The Sunday Indian: How did it all begin: your journey as a journalist and historian?

Andy Worthington: I was always interested in history, and in writing. I studied English Language and Literature at New College, Oxford, in the 1980s, but my journey really began when I published two books on modern British social history, dealing with protest movements, dissent, state oppression and civil liberties in 2004 and 2005, After that, I felt able to move into the field of human rights.

The Sunday Indian: How did you get interested and involved in the Guantánamo detention camp?

Andy Worthington: I had been interested since the prison opened, on January 11, 2002, and the world first saw the shackled prisoners in their orange jumpsuits, with their eyes and ears covered, closed, subjected to sensory detention. Like many others, it told me that something had gone terribly wrong in the United States in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as these men were obviously not being held either as prisoners of war or criminal suspects.

Of course, it took many years for the truth of what was happening at Guantánamo to emerge, and in fact, much of the story only emerged in the spring of 2006, as I began researching the story full-time for my book The Guantánamo Files, when the Pentagon was obliged, through a lawsuit, to release the names and nationalities of all the prisoners — for the first time since the prison opened — and 8,000 pages of documents about them.

These included the allegations against them, and transcripts of the tribunals convened to assess whether they had been correctly designated on capture as “enemy combatants,” who could continue to be held indefinitely. The tribunals were a sham, as they were designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ designation as “enemy combatants,” and they were not allowed lawyers, or to see or hear the classified evidence against them, preventing them from challenging the allegations effectively,  but they did allow their voices to be heard, and they were invaluable as I set about analyzing and transcribing the documents, creating a chronology, and establishing who the prisoners were.

The Sunday Indian: You started with the question, “Who is in Guantánamo?” After you completed the book, do you feel you can give a three-sentence answer to this question?

Andy Worthington: I can — or three paragraphs, at least. There were three types of prisoners at Guantánamo — those who were completely innocent, and who were swept up through poor intelligence, through a deliberate lack of adequate screening on capture, and because America’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, who seized around 90 percent of the prisoners, were being paid substantial bounty payments for handing over al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, or those who could be dressed up as al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.

The largest group consisted of foot soldiers for the Taliban — either Afghans, who were often unwilling conscripts, or Arab recruits, usually drawn to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance in what was portrayed as a struggle to establish a pure Islamic state. One of the greatest institutional crimes of the “War on Terror” was to claim that soldiers were not soldiers, but were “enemy combatants,” who were essentially interchangeable with terrorists, and could be held without rights.

The third group, consisting of a few dozen prisoners, are genuine terror suspects — those involved with the 9/11 attacks or other acts of international terrorism. And in the case of these prisoners, my belief is that they should have been tried in federal court, rather than being subjected to a program of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and a government and lawmakers who wanted — and still want — to try them in specially convened military courts that do not have internationally recognized legitimacy.

The Sunday Indian: Do you think that the American media is partly responsible for the manifestation of a system like Guantánamo?

Andy Worthington: Not the initial manifestation, but certainly its continued existence. The media should have asked more questions in the first few years of Guantánamo’s existence. When the submerged truth about the systematic violence and abuse in the “War on Terror” became apparent in April 2004, with the release of the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, the media should have made sure that Guantánamo, and the abuses of the “war,” remained under permanent scrutiny, but they did not. The research I have undertaken as a freelance investigative journalist should have been undertaken by the mainstream US media.

In addition, since President Obama came to power, and found himself unable to close Guantánamo, the mainstream media has not focused sufficiently on this failure, and on the disgraceful activities of lawmakers (mainly in the Republican Party), who have made Guantánamo a negative campaigning issue, and have passed outrageous laws severely restricting the President’s ability to close the prison.

The Sunday Indian: Can you describe who these people are — these prisoners that Donald Rumsfeld said were “the worst of the worst”? Who are they and how did they get to Gitmo? After meeting some of the former prisoners up close, did you find them to be the “beasts” the media has portrayed them to be?

Andy Worthington: I hope to have partly answered this question above, about who the prisoners are. As for meeting former prisoners, I have met several, and they have been people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and fascinating individuals who have managed to survive what happened to them and to emerge without malice. It is a testament to their faith, and to the close bonds of friendship between the prisoners at Guantánamo.

The Sunday Indian: Would you agree with the conclusion, which the film “The Road to Guantánamo” tried to convey, that the majority of people in Guantánamo were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Andy Worthington: Not entirely. Certainly, there were many innocent people swept up through American incompetence and arrogance, and through offering bounty payments to their allies, but again, as I mentioned above, many of the prisoners were — or are — soldiers, so the problem really is that America decided to equate soldiers with terror suspects and to hold all of them as “the worst of the worst,” when that simply was not appropriate. If the soldiers were held as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, they would now be asking when the “war” in which they are held will actually end, and if the terror suspects had been treated as criminals, and not subjected to torture (as with many of the soldiers that the Bush administration decided were terrorists), they would probably, by now, have been successfully tried, and, if guilty, convicted and sentenced.

The Sunday Indian: Would you agree with Amnesty International’s definition that we are looking at the Gulag of the 21st century?

Andy Worthington: Essentially, yes. America has reassured brutal governments and dictatorships around the world that arbitrary detention and torture are acceptable, when they are not, and it remains a major problem that the Obama administration has chosen to “look forward rather than back,” and has not held senior officials and lawyers in the Bush administration accountable for their crimes.

However much Guantánamo is improved and made more humane, it remains an abomination, with a legacy of torture and the permanent injustice of holding men neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects, possibly forever, and on a basis that, despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court (which gave the prisoners habeas corpus rights in 2004 and again in 2008, after Congress had tried to remove them), are essentially meaningless, as right-wing appeals court judges have effectively gutted habeas of all meaning, thereby ensuring that Guantánamo effectively remains a place where arbitrary detention still prevails.

The Sunday Indian: Another book on Guantánamo, Joseph Margulies’ Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, makes the claim that the actual aim of the whole “war on terror” is to make the executive branch more powerful and to give the president unprecedented powers. Would you agree with this?

Andy Worthington: Partly. Dick Cheney, in particular, was a great believer in the President’s right to do as he saw fit without any interference, and establishing a permanent “war” was certainly a good way of ensuring that the President would endlessly be able to claim that he needed to be free to act without undue scrutiny in the interests of “national security.” In fact, though, the main problem is that the fear stoked up in the ‘War on Terror” also infected Congress and parts of the judiciary, and has enabled the injustices of the “War on Terror” to continue without the President’s powers being the only problem.

What we need is an end to the “War on Terror,” and a return to the values that existed before 9/11 — respect for the Geneva Conventions, terrorism as a crime, and an abhorrence of torture and of arbitrary detention.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

If you’ve checked out any of the above, then my 25-minute interview with Kevin Gosztola, an intern for the Nation, available here, may not contain too many surprises, but Kevin asked some great questions, and the rather more expansive format allowed me to cover some of the important themes in more detail than elsewhere — the stories of the juveniles, for example, as I discussed in my article, The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo, in November 2008 — and also to discuss the amnesia of modern life, aided by 24-hour news cycles, which means that much of what has been exposed before regarding the Guantánamo prisoners has apparently been wiped clean from people’s minds.

I also had the opportunity to address Kevin’s question about the Justice Department’s ludicrous insistence that attorneys for the Guantánamo prisoners cannot use — or even read — any of the documents relased by WikiLeaks by running through the attempts to secure justice for the prisoners at Guantánamo by legal means, which looked promising in 2004, and again from 2008 to 2009, but which have ground to a halt because of the hostility of right-wing judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, including the notorious figure of Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who is now, single-handedly, driving most of what passes for President Obama’s detainee policy at Guantánamo.

Closing the show, I spoke about how the administration and Congress had, prior to the release of these documents, succeeded in shutting down any avenue for the release of prisoners, or the closure of the prison, and explained how, as a result, the release of the WikiLeaks documents is of great significance, even if, as I mentioned a few days ago, it may, sadly, not create “significant enough ripples in the US to effect any kind of change to the existing policies.”

This is how the Nation described the show:

WikiLeaks released the long awaited “Gitmo Files” this past week. The files are previously classified detainee reports from 2002 to when Obama took office that include analyses and recommendations from Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) on what to do with the detainees at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba military prison. London-based journalist Andy Worthington, who is a WikiLeaks media partner for the release, describes in this Nation Conversation with Nation intern Kevin Gosztola how the documents reveal new information on “unreliable informants” and what the government used to justify the detention of juveniles and senior citizens at Guantánamo.

When considering the fact that the Obama Administration has failed to close Guantánamo, Worthington states, “The United States’ system of law has failed at Guantánamo.” He contends, “In the desire to have more transparency and push back against overclassification,” the release has been very useful. He doesn’t think the material would have been released if WikiLeaks had not published the reports.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Some of these (with the BBC and Antiwar.com) have already been mentioned, but over this weekend I’ll also be making available links to other shows that I’ve taken part in during the last few days. In a busy evening, in which I spoke on shows run by FAIR and the Nation (coming soon!), I also spoke to Alexa O’Brien, in a 13-minute interview for a WikiLeaks-themed site, WL Central, which is available here. I’m also delighted to reproduce below a transcript of the interview, which Alexa produced in an amazingly short amount of time (please note, however, that I’ve added new links, and replaced others).

An interview with Guantánamo expert Andy Worthington

Alexa O’Brien: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a couple things that you had mentioned when you were talking with Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now! One of the things you talked about was that “guidelines” needed to be set up for filtering or discriminating the content that was found in the documents. Could you tell me a little bit about what that would be like in terms of application?

Andy Worthington: Well, you know, to be honest a certain amount of hard work is required and some of that has already been done by some of the journalists who’ve been writing about it already, who have worked out that a lot of this supposed “body of evidence” consists of allegations that have been made by a small number of prisoners, who have made repeated allegations against large numbers of their fellow prisoners, which have been called into doubt.

Now, you know, the doubts about this information are not necessarily mentioned — in fact, they are rarely mentioned in these military documents, but they have been mentioned elsewhere, and, so you know, a certain amount of cross-referencing is required. Some of these stories have emerged in media reports over the years, and some of them have emerged in court cases, where the prisoners have had their habeas corpus petitions examined by judges in a district court in Washington DC.

They [the allegations in the documents released by WikiLeaks] involve essentially a number of “high-value detainees” making allegations about a large number of the prisoners. These are people held for quite a long time, in secret CIA prisons, where they were subjected to torture. One of them is Abu Zubaydah and he turns up over and over again. He was the first “high-value detainee” that the Bush administration tortured, after lawyers specifically attempted to re-write the rules on torture so that they could torture him. He was waterboarded, subjected to a form of controlled drowning, 83 times in the month after his torture was approved by lawyers in the Justice Department.

On what basis they could possibly be regarded as credible, any of the claims that he made against his fellow prisoners, you know, is rather beyond me. And he is not the only one. There are other “high-value detainees” who appear in these documents.

Other problems are with informants within Guantánamo — people who have been regarded as useful within Guantánamo, because they have made allegations against a large number of prisoners. And, the easiest way to imagine this — the way that this happened — is that the authorities would show prisoners photographs of other prisoners and say, “Do you know this person? What do you know about this person?” And I think that helps to understand how easy it would be for somebody to say, “Oh yes. I know that person,” even if they didn’t, just to get somebody off their back, or, in the cases of some of the people in Guantánamo, to get favors. You know, there is an interrogator saying, “What would you like? Would you like a nice meal? Would you like a TV? What kind of stuff could we give you if you helped us out here?”

People — either because they are put under horrible pressure, or because they were enticed in this way — many people came up with these false stories about other prisoners.

As I say, these have been exposed in other contexts, but I would say even bigger than that is the problem with so many of the people held in Guantánamo and in the ‘War on Terror’ — people who have been released — who have said, “Look, in the end I cracked. I told them things that they wanted to hear that weren’t true.” It’s very understandable why people did that.

Very often when people think about the circumstances in which people are held, and they imagine themselves in it they say, “Well I am not sure how I would have taken it. I am sure I would have cracked within a short amount of time.” So that is what we are dealing with.

And it requires a certain amount of dedication on the part of people reading these stories to understand that it isn’t a coherent network of intelligence. Actually what it is, is a bunch of people rounded up largely indiscriminately, most bought by the US military, not screened adequately on capture, taken to Guantánamo, and when they didn’t really know who they had, they started to try and piece it together. And the only material that they had to do that with was the prisoners themselves.

Alexa O’Brien: Do you think that the American media is partly responsible for the manifestation of a system like Guantánamo?

