Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/31/23 Andy Worthington: Some Good News from Guantanamo Bay

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

Andy Worthington is back to discuss what’s happening down at Guantanamo Bay. This time there is a positive development. A judge has ruled that statements gathered from the so-called “Clean Team” interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri cannot be used against him. Scott gives some background on what the “Clean Team” interrogations were before the two discuss the specifics of al-Nashiri’s situation. They also detail how he was tortured. Finally, Worthington explains the status of the men who remain at Guantanamo. Discussed on the show: “Trial Judge Destroys Guantánamo’s Military Commissions, Rules That “Clean Team” Interrogations Cannot Undo the Effects of Torture” (Close Guantanamo) The Convenient Terrorist by John Kiriakou and Joseph Hickman 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. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scott horton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton's show all right you all on the line i got andy worthington our good old friend for i don't know 15 20 years now or something welcome back to the show andy how you doing yeah i'm good Scott. Yeah, I think we first spoke about 16 years ago, actually. Can you believe it?

Sounds about right. Yeah. W. Bush years still. Listen, y'all, if you're not familiar, Andy keeps the great blog at Andy worthingtonton.com. And it's the Guantanamo Files. He wrote the book, The Guantanamo Files. and he also produced this documentary outside the law stories from Guantanamo. And he really is the single greatest expert on America's illegal torture prison down there at Guantanamo, Bay, Cuba that you can find anywhere in the world. And other than somebody who lived through being tortured there. And he's written a million great articles about it all of this time. And this brand new one is just huge.

I mean, hell, I don't know, a lot of people might be surprised that Guantanamo prison is even still open at all. But this piece is about some brand new news about a very old story here, but it's really something else here. It's called trial judge destroys Guantanamo military commissions, rules that clean team interrogations cannot undo the effects of torture. Well, all right, save the after the comma for a second. What do you mean trial judge destroys Guantanamo military commissions, Andy? Well, yeah, I mean, this is the big shocker, isn't it? So, I mean, you know, this is related absolutely to what is allowed in the military commissions at Guantanamo as evidence. And, you know, anyone who's stayed awake for all of these years will realize that the military commissions aren't going anywhere.

They're a kind of groundhog day of flawed justice, because these are men who were tortured for years in the CIA black sites. And, you know, the U.S. government is trying to put them on trial in this system that it dredged up out of the history books after 9-11, the military commissions, and it's failing because on the one side, the defense teams for these men are pointing out quite sensibly that, there to be anything that resembles a fair trial, they need to know what happened to these guys in the black sites. And the job of the prosecutors, of course, is to keep that hidden. And so it just goes round and round and round. And, you know, this story goes back such a long time, because obviously when these guys were in the black sites, then as far as we can tell some way or another, they were persuaded to come up with self-incriminating statements when they were being tortured. But the U.S. government recognized that these would not be admissible.

So when the guys came to Guantanamo from the Black Sites, and this is nearly 17 years ago in September 2006, what happened then was they arranged for there to be clean teams of interrogators from the FBI and other agencies who would meet with these guys in a kind of informal manner. and suggested them that maybe they would like to incriminate themselves voluntarily. All right, let me stop you for just a second to clarify here for a second, for people who are catching up. So they opened up Guantanamo in, what, early 2002. January 2002. Right.

And they started stuffing it full of just nobodies who had been kidnapped on bounties by the Pakistani military and turned over in this kind of thing. filled the place with 700-something people, and the vast majority, I think 700 and something of them, were sent home by the end of W. Bush, if I remember my Worthington, right? 532. Basically, Scott, two-thirds of the men they held at Guantanamo were released by the end of the Bush administration. Okay. It wasn't, it wasn't above 700. I remembered that wrong. It was 532. 532. Okay. So still, the super majority. of them were sent home before the end of W. Bush

even. Okay, but what you're talking about is a totally separate category of people. These are guys who I don't want to overstate this, but I think it may be fair to say are have some ties to Bin Laden's network. We're actual

al-Qaeda guys to one degree or another, or at least the government had real reason to believe they were as opposed to just be in some poor sheep herder in Afghanistan who got rounded up, right? And these These were the guys who were tortured in Thailand, in Poland, in Morocco, and these other black sites, Romania, and then later brought to Guantanamo, as you're saying, in, was it 2006? Yeah.

