06/25/09 – Andy Worthington – The Scott Horton Show

Hi y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
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Wow, this coffee is really starting to kick in I think.
All right, our next guest on the show is Andy Worthington.
He's the author of the Guantanamo Files.
You can often find what he writes at Counterpunch, at the Future Freedom Foundation, at antiwar.com, and at his great blog, andyworthington.co.uk.
Welcome back to the show, Andy.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Welcome back to the show.
Well, it's nice to be here.
I don't know whether I've had as much coffee as you, though.
Well, I'm on about a pot and a half now.
We'll see what happens as the afternoon progresses.
All right, so tell me, who is Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi?
Well, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi is possibly the most famous ghost prisoner of the CIA and the Bush administration that many people still haven't heard of.
He's a man who was picked up at the end of 2001, as were the majority of the prisoners in Guantanamo, and who died in mysterious circumstances in a Libyan prison about six weeks ago.
Now, what's particularly interesting about al-Libi is that when he was picked up, he was actually questioned initially by the FBI, the heroes in the Bush administration interrogation story, the people who didn't believe in using torture, who believed in playing by the book.
And they actually said that al-Libi had started to be helpful.
He was communicating well with them.
And then somebody high up, let's say Dick Cheney, and the CIA decided that this wasn't really good enough, and this was not the way to get information.
So they trapped him into a small box and sent him out to Egypt, where he was tortured.
And the famous thing that happened during his torture in Egypt was that he confessed that there was a link, a non-existent link, between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Well, and a very serious one, right, that Saddam Hussein had trained them how to use chemical weapons on Americans.
That's right.
Chemical and biological weapons.
And, you know, I mean, this was actually regarded with enormous suspicion by some of the intelligence agencies right from the word go, but not Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney decides what the truth is and then molds the facts to go with it.
He's still doing that to this day, of course.
And he used this as part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq.
And peddled it to Colin Powell, who was very doubtful about it.
Peddled it as new information, even though it was actually old and discredited.
And kind of cajoled Colin Powell into presenting this to the UN a month before the invasion of Iraq began.
I actually talked with Lawrence Wilkerson, who was a colonel at the time and Colin Powell's aide.
And he said, you know, I was there and George Tenet came in and he lied to us, man.
He told us that this information was good and we believed him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I've spoken.
I've spoken today with them as well.
And, you know, I think that's the case.
I mean, it may not be, but I mean, you know, why would it not be given what we know about the secrecy and the lawless mission of Cheney and, you know, his fellow conspirators?
Well, you know, Powell, he knew he was out there to sell us an aggressive war and that it was illegal and wrong for all the reasons that he knew it was.
The same ones that we knew at the time.
And he knew he was, you know, out there basically telling, even if he was taking what he thought were little truths, he was weaving a big lie out of it and he knew it good and well.
So it's beside that point.
But this is part of what became major ammunition in the propaganda of the war party in the run up to the war.
I mean, they really relied on this, George Bush and others in his administration, as well as all the, you know, propagandists on TV used this over and over again.
Absolutely.
But they didn't care less if it was up to them whether there was any legitimate reason for invading Iraq.
But, you know, they were aware that people wanted there to be a legitimate reason.
So they very much needed something like this.
All right, now, this guy's dead now.
Where did he die and how did he die?
Well, you know, he went on quite a journey before he ended up in Libya, which was what I was kind of able to put together.
What had happened was that I'd spoken to a released British prisoner who's originally from Libya, Omar Dagayes, and he told me that he'd spoken to somebody in Libya who had actually met al-Libi in the Libyan prison he was held at before he died.
He had explained to him the torture tour that he had been taken on by the CIA.
And the places that are mentioned, you know, they fit with stories that have been mentioned before and I have no reason to doubt the truth of it on that basis, really.
So he not only went to Egypt, he was taken to Morocco, he was taken to Mauritania, that's in Western Africa.
He was taken to Jordan.
And then he was taken to Afghanistan, where he spent time in at least three secret CIA prisons there, including one that's not very well known.
The horrible thing, really, that I was told about his story, particularly in the African prisons, was that in each place people were brought before him who he was required to identify.
And, you know, of course we know that he wasn't being treated well when he was on this torture tour.
So torture and a large number of witnesses paraded in front of him kind of expands the torture story really quite horribly in my mind.
And one of the things that I mentioned, went into in the article, was about how other prisoners have pointed out that they were shown photographs.
In fact, this happened to all the Guantanamo prisoners.
It also happened to high-value prisoners.
