Well, if Homeland Security ever comes to get me and they call me an enemy combatant and throw me in the brig, I want Candace Gorman to represent me.
If I get a lawyer at all, maybe we'll be past lawyers by that point.
H. Candace Gorman, she has her own law firm where she represents, in Chicago, where she represents, for free, right now, I believe two different of the kidnapped at Guantanamo Bay, and is here to discuss developments in their stories and others surrounding the Guantanamo Bay travesty.
Welcome back to the show, Candace.
Hi Scott, how are you?
I'm doing good, how are you?
I'm doing okay, thanks.
And you're on the line from the Netherlands this morning, is that right?
I am.
And what are you doing there, working with the global court system?
So I was actually doing that in the spring, now I'm here trying to talk to some government here about taking my clients.
Trying to do what now?
I'm trying to get some government here on this side of the ocean to consider taking my clients as asylum seekers.
Oh, I see.
And is that working out?
Is anybody very receptive to that?
No.
I would like to say yes.
I actually have worked out something with the Swiss some months ago to take Mr. Al-Jazawi, my client who is still very ill.
And the Swiss agreed to take Mr. Al-Jazawi, and we have a hospital there that's willing to care for him to be in charge.
And the Swiss only had one condition, and that was that the State Department request that they take him.
And the State Department refused.
They said they would be willing to have him go if the Swiss would ask, but they would not be willing to make a request to the Swiss.
Well, so then what, the court system at Guantanamo has already decided to let this guy go, but they have nowhere to release him to yet?
Or you're just kind of looking around for a place in the event that he's ever allowed to go free?
I guess you would say the second.
He will never be charged in the military conditions.
The government has already admitted that, so he's just one of those men who will languish forever without charges unless or until they decide to set him free.
I see.
He's still an enemy combatant, but he's not being charged with war crimes.
Correct.
And now, well, I guess you're his defense attorney, so you wouldn't say, but well, answer it this way.
Does the prosecution, do they claim, do they have a case against him of any description of any war crimes he committed, or even what it is that makes him an enemy combatant?
Well, I don't know if you've ever heard this about the Stralte Valley, but the Stralte Valley was found not to be an enemy by the military back in 2004.
They found that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing, any connection at all to terrorism or to Al-Qaeda or to the Taliban, and it was a unanimous decision back in 2004 when they had those mini-tribunals to determine if people were enemy combatants or not.
But five weeks later, once the State Department found out about Mr. Aldo Valley and 30 other men being found innocent, they decided to convene new panels to look at their situation again.
And all 30 of those men, including Mr. Aldo Valley, was found now to be an enemy combatant five weeks later.
They had no new evidence.
They had no new facts or anything.
The only thing they even suggested about Mr. Aldo Valley was that because he was Libyan, he was probably part of the Libyan resistance against Gaddafi.
Well, that ought to hold up in court, it sounds like.
I guess not.
Well, and in fact, I thought the way you told this story was that they actually, it wasn't even double jeopardy, it was triple jeopardy on that count, that they had impaneled two different panels, I guess, whatever you call them, and that two different ones had decided that he wasn't an enemy combatant, that it wasn't until the third that they decided that in fact he was after all.
No, that was actually another man.
Oh, I see.
I see.
I was confused in two different cases there.
Yeah.
And now remind me again, what illness your client has that's so, you know, necessary that he gets immediate medical care?
He has hepatitis B, which has gone untreated now for two years since he's been at Guantanamo.
He's been at Guantanamo for almost seven years now.
Untreated, but Michael Moore's movie said that everybody gets great health care at Guantanamo Bay.
Well, I guess that was wrong.
What the military says is that my client doesn't want medical care, that if he wanted it, he would get it, but he doesn't want it.
Well, is that true or that's a lie?
That's a lie.
That's a lie.
It's a lie.
My client has been trying to get medical care since before I even became his attorney, and I have been trying to fight for it for the last two years and not getting anywhere.
Well, and it's interesting that they would even try to say that he denies it.
You're his lawyer.
You speak for him.
You have power of attorney by definition, right?
If you say give him medical care, then never mind what he says, right, in this case?
