Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/9/26 Andy Worthington on Twenty Four Years of Guantanamo

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

As we hit the twenty-fourth anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo Bay “detention center,” Scott brings Andy Worthington on the show to discuss the history of this illegal prison and the status of the men still being held there. Discussed on the show: The Guantanamo Files by Andy Worthington Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi Don't Forget Us Here by Mansoor Adayfi Outside The Law: Stories from Guantánamo Scott’s interview with Sterling Thomas Andy Worthington is the author of Guantanamo Files and the director of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo.” Read his work at the Future of Freedom Foundation and AndyWorthington.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @GuantanamoAndy. Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries in five years.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right, you guys, introducing Andy Worthington, just like back in history, but now in video. Andy, of course, is the great author of the book,

The Guantanamo Files, and I spent the last generation raising awareness about the Guantanamo Bay Prison and trying to get that thing closed and the people released out of there. His website is Andy Worthington.c.c.0.uk. I haven't said that in a while, but I'm glad that I had a chance to.

And also he's at Andy Worthington.substack.com as well as his new one. And get this, go, y'all. 24 years of Guantanamo on January 11th this Sunday. So, boy, is that a long time to be held in prison without trial, it seems like, especially in sort of kind of the U.S. of eight. Welcome back to the show, Andy. How you doing, man? Yeah, I'm good.

Thanks for having me on Scott. It's always a pleasure. And what a long, long time we've been doing this for. I know. And it's been too long since we've spoken. But it's been way too long that we've had to talk about this subject. It's just completely nuts. And they kicked this thing off then right there at the dawn of the Terror War.

And what was the purpose of even putting people like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? That might even be confusing for young people or just. people who aren't too familiar with these topics. How is it that America even has a naval base in Cuba anyway? I thought they hate us and we hate them because they're a bunch of commie rats and we're great. It turns out the U.S. has got naval bases at almost every country on earth. I mean, the fact that we had one in Castro's Cuba that whole time might be surprising to people. So what's the story with this base, man?

Well, absolutely. And they chose it because they thought it would be beyond the reach of the U.S. law and in so many fundamental respects, despite all of the legal battles over the years, the Bush administration has largely been proved correct. It's a place where, you know, as you said, people have been held and continue to be held indefinitely without charge of trial. There are only 15 people there now. Throughout its history, 779 men and boys were held there the US military. We're down to 15, but of those 15 men still held, none of them are held in, on any legally acceptable basis whatsoever. And although some of them have been charged

in a broken and invented military trial system, there are still men held at Guantanamo who have been held from day one without charge or trial, who are still held without charge of trial. And actually, Scott, I've been thinking about one poor guy who was, um, approved for release by an administrative review board, an administrative review process rather. This was in the first year of President Obama's first term. So this was in 2009. He was approved for release.

This guy is, his name is Muin Abd al-Sata. He appears to be a Rohingya Muslim. The United States thought he was from the UAE. I think he spent some time in Saudi Arabia. I think at some point his father may have secured for him a Pakistani passport, but he seems to be from Myanmar. He is therefore, you know, I mean, his very origin is of such dubiousness that it's difficult to work out exactly who he is.

Guess what? He has refused to engage with the authorities at any point. He's not interested in. He's never been interested in having legal representation, which isn't a requirement to Guantanamo, you only get it if you say, hey, I would like a pro bono U.S. attorney to come and work for me to represent me.

That's never happened. So he's literally lost in the machine. There is no way that this guy is ever going to get out of Guantanamo. 24 years. What are we doing? Where else does that happen within the United States carceral system? that somebody is held for 24 years without any trial, without any representation just disappears off the face of the earth.

He's just a name on a piece of paper. There's one photo from the WikiLeaks files from Guantanamo, and the guy's just lost. How is that possible? People forget that that was part in the Manning and Assange Link from 2010 was the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the State Department cables and the Guantanamo files. Very crucial stuff there, as you say.

Otherwise, you might not even know about this guy at all, right? Yeah, I mean, a lot of stuff was available in those files, Scott, I have to say. And it's still, you know, to this day, it's not, I don't think that it's coincidental that although, you know, the entire U.S. establishment tried to ignore the release of those files, within a week of them coming out, they had decided that it was urgently important for them to assassinate the Sama bin Laden in that compound in Pakistan. Just one week. And that removed anybody from that point onwards of even remembering that Julian Assangean WikiLeaks had released all of these classified military files, which, if you looked at them closely, completely exploded their myth that the people that they were holding were, you know, in any way significant.

at all. Was that necessary? Just a week after the files were released? I still think that's significant, but, you know, if you look for any information about that online, you won't really find anything about it. No one really cares. And that could be a coincidence,

but, you know, there are a lot of things in motion all the time, but it sure is at the very least, very unfortunate, the timing there and the way it was able to distract. Well, and also because, you know, what went with it was that you started getting, you know, the, the apologists for Guantanamo and torture starting to talk again about how important torture had been, how important it was that Guantanamo existed. So, yeah.

