with us and we don't know how they're going to go about it, rather than to allow the judges and the lawyers who've been, you know, fighting for years to get rights for these men to go ahead with that procedure.
So, a bit of a mess, really.
I was going to say, yeah, it sounds all very straightforward.
Not really meaning it, of course.
When has it ever been straightforward with Grant Adamos, Scott?
Yeah, no, I guess, no, it never has been.
Well, it's pretty straightforward from where I'm sitting as far as, you know, how it ought to be instead, but how to get from here to there.
Boy, I'm glad I'm not in the Office of Legal Counsel and who knows whether, you know, the good people in there, because I know that there are people in there who were, you know, the people who blogged over at Balkanization, Jack Balkan's blog.
These were the anti-torture, anti-unitary executive lawyers are now in the OLC, right?
Yep, I think there's something like that going on.
Who knows if they'll really have the power to make it their way now?
Well, I mean, you know, I don't think we have anything to worry about to the extent that clearly, you know, more capable and reasonable people are taking up positions in the government.
I mean, certainly let's not forget that in the Justice Department you, I think, had to demonstrate that you either had the political sensibilities of Sarah Palin or was slightly to the right of her to get a job in the Bush administration's Justice Department.
You know, imagine a place run by Alberto Gonzales.
It's grief.
So, you know, it's obviously better, but when we're talking about, you know, the actual power, the actual decision-making, then, of course, it's starting to get a little more complicated and a little bit more worrying, I think.
You know, I mean, one of my worries has been from the very beginning that keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary to provide some sort of bridging continuity may well have made sense, but, you know, what, he's permanently in the fold now?
And how many other Bush officials are in the Pentagon?
You know, and certainly when it comes to some of the Guantanamo processes, some of those people are still there.
So I wonder what's going to happen to the people who, I mean, there are a few, and I don't know how many you would categorize as, like, actually guilty.
I mean, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was clearly best buddies with Mohammed Atta and was in on this thing.
And so, you know, they say Qatani, if he'd been allowed into the country, was under instructions to become one, you know, would have become one of the hijackers, something like that.
These people who actually had something to do with the attack on the country, which as far as I know can be counted on one hand like that, what's to happen to them?
Can they be prosecuted?
I mean, what are the different options?
I mean, I'm reading in the New York Times here where they're saying the U.S. may revive Guantanamo military courts and not even bother trying to put these men into the American courses.
And I guess that's a recognition that there's no way they could convict these men after the way they tortured them under regular American law, huh?
Well, you know, I really don't think so, actually.
What was kind of ironic last week was that on the same day that Robert Gates was mentioning these things, it was the day that Ali al-Mahri, the last U.S. enemy combatant, the guy who was sent to the United States to head up a sleeper cell, you know, admitted in court that, yes, this was the case and, you know, and came to a prearrangement where the actual sentence is yet to be decided.
Now, this appears to be a pretty straightforward victory for the court system, even though it's worked out that it's being done through a plea rather than through actually going to trial.
If it had gone to trial, it would be rather difficult to circumvent the missing years when al-Mahri was held in complete solitary confinement in a U.S. military brig rather than being held in part of a normal court system.
When this decision was announced, that was when Eric Holder stood up and said, look, this shows that the federal courts can handle terrorism cases, that we can operate within the law.
So this is the same day, the same day you've got Eric Holder saying this, the attorney general, and then on the other hand you've got all this talk about Guantanamo and, oh, no, we can't, it's going to be far too difficult with the problems with the evidence, the prosecuting these guys in the federal courts, let's resurrect the military commissions, the new trial system invented in November 2001 by, let's not forget this, by Dick Cheney and by David Addington.
You want to preserve anything these guys came up with?
Are you crazy?
You know, I think they're not trusting themselves.
I think people are sitting around there saying, well, they might get off.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, let's not talk about they might get off.
They're not going to get off.
Why don't you choose where you have these trials?
Put them in places that are not known for having liberal juries.
You know, let's start playing around a bit with what we're allowed to talk about and not, if you want.
Most people will accept a trial that's moderately not as open as it should be in the cases of a handful of genuinely dangerous guys, to see justice done after the way that justice has been denied for so many years.
You know, nothing is going to end up clean at the end of all this.
It's a disgraceful story, everything that happened.
But, you know, you're talking about letting the genuinely dangerous guys walk free?
Well, no, of course not.
And to be honest, no jury in the United States is going to let the genuinely dangerous guys walk free.
So long as there's evidence that can be produced, independently of all the terrible stuff that happens to them in CIA custody, that these were the bad guys, you know?
Do you think a jury is going to let them off the cuff?
I don't.
Yeah, well, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Youssef, who murdered six people at the World Trade Center in 1993, is rotting in the Supermax one-piece concrete cell confinement there at Terre Haute, I believe, in Indiana, and last I heard, found Christianity and is a model prisoner.
