Andy Worthington on Antiwar Radio: Obama, Guantánamo and Torture

On Saturday, I was delighted to be invited once more to discuss Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio (the show is available here — and the MP3 is here). This was the first time Scott and I have talked since George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (who had morphed into Dr. Strangelove for his farewell appearance) left the White House, and Barack Obama marked his first few days in office with three Presidential orders requiring Guantánamo to be closed, banning torture, and ordering the CIA to close any secret prisons. These, of course, are the secret prisons that the CIA may have been operating since President Bush declared, in September 2006, that the previously undisclosed secret prison program, which he had, to that point, strenuously denied, had come to an end with the transfer of 14 “high-value detainees” to Guantánamo, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

As ever, it was a delight to have a decent amount of time to talk about the crimes of the Bush administration — and the new broom — with Scott, whose recent move to L.A. from Austin has clearly not dampened his sense of outrage, and in a detailed discussion we also talked about the recent confession by Susan Crawford, the Convening Authority of Guantánamo’s Military Commission trial system, that Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, could not be prosecuted because he had been tortured in US custody.

As we attempted to work out what Crawford’s ulterior motive may have been, I made a point of noting that Barack Obama is now required to prosecute the architects of the torture policy — although I don’t expect this to happen without a struggle — and had the opportunity to inform Scott and Antiwar Radio’s listeners that the kind of abuse that al-Qahtani suffered, though horribly severe, was part of a system of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” introduced in 2002, which were applied to over a hundred prisoners in Guantánamo.

We also discussed what might replace the Guantánamo trials, which Obama halted on Day One, and this gave me the opportunity to dismiss proposals to create a new trial system, or to create legislation to endorse “preventive detention,” because, of course, both proposals are, in effect, almost indistinguishable from their reviled predecessors, and we also talked about the Pentagon’s latest salvo of empty propaganda regarding the number of ex-prisoners who have allegedly “returned to the battlefield,” and the recent claims that a former prisoner is now the deputy leader of an al-Qaeda unit in Yemen. This also gave me the chance to discuss how even the most exaggerated estimates of recidivism rates are far less than in any other penal system, and to wonder why it is that, when it comes to the “War on Terror,” members of the public allow themselves to be swayed into thinking that, in order to avoid a single prisoner “returning to the battlefield,” it is somehow justifiable to hold terror suspects forever without charge or trial.

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.