Andy Worthington: Well, I don’t think that they complained thoroughly enough about it. It was a difficult issue, it is a difficult issue, in the sense of knowing exactly what to make of who is held there, but, you know, that is why it is important for people to understand how random it was, and how arrogant it was of the United States under President Bush to deny Geneva Convention rights to prisoners, and, to implement torture, all of these awful things.

I am not sure that everybody quite realizes how wrong the whole foundation of the ‘War on Terror’ is. Because, what we have at Guantánamo are people who are labeled “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration. Now, Obama, early on, his Justice Department dropped that terminology. They knew that it was pretty toxic, but they haven’t replaced it with anything. There is no name for these people now.

But what they are not is either criminal suspects allegedly responsible for terrorist activities, or enemy prisoners of war held according to the Geneva Conventions. Now those are the only two ways in which you are allowed to hold people prisoner and deprive them of their liberty.

So there is still this third category of human being, invented by the Bush administration, called “enemy combatants,” and intended to be held without any rights whatsoever. What has happened is that terrorist suspects have been confused with soldiers, so that, apart from all the innocent people held at Guantánamo, there were many foot soldiers for the Taliban, and the purpose of Guantánamo has been to dress these people to be more significant than they were.

Many of them were not anything more than soldiers fighting against other Muslims in Afghanistan, and that particular conflict morphed into a ‘War on Terror’, a war against the US, after the US-led invasion [in October 2001].

Alexa O’Brien: I am trying to understand Guantánamo from an institutional perspective, in the sense that institutions are suppose to underpin and support democratic principles, or the foundational principles of a society. So, you have mentioned that there was a third category of human being: I wonder if there is a fourth category of human being called the corporation. You mention “fear politics” or the “season of fear.” What is the source of that? Is it simply socio-political phenomena that happens when a country is attacked? Or is there more to the story then simply the sophistry, or the propaganda, or the agenda-setting of politicians with a view towards national security? Are there other forces at play?

Andy Worthington: Well, I think there are a few forces at play, and I think the starting point would be to say that the Bush administration was so severely rattled, and understandably so after the 9/11 attacks, that, instead of taking a measured response, they wanted to be strong, they wanted vengeance, and they threw out what they regarded as all these weak kind of laws restricting what they could do.

So that was their starting point. Now I think it would be too generous to them to say that that remained their agenda for very long, because what has become apparent about the Iraq War over the years, has been that, in early December 2001, people [within the Bush administration] were pushing for moving on to Iraq.

On the day that the 9/11attacks took place, British officials who were in Washington D.C., told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker how shocked they were that hours after the attacks, people were talking about, “When can we invade Iraq?”

Iraq had no connection to it, but there were people who wanted Iraq to have a connection to it, and who were pushing for that invasion which eventually took place in March 2003. And, you know, one particular prisoner — and he turns up a lot in these documents just released, as well — he is called Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He was captured, he was sent to Egypt, where he was tortured on behalf of the CIA, and where he said that two al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons.

That was used by Colin Powell in his submission to the United Nations, a month before the invasion in February 2003, as a justification for war. Now al-Libi had recanted what he had said, what he had produced under torture in Egypt, but, you know, was that deliberately used to justify an invasion of Iraq? Or did Cheney and other people in the administration believe what al-Libi said?

It is one or the other. They either thought that torture was producing the information that they needed or, even more worryingly, they were cynically “exploiting” somebody like al-Libi to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign country. Whichever one it is, it is bad. If it is the latter, then Cheney, who I believe was driving this, has committed the most enormous crime I think that a vice president of the Unites States could do.

Alexa O’Brien: This is my last question. Is there a historical parallel that comes to mind when you think about Guantánamo — either its model, or the crimes committed?

Andy Worthington: You know, in some ways, the United States has overreacted previously — in the Second World War, for example, with the internment of so many Japanese Americans — something that came to be looked at afterwards as a horrible overreaction.

There is a historical pattern, I suppose, of overreacting to things, then being able to look back at it afterwards and say, “Oh dear. That was a bit over the top. That was wrong. We undermined our fundamental values by doing that.”

Now, you know, we are nearly ten years on from the 9/11 attacks and from the opening of Guantánamo, and I think it is time for that point to be reached, but there are a number of forces within the United States — powerful forces, both in congress and in the media — who are dedicated to keeping this alive. They want more of this.

So you know, I think that actually the struggle that is still underway is a kind of struggle for the soul of America, and it doesn’t just involve arbitrarily detaining a bunch of Muslims in this little corner of Cuba, outside of all the norms. It is everything else that went with it. It was the deliberate attempt, at the highest level of the Bush government, to use torture as part of this process of holding people outside of the norms of domestic and international law.

And, that has been accepted. Obama has failed by not calling to account the people within the Bush administration who authorized this, who implemented it, who issued the legal advice, but there are too many people in the United States who believe that torture is justified. And it is not, of course. It is counterproductive, and it is illegal. The story has drifted, and it needs to be addressed, and that is why I think it is so crucial.

I think that all of this really involves two sides, with people who understand that there used to be right and wrong, and that something terrible has happened, and, on the other side, people who have got increasingly violent and hysterical in their approach to things — and, fear is part of that. I am sure that this is being manipulated in some ways.

Who has made money out of not just the ‘War on Terror’, but the wars of the last ten years? Well, it tends to be arms manufacturers and big companies like Halliburton. You know, very few people have actually benefitted financially. But the corporate interests that have are obviously tied in with the governments as well. So, all of that is worth looking at as well, really.

Alexa O’Brien: I thank you very much for your time. You have been very generous.

Andy Worthington: Okay. You are welcome.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Revolution Interview with Investigative Journalist Andy Worthington
The Outrage of the Bush-Obama Military Commissions

According to recent news reports, the Obama administration is getting ready to conduct a new series of Military Commissions trials for a number of prisoners being held at the U.S. torture camp at Guantánamo. These Military Commissions, begun under George W. Bush, basically deprive defendants of all rights, and have been part of the whole new level of fascistic repressive measures since 9/11. Revolution talked about the background and the new developments around the Military Commissions with Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the U.S.). His website is here.

The Revolution Interview is a special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own, and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper.

Revolution: Before we get into the new developments, can you give us some background on the Military Commissions — what they are, their beginnings?

Andy Worthington: What they are is a specific type of military trial that has been used throughout American history. It was most recently used in the Second World War, in the cases of certain Nazi saboteurs. And when the Bush administration was fishing around for new ways to deal with people it had captured, in the early days of the “war on terror,” then it came across the Military Commissions, specifically as they were used in the Second World War. These were established through a “military order,” which was passed with virtually no oversight from anyone, signed by President Bush on November 13, 2001.

The background story to that is that it was essentially hustled through a couple of departments in the White House without anybody really seeing what was going on. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell later said that he’d not even heard about this, that he saw it on TV. This was essentially the document that established the notion of “enemy combatants” and said these guys can only be tried by Military Commissions, and evidence that would not be permitted in normal courts will be able to be used. I think what was obvious from that document to people who were looking closely was that it was an attempt to set up show trials that would be able to draw on evidence derived from torture and then execute people the administration said were guilty.

It then took quite a while for the administration to be able to put the trials in place. Almost before anything had gotten going, in 2005, a number of prosecutors resigned because they realized this was a bent system. From 2004 to 2006, 10 people were charged. There were various pretrial hearings that were held, but they were all shambolic. Pretty much everything that has ever taken place in a Military Commission hearing as part of the “war on terror” has been shambolic because the rules are so ill-defined, there are so many holes in all the procedures. And this went on until June 2006 when the Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions were illegal. They actually ruled that they contravened the Military Code of Justice and the Geneva Conventions.

So having been thrown out, the Bush administration then went to Congress to revise them. And in that amended form, they have had a second phase of activity. I think it’s quite important to note that at this point, Congress invented war crimes that were tryable by Military Commission. So although the initial idea of having Military Commissions for alleged terror suspects came from Dick Cheney and his chief legal advisor, David Addington, when it was revised by Congress, Congress specifically attempted to make war crimes out of crimes that are not recognized as war crimes, such as “murder by an unprivileged belligerent.”

So at the start of 2007 the Military Commissions were back. From then until the end of the Bush administration, they again stumbled on from one disaster to another. Twenty-eight men were put forward for trials by Military Commission, but only three ever went to trial. The first of those cases was David Hicks, the Australian, and a plea deal had been arranged between Dick Cheney and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. Hicks had been picked up on the radar in Australia — there was a movement around the injustices against him. So there was a deal that was struck that was supposed to help get John Howard reelected. It failed. But Hicks was “encouraged” to file for a plea deal, whereby he spent another six months in prison back in Australia, in exchange for admitting to “material support for terrorism” — which is one of the key ingredients in federal court terrorism prosecutions, but is one of the invented “war crimes.” It’s not traditionally been viewed as a war crime.

The second case in the summer of 2007 was Salim Hamdan, who was one of a number of drivers who worked for Osama bin Laden, a Yemeni who had taken the job for money. The military jury in his case threw out the conspiracy charge, correctly understanding that one of the many guys who drove bin Laden around wasn’t privy to any secrets, although they did find him guilty of “material support for terrorism.” The jury gave him a five and a half year sentence but the judge back-dated that to the time of his capture. He was a free man five months after that.

The only other case under Bush — the week before the presidential election in November 2008 — was Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who had made a propaganda video for al-Qaida, which he admitted to. Al-Bahlul refused to take part in the process at all. As a result he was not represented legally, because lawyers are not allowed to represent an unwilling client, and even though the military was pushing his lawyer to do so, he refused to take part. So they had a trial for a week, which was a completely one-sided trial because he refused to mount a defense at all. And at the end of that, almost on the eve of the presidential elections, he was found guilty and sentenced to life — in Guantánamo, which he is serving. So that is the background under Bush.

Revolution: Stepping back a little, looking at the Military Commissions under Bush, wasn’t this a significant departure from the legal “norms” in the U.S.? In the history of the U.S., there have been many instances of politically motivated cases and injustices, especially involving people who those in power see as threats, or oppressed people on a daily basis. But still, the Military Commissions represented a major leap in repressive measures — in throwing out basic rights, allowing torture, and so on.

Andy Worthington: Well when they were brought back by Congress, there was an attempt by Congress to say that the use of torture wouldn’t be allowed. The fundamental problem with the Military Commissions is that terrorism is a crime, but the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration, were trying to prosecute people in military settings for crimes, which they were trying to turn into war crimes. And that’s the fundamental misconception about the whole thing, why it doesn’t fit together.

Revolution: Barack Obama campaigned with pledges to shut Guantánamo down and stop the Military Commissions, among other promises. So what has happened under Obama?

Andy Worthington: He suspended the Military Commissions on his first day in office in order to review them, and on his second day in office he also issued executive orders that promised to close Guantánamo within a year, upheld the absolute ban on torture, and promised humane interrogations of detainees in the future. However, in May 2009, he delivered a major national security speech at the National Archives, where he put Military Commissions back on the table. He also put the indefinite detention without charge or trial of some prisoners back on the table as well. And all the dreams and hopes that he was going to either charge or release prisoners, and if charged, try them in federal courts began to unravel at that point. So that’s a simple answer, that on May 2009 he was told, or persuaded to change his mind.

Revolution: So what about these recent reports that Obama is planning to ramp up the Military Commissions again?

Andy Worthington: What’s happened under President Obama is that very little was happening for the first 18 months — there were hearings still going on, but the plan was that the administration wanted to have both federal court trials and Military Commissions. In May 2009 the administration moved one man from Guantánamo, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, to the U.S. mainland (and he was sentenced to life without parole in federal court last week). However, in November 2009, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused in involvement in the 9/11 attacks would be brought to the U.S. mainland to face trial, the backlash against that meant that the administration shelved its plan.

That refusal to follow through on its initial statement meant that it gave Congress time to pass a law prohibiting it, which is what lawmakers did just before Christmas, when they passed legislation preventing President Obama from bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland to face trial. So Obama’s only option is Military Commissions, but their history, under Obama, has not been better than it was under Bush. Last summer, when I think they had been hoping that federal courts and Military Commissions would be coexisting, they reached the trial phase of Ibrahim al-Qosi, another peripheral figure in the al-Qaida picture, really, a man who from what I can see sometimes was a cook in a compound that was sometimes used by Osama bin Laden. So, you know, pretty tangential to everything. When the administration was faced with the prospect of actually going ahead with a trial, it pushed for a plea deal instead. We don’t officially know how long he’s going to serve but the rumor is that he’ll serve two more years and then go back to Sudan.

And in autumn there was the trial of Omar Khadr, the former child prisoner from Canada, who also accepted a plea deal. And he’s apparently serving eight years, one more year in Guantánamo and seven in Canada. That was a total disgrace because he was a child when he was captured after a battle in Afghanistan.