Why shouldn't his uncle be in there right next to him?
Well, right, exactly.
And the reason that it's difficult to envisage his uncle being in there right next to him is because of what happened to him in those three and a half years before he was moved to Guantanamo.
But, you know, get over your qualms about it.
If this is a guy who genuinely did do bad things, then let's trust the courts, even under these difficult circumstances.
Let's trust the courts and the people to deliver the right judgment.
Well, and I don't know the exact rules of evidence in New York District Court or whatever, but it would seem to me, like, for example, the testimony of, I forget how to say his name correctly, from Al Jazeera that got the interview with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shiv would be enough to send both of them to life in prison forever in a Supermax.
Well, you know, you would think so, wouldn't you?
I mean, obviously, you know, it could be stated, well, hey, these guys were just bragging about something that they didn't do.
But let's face it, you know...
Yeah, right, well, tell that to the New York jury and see how far it gets you.
There's more evidence than that, Scott, that's a thing.
And the key to this is some of the other, I think, I presume, but some of the other people who have...
It has been stated that they were involved in the 9-11 attack.
You know, all we've ever had over the years is that these were guys who were slung into a black hole where the CIA decided that it would leave the civilized world and start torturing.
What else was that for?
With people who had information that was available by normal means, what on earth were they playing at?
You know, they embarked on a policy where they thought, hey, but torturing people gets stuff out of them that we don't get any other way.
You know, I mean, it's a shame, you know?
It makes me angry, but it's a shame that all of that went ahead, that, you know, the deluded people who had no history of either military service or interrogation who were running the United States, you know, pushed that against all the advice of people with genuine experience who told them from the beginning, it's illegal, it's wrong, it's counterproductive, we would end up in a terrible mess, and here we are.
Well, now, so let's get into some of the detail of this Almari case.
You know, under the law of America, he was supposedly presumed innocent.
As he said, he started into the court system and then was taken off to Charleston, South Carolina, not to Guantanamo.
He was held on an American naval station on American soil there and presumably given the Padilla treatment the whole time, although I don't know whether that story has come out yet.
You, I'm sure, know better than me.
But it's, I think, really important that his plea deal, you know, rather than going through a trial, he pled out and got a 15-year sentence.
And it seemed to me like if this guy was in Al Qaeda's sleeper cell who was working directly for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden and his job was to come here and murder Americans, what the hell kind of plea deal is that?
15 years.
There are people in jail doing a hell of a lot longer time than that for smuggling pot.
Well, yes.
You know, and I have to say that I don't know.
I mean, I can only presume that on the basis of what happened, you know, this deal was negotiated that if he didn't go for the negotiated deal, then they were going to press for a 30-year sentence.
Presumably him accepting half of that is based on the fact that, yes, he did do what he testified to.
Now, it's just possible that he thought, well, no, but I can't get off the stuff I've been accused of, so I'm going to settle for, you know, whatever's the easiest.
I'm presuming that that's not the case.
We don't know what he's going to get because there are going to be challenges based, I think, understandably, Scott, on the basis that he spent three-and-a-half years getting the Padilla treatment in chronic isolation.
I think 16 or 18 months at that time he was held totally incommunicado.
The same thing, the blackouts, the regime of abuse that had come from the CIA program, the Army training program that was used at Guantanamo and that spread to everywhere else in the war on terror.
It was very hard.
I mean, as Padilla did and as did, yes, Hamdi, the other guy who went through this when they did, because even in Guantanamo, you know, people were moved out of isolation at some point and had people in neighboring cells that they could talk to.
These guys had nothing, nobody.
You know, it was really, really very extreme.
I think people forget about Hamdi.
The American citizen born in Louisiana, arrested supposedly, according to the liars, but maybe this part is true, on the battlefield supposedly in Afghanistan under some circumstance, and he was really the precedent, just like Padilla, even though Padilla was arrested on American soil, it was a bit different case, but he was, I guess, to be a major test case for the president's powers, and then they let him go and sent him back to Saudi Arabia.
Has he talked to the media and explained, you know, what the Hamdi treatment amounted to while he was in military custody, CIA custody here?
I've never heard a word from him, actually, but, I mean, you know, we've never heard anything from any released Saudi prisoner unless they're people who've gone through the rehabilitation program, and Hamdi went back home before then.
The rehabilitation program?
Yeah, the Saudi government has set up a program of re-education and supporting former Guantanamo prisoners and people who were caught trying to get into Iraq, people who've fallen for the jihadi line.
They re-educate them and present them with religious teachers who tell them that the people that they've been listening to are lunatics, and they've been supporting them in getting them back into society.
