Worthington, Andy - Interview master file
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Johnny | We're rolling. | 0:05 |
Peter | Good, good afternoon. | 0:06 |
- | Hi. | 0:07 |
Peter | Hi, we are very grateful to you | 0:08 |
for participating in the Witness To Guantanamo project. | 0:10 | |
We invite you to speak of your experiences | 0:14 | |
with Guantanamo Bay prisoners | 0:17 | |
and your knowledge of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. | 0:20 | |
We are hoping to provide you an opportunity | 0:24 | |
to tell your story in your own words. | 0:27 | |
We are creating an archive of stories | 0:30 | |
so that people in America and around the world | 0:32 | |
will have a better understanding of what you have observed, | 0:35 | |
and experienced, and the whole story of Guantanamo. | 0:39 | |
Hopefully people around the world | 0:44 | |
will have a better understanding from that. | 0:46 | |
Future generations want to know what happened in Guantanamo | 0:49 | |
and by telling the story you contributed to the history. | 0:52 | |
And we'd like to let you know | 0:56 | |
that if you want to take a break at any time | 0:57 | |
you feel free to let us know. | 0:59 | |
And also if you say something that you feel | 1:01 | |
you'd like removed | 1:03 | |
and you tell us at the end of the filming, we can remove it. | 1:04 | |
And we'd like to begin by having you tell us your name, | 1:08 | |
and date of birth, and age, and where you were born. | 1:12 | |
- | Okay, well, my name is Andy Worthington. | 1:17 |
I was born in, how precise do you want me to be? | 1:20 | |
I was born in 1963 (laughing). | 1:22 | |
Peter | Great and your age is? | 1:24 |
- | At present I'm 53. | 1:26 |
Peter | And where were you born? | 1:29 |
- | I was born just outside Manchester in Northern England | 1:30 |
where I moved when I was a child, | 1:33 | |
when I was just three, actually, | 1:35 | |
to the other side of the country in the east, | 1:36 | |
place called Hull, | 1:39 | |
in fact it's a large village outside Hull | 1:39 | |
which is a formerly quite significant fishing port. | 1:42 | |
That's where I grew up. | 1:49 | |
Then I went to Oxford University, | 1:51 | |
and then I moved to London and I've been there ever since. | 1:53 | |
Peter | And before you started working | 1:58 |
on Guantanamo issues, | 2:00 | |
did you have any works that might be interesting | 2:01 | |
to the audience? | 2:04 | |
Tell us what you did after. | 2:05 | |
- | Yeah, well I came to Guantanamo | 2:07 |
through an interest in civil liberties and human rights | 2:13 | |
that had developed over the years previously. | 2:17 | |
I should probably say that I think that the kind of Genesis | 2:19 | |
of my interest in human rights and in tackling injustice | 2:23 | |
probably comes from my Northern English, | 2:27 | |
working class Methodist background. | 2:30 | |
And I think it's significant that religion as I perceived it | 2:33 | |
is one that is very concerned with justice, | 2:40 | |
with combating injustice and is very concerned | 2:43 | |
with standing up for the underdog. | 2:45 | |
And a lot of those issues are supposed to be basic | 2:47 | |
to Christianity as a whole. | 2:49 | |
But I think that some of the more establishment Christians | 2:51 | |
don't sympathize enough with the underdog. | 2:54 | |
But it took me a long time to realize in my life | 2:59 | |
that this was something that was significant to me. | 3:02 | |
I'd lost my faith, but the values were things | 3:04 | |
that I've always carried with me. | 3:09 | |
So, I'd been working on a project | 3:11 | |
about British social history. | 3:17 | |
So, actually it was about Stonehenge | 3:19 | |
and it was about the various groups of people | 3:22 | |
that have been attracted to Stonehenge over the years. | 3:25 | |
So an odd selection of rebels and outsiders. | 3:27 | |
People connected with paganism | 3:32 | |
and the also people connected | 3:34 | |
with the British counterculture. | 3:36 | |
And there was a free festival in the 1970s and the 1980s | 3:38 | |
that took place at Stonehenge which got massive | 3:45 | |
and was shut down very violently by Margaret Thatcher | 3:49 | |
in 1985, the year after she'd violently suppressed | 3:52 | |
the minors in the UK. | 3:56 | |
And she then set up a military exclusion zone | 3:58 | |
outside of Stonehenge every summer solstice | 4:01 | |
to prevent people getting there | 4:04 | |
which lasted for about a decade and a half. | 4:06 | |
And eventually what happened | 4:09 | |
was that people who were peacefully protesting | 4:10 | |
outside Stonehenge were arrested by the police. | 4:13 | |
And they took that case to the courts | 4:15 | |
and they went all the way up to the Law Lords, | 4:17 | |
which was the highest court, | 4:19 | |
we now got a Supreme Court. | 4:21 | |
At the time they were the Law Lords. | 4:22 | |
And they made this decision | 4:24 | |
about saying that the government had no right | 4:26 | |
to arrest people who were peacefully protesting | 4:28 | |
on the side of the road. | 4:31 | |
Because if people think that there's no way | 4:31 | |
to get redress for a perceived wrongdoing, | 4:34 | |
then peacefully protesting is a completely valid way | 4:36 | |
to do it. | 4:39 | |
If they get violent, it's a different matter, | 4:40 | |
but if they're peaceful, which they were. | 4:41 | |
So, that suddenly the exclusion zone went | 4:44 | |
and they had to allow people back. | 4:46 | |
And now bizarrely, they have a young people's hedonistic | 4:49 | |
party in Stonehenge every summer solstice. | 4:53 | |
Whereas before all this nonsense began, | 4:56 | |
the hippies festival was across the road. | 4:59 | |
And it was only a small number of them | 5:01 | |
who actually went to the solstice. | 5:03 | |
But anyway, the key to this story | 5:04 | |
is that I had read the Law Lord's ruling | 5:07 | |
and I found their language | 5:10 | |
and their reasoning really interesting. | 5:12 | |
And I was dealing with civil liberties issues. | 5:15 | |
And so, this combination of focusing on civil liberties | 5:17 | |
and getting into the mentality of how judges operated, | 5:22 | |
how the law operated, | 5:27 | |
meant that it wasn't that big a leap for me | 5:28 | |
to start getting into Guantanamo. | 5:31 | |
Peter | But there was some gap | 5:33 |
between that, what happened? | 5:34 | |
How did that happen that you did get into Guantanamo? | 5:36 | |
- | Well, I'd actually spent several years | 5:39 |
working on this Stonehenge issue, | 5:42 | |
and I'd written two books | 5:44 | |
and I was looking for a new project. | 5:44 | |
I'd liked that I was just independently writing books. | 5:46 | |
And I was looking for something that I could do | 5:52 | |
and Guantanamo was something that had been on my radar. | 5:56 | |
So, I hadn't been obsessive about it | 6:00 | |
but most people outside the United States | 6:02 | |
who weren't on the extreme right, | 6:05 | |
knew as soon as Guantanamo opened | 6:08 | |
that something was fishy about this, | 6:10 | |
the whole orange jumpsuit thing. | 6:12 | |
Now, I know that in America, | 6:13 | |
not only was the spirit of vengeance so strong | 6:15 | |
but orange jumpsuits are prison outfits. | 6:17 | |
Nobody was surprised by the orange. | 6:20 | |
Outside, the rest of the world, all of this stuff, | 6:22 | |
and the orange suits was a bit alarming. | 6:25 | |
So, there was a low level monitoring, I would say, | 6:28 | |
around the world amongst decent people | 6:32 | |
of what are they up to here? | 6:34 | |
And then of course, when people started being released | 6:36 | |