Revolution: He was also tortured in Bagram prison in Afghanistan and threatened with rape…

Andy Worthington: Absolutely. Was tortured. Was never treated as a juvenile prisoner should be treated according to the UN Convention on the rights of a child in war time—which the U.S. signed after his capture, signed in January 2003, and which require the rehabilitation rather than punishment of juveniles who are under 18 when the alleged crime took place. Plus Khadr had to confess to invented war crimes, that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” who was not allowed to be in a combat situation with U.S. forces. It was “illegal” for him to do so. That’s just a complete disgrace. But, unperturbed [laughs] the administration has now announced — it hasn’t been officially announced, but it has been indicated that they’re revving up to hold more trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo. There are four guys we’ve been told about, who are likely the ones who are going to be put on trial.

Revolution: One of them is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and it has been openly acknowledged that he is one of the detainees that the U.S. tortured with waterboarding. And one of the outrageous things about the Military Commissions is that so-called evidence obtained under torture and hearsay evidence can be used against the defendant, who has no way of challenging them.

Andy Worthington: Yeah, absolutely. And the administration has tried to fudge this. When in November 2009 Holder announced the apparently imminent prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men, he also said that the Military Commissions are officially back, and here are five guys that we’re going to put on trial, and he tried to distinguish between the two systems by saying Military Commissions are more connected with activities that took place in the military context, claiming that, in al-Nashiri’s case, which allegedly involved the attack on the USS Cole [in 2000], was a military target, whereas they were saying 9/11 was a civilian target. I don’t think that really stands up to scrutiny because as you’ve indicated, what lies behind this are issues of evidence. And what they’ve actually done is decide what they think they can get away with in whatever forum. And it’s part of the reason that, the more confident they are, then they’ll go for a federal court trial, where torture evidence is definitely excluded, and hearsay evidence isn’t going to wash. They’ve got more leeway in the Military Commissions.

And of course, beyond the federal courts and the Military Commissions, there is a third category of people — those they want to hold indefinitely without charge or trial, because they have said: we think these people are too dangerous, but we don’t even have the evidence that would stand up in a Military Commission — i.e., they really don’t have anything resembling evidence at all. So it would all have to be hearsay. And yes, it’s troubling that they rely on hearsay because it’s so much tied in with the torture program, essentially. Not just the “high-value detainee” program and extraordinary renditions and CIA secret prisons where torture was clearly central, but the fact is that torture permeates so much of the way in which the men were held and interrogated in Afghanistan before they went to Guantánamo. So in Kandahar and primarily in Bagram, as in Guantánamo itself, where there was a regime in place, certainly for two years, that was a version of the torture program that had been used by the CIA in their secret prisons. It didn’t involve waterboarding, but it did involve torture.

Revolution: How many prisoners are there currently at Guantánamo, and what are their conditions of imprisonment?

Andy Worthington: There are 173 men being held at Guantánamo. In general, conditions improved under Obama. This doesn’t apply to all of them. There are still some men held in solitary. In general though, they have been allowed to mingle more and to have some recreational facilities. Although recently we’ve heard from prisoners, who have unclassified phone calls with their lawyers, that there’s something going on there, that they’re actually moving people back into spending more time in isolation. But there has been in general an improvement, which I think has indicated that they’re in it for the long haul.

After all, Guantánamo’s purpose as an interrogation center is long gone. That was the whole point, really, about what the Bush administration wanted, was to hold people outside the law, so that it could do whatever it wanted to do to them, to get what it described as “actionable intelligence.” It wasn’t concerned with what the hell it was going to do with these people, and it wasn’t concerned with prosecution. It was about intelligence. And sadly what happened was that when people didn’t tell them what they thought they should be telling them, whether that was because they were withholding it or they were completely wrong people, then they introduced torture, having fooled themselves into thinking that torture was going to be a good way of getting the truth. But it doesn’t necessarily get you anything even resembling the truth, or you can’t separate the truth from fiction. You end up accusing someone falsely, kicking so many doors down in the middle of the night, and dragging off to dungeons other people whose name was divulged because someone’s been tortured, not because they did anything. That web of where torture leads is absolutely horrible.

Revolution: There are still U.S. prisons, in Afghanistan for example, where people are still being held in conditions of torture…

Andy Worthington: There’s the prison in Bagram. There are persistent stories of a secret prison that is part of Bagram. And I think it’s very credible that, although there has been in general an effort to learn from a lot of the mistakes of the Bush administration, operationally there are certainly people who find it useful to have some leeway in how people can be treated. And I think more fundamentally the problem that is demonstrated by Afghanistan is that Bagram, which is the main prison for the ongoing U.S. operations in Afghanistan, is not a place that has been returned to the rule of the Geneva Conventions. It’s a place where people are held for a significant amount of time without any adequate screening to determine whether they should be there and then are given a review which actually resembles the review process at Guantánamo, which the Supreme Court found inadequate in 2008. The military is not operating according to the Geneva Conventions. That’s the kind of major change that happened, I think, that hasn’t been addressed.

The more disturbing aspect is that around the edges of this amended military detention scenario are people that are kept off the books for a while completely so that they can be leaned on a bit. We’re dealing definitely with torture. All the stories demonstrate that we’re dealing with torture. The magic word for most people with torture is: were they waterboarded. Well that’s not the issue here, really. It’s people that have been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement and sleep deprivation, for example. That’s a form of torture.

Revolution: Are there any other points about these reports of new Military Commission hearings we should be aware of?

Andy Worthington: What we know is that the administration initiated a Task Force when Obama came into office. They spent a year going through all the Guantánamo cases, deciding what to do with them. This involved officials and lawyers from government departments and agencies — I describe them as pretty sober set of career officials — who carefully went through what information they could about the men held to decide what should be done with them. Now I have a problem with that because there’s already a legal process underway, which is their habeas corpus decisions. President Obama had set up essentially a kind of executive parallel review process. So I have a problem with that anyway, but this is their basis for deciding what to do with the men held.

And they said, of the 173 men held — and bear in mind three of the ones are held because of the results of their Military Commissions — they want to put 33 men on trial, they want to hold 48 indefinitely without charge or trial, and the rest ought to be released. And so clearly, there’s a big problem — 89 men recommended for release who are still held. Another big problem — 48 men held indefinitely without charge or trial because any evidence against them you can’t use, so it’s not evidence. And that’s a fundamental problem. Thirty-three men are supposed to be put on trial. So are they going to give up on holding federal court trials? Are they possibly going to, as has been suggested, use Justice Department funds to bypass Congressional ban on bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland using the Defense budget and put them on trial?

The trial of Ghailani, which resulted in a jury convicting him of only one count out of 285, was portrayed by the supporters of the Military Commissions as a failure. I mean, if you had not been paying attention, you could think that the man was acquitted. He wasn’t. That one charge carried a maximum of life without parole. And last week the judge sentenced him to life without parole. That also proved to Obama’s critics that the federal courts are a safe venue for prosecuting terrorists. I think it’s easy to say that actually it also demonstrated federal court trials are too successful because they deliver punitive sentences. Because if you survey the whole landscape of terrorism-related offenses prosecuted in federal courts, there are very, very worrying sentences being handed down for people doing virtually nothing, receiving enormous sentences.

But if they want to proceed with these trials, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, and the four other men in a venue that will be internationally recognized, if they want to attempt to draw a line under the whole of this “war on terror,” which started because of 9/11, and here are the guys who are supposed to have done the whole thing — are they going to do that? Or are they going to accept that, no it’s too unpopular to do that, just leave them in Guantánamo, and we’ll start picking away at people, one by one, and put them on trial in Military Commissions and see if that works? I don’t quite know which course of action they’re going to take. But first of all they’re going to have to get through the trials of the men they’ve put forward.

We’ve spoken about al-Nashiri. But another of the three other men they’ve put forward — Ahmed al-Darbi, picked up in Azerbaijan — seems also to have a history that’s replete with torture, particularly in Bagram, probably in the secret part of Bagram that was running under the Bush administration. One of them, to me, is completely pointless — a minor insurgent, if anything, in Afghanistan, an Afghan named Obaidullah. What on earth is going on here, with an attempt to prosecute him? We’ll have to see how it goes. My feeling is that they will carry on trying to secure plea deals in these Military Commission trials, as it’s the only venue where they can do trials at all at the moment. And it may be that, if you look on average at how the Commissions have worked out, they’re actually working out better for the prisoners in terms of getting out of Guantánamo than any other way.

Revolution: Aside from the individual cases of these prisoners, there is the overall moral and legal implications of the continuing existence of Guantánamo, of indefinite detentions, and so on.

Andy Worthington: I don’t know how it’s possible to shift the discussion to where it should be. But all of this, whatever Obama has tried to do the last few years, has really failed to shift the structure of detention, from what was so falsely established by the Bush administration. This is a new kind of thing in history. We’re not dealing with soldiers. We’re not dealing with criminals. We’re dealing with a new category of human beings who don’t deserve to have any rights, the “enemy combatants.” Now Obama dropped that terminology. But when they want to put the people in Guantánamo on trial in Military Commissions as we saw with Omar Khadr, they have to be declared by a judge to be “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” which they think is more in spirit with the Geneva Conventions. But again, it’s a legacy of this fundamental problem that hasn’t been addressed, which is, there is not a third category of prisoner, there are only two types of people that you hold. They are either criminal suspects and you put them on trial — speedily, I believe, is an important aspect of that — or they’re prisoners of war, they’re soldiers who you’ve captured in wartime, whether they’re wearing a regular uniform or not, and that’s it.

There’s an enormous resistance to going back to the world that existed before 9/11 in that sense. The Bush position is ferociously defended by numerous Republicans now. But it’s also essentially, fundamentally defended by the Obama administration as well, however much they may try to dance around that — and if challenged, they would probably talk about how this isn’t about projecting into the future, this is a legacy problem they’re trying to deal with, and under the terms of this legacy problem, that detention situation exists. They could redefine people as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Convention. Then we could all be debating about how long the war lasts and how long it’s appropriate to hold these men.

So it’s a disastrous confusion, really, the position we’re in now, with all these different factions fighting their own corners, and the people in Guantánamo ultimately being the losers. If they’re cleared for release, they’re not going anywhere. If they were recommended to be put forward for trial, then one avenue for trial has been cut off, the other one doesn’t look promising. Then behind that are men to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, which was exactly what the Bush administration intended in the first place. And however that’s dressed up, that’s not fundamentally any different either.

I hope that at some point we will be able to push the debate onto these issues of scrapping the whole terminology that underpins detentions in the “war on terror” and get back to an understanding that people are either criminals or soldiers, and that’s the end of the story.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Labour Briefing: What made you (and Polly Nash) make the film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”?

Andy Worthington: The film arose as a follow-up to my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, published by Pluto Press. Polly, who has worked in film and TV production for 20 years, is an old friend, and when the book was published I thought that its central themes would translate well to film: specifically, about how prisoners were not “the worst of the worst,” seized by US forces “on the battlefield,” but were, instead, mostly innocent men or low-level Taliban recruits, sold to the US military by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and how some of the men were in Afghanistan or Pakistan as missionaries or as humanitarian aid workers.

Polly agreed, and so we put together a structure for the film, telling these stories by focusing on the cases of three particular British prisoners — Shaker Aamer (who is still held) and Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes (both released) — and I then approached contacts I had established for the interviews that tell the story: in particular, lawyers Tom Wilner, Clive Stafford Smith and Gareth Pierce, and former prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, with myself providing some of the commentary and interpretation.

Labour Briefing: What reaction have you received so far from the mainstream media and from the anti-war movement?

Andy Worthington: Sadly, there has been silence for the most part from the mainstream media, although in March the BBC in Kent and in Scotland took an interest in the ongoing UK tour of the film undertaken by myself and Omar Deghayes, and we have had successful screenings everywhere we’ve been, including at Amnesty International’s HQ in London, at the National Film Theatre, and as part of the London International Documentary Festival in April. There has been stronger support from the anti-war movement, and several screenings have been organized by various Stop the War groups.

Unfortunately, the mainstream seems to think that Guantánamo is an old story, even though Obama has reached a state of paralysis in his attempts to close the prison, and 181 men are still held, with no sign of when — or how — this aberrant experiment will actually be brought to an end. It would be nice to think that a distributor will pick up on the film, and realize that there is an audience for the film, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Labour Briefing: What reaction have you had from other countries?