Right, and you know what?
That's one of the weird things because the judge said, in my case and Mr. Algivelo's case, that he believes the military.
He said the judge said that if Algivelo is having any medical problems, and of course the judge doesn't know if he is or not because the judge hasn't even looked at the medical record, but he said if he is having medical problems, it must be his own fault because he's not doing what the military says.
Even though I tell him and I have an affidavit from my client and an affidavit from the doctor saying what should be done, the judge just disregards all of that and whatever the military says is the way it is.
It's sort of like in the Bybee memo where if you torture them to death, we're pretty sure you meant well and you're only trying to stop a worse harm, so don't worry about it.
Right, and of course we do have some deaths there too, and you know, most of the deaths that have taken place at Guantanamo have gone, you know, been listed on page like 20 of the newspaper and no one pays any attention to it and no one really knows what went on to cause these men to die.
Yeah, well and now you're representing one other client down there at Guantanamo too, right?
That's correct.
And what's his name?
Mr. Razak Ali.
Razak Ali is from Algeria.
And is he an al-Qaeda terrorist?
No, and you know the funny thing about Razak Ali is that I finally got government information from his combat status review tribunal in 2004, the same one that my client was found to be innocent at.
For Razak Ali, they don't even know who he is.
They think he's a Libyan.
They thought he was from some small town in Libya, and they had this whole concocted story about how he traveled to Pakistan, maybe met with someone from al-Qaeda, but they didn't really know.
But anyway, it's not my client.
My client's from Algeria.
He's a very different person, never lived in Libya, never lived in this little town, so who knows who this person is that they're describing as being my client, but it surely isn't him.
Well, I guess in essence, this is sort of the, well, this is chaos radio.
This is the shit end of Donald Rumsfeld giving the order, grab whom you must, do what you want.
They just go around and I guess they paid ransoms and basically just bought prisoners from, you know, I don't know whoever, Pakistani military types, anybody that they can find.
You know, sell me an Arab.
I'll take them off to Guantanamo Bay.
Yeah, and you know, former President Musharraf from Pakistan even bragged about this in his autobiography a couple of years ago where he talked about the millions and millions of dollars that the Pakistani government made in the bounty program.
They just were rounding up anybody they could and turning them over for $5,000 a head.
Incredible.
All right, now there's been quite a bit of news lately about Guantanamo Bay.
I guess, do you know, what's the state of the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Ramzi bin al-Shibh trial?
I mean, last I heard, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was, had been driven, you know, tortured completely out of his mind and they couldn't get him to show up in court.
Well, quote unquote court, you understand what I mean?
Yeah, the military, the military so-called court.
Right, ironic quotes go with that every time.
Yeah, you know, none of the cases are set now.
The one that I've been watching with a particular interest is the Kotter, you know, the juvenile, the kid who was 15 when we picked him up.
Right.
And that trial was supposed to be the next one going and that one was discontinued a couple of days ago.
Well, not indefinitely, well, maybe indefinitely, but it was continued to four days after inauguration day, which at least gets it off into another presidency and hopefully President Obama.
Well, and that wasn't, was he one of the five that were dismissed together or that he was even separate from that case?
Separate from that case, it wasn't dismissed, it was just continued.
It was continued because, because the military has refused to turn over evidence that they had that went to his innocence.
And also his defense lawyers wanted to have a psychologist come in and examine him to see if he was even competent after being held in these awful conditions for seven years as a, you know, as a youth, a 15 year old.
They didn't think he was competent to stand trial.
They wanted to bring in a psychologist and the government, of course, fought it, fought it, fought it.
Then finally the judge said, well, they'll get, they get it, they get the psychologist, the psychologist can meet with him.
And since the government fought this for so long, they had to continue the trial so that the psychologist could actually meet with this kid and sell it for the poor and figure out what's going on with his son.
Thank you.
And is there any indication so far whether he's been driven crazy there?
I think there's every indication that just about everybody that's like Guantanamo is crazy at this point.
I mean, they've been there without charges for seven years.
Most of them have been tortured before getting there.
And after being there, they've been in isolation without any, most of them that are in complete isolation where they don't even get to talk with anybody day after day.