You know, the U.S. government has backed this one, and although there have occasionally been these stories of one or two people going through the program and then returning to terrorism, nobody's really bothered to study the recidivism rate, which is a few percent in the case of people released from Guantanamo compared to, I think at the last count, something like 60 to 70 percent from the U.S. jail system.
Well, there's a major war party talking point, which is that there's a 60 percent recidivism rate from Guantanamo itself.
Well, no, they tried to claim that it's 60 prisoners, but they're on about 10 or 11 today.
Oh, I'm sorry, that's right, 60 prisoners.
What was the story there?
Well, they've never backed it up.
You know, we know from studies that have been undertaken, particularly by guys at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, that when the Pentagon first started brandishing these figures around, returning to the battlefield meant taking part in a documentary about Guantanamo, attending a conference, I mean, ludicrous stuff, you know.
And they've never adequately substantiated who all these people are.
Myself and others who've studied it know that there's a small percentage, but I think the last time that Robert Gates spoke, I suppose, he said that it was about four percent.
You know, the fact is, why on earth should there be a zero recidivism rate in Guantanamo, especially given what happened to these guys, which, as everybody says, you know, surely that would turn you into a terrorist.
And I've said before, well, no, becoming a terrorist is not really a lifestyle choice.
I mean, it takes a certain amount of work to get into that position.
But, you know, the way they were treated, are they going to be not happy about it?
Well, you would think so.
But it's a very small rate of recidivism compared to any other legal penal system that's been established anywhere.
So let's get away from this talk about, you know, if one person is released from Guantanamo and turns up regarding the Americans as the enemy, you know, I'm not going to worry about this until it turns out that it's hundreds of people.
Because what are you talking about?
On this basis, what are you going to do?
You're going to have prisons and you're never going to let anybody out because of the recidivism rate.
I mean, it's topsy-turvy, really.
Well, yeah, and especially when, you know, it's sad but ironic.
But, you know, if you read Lawrence Wright, his work, The Looming Tower, where he really goes back into the history of Ayman al-Zawahiri or Zawahiri or whatever, and also Loretta Napoleone's work on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, both of these guys were tortured in dungeons by American-backed dictators in Egypt and Jordan.
And that's what turned Zarqawi from a two-bit rapist nobody into a leader of suicide brigades.
And Zawahiri, I don't think he was ever a two-bit rapist, but he was like the four degrees of separation or six degrees of separation removed from the plot to assassinate Sadat or something.
And so it was the torture that turned him into the monster that he is now.
Well, I mean, it's one way of looking at it, but that might be the case.
I mean, I suspect that, you know, my way of looking at it would be that he was probably deeply unpleasant and with tendencies towards that kind of militarism at the beginning.
But I think that what happened to him certainly gave him a kind of edge that wouldn't have happened had he not been treated in that way and turned him into, you know, one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world.
Yeah, I sure didn't mean to, you know, spin him as some great guy.
In fact, there's footage in The Power of Nightmares, I believe, documentary, has footage of Zawahiri in a cage.
That's right, yeah.
And everybody's rioting and mad and yelling in some strange language I can't understand.
And then Zawahiri stands up to talk to the camera and everybody shuts their mouth and sits down and he goes on this, you know, long rant about what's going on and what have you.
And obviously, you know, speaking for everybody else there, you know, it's like he turns a prison riot silent by standing up and preparing to talk.
And that was from, I don't know when, but I guess way back in the early 80s or something like that.
Yeah, sometime in the 80s, yeah.
Yeah, and it's powerful, isn't it?
Yeah, that's a great documentary, by the way, for people who have never heard of that.
The Power of Nightmares, I'm sure there's somewhere online you can watch the whole thing.
And I think that's a real great, not perfect, but a really good kind of backgrounder in what this bogus terrorism war is about.
It's got, you know, I wanted just to go back to what you were saying about Ali al-Marri, because you were saying, you know, if this was such a bad, dangerous guy, how come he's ended up with 15 years?
And I think, honestly, that's what it looks like he's ended up with 15 years because of what was done to him that was illegal.
You know, and so what has transpired is a result, and that is not the result that would have happened very possibly had none of this torture and extreme isolation taken place.
But that's the kind of lesson, really, you know.
This is what you get when you step outside of the law with prisoners.
And it may be that these kind of deals are maybe what would have to take place in the case of other people.
Now, I'm not talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
I'm not talking about Ramzi bin Al-Sheib.
However many, the small handful of people who seem to have had their hands directly or over the 9-11 attack.
But it may be that deals will have to be cut to some extent, you know, on the part of some of these other guys who are in Guantanamo.
Because, you know, very frankly, I know that Lieutenant Colonel Daryl Vanderveld, who was the prosecutor who resigned from the military commission in September last year, he's talked about the changes that would be required, the fundamental changes that would be required to the military commissions that would bring them almost in line with courts martial for them to be something that was legally acceptable.