Andy Worthington: I took the film on a short US tour in November, but I have to say that, after an initial flurry of optimism in the wake of Obama’s election, something close to despair has set in amongst progressives and liberals — or people are still fooling themselves that Obama has waved a magic wand and thoroughly repudiated the crimes of the Bush years, which, of course, he has not. Polly and I are discussions with an American distributor, and I hope something comes of that, because the film really needs to be seen widely in the US.

In February, Polly and I were invited to take part in a film festival in Oslo (the Human Rights, Human Wrongs Festival), which was very successful. We’re also waiting to hear from various film festivals around the world, and volunteers are currently translating it into various other languages, so I’m hopeful that it will eventually be seen by international audiences.

Labour Briefing: To what extent do you think you were only able to scrape the surface in making “Outside the Law”? Do you think it is possible to lift the lid on the system of secret prisons and the use of rendition states to do the West’s dirty work in torturing people in secret?

Andy Worthington: There are obviously other stories to be told — particularly about the whole program of “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons, and about the complicity of other countries in the “War on Terror,” including the UK, which was deeply involved, as recent court cases have shown. Part of the problem is that countries are fighting tooth and nail to prevent these stories coming out, as they provide evidence of complicity in war crimes, but another problem is the Obama administration, which is maintaining that it wants to “look forward and not back.” I think that the truth will eventually be revealed, but it will take many more years, and in the meantime I think we all need to also focus on making sure that our governments are cleaning up their acts.

Labour Briefing: What impact has the experience had on the men released from Guantánamo, such as psychological and political effects?

Andy Worthington: I think it depends. The former prisoners that I have come to know have mostly shown extraordinary resilience, though their faith and through the bonds they established in Guantánamo to help them survive their ordeal, but I know that not everyone has been so strong, or so fortunate. Former prisoners in the West have access to psychological counseling, but this is not available elsewhere, even though many other former prisoners need it. In addition, of course, very few former prisoners can find work after being held at Guantánamo, unless they can find a way to be become involved in human rights. I recommend people to look at the work of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, founded by former prisoners, which is attempting to raise money for the welfare of former prisoners, and also to establish court cases against those who authorized or facilitated their detention, rendition and torture.

Labour Briefing: To what extent has the political culture within Britain changed so that questions of legality and illegality and human rights issues are seen as marginal?

Andy Worthington: I think the UK is less fooled than the US when it comes to swallowing the fear-filled rhetoric of the “War on Terror,” but it is sadly true that Islamophobia has taken hold, and that it has not only infected popular discourse, but has also infected the government and the intelligence services. I don’t doubt that there are threats out there, but the approach is to tell Muslims to shut up and not to discuss, let alone be angered by Britain’s foreign policy. In addition, Britain has its own version of Guantánamo, in the cases of the men — all Muslims — who are detained under control orders, or on deportation bail, on the basis of secret evidence that they are unable to challenge adequately. If this were happening to any other group, there would be a public outcry, but because it’s happening to Muslims, it is somehow regarded as acceptable. That, in a nutshell, tells you how far we have drifted from respect for the law, and for the fundamental principle that no one should be deprived of their liberty except in a court of law, and by a jury of their peers.

Labour Briefing: What do you think the new government should be doing in dealing with the whole issue of illegal imprisonment and torture?

Andy Worthington: The new government needs to look very closely — and urgently — at existing anti-terror legislation: the use of secret evidence, control orders and deportation bail, in particular, but also the idiotic attempt to outlaw the “glorification of terrorism,” which runs the very real risk of criminalizing thought crimes.

For me, this is all tied in with the increase in racism and xenophobia over the last 15 years, so I hope that the new government will also uphold Britain’s obligations to refugees, and will recognize that there is something truly appalling about the way in which failed asylum seekers are held, and will also recognize that we need a grown-up debate about how to stop criminalising asylum seekers and pretending that we don’t need to address the problem of the many, many thousands of failed asylum seekers who are living in poverty below the radar, hiding out from a society whose only response to them, though illegal under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, is, “Send them all back!”

Politics being as it is, however, I doubt that the new government will do any of this willingly.

Labour Briefing: Shaker Aamer is still detained in Guantánamo. What can activists do to highlight and campaign against this injustice?

Andy Worthington: Push the new government for his return. Shaker is the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was cleared for release in 2007, but is still held. I advise activists to send letters to the Prime Minister and the foreign secretary [a letter is here] asking them to demand Shaker’s return, and also to ask for the UK to accept Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who lived here for three years. Ahmed was also cleared for release in 2007, but is terrified of returning to Algeria.

I also believe that the UK government should accept other cleared prisoners, like Ahmed, who cannot be returned to their home countries, but who, unlike Ahmed, have no connection with this country. This is the least that Britain should be doing, after being so intimately involved with the crimes of the “War on Terror,” and it is unacceptable that the UK has been standing by, while Albania, Belgium, Bermuda, Bulgaria, France, Georgia, Hungary, Ireland, Palau, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland have all helped out by taking cleared prisoners who have no previous connection with them, in order to close Guantánamo and to bring to an end these men’s undue suffering.

Note: Please also see here for a letter that readers can send to MPs asking them to take action for Shaker Aamer, and to oppose the use of control orders and secret evidence.

“Outside the Law”: reviews and feedback

“[T]his is a strong movie examining the imprisonment and subsequent torture of those falsely accused of anti-American conspiracy.”
Joe Burnham, Time Out

“[T]hought-provoking, harrowing, emotional to watch, touching and politically powerful.”
Harpymarx, blogger

“The film knits together narratives so heart-wrenching I half wish I had not heard them. Yet the camaraderie between the detainees and occasional humorous anecdotes … provide a glimpse into the wit, courage and normalcy of the men we are encouraged to perceive as monsters.”
Sarah Gillespie, singer/songwriter

“The film was great — not because I was in it, but because it told the legal and human story of Guantánamo more clearly than anything I have seen.”
Tom Wilner, US attorney who represented the Guantánamo prisoners before the US Supreme Court

“The film was fantastic! It has the unique ability of humanizing those who were detained at Guantánamo like no other I have seen.”
Sari Gelzer, Truthout

For further information, interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Polly Nash or Andy Worthington.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a Spectacle Production (74 minutes, 2009), and copies of the DVD are now available. As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. See here for videos of the Q&A session (with Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Andy Worthington and Polly Nash) that followed the launch of the film in London on October 21, 2009, and see here for a short trailer.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Celebrity Dialogue: Andy, we really appreciate the time you took out of your busy schedule for Celebrity Dialogue. First of all, let’s start from your early life. Tell us about your childhood, education etc.

Andy Worthington: I grew up near Hull, in the north of England, and studied English Language and Literature at New College, Oxford University more years ago than I care to remember.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did it all begin: your journey as a journalist and historian?

Andy Worthington: My journey began when I became fascinated by the ancient sacred sites of England in 1996. I then undertook a number of long-distance walks through the countryside of southern England in the summer of 1997 and 1998, visiting these sites, which I then attempted to write up as a book.

Celebrity Dialogue: One of your previous books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, what was it about?

Andy Worthington: The process of writing a book about these long-distance walks was ultimately unsuccessful, but it led to me focusing on one particular part of the story — the Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic annual event that I had visited in my youth — and writing, instead, a social history of Stonehenge, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, in which I explained how, over the course of over 100 years, archaeologists and the State had come up against an extraordinary array of other people with claims on England’s most famous prehistoric monument: Druids, student revellers, free festival goers, anarchists, hippies, new age travellers, green activists, feminists, anti-nuclear protestors, anti-road protestors and land reformers. This then led to a second book, The Battle of the Beanfield, about a critical confrontation between a convoy of travellers and green protestors and the might of Margaret Thatcher’s police in a field in Wiltshire in June 1985, and from there, having conducted research into civil liberties, human rights and the law, I was in a good position to move onto a more challenging topic: Guantánamo.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did you get interested and involved in the Guantánamo detention camp?

Andy Worthington: I was interested from the moment Guantánamo opened, and we saw the dehumanized prisoners, shackled, kneeling in their orange jumpsuits, and subjected to sensory deprivation. I then followed the stories of the released British prisoners, in 2004 and 2005, and their accounts of torture and abuse, and, in the summer of 2005, began trying to find out who was held at Guantánamo. As the US government had not yet been obliged to release the names and nationalities of the prisoners, this involved tracking down news reports relating to released prisoners, reading interviews with released prisoners, and drawing on largely speculative prisoner lists compiled by the Washington Post and the British human rights group Cageprisoners, but it was enough to get me started.

Celebrity Dialogue: Tell us about your book, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. What motivated you to write this book?

Andy Worthington: In spring 2006, following the initial research described above, I got lucky. The Pentagon lost a lawsuit brought by the Associated Press and was obliged to release the first ever prisoner list, plus 8,000 pages of documents providing the allegations against the prisoners and transcripts of the tribunals and review boards held at Guantánamo — a largely sham process designed to demonstrate that the prisoners were “enemy combatants,” who could be held without rights. However, these tribunals and review boards at least allowed the prisoners to tell their side of the story, and it was through a four-month analysis of these documents — a process that no one else undertook, to my surprise — that I was able to establish a chronology of the men’s capture, and a context for their capture, whether in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan, or in other countries, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and held in secret prisons. This, together with other information — including how the majority of the men were seized not by Americans but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments were widespread — enabled me to understand, and to demonstrate, that the overwhelming majority of the men were not terrorists, but were, instead, either completely innocent men or low-level Taliban recruits, mainly from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who had been persuaded to take the side of the Taliban against other Muslims (in the Northern Alliance) in Afghanistan’s long-running civil war. Moreover, it seems clear that many of these men had not advanced beyond basic training, and others had served only as cooks or guards.

Celebrity Dialogue: You have researched so much about the Guantánamo Bay prison, yet you haven’t been to that place. How does it feel?

Andy Worthington: To be honest, it feels fine. I regret, in some ways, missing out on the Military Commissions — the trials that took place at Guantánamo in 2007-08 — because at those trials journalists could actually see the prisoners and hear the proceedings, whereas otherwise they are given a PR tour, and are told that the authorities are running a lawful, humane facility, even though the men are held without charge or trial and no one is allowed to speak to any of them. The only people who genuinely have insightful access to the prison are the lawyers (and their translators), who actually get to meet the men.

Celebrity Dialogue: If given a chance, would you like to visit the detention center personally?

Andy Worthington: As above, only if someone flew me out there to report on a trial, and I’m hoping that no further trials will take place at Guantánamo, and that those whom the administration wants to try — just 35 of those still held — will be tried in federal courts in the US.

Celebrity Dialogue: After meeting some of the former prisoners up and close, did you find them to be the “beasts” media has portrayed them to be?

Andy Worthington: Of course not. When the men were largely seized randomly, and were, in most cases, sold to their US captors, it’s extremely difficult to find anyone who would qualify as a dangerous person in any sense. Of the men I have met — mostly the British ex-prisoners, but a few others, including former al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj — what has impressed me the most is not just that they were seized by mistake, but that they have, in most cases, survived their ordeal in the most extraordinary manner, through their faith, and through the support network of the prisoners themselves.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did your personal relationship develop with some of the former prisoners you came to know during your quest in this case?

Andy Worthington: The people I have come to know the best are a former prisoner who does not live in the UK, with whom I have been in contact for several years, and two of the British ex-prisoners: Moazzam Begg, who read a draft of my book before publication, and Omar Deghayes, who was still in Guantánamo at that time. Omar and I are currently spending a lot of time together, taking the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” on a UK tour, and it is a real pleasure to be getting to know him better, and to be able to start working together on publicizing the stories of those who are still held at Guantánamo.

Celebrity Dialogue: You are the co-director of the documentary, “Outside the Law: The Stories from Guantánamo.” Tell us how you got involved in this project.

Andy Worthington: I proposed the idea of a documentary to a good friend, Polly Nash, around the time The Guantánamo Files was published. I thought that some of the central arguments of the book would translate well to film, and Polly agreed. We secured some seed funding from the college where she teaches — the London College of Communication — and established that we could tell the story most effectively through interviews with a handful of particularly knowledgeable individuals with whom I was in contact; primarily, the lawyers Tom Wilner in Washington D.C. and Clive Stafford Smith in the UK, and former prisoners Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes. I also took part in the film, and there are also appearances by solicitor Gareth Peirce, former Guantánamo chaplain James Yee, and Shakeel Begg, an Imam in London.

Celebrity Dialogue: Lately, you have been busy touring different locations for the screening of your documentary. Where have you been so far?

Andy Worthington: In early February, Polly and I went to Oslo to take part in the Human Rights, Human Wrongs Film Festival, and since then we have had several screenings in London — at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre, at the National Film Theatre, at LSE, SOAS, UCL and South Bank University. We have also taken it to Oxford, Bradford, Norwich, Canterbury, Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and have many more screenings lined up for the coming months, including the London International Documentary Festival. Full details can be found here.