Yes, they're all going crazy.
Well, now, you know, I don't want to define crazy too broadly.
I mean, you know, people use that term kind of loosely, but I mean, seriously crazy, like Padilla, tortured, no touch torture, sensory deprivation until his brain, his personality is literally trashed.
That crazy?
I think there's varying degrees, and I can't talk about everyone there.
My two clients, one of my clients is not in solitary confinement, and he's actually doing okay, given this situation.
He's around other men, you know, they can talk together, they can, you know, they can get books, they can read, they can do their own laundry, I understand.
But that's a very small number of men, that's like 25 or 30 men.
And Mr. Al-Jazawi is like all the rest of them.
They're in camp six or worse.
They're in these conditions where a supermax facility where they have no contact with people.
When they're taken out of the facility, they have the eye muffs, you know, the eye blackers put on, the ear muffs put on.
So they're all handling it differently.
And, you know, I can't say all of them are completely crazy like Padilla, but, you know, you go through this for a few years, Mr. Al-Jazawi has been in this condition in this place for two years, in this actual camp six where there is no other support system.
Well, and you know, this is a very important point, I think.
You know, the way the story goes is that, well, you know, once Alberto Mora, I think he was the Navy JAG, head of the JAG team or something.
And once the Pentagon finally said absolutely not to this, then they repealed all the guidelines for all the different ways that people were meant to be tortured at Guantanamo and that kind of thing.
And yet, as you say, being locked in solitary confinement for seven years with no hope of ever even being charged with a crime to even have to face your accusers or anything like that at all, in a sense, well, the isolation thing clearly is torture.
The indefinite nature and the hopelessness of the situation and the knowing that they have no ability ever to challenge the case against them in any meaningful fashion to me seems, you know, almost kind of bordering on torture itself.
But then, you know, when you talk about the blackout goggles and the earmuffs and all that, this is like we've seen the pictures of Jose Padilla when they were taking him to the dentist and they're leading him by his chains.
They have his his blackout goggles, like gunshot earmuffs, right?
So he can't hear anything.
And they're not even don't even so much as have a hand on his shoulder.
They're leading him by his chains.
And, you know, this has been described as Alfred McCoy in his book, A Question of Torture, really explains how this is the the Nazi slash Soviet slash CIA method of torture.
No touch torture.
See, we didn't leave a bruise on him.
All we did was completely destroy his mind.
Right.
And that's, you know, when my client comes to a visit with me, I just had this weird situation last time I went to visit with him where I was waiting outside the area where where the meeting was going to take place and the van pulled up.
Usually he's already in there when I when I arrive.
They get from there, you know, an hour earlier or something.
But this time the van was running late because the van pulled up when I was there and they had me go into a room with the door closed because I wasn't even allowed to see him stepping out of the van to go into the meeting room.
And, you know, he goes, I know what he looks like.
It's not like, you know, someone that I don't know who he is.
And I also know what the conditions are.
I know that he's got the muffles on and that he knows the chain, both his hands and his legs when he's brought in there.
They do take the chains off his hands when he's in a meeting room, but they do leave the floor chain shackled to the floor when I meet with him.
But the whole idea that I have to go into this separate room and have the door closed so I don't see him exiting from the van into the meeting room is pretty ludicrous.
Well, yeah, it just sounds like guilt on the part of the people who are arranging all this stuff.
They know what they're doing and they know it's wrong.
They know you're going to come on my show and talk about what you saw.
So they lock you in a room so you can't say all you can say is what you didn't see.
What I know happened.
Yeah.
Well, now back to the story of this guy caught or this kid, I guess.
I don't know if he's a kid anymore.
He was a kid.
You know, when you talk about war crimes, you think of, you know, starting a war or, you know, putting civilians on boxcars to be exterminated.
And yet this guy is charged.
I'm not even certain, Candace, fill me in on the details.
The way I understand, I'm not even certain he's being charged with throwing a grenade anymore.
He's being charged with standing next to somebody who threw a grenade in a firefight with American soldiers on the battlefield.
Is that right?
That's right.
