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Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Jason Leopold.
He's an investigative reporter and the deputy managing editor at truthout.org.
He's the author of the national bestseller News Junkie, a memoir.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Great to be back with you.
Thanks so much.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and you've got a very important piece here I want to recommend very highly to everyone.
My tortured journey with former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks and there's a link right here at the top to the full transcript of your, I believe, exclusive first interview with David Hicks since being released from the gulag down in Cuba and you've decided and you explain why in the beginning of the article here, you decided to write this article from a personal point of view to go along with the actual transcript of the interview there.
And so I was thinking that would be a pretty good place to start this interview.
Why it is that you chose to write this piece about the interview the way that you did?
Well, it's a number of reasons, Scott.
And, you know, as I say in my piece, I've never spoken to a former Guantanamo detainee before.
And I've never spoken to anyone who has been tortured the way David Hicks was tortured.
And we know that there are a lot of folks out there, a lot of detainees who were tortured in our name, war on terror, whatever.
Seven hundred something of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, when David Hicks, let me just back up for a moment.
He released a memoir last October called Guantanamo, My Journey.
And, you know, I read the I read the book and it really affected me.
And I'm not sure if people realize, but there are a few detainees out there, former detainees who have been released who have read who have written books.
And I would really encourage people to, you know, take the time to read it because it read those books because they're they're truly important.
Anyway, you know, I read the book.
It impacted me.
I had an opportunity to actually interview David Hicks.
The very first interview he, you know, since being released and after the book came out and as I sat down to try to write this story, I wanted I wanted to write it.
I really did want to write it just as a straight news story.
You know, here's a guy who was tortured.
Here's a guy who, you know, was in Afghanistan in these.
He was in training camps.
I mean, he was he was he was there in in 2002 and he was sold to US forces.
And as I started to write the story, I just I had so much difficulty finding the words, finding I'm sort of at a loss of words right now.
I just could not seem to come up with the words to or think of the words of how to write it.
And I really was impacted by it and by my conversations with him over the past two months because it affected me emotionally.
And I started to dig deep and figure out what was what was going on.
Why could I why was I drawing a blank?
And, you know, as I say in my story, I really empathized with David Hicks.
I empathized with a guy who found himself in Afghanistan associating with jihadists.
And, you know, as I indicated in my story, I empathize because I understood probably better than anyone how that could happen simply because of my own story, my own personal story, which I sort of alluded to which is covered in my own book, which came out about five years ago.
And I felt that if I were to be honest and just say right how I felt, how speaking to David Hicks and two former Guantanamo guards who have come forward to talk about his torture and how everyone was affected by it, how torture affected me hearing about it, how it affected the guards.
I felt that would be the best way to try and explain to the public, explain to my readers that, you know, how this is truly something that we all need to really, you know, pay closer attention to and care about.
And so I just decided to do that.
And I had no idea how the story would would end up, you know, where it would, you know, what direction it would take.
And so it just turned into sort of, you know, somewhat of a first person narrative on how it really emotionally affected me as a journalist.
And, you know, as I say at the end of the article, I realized that, you know, torture does affect everyone.
Torture not only permanently scars the, you know, the victim of torture, but everyone who comes in contact with that person.
And, you know, whatever anyone may think about David Hicks or whatever feelings they may have about him and, you know, what he has been accused of or his presence in Afghanistan, it all comes down to the fact that no one deserves to be treated this way.
No one deserves to be tortured.
And, you know, as I was writing the story, you know, I realized as well that, you know, I've been obsessed with the Bush administration's torture program for, you know, for, geez, more than five years now, almost a decade I've been writing about it.
And I really don't know why.
But I, you know, as I say in the story, I just know that these crimes committed in our name, it just it truly haunts me.
And, you know, when you speak to someone who was actually there, they start telling you about their, you know, being injected with unknown drugs, being put in solitary confinement, being beaten for 10 hours.
I mean, let me just say that, you know, David Hicks told me he was beaten for 10 hours, but he calls it, you know, a mild beating.
I mean, that's how much they've broken down these people to the point where it's like, oh, you know, it was just a mild beating compared to someone else who, you know, was waterboarded shock.
It comes down to we just don't know the extent of someone's pain.
We don't know the we still don't know the extent of what happened there and what's continuing to happen over there at Guantanamo.
And I had no idea that this, you know, that I would be so affected by it.
And I figured, as I said, that I, you know, get on the phone with him.
I'd do it.
You know, he'd do his first interview.