Celebrity Dialogue: What was the response that you received from the general public during the screenings?

Andy Worthington: The response has been very positive. People are very impressed with the humanity of Omar, in particular, whom I regard as the heart of the film, and his combination of inner strength and vulnerability very powerfully brings home to people the human tragedy of Guantánamo. In addition, we have received support for the campaign to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, who is also featured in the film. The last British resident in Guantánamo, Shaker was cleared for release in 2007, but continues to be held not because of anything that he did, but because he has relentlessly stood up for the prisoners’ rights. People are also particularly engaged right now, because of recent revelations, in the UK courts, of British complicity in the torture of Shaker Aamer and the other man featured in the film, Binyam Mohamed.

Celebrity Dialogue: Are there any other places you would like the documentary to be screened?

Andy Worthington: As mentioned above, we have just been accepted as part of the London International Documentary Festival, at the end of April, and we are hoping that other film festivals will take the film. We’re also in discussions with distributors, and are especially looking at ways of getting the film out to American audiences, where its message is particularly important. We’re also interested in screenings being facilitated in as many countries as possible, and are pleased that a few people have recently volunteered to translate the film into other languages. We’re also encouraging people to put on their own screenings, by buying a DVD from the website of the production company, Spectacle.

Celebrity Dialogue: Which television channels have aired it so far?

Andy Worthington: None, although we are in discussions with a few people. Personally, I’d love it to be shown on TV in the Middle East and in Pakistan.

Celebrity Dialogue: In addition to spreading awareness about the plight of those who are suffering at the hands of governments, what else can be done?

Andy Worthington: Spreading awareness is extremely important, but public pressure is also significant. In the UK, this involves sending letters to government ministers, contacting MPs, organizing and attending protests. In addition, sending letters to the prisoners themselves lets them know that the world has not forgotten them, and also makes them less likely to be subjected to abuse in custody.

Celebrity Dialogue: Do you see hope for the Guantánamo prisoners and others like them around the world?

Andy Worthington: I always try to see hope. President Obama has lacked courage in closing Guantánamo — both in comprehending the full extent of the mistakes made by the Bush administration, and in fighting back against his opponents, who are playing an unprincipled political game with questions of national security. However, although there are questions still to be answered about how the US treats terrorist suspects in future, and whether the application of the Geneva Conventions will be unconditionally restored for prisoners seized in wartime, I think it’s fair to say that Guantánamo is, above all, regarded as a failed experiment that needs to be brought to an end. Sadly, however, there is still some way to go before this can become a reality, and I am discouraged, and even dismayed by the refusal of US lawmakers to offer new homes on the US mainland to cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, by the revival of the Military Commission trial system as an alternative to federal court trials, and, in particular, by the decision to continue holding other prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, because they are regarded as too dangerous to release, even though the evidence against them is untrustworthy. Endorsing Bush-era indefinite detention is a terrible thing for the Obama administration to be proposing.

Celebrity Dialogue: In your opinion, how can governments be stopped from illegal detention and torture?

Andy Worthington: Again, by public pressure. We need to campaign to make sure that people — including politicians — accept that torture is illegal, fundamentally unreliable and morally corrosive, and to roll back the casual way in which it has been accepted over the last decade. And we can, in addition, support lawyers and judges who are committed to outlawing these practices and holding those responsible to account, and, as always, we can continue to educate others be spreading the word. Fundamentally, the way I see it, the senior Bush administration officials and lawyers who created and endorsed horrific policies enacted in the “War on Terror” need to be held accountable in a court of law. Otherwise, US laws and the UN Convention Against Torture mean nothing.

Celebrity Dialogue: After the Guantánamo issue is settled, do you see yourself continuing your fight against similar injustices or do you have other projects in mind?

Andy Worthington: I’ll get back to you on that when the Guantánamo issue is finally settled!

Celebrity Dialogue: Thank you so much for your time, Andy. We wish you the best of luck in your efforts and hope for your success in life.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

London Bangla: Do you believe Guantánamo prisoners will receive a fair trial?

Andy Worthington: That depends. If the Obama administration proceeds with federal court trials, then yes, we have to presume that they will be as fair as possible. Unfortunately, the administration has also revived the Military Commissions, the “terror trials” first introduced by former Vice President Dick Cheney, which are widely viewed as a second-tier judicial system, designed to secure convictions when the evidence is weaker. At present, Republicans, and some Democrats, are so caught up in hysteria that they’re opposing federal court trials for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. This is in spite of the fact that the Military Commissions only produced three verdicts in seven years, whereas the federal courts have successfully prosecuted hundreds of cases related to terrorism.

London Bangla: For the benefit of our readers please explain the safeguards of the Geneva Conventions?

Andy Worthington: Basically, the Geneva Conventions, developed after the horrors of the Second World War, provide a minimum baseline for humane treatment to anyone — whether a soldier or a civilian — seized during wartime, under Common Article 3. The Conventions also prohibit coercive interrogations, but in its rush to interrogate prisoners coercively in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — in other words, to be able to use torture, which is illegal under any circumstances — the Bush administration decided that prisoners in the “War on Terror” were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

London Bangla: Why is the term “enemy combatants” used?

Andy Worthington: The term was used to enable the Bush administration to hold prisoners neither as enemy prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, to be put forward for trials, but as a novel category of human being with no rights whatsoever.

London Bangla: Please tell us of any high profile cases?

Andy Worthington: The most high profile cases are those of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. They are among 14 “high-value detainees” who were brought to Guantánamo in September 2006 from secret CIA prisons, where they had been held for up to four and a half years.

However, many other prisoners — 30 to 40 more — arrived at Guantánamo after being held in secret CIA prisons. One is Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was sent to Morocco to be tortured for 18 months, and was then held in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, known as the “Dark Prison,” where prisoners were held in compete darkness, chained to the walls and forced to listen to ear-splittingly loud music for 24 hours a day.

Binyam Mohamed was released from Guantánamo in February 2009, primarily because the British and American governments hoped to bring to a halt a court case in the UK, in which his lawyers were seeking evidence of British knowledge of, and complicity in, his torture by US agents in Pakistan, before he was sent to Morocco. However, the case continued, and on 10 February this year, judges ordered these documents to be released (also see here).

Also caught up in this currently unfolding torture scandal is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who has a British wife and four British children. He now has a court case involving allegations that British agents were present when he was tortured in Afghanistan before he was sent to Guantánamo in 2002, and his lawyers hope that this court case will push the British government to press for his return. He was cleared for release in 2007, but the US is unwilling to release him, and it seems that the reason is that he is a supremely eloquent opponent of injustice, who has persistently opposed the brutal detention policies of the “War on Terror,” and who, moreover, knows more about Guantánamo’s workings than any other prisoner.

Both Binyam Mohamed and Shaker Aamer are featured in a new documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and myself), which is currently on a UK tour.

London Bangla: How many women are there imprisoned at Guantánamo?

Andy Worthington: None, although after many years the US finally admitted that at least one woman had been held in Bagram, in Afghanistan, who may — or may not — have been Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani woman who was convicted in a New York court in February this year.

London Bangla: Are there minors?

Andy Worthington: There are still a few prisoners who were minors when they were seized: Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was 15 when he was seized in July 2002, and Hassan bin Attash, the younger brother of one of the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, who was 17 when he was seized and rendered to a prison in Jordan, run as a proxy prison for the CIA, before being sent to Guantánamo. Throughout Guantánamo’s history, at least 22 prisoners were held who were under 18 when they were seized.

London Bangla: Are there any prisoners that may have mental / physical / learning difficulties?

Andy Worthington: I suspect that there are many, but it’s impossible, as yet, to know who they are. Some of the prisoners don’t have lawyers, others have refused to see their lawyers — or the authorities have said that they refused to see them, even though this is often not true. And in the cases of prisoners who do have lawyers, all communication is treated as presumptively classified. Lawyers can only speak about, or publicize their client’s cases when this information has been declassified, and it may well be that information revealing mental health problems is being hidden by the authorities. We’ll only know the awful truth when Guantánamo finally closes, and everyone held is either charged or released.

London Bangla: Please describe some torture methods?

Andy Worthington: In Guantánamo, between 2002 and 2004, torture methods and other methods of cruel and inhuman treatment included prolonged sleep deprivation (moving prisoners from cell to cell every few hours, for weeks at a time), prolonged isolation, 20-hour interrogations in a 24-hour period (repeated for long periods), the use of extreme heat or cold, forced nudity, shaving of hair and beards, religious abuse, exploitation of phobias (dogs, for example), sexual humiliation, and short-shackling for long periods in painful positions. In CIA custody, a handful of prisoners were also subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning.

London Bangla: What can be done further to highlight the torture of prisoners?

Andy Worthington: Education is the key to publicizing the crimes of the “War on Terror.” Everything described above is illegal, but in the post-9/11 world, it has become fashionable to claim that torture works and is necessary, and also that it is necessary to hold people without charge or trial. These are all lies. Torture is illegal, and those who order it are liable for prosecution under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, to which all supposedly civilized countries — including the US and the UK — are signatories. Moreover, torture doesn’t work. Skilled interrogators have always known that “rapport-building” is the only way to extract useful information, and that torture only induces its victims to tell interrogators what they want to hear. In addition, there is no excuse for holding anyone without charge or trial. If you have evidence, try them in a court of law. If you don’t, release them. It really is a simple as that.

London Bangla: How many prisoners or “enemy combatants” have been found guilty of any charges?

Andy Worthington: Three, in the Military Commissions. David Hicks, an Australian, accepted a plea bargain in March 2007, receiving a nine-month sentence in exchange for pleading guilty to providing “material support to terrorism.” Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni and a driver for Osama bin Laden, received a five and a half month sentence in August 2008 for providing “material support to terrorism,” and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who made promotional videos for al-Qaeda, received a life sentence in November 2008 for conspiracy and material support, but only after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defence. Hicks and Hamdan are now free men, and lawyers for al-Bahlul are currently appealing his conviction.

London Bangla: What is the charge most commonly attributed to prisoners?

Andy Worthington: There is no common charge, but most of the men have been accused of supporting al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, even though the former is a terrorist group and the latter was, in 2001, the government of Afghanistan. This deliberate blurring of the distinctions between al-Qaeda and the Taliban has been a profound problem, and remains so to this day.

From my research, I have no hesitation in saying that only around 35 of the prisoners, at most, had any connection to terrorism, and that, of the other 740 or so prisoners, around half were involved with the Taliban, but only as recruits in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that began long before 9/11 and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism, and the other half were completely innocent men, seized because the US was offering bounty payments, averaging $5000 a head, to its Afghan and Pakistan allies, who seized the majority of the prisoners held at Guantánamo.

London Bangla: How long did your book take to write and did you meet prisoners / detainees?

Andy Worthington: My book took 14 months to write, because I had to piece together a narrative and a chronology from over 8000 pages of Pentagon documents, from news reports, from lawyers’ accounts, and from the accounts of released prisoners. I didn’t actually meet any released prisoners until after I had completed the book (although, as mentioned, I drew on some of their accounts), but have now met most of the released British prisoners, and am in touch with some former prisoners in other countries. On the tour of “Outside the Law,” I’ll be traveling with Omar Deghayes, who features in the film and was released from Guantánamo in December 2007.

London Bangla: Who will speak for the 774 men who have been held in Guantánamo?

Andy Worthington: Well, I do obviously (and that line is taken from the publisher’s blurb for my book), through the book, the film, and the 500+ articles that I’ve written in the last three years, which can all be found on my website.

But in a wider sense, the answer to your question is, “We all do.” It should scare all of us that, in the name of combating terrorism, our fundamental values have been eroded to the extent that so many people now regard indefinite detention without charge or trial and the use of torture as somehow acceptable. Habeas corpus — the right not to be held without charge or trial — was invented in England nearly 800 years ago, and many fine and principled people struggled for centuries to outlaw the use of torture. For all this to be swept away is extraordinary, and extraordinarily worrying.

London Bangla: Please briefly explain the process of “extraordinary rendition” that underpins the US administration’s “War on Terror.”

Andy Worthington: Basically, it’s a form of international kidnapping. “Rendition” existed long before 9/11, and involved kidnapping wanted criminals and bringing them to justice in the US. With “extraordinary rendition,” the whole part about bringing prisoners to justice was dropped, and hundreds of men were rendered to foreign prisons, where proxy torturers did the CIA’s dirty work for them, or to secret prisons run by the CIA, where torture was, as directed by senior officials in the Bush administration, and sanctioned by lawyers, brought “in-house.” It remains the most disgraceful period in modern American history.