And originally, and I don't know if the government is totally back down from this charge or not, but originally he was charged with throwing the grenade, which of course in a war, that's what happened.
So it's not really a war crime unless all of our soldiers are going to be charged with war crimes for shooting or throwing grenades.
But in fact, one of the pieces of evidence that was being suppressed in his case was the fact that there was a witness, a military witness, that said it wasn't this kid, Cotter, it was someone else that threw it.
And they withheld that name from his team, from Cotter's legal team, for literally years.
And it was actually by mistake that the defense team even found out about this witness.
So that's just one of the pieces of evidence that was suppressed by the military that ended up continuing this trial until later in January.
Well, and I think that's the point I confused, was there was new evidence that said he wasn't the one.
I don't think the government had actually backed down on their accusations, though.
But still, so I'm actually confused about the law here.
You're a lawyer.
Can you explain to me under what contortion of the law, I mean, is this simply a David Addington memo being expressed here that being a 15-year-old kid and throwing a grenade on a battlefield during a battle amounts to war crimes?
You know, it's so ludicrous that there's no legal way of describing it because it has nothing to do with the law.
But I would also point out that since he was 15 years old, there is a law, there's an actual treaty that we signed that says that child soldiers, even if he was a soldier, he was a child, and that they cannot be punished, that they must be rehabbed.
So even if he did throw a grenade in a battle, he's not a war criminal, he's a child.
And that's how he should have been treated.
And that's the treaty that we actually signed onto.
A lot of the treaties we haven't signed onto because we don't want to be held to those tough standards.
But this one we did sign onto, and yet we're just totally disregarding it and treating this kid as though he was, you know, Adolf Hitler.
Right.
Well, you know, the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer, he actually went back and looked.
What did they do to Hitler's chauffeur?
What did they do to Mussolini's chauffeur?
And the answer was nothing, you know?
Of course not.
And yet, this was like the crowning case.
This was the first case.
You know, the guy that they went after was the guy who drove bin Laden around, who really wasn't in on anything.
Right.
And, you know, actually, the very first case was the Canadian.
And, you know, that was the best case.
And I don't know if you remember the plea deal that was made so that he could go back to Canada.
I mean, back to, I said, Canadian, Australian.
Oh, right.
David Hicks.
Yeah.
David Hicks.
Right.
And so he worked out a plea deal that gets him eight months.
The worst of the worst of the worst.
That's why his trial was going to be first.
And he gets a plea deal for eight months, three months in the state, first three months in Guantanamo and five months in jail in Australia and a muzzle on him until after the Australian election.
And then he was freed.
Well, OK, let me understand.
Let me see if I well, I got to check my law with you and then ask my question to the habeas corpus thing, the ruling in Beaumedine versus Bush, which I know I'm pronouncing his name wrong.
That's the best I can do.
Forgive me.
In that case, they said, if you are an enemy combatant who is going to be tried or maybe you've been, I guess, not yet indicted for on war crimes, you can get a writ of habeas corpus and one showing in federal court.
If you've already been, quote, unquote, charged with war crimes down there at Guantanamo, then that doesn't apply.
So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and them, they don't get a writ of habeas corpus.
But your client should.
Right.
My client should.
You know, you're following this so carefully that nothing is happening in the federal court.
One of the things that the Supreme Court said is that this is dragged on long enough.
These men have been held for years.
So now we need speedy habeas hearings.
And that's what I have been trying to get.
And all the rest of our other habeas attorneys have all been trying to get for the last six months now since the decision, five months.
And we're no closer than we were five months ago.
The courts are just dragging their feet and the government is doing everything it can to stall.
So, yes, my clients should get these habeas hearings, whether they ever will.
I doubt it.
And for those, you know, who aren't interested or, you know, up to their eyeballs in these kinds of things and and don't necessarily know the terminology, the writ of habeas corpus, it's not really it was Latin for where's the body, something along those lines.
But it's not really your right to writ of habeas corpus.
It's the power of the judge to issue one.
That's what's at stake here, right, is the power of the judge to say to the executive, no, you don't bring this guy before me.
I'll decide whether you're allowed to continue to hold him or not.
It also requires the government to come up with some reason.
