The 9/11 Trials at Guantánamo on Antiwar Radio

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of joining Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio (for the fifth time), for another healthy 45 minutes sounding off about the ills of Guantánamo, the evils of torture and the steady accumulation of chilling evidence about the command structure of the Military Commission trial system invented by Dick Cheney and David Addington in November 2001. The show is available here — and the MP3 is here.

Scott had requested an interview specifically as a follow-up to an article I had written about the pre-trial hearings in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks, which he referred to, in his blurb for the show, as “the absolute mockery that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is making of the ad hoc star chamber commissions.”

Our discussion of how it came to pass that the Commissions have provided Mohammed with a platform that would have been denied him in a US federal court also led to discussions about the alleged mental health problems of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another of the accused 9/11 co-conspirators, “how the FBI interrogates someone in actual attempts to gain information from them” (as Scott put it), rather than resorting to torture (which is illegal, immoral, and counter-productive), and the case of Ramzi Yousef, Mohammed’s nephew and the original World Trade Center bomber, whose case neatly demonstrates the supremacy of pre-9/11 interrogation tactics.

We also touched on the resignation of prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld in connection with the suppression of defense evidence in the case of Afghan prisoner Mohamed Jawad, the “reassignment” of Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the Commission’s legal adviser, and what these developments mean for the Commissions’ tottering legitimacy. Following the chain of command up from the Commissions to the Pentagon, and on to the office of the Vice President, these are themes that I developed into another article on Wednesday, The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials.

Andy 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 see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.