London Bangla: How long did you study the released Pentagon transcripts?

Andy Worthington: I spent about four months transcribing and collating the transcripts, and am still amazed that no major media outlet did the same. It’s an achievement that I’m very proud of, and it still informs my work on Guantánamo to this day.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Elizabeth Ferrari: Andy, last week was a terrible week for lies and misinformation regarding Guantánamo, particularly concerning the Yemeni prisoners and a Pentagon statement alleging that 1 in 5 released prisoners had engaged in terrorist activities. You wrote a number of articles about these topics (see here, here and here), and also discussed them on Democracy Now! on Friday, and I was hoping in this interview to follow up on some of these stories.

As you mentioned, the Pentagon is still putting out misleading reports that inflate the numbers of released detainees who “return to the battlefield.” The last one I read was even released by the same spokesman, Geoff Morrell, who did this under Bush and in the same dodgy language. This false report does undercut President Obama’s project to close Guantanamo.

The right wing will go on and makes their ridiculous claims, but more concerning is watching the Pentagon produce these reports at politically sensitive moments for Obama, and also for detainees who have been held without charge for years and years.

For those who missed your interview and your articles, could you run down how the Pentagon puts out these alarming reports and how Seton Hall and others have researched and refuted those claims?

Andy Worthington: Sure. The Pentagon has an alarming habit of releasing reports about alleged recidivists — prisoners who have apparently “returned to the battlefield” — at suspicious times. A claim about 61 recidivists, for example, was touted at a Pentagon press conference just a week before President Obama took office last year, and researchers from the Seton Hall Law School, who have been studying these claims assiduously, issued a wonderful report in response (PDF), in which, along with copious amounts of research, they noted that this was “the 43rd attempt to enumerate the number of detainees who have returned to the battlefield” and that “In each of its forty-three attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department’s own data.”

Last May, the New York Times got in trouble when it published a front-page story based on another conveniently issued report, which claimed that 1 in 7 released prisoners — 74 in total — had returned to the battlefield. The problem was that the Pentagon had only provided names and “confirmation” for 27 of the 74 prisoners cited in the report, so that it was impossible to check any information about the other 47, and a week later, as I explained in my recent article:

[T]he Times allowed Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation to write an op-ed criticizing Bumiller’s article, in which they concluded, from an examination of the report (PDF) that a more probable figure for recidivism — based on the fact that there were “12 former detainees who can be independently confirmed to have taken part in terrorist acts directed at American targets, and eight others suspected of such acts” — was “about 4 percent of the 534 men who have been released.”

The Times then published an Editor’s Note apologizing for the story, but the damage had already been done, and another Seton Hall report (PDF) — putting the real figure at around thirteen (or 2 percent) — was, as a result, a kind of exercise in damage limitation.

So this latest claim — unsubstantiated by any kind of supporting evidence whatsoever — was typical behavior, but its timing, coming, as it did, the day after Obama announced that no more Yemenis would be released from Guantánamo in the near future, was incredibly suspicious, as it indicated that there were figures within the Pentagon — Bush-era figures like Geoff Morrell, for example, and those pulling his strings — who were capitalizing on the situation to pursue what was presumably their own agenda: doing all they could to prevent the closure of Guantánamo, and to derail further the President’s already tattered plans to close the prison.

Elizabeth Ferrari: Who is setting the agenda at the Pentagon and, more broadly, in our national security establishment, that these reports are still being timed to contradict Obama? Could you speak to that? There seem to be any number of actors in this administration who are not on the same page as the president. Mr. Brennan is on the record supporting torture as a “tool.” Admiral Blair was involved in supporting the Church massacres in East Timor. We’ve just heard that Secretary Gates will be around for another year and, even overlooking his long career of helping politicians skirt the law and his CIA background, he was accommodating of Bush’s human rights violations. This crew is not a bunch of reformers.

Andy Worthington: Unfortunately, I have no idea, but either Obama is playing a devious game, pretending to want to close Guantánamo (which I’ve heard suggested, but actually don’t believe) or he’s not entirely in charge of the Pentagon. It’s long seemed to me that he kept Gates on because he and his close advisors literally didn’t have anyone on board who had the background and the contacts to control the Pentagon, so perhaps that’s it: he’s stuck with Gates, and stuck with other players who have their own agenda.

If this is the case, it’s rather alarming, of course, as it suggests that the military-industrial complex has its own momentum and that the only pressure to shut it down — or, at least, to scale back the profligate warmongering and spending that dominated the Bush years, and that is being repeated under Obama — has to come from the people.

Elizabeth Ferrari: In your articles, and on Democracy Now! you pointed out that President Obama is not making the same mistakes Bush did in that he is being careful about who he releases, whereas Bush made some releases against the advice of the “intelligence” community, which later turned out to be problematic. Could you help us understand the story on Yemen right now and why the president has decided not to release more prisoners to that country?

Andy Worthington: Pure fear. Political pragmatism. The uproar about releasing Yemenis, because of the failed Christmas plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s alleged connection to a Yemeni group containing Saudi ex-prisoners from Guantánamo (the ones released by Bush) was so intense that he felt he couldn’t take it on, and he did what he did last year, when his counsel Greg Craig was planning to bring some of the innocent Uighurs from Guantánamo to live in the US, but the administration was taking flak for releasing the torture memos and planning to release the photos of the abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. He capitulated, pure and simple.

In defense of John Brennan, the former CIA man who is one of Obama’s senior counter-terrorism advisors, I have to say that he put up a good fight when he appeared on the TV shows the previous weekend, defending how careful the administration has been in approving releases from Guantánamo, and generally putting on a great performance as a career official who appreciates how Obama has learned from and has rectified mistakes made by Bush, for whom Brennan also worked, of course.

To my mind, Obama should have gone with Brennan — perhaps sending him out again to tackle some of those spreading hysteria and misinformation — instead of caving in, because I think Brennan’s on his side and knows how to talk tough to the barking lunatics who are usually the only ones raising their voices. But it didn’t work out like that, and I’m disappointed, as Obama only loses more ground and more authority when he backs down, instead of taking on his critics in a manner they understand. I actually think that the failure — or inability — of senior Democrats to shout down their opponents is one their major failings.

Elizabeth Ferrari: We’ve been inundated with information — or more precisely, with propaganda — by the supporters of the “War on Terror,” and it’s very difficult to keep everything straight and clear. As I understand it, there is a group of detainees who had been cleared for release because they were found by a judge to be students in a guesthouse, not combatants in any way. They were going to be released to Yemen. Is it right that all of that has been tabled?

Why were they being released to Yemen and, if you can, can you give the numbers you’ve assigned to them so we can look them up in your Definitive Prisoner List? It looks like these people are being held hostage to a political struggle in the United States. What will it take to get them released?

Andy Worthington: OK, so you’re talking about Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a student in a guest house in Pakistan, who triumphantly won his habeas corpus petition last May and was finally released by Obama in October. There were around 15 other men seized in that house — eight of whom are Yemenis — but although one was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration (because he was only visiting on the night of the raid and didn’t even live there), and although the judge in Ali Ahmed’s case — Judge Gladys Kessler — stated that she thought it probable that the majority of the others seized in the raid were also students, none of them have won any court cases, because the habeas petitions move so slowly (largely through Justice Department obstruction).

It may well be that they have been cleared for release after the deliberations of Obama’s interagency task Force, which has been reviewing all the Guantánamo cases since last January, and has cleared around 40 of the remaining 86 Yemenis for release (in addition to the six men released before Christmas), but there’s no way of finding out, as only the Task Force and the prisoners’ lawyers know, and the lawyers are prevented from discussing the Task Force’s conclusions publicly.

As a result, I can’t give you any specific prisoner numbers to look up in my list, but if you go through all four parts, you’ll be able to find the 86 Yemenis who haven’t been released, and to either follow links to their stories, or find where they’re discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files. Some were also cleared under the Bush administration, but were never released, and a few are amongst the 32 out of 41 prisoners who won their habeas corpus petitions between October 2008 and December 2009, but have also not yet been released.

As for when any of these men will be released, your guess is as good as mine, after Obama’s capitulation. I can only repeat what I’ve said before, which is that someone in the administration needs to find some courage to stick to principles, as pragmatism is a slippery road.

Elizabeth Ferrari: It has been confirmed recently that Erik Prince is or was a CIA asset and that Blackwater has been involved in a multinational assassination program — in Germany, perhaps in Pakistan. To your knowledge, has the CIA used Blackwater operatives at Gitmo or at any of their other prisons, black sites or at Bagram, for example? Blackwater’s impunity in daylight is terrible enough. It’s very concerning to wonder what they do in secret and if they have been involved with detainees of the United States. Have you found any “fingerprints” to this effect?

Andy Worthington: In a word, no, but only, I’m sure, because I haven’t had the time to look. “Contractors” are all over the torture, “extraordinary rendition” and secret prison stories, so I’d be very surprised if Blackwater wasn’t involved somewhere along the line. I actually hope to do some more research into the secret prisons this year.

Elizabeth Ferrari: For those of us trying to follow these cases, what would you suggest tracking right now? What are you yourself looking out for?

Andy Worthington: Most of my time is still spent on the Guantánamo story, trying to publicize the horrendous crimes of the Bush administration — and to highlight the incompetence of senior officials, as much as their cruelty. If readers want a useful avenue to pursue, it would be to look at the cleared prisoners who can’t be repatriated because they face torture in their homelands — dozens of prisoners from Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, as well as the last seven Uighurs — and to look at the work that Nancy Talanian is putting together at No More Guantánamos, trying to persuade communities across the States to pass resolutions specifically adopting certain prisoners and asking Congress to overturn its ban on accepting cleared prisoners into the US, following the example of Amherst, Massachusetts.

Countries in Europe have taken a handful of these men, but they’re finding little reason to do so when the US won’t take any itself, and my fear is that cleared prisoners will remain in Guantánamo — or in some other hellhole in the States, if that project ever comes off — for years, or for the rest of their lives, without concerted action to demand that the US government accepts responsibility for its own mistakes.

Otherwise, keep educated, spread the word, and keep an eye on the prison at Bagram airbase, which remains as much outside the law as Guantánamo was back in 2004, before the Supreme Court got involved, and lawyers were able to meet with prisoners to begin filing their habeas petitions, and to bring their stories of torture and abuse to the world. That process was derailed by Congress for another four years (although the administration failed to keep the lawyers out), but no lawyer has set foot in Bagram, and, although a District Court judge ruled last March that foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram and held for up to six years have the same habeas rights as the Guantánamo prisoners, the Obama administration appealed, and the Court of Appeals is currently considering that appeal.

Bagram’s also important because it’s where the war meets the detention policies, and I think we need to do all we can to bring together anti-war protestors, torture opponents, and opponents of the lawless detention polices of the last eight years, to try and get a new mass movement going at the start of this new decade.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Amelia King: How did you become involved in making the documentary “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”?

Andy Worthington: After I wrote my book, The Guantánamo Files, it became apparent from conversations I had that the key themes in the book might translate well into film. I have a good friend Polly Nash, who is a filmmaker and who secured some funding from the London College of Communication, where she works. We then set about writing a structure for a film that would tell the story of the Bush administration’s flight from the law.

We focused on the human stories of those who got caught up in the cruel and incompetent system of rounding up people who had nothing to do with terrorism.  We approached a number of people who were well informed about these issues, including Tom Wilner and Clive Stafford Smith. Tom is an American lawyer who was very involved in the Guantánamo cases from the beginning and was deeply involved in the 2004 US Supreme Court case that secured habeas corpus rights for the prisoners. Clive is the director of Reprieve, here in the UK. It was also clearly important for us to speak to some of the former prisoners.

Amelia King: Which specific stories does the documentary tell?

Andy Worthington: We decided to tell the broad story but within that, we would focus on certain people’s stories. Their stories covered all the bases with what had happened in the War on Terror. We focused on Binyam Mohamed, who was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, Omar Deghayes, another British man who was seized in Pakistan, and on Shaker Aamer, who is a British resident still held in Guantánamo. We also spoke to Moazzam Begg, who is a good friend of Shaker. Moazzam has generally been asked about his story so it seemed like a good opportunity to focus on the story of his friend — which is an extraordinary story. The US government has no evidence of wrongdoing against Shaker apart from the fact that he has advocated for the human rights of prisoners while in Guantánamo, and this has made them think he is some kind of al-Qaeda big shot.

Amelia King: Can you tell me a bit about what the film-making process involved?