Yeah, crucially, they lied that torture led to the capture of Bin Laden and they even made a movie like that with that disgusting lady from the dinosaur movie where they pretend that was how they knew he was there when, in fact, it was a walk-in who just, came to the U.S. embassy and told them where the guy would work. They did not torture a guy into revealing the name of the courier and all that is totally made up hoax. So anyways, and I know that because my wife reported, although it never got published, but she had it first and then Seymour Hersh eventually published it a couple years later.

I know that that's how that happened. So anyways, Godang, I want to ask you about, okay, let's talk about the guys who never even were charged and all this. kind of ghost prisonerness stuff in a second. But about the guys who've been charged in the military tribunal system, I mean, I'll just go ahead and bake it into my questions for people who don't know. They're like, they have had to re-engineer the military tribunal system at least a couple of times due to court rulings, like civilian American Supreme Court rulings and such about

how things are played down there. But I'm trying to remember, and I'm sorry. Sorry, because, boy, it's just been a long time since I was thinking about this, Andy. Refresh my memory. Have those military tribunals down there ever convicted a single guy this whole time? They have, yeah, but they've only ever done so once through what we would regard as an acceptable trial. You know, the most... How many guys?

How many guys are... How many guys are... And I guess if you can differentiate, if any of them had just went ahead and pled guilty or whatever, or how many guys have gone through some kind of trial and were actually convicted? I think it's something like 11, Scott. So out of those 779 men who were called the worst of the worst, they managed to.

Well, that's still more than I thought. That's still more than I thought. Because it had been, I know that at one point, there were seven different prosecutors. It could be more, but there were at least seven different prosecutors who resigned rather than participate in prosecuting someone in this fashion, in the various fashions that they had set up in the past. That's pretty bad.

Yeah, and that was mostly under the first version of the military commissions that were the kind of the brainchild of Dick Cheney, where what he hoped was that they would launder information derived through torture and then would impose the death penalty on people. that got kicked out by the Supreme Court as a time when the Supreme Court would have been able to recognize the importance of issues like that. I don't think that we would look at the same thing happening these days.

Now, Ramsey bin al-Shed and Khalid Shah-Mohemahmahad. Oh, sorry, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to say, then Congress brought the commissions back, and then when Obama got in, then he shouted them, and then he brought them back. So there are three versions of the military commissions. And, you know, the thing with these 11 convictions that have taken place

is that nine of them have been achieved through plea deals. So, you know, literally, in some cases, people have recognized, hey, I didn't do anything wrong, but the only way I'm getting out of here is to accept that I did. And let's remember that the most grotesque example of that, which took place under President Obama, was that a former child prisoner, Mahjado, the Canadian citizen, recognized that the only way he was ever going to get out

to Guantanamo and go home to Canada was that he confessed to killing a U.S. soldier in a firefighting in Afghanistan, which he almost certainly did not do. But he had to lie to get out of Guantanamo, otherwise he was going to rot there forever. Well, that is the American way. So most of these have been plea deals. And why should we accept that these plea deals are really any more credible than they are in most of the U.S. court system where that happens. Only two trials. Yeah, they're already being, yeah, they're already being punished and coerced.

And so, yeah, any plea deal is basically a hoax. And that was what, yeah, I was trying to get out. I was like, how many were to, where any military tribunal actually had to issue a ruling at the end of a trial and really convict a guy based on the evidence presented and over the There were just two cases, but we are back in ancient history now, Scott. These took place at the end of the Bush administration. The first one was a Yemeni guy called Salim Hamdan. He drove a car for Osama bin Laden.

You remember, it will all come back to you. He drove a car for Osama bin Laden. You know, he didn't know anything about anything. He just needed a paycheck for his family. And what happened in his case was the military jury, you know, convicted him. then the judge, who had been so appalled really by what had happened, said, okay, that's a sentence, but I'm going to give him time. I'm going to give him credit for time served.

And he went back to Yemen five months later. This was in 2007. I wrote about it at the time. The justification for Guantanamo was over at this point. A guy who had actually worked with bin Laden, he drove his car, was sent home to Guantanamo after a trial. nothing happened. And then the only other case,

that was his Supreme Court case was being mapped for him, right? If I just mentioned Ali Hamza al-Baloo, this is a guy who apparently made a video, he was a video maker for Al-Qaeda. He apparently made a video glorifying the 9-11 attacks. I mean, actually, we don't even really know what he did or didn't do, because when he was put on trial,

he refused to mount a defense. He absolutely refused. he refused to let his defense lawyer represent him. This was in the very end of the Bush administration. He was convicted. He was given a life sentence. He's serving a life sentence in solitary confinement in Guantanamo, even though almost every part of his conviction has been overturned by the court since,

as it has in the case of many of these other 11 men who've been convicted, there's only one disputed conspiracy strand that still stands to justify holding him. But he's held in solitary confinement, not even by design, but because they insisted that anyone convicted had to be held separately

from the rest of the population, and they imagined that they were going to fill this block with all of these people. All of these people never materialized. This guy has been held since November 2008, pretty much in solitary confinement in a prison block in Guantanamo