So the government has to say why they're holding the person, because that's what the habeas corpus is really all about.
They have the body and they have to say why they're holding it.
And then then the person supposedly, then you're charged with something and you know how to defend yourself.
But until you're charged, it's impossible to defend yourself because you don't know what you're defending again.
And that's since 1215 at Runnymede, right?
The writ of habeas corpus goes back to, hey, King John, we're going to cut your head off if you don't sign this thing.
And that was 800 years ago, right?
Right.
That's right.
Sorry, we don't need that old law.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, that's a relic of bygone days.
It's quaint and irrelevant now.
We've determined in a finding.
Wow.
All right.
So can you speak to the story of Lieutenant Colonel Daryl Vandeveld, who another prosecutor, I believe the sixth Guantanamo prosecutor to resign in disgust in disgust rather than continue to participate in this farce?
You know, I haven't kept track of the numbers, but it's amazing to me every time these prosecutions that look like they're moving along in a, you know, in an amazing fashion because everything is so illegal.
Are there any notions of law that we used to have in our country?
But they seem to be moving along and then all of a sudden the prosecutors are resigning.
And it's so amazing to me to watch this because, you know, these are the real heroes in the story.
These are career military people who have put their careers on the line by saying, no, no, I will not give up my ethical duties as an attorney.
I will not turn the Constitution inside out for these illegal procedures just to try to justify the holding of these men, which is not justifiable.
I think that context is important, too, that we are talking about people who are career military officers, somebody who's a lieutenant colonel or whatever kind of rank.
This is somebody who was planning on getting the very highest rank they could before retiring from a career in the U.S. military.
This literally is career suicide to stand up about something like this.
One hundred percent chance nobody's going to get a promotion for quitting over this.
Right.
Not only are they not going to get a promotion for quitting over this, they will very likely end up having to resign because of the political fallout.
So that's what's happened with most of the men.
That's what happened with Moe Davis.
That's well, you know, the military person that came forward in my case wasn't a prosecutor, but he was one of the men on the panel that sat on Mr. Algiers Valley's first that first C.S.
R.T. that found him innocent.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Tell me that story.
I don't know that one.
His name is Stephen Abraham.
He was the lieutenant colonel.
He was an attorney who was working at Guantanamo during the 2003-2004 timeframe.
And his job was to pull together all of the information for the Combat Status Review Tribunal.
And he said something was really smelly in there.
It just didn't...things weren't being done the way he thought they should be done.
There was no collaboration of evidence.
There was no searching for evidence that might be beneficial to the progress.
All these things that were promised were not being done.
And he was actually put on one panel.
He only sat on one panel, but it turned out to be my client.
And they looked at the evidence on that one and said, you know, there's nothing here.
This is garbage.
That's actually the word he used.
And he said the military higher-ups came back to the panel and tried to get them to change their minds.
And he said no.
And he ended up filing an affidavit in the U.S. Supreme Court at the time the court decided to hear Boumediene, the case that they originally said they weren't going to hear.
And then three months later, they changed their mind and said, OK, you know what, we will hear this case.
And it was because of Colonel Abraham's affidavit.
So was Boumediene then was one of the five, along with al-Jazawi then, who were all found to not be enemy combatants, but then were later found to be enemy combatants?
No, actually not.
Abraham just did his affidavit to talk about the procedures, and it wasn't about Mr. Boumediene in particular.
It was just about the processes.
I see.
But in the course of his affidavit, he did discuss the one panel that he sat on, and he didn't remember Mr. al-Jazawi's name.
We pieced it together afterwards based on what one panel he sat on, which was my client.
And he thought Mr. al-Jazawi had been set free because the panel had found him innocent.
Oh, so he believed mistakenly then that your client was one of the 500 or so who've been set free?
Because after all, he sat on the panel and said, oh no, this isn't an enemy.
This is fine.
Yeah.
He was shocked when he found out not only was Mr.al-Jazawi still there, but he was sitting in Camp 6 in the horrendous conditions that he was still and not being treated.
And he testified before Congress, not this past summer, but the summer before, talking about what a travesty the situation was with my client.
So naive, these officers sometimes.