And at that point, I remember even at the time, it was almost like it was a PR stunt. They're like, see, there are terrorists, real terrorists like Khali Sheikh Mohammed and Ramsey bin al-Shib are at Guantanamo. And it's like, yeah, but they just got there. And this has been going on for four and a half years already. You know, but anyway, so I just wanted to, like, catch people up a little bit about that because the bulk of the whole thing was a hoax. And a lot of those people were tortured. Those completely innocent people were absolutely brutalized.

But these were the guys who were tortured at the black sites by the CIA and brought to Guantanamo later. Okay, so sorry. Now, you're saying once they were brought there, they knew they couldn't use the tortured testimony. So they turn them over to these clean teams to re-interrogate them. So what's the problem, Andy? Well, the problem is the trial judge, who's been the trial judge for several years now

in this case of Abdulrahima al-Nashiri. So this is the man who's accused of being the mastermind of the USS coal bombing, which was way back in 2000 when 17 U.S. soldiers died. He's accused of being the mastermind. I mean, you know, it's interesting just as a digression here for people to think about. We don't know whether he was the mastermind of the USS coal bombing at all. Objectively, you know, objectively where is the information? But he had incriminated himself in the black sites.

Then they set up this clean team to say to him, you know, there's no threat to you. But if you'd like to talk about whatever, then, you know, we're happy to hear anything that you've got to say. and he incriminated himself again. And the trial judge has delivered this 50-page ruling saying there is no way that this guy was free of the taint of the torture to which he was subjected. You cannot possibly use this statement that he made to the clean team because this man was absolutely haunted by the torture.

And crucially here, the way the torture worked in the black sites is that the interrogators, I shouldn't call them interrogators, they were actually psychologists who were running the program, which is James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen from the SEA program. What they had done was they, all along they had said, we're going to torture you, and then they would torture a prisoner, and then they'd say, we've stopped torturing you now. Now it's time for you to tell us what we want to hear.

And if we don't hear what we want to hear, then the torture will begin again. And so imagine this guy had had four years of this, he was so conditioned into thinking that he had to tell them what they wanted to hear because otherwise he thought, you know, the bad guy torturers are coming out from behind the curtains to take him off to the torture dungeon again that he told them what they wanted to hear. And the judge has absolutely slammed the government for thinking that it could rely on this. I mean, you know, you've read it, Scott. Some of the things that the judge writes in his opinion are really just devastating. But, you know, what's also important to remember is that two months after this, Amashiri went before a combatant status review tribunal. So this is this kind of Mickey Mouse hearing at Guantanamo, which was required to be eligible for a trial by a military commission. Now, at this hearing, when he isn't fearful of the torture of suddenly coming out from behind the curtain, he says, no, I didn't do it. So this is within the space. of two months. And the judge looked at both of these statements that he'd made and said,

look, in the first instance, this guy had no way of knowing that the so-called clean team was trustworthy. But when he went before a tribunal of military officers, then he felt comfortable enough to say, actually, guys, I didn't do it. And so as far as I can see, the whole thing has now fallen apart. And this is where it, you know, this is interesting, Scott, because Carol Rosenberg wrote in the New York Times that prosecutors were relying on his clean team statement as one of the major elements of the prosecution case. What, they haven't got any other information from anywhere that they can use? Is this guy actually the mastermind?

And then, of course, the other troubling thing is that clean teams were also used with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other guys accused of the 9-11 attacks. So, again, the problem there is, do you have any other evidence? or is it actually just based on the clean team statements? Because obviously after what happened in this on the Shiri ruling, this is going to completely affect the 9-11 co-defendants as well. Well, and you could see how, regardless of whatever other separate evidence they might have, that any statements are going to have to be completely dismissed as untrustworthy at this point.

And we know already from the history that college Sheikh Mohammed made up a million. stories. He had the Muslim Brotherhood plotting to blow up Montana and had FBI agents chasing ghosts all over the country. And you know, a lot of those fake plots that, you know, Bush would bring up in the run up to a Rock War II.