on his own. And apparently, that's not a big deal like it. I mean. Yeah, that's absolutely tortured. Just brutal. And I like that because, oh, well, see, a bureaucratic decision was made an eon ago

based on assumptions that turned out not to be right, but then they never revisited the policy at all. You know, we still leave him there. I was going to say about Hamdan, there's the Supreme Court decision named after him where they said that he did have at least some degree of habeas corpus. And I forget, because I used to know all three, major Supreme Court decisions at that time that you said that actually putting the prisoners

on a American base in Cuba does not remove you from Supreme Court jurisdiction, even though they're not for you at persons or whatever. They still said, one, we do have jurisdiction there and two, at least some of these people get a writ of habeas corpus. Was that the Honda decision? Was that they at least get rid of habeas corpus, although he was already gone by then? That was the Rasul decision in 2004, which the Bush administration then ignored and led to Bumedian in 2008, when finally the prisoners were given constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, but only for two years until the appeals court overthrew all of the bases on which they could actually successfully appeal habeas corpus. So Hamdan was the first of the three, is that correct?

Hamdan was the one in the middle, which was when the Supreme Court overturned the military commissions as unconstitutional. But I'd say historically the most important aspect of Hamdan was that the Supreme Court reminded the Bush administration that you are not allowed to deprive anyone of their liberty and torture them or subject them to abuse or other forms of ill treatment. Because up until that point, that had been exactly what the Bush administration they'd be doing. They had not only been saying, we have a right to hold people who have not. No rights whatsoever. No fundamental rights as human beings whatsoever. But we can do whatever they want with them. And as soon as the Supreme Court issued that ruling,

then the Bush administration went, these black sites that we've got, guys, I think we're going to have to wrap them up now because we have been told by the highest court in the land that we are not allowed to mistreat our prisoners. Oops. Hey guys, Scott here. For Moondos, Artisan Coffees,

it's the Scott Horton Show-flavored coffee. breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it'll forge you on there to Moondos artisan coffees. Get it. They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondos and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton's Show coffee is the number one bestselling coffee at Moondos Artisan coffees right now. Just go again to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. And then it was such a great PR stunt. I remember at the time, in effect it was anyway, that once they brought Khalis Sheikh Mohammed

and Ramsey bin al-Shib and a couple of the others to Guantanamo, then they were like, yeah, we got real dangerous 9-11 guys there. I was like, yeah, but you were torturing them in Morocco a minute ago. This is way after the fact. And then I remember because we talked about this so many times back in the past that by the end of Bush, before Obama ever came to town, they had already released 600 and something of the 700 total, right? Yeah, 532 underbush.

So that's just a blanket admission. Yeah, that's just a blanket admission of guilt that they simply kidnapped a bunch of innocent, posthune, sheep herders and whoever they felt like, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then on the torture, you know, people forget because it's all a big complicated thing, but the CIA started it with the black sites.

And then Donald Rumsfeld got jealous and said, well, I want to torture people too, and we'll do it. We'll torture him down at Guantanamo under military authority down there. And very quickly, the policy spread back into Afghanistan and Iraq as well, where then it was like, everybody's an enemy combatant, and he could just torture anybody all the time. And this totally went wild from there until they finally got busted, Abu Ghraib and all of that.

But in Guantanamo, there was a severe torture regime there for what, like at least two years, right? Yeah. I mean, basically, in 2002 to Abu Ghrave in 2004. Yeah. I mean, it happened until they realized that the Supreme Court in Rasul, which was June 2004, so it'd been open for nearly two and a half years, that they were going to open the prison up to outside scrutiny. I mean, that's the, you know, that's when it happened.

Up until that point. So even after Abu Ghraib, even after Abu Ghrae, they were still torturing people down there. After Abu Ghrae broke in the media in the spring of 2004. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and the thing as well is that, you know, I mean, there's all been all this stuff over the years ever since, you know, force feeding hunger strikers for years, years. That went on for years. But, you know, but there's also the fundamental thing of which a representative of the Red Cross said quite early on in Guantanamo's history,

that they were extremely worried about the mental stress that prisoners were placed under when they had no idea if, they were ever going to be released from the imprisonment that they found themselves in because they're held indefinitely without charge of trial. There's no there's no knowledge of when, if ever, it might end. That is a form of mental torture. And that is still what's going on there. Now, okay, so out of the 15 total, it's how many have actually been charged and how many are these ghost prisoners who they've already said are never going to be charged

but also are never going to be released? Okay, so there's three guys. that they said years ago they wanted to release, but they somehow can't manage to get around to actually doing it. And what we did at the end of the Biden administration was that people pushed like hell to get him to release people. And he did. He released 15 of the 30 men that he was holding

by the end of his presidency. But it still left these three guys who high-level government administrative review processes have said, we don't want to hold these guys, but they're still there. There are three other guys who counters the ghost prisoners. They've never been charged, but they've never been approved for release either. And, you know, these administrative review processes that go on at Guantanamo are the closest thing to them. And it was obviously an inspiration for the Bush administration is the process of administrative detention that Israel has,

which, you know, at any given time, it applies to thousands of Palestinians where you don't charge them and you can renew every six months this decision that you're going to carry on holding them without charging them, which means that people are healthy years and years and years and never charged. That was clearly, you know, some kind of inspiration for what happened at Guantanamo. But at Guantanamo, you can go years without them even renewing your administrative detention. And this is, you know, this is pretty much the situation for these three guys. And one of them, Scott, whose name you will know.