I'd give him the opportunity to discuss what happened.
And he did.
And I certainly make that that, as you noted, the transcript available.
But I just felt that maybe people would look at this story differently, the torture story differently, if I were able to be vulnerable and share what this did to me.
And, you know, it was it was uncomfortable because, as I said, you know, I empathize with him and I understood, you know, how how he ended up there due to my own personal story and troubles that I've had in my own past.
But I I felt that maybe people would just look at look at it differently.
And it was it was a departure for me because as a journalist, you know, you're always taught, hey, you're not supposed to get too close to, you know, your interview subject.
You're not supposed to sort of be vulnerable.
And I just felt that I just felt that, you know, if I were to approach the story any other way, what would happen?
You know, it would be like, oh, hey, yeah, another guy tortured.
And that's the end of the story.
We how many of those stories like that have we read thus far?
Well, you know, it is a risk, but I think it works.
I think it's a very important article.
It's a hell of a read.
My tortured journey with former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks.
And we'll get more specific about the facts of the case with Jason Leopold from Truthout.org right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Talking with Jason Leopold from Truthout.org, author of my tortured journey with former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, a very important story.
I urge you to read it.
I plead with you.
OK, so now tell us, Jason, what was it about what you learned from this guy that affected you so much that you had to end up writing the piece this way?
Well, you know, it was the it was his backstory, really, Scott.
It was, you know, David Hicks dropped out of high school.
He was somewhat of a drifter looking to belong to something.
He ended up, you know, abusing drugs, alcohol, you know, ingratiating himself with, you know, a wide range of of characters.
And for me, you know, I wrote I wrote my own memoir five years ago called News Junkie.
And aside from the fact talking about my, you know, my work as a journalist, I talked about how my my past informed my professional life.
And, you know, one thing that I that I talked about is that in my early 20s, I, too, was, you know, looking to belong to something, you know, felt a need for attention and ingratiated myself with making a terrible decision ingratiating myself with some made members of a New York crime family, which I paid a heavy price for.
And so reading that reading how this guy who grew up in Australia, you know, came from a came from pretty good family, you know, his dad campaigned for his, you know, for his release.
I understood.
I understood how someone, you know, loses their way.
And it just really affected me that way.
I mean, this was a guy who, you know, just started reading up on so many different things.
And, you know, he back in I think it was 1999, you know, decided to become a convert to Islam and, you know, did that.
And, you know, at the time, he's David Hicks is only 36 years old right now.
And, you know, he's a young guy, naive, full of bravado, very impressionable individual.
And, you know, just got sort of, you know, fell into these, you know, making some really bad decisions.
And obviously, those bad decisions he, you know, he paid a heavy price for.
And, you know, you take that and it's like, how the heck did a guy like this end up in, you know, in Afghanistan?
And, you know, let me just point out that not everyone who goes to Afghanistan, you know, is a terrorist.
Not everyone who goes to Yemen is a terrorist.
You know, he went out there, you know, thought he was he was going to be enlightened.
And, you know, and ended up, like I said, you know, associating with with jihadist.
He was in a well, even going to the training camps there for years and years before and after the Soviet occupation there was sort of a rite of passage for Muslim young men all over the world to just go and go through the camps and whatever.
It doesn't mean you work for Osama.
That's exactly true.
You know, tens of thousands of people went through there.
Absolutely.
And, you know, what's really what I really learned is how uninformed people are.
Truly, the public is so uninformed, has such a poor grasp on history to, you know, particularly not U.S. history, just, you know, world history, understanding what you know what this means.
I mean, we are so, uh, you know, lap up whatever, you know, government officials tell us.
And it was just amazing.
And, as I said in a piece, and actually, I realized that I, too, to some degree, feel like I've been conditioned over the past 10 years, you know, to think about anyone who, you know, steps foot in Afghanistan, you know, that that that does not wear a uniform or is embedded with, you know, some military unit is a terrorist.
And as I was writing the story, I realized that, you know, to say that I empathize with David Hicks and understood how this happened to him and why he, you know, made the decision that he did, it actually did scare me, because I see I truly feared, Scott, that, you know, that I would be accused of, you know, being some sort of terrorist sympathizer, simply because of what people, you know, how they have, how we have such a knee jerk reaction to, you know, hearing these, you know, these stories without having a true grasp on history.
And that's because the, you know, disinformation that's peddled by Democrats and Republicans, when it comes to particularly over the past 10 years, when it comes to wars and military and, you know, terrorism, etc. long list, which I know that you're, you know, very informed about, but it was something that, for me, this was truly a journey, and one that was tortured, and one that I also learned a lot about myself.