It worries me that they're even talking about it at all.
But if they are going to do it, they really need to read what Daryl Vanderveld said.
They need to listen to people who are telling them about the complete, the complete overhaul of the system, you know, to get rid of the Cheney and Addington figures who are still involved in the administration of it.
They're still in their jobs.
Susan Crawford, the convening authority.
Get rid of these people.
Listen to everybody who tells them how to make it legally acceptable if they're going to do it.
And it will be like the courts martial.
Because the last thing that anybody needs is for them to go off and come up with a moderated version of this disgraceful trial system that was invented by Cheney and Addington, you know, that failed miserably in its seven-year history.
And do they want that?
I mean, OK, that will keep these guys in prison for, you know, X years more without actually having to deal with what they're going to do with them.
But, you know, what happened when Bush and Cheney were booted out of the White House was that a significant number of American people wanted there to be a change in the way that the law had been abused by the predecessors.
You know, obviously, you know, I've spoken to so many Americans at so many levels who have found it disgraceful that a nation founded on the rule of law was so cruelly led astray by these guys.
So, you know, you need to find a way to deal with these people properly, not to go wandering into a disgracefully failed system thinking that if you tweak it, maybe it will work the second time around.
I mean, I am genuinely shocked that they're contemplating it.
I really am.
Well, yeah, and you know, this goes back to something that we've talked about before, which is kind of the larger picture of the abandonment of the best parts of the old Anglo-American tradition like habeas corpus and innocence until proven guilty and no cruel and unusual punishment and the very kind of basics.
And I guess the thing I want to get at here is the, well, if you look at the neocon dream of a new American century and a Pax Americana where, you know, no near-peer rival ever rises up to challenge us again because we're so dominant all over the world, if they're going to be able to get anybody else in the world to actually want to go along with that, they're going to have to like us, not just fear us.
I mean, if that's what they're really trying to establish here, it just seems like from the point of view of a purist libertarian, like if Harry Brown had been elected in 2000 instead of George Bush, or even from the point of view of Dick Cheney, you know, the monster, it seems like the way to more successfully get what their goals would be accomplished would be to play it cool, to show the example of see how good we are?
You see how nice it is to have a constitutional republic where the rule of law reigns and where even in the worst of times we know we can rely on it to get the right thing done?
And that's supposedly what they want is to have the whole world follow us and yet they completely show themselves to be the world's worst hypocrites on even the most basic issues such as letting somebody face their accuser and get a hearing in front of a jury, you know, the most basic things like that.
Sure, sure.
I mean, I'll tell you what worries me beyond all the torture revelations that have come out in such quantities since the last time we talked, beyond the perennial issue of like, you know, please, will you get on with closing Guantanamo, I understand that there's only a few dozen people in there who you should be concerned about, do whatever it takes to get the rest of them out, please, just get on with it.
Behind all that, there are two military operations ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, which are also based on the Rumsfeld approach to detention and interrogation, which, you know, overlaps and parallels the CIA's version of that, which is that the first thing that you do is that you tear up the Geneva Convention.
Now, you know, I think that it's clearly time for the United States to stop pursuing aggressive and pointless wars that benefit only a handful of arms companies and I would like to see the United States get out of both countries as soon as possible and I would like then to see, okay, well, let's say that America now faces a problem where there's another war that's going to take place.
Well, the first thing that I want to know for America to have reclaimed the law, to be a nation of laws, is that when that happens and people are captured, the first thing they see pinned up on the wall is a copy of the Geneva Convention.
But we get back to that because I don't know what's going on.
You know, the Obama administration came in and Obama said, right, that's it, all interrogations by the Army field manual, you know, we're sticking to the rules, no more inhumane treatment, and then they wouldn't let anybody examine what's going on at Bagram.
Now, Bagram is not run as a conventional prisoner of war camp.
You know, it doesn't meet those criteria in any way at all.
Yeah, it's the same.
It's just Guantanamo only in Afghanistan.
I guess full of a bunch of people who weren't even arrested in Afghanistan.
They were brought there just because it's the new Guantanamo, right, and really fast now.
That's the particularly bad issue there is that there are foreign prisoners captured in other countries who were taken there who are essentially the same as the Guantanamo prisoners, except that they have no rights whatsoever.
You know, and Judge John D. Bates recently kicked the government very hard when it claimed that it didn't want to give any rights to them and extended the Supreme Court's remedial decision that the prisoners in Guantanamo have habeas corpus rights to the Bagram, to these foreign Bagram prisoners, and good on him.
We'll have to keep our eye on that and have you back to see how that very important point develops, but I've got to let you go right now.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much, everybody.
Andy Worthington from AndyWorthington.co.uk.
The book is The Guantanamo Files.
Thanks again, Matt.
My pleasure, Scott.