They were being beaten out of college Sheikh Mohammed. Oh, they're going to attack the library tower in Los Angeles, they said. And they had a bunch of those. And of course, it was all fake. It was all fake. And we know that they beat it out of the guy. Well, you know, and they also did it, you know, and I must

mention this because, you know, of the 14 men who came from the black sites in September 2006, it wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that it was clear from the beginning that these were people who, you know, were seriously involved in al-Qaeda to some extent. Let's look at Abu Zubeda, who they said was number three in Al-Qaeda. They've walked back from everything they've said about him over the years. He's never been charged with a crime. Now he's just a travel agent. And he's still stuck at Guantanamo. Yeah. And all these wild goose. chases based on false statements made under torture. That happened with Abu Zubedra as well. He was the first torture victim. Well, they made him implicate Iraq. He would invent these

plots and they'd then have to send their agents to go chasing around looking for things. I mean, just disgraceful. Yeah. Well, Sheikh Ali's dead now because Gaddafi murdered him back when he was still working for Obama before, maybe it was during Bush. I think it was still, when he was still working for Obama before Obama murdered him as a payback for that. Yeah, but But Zubeda was one of the others. It was two of them that Cheney had tortured into implicating Saddam. And just tell me Saddam is your friend, and I'll stop

beating the crap out of you. They told them. And so finally, those two guys implicated Iraq. And they didn't want to just make it up. They wanted to make it up and then put those words in the mouth to some poor schmuck they were torturing. And then say, see, even this guy said it's true. Yeah, absolutely.

And then by the way, and this is a crazy one, but John Kiriaku who wrote a book where with Joseph Hickman, speaking of Guantanamo, the witness, the great witness from the Guantanamo murders of 06, of June 06, those two wrote a book where they figured out that Abu Zabed was two different guys.

It was him and his cousin. And no wonder that they were such accomplished terrorists and stuff like that. It was two different guys. And the guy that they had brutalized within an inch of his life was essentially a nobody. He knew these guys. He'd be like, he would arrange for, you know, the, you know, Arab terrorists in Afghanistan, he would arrange for their wives and children to come and visit and then send them back home again, stuff like that.

That was who he was. So we knew who everybody was, but he wasn't in on anything. And they said, remember the famous quote, George W. Bush said to George Tenet, hey, I said that this guy was important. You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you, George? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. These people. I almost finish that statement in a way I am glad I didn't

But yeah So listen Go back as you do You do such a great job in the article here Andy of describing the tortures That this guy was put through And you're right They're like

Geez they've been telling us all along This is the USS Cole guy And then I don't know whether Ali Sufahn would say Like oh yeah no he was definitely at the Malaysia meeting or something I don't know what they're if they do have as you said they said the prosecution said that this admission of his was all important to their case really raises a question what was their never mind probable cause what was their belief at all that this was a guy that they needed to torture into admitting that he did it or they just needed somebody to torture you know

but but i think most americans they were told oh come on it was a little enhanced interrogation Can you describe for us what happened to this guy and how we know? Well, we know. I mean, so this is interesting. The most that we know is because of the Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA's torture program. So, you know, that astonishing four-year magnum opus by the researchers working for the Senate's Intelligence Committee, who, you know, were able to compel the CIA's

to release all these millions of pages of documents, contrast this with the prosecution in the military commissions, and they have persistently, for all these years, I mean, this guy was first to reign nearly 12 years ago. The prosecutors have persistently tried to prevent the defense from having any helpful information. And so the actual judge in this case, his primary source for information, is the Senate Intelligence Committee report. yeah and you know and and you know all we got was the executive summary it was redacted but it was 500 pages and some of the stuff that is in there is devastating so you know he did

the rounds of nearly all of the sites and was just just just treated horribly i mean it's once you start hearing about the you know the the nudity the beatings the being locked in a small box, the loud music, the sleep deprivation. And you realize how kind of managed this was as well. So that Mitchell and Jessen, the two people that they hired to run their torture program, are constantly checking in, you know, to remind him that he knows that if he isn't perceived to be telling them what they want to hear, that the hard times, as they call it, will begin again. You know that he only has a break from the torture while they regard him as compliant.