As far as I can see, this is widespread throughout the war on terror.
It's a very easy way to put pressure on people and to get them to make false confessions about people.
They called it the family album when it was used in the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan before Guantanamo.
Show people photographs of other people that you have, either that you've captured or that, you know, you want to know about.
Put pressure on them and get them to come up with stories about them.
And as we're seeing from the court cases, the habeas corpus cases in Guantanamo, most of what purports to be evidence on the government's part is confessions made by other prisoners.
And these guys are unreliable.
They were either tortured, coerced in some other way.
They were bribed, given better conditions.
There were some notorious lies in Guantanamo as a result of that.
And in some cases there were people with severe mental health issues.
And I think in every case this photo album, the family album, comes into it.
You know, what's easier really?
Show somebody a picture of somebody, tell us what you know.
I know nothing.
Oh, well, let's try again.
Yeah?
Yeah.
I mean, at some point you're just going to start telling them whatever it is that you think they want to hear.
Well, exactly.
I don't know this guy.
Yes, you do.
Okay, I saw him at a training camp.
Yeah.
And off you go.
Well, you know, I think it was the Washington Post reported.
They had a quote from some new documents.
And, you know, this one part, I guess, wasn't blacked out.
And I forget now if it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah who said, who explained that.
You know, they asked me where Osama Bin Laden was.
And I said, man, I don't know.
And then they beat the hell out of me.
And I said, oh, yeah, he's, you know, in this one region over there, you know, where he is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I think.
Yeah, I mean, well, what do you expect?
What's he going to do, you know?
You know, they never...
It's almost like the foreign policy, you know, in general, right?
They never ask, well, wait a minute, though.
But what if this is true?
What if, for example, he doesn't really know where Osama Bin Laden is?
You know what I mean?
They never ask that of themselves.
Yeah, I know.
Well, I mean, you know, the fact is that, you know, all the reports that come out at that time, occasionally you hear reports from kind of outside the military or outside the prisons of the obsession that they had with finding Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
You know, and what's kind of particularly stupid about this whole thing is that, you know, what was the most important thing to somebody like Osama Bin Laden?
Secrecy.
What was the most important thing about how the 9-11 attacks took place?
Apart from, you know, the incompetence of the intelligence agencies who didn't stop the guys when they had several opportunities to.
Was secrecy.
You know, do you go around telling this to a load of people that you want it to be successful?
No, you don't.
You keep quiet about it.
And, you know, how many tens of thousands of people were interrogated about the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden when probably about six guys knew?
And where were they?
Well, they were with Bin Laden.
Well, you know, I read something, and I think this was the Christian Science Monitor or something, about Iraqis being thrown in a cage with a lion and saying, where are the weapons of mass destruction?
Like, thrown in a cage with a lion.
I guess they got from the Baghdad Zoo or something.
I don't think they kept them in there very long or whatever.
But just, you know, man, I don't know where your weapons of mass destruction are, bro.
No.
Well, you know, I mean, I mean, the great thing about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is that what you should really say is, you know, why don't you go and have a look at your invoices?
Yeah, exactly.
Because whatever Saddam Hussein had, which had degenerated by the time you invaded, you know, you guys sold them to him in the first place.
Yeah, right.
Why don't you go back and look at the video footage of the destruction of every last bit of it in 1991?
Thanks a lot.
Right.
Well, and of course, we know that, and maybe, I don't know if you know off the top of your head, like all the different ways that we know that Dick Cheney was seeking lies, that that was the purpose of this thing, was that many of these people were tortured.
I know I read a McClatchy story that had quotes from agents I guess lower-level agents in the government and they said that's exactly what was going on was Cheney was saying, beat everybody up until they point their finger at Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, the thing is, though, that I always, you know, I do believe all along that he thought that was the case.
You know, the difficult thing of trying to understand Dick Cheney's mind and the way that it works or the way that it doesn't work is that this is a guy who became intensely paranoid after 9-11 and then tried to shape reality to what he thought it was.
So if you look at extreme paranoia, and honestly, I mean, I believe extreme paranoia, when you read the stories about everybody who knew this guy who was not pleasant before but said, whoa, he changed, you know, it's like, well, that's scary.
But, you know, he thought that and the way that him and the guys around him, you know, saw things was, okay, well, that's the truth.
Now we find the ways to get the people to tell us the truth.
You know, and the torture, when you see it that way, it's just another example of their stupidity.
It's like, well, even if you believe this, why didn't you go about it the right way, which is to hire professionals to sit down with these guys without using all the torture and stuff to find out whether there is?