And I hope that many of your viewers know his name is Abu Zabeda, who was the man for whom they first invented their torture program after 9-11, who was waterboarded, who was held in all of the different sites that they set up all around the world in that dirty manner, in which they had to prevail upon other plying countries to let them have tortured dungeons on their side. because they weren't allowed to do it on the US mainland. And Zubeda, they called him the number three in Al-Qaeda.

They said he knew all about the 9-11 plot. Eventually, they walked back from all of these claims, but they've not let him go. They've not charged him with anything. He's still stuck there. And, you know, in his case, in a few of the other men held, the United Nations on those occasions

when it's been able to issue rulings about men held at Guantanamo. They've ruled that his continued imprisonment is completely arbitrary. This is the working group on arbitrary detention. What is there about his detention that isn't arbitrary, which is a fundamental betrayal

of any kind of legal principle involved if you're going to deprive somebody of their liberty for any amount of time, let alone for... you know, decades. And so, okay, so there are three who've already been cleared for release. There are three who you say have not been charged or cleared for release. Are those the same three that the government has vowed?

We are keeping these people forever and we're not going to charge them, forget it. Because that's a certain category of these guys. Is that those three guys where they have said, we're not saying we could convict them, but we are saying we're still not ever letting them go. Whereas they're at least saying, Sorry, just they're at least pretending that someday they're going to put Ramsey bin al-Shib and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial there, even though I guess they're not. But they've sort of gone through the process of charging them, quote, unquote, and pretending that we're going to event. But no, these three guys are subject to administrative reviews, which take place maybe every two, three years, when a small board of military and official people and intelligence people get together and say, no, we've looked at the, they're.

case, no, it's not safe for us to release them. So we're going to carry on holding them indefinitely. Are you saying them wrong, though, that... So I misunderstanding. You're saying, there's really not a group of people who they vowed, we are giving these people life, but we are never giving them process. You do have this review that you're talking about. These are the close, these three are the closest to that, but I'm overstating it. There's this review, but it's... It's like the Israeli policy of administrative detention. It's a way of constantly deferring. ring actually charging something. So then there's nine who we're going to supposedly get a trial someday?

Okay, so of those nine, one of them is the guy I spoke about who's serving a life sentence in solitary confinement. Another guy has been convicted by a plea deal. This is a guy called Abd al-Haddy and Al-Iraki, who they eventually fitted up on war crimes charges related to the fact that he was involved in military activities in Afghanistan. These are not war crimes. These are just, you know, things that happen in war. He didn't cross the line into the kind of horrific stuff that you're supposed to get prosecuted for war crimes.

But, you know, the horrendous thing about this guy is that he has a congenital spinal disease, which can't be treated at Guantanamo because they have inadequate facilities. So they've had seven botched operations on him. He is almost entirely crippled now. And they will never allow a prisoner to go to the U.S. mainland to get the kind of medical treatment that they need. They simply won't allow it. Republicans pass a provision in the NDA every year to make sure that that doesn't happen. He agreed to a plea deal finally.

But who knows when he's getting out of Guantanamo? He's an Iraqi. At the end of the Biden administration, they tried to send him back to Iraq. they acknowledged that he needs lifelong care and they knew that it was unsafe to send him back to Iraq that they tried to do it anyway and it was almost on the last day

of the Biden administration that a court ruled in an emergency order that they couldn't send it back. He's stuck in Guantanamo now. I think his sentence is supposed to end in something like six years' time that he agreed to in his plea deal when some country has to be found, Scott,

that will look after a man who is almost entirely crippled and who has the taint of having been at Guantanamo. I don't think he's going anywhere. You think he's one of these handful of people that we look at, that they're stuck with a certain number of people that they held, brutalized, refused to give due process to who they're going to have to, one way or another,

look after for the rest of their lives. But they don't even want to do the looking after bit. They just want to preserve their rotten old prison at Guantanamo and whole people there, invisible and continue to abuse them on as many levels as possible, both legally, psychologically, physically, every way you can think of, really. Yeah. Man, if you have any money, you should be buying gold with it. Central banks are hoarding it up.

And if you need some, you should go to rrbi.c.0.c. That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. It's my buddy, Tim Frye. He's a really great guy. Him in this business, they've been over there for a very, very long time. And they will help you get your medals and they will always do you right. That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. at R-RBI.co. Well, and so, I mean, it was in, what, in 2010 or whatever,

when Eric Holder for a minute tried to indict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators in New York and just give them trials and convict them and give them the death penalty or life at prison or whatever the law is in New York, whatever. But so that was shut down. And then, so the fact that there are a few, I don't know, the total number, but there's at least a solid handful of actual Aspen-Lodd-Night bad guys who are in on attack the United States, whether the Cole or September 11th or whatever it is, the small handful of guys, I think Al-Nashiri is probably there or I don't remember.