And if they think that he's backsliding in any way, all of this stuff is going to happen to him again. Imagine living under that for four years. I mean, it was the first year, year and a half maybe that was particularly brutal for him. But he's living under that threat the whole time. And they shunted him around all of these black sights, Scott. Pretty much every black sight he ended up in at some point or a. another and these him and all the others throughout all this time are completely alone then they have no other communicating you know they're not hanging out with each other in between the torture

no they are completely held in communicado and and in solitary throughout the whole of this horrible ordeal yeah hey guys scott here for leo hamill find jewelers out of san diego at jewelry store s d.com they do business nationwide they sell jewelry and watches specializing in engagement rings. You know, in case you're in love with somebody. They also specialize in one-of-a-kind vintage and antique jewelry, fully serviced pre-owned fine watches such as Rolex, Patec, Philippe, Cartier, and any high-end brand. Leos also services high-end watches faster and cheaper than going to a factory service center. Leos takes all the stress out of shopping for jewelry and engagement rings, and always at the right price. They deal

nationwide over the phone at 61929-299-1500. That's Leo Hamill find jewelers out of San Diego. Go to Jewelry StoreSD.com to check out their fine selection and to find out more. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com, and if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else, but not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh?

Scott Horton Show.substack.com. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses. Theatres August 29th, from the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things Comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch,

Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney, a hilarious new comedy, filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. Get tickets now. Well, and you know, Dick Cheney said, oh, it's just a dunk in the water, and all the Republican apologists said, you know, they did, I've seen some of the most ridiculous reenactments of waterboarding where the cloth over the guy's face is folded so many times. His mouth ain't even getting wet. And the whole thing is just so completely, but no, this guy that threatening him with a power drill. Just like the Bada Brigade under David Petraeus in Iraq would torture people to do. death with power drills and put a gun to his head, you know, dry fire a gun. Get on your knees, boy. It's time to die. Put a gun to the back of his head and fire it. Ah, whoops, gotcha. No bullet in the chamber, but it could have been. And then threaten. And again, this is from the Senate committee report based on the CIA's own documents that they threatened to rape this guy's mother

in front of him. This is the Republicans, the party of offense. Family values, CIA protecting American liberty and our national interests, threatening to rape a guy's mother. When, of course, they have all the power in the world to do so and get away with it. And the guy they're torturing knows it. As you say, locking him in a box. In some cases, I don't know if it was with this guy, but bury him the guy alive. Putting him in a box and then putting the box in the ground, right? This is pure barbarianism from places east of Russia is where people behave like this.

And this is the United States of America doing this to people. And hence the importance of the judge's ruling because you can you can see from here. This is a guy who's about to retire. This is his parting shot. He's had to sit for years as a judge in this farcical military commission process that doesn't work. And that, you know, that he finally has the opportunity to deliver a very accurate judicial ruling, but one that also condemns the farce that he's been required to sit in for all of these years, which is essentially about laundering or making torture invisible. And, you know, and he's basically, you can see, you've read it, yeah? He's appalled by it.

Yeah. Well, yeah, and talk more about that. I mean, because we don't really get this very often. We had this recently in Missouri with a judge, and then I guess the appeals court to all upset about the Twitter censorship regime. And it's like, wow, it's very rare you get to see a federal judge who's really pissed off. And he's on the side of James Madison's Bill of Rights for a change instead of siding with the executive against mankind, which is always. yeah well he yeah i mean he's a military judge i mean i'm not sure that anything is yeah i mean there were devastating rulings by federal court judges in uh some of the habeas legislation that you know there were those two golden years from 2008 to 2010 before the appeals court judges

shut down habeas when there were some great rulings but otherwise no we don't see somebody um telling telling the truth to the government like um like like this military judge has and you know and it's going to be very interesting to see what happens scott are they going to try and appeal against it i don't see how they can i mean what we the point we should reach now is the one where um where they go for the the plea deal option but i mean i don't know whether you've been noticing in the news lately the suggestion that um that you know they have to take the death penalty off the table for el nashiri and for the 9-11 co-acute they have to come up with plea deals because there is no way that they will ever get a successful prosecution.

And so, you know, Republicans and the right-wing media are now all, you know, all up in arms about it, but there won't be justice for the 9-11 people. And it's like, no, there isn't going to be justice for the 9-11 people because of what you did by torturing these people in the first place. You can't wish and pretend that there will be a successful outcome to this judicial process. It's broken. You broke it and infected it with torture. You cannot wish that away. And, you know, I don't know how this is going to be a result. Because what they're saying is, look, we know these people are guilty and therefore we want to execute them. And it's like, so excuse me, you know that they're guilty, but you can't go through any actual judicial process to establish that. And it's where we're moving the law to now. It is enough that me and my friends on the right wing of politics here say that we know that these people are guilty and therefore they must be executed and we'll all be happy. You know, we're back in some kind of lynch mob territory