And, and I'm just amazed that, you know, people just don't care enough to take the time to understand how, you know, first of all, to have any compassion, you know, one of the things that I should say is that not in the U.S., but in Australia, you know, the media there is really vilified this guy, David Hicks, basically saying that he deserved it.
You know, he was in Afghanistan, so he, hey, he deserved, he deserved to be tortured.
And without actually knowing, or I should say, without actually caring how the Howard government, Prime Minister John Howard there, total bushelacky, you know, manipulated his case, basically forced the guy to plead guilty to a, you know, providing material support for terrorism, five years after he had already been in Guantanamo, much of which was spent in, you know, solitary confinement, because he was, John Howard, was concerned that any further imprisonment would hurt his re-election chances.
And let me just say that there's documents out there on that, and it's been well documented that Dick Cheney, you know, paid a visit to Howard back in 2007, early 2007, to discuss Iraq.
You know, the David Hicks case came up.
Howard urged Cheney to do something about it.
Cheney comes back, you know, calls up the convening, you know, judge over at, you know, presiding over the military commission, you know, gets some sort of, you know, charge against David Hicks, and basically says, hey, you got to plead guilty to this, then we'll let you, you know, we'll let you out of here, which he did.
I mean, at that point, he was already there for five and a half years, and they let him out.
But again, it's, they didn't have any evidence, really, against him.
And as you noted, you know, just being at a training camp is not evidence.
It's not enough evidence to say that, you know, someone's a terrorist.
So they, you know, providing material support for terrorism, you know, that was a war crimes charge that was inserted into the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which, you know, Obama said was a, and everyone agreed, including, you know, some courts, was, you know, a highly flawed, you know, judicial process, designed to just obtain guilty plea.
And so, you know, the whole thing is, is that, who's the real, you know, who are the real criminals, in a sense, you know, you've got, you got a guy here, okay, he was, you know, he was out there.
And if they had any evidence that he committed a crime, you know, prosecute for him for that.
But they, but they didn't.
So they, you know, they made it up.
And then you had the, you know, political interference, malfeasance, you know, taking place as a result.
And, you know, here we are.
Hey, Jason, let me keep you one more segment here.
You got it.
All right.
It'll be a long break for the top of the hour here.
Then when we get back, we'll have more with Jason Leopold from truthout.org.
My Tortured Journey with Former Guantanamo Detainee David Hicks is the title of the piece.
It's anti-war radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Leopold from truthout.org.
The article is My Tortured Journey with Former Guantanamo Detainee David Hicks.
And so now I think, Jason, we've established, I mean, hell, the guy's name is David Hicks.
He could be from Houston.
He's from Australia, which, you know, I think they're on the human like us list.
Help us fight against the commies in Vietnam.
Right.
And our loyal ally, part of our commonwealth that we inherited from the British after World War Two there.
And we're good friends with them.
And he's more or less white looking and stuff.
So I think we've established he's a human being.
And I think you've established that.
And, you know, he was running with the wrong crowd, but hadn't really done anything.
But so now the important point to get to, if assuming we've convinced anyone that this guy, David Hicks, is human, is the inhuman things that were done to him.
Yeah.
And you cover that pretty thoroughly in this article here.
And and it's a nightmare, you know, for anybody who's ever had a really bad headache or a toothache or a broken bone or something.
You know, you think about how bad that hurts and think about someone doing that to you.
And then some, as described in this article, please elaborate.
Yeah.
You know, David said that, you know, from the first moment that he was captured, he realized that torture was going to become a reality because he was, you know, in his first interrogation, the first it was beating just, you know, he was just beaten to a pulp and, you know, you know, one beating for, you know, for 10 hours.
From there, you know, once he was transferred to Guantanamo, he was injected with unknown substances in the back of his neck.
He was sodomized with, you know, with foreign objects beaten again at Guantanamo.
He needed a hernia operation and was told that if he did not say, you know, certain things that they wanted to hear, you know, he would not be able to get that operation.
He was given other sort of, you know, forced to take other medications, you know, against his will.
And basically what he said was is that if you decline to take medication, pills, whatever it is, basically they have this immediate reaction force, what they call the IRF team, who would come in and basically beat you down and force you to take it.
I mean, do people understand that, you know, there's, you know, we're holding, I mean, I realize that they're not prisoners, they're called detainees, and we're forcing them to, you know, take medication, take things that they have no idea what they're taking against their will.