Well, so I guess he's going to be your star witness if you ever do get a habeas corpus hearing, right?
If I ever do.
Do you have any...
They're not going to want to do one.
I'm sorry?
They won't ever want to do one for people like my client.
They have absolutely no evidence against them.
Well, isn't it up to the federal judge, not up to them?
Yeah, but the judges aren't doing anything.
You know, right now we've got federal judges who have all decided, most of them have decided to let one judge set up the procedures for how these habeas hearings will be held.
So all of the judges, they're kind of sitting back, except for maybe two or three of them.
None of them are my judge.
My judges are sitting back and letting this one judge come up with the procedures.
And he's been sitting on these proposed procedures for three months now and not doing anything.
And you think it's going to stay that way until the new administration comes to power?
I do.
I don't think there'll ever be any habeas hearings.
I think that before they get heard, I think you'll see the men getting out of there, being sent to one country or another to avoid having these hearings.
And, you know, when the government moves to send men out of Guantanamo, the attorneys are not allowed to talk about it.
You know, I'll get a call.
I haven't gotten a call.
I could say that.
I'll get a call where they'll say, hey, we want to send Mr. Al-Jazawi back to Libya.
And I'll say, no, we're not going to do that, because he'll be tortured there.
And then they'll say, well, we're going to try, and they're going to ask the judge to allow him to be released there.
And then the government will file a motion.
Well, what I'm seeing, even though I can't see the names of the clients, I'm seeing a lot of these motions flying around right now on the court surface where the government is trying to move men to countries that do torture, and attorneys are trying to get their clients moved somewhere where they won't be tortured.
So all of this is being done behind closed doors.
It's all being done under seal.
But there's a lot of it going on right now.
The government is really trying to get the men out of there whose hearings will be coming up first.
That's been the game with the government this whole time with Guantanamo.
When you get close to having an actual hearing or something where a judge might make a ruling that's not favorable to the government, then they try to move the men out.
Yeah.
Well, and it has been, I think, if I remember right, Andy Worthington said it's over 500 men have been released from Guantanamo here and there all this time.
Yep.
Usually happens in the middle of the night.
You know, three or four men are gone, and the plane stops at two or three different countries, dropping the men off.
More than 500 are home free.
Most of them are home free.
A few of them are still in countries where they're being held based on the lies that our government has told them.
But most of them have been freed.
I'm talking with H. Candace Gorman.
She's a civil rights lawyer in Chicago.
Her blog is gitmoblog.blogspot.com.
It's G-T-M-O.
No I.
G-T-M-O blog dot blogspot dot com.
And she represents two of the kidnapped being held down there at Guantanamo Bay.
So let me make sure I understand you there, Candace.
When, say, John McCain and Barack Obama takes power, I believe both of them have pledged to close Guantanamo Bay.
They don't want to have to do anything with any of these guys except just get rid of them.
Pretend this whole thing never happened.
Rendition them back to their home countries for whatever fate awaits them, whether it's, as you said, home free or back to some other prison.
That's what they both said.
You know, I just remind you that George W. said that he wanted to close Guantanamo back when the Supreme Court was getting ready to rule and that he was just waiting for the Supreme Court to rule.
That's what was holding him back from closing the place.
And now we know from more recent reports that he never had any intention of closing the place.
But I have I have great hope that Obama will, in fact, close the place.
I don't have that same hope with Mr. McCain.
Yeah, well, but so even if Obama does close the place, there's really nothing to do with these people.
You can't bring them back to the United States and put them on trial.
We've already been torturing them extra legally all this time.
And so they really can't do anything except send these guys home.
Am I right?
I think you're right.
I don't think any court in our country, if we ever could get to a real court, would allow the evidence to stand against these men that was tortured out of them.
Even these so-called high valued, you know, prisoners, the ones that were held in the black sites, who may actually be guilty of something.
I don't know that for sure anyway, but they may actually be guilty of something, but they can never be found guilty under our court system because we tortured them.
Well, so what do we do with, say, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shib, both of whom took credit to Al Jazeera for the attack before being tortured?
It's a pressing problem.