and in Britain, I think in particular, it was noticeable | 6:38 | |
that when the British guys were released | 6:40 | |
in March, 2014 and spoke to the press, | 6:43 | |
we were suddenly hearing these stories | 6:46 | |
about the level of torture and abuse | 6:48 | |
and what a terrible situation it was in there. | 6:51 | |
It built up from there. | 6:54 | |
And I became interested from a research point of view | 6:56 | |
of how dare the United States be holding people | 7:01 | |
when they are not even telling the world | 7:04 | |
who they're holding there. | 7:07 | |
And I became interested in finding out who was there. | 7:08 | |
So, then this was in about September, 2005. | 7:12 | |
And I started researching on the internet, | 7:18 | |
really, in-depth searches on the internet | 7:21 | |
for who might have been held there | 7:24 | |
and what their stories were. | 7:27 | |
So, released prisoners. | 7:28 | |
I had two lists that I worked from. | 7:30 | |
One was the list that the "Washington Post" | 7:32 | |
had tried to put together. | 7:34 | |
And another was a list of Cageprisoners in the UK | 7:36 | |
had tried to put together of who might be there. | 7:39 | |
And I started searching these names | 7:41 | |
and I would find the reports, | 7:44 | |
an AP report from Kabul when a plane arrived | 7:46 | |
in 2003 with a whole bunch of Afghans on board. | 7:49 | |
And they would give little bits of their stories, | 7:52 | |
some of them, they would say a few things. | 7:54 | |
And I was trying to piece it all together from that. | 7:56 | |
But obviously there were huge, huge holes in the story. | 7:58 | |
And we didn't know who was there, they hadn't told us. | 8:02 | |
So it wasn't until spring 2006, | 8:07 | |
that was when the government lost these lawsuits | 8:10 | |
about freedom of information | 8:14 | |
and were compelled to release the names | 8:15 | |
and the nationalities of the prisoners. | 8:19 | |
And I think it's about 8,000 pages of documents. | 8:20 | |
The unclassified summaries of evidence | 8:24 | |
and the transcripts of the the "Mickey Mouse" tribunals | 8:27 | |
that they held there, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal | 8:32 | |
and the Administrative Review Board. | 8:35 | |
And those documents were really the basis | 8:39 | |
for how I got into the stories of who the people were. | 8:44 | |
Peter | That was your goal. | 8:51 |
That was your concern to the stories | 8:52 | |
of the people, that really is where you wanted to focus. | 8:54 | |
- | Well, there were always been two things. | 8:57 |
I wanted to show that these were human beings | 9:01 | |
because that's always the case. | 9:04 | |
And even people who've done bad things, | 9:06 | |
they're human beings, there're stories. | 9:08 | |
And we had been told pretty explicitly | 9:11 | |
by Donald Rumsfeld in particular, | 9:14 | |
don't even bother thinking about who these people are. | 9:17 | |
They're the worst of the worst, we're keeping you safe. | 9:21 | |
That was very, very, very powerful. | 9:27 | |
And on the face of it, quite reasonable, | 9:31 | |
total dehumanization of the men held at Guantanamo, really. | 9:34 | |
And it's been extraordinarily successful. | 9:38 | |
I would say that still is the message | 9:40 | |
that it's almost it's beamed out relentlessly | 9:44 | |
across the United States. | 9:47 | |
Don't think about Guantanamo. | 9:49 | |
There're still really terribly bad people there | 9:50 | |
and we're keeping you safe. | 9:54 | |
So, there's also this very paternalistic, | 9:56 | |
we're looking after you side of things. | 9:59 | |
Peter | Why did the U.S seem so important to you | 10:03 |
as opposed to the way the British | 10:05 | |
were treating people they captured? | 10:07 | |
- | Because Guantanamo was the iconic prisoner of the war | 10:13 |
on terror and because of the United States sets itself up | 10:16 | |
as this great nation and the values | 10:21 | |
that it claims to uphold. | 10:23 | |
Then it was particularly outrageous | 10:25 | |
that here was Guantanamo, | 10:27 | |
and that Guantanamo itself wasn't being hidden | 10:30 | |
but everything about what it stood for | 10:35 | |
and what was happening there, | 10:38 | |
and who was held there was being hidden. | 10:39 | |
Peter | And what kind of response | 10:42 |
did you get from people? | 10:43 | |
You started blogging with this? | 10:45 | |
Is that how you put out your information? | 10:47 | |
- | No, what I actually started doing | 10:48 |
was I started writing a book. | 10:50 | |
So, actually when these documents came out | 10:52 | |
I just started analyzing them. | 10:59 | |
And there were two lists of prisoners | 11:02 | |
and they had the prisoners numbers and their names, | 11:06 | |
and all of the documentation of the allegations | 11:10 | |
and the transcripts had the prisoner numbers | 11:13 | |
on them somewhere. | 11:17 | |
So, I had to match the numbers on the list to these | 11:18 | |
and then start working out who these people were | 11:21 | |
and the Bush administration said they were captured | 11:24 | |
on the battlefield. | 11:29 | |
No one was captured on the battlefield. | 11:30 | |
They were captured, for the most part, | 11:32 | |
by the U.S's Afghan or Pakistani allies. | 11:34 | |
Or they were captured in what mostly appeared | 11:38 | |
to be chronically inept raids on houses in Pakistan. | 11:41 | |
But it was important for me in trying to work out | 11:48 | |
who they were. | 11:52 | |
So, their voices would come through | 11:52 | |
sometimes in the transcripts. | 11:54 | |
It was amazing that in some cases | 11:55 | |
it was almost like you could hear them, | 11:59 | |
even when they were translated. | 12:00 | |
Even with all these mistakes that would have occurred | 12:02 | |
in the translation, | 12:06 | |
the whole clunking idiotic system of these reviews | 12:07 | |
which was only intended to rubber stamp | 12:11 | |
their prior designation as enemy combatants, | 12:13 | |
it was not meant to be about justice. | 12:16 | |
But sometimes you can really hear the people. | 12:17 | |
But it was important to me not just to convey who they were, | 12:19 | |
if I could, but to work out the statistics. | 12:24 | |
If these people weren't the worst of the worst | 12:28 | |
and captured on the battlefield, then who were they? | 12:30 | |
So, that nearly half of them were captured | 12:32 | |
crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan at the end of 2001. | 12:35 | |
A much smaller number, actually, were captured | 12:40 | |
in Afghanistan in various places. | 12:42 | |
And then these house raids like I said, in Pakistan, | 12:45 | |
primarily, and then the 40 or so prisoners | 12:48 | |
who had been through the black sites | 12:52 | |
and had come to Guantanamo through that route. | 12:54 | |
And then, so at some point, | 12:58 | |
I think it must've been quite early on. | 13:00 | |
I was looking around for someone who might wanna publish it. | 13:01 | |
And Pluto Press said that they would do it. | 13:06 | |
So, I spent 14 months working on the book. | 13:10 | |
And when the book came out, when the book was finished, | 13:14 | |
I delivered the manuscript to Pluto Pressing. | 13:17 | |
Peter | What was the book called? | 13:19 |
- | The "Guantanamo Files, The Stories | 13:21 |
Of The 774 Detainees In America's Illegal Prison". | 13:23 | |
And the 774 was right at the time but five more prisoners | 13:27 | |
arrived after I finished the manuscript. | 13:31 | |
The 779 is the number of prisoners officially held | 13:36 | |
by the U.S military at Guantanamo. | 13:39 | |
So, I finished the manuscript, | 13:44 | |