So these guys, then they become the excuse for keeping the whole thing open where then you have these others who were also lumped in with them and victimized in this way. And this most un-American of ways. But then the thing is, the question is, so how do we resolve this then? Because no politician or I don't know, and any, no foreseeable politician is going to go ahead and do, we had our one shot at that was when Eric Holder,

who I don't even know why he tried to do this, actually other than maybe his own self-aggrandizement. It was the right thing to try to do anyway. And they just shut him down. that like, no, these people are not getting trials under American law. They're just not. And so, or under, you know, civilian law. So, but then that means as long as these guys don't die of old age and they're still there,

then that means that the prison isn't being shut down and these other people are going to be stuck in this same continuing circumstance. And so I wonder, like, what can be done, man? Well, you know, the interesting answer to that is that it could have been done at the end of the Biden administration again. But it was shut down. So, you know, what happened with these guys is that, you know, what's been happening at Guantanamo with these military commission pre-trial trial hearings. So they just go round and round and round and round. You know, the defense team are trying to get evidence of torture introduced so they can defend their clients. And the prosecutor's main aim is

to hide all the evidence of torture. So it goes around and around and round. And eventually the prosecutors realized that this was not going to end successfully, and they started negotiating with the defense teams for plea deals. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of these other guys would plead guilty, would actually make confessions about what they did in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table. They would get life sentences that would be served at Guantanamo. There would be closure for 9-11, for the relatives of those who were killed. And, it was agreed with the convening authority. So this is the official who is put in control of the commissions by the government.

This is a military figure who was put in to oversee the military commissions. She was allowed to make these plea deals. As soon as she announced them, which was at the end of July, in Biden's last year in office, the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin said, no, I'm not having this. He shut them down. And he shut them down even though the judge that had been responsible said that he had no power to do so,

even though a legal review process to do with the commission said that he had no rights to do so. He took it to the federal courts, and the federal courts backed him. So the only chance that the United States had to get out of this whole of its own making was shut down by Biden's defense secretary because he could not accept that the only way to conclude this

was to take the death penalty off the table. He insisted that this impossible illusion of successfully prosecuting and killing the men allegedly responsible for 9-11 was more important than accepting that it was impossible and reaching a conclusion that was the only satisfying and realistic

way for things to happen. That's what happened, Scott. I mean, the thing is, most people don't even know because Quentinamo's just a foot known there. You know, nobody knows that they were, that, that the, the biggest opportunity to bring this to some kind of conclusion was shot down by the Biden administration itself. Yeah. Man, and then, I think you're saying here, don't you, that one of these guys has been

judgmentally unfit to stand trial. That's that we have an insane asylum down there So he's just got to sit in solitary too, huh? Well, the latest story is that prosecutors are now trying to pretend that it doesn't matter that he's mentally unfit to stand trial They want to put him back on the case And they want to prosecute him anyway, what the hell? You execute him in Texas, you know?

Oh, hell. Okay, well, refresh my memory if you could refresh your own here for a minute. People really wanted to read the best stuff about the horrors of the torture regime at Guantanamo in the W. Bush years. What's the best thing

on that? Well, I mean, there's a book by a British writer called Andy Worthington. Is it in the Guantanamo files? There's my book, the Guantanamo files, which, you know, tells the story of about two-thirds of

people who were held there and the chronology. of everything that happened in those crucial early years. But, you know, I would love people to read that. Scott, I would say that, you know, people should read, should read Mahamadu Uld Slahi's account of his torture. So, Mohamadu, you know, who is fantastically eloquent and funny and deep, deep man who was brutally tortured at Guantanamo. His book about his experience,

experiences is really fantastic. And so is the book by Mansour Adafi. Don't forget us here. And he was one of a bunch of young Yemenis who decided that the best way to endure their unacceptable imprisonment by the United States was to fight like hell against them, which they did for years.

These were young guys. Some of them weren't even 20 at the time. Some of them were in their 20s. They fought back relentlessly against the assaultists and were punished horribly. you know, the really dark subtexts to Mansel's stories, a lot of his closest friends, a significant number of them.

I mean, we're talking about five people, I think, were amongst the men, the nine men who have died at Guantanamo. And these are all people whose deaths were questionable in terms of the allegations that were made by the authorities that they committed suicide. But, you know, Mansell went through it. Eventually, what happened was that he got a legal representative who managed to convince him.