here, aren't we? And these are people that they've heard for 20 years. Yeah. Well, okay, and we know that as far as from our government, the U.S. government's point of view, there are still three categories of men there, right? Guys who really are Al-Qaeda guys who they tortured at the black sites, who they would like to try for the coal, or especially for September 11th. Then you have other guys that they say are al-Qaeda guys that they have evidence against that they would like to try someday for other different wide and varied activities. And then they have guys who they want to keep forever, but they'll admit that they don't have any useful evidence that they could introduce, but that they're going to hold essentially Israeli style an administrative detention forever anyway,

where they're not even without even a pretension of a military trial. So we're talking here about the first category, but those other two categories of men are still there too, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, there are 30 men at Guantanamo, so 16 of them have been approved for release. You know, they can't be freed because the majority of them can't be sent back to their home countries. And so we have to trust that the State Department is working hard

to try and persuade other countries to take in these. So that's the fourth category. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so go ahead. Yeah, I mean, we have three forever prisoners. Everybody else has been charged. So, you know, or charged or, you know, one plea deal has been agreed. One person was convicted years ago and is serving a life sentence in solitary.

So that's 11 of them. Three of them are forever prisoners. So one of them is Abu Zuveda. These are the guys that they have been saying for years, like you noted then, we know you're bad guys. we haven't got the evidence against you, but we're going to carry on holding you indefinitely. And they have these periodic reviews for them, and each time they say, actually, no, we still think you're a bad guy. We still think you're dangerous. And administrative detention, Israeli style, is a very good way of describing this situation.

Yeah. Well, what a disgrace. I mean, imagine we're having this conversation at the end of the summer in 2003 about what they're going to. And the tone is, as ever. Yeah, we really don't know what the hell is going to happen here because they don't. This is either the second or the third iteration of the military commissions, the form of the trial system itself since they started this, right? And they're really just treading water here, Biden time, kicking cans down roads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, I mean, I suppose the shameful thing that we all need to recognize is they don't. don't need to resolve any of this, because if they say that these guys that are the bad guys, if they just stay in Guantanamo forever and they never resolve anything legally, the CIA certainly doesn't mind. How many other people within whoever is in the government also don't mind? Because everything that is going to rise to the surface is more and more of the dirty secrets about who set up, authorized, and implemented and carried out the absolute. absolutely horrendous torture of these guys. I don't care how bad these guys were.

The fact that the United States was doing these things to people is just something that absolutely should never have been happening. Well, it's just their guilty conscience because they know they already got away with it. Andy, they're not getting into trouble for this stuff. Well, that's why, you know, that's why we'll have to see, Scott, whether we, you know, whether we do reach a point where we get the plea deals. I think we need the plea deals. And don't forget, you know, the case of Majid Khan is quite instructive because, you know, he's the guy who was convicted for being a chorea for Al-Qaeda. He got a plea deal. He cooperated with the authorities and they finally spent a lot of time, money and effort resettling him in Belize earlier this year where he now is.

But the only condition that he made for all of his cooperation was that he got to make a statement personally, publicly, to the world. about what they did to him, which he did in the fall last year. And it was devastating. And that was the one where the military jury that was working out a sentence for him, seven of the eight members of the military jury was so appalled that they then wrote a handwritten letter after they'd heard him saying,

we demand clemency for this man. We are so appalled by what we have been told about what we did to him. So plead deals are, I suppose, the opportunity for these people to actually say what happened to them, admit responsibility, if there was responsibility. That could be quite revealing. And yet, you know, as we both know,

there will be people within the CIA in various parts of the government who would like to just keep all of this hidden and just keep nothing happening endlessly. So these guys just stay at Guantanamo. no trials, no plea deals, no nothing, until we die, whenever that is. Yeah, exactly. Wait, them out. Let them die of all age.

All right, listen, I'm so sorry, I've got to go, man. I'm late. But thank you so much for coming back on my show, Andy. You're the best. Yeah, I really enjoyed it, Scott. And next time something amazing like this happens at Guantanamo, if we get another thing like this, we'll talk again. Yeah, I really appreciate all the interest you've taken over the years.

Absolutely, man. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. All right you guys, that's Andy Worthington. Check out at site, Andy Worthington.com. Trial judge destroys Guantanamo Military Commissions, rules that clean team interrogations cannot undo the effects of torture. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.