handed the manuscript in May, 2007. | 13:45 | |
And every time I've written a book, | 13:52 | |
the couple of weeks afterwards are a weird time. | 13:56 | |
You can't really adjust to reality. | 14:00 | |
So, you walk around in a daze for a few weeks | 14:03 | |
and then you wonder what it is | 14:04 | |
that's gonna bring you back to reality. | 14:05 | |
And what brought me back to reality | 14:07 | |
was that a man died at Guantanamo. | 14:08 | |
A man called Abdulrahman Al-Amri, | 14:11 | |
who was a Saudi died reportedly by committing suicide | 14:13 | |
which may or may not be true. | 14:17 | |
But I already knew who this guy was. | 14:20 | |
And so, I approached "The Guardian", | 14:23 | |
actually, to see if they were interested, | 14:26 | |
I explained what I'd been doing. | 14:28 | |
And they went, we gotta go with the Associated Press. | 14:30 | |
And I thought, okay, this isn't gonna be easy then. | 14:33 | |
I now have this knowledge about the prisoners | 14:36 | |
but I didn't really seem to be that interested. | 14:39 | |
So, I had a blog that had been set up for me | 14:41 | |
to sell my previous books. | 14:46 | |
And it had been set up as a fixed website. | 14:50 | |
And then blogging really took off, | 14:53 | |
I think in about 2005, really, | 14:56 | |
I think it was when WordPress began, | 14:58 | |
when you didn't need any coding knowledge. | 15:00 | |
It was when the first setup of blogging | 15:02 | |
was that you could just put the info in and publish, | 15:04 | |
which has been revolutionary. | 15:10 | |
But I decided that it would make sense | 15:12 | |
for me to start doing that, so I did. | 15:15 | |
Pretty quickly I started writing on an almost daily basis | 15:24 | |
because I didn't want to let go of the story. | 15:26 | |
I had this role that I had researched | 15:30 | |
and written myself into | 15:33 | |
of knowing who all the prisoners were. | 15:36 | |
And my, I think, reasonable assumptions | 15:39 | |
about who they were | 15:44 | |
to the extent that it's hard to gauge properly | 15:47 | |
in such a chaotic situation as Guantanamo | 15:51 | |
who these people really are. | 15:53 | |
Peter | Were you surprised | 15:56 |
that you the only person on the planet | 15:57 | |
paying attention to every one of these individuals? | 16:00 | |
- | I was very surprised. | 16:03 |
I was surprised that "The New York Times" | 16:04 | |
and the "Washington Post" didn't put people on | 16:07 | |
to do a proper analysis of these documents. | 16:10 | |
I remember what happened. | 16:16 | |
The Associated Press got the documents, | 16:18 | |
they put together, I think it was a three-part series | 16:21 | |
of, they put some people on it. | 16:26 | |
Said, go through these files, | 16:28 | |
pick out some interesting stuff. | 16:29 | |
So they did, and these went all around the world | 16:31 | |
and they were posted in all kinds of newspapers | 16:33 | |
and then nobody followed up. | 16:37 | |
And I met someone from human rights watch | 16:40 | |
who told me that they had put a couple of researchers on | 16:42 | |
but they defeated them. | 16:46 | |
It wasn't an easy subject, I understand. | 16:50 | |
And from the point of view of an NGO, | 16:55 | |
I'm kind of more surprised in a way | 17:01 | |
than with the newspapers. | 17:03 | |
One of the things that was here to defeat the newspapers | 17:04 | |
was that they didn't know who was telling the truth, | 17:07 | |
or they didn't have clear voices. | 17:11 | |
So, I could see that your traditional reporter type scenario | 17:15 | |
was gonna end up with people flailing around, | 17:20 | |
going, "I don't know what to think." | 17:22 | |
On the one hand, you're not gonna get specific information | 17:23 | |
about any of these guys. | 17:27 | |
So, you can go through the files | 17:28 | |
and have them saying, "I didn't do it. | 17:30 | |
I was a missionary, I was a humanitarian aid worker." | 17:33 | |
Some of which were true and some of which were covers | 17:38 | |
for fact that people may have been out in Afghanistan | 17:41 | |
because they'd been told to go | 17:45 | |
and support the Taliban by their Imam. | 17:46 | |
And that's a different thing from being a terrorist. | 17:49 | |
But this is very fundamental to the Guantanamo story | 17:53 | |
is that the U.S government treated everybody, | 17:57 | |
described everybody as these illegal enemy combatants | 18:03 | |
who had no rights, that was a fundamental thing. | 18:05 | |
Imprison people with no rights whatsoever | 18:08 | |
and completely disregard whether you call people | 18:11 | |
by mistake, because there's supposed to be a process | 18:14 | |
of reviewing people shortly after capture. | 18:17 | |
If you've got any doubts whatsoever | 18:20 | |
about whether they might be a civilian, | 18:21 | |
completely ruled that Combatant Tribunals, | 18:23 | |
article five of Geneva Conventions. | 18:26 | |
The army was prepared to do them, | 18:29 | |
and they were told from on high we're not doing that. | 18:30 | |
Everybody that comes into U.S custody | 18:33 | |
is presumptively guilty of being an enemy combatant, | 18:35 | |
which is a nebulous enemy of the United States | 18:39 | |
with no rights. | 18:42 | |
But they fundamentally confused terrorists with soldiers. | 18:43 | |
So, if you're a soldier, | 18:48 | |
if you're some guy who's under somebody's command | 18:51 | |
engaged in combat in a war zone, | 18:55 | |
you are supposed to be protected by the Geneva Conventions. | 18:57 | |
If you've engaged in terrorism, | 19:01 | |
then that's a criminal offense | 19:03 | |
and you should be prosecuted in court. | 19:06 | |
But in this mess of Guantanamo | 19:10 | |
they didn't know who they had. | 19:15 | |
When people had an opportunity to talk about who they were, | 19:17 | |
it was difficult to gauge | 19:20 | |
whether they were telling the truth or not | 19:21 | |
without, I think, doing what I did | 19:25 | |
which was to overview all the stories. | 19:28 | |
And then you have to have some kind of way | 19:31 | |
of gauging the probabilities | 19:36 | |
of what you think is the extent | 19:39 | |
to which people are telling the truth or lying. | 19:40 | |
Which I think is what I did | 19:45 | |
and I think I was reasonably successful | 19:48 | |
in saying when you've captured a whole bunch of people | 19:51 | |
who've crossed from Afghanistan into Pakistan, | 19:55 | |
for example, they didn't all come from Tora Bora | 19:57 | |
where they'd been fighting with the remnants | 20:00 | |
of Al-Qaeda against the Afghan proxy forces | 20:03 | |
who were there on behalf of the United States. | 20:06 | |
The United States was bombing these Afghan soldiers | 20:08 | |
on the ground. | 20:11 | |
And there was an Al-Qaeda presence there. | 20:11 | |
Osama Bin Laden was there, | 20:13 | |
senior Al-Qaeda people were there, senior Taliban people. | 20:15 | |
A lot of these people escaped. | 20:19 | |
A lot of these people, it seems escaped | 20:21 | |
with American knowledge that they escaped. | 20:24 | |
And they were rounding up other people | 20:27 | |
and all of them are then bodyguards | 20:29 | |
for bin Laden or whatever. | 20:32 | |
And some of these people, I think very, very few of them, | 20:34 | |
if any, were body guards for bin Laden | 20:40 | |
although dozens were described as that. | 20:43 | |
But yeah, sure, a lot of these guys were soldiers. | 20:44 | |
Why were there not also other people fleeing | 20:48 | |
the death and destruction in Afghanistan? | 20:51 | |
Of course they were, it was total chaos. | 20:53 | |
And there were civilians trying to get at it | 20:56 | |