I mean, and this is a point at which these guys are getting a bit older. They're in their late 20s now. They've been fighting like healthy years. Persuaded him, you know, Mansoor, this is going to kill you. You need to try and step back from it and try and find a way that you can find a balance in this horrific situation that you're in. And that coincided with Obama coming in

and when they allowed the prisoners to make art at Guantanamo, which they hadn't done before. And there was a brief flourishing of allowing this kind of creativity. And Mansoor is a very eloquent explainer of how significant that was to some of the men who were still held. So I would really recommend people to go to prisoners accounts. And I think that those two by Mohamadu and by Mansour are both just, you know, absolutely riveting accounts of the horrors of Guantanamo. And a testament to the, you know, to the endurance. of the human spirit, Scott, I have to say,

that some of the men who have been held at Guantanamo have shown absolutely extraordinary humanity in the face of what they've had to endure. I'm trying to remember, you know, first of all, I only page through the torture report looking for certain things. I don't know what I was working on at the time when that thing, when they released the 500-page summary. I was too busy with something else

to, like, sit down and read it cover to cover, which I still need to do. I've looked through it, like looking for stuff on Abu Zabeda and stuff like that before, but I forgot what, you know, if they ever had anything about Guantanamo exposed in there, but I got this one anecdote in my head

that I don't remember where I know this from anymore. And I wonder if you still do. And it was about how it was really because all this was lawless and crazy, there was no procedure. So they're making it all up at the time, of course. And how some of just like the employees down there, right, like not policy makers and not, you know, deputy secretaries of anything, but just like the local people in charge of the prison are sitting around a table,

floating ideas for how we can torture people and including a lot of them, no imagination whatsoever, are talking about, well, on last night's episode of 24 with Keeper Sutherland, he used these tortured techniques on a guy. So we already know, and they admitted this to Jane Mayer in the New York Magazine, people can read it with. They said explicitly, the reason they made the show, 24, was to normalize torture and to make it seem like everybody knows. There's always a ticking time bomb, and it's always, you have no choice except to torture a guy, and that's the frame of reference. You always have to

accept or whatever. So they did that. I mean, they said that was why we put it on TV was to make people like torture more and stuff. But then down at Guantanamo, they're sitting around the table and going, well, last night on 24, here's how we did it. And then they're getting their ideas for how to torture prisoners at Guantanamo from watching the TV show. And I was wondering to remember how I know that anymore. I don't remember my footnote. I don't remember the exact context of that story, Scott. But as you were relating it, it just feeds into, you know, my understanding that on the one

hand, you had, you know, quite laid out rules for how they torture people in the black sites, although what the torture report exposed was that those rules were regularly exceeded and in some cases kind of, you know, rogue operatives did things that they, that weren't, you know, that they weren't even authorized to do, which is all comes out of this kind of spirit of permissive torture, really. At Guantanamo, you know, the chaos at Guantanamo in the early years was that there were all kinds of agencies in there. There were people who were there who were trying to interview people non-coercively so they

could build a criminal case against them. you know, that's the only way you could actually build a credible criminal case is that you don't torture the people that you're interviewing. But at the same time, you had these kind of wild crew of people who were licensed to go in and just dream up ways of abusing prisoners to break them. And it's exactly the same thing that happened in Abu Ghra. What you saw Abu Ghra, which is the only time when those photos came out when we were able to see the horrendous things that were going on was because they'd been told. you need to make sure that these people don't sleep. You need to make sure that these people are terrorized so that when we interview them,

when we interrogate them, they will be pliable and will tell us what we need to know. So really that's the kind of stuff that was going on when you had people sitting around dreaming up things to do, like which songs they were going to play a really loud volume. And like you say, watching disgusting propaganda shows like 24 to, come up with ideas from Hollywood.

And, you know, I think that also the film you're talking about that tried to pretend that it was torture that led to finding bin Laden came after all of this stuff. But it's all part of the same culture of Hollywood repeatedly suggesting to the American public, but torture's great, you know, everybody should be doing it. This is the only way you're really going to get things done. and that's been hugely damaging, I think. All right, this episode of Scott Horton's show brought to you by the books I wrote. You can see them behind me there.

Enough already. Fools errant and then enough already and provoked. And then, of course, one might have fallen down there, but I got Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul, Scott Horton Show interviews and hotter than the sun. See that one back there over there that way? Hatter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. that's all interviews I did all about nukes and really great stuff. And I busted my ass on these things.

And you know, I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They all have been endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one I know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that provoked is the definitive account.

In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Matte said about it too. The definitive account. of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. So maybe check that up. Philip Sands and The Guardian, I found my footnote. That was where they told him. Yeah, we were sitting around watching 24

and then discussing it at work the next day and then implementing those procedures, those practices on these people. So, yeah, you couldn't make this stuff up, man, but that's America and the Terror Wars. Yeah, well, exactly. All right, listen, man, I should let you go. But thank you so much for coming on the show, Andy.

And why don't you tell us a little bit about what's going on this weekend? Sure, Scott. I mean, I will tell you about that in a minute. What I will also just say is that we should do a follow-up at some point because we haven't spoken about Donald Trump and what he's been doing at the time for the last year where he co-opted part of his war on migrants. So should we talk about it?

Yeah, no, that well, yeah, that's a different interview. Let's go ahead and that way I'll read up on it and I'll know enough to ask you good questions about it. That will be great. And of course, it's a still unfolding story because, you know, this clown is actually in charge of the place now. All the ancient history we've been talking about emboldered out of the presidents. This is the reality there. But, yeah, that's been pretty shocking.