Well, I think that may explain the behavior of some of these people, but I don't buy that for Dick Cheney.
I mean, I've read the whole thing about, well, he even said at that speech a few weeks ago about, you know, there was a plane and it was headed right for me and I was real scared and all that kind of thing.
And I understand there must be a little bit of that.
But, you know, the American Enterprise Institute has been trying to push the Osama Bin Laden is really a front for Saddam Hussein outright lie for, you know, now 15 years or something.
You know, Saddam Hussein's unfinished war with the United States by Laurie Milroy, she and Judy Miller, notorious liar Judy Miller, wrote books together and their whole thing was that Ramzi Youssef was really an Iraqi agent who killed Ramzi Youssef and was pretending to be him.
And the whole thing is all Saddam Hussein's secret war against us.
So, I think Dick Cheney, out of pure, you know, malevolence and, you know, premeditated homicide, you know, decided to torture these lies out of these people so he could have his war.
He knew he was lying since way before 9-11 about that.
Well, you know, I know they wanted that before.
In fact, Cheney's wife, Lynne Cheney, endorsed Laurie Milroy's book and I think sort of Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, it's just two slightly different ways of looking at it, I suppose.
But, you know, it comes down to the same thing that, you know, here's a madman obsessed with finding a way to take America into an illegal war and Iraq.
And now, I forget if, I don't know if you've said or if I've ever heard, was this guy out Libby actually an Al Qaeda terrorist, friend of Osama, who should have been at least arrested and tried in New York or something?
Or was he just an innocent man here?
No, I think that he should probably have been either arrested and tried in New York or if he had been interrogated as the FBI wanted and would have given an enormous amount of information, then maybe, you know, he would have become some kind of protected witness.
He was not connected to Al Qaeda.
The thing about Libby was that he was a Mujahideen against the Soviet Union and then he established his own independent training camp for jihad.
Now, that means many things.
To him, largely what it meant was Bosnia and Chechnya throughout the 1990s.
And Chechnya, you know, right up to the end.
He didn't want to deal with Osama bin Laden.
He didn't want to deal with the Taliban.
The Taliban closed his camp down before 9-11 when he wouldn't cooperate with bin Laden.
So, you know, I'm not painting this guy as somebody who wasn't a threat because clearly he was.
Because people that he trained for jihad, there's many people who said this.
Abu Zubaydah has said this as well.
That they gave people training and it was up to them what they did with it.
If they wanted to do it as a kind of, you know, as a kind of learning part of the process of growing up as a young man to learn self-defense should you need it.
Which is really what some of these young guys did.
They could do that.
You know, if they wanted to go and fight as Muslim freedom fighters in Bosnia or Chechnya, they could do that.
Similarly, you know, and this is where it gets worrying.
If they wanted to go, say, back to Northern Africa or to the countries that they lived in in Europe to plot terrorist attacks, then they could do that.
So, you know, it's not all benevolent.
But what it shows is the kind of different faces of what jihad meant.
And, you know, the kind of crucial thing if we are looking at the pursuit of al-Qaeda is that this guy wasn't connected to al-Qaeda.
And remember, his gatekeeper was Abu Zubaydah.
And Abu Zubaydah is one of the high-value detainees in Guantanamo, one of the most tortured people in the war on terror.
And the FBI said all along, this is not the guy that you think he is.
You think he's the number three.
And in fact, one of the redacted bits of that transcript that was released was just one line of Zubaydah saying, yeah, after all this, you come to me and say, oh, yeah, sorry, we know you're not the number three in al-Qaeda.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
All right, now, let me give you a chance to address the mysterious death of this guy.
Or how mysterious is it?
Sheikh Ali in Libya.
Well, you know, in terms of the Libyans, it's not that surprising.
I mean, you know, what happened was that...
I mean, it's officially a suicide.
Yeah, yeah, it is, yeah.
But, I mean, there's a long history of political prisoners suiciding themselves in Libya and, you know, then finding out that they've been shot in the back.
I'm sure that the Libyans wanted to get rid of him.
Now, you know, the bigger question is, you know, how useful was that for the CIA?
Well, you know, for some people within the CIA, wouldn't that be useful to get rid of him as well?
This is the guy who knows too much.
Yeah, well, Qaddafi's our guy now.
After years and years of trying to suck up to the West, they finally allowed him to after the Iraq War so they could pretend the Iraq War convinced them to.
Well, absolutely, they did.