as much as they were soldiers trying to get at it, | 20:58 | |
but they muddied the waters, | 21:01 | |
they always muddied the waters on everything | 21:02 | |
from the beginning. | 21:04 | |
Peter | Did you seek out the British detainees | 21:06 |
to get a personal relationship with any of them | 21:09 | |
just to understand better who these people were? | 21:13 | |
- | Well, when I was doing the book, | 21:16 |
I'd had no connection with this field at all | 21:19 | |
before I started on it, and I really did it in a bubble. | 21:22 | |
I reached out to a few lawyers, | 21:27 | |
mainly I did it by researching | 21:31 | |
what was publicly available information. | 21:32 | |
So, the British prisoners had all spoken to the press | 21:35 | |
and they'd all given pretty serious accounts | 21:39 | |
of what had been happening. | 21:42 | |
And Cageprisoners which was the British website | 21:44 | |
that was set up that involved former prisoners | 21:47 | |
had quite a lot of information on its site as well, | 21:50 | |
of things outside of the mainstream media, | 21:53 | |
of reports from former prisoners and things like this. | 21:56 | |
So, I didn't really start meeting people until afterwards, | 22:00 | |
but then I did. | 22:05 | |
Peter | Why did you, how did that happen? | 22:06 |
- | How did I start meeting people? | 22:09 |
I think, actually, the first thing that happened | 22:14 | |
was probably that Maryam Hassan, | 22:17 | |
who as I understand it has set up Cageprisoners. | 22:22 | |
Peter | Can you tell her who she is | 22:26 |
before we talk, so that people know who she is. | 22:27 | |
- | Well, Maryam is, I only really knew of her | 22:31 |
as this formidable, tireless, human rights activist | 22:37 | |
working on behalf of the prisoners | 22:41 | |
because this website was devoted | 22:44 | |
to finding out who was at Guantanamo, | 22:46 | |
trying to tell the truth about it | 22:50 | |
and trying to get the prison closed down. | 22:51 | |
And she was one of the first people | 22:53 | |
to pick up on what I was doing. | 22:54 | |
So, after "The Guardian" told me, | 22:58 | |
"We're not interested in your story." | 23:01 | |
And then I started writing myself | 23:02 | |
about who the guy was who died. | 23:04 | |
And then it carried on from there. | 23:06 | |
And she very quickly picked up on my work | 23:07 | |
and started cross posting it on Cageprisoners. | 23:10 | |
And then she got in touch with me, | 23:14 | |
and within a couple of months she'd invited me to this event | 23:15 | |
down in South London for the Guantanamo prisoners | 23:20 | |
that were still held. | 23:28 | |
And Moazzam Begg's daughter, was one of his children, | 23:29 | |
his daughter was speaking at that, | 23:34 | |
Shaker Aamer's daughter was speaking at it. | 23:36 | |
And a lot of the former prisoners were there. | 23:39 | |
So, I got introduced to some of them on that day. | 23:41 | |
And then it kind of carried on | 23:45 | |
that I was then part of the scene in a way- | 23:47 | |
Peter | Mary on that day too then? | 23:52 |
- | I'm not sure I did meet, I may have done actually. | 23:53 |
I met her a few times over the years at various events, | 23:56 | |
but we mainly communicated by email or even by phone | 24:00 | |
a few times. | 24:05 | |
Peter | You don't know her background, | 24:05 |
how she was involved in this? | 24:06 | |
- | I don't, I think that her family | 24:08 |
seems to be very interested in these human rights issues. | 24:11 | |
I think her sister, I could be wrong here, | 24:15 | |
but I think she has a sister | 24:18 | |
who's also involved in Muslim charitable work. | 24:19 | |
And it's not surprising. | 24:23 | |
There's a very big charitable element to Islam | 24:25 | |
which I think is much more comparable | 24:29 | |
to how Christianity used to be than to how it is now. | 24:33 | |
I don't mean that there aren't charitable Christians, | 24:36 | |
but I think that big element of it being, | 24:38 | |
do good for the people who are suffering | 24:42 | |
and give us your money is a bigger thing | 24:45 | |
than it used to be in Christianity. | 24:48 | |
- | And how did it seem to you, | 24:50 |
how did it feel when you met former detainees | 24:52 | |
when actually you saw flesh and blood | 24:55 | |
in the kind of people you were writing about | 24:57 | |
that changed your perspective at all? | 24:59 | |
- | Well, to be honest, no, I don't think it did. | 25:02 |
I'm always slightly amazed at how nice, | 25:06 | |
how unbitter, how intelligent and how eloquent | 25:12 | |
so many of the former prisoners are. | 25:16 | |
Now, that's not universal. | 25:18 | |
There were people who were very seriously damaged | 25:19 | |
by what happened to them. | 25:21 | |
And there are people who are not necessarily that nice, | 25:23 | |
and they maybe weren't that nice in the first place, | 25:25 | |
or they may have been okay and have been really damaged | 25:27 | |
by what happened to them. | 25:31 | |
And we obviously know that some people | 25:33 | |
have been so profoundly damaged by what happened to them | 25:34 | |
that they've developed serious problems. | 25:37 | |
But most of the people that I've met | 25:42 | |
have been quite amazing people | 25:44 | |
considering what happened to them. | 25:49 | |
They seem to have turned what happened to them | 25:51 | |
into something that helped them grow as people. | 25:55 | |
And some of that's related | 26:01 | |
to their understanding of their religion, | 26:02 | |
that they were tested by Allah | 26:05 | |
and that, actually, that is a blessing | 26:06 | |
that was bestowed upon them. | 26:10 | |
The opportunity to go through this suffering, to grow. | 26:12 | |
Peter | Were they grateful to you | 26:17 |
for telling their story? | 26:18 | |
- | Yeah, as far as I know, I think that's the case. | 26:21 |
Moazzam Begg once said to me, | 26:27 | |
and I said this quite often, | 26:31 | |
"If I want to know who I was in Guantanamo with | 26:33 | |
I go and read Andy's book." | 26:36 | |
Because Moazzam, actually, was held in isolation | 26:39 | |
for all of his time in Guantanamo. | 26:43 | |
So, he didn't have the general population | 26:46 | |
to mix them with the tool. | 26:49 | |
But the person that I got to know the best | 26:51 | |
is Omar Deghayes. | 26:53 | |
And so, the nicest thing that anyone has ever said | 26:55 | |
to me about my work is that Omar said | 26:59 | |
to me "You write as though you were there with us." | 27:02 | |
You know, that's (chuckling). | 27:06 | |
Peter | So, what happened then after you met | 27:09 |
the detainees, did that transform your work at all? | 27:12 | |
Or did that inform your work further, | 27:15 | |
or what did happen after that? | 27:17 | |
- | I think it just reinforced my understanding | 27:20 |
that what I was doing was right. | 27:27 | |
But I may not have any doubt | 27:29 | |
about what I was doing was right. | 27:30 | |
When I was researching, | 27:32 | |
I did go through a phase of initially thinking, | 27:34 | |
oh my God, they literally, | 27:36 | |
almost everybody they got was innocent. | 27:40 | |
And then I actually read an interesting book | 27:43 | |
called the "Interrogators" by an interrogator in Afghanistan | 27:45 | |
who had written this book under a pseudonym | 27:52 | |
had to also change the names of everybody | 27:55 | |
who could be recognized in it. | 27:58 | |
But it was a really, really powerful book | 28:00 | |
about explaining how so many mistakes were made, | 28:04 | |
but also about suggesting that yes, | 28:06 | |
some of these people were lying about who they were. | 28:09 | |
And that really helped me to understand. | 28:12 | |