I don't know what we do with them, but I do know that under our system of government, under our system of laws, we cannot hold people without charges indefinitely, even though we've been doing it.
And we cannot find someone guilty of a crime who has been tortured.
So I think, although I'm not sure what their mental state is at this point, whether they're competent or physically able to go back into society, maybe they'll end up in some hospital somewhere.
Surely we have to stop our newfound system of disregarding the law.
We cannot allow our country to continue to hold men that we have tortured into confessing.
Well, it sure does seem like there's a lesson learned here, got to be a lesson learned here, for some people who thought that maybe this really was the way to go, doing something like Guantanamo, holding these people offshore where the law can't get to them.
But we see what happens when they try to just make up the system as they go along.
It's a total catastrophe.
I mean, you have prosecutors quitting, you have College State Mohammed cross-examining the judge about whether he's fit to be a judge or not in his case.
I mean, kinds of things that could never happen in an American courtroom, and it's simply because it's all ad hoc.
It is.
And, you know, one of the things I've often said about Guantanamo is that this is Bush's way of trying to let the American people feel safe.
See, we've caught bad guys and we've locked them up somewhere, and now you can all feel safe because we've done something.
And I think what the American people should be learning is that they were never made safe by this place, that we were actually made less safe, because we've disregarded our laws, our judicial system.
We've disregarded who we were.
Now, tell me if you saw this one in the Mother Jones.
It's on the Mother Jones blog.
16 words.
New court filing suggests manufactured terror threat in Bush's 2002 State of the Union.
Did you see this one?
No, but isn't that the same story that has been talked about, about those 16 words?
Well, no, it's 16 different words in the very same State of the Union.
This is in a Beaumedine lawsuit against George Bush.
It lays out the case, according to the Mother Jones blog, it says, lays out the case that the Bush administration threatened at the highest levels to withdraw diplomatic and military aid to Bosnia if that nation released some abducted terrorists, which its own three-month investigation had found innocent of any terrorism charges in the days leading up to Bush's January 2002 State of the Union.
So the Bosnian government had arrested some guys and said, oh, we think we have some terrorists here.
Then they did their investigation and decided that these men weren't terrorists after all.
The Bush administration, apparently, according to this lawsuit, makes the case.
The Bush administration pressured the Bosnian government into pretending that they were terrorists anyway, and then turned them over to Guantanamo Bay.
You know, I have a slightly different recollection of how this works, but my recollection is even worse than the scenario painted in the Mother Jones article, and that was that after the Bosnian government had released these men because they found no evidence that they kidnapped them.
Because we said, you can't let them free.
They are terrorists.
The Bosnian government said, no, we did our investigation.
There's no link here to terrorism.
And so they just went in and took them.
Wow.
And here they are.
They knew.
I mean, and I like the fact it's just kind of a coincidence.
It's another 16 words, but that really, you know, when you talk about war crimes and war crimes trials going on all the time, it would seem to me, you know, people can, I guess, lie and you can't prove their state of mind when they say, oh, gee, we believe the Niger-Uranium documents.
They sure look credible to us or whatever.
But when you have something like this, I mean, this is, you're a lawyer.
Tell me, is this not a, was it prima facie case or whatever on its face?
This says that they deliberately lied us into war and in fact, kidnapped innocent men simply to use them as props in a case to lie us into war?
You know, I truly believe that these men that are running our country, these men and women that are running our country are war criminals.
And so whether or not it's 16 words or another 16 words, what they've done with these, with Guantanamo is a war crime.
They have kidnapped men.
They have taken them for bounties.
They have held them knowing that there is nothing remotely connecting them to terrorism, but they have kept them there because they don't want to be second guessed.
They don't want anyone telling them what to do.
And they want to make the American people think that they're somehow doing something by keeping this place open.
And so, you know, there has got to be investigations done when this administration is gone into the nature of all of these war crimes.
I mean, our clients should all be pursuing charges against the government of the United States for their illegal detention for all these years, knowing that they had done nothing wrong.
And so, you know, maybe we can't prove the Nigerian, you know, maybe that fraudulent document linking, maybe we can't prove that someone didn't know what was going on with that really that deep down.