Andy Worthington: We took over a year on and off to record the various interviews which form the basis of the film. A key component was an interview we did with Omar Deghayes after his release in December 2007. We interviewed him about a year after that and he spoke at length and very openly about his experiences. In many ways, I think that he provides the heart of the film. As well as the interviews, I play a part in providing a lot of the explanation of the background.

We did the film on a low budget and kept it quite simple. We hoped that we would tell the story most effectively by just having a handful of people, who are engaging and knowledgeable, to talk through the story. From the feedback we got from the launch night showing, I think we managed to achieve that.

Amelia King: How is the film going to be made available?

Andy Worthington: We are not quite sure at the moment because we are in discussion with various broadcasters and distributors to see whether any avenues might open up to an audience that way. Increasingly, there are different ways in which you can get films out to people. One important development is the growth of distribution networks for activists. We are in discussion with a few human rights groups on that basis.

We are planning a certain amount of screenings in the UK where a number of us featured in the film will take part, and in November I undertook a short tour of the film in America. I’m under no illusions that Guantánamo and the abuses of the “War on Terror” are things which are attention grabbers, and I’ve learnt that a lot of people don’t even want to go near these kinds of subjects, so we will see how it goes. It is a little bit early to say, but after the reception the film had at the launch and in the US, I would hope that if we can get showings at major towns and cities, we would be able to draw people in. The film is also available to buy on DVD through the website of the production company, Spectacle.

Amelia King: How has your work been received in the UK compared to America?

Andy Worthington: In the UK I have a fairly good following but it is much more of a peripheral issue.  In the early days of Guantánamo and the “War on Terror,” substantial support built up for the British men who were imprisoned without charge and trial. The Bush administration indulged in a set-up which meant legal ways of addressing issues became an incredibly long and drawn-out process, so the more immediate way of getting people released was through diplomatic pressure. I think the release of the British nationals in 2004 and 2005 was influenced by the media interest and pressure from human rights groups. For example, in Brighton, there was a big campaign to release Omar Deghayes, and I know Moazzam Begg’s dad was actively campaigning to get his son released too. The question of British involvement on an official level in securing prisoner releases stopped when the British nationals came back but of course that left a number of British residents still in Guantánamo.

Over in America, I have an audience that is more engaged in these issues because their government was the driver of it all. Now the new administration is attempting — sometimes with success and sometimes not, sometimes with great bravery and sometimes with cowardice — to address the problems that remain. It is in so many ways an American issue but over in the UK I think the question is really about British complicity in what the Bush administration got up to.

Amelia King: Can you tell me a bit more about the British residents?

Andy Worthington: The first British resident to be released was Bisher al-Rawi, who was originally from Iraq, but had lived in this country for a very long time. He did not have a British passport as his family wanted to leave some avenue open to Iraq as they had been forced to abandon their home through persecution by Saddam Hussein. It was only an imminent confrontation in court that finally provoked the Government to act on behalf of Bisher al-Rawi as a British resident.

In fact, the pattern of release of the British residents has always involved some potential showdown in court where the government feared what might be aired.  This is a big issue that is not covered enough; the complicity of the British intelligence services in the kidnapping and rendition of British men to Guantánamo, be they citizens or residents.

Amelia King: Binyam Mohamed has taken his case to the British courts. What is happening with his case?

Andy Worthington: Binyam Mohamed’s case has been going on for over a year and a half. A judicial review took place last summer after his lawyers had persuaded the High Court that they needed to review his case. He was facing a trial in Guantánamo, which potentially carried the death penalty. He alleged that he had been subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture by the Americans and to some extent the British had been complicit in this. His lawyers needed documents in the possession of the British government to be made available to help fight his court case.

This opened the most extraordinary can of worms about the Americans’ policies, their involvement in torture and about British complicity. Now there is a struggle between the judges trying to get this information out and the Foreign Secretary, David Milliband, trying to suppress it. He is doing this on the basis of national security and particularly threatening that it would cause damage to the intelligence-sharing relationship between the UK and the US. I think what we are actually talking about is that it would be embarrassing for this material to be released, but more than that is the fact that it involves complicity in war crimes and nobody wants to talk about that [also see here and here for the latest on a court case launched on behalf of Shaker Aamer].

Amelia King: What should there be more focus on in the UK?

Andy Worthington: I think we should focus more on what the British government is still doing by looking at the counter-terrorism policies that involve some kind of complicity in the torture of prisoners and reliance on intelligence that may have been contaminated by the use of torture, and as an extension of that, how people have been deprived of their liberty in the UK, with control orders and people facing deportation on the basis of secret evidence which all stems from this network of very dubious intelligence, some of which was extracted through torture or duress.

A very serious problem with contaminated evidence from torture is that Western countries are relying on it, sharing it amongst themselves and using it to assess the threat posed by those regarded as being terrorist suspects. The fundamental underlying problem is not only that torture is unreliable, which makes the intelligence unreliable, but that it is of course illegal.

Amelia King: Dealing with politically sensitive issues, have you come across barriers to your investigations?

Andy Worthington: No, I haven’t really. The whole way I’ve been able to do my work is because the American system has checks and balances. The American government was obliged to release hundreds of thousands of documents relating to what they actually got up to and so information was publicly available. In the UK, there is a certain amount of publicly available information but I don’t think we have such a transparent system.

The fundamental principles of free speech, which we have in both countries, are not to be underestimated. For anyone who is involved in questioning governments at the highest level about their potentially illegal activities, it’s clearly a minefield in some kind of way, but we genuinely do have the freedom to ask questions of our governments.

Amelia King: What has been the most memorable conversation you’ve had during your investigations?

Andy Worthington: I am constantly impressed by a lot of the lawyers I’ve met, not just civilian lawyers, but also the military lawyers as well. The Military Commissions was the system that was established to put the prisoners regarded as serious terrorist suspects on trial, a horribly flawed system designed to hide evidence of torture and secure convictions. Many military defense attorneys reacted by campaigning vigorously to end the use of the Commissions and risked their careers to do so, as did a number of prosecutors. There is something about these men and women in uniform, speaking out because of their allegiance to the Law and the Constitution and not to the whims of a President, which is particularly powerful. I have been genuinely impressed by these people whose strong conviction is that the Law is the foundation of the United States, and that it was wrecked deliberately and flagrantly by the Bush administration. This shocked them to the core of their being.

The lawyers — both civilian and military — have been to Guantánamo and met the prisoners and are the only outsiders, apart from the Red Cross representatives, who are not allowed to speak publicly, who have been able to establish relationships with some of these men. I’ve been very moved by these relationships that have built up, because they add that very human element to a system which is designed to dehumanize and “disappear” people. So they are in a particularly unique position of being the only mediators between the outside world and the men in the prison. They tell the world not only about the abuses that have been done to US and international law, but also about the abuses that have been done to these people, and reveal to the world that we are talking about human beings here.

Amelia King: Recently your blog was listed in the Technorati Top 100 World Politics Blogs. Why do you think that blog culture has become important?

Andy Worthington: I think blogs have become important because often the kind of detailed information that a certain number of people would like to see is simply not covered by the mainstream media. If a newspaper publishes a news story relating to Guantánamo, it will probably be about 1,000 words. It may well give you a good outline but if you want more detail they are not going to provide that to you. Generally, I would say that there is a shortage of investigative journalists and serious features, so bloggers have stepped in to fill these gaps to include more detailed coverage of what is in the news and stories that are just not being covered.

I think what I have been doing for the last two and half years of blogging is a combination of both. Some of it is addressing things which are just not raised at all, and some of it amplifies stories in the news to provide more detailed information to those who are looking for it.

Amelia King: And how have you established your blog?

Andy Worthington: The way the Internet works is that it rewards dedication, perseverance and specialization by picking up on consistent themes. So what happened with my writing, and how it got into the Technorati listing, is in part down to having a web presence that became well recognized by search engines.  I also use Twitter and Facebook. I prefer Facebook because it allows more conversational possibilities but as a writer online I think they are both useful tools for putting the word out. The other interesting part of this is that the Internet essentially rewards co-operation, so that if you share your work it all adds to your online presence.

Amelia King: Your work is available for free online. How do you finance yourself?

Andy Worthington: That’s a key point. We are somewhere between the old media and the new media and funding is a problem that everyone is looking at. I do a lot of writing for free, and I’ve chosen to do that because I have a lot to say, but also I think it is true that the more you do the more you get noticed through the Internet.  So in this way the new media encourages people to be busy.

I am still slightly shocked that entrepreneurs haven’t picked up on the possibilities provided by the new media, now that you can run a newspaper or magazine without premises or printing presses. The time is really ripe for some new online newspapers and magazines to tap into the independent writers that are already online.

Amelia King: How could the potential for independent writers to earn money online be realized?

Andy Worthington: Generally, the people I work for who pay do so by having subscribers or people who donate to them. People who enjoy what they read on the Internet will pay a certain amount of money, maybe on a regular basis or as a one-off donation, to help pay for the running costs. A lot of the US sites that have been going for a long time pay for their running costs this way. Some will hold a fundraiser every few months and raise, say, $70,000-$100,000, which pays for the maintenance of their network and a small staff of people. Unfortunately, it has not necessarily reached out far enough to pay the writers, but there are some sites that are beginning to make sure writers get paid and I think we are going to see more of that. The question is how the business model will change and whether donations will become more a part of things. Obviously it’s difficult, with the recession, to ask people to put their hands in their pockets and give money for something they are already getting for free.

Online publications can easily attract tens of thousands of readers. You can get the readership that a lot of the political magazines have very easily on the Internet without any of the associated costs. Securing advertising to fund that ought to be the way forward. I’m just waiting for people to figure that out.

Amelia King: What are your plans for upcoming projects?

Andy Worthington: I’m generally pretty happy acting as a commentator on political events in my particular field and I have support from a number of places that makes it viable for me to do that. I do really hope to get this film out and that it might provide possibilities to do more TV or film work. I would love to write another book but they are the most difficult things to sustain financially. You really need to be subsidized while writing a book. Like most writers, I am not getting a big fat check up front and so sometimes it involves trying something different, such as obtaining funding from foundations.

I’ll keep plugging away at all these different fronts, really. I think they are all exciting media and whichever one you choose, as a creator, you now have many more opportunities to get your work out there than in the pre-Internet age.  Clearly, it is an extremely competitive world, but the possibilities for being motivated as a creator and getting the word out have never been greater.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

In the first part of this interview, Col. Wilkerson discussed fears within the State Department that war crimes were taking place in Afghanistan, how he suspected that the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia (leased to the US) was used to hold prisoners in the “War on Terror,” and, perhaps most significantly, how he had recently become convinced that the administration’s fear of another terrorist attack (which was, essentially, used to justify the implementation of “extraordinary rendition” and torture) subsided more rapidly than has been previously acknowledged, as the drive for war in Iraq took over.

The second part of the interview begins with further discussion of the significance of Col. Wilkerson’s statement that no more than a couple of dozen of the prisoners at Guantánamo had any serious intelligence value, and also includes reflections on how former Vice President Dick Cheney is “crazy,” how the Democrats have no spine and the mainstream media has no principles, and how the US had no Arabic experts at the time of the 9/11 attacks except a handful in the FBI who were promptly sidelined.

Col. Wilkerson also spoke about how the investigation into the CIA’s destruction of 92 videotapes recording the interrogations of “high-value detainees”, which is being conducted by federal prosecutor John Durham (who was recently appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the abuse of prisoners held by the CIA) could be explosive, described the crucial role played by Cheney’s closest advisors, his legal counsel David Addington and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (who resigned as Chief of Staff in October 2005 after being indicted in the Valerie Plame scandal, was convicted but had his sentence dismissed by President Bush in July 2007), and concluded by admitting that, until January 2004, he had no idea of the extent to which the State Department had been excluded from the machinations of Cheney’s “war cabinet.”