And there isn't necessarily a malevolence in this. | 28:14 | |
I think some people at Guantanamo, | 28:17 | |
when you're arrested by the police, | 28:19 | |
you come up with some story and then you stuck with it. | 28:22 | |
I think that happened when some people were first seized. | 28:25 | |
But that was great for explaining how the CIA, | 28:29 | |
for example, picked people up, dumped them, | 28:31 | |
gave no information whatsoever about who people were. | 28:34 | |
Plucked people out of custody randomly | 28:38 | |
without telling anybody. | 28:40 | |
And so, CIA special forces were completely irresponsible | 28:44 | |
in the way that they were delivering prisoners. | 28:48 | |
Peter | And why do you feel obligated | 28:51 |
to continue now that you've identified 789, | 28:52 | |
or actually 79 people? | 28:58 | |
Actually, I think it's seven 80 now. | 28:59 | |
But once you've identified them | 29:01 | |
why'd you continue with your project? | 29:03 | |
- | Well, I seemed to be the only person | 29:06 |
who had this overall knowledge of who was at Guantanamo | 29:09 | |
and I still seem to be the only person | 29:12 | |
who has this overall knowledge of who was at Guantanamo. | 29:14 | |
So, if I could have handed that on to somebody | 29:17 | |
maybe I could have moved on to something else. | 29:20 | |
Peter | And did newspapers like "The Guardian" | 29:24 |
reach out to you subsequently? | 29:26 | |
- | No, nobody reached out to me. | 29:28 |
People obviously use my work because it's all online. | 29:31 | |
I've written over 2000 articles about Guantanamo | 29:36 | |
since May, 2007 and it's all online, | 29:40 | |
and it's all free and people use it. | 29:43 | |
Peter | Does that matter to you? | 29:48 |
Are you glad, or how do you feel about that? | 29:49 | |
- | Well, I think that it would be useful | 29:51 |
if people look at my work. | 29:54 | |
I have a prisoner list where I identify everyone who's held. | 29:58 | |
And then I link to everything that I've written about them | 30:02 | |
over the years. | 30:06 | |
"The New York Times" has a docket | 30:06 | |
where they put all the government's documents up, | 30:09 | |
but there's no editorial analysis | 30:13 | |
of whether those documents are accurate or not. | 30:15 | |
In fact, for the first few years, they didn't say anything. | 30:17 | |
And now they have a disclaimer saying lawyers | 30:19 | |
and the detainees themselves dispute | 30:22 | |
elements of what's in these files, | 30:24 | |
which is putting it mildly. | 30:28 | |
So, and I've put together lists of the prisoners | 30:31 | |
who went to the habeas litigation | 30:35 | |
and the prisoners who've been through the major commissions | 30:38 | |
and the periodic review boards. | 30:42 | |
And I know that they're useful documents | 30:45 | |
in the sense that I have an analysis | 30:48 | |
of the situation, which is, I am 100% convinced is useful | 30:53 | |
to people who want to know the truth | 30:58 | |
about how wrong almost everything | 31:01 | |
about Guantanamo has been. | 31:05 | |
Peter | And how will people access this information | 31:08 |
50 years from now, | 31:11 | |
where just online that could very well disappear | 31:12 | |
tomorrow or today? | 31:14 | |
- | Oh, you mean if the U.S. military pulls the big plug, | 31:16 |
the entire world wide web. | 31:22 | |
(Peter laughing) | ||
Peter | Well, people forget it can change. | 31:25 |
It can change and things do disappear off the web. | 31:28 | |
- | Yeah, well, I don't know. | 31:32 |
I would obviously be keeping an eye out on, | 31:35 | |
they'd have to surprise me. | 31:37 | |
I would have a paper backup of everything | 31:41 | |
if I really thought someone was gonna pull the plug. | 31:43 | |
Peter | So, you think going forward | 31:46 |
at infinitum your work will always be up there. | 31:49 | |
- | That's the intention, yeah. | 31:51 |
If the internet doesn't fundamentally change | 31:53 | |
then it's just a matter of paying a provider | 31:57 | |
a small amount of money every year | 32:00 | |
and the thing stays there. | 32:01 | |
I would love it all to be in a paper archive somewhere. | 32:04 | |
I think that would be sensible, | 32:08 | |
but I'm intending to bring out a book soon | 32:12 | |
of the best of what I've written out for the last 10 years. | 32:16 | |
Peter | And have other human rights organizations | 32:21 |
reached out to you for some of your information | 32:23 | |
and documented it themselves? | 32:25 | |
'Cause maybe they can store some of it? | 32:27 | |
- | Well, maybe I haven't really thought about the storage | 32:29 |
out, actually, until we're talking about it now. | 32:31 | |
(clearing throat) | 32:36 | |
I know that a lot of people use it | 32:37 | |
and especially people- | 32:39 | |
Peter | Lawyers use it? | 32:43 |
- | Yeah lawyers use it. | 32:44 |
I met a lawyer, this was another nice story, | 32:46 | |
I met her in Massachusetts a couple years ago. | 32:48 | |
So, I go over to the states every January | 32:52 | |
around the anniversary of the opening, on January 11th | 32:54 | |
and I do events. | 32:58 | |
And a couple of years ago, I got taken out to Massachusetts | 33:00 | |
to do a little tour around there. | 33:03 | |
And I met a lawyer for one of the prisoners | 33:05 | |
who sat in the secure facility. | 33:07 | |
So, everything that lawyers and their clients talk about | 33:08 | |
is presumptively classified. | 33:12 | |
If they then submit their notes of their meetings | 33:14 | |
to the Pentagon censorship review process | 33:17 | |
which decides what can be unclassified or not. | 33:20 | |
And they also have to go to the secure facility | 33:25 | |
to look at any of this stuff. | 33:28 | |
And he said, there's a copy of my book there | 33:30 | |
which is so well farmed | 33:31 | |
that it's just totally falling apart. | 33:33 | |
And I think they've been replacement copies | 33:35 | |
but that's the paper copy of the initial work that I did. | 33:37 | |
So, I would like a lot of the other work that I've done, | 33:42 | |
in some way it would be great if it was in a book form | 33:47 | |
that it has the stories | 33:49 | |
in as comprehensive a way as possible. | 33:53 | |
- | I think you've said this Andy, | 33:57 |
but I think it's important to have you repeat it in one way. | 33:58 | |
What exactly is your goal now | 34:02 | |
or what was your goal in doing all this work? | 34:04 | |
- | Oh, well my intention always is to get the United States | 34:08 |
to return to the rule of law as it existed | 34:11 | |
before September the 11th, 2001, that's fundamentally it. | 34:13 | |
I don't think that anyone should be held | 34:18 | |
under the circumstances that the men are held at Guantanamo. | 34:20 | |
None of them, if you're a criminal | 34:23 | |
then you should be tried in federal court, | 34:26 | |
and if you're a soldier | 34:28 | |
then you should be protected by the Geneva Conventions | 34:29 | |
and the held unmolested, very important. | 34:32 | |
And when the people holding you start start pretending | 34:38 | |
that this is an eternal war, | 34:45 | |
that you should have a meaningful way | 34:47 | |
to litigate about that. | 34:49 | |
And we've barely seen that. | 34:51 | |
There have been a few prisoners who have tried to challenge | 34:53 | |
the basis of their detention | 34:56 | |
and actually, they failed in the courts. | 34:58 | |
We had this absurd situation over the last couple of years | 35:01 | |
where President Obama actually said | 35:04 | |
that major combat operations were gonna end in Afghanistan | 35:06 | |
and the courts didn't agree. | 35:09 | |