It would be great if we talked about that again at some point in the future. What's happening again? Sorry, go ahead. Wait, real quick, before that, where can we watch your documentary outside the law? Is that on YouTube? Yeah, it is on YouTube, actually. Okay, great. Yeah, that would be great.

You know what? I don't think I've ever seen it. I think we went through this 20 years ago or something. I never could figure out where I could watch it. So I'm sorry, go ahead and talk about this weekend, please. Yeah, so this weekend, January the 11th, this Sunday is the 24th anniversary of opening Guantanamo. I would say that the fog of amnesia has engulfed Guantanamo for more years than I care to remember. And no one knows, no one's interested.

but nearly three years ago I persuaded various activist friends of mine across the US and around the world to at least try and make Guantanamo remembered by holding vigils, coordinated vigils, which we mostly do on the first Wednesday of every month. So these are outside the White House in New York, in San Francisco, and Los Angeles, in London, Mexico City, Brussels, and other US towns and cities. where we just try and remind the world that, you know,

hey, Guantanamo's still here, and there is a good reason why we're doing this and why you should care. So we'll be doing that on Sunday at all of these locations, which people can find out on my website or on the closed Guantanamo website. And I've also, for many, many years now

been doing a poster campaign, a photo campaign where I make a poster every hundred days and also on the anniversaries, showing how long it's been open, asking whoever it happens to be that claims to be in charge of the US at the time to shut the place down. And people take photos with it and collect these together and also use these as another way of trying to get people to remember that the prison's open and why that is such a horrific stain on the United States.

So they'll all be happening. Hopefully people can visit my website and see what's going on and get involved. and maybe hopefully hang around on my website and read some more about Guantanamo because that's what I've been doing so much for the last 20 years. And I'm doing it for the same reason, as I always have been, Scott, you know,

these are human beings. Most of them were, you know, maligned. They were all abused in all kinds of ways, but they were lied about it as to who they were. Hardly any of them were involved in terrorism. And Muslims from other countries are human beings just like we are. And, you know, that's one lesson that people need to remember. But, you know, another lesson that people need to remember is that the fundamental rule about

being deprived of your liberty is that you are either accused of a crime and you are put on trial or you are a prisoner of war held under the protections of the United States government under Bush shredded that. And it has never been properly reinstalled, which is why Guantanamo still exists. And it's why every leader of the United States that is in charge of Guantanamo is still responsible for claiming that it is okay at Guantanamo to hold people possibly for the rest of their lives without any form of due process without charging them with a crime. And that is, you know, fundamentally an American. I think that, you know, I think people should understand that, but it's fundamentally inhuman. This is not the way that anyone should behave.

unless they are proud to stick a swastika on their forehead and say, no, no, actually, we don't believe that any people should have rights who we don't like. We are a dictatorship and we are proud of it. And, you know, I should hopefully not need to remind people that as the things we're seeing unfold in the United States happening right now, these are crucial things for people to be aware of. And you can't wish them away. when you're confronted by this kind of evil,

you have to take it on some way or another. And, you know, in my case with Guantanamo, it's a long struggle of saying, the important thing is that we don't forget. When chronic injustices happen, they don't get corrected easily, Scott. It's a long struggle to try and get them overturned. But it's really important that people don't give up.

Yeah. And as you mentioned before, I mean, Charles Manson probably ain't as bad as these guys. You know, or, you know, right around equivalent morality there. I mean, you have, as you mentioned there, this suspicious suicides. And now people should know it's the other Scott Horton, not me, but Robert Scott Horton, the law professor from Columbia University and some kind of contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, who did suck great coverage of the so-called Guantanamo suicides,

where three guys were murdered by the CIA at their black site down there that was called Penny Lane or Camp No. And Robert Hickman was the heroic sergeant who blew the whistle and saw the cover up of removing the dead bodies and all that and the covering up of the thing. No, Joseph Hickman.

I'm sorry, Joseph. Joseph Hickman. He's the heroic whistleblower there. And then there's at least one more that Jeffrey K wrote about. I forget the guy's name, but that's K-A-Y-E. Jeffrey Kaye, who wrote a monograph that you can find about the other very suspicious suicide there. I think you mentioned two more.

I don't know if they may have been murders or not. I just don't know of the other two, but that's at least four that I know of that word. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's four, five, maybe six that are dubious. There are some other deaths at Guantanamo that are less dubious. I mean, one that I wrote about, which, God, this is ancient history, is 18 years. years ago. I worked with Carlotta Gaul and we got a front page story in the New York Times, who then promptly disowned me when the Pentagon got on the phone and went, why are you giving

this guy a byline? Because he has an opinion. And I, yeah, I did have an opinion because the story that we worked on involved an Afghan guy who they sent to Guantanamo, who had told them repeatedly, you've got the wrong guy. I actually liberated one of Karzai's ministers who was being held in a Taliban and jail and I had to escape and live in Iran for years. And they didn't listen to him. And he said, call up Ishmael Khan, the energy minister under Karzai. Call him up. He will tell you who I am.