Andy Worthington: I’ve watched these figures over the years — suggesting that only somewhere between two dozen and 40 of the prisoners had any connection with terrorism — so it was great for me when you raised that issue in March, in your article for The Washington Note, and I wondered what you thought about what’s happening with the Obama administration. They seem to be listening to a certain amount of scaremongering — as when Robert Gates suddenly popped up in April and started talking about legislating for a new preventive detention policy for 50 to 100 of the prisoners. Now to me, even the notion of introducing preventive detention legally, if you like — the Bush administration having done it illegally, as I regard it — is a terrifying prospect, having to think that they should even be contemplating doing that, but it also suggests that they’re reading too much into the significance of the prisoners, and I wondered what your thoughts were on that.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, to keep it brief, I think the problem is that this is a national security issue, and there are so many more challenging issues — as one official put it to me the other day — on which the President has already shown some ankle, whether it’s about talking to Iran or whether it’s his rather pronounced silence vis-à-vis North Korea, or whether it’s something as minuscule as lifting some travel restrictions on Cuban Americans for Cuba. They don’t believe they can show another square centimeter of ankle on national security, because the Republicans will eat their lunch, and every time I’m told this I die laughing. I say, your guys are captured by the Sith Lord, Dick Cheney, you’re captured by Rush Limbaugh, whose real radio audience is about 2.2 million, and whose employer, Clear Channel, lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter of this year. I said, when are you gonna wake up? These are kooks. And Cheney is the kook leader. But [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid are such feckless leaders they haven’t got any spine. We have no leadership in the legislative branch on either side of the aisle.

Andy Worthington: I agree with you absolutely there …

Lawrence Wilkerson: I become exasperated. There’s just no courage, there’s no moral courage whatsoever in the Democratic Party.

Andy Worthington: Unfortunately, when it comes to getting rid of Guantánamo after all these long years, somebody’s going to have to come up with some courage at some point, because this question of the prisoners’ significance is the crucial issue to me. The hardest thing should be coming up with countries to take some of the men, not still sitting around discussing whether it’s still worth holding them. We should be focusing on the — whatever it is, two dozen, three dozen, four dozen at most — and doing everything in our power to get the rest of those guys out of there, to close the place down.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I agree, and from what my diplomatic colleagues tell me now, it’s difficult to get countries to accept them because we’ve taken such a hard stance with the Congress not approving the money and not wanting anyone even imprisoned in our maximum-security prisons in this country, which is preposterous.

Andy Worthington: Yes, exactly. I mean, how safe do you think your prisons have to be?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Another part of this that I discovered — it shouldn’t have shocked me, but it did surprise me — was that when 9/11 went down there was no interrogation capability in the United States, other than in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There was none. Everything the military had was geared still to the Cold War, everything the CIA had had been dismantled, and the FBI had maybe — the best figures I’ve been able to get my hands on of people who were fluent in Arabic or Farsi or maybe both, and they also were culturally sensitive, knew something about the region from which the detainee might come, knew something about his tribal affiliations and so forth — there were maybe two dozen. Here we have this attack, and then we captured people, and we had no interrogation capability other than a small contingent in the Bureau.

Andy Worthington: And they were sidelined …

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yes, after they proved their worth, they were sidelined.

Andy Worthington: To me that’s still the biggest shock about the whole story, and it’s the clearest example of why disregarding that experience in the FBI was such a disaster.

Lawrence Wilkerson: But it was something this administration almost made a cult of doing — not just on interrogation, but on almost everything, whether it was Iraq, whether it was the Middle East in general, whether it was North Korea. The attitude was: Don’t talk to me from a position of expertise, talk to me from a position of fixed religious adamancy, you know.

Andy Worthington: Exactly. And again, that was the story that impressed me in Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, when, after understanding that there were so many “Mickey Mouse prisoners,” as General Dunlavey called them, John Bellinger, who, at the time, was the National Security Council’s Legal Advisor, went to try and have a meeting with Alberto Gonzales, when he was still Bush’s Counsel, and found David Addington there, and Addington said, we’re not bothered about what you’ve got to say about innocence and guilt. The President has said they’re all guilty on capture, that’s the end of the story, nobody’s reviewing it. You know, it’s an example of justifying actions on the basis of executive power, and as you said as well, if you’re going to get into the details of why on earth are you doing it, it’s because they thought they could very slowly build this “mosaic” of intelligence that would take forever, of every terrorist movement, every insurgent movement ever, and who knows how many people that would involve? I think the number of people in US custody throughout the Bush years is over 80,000, isn’t it?

Lawrence Wilkerson: The figures I came across for Iraq, Afghanistan, secret prisons, Guantánamo, people who were being held in prisons in other countries on our behalf — the highest figure I ever came to was about 65,000, but it could have well been more than that.

Andy Worthington: And I get the feeling that they would just have gone on forever if they could …

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, I mean, that was it, it’s a hard slog, it’s war, and therefore, if we say it’s never over then they’re always detained. I remember [Colin] Powell and Taft — Taft was his legal advisor, Will Taft — asking a question, something to the effect of, “What’s final disposition?” and [Donald] Rumsfeld’s response was something like, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Andy Worthington: That’s another thing, really, is that at no point did they ever seem to have any concept of how something might end. They started things and had no idea what their ultimate plan was. What, you really intend to hold people forever without charging them with anything? You really want to kidnap people on an industrial scale and have secret prisons and — you don’t know what you’re going to do at the end of this, do you? Everything was started with no thought for how it might possibly be concluded.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think the principal figure in this — Vice President Cheney — would say, in response to what you’ve just said, “So what?” I mean, I really do. I wouldn’t have said that a couple of years ago, but now I’ve come to the conclusion that the man truly is — whether he was that way when I knew him before, when he was Secretary of Defense, I don’t know, that’s not at issue with me any more — the man now is just crazy.

Andy Worthington: Yes, well, I’m glad you said that. In March you called him evil. Crazy is — you know, he just seems to be a deranged man, I’m surprised he’s been getting so much air time.

Lawrence Wilkerson: It’s our media. Our media loves to keep it going. They love to throw him out there and, you know, stoke the fires. I asked a couple of people fairly high up in our media world, “Why in the world do you continue to give him and Limbaugh an audience? Why? Why do you even put them on the same plane as the President of the United States? Why do you have these dueling speeches? You guys made them dueling speeches, not the two principals.” Well, you know, they’re running out of business. People are canceling their newspaper subscriptions every day. They want news.

Andy Worthington: And they’re more interested in hearing this than they are in hearing that this madman was the driver of manufacturing false intelligence through torture to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, they helped in that.

Andy Worthington: Of course, that’s why they don’t want to talk about it.

Lawrence Wilkerson: With the exception of Knight Ridder, now McClatchy, they just about all helped.

Andy Worthington: Yes, it’s true, but I’m still shocked at how that’s underreported in the Cheney story, because he’s just been allowed too much time to carry on trying to sell his own version of it: that torture saved us from some attack that we’re not allowed to find out about, that nobody can seem to find any evidence for, but maybe the more it goes on — I mean, he really does seem like a crazy man. He had the chance to relax and he doesn’t know how to do it.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yep. He even got his family out there.

Andy Worthington: Well, how else would you deal with him, I suppose, if you were related to him?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I do think there’s some fear in it too. I think there’s some folks realizing that there may be, at a minimum, some problems with traveling, and at a maximum, there may even be — I just don’t think there’s a political will in this country to do anything truly dramatic to bring some accountability to this, but I do think that these people, much the way that military people do still, count their reputation and their legacy and how the history books are going to look at them as something significant, and as they grow older it grows in importance, so that, you know, they don’t want to be tarnished, and I think Cheney’s seriously concerned about where he’s going to go in the history books.

Andy Worthington: Well, I understand that. I think it ought to be more serious than that, but I’ve felt all along that, although prosecutions ought to happen because, you know, torture statutes have been broken, but apparently nobody is going to be held ultimately responsible, that’s really not an acceptable position. The position taken by Obama, it seems, is to say, well, OK, we’re going to clean up our act but we’re not going to hold these people to account, but whichever way you look at it, it certainly doesn’t leave Cheney in the clear …

Lawrence Wilkerson: No. My wife thinks that ultimately there’s going to be something. I’m a little more cynical than she, but she’s convinced that this investigation that’s been going on [by John Durham] — very low-key, the guy’s very persistent, he’s very determined, he reminds me of [Patrick] Fitzgerald on the Valerie Plame case, and his starting point is the destruction of the videotapes, and I’m told he’s got a plan, and he’s following that plan, and I’m told that plan is bigger than I think.

Andy Worthington: Well, I’m quite encouraged by that, because I’ve not heard too much about that investigation. I’ve heard more about the long-awaited Justice Department investigation into the lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel who wrote the torture memos, and from what I’ve heard about that investigation, it seemed to involve establishing concrete, irrefutable connections between Dick Cheney’s office and the Office of Legal Counsel, because the torture memos have come out, and somehow still it’s as if the lawyers did it themselves …

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yep.

Andy Worthington: And what’s needed is: no, the lawyers were told what to do, they agreed that they would not think independently, and they would make the advice what was required, and if a chain leads infallibly up to that particular office, then how can they wriggle out of it? I understand that Dick Cheney was, I think, driven mad after 9/11 by his fear and his paranoia, and a lot of his unsavory impulses took over what may have been left of his humanity, and he became consumed by it, and I don’t think anybody doubts that in some ways they were motivated by the fear of another attack, but when you break the law, which is what they did, is it enough to be able to leave office and your crimes go with you? Is that enough?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, you know, I’ve read some of the language in the International Convention Against Torture, and in the document that President Clinton had to submit finally to the Senate, and I’ve read the Senate’s qualification of that document too, but, you know, this is in order to become a signatory to the treaty, to promise to the treaty holder that you will do as necessary, to make your domestic law conform to the law encased in the treaty, and it’s pretty clear that there is no national emergency “out,” there’s no exit.

Andy Worthington: No, there isn’t. It’s Article 2.2 of the Convention, which says, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Lawrence Wilkerson: And that’s not something we qualified, that’s not something where we said, “Oh, that’s a little part of it we don’t agree with, but we’ll still be a signatory.”

Andy Worthington: And that, of course, explains why it was crucial in the OLC memos to redefine torture so that torture wasn’t happening.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Right.

Andy Worthington: I mean, why would you do that unless you know that it was illegal?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yes, and to me that’s why so many people kept saying, “We don’t torture.” They had to get that on the record that this is what they believed, because that was the legal opinion that they had. Now the man who, to me, brings all of this together more than Cheney himself, because he has one foot in the legal camp — and I must admit it’s a fairly brilliant foot — and he has one foot in the operator camp, that’s David Addington. That is to say, Addington was very influential, maybe to the point of maximally influential with that idiot Gonzales, and everything that flowed from Gonzales, both when he was Bush’s Counsel and when he was Attorney General, and was also influential through his connection with Libby, and Libby’s ability to coordinate the interagency group that essentially worked for the Vice President — not for the President but for the Vice President. Addington was both the Zawahiri and the bin Laden.

Andy Worthington: What a fabulous analogy that is.

Lawrence Wilkerson: David’s a strange person. When he was working for Cheney, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, we in the uniformed military used to refer to him as “Weird David.”

Andy Worthington: Yes, well he was just in the right place to push everything where it shouldn’t have gone after 9/11,wasn’t he?

Lawrence Wilkerson: He was perfectly placed. He and Libby both. They were perfectly placed.

Andy Worthington: But it is extraordinary the lack of public accountability and the absolute significance of Addington’s role in all those years. I mean, I can’t think of another period in American history when somebody who was working for the Vice President so often actually seemed to be running the show.

Lawrence Wilkerson: It is extraordinary with regard to the Office of the Vice President. I mean, it’s hard to go back and find anybody ever in that position who gathered to himself as much power as Dick Cheney did.

Andy Worthington: Sure.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I mean, I can find places where Alexander Hamilton as aide-de-camp to George Washington was as influential as George Washington was during a specific instance at a specific time or a specific date, but it wasn’t something that pertained throughout Washington’s command of the continental armies or his Presidency.

Andy Worthington: And I think earlier, when you were saying about Colin Powell telling the President in January 2005 –

Lawrence Wilkerson: January 13, 2005.

Andy Worthington: — that he had no idea of the scale of what was going on, that was an insight for me into how the President really didn’t know who was actually running the show.

Lawrence Wilkerson: The sad thing is that, until early January 2004, I’m not sure we did either. I understood that there was a team, I understood it was highly placed and probably under the Vice President, I understood that it was membered in almost every aspect of the interagency group that dealt with national security, I understood they had a strategy, I understood they were ruthless in carrying out that strategy, and I understood that I was a day late and a dollar short, because they’d beaten me to the marketplace. But it took me a while to figure that out. I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs.

Andy Worthington: Well, I’m sure, but I suppose why wouldn’t it when they were so obsessively secretive? And on that note, I guess I’ll let you get on. It’s been a real pleasure meeting you here on the phone and talking to you, and I’m sure those who read this interview will be grateful that you took the time to do so.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on Foreign Policy Journal. Both parts of the interview were cross-posted as a single article on The Public Record. The interview was also picked up on by Scott Horton at Harper’s, by The Raw Story, and by Chattahbox, and for a couple of interesting follow-up articles on Firedoglake, see the following on Empty Wheel and The Seminal.