'Cause the prisoners were trying to say, | 35:11 | |
"We were caught in connection with the U.S occupation | 35:12 | |
of Afghanistan, please let us go." | 35:16 | |
But of course that's never really been realistic | 35:19 | |
because they could have argued | 35:21 | |
that they should have been released | 35:24 | |
when the Taliban was toppled and there was a new government. | 35:25 | |
We're in this cloud cuckoo land legally | 35:32 | |
and it's completely wrong. | 35:35 | |
It's easy to make light of it | 35:37 | |
but the fundamental truth is that no one should be deprived | 35:38 | |
of their liberty | 35:42 | |
unless it's through internationally recognized forms | 35:44 | |
that have been developed over a very long time. | 35:49 | |
Last year it was the 800th anniversary | 35:51 | |
of the creation of the Magna Carta and habeas corpus | 35:54 | |
in the UK | 35:58 | |
which of course, it initially only applied to the barons. | 35:59 | |
But how many people fought, how hard for how long | 36:02 | |
to get habeas corpus to apply to every human being? | 36:06 | |
It's a massive achievement. | 36:11 | |
And it's so fundamentally important | 36:12 | |
to prevent executive overreach, | 36:15 | |
to prevent any kind of tyrant from slinging us in a dungeon | 36:19 | |
and throwing away the key, it's so crucial. | 36:23 | |
But the prisoners at Guantanamo are political prisoners. | 36:25 | |
There is no legal process for them to get out of that place. | 36:28 | |
They can only be released at the whim of the executive. | 36:31 | |
Since the appeals court shut down the habeas corpus route | 36:35 | |
which was a long struggle, | 36:40 | |
cynically defeated for ideological reasons | 36:43 | |
by right-wing judges and subsequently not addressed | 36:46 | |
by the Supreme Court or the administration. | 36:51 | |
Peter | Did anyone ever ask you | 36:55 |
why someone in the UK is the person | 36:57 | |
who had to do all this work | 36:59 | |
and why no one in the U.S would do it? | 37:00 | |
- | No, obviously I've had a lot of people | 37:05 |
that have thanked me for doing the work | 37:09 | |
that they thought somebody in America should have done. | 37:10 | |
But as I was saying, it was interesting for me to hear | 37:12 | |
that Human Rights Watch had tried to analyze it | 37:19 | |
but the people that they had put on it | 37:21 | |
just couldn't cope with, probably, the amorphousness of it. | 37:23 | |
How do you interpret it? | 37:27 | |
I do think that was my big project. | 37:33 | |
That I don't know whether anything like that | 37:38 | |
would ever come along again. | 37:40 | |
But I do think that the American people | 37:43 | |
should be justifiably critical of supposedly liberal media | 37:46 | |
for having not spent their time on this. | 37:53 | |
- | When Obama became president | 37:59 |
did you think he was gonna shut down Guantanamo? | 38:00 | |
- | Yeah, (laughing), yeah I did. | 38:02 |
He said he was gonna do. | 38:06 | |
And I know why he hasn't | 38:08 | |
but that doesn't give him the extent of the excuses | 38:13 | |
that he claims and that his defenders claim | 38:16 | |
which is purely that it was opposition from Congress. | 38:19 | |
Peter | You believe in something more than that? | 38:22 |
It's other than that. | 38:24 | |
- | Yeah, it's that he didn't prioritize it sufficiently, | 38:26 |
it could have been closed. | 38:29 | |
He had a majority in his two years | 38:31 | |
and he didn't take advantage of that. | 38:35 | |
And then obviously what happened is that Congress then, | 38:38 | |
and Republicans cynically, I think, I never can quite decide | 38:43 | |
how much it involves cynicism and how much it involves them | 38:48 | |
actually being hopelessly paranoid, | 38:51 | |
but it's one or the other, it's cynicism or paranoia. | 38:54 | |
Peter | Obstructionists. | 38:58 |
- | Yeah and they'd been so obstructionist. | 38:59 |
They were so obstructionist to him | 39:01 | |
to a horribly damaging degree, actually, of impeding | 39:06 | |
any ability for the government to do anything really. | 39:10 | |
Peter | So, will Guantanamo close now | 39:13 |
in the end of 2016, before Obama leaves office? | 39:15 | |
- | I don't think that he can do it. | 39:19 |
Actually, he needs the cooperation of the authorities | 39:23 | |
in whichever state he would choose | 39:26 | |
to locate a prison to hold them. | 39:29 | |
And I don't think they're gonna do that | 39:31 | |
because they've all been worked up | 39:34 | |
into this state of monstrously paranoid agitation | 39:37 | |
by the notion that moving a single one of these superhuman | 39:40 | |
terrorist entities to the United States | 39:44 | |
will invite some kind of nuclear armageddon, it's pathetic. | 39:46 | |
Honestly, from a non American point of view it's pathetic | 39:50 | |
the kind of scaremongering that goes on. | 39:55 | |
But it's part of the whole stupidity | 39:58 | |
of they built Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | 40:01 | |
up into some kind of superhuman. | 40:03 | |
If he is the man behind the terrorist attacks, | 40:05 | |
he's dirty criminal scum, and he should have been prosecuted | 40:08 | |
like every other dirty criminal scumbag. | 40:12 | |
They made him into a super human, | 40:16 | |
and then they've kind of allowed him to amplify himself | 40:18 | |
as the superhuman, it's ridiculous. | 40:21 | |
But most people, I don't think know | 40:24 | |
that one of the super humans who was moved from Guantanamo | 40:29 | |
in 2009 before Congress imposed a ban | 40:32 | |
on bringing any prisoner to the United States | 40:35 | |
mainland for any reason, | 40:38 | |
which is the one that has applied ever since, | 40:39 | |
which is the most difficult thing from Obama to close it. | 40:41 | |
But they brought a guy over, he was allegedly complicit | 40:46 | |
in the African embassy bombings in 1998, | 40:49 | |
a pretty low key figure in that but involved. | 40:54 | |
He'd been through the black site, so they tortured him. | 40:58 | |
So, they had all these whole problems | 41:01 | |
of if you torture people it's very difficult | 41:03 | |
then to have a fair trial. | 41:06 | |
But they brought him over, they put him on trial, | 41:10 | |
they charged him with all these counts of everything. | 41:12 | |
And the jury came back and only convicted him on one count | 41:15 | |
but he got a life sentence for it. | 41:19 | |
It was in their own terms, it was phenomenally successful. | 41:20 | |
But Congress shut down the right of the government | 41:25 | |
to bring any prisoner to the U.S mainland subsequently, | 41:28 | |
he's the only one. | 41:31 | |
And it's been a shambles that President Obama declared, | 41:34 | |
Eric Holder actually the attorney general | 41:41 | |
declared they were gonna bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | 41:43 | |
and the other 9/11 co accused to New York, | 41:45 | |
put them on trial, great idea. | 41:48 | |
But when they faced criticism again, | 41:50 | |
mixture of cynicism and paranoia, they backed down on it. | 41:53 | |
Well, they shouldn't have backed down on it, | 41:57 | |
but they shouldn't have re-introduced | 41:58 | |
the military commissions | 42:00 | |
when they said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | 42:02 | |
was gonna be tried in New York. | 42:04 | |
Because as soon as they face criticism | 42:06 | |
on federal court trials, they could drop them | 42:07 | |
knowing that they could put them back | 42:10 | |
into the military commission system. | 42:12 | |
The military commission system is like a broken roundabout | 42:14 | |