He said that, you know, the injections in the back of his neck were, you know, he ended up hallucinating, and that happened regularly.
And then, of course, you know, I think what's really important to note is that the, you know, solitary confinement, 23 hours a day for almost a year, that's truly torture, by the way.
People think just, you know, being locked up, and I realize there are folks out there that will say, hey, you know, we do that a lot here in maximum security.
You know, solitary confinement is torture, and the way that it was done to David was really torture, because they did it right after they, you know, filed charges against him.
And so basically what they did is that they, you know, they put him in solitary confinement, keeping him away from it.
He had no contact with anyone, and it was designed to psychologically, you know, break him down to the point where they could extract a confession from him.
You know, we, of course, have the, you know, shackling, loud music, cold temperatures.
For David, you know, being in an extremely cold temperature was particularly torturous, because he's, you know, something that he's not used to, and he said he feared.
And so they exploited those fears.
You know, some of the other things that they did was they would use chainsaws and rev them up to induce fear.
And, you know, in addition to that, it was the, you know, I'm just going over in my head some of the things that he was telling me.
What you say in the article, you talk about, and these are things that we've heard of, I think not so much in specific cases, but just, you know, in general, the use of extreme cold and stress positions and strobe lights and extremely loud music, and then, of course, just the regular beatings that go along with all of that.
The, I don't know, was he part of the frequent flyer program down there at Guantanamo, where they move you from cell to cell every 10 minutes or something, so you can't get a single wink of sleep for two weeks?
Yeah, he was not part of the frequent flyer program, but he was interrogated, you know, almost every single day.
And, you know, the one thing about David, and this is what some of the former guards who are quoted in the story, you know, came forward to say is that who knew David, is to basically say that he's a guy that was easily manipulated, and I think that sort of underscores sort of the point of how he ended up in the position that he ended up in, and, you know, that led to his capture and arrest.
He just wanted the interrogations to stop, so he, you know, would just sign a document.
He would do whatever the government, the military said you should do in order to get those things to stop, and he is very, feels very guilty about the fact that he was so weak that he simply gave into it.
It's truly heartbreaking.
I mean, you know, one of the things I noted early was that he was sodomized with foreign objects.
I mean, that is just, you know, the way that the guy was, the way that he was describing it for me, it was just, it was horrific.
I mean, and, you know, in some ways, he feels guilty that his, you know, for, I didn't really get into this in the story, but I will tell you that he feels guilty actually saying the word torture because he felt that his treatment did not measure up to the treatment of others who were treated worse, other detainees, whether it's waterboarding, he said electric shock, so he feels guilty actually using the word torture.
In some ways, it's almost as if he's a, you know, kind of like a rape victim who, you know, felt guilty, actually, you know, feels guilty saying the word rape or thinking that, oh, you know, this was, you know, not really, perhaps not rape, you know, so it took a lot to convince him that he was, you know, his treatment was torture.
Sure sounds like torture to me, but you can see how he would think so because of what he knows was done to other people, much worse, you know, choreographed from the White House by the principals committee, you know, he can't, he can't help but, you know, like survivor's guilt, right?
I didn't have nearly as bad as some of the other guys, but that doesn't really diminish what he went through.
Exactly, and that's it, survivor's guilt, and, you know, and by the way, for people, no matter how guilty this guy is, nobody deserves that, but just for the record, you know, Cheney gave him $50 in time served like night court here, he wasn't the worst of the worst, he wasn't Al Qaeda terrorists, he never did nothing to nobody, this guy, he was just some guy they scooped up in Afghanistan, that's it.
He was, exactly.
So they torture him within a foot of his life instead of an inch, like that ought to somehow be an apology.
And that is, you know, when I started really looking at it, looking at it, you know, Scott, from the way after speaking to him, you know, checking out, going back and looking at, you know, some past articles and doing some research, that was the attitude.
Well, you know, he was, that's not so bad compared to, you know, some of the, you know, more horrific things that, you know, that we've done.
But he does talk about, you know, what he thought was experimentation as well, you know, going on there.
And I think that his book is just, it's truly eye-opening.
All right.
Well, listen, I hope everyone reads this article, My Torture Journey with Former Guantanamo Detainee David Hicks.
It's by Jason Leopold at truthout.org.
And he's also, of course, the author of the book News Junkie, a memoir.
Thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Jason.
Scott, thank you.
Appreciate it.