And, you know, they've just strengthened their ties with Libya.
Three days after Ali Ali died, the American flag went up over the embassy for the first time in nearly 40 years.
That's so funny, because, you know, he was the enemy du jour when I was a little kid in the 80s.
I remember drawing pictures of F-111s heroically bombing the people of Libya on the back of my work at school.
Oh, man.
That must have been a handful.
That's real political inaction, isn't it?
Yeah.
You know, what's happened with Qaddafi.
Oh, by the way, I'm sorry.
I just want to go ahead and throw in here for the footnote that there's an article in the New York Times Magazine, I think it is, all about Gary Hart.
And he talks about being in Athens and an agent of Qaddafi approaching him and saying, hey, you're former Senator Hart.
I want to talk to you.
Listen, we want to work out a deal and we'll do whatever you say.
And how he relayed that information back, I think, to the Clinton administration even.
And they refused.
And, of course, the Bush administration refused until, I guess, the end of 2003 to finally allow Qaddafi to suck up to the West like he'd been trying to do, including having two of his nationals take the blame for that Lockerbie-Scotland thing, which I understand was actually not done by them.
Yes.
Well, I don't know enough about that story, but yes, it's all very likely, isn't it?
But, you know, I mean, the bad thing about Qaddafi is, you know, as I say, it's not so much our Libby.
I mean, I don't...
I would like to see people be able to differentiate between different types of jihad.
But, you know, I'm not saying I have sympathy for this guy.
But what's happened as a result of Qaddafi becoming, you know, one of our guys is that the people who historically were opposed to him seven years ago, they were our friends.
As soon as Qaddafi does the flip, well, hey, those guys are our enemies now.
And, you know, there's only a handful of them, but there's about six of these guys in Guantanamo, enemies of Qaddafi, therefore enemies of the US.
What's going on?
And we have the same thing going on in Britain as well.
We have these guys held under control orders, which is like house arrest.
They can't return these guys to Libya because, you know, like the United States, we're not allowed to return people to countries where they face the risk of torture.
But why have we got these guys held in their houses under these strict curfews?
Well, they were enemies of Qaddafi.
It's part of the trade-off.
But what are they known to as the British public?
Terrorists.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we had Daphne Eviatar on the show yesterday talking about, and this is a subject you and I have talked about before, a kid who was 12 years old at the time that he was accused of being a war criminal for supposedly throwing a grenade that doesn't seem like there's any evidence he actually even threw, and there is contrary evidence, you know, saying other people threw the dang thing.
And he's a 12-year-old, and how now even Barack Obama's Justice Department, I guess, is invoking this kid's tortured confession, the confession that was tortured out of a 12-year-old they're using in his habeas corpus hearing to try to continue to hold him indefinitely.
Yeah, well, it kind of is unbelievable to me, Scott, because even before Obama came in, the judge and, you know, this kid has been put forward for trial by a military commission.
And even before Obama came in, the judge had ruled out all the evidence against him as being obtained through torture, and therefore it couldn't be used.
And that's all there is.
He was captured by the Afghans.
They tortured him.
You know, a couple of hours later, he was handed over to U.S. forces who also took a confession off him.
And the judge said, first of all, he said, look, the first confession was obtained through the use of torture.
And I do not believe that the ordeal that he had been through had dissipated in a few hours that it took for the U.S. to do the same thing.
So I'm ruling out his second confession as well.
And that was the case.
There is no other case.
And there is all this other evidence, you know, as you say, about how young he was, about how he was drugged by a group that had recruited him, about how other people confessed to throwing the grenade.
You know, you have to ask what's going on.
It's the same thing, and I presume we were going to talk about this at some point, as the guy that the court cleared of being an enemy combatant just on Monday.
Judge Richard Leon, you know, the George Bush, George W. Bush appointee who's been ordering the release of people from Guantanamo.
And, you know, the story of this young Syrian guy who, why was he in Guantanamo?
Well, he was in Guantanamo because he'd been tortured by al-Qaeda for three months for being a spy, imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months for being a spy, and yet had been sent to Guantanamo when the Americans came to liberate him from the Taliban jail.
Well, maybe he was a spy, and maybe that's why they kept him in Guantanamo.
Well...
I mean, geez, if the al-Qaeda tortured him, he must be guilty, right?
Or else why would they be torturing him?
Actually, Scott, maybe they were trying to use him as a spy.
I mean, that's a kind of hidden side to the whole Guantanamo story that we've heard very little about.
You know, I know we heard it from Sami al-Hajd, the al-Jazeera cameraman.