that just goes round and round endlessly, giddily, | 42:17 | |
like this, is incapable of achieving justice. | 42:20 | |
There have been eight results in the stumbling history | 42:24 | |
since Dick Cheney and David Addington | 42:30 | |
dragged them out of the history books in November, 2001. | 42:34 | |
And half of those have been overturned on appeal, | 42:39 | |
these convictions, because the fundamental problem | 42:43 | |
with the military commissions | 42:47 | |
is that they were trying people for things | 42:48 | |
that aren't war crimes, | 42:50 | |
that were invented as war crimes by Congress, | 42:51 | |
and the judges, on this, failed to go | 42:54 | |
with the political push to bend the law. | 42:59 | |
Unlike what they did with habeas corpus | 43:05 | |
where they very, very deliberately | 43:07 | |
said, "These are dangerous people. | 43:10 | |
And we have to change the way that we interpret the law | 43:12 | |
and habeas corpus, when it applies | 43:15 | |
to this particular type of dangerous people | 43:17 | |
that we have at Guantanamo. | 43:19 | |
But on the military commissions, they went nah. | 43:20 | |
These are not war crimes. | 43:25 | |
War crimes are supposed to be terrible things | 43:27 | |
that are done to civilians deliberately in wartime. | 43:30 | |
Omar Khadr who was a 15 year old | 43:33 | |
when he was probably shot in the back by U.S special forces, | 43:37 | |
who allegedly threw a grenade, but probably didn't. | 43:42 | |
But even if he did, he was in an occupied country | 43:46 | |
where the United States was at war, | 43:51 | |
how is that a war crime? | 43:54 | |
It's just not a war crime. | 43:56 | |
And if he had been an adult that would have been bad enough, | 43:58 | |
but he was a child. | 44:01 | |
And President Obama signed off on that. | 44:03 | |
This kid had to agree to a plea deal | 44:05 | |
to get out of Guantanamo | 44:11 | |
for something that he probably didn't do. | 44:13 | |
But even if he did do, it wasn't a war crime. | 44:15 | |
And in any case, he was a juvenile, | 44:18 | |
and juveniles are not responsible for what they do in war | 44:20 | |
when they have been sent there by their fathers. | 44:25 | |
And the United States signed up to the optional protocol | 44:27 | |
to the UN Convention | 44:30 | |
on the rights of the children in wartime. | 44:32 | |
Signed up to it and completely ignored it, as did Canada. | 44:33 | |
And in the case of Omar Khadr | 44:38 | |
is just shameful on every level | 44:39 | |
for the United States and for Canada, completely. | 44:42 | |
Peter | Well, why aren't people in the U.S | 44:47 |
as average as you are? | 44:53 | |
(Andy laughing) | 44:55 | |
- | Well the magician Donald Rumsfeld told them, | 44:56 |
"Don't worry about it. | 45:02 | |
Go to bed early, sleep soundly, you're safe. | 45:03 | |
We got the bad guys we're looking after you now." | 45:06 | |
Now obviously, you could only do that | 45:11 | |
when there's a certain racist narrative, it must be said. | 45:16 | |
Because the people at Guantanamo are all Muslims. | 45:20 | |
Actually it's a little aside, | 45:25 | |
but I will say there was an Iranian well digger | 45:27 | |
who was held at Guantanamo, they released him in about 2005. | 45:31 | |
Who said that he'd crossed the border to get some hashish | 45:36 | |
and who claimed to be a Catholic. | 45:39 | |
(Andy laughing) | 45:42 | |
Which may actually be true. | 45:44 | |
And he may be the only non Muslim to have been held | 45:46 | |
at Guantanamo, but it's a prison for Muslims. | 45:48 | |
So, let's imagine that somebody has a prison | 45:52 | |
where the law doesn't apply and it's holding Christians | 45:55 | |
or it's holding Jews, how could that be acceptable? | 45:58 | |
It could not be acceptable. | 46:02 | |
So, there's a fundamental racism built into it. | 46:04 | |
And I think we can see the damage that's caused. | 46:08 | |
I'm really upset, actually, that the hysteria | 46:12 | |
that I understand that took place after 9/11. | 46:15 | |
I don't condone the fruits of that hysteria at all | 46:18 | |
but I can understand that people would be very upset | 46:23 | |
and would not be thinking in terms of the total importance | 46:26 | |
of respecting the law, | 46:37 | |
I could see that people would get a bit carried away. | 46:38 | |
And we've worked for years to say yes | 46:41 | |
but everything that's happened is awful. | 46:45 | |
This is terrible. | 46:49 | |
The way that you've rounded people up, | 46:51 | |
the way you've treated them, | 46:52 | |
the way you blame the wrong people for things that happened. | 46:53 | |
And I thought that we should have reached a point | 46:58 | |
where we were coming back round, | 47:00 | |
but we now actually seem to have entered | 47:03 | |
a new reinvigorated stage of anti-Muslim hysteria. | 47:05 | |
And I understand that there have been terrorist attacks | 47:11 | |
in the United States. | 47:13 | |
I understand that there was a terrorist attack in Paris. | 47:14 | |
There've been various terrorist attacks in Europe. | 47:17 | |
But the reasons for us not to lose our sense | 47:20 | |
and our sense of proportion, and our adherence to the law | 47:26 | |
are just as important as they've been | 47:29 | |
throughout this whole war on terror period. | 47:32 | |
I think it's very worrying because in Europe, in Britain, | 47:38 | |
we have this anti-immigrant sentiment at the moment | 47:42 | |
which has led to this ludicrous decision | 47:45 | |
to leave the European Union. | 47:48 | |
And part of that is not just driven | 47:50 | |
by anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been ramped up | 47:52 | |
cynically by the media primarily, but politicians | 47:58 | |
and we lack moral leadership. | 48:02 | |
There is no moral leader, there just isn't. | 48:04 | |
But it isn't just that one element of it, | 48:08 | |
it's the immigrant terrorist line that's just total lies, | 48:10 | |
but that has been peddled. | 48:18 | |
And we can see the same thing that happened with Trump | 48:18 | |
in America, the way that immigrants and terrorists | 48:21 | |
were preyed on in the rhetoric. | 48:24 | |
Encouraging people to believe that their terrible fantasies | 48:27 | |
as something that has some kind of reality. | 48:35 | |
Peter | So, when we travel around the world, | 48:40 |
people are so much more aware of Guantanamo | 48:43 | |
than they are in the U.S. | 48:46 | |
And often when I tell people in the U.S about the work | 48:47 | |
we do and they say, "Well, Guantanamo's closed." | 48:50 | |
Why do you think that is? | 48:53 | |
- | Well, that would have to be a failure | 48:55 |
of the mainstream media, wouldn't it? | 48:56 | |
And I think there has been a failure | 49:00 | |
of the mainstream media. | 49:02 | |
And I think the failure is a failure | 49:03 | |
that the liberal media has overall. | 49:05 | |
And the problem with the failure of the liberal media | 49:08 | |
overall, is that it has now led us | 49:11 | |
into partly, into the place that we're at now. | 49:13 | |
This post-truth world of dangerous right-wing lunacy | 49:16 | |
which is very worrying. | 49:22 | |
But part of the problem has been that the right wing | 49:25 | |
never cares about telling the truth. | 49:28 | |
But the liberal media ties itself up in knots | 49:30 | |
trying to be objective. | 49:33 | |
So, the thing we have here | 49:35 | |
where we generally have a better media, | 49:36 | |
I think, is that the BBC is becoming hopelessly biased | 49:39 | |
partly because it's feels the political pressure | 49:45 | |
from government which is exerting pressure on them | 49:47 | |
