All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Nick Baumann from Mother Jones Magazine, motherjones.com, and they've got this special investigation about the domestic war on terrorism, the FBI's role in the war on terrorism really is more accurate.
We talked with Trevor Aronson about his article, The Informants, just, I don't know, two or three weeks ago, but Nick's is called Locked Up Abroad for the FBI, and the story starts with Ghoulette Mohammed, and we talked about him on the show, Nick, at the beginning of the year, but this is an American citizen who was arrested, and if I remember it correctly, quite severely abused in Kuwait at the behest of the Obama administration.
Yeah, that's what appears to have happened, or what he and his lawyers believe happened, is that he was picked up at the behest of the United States.
You know, one government official has denied this, although that person has since left the government, and other than that, the government's been mostly refused to comment on specific cases like this, and that's, as my article explains, the reason for that is probably because they really do occasionally ask or suggest to, that's how they would phrase it, foreign governments, even sort of abusive foreign governments, that they pick up U.S. citizens and, you know, ask them some questions, and those foreign governments might not be as kind or non-abusive as even your local cops or your local FBI might be, because they're used to abusing prisoners.
Right.
Now, well, and, you know, your local cops and the FBI are too, but you know, at least there's ACLU here sometimes.
All right, now, but so tell us real quickly the story of Ghulam Mohamed, why it was that he was, you know, supposedly, anyway, detained by the Kuwaitis, why it was the Americans had them do this to him, and where is he now?
And then there are quite a few other stories in this article I'd really like to get to as well, if we can.
So he traveled, he's a teenager from Virginia, and he traveled to Yemen and to Somalia to visit family there.
You know, his father died when he was very young, and he was looking to sort of get in touch with his roots, and, you know, one government official told me that, you know, just the very fact of traveling to those countries as a young Muslim man is enough to raise red flags for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
And, you know, months later, months after he travels to these places, he's living in Kuwait and living with family there, and he goes to the airport to renew his visa, and he's picked up by, you know, men who appear to be members of the Kuwaiti security forces and sort of dragged off to this black site where he claims he was beaten, and he was questioned, including questioned by some of the questioning he says was led by someone who he believed to be an American agent.
And how long was he held there?
So he was held sort of incommunicado and sort of disappeared for about a week, and then he was eventually transferred to a deportation facility where they continued to hold him.
And at this point, he was able to get access to a cell phone and contact the media, and that's sort of what got him out of this situation, is because it became an embarrassment for the Obama administration, for the Kuwaitis to be holding this person who, it didn't appear had really done anything at all.
And he's back in the U.S. now, and he's never been charged with a crime.
You know, no one's ever indicted him for any sort of terrorism related.
Was he suing Barack Obama for this?
Yeah, and he has.
He's sued the government, and the problem is that a lot of this stuff is really hard to prove, and, you know, as I'm sure your listeners have followed these sorts of terrorism cases for a long time, the government has lots of ways of making it take forever in court to sort these things out.
You end up arguing about things that have nothing to do with the case itself, the merits of the case.
So, you know, they're going to be locked up in court for, I imagine, years.
And then eventually they'll just say, nah, the executive branch has sovereign immunity for anything that they do, no matter how criminal it is.
And it's a state secret, and you know, we don't have to tell you.
And that's their get out of court free card, you know.
If they ever come close to losing a case like this, they can just say, well, you know, continuing with this case would endanger state secrets, and the court can't really say anything about that.
Now, this case isn't in your article.
You have four or five more here, but this is really the same situation with Abu Ali, right, who was tortured by the Saudis in, apparently, I think, right in front of the FBI, asking their questions, and then was basically beaten into, quote-unquote, admitting to a plot to assassinate George Bush.
And they tried him in civilian court in Virginia, and they included the torture testimony, but they excluded any evidence of torture from the trial, and he was convicted on that.
Yeah, well, the interesting thing about the Abu Ali case, right, is that he was held by the Saudis, and his lawyers in the U.S. basically believed that he was being held by the Saudis on behalf of the United States, that this was a case of proxy detention, basically.
And when they filed, the basic fact of the matter is that there's really no constitutional justification for asking foreign governments to detain people on our behalf.
So, one of the most fundamental rights you have as a U.S. citizen is the right to return to the U.S.
Now, they can prosecute you once you return, and that's what happened to Abu Ali once he was brought back to the U.S., but basically, as soon as they filed this suit, instead of fighting the suit, they just sent him back to the U.S. and charged him in civilian court.
Well, you bring up an important point there.
I wonder, how new, really, is all of this?
Completely unprecedented?
And how illegal is it, if it's illegal?
Well, I don't think it's new.
You know, from my reporting, this has been something that's been going on to varying degrees since at least the early Bush administration, perhaps longer.
It's hard to tell for sure.
In terms of illegality, I don't know.
You know, there's things that are illegal, and then there are things that violate people's rights.
So, you know, you could conceivably be doing something that's violating a detainee's rights without actually committing a criminal offense yourself.
Well, I wonder, I mean, it seems like Obama here, if I'm the prosecutor, I want to indict him for conspiracy to commit torture, and that's already a felony just in the regular penal code, torturing someone and conspiring to do so.
But I wonder whether, you know, the law says that the State Department must, you know, help someone as much as they can in a situation like this, and if they don't, they're criminally liable somehow, or anything in the structure of how it's supposed to work already that's being overrun here.
Well, the interesting thing with regards to the State Department is I think that in a lot of these cases that I studied, there's a decent amount of evidence that the state was sort of out of the loop on it, that basically the FBI and the CIA and the law enforcement and intelligence agencies, along with DOD, were sort of running the show, and the state was brought in after the fact, or sort of the wool was pulled over their eyes to a certain extent.
You know, they're sort of seen as the touchy-feely people by the law enforcement types, so I think in some cases they didn't know, in some cases they probably, you know, chose not to.
Well, and really this all comes down to Justice Department guidelines and rules and regulations that describe how these things are to be handled, rather than any congressional edict one way or the other, am I right?
Yeah, and I think that there seems to be a lot of...the Justice Department seems to be giving people, you know, the FBI a lot of flexibility in how it cooperates with foreign governments to deal with American citizens who are suspected of terrorism.
Again, it's Nick Bauman.
Motherjones.com is the website, and Locked Up Abroad for the FBI is the article, and you profile five or six guys in here really quickly.
Tell us one more that you think was really notable.
Well, I think this really interesting one, and I'm probably going to have more on this guy soon, because I followed a FOIA request related to it, is this guy Sharif Mobley, who was basically picked up in this sort of action movie style shootout in Yemen on the street, where this van pulled up and all these guys in black masks came and got him.
He tried to run away and they shot him, and then they basically threw him in prison and eventually he tried to break out.
So that's a really crazy story, and he's actually still in prison in Yemen at this time, because when he tried to break out, he allegedly shot a guard.
So we'll see what happens with that.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're out of time, but I really appreciate your time on the show today, Nick.
Good stuff.
Great journalism here.
No one else covers this story at all.
It's you.
All right.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Nick Bauman from Motherjones Magazine.
Motherjones.com, locked up abroad for the FBI, part of their big investigative piece all about the bogus terror war, the FBI's bogus one.