He said, well, listen, they spent their whole time trying to turn me into a spy who works for them inside al-Qaeda, inside al-Jazeera.
I've heard it from...
You know, over the years, I've heard stories from other prisoners.
Some of the European prisoners who were released said, yeah, yeah, yeah, they spent a long time trying to turn me into a spy for them.
So, maybe.
I mean, certainly they tried to do that.
And like I say, we haven't heard that much about that side of the story.
And it seemed to me that it was a pretty stupid recruitment policy as well, you know.
Where have you been?
Okay, well, here's some...
Here's some wild hyperbole for you.
And then you can straighten me out and walk it back and explain why what I say is wild hyperbole to the audience here.
Barack Obama has taken and closed Guantanamo Bay and simply moved the legal black hole to Bagram or kept it there and is basically following the exact Bush policy of using the Bagram loophole in the Bometting decision to deny people their writ of habeas corpus.
As you say, George W. Bush appointed judges keep releasing these people once they get a writ of habeas corpus because they're innocent or because they're 12 or things like that.
And so, instead, they're shipping all these people off to Bagram and they're saying they can keep them at that American airbase in Afghanistan from now until hell freezes over.
Okay.
Well, you know, it's an interesting point.
But I don't think that anybody's been taken to Bagram.
Now...
Well, I keep reading that there are a lot of people at Bagram who weren't even arrested in Afghanistan at all who were taken to...
No, they are.
No, they are absolutely, Scott.
Now, you know, what there is in Bagram is about 650 prisoners.
And I think that there are two categories of prisoners there.
There are foreign prisoners who were rendered to Bagram who have been there for six or seven years who only through some kind of administrative accident didn't end up in Guantanamo.
Now, if those guys had ended up in Guantanamo, what do they get?
They get the whole five-year legal history of lawyers trying to get them habeas corpus rights.
And, you know, eventually, after many hiccups involving cowardly and stupid politicians, they get a second decision from the Supreme Court that says, these guys have habeas corpus rights.
You have got to tell them why they are being held because we have a very strong suspicion that you guys are so incompetent that you had absolutely no idea what you were doing.
So, this is what the guys in Guantanamo got.
What do the guys in Bagram get?
Nothing.
What are the circumstances of their arrest and their detention?
Exactly the same.
So, you know, for Obama to claim that these guys have no rights and the Justice Department is fighting this one, well, that one doesn't make any sense.
I'm firing them to the ends of the earth on that one.
Now, there is a different story going on in Bagram which is that it's a prison in a war zone.
Now, you know, it's a separate issue as to how long the United States should be in Afghanistan and does it not have its own government and these kind of stories.
But if we take it that there is a war going on and that it's a war prison, it's a prison in a war zone, then these guys are entitled to be held as prisoners of war, the Afghans, with the protection of the Geneva Convention.
Now, is that happening?
Now, I know the thing that the BBC came up with was that it interviewed a lot of prisoners who were held from 2002 to 2008.
Now, it's not given to them any differentiation as to when they were held when things took place because if you were in Bagram in 2002 or 2003 or 2004, you know, this is when all the fear techniques were being applied in Guantanamo as well.
It was terrible.
That was a really short article for being based on interviews with 27 former prisoners.
I couldn't believe it.
Where's the rest of it?
Right.
Okay.
Well, where's the rest of the story?
Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of information on the internet.
There's loads of room in cyberspace.
Well, so, let me ask you.
So, my hyperbole was that Obama is still renditioning people to Bagram during, you know, since January 20.
That was the part where I went off the story.
Is that it?
I don't think that he is.
But, you know, we know that he's kept open a loophole and Panetta has talked about this as well where under controlled circumstances they will be able to render prisoners if they want.
And what Panetta actually said was, you know, pretty much if we do that they're probably not coming into the U.S. system at all.
They're going to be sent to their home country, i.e. rendition to disposal and torture.
But, you know, I mean, they're both stressed they're not going to do it very much.
And I think it would be a very big overhaul of everything that's happened and I think it's very false because he said to the CIA in the mid-90s, you know, the CIA went to him and said, what are we going to do about these kind of guys that we keep coming across every now and then who are very dangerous but, you know, we don't want them in the system.
Right, and Bush turned that into, now we'll go ahead and torture them instead of sending them back to their home countries.
I'm sorry, we're up against the time wall here.
For more details, the website AndyWorthington.co.uk That's Anti-War Radio for today.
Coming up next, the Mike Danger Show on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.