They wouldn't listen to him. He died of cancer at Guantanamo. And after he died, they had the effrontery to claim all of the, all of the rubbish they'd been talking about before that this guy was an al-Qaeda member who posed. I mean, it was just sickening. But, you know, that was a story that it remains important. But, you know, most of these horrors are just lost in history now, aren't they, Scott? I know.

Even him, it just occurred to me. I remember this like an hour ago or whatever, 40 minutes ago, but it just occurred to me again. I forgot it. It occurred back to me again that I interviewed this guy. He was an Air Force colonel who was the JAG defending this guy and got him out because, and they had held this guy for like 15 years. on the charge of him having chemical weapons that they found at his house. And then you couldn't make this up, man.

It literally was tubs of salt and sugar and butter. That was what they got and claimed was chemical weapons and held this guy in a torture prison for like 15 years or something. And finally he got a chance to have a jag come and look at his case. And he was like, general, there's something wrong here. like this literally is sugar. So I don't know what you want to do here. And they finally turn around and let the guy go.

And I interviewed Sterling, I believe was the name of the office that I interviewed. If people want to search my name, Sterling. I believe that it all goes. It all does go back. It goes back to the very beginning of the story, you know, because in the first summer that Guantanamo was open, people who were concerned about it found a CIA analyst who was an Arabic speaker. Now the CIA had literally.

a handful of Arabic speakers when 9-11 happened and when Guantanamo opened. They found an actual expert who went down to Guantanamo and randomly interviewed a selection of the prisoners there. And he was so shocked to discover that most of them were really totally innocent and seized by mistake. And they were trying to make a really, really big story of this. And they tried to get this to the president. They tried to get this out to the people.

people at the top of the Bush administration. And what happened was that David Addington, who nobody remembers these days, but you will remember was the Cheney's lawyer. The Dick Cheney, Cheney's lawyer. Right, yeah. He blocked them. He blocked them in the hallway. And he said, I'm not letting you go through with this information.

What you have to understand is that President Bush said when he captured these people, that they are enemy combatants, that they are guilty and that they have no rights. and you have, you know, we do not want to hear you coming with an alternative story, with your fake news, you might have said. They were not interested in the truth. They had decided that these people were guilty without any evidence being provided. And, you know, that is the burden, that's the moral burden that Guantanamo still groans under, is that they said the truth doesn't count, evidence doesn't count. guilt or innocence doesn't count. You know, this was an evil project,

and you know how much that's bled out into the degeneration of the political sphere now, 24 years on. Yeah, it's still part of it, isn't it? Of course. I mean, so, you know, thank you, Scott, for having me on to talk about it. Yeah, of course. And let me just add to that real quick,

that I remember very well, I remember where I was driving. listening to my favorite right-wing radio station from San Antonio 5.50 a.m. down there. And every right-wing host on that station. And it was, they did know Rush Limbaugh or Dr. Laura. It was all local guys all day long from morning to night there. And they were all just absolutely outraged. You know, we are Christians, we are Americans, we are George Washington folk.

We do not torture people. How can we be Americans and torture people? This is, if American means anything, then this is anti-American. You can't torture people. What the hell are we? The Chinese or something is nuts. They were freaking out. They couldn't believe it.

And then by the end of the week, it was, well, I guess that's what it means to be a patriotic, American conservative Bush supporter is, in fact, we do torture people, and that's what's right, or we wouldn't be doing it. And I guess these guys are real bad guys. And what if they were going to nuke a city? And you had to torture a guy to get him to tell you the code to turn off the nuclear bomb, like in the absolute garbage I saw on Sean Hannity show last night or whatever. It just worked, man.

It just because what are you going to do? You're going to side with the Democrats? So George W. Bush is saying, look, I don't want to go to jail so everybody support me. And then so every last American who leaned right supported him. Right? Okay, I guess we are torturers after all. And it was that easy to turn half of America into a nation of torturers. They're like, please.

And they were like, okay, we'll support it then. That was it. It sucks. And yes, that lasts. And yes, that's always going to be a part of the history of this country and how it got to how screwed up it is, even in this moment, of course. You know, George W. Bush has plenary and unlimited executive unitary authority to do anything that he wants. Barack Obama could start a war at the drop of a hat with a press release. He can start a war without even to never even mind Congress declaring it. Yeah, the state department put out a press release. We're bombing Yemen now. well, if they can do that, then Donald Trump can also do whatever he wants.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. There's absolutely a straight line. And by, dude, don't let me skip Biden, for God's sake. Sorry, I didn't mean to leave him out of the guilty. Same thing with him. He can do whatever he wants to. That's the state that he left,

that he returned to Donald Trump after his four-year absence, you know? All right. Thank you, Andy. It's so great to be with you again, man. Thanks, Scott. Somebody to talk. Cheers. And everybody, we'll have it in the show notes. The book is The Guantanamo files.

The documentary is outside the law, stories from Guantanamo. And then again, the sites are Andy Worthington.c.c.c.c.com and Andy Worthington. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts and Robbers, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fools Aaroned, Enough Already, and my latest, Provoked,

how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Length of Music, Intrnotro Videos by Dissidents. Media. Audio mastering by Potsworth Media. See you all next time.