But we know that they've known for years that the men at Guantanamo, that most of the men have done nothing wrong and that they are holding them there for their own purposes.
Yep.
Well, it sounds like war crimes to me, but, you know, I'll never be the type to seek state power.
Maybe you'll be a federal prosecutor one day, Candace, what do you think?
You know, I don't think I'll ever work for the government, but I'll certainly go after them.
Right.
It's not that the best lack all conviction, it's just that the best lack all prosecutorial power in the country is on the ground.
Yeah.
To get those convictions.
Well, OK.
Now, one more thing I wanted to bring up here, and I don't know if you know too many details about this case just off the cuff, but I'm sure you've heard of it.
Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident accused in the dirty bomb case.
He was supposedly a co-conspirator with Jose Padilla to set off a radioactive dirty bomb charges that that never came up in his indictment when they eventually tried him in civilian federal court.
And now they've apparently dropped the dirty bomb charges against this guy, Binyam Mohamed, who seems like I don't know, was he one of the guys tortured into incriminating Padilla there or what happened?
You know, it's I don't know if we'll ever really know what happened here, but it always seemed to me and Padilla that the evidence against him was so flimsy and hopefully on appeal or with the Supreme Court, his conviction will be thrown out.
But these, again, seem to me to be scapegoats by the government to make it look like they're doing something.
And Binyam, you know, I've never seen any real evidence against him.
You know, I know that they claim that there's secret evidence, but they drop the charges.
So it makes you wonder if this is just more of the same, you know, calling these people criminals and terrorists to make the American people think that the government's doing something when in fact there's no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Now, I'm not as good with these names.
They're hard to memorize for me.
And so I'm not I'm not certain.
But I remember reading that there were, I think, two different men, one of them, an Ethiopian gentleman who tortured him with razor blades.
I'm trying to think of the word mangled him or whatever, you know, his genitals with razor blades.
And he was one of the guys who pointed the finger at Jose Padilla, of course, after the torture.
Do you know, is this guy Mohammed?
Did they torture him or I'm thinking somebody else?
Well, I know I can't think of the man's name, either the one that you're referring to with the razor blade.
But I but I do know that one that's being argued about in the British system right now, because he does have ties to the British system.
I believe he wasn't a citizen, but maybe a resident of Britain.
And his lawyers have been trying to get the British government to release the information about his torture, because supposedly, the British government has that information.
And the American government, our government refuses to turn over that information.
And I think just in the last day or two British, that if the American courts do not, and I think they must be meaning the military court, does not turn this information over to their lawyers, then the British court is going to order the British government to turn it over since they have copies.
So I think there's corroborating evidence of the torture.
And I, you know, my understanding is that there's also pictures because this man said they did take pictures of his mutilated penis.
Well, so what about so the future from here, are you are how optimistic are you that the Obama administration is going to, you know, do anything to set these things right?
Well, let me just say that I, I have great hope that the Obama Obama administration will do something I really my clients only hope and most of the medical antonyms only hope because the judicial system is just it is such a standstill and has become so ineffective because of the manipulation by the Bush administration and the Department of Justice, so called justice.
So my hope is that the Obama administration will do as it's promised to do.
And that is to close the place.
I think there are a number of attorneys who have been active on the Guantanamo issues that are well versed on it, that are also well connected with the campaign.
And I think they'll be doing their best to get this right on track, right from the beginning.
And I can't imagine Obama coming into I can't imagine him becoming president and then just ignoring Guantanamo.
It's too big of an eyesore for our whole country.
Although I couldn't imagine him finding onto the NSA either.
So I guess I guess I've been surprised before.
Well, it's a lot of power to give up.
I guess we'll see.
We'll know by, you know, February 20th, whether he's done anything or not.
I guess we will.
All right.
Listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been great being back.
Thanks for having me on.
Okay.
Talk to you again soon.
All right.
Take care.
All right, folks.
That's H. Candace Gorman.
She's a civil rights attorney in Chicago and has her own law office there.
The blog is the Guantanamo blog.
It's GTMO blog.
Forget mo blog.
GTMO blog dot blog spot dot com.
Anti-war radio.
We'll be right back.