to tow the government line, which isn't supposed to happen. | 49:51 | |
Peter | What is biased media? | 49:54 |
- | But also because they are constantly giving voice | 49:55 |
to right wing people in this. | 50:02 | |
Their suggestion is that it's actually balanced, | 50:06 | |
but it's not, | 50:09 | |
they are actually giving much more prominence | 50:10 | |
to these people | 50:12 | |
than they're giving to people on the other side. | 50:13 | |
And the only case that I can think of | 50:15 | |
when the media on the center left, | 50:20 | |
said, we aren't going to be slaves to this objectivity | 50:26 | |
was after the invasion of Iraq. | 50:31 | |
When the "Daily Mirror" here in the UK | 50:33 | |
had a WMD o-meter that they printed | 50:36 | |
on the front page of the newspaper every day | 50:38 | |
counting how many days it was | 50:41 | |
that the weapons of mass destruction | 50:43 | |
hadn't been found in Iraq. | 50:45 | |
Because that was the reason | 50:47 | |
that we were supposed to be invading, | 50:48 | |
was to find the weapons of mass destruction | 50:51 | |
that Saddam Hussein had. | 50:53 | |
And it was a great campaign by a newspaper | 50:56 | |
that was prepared to recognize that it was a right wing | 50:59 | |
plot to suggest that left-wing newspapers weren't allowed | 51:03 | |
to actually say, "Some issues need this kind of reminder." | 51:09 | |
And Cageprisoners, the website used to have a clock | 51:14 | |
that ticks counting how many days. | 51:17 | |
Then you can still go to the old Cageprisoners website | 51:19 | |
which has been archived, | 51:21 | |
and the clock is still there showing how many days | 51:23 | |
Guantanamo's has been open. | 51:25 | |
But Guantanamo is, I do still think, | 51:26 | |
the fundamental principles of what is happening | 51:31 | |
at Guantanamo are so important | 51:34 | |
that a clock on the front page of a major newspaper | 51:37 | |
would be valid. | 51:40 | |
Peter | And how many people profile you? | 51:43 |
Again, it's the same issue | 51:46 | |
that even though you've identified serious human rights | 51:47 | |
abuses more than most people have, there's just no traction. | 51:51 | |
- | Well I've done some work for the United Nations. | 51:57 |
Peter | They reached out to you? | 52:01 |
- | Yeah, I was the lead writer on a report | 52:03 |
on secret detention in 2010. | 52:05 | |
And this isn't specifically the Guantanamo story, | 52:10 | |
this is the black site story, well the black site | 52:16 | |
and the rendition to other countries story. | 52:21 | |
So, some of those people ended up at Guantanamo | 52:24 | |
where the picture is bigger. | 52:26 | |
As we know, from the Senate report | 52:28 | |
it was around 120 people. | 52:32 | |
And that doesn't include the dozens | 52:34 | |
of people who didn't end up in black sites, | 52:37 | |
but were sent out to places like Jordan and Syria | 52:39 | |
to be tortured. | 52:43 | |
So, the real figure is probably something more like 200 | 52:44 | |
and 40 of those people ended up at Guantanamo. | 52:48 | |
But piecing together that story took a long time. | 52:51 | |
So, various NGOs had worked on, | 52:55 | |
there was a good report that came out in 2007 | 52:57 | |
called, I think, Off The Record, | 53:00 | |
which a number of NGOs worked on trying to work out | 53:02 | |
who the ghost prisoners were. | 53:06 | |
And then I did quite a lot of independent research | 53:09 | |
for myself and poured a lot of that | 53:11 | |
into this UN report in 2010. | 53:14 | |
And that was then followed up on by researchers since | 53:18 | |
and I think people working on these issues, | 53:21 | |
which is more NGO led than the mainstream media | 53:24 | |
have helped to reach the point | 53:29 | |
where it's been part of the story | 53:31 | |
of making the torture report be something | 53:35 | |
that was necessary. | 53:37 | |
But there's no mechanism that any of this has | 53:42 | |
to compel the United States to do anything, | 53:46 | |
this is part of the problem. | 53:50 | |
Now we're staring at a Trump presidency. | 53:51 | |
Now we can see that everything that President Obama | 53:54 | |
didn't deal definitively with | 53:57 | |
is something that President Trump can take | 54:00 | |
and do whatever he wants with. | 54:03 | |
So, at Guantanamo that is open | 54:05 | |
rather than closed, (chuckling) it's dangerous. | 54:07 | |
And, similarly, President Obama issued an executive order | 54:14 | |
prohibiting the use of torture. | 54:19 | |
The appendix arm of the army field manual | 54:22 | |
contains torture techniques which can be applied | 54:25 | |
if the commander believes that's useful. | 54:27 | |
So, there's a loophole there. | 54:31 | |
We don't know how much that's used | 54:32 | |
and it shouldn't be there in an ideal world, obviously. | 54:33 | |
But he had an executive order to stop the use of torture. | 54:37 | |
It's kind of common sense. | 54:42 | |
You can see in the way that Trump has been criticized | 54:43 | |
even by establishment right wing figures | 54:46 | |
that torture doesn't work. | 54:49 | |
Everybody sensible knows that it doesn't work. | 54:50 | |
But he could bring it back. | 54:53 | |
And parts of the problem is that no one | 54:54 | |
has been held accountable. | 54:56 | |
No one has been held accountable for what they did. | 54:58 | |
A few low level people in Iraq at Abu Ghraib | 55:01 | |
were held accountable for that abuse, otherwise nothing. | 55:06 | |
And the Obama administration constantly shut the door | 55:11 | |
on efforts to hold anybody accountable for anything. | 55:15 | |
Peter | Why do you think they do that? | 55:20 |
- | Well, I don't think that the intelligence establishment, | 55:23 |
in particular, wants to be held accountable for what it did. | 55:28 | |
I think they fundamentally believed | 55:31 | |
that they're outside the law. | 55:35 | |
But I also think that what we've seen in the Senate report | 55:38 | |
was a big part of that, | 55:40 | |
is acknowledgement at various levels | 55:43 | |
that something terrible happened | 55:45 | |
but not a desire for people to be prosecuted for it. | 55:46 | |
But we haven't had the proper accounting for it. | 55:53 | |
We haven't had the full report released. | 55:55 | |
We haven't had that kind of, | 55:57 | |
you'd have to have a truth and reconciliation process | 56:00 | |
if you were gonna follow the non prosecution route, I think. | 56:02 | |
So, it's been left dangling there. | 56:06 | |
It's certainly more transparency than I can say | 56:08 | |
the British government comes up with. | 56:12 | |
The Senate report was quite an achievement, | 56:16 | |
honestly, I think, in terms of there being checks | 56:18 | |
and balances in the United States. | 56:21 | |
But until someone is given a reason, | 56:23 | |
an actual reason to behave, | 56:29 | |
that would be if you cross this line | 56:31 | |
you will get prosecuted. | 56:34 | |
So, the only thing that gives me hope on this front, | 56:36 | |
Peter, is that Mitchell and Jessen, | 56:38 | |
that there is still a case ongoing | 56:41 | |
against Mitchell and Jessen. | 56:43 | |
The military contractors, the former psychologists | 56:47 | |
who reverse engineered the CIA program | 56:49 | |
for training U.S personnel to resist torture | 56:53 | |
and twistedly applied it in the real world. | 56:56 | |
But as we're talking, | 56:59 | |
Mitchell's just had a book out and it's being fated | 57:02 | |
on the chat shows and being given a platform | 57:05 | |
for peddling his filthy lies | 57:09 | |
about how torture was necessary. | 57:11 | |
Peter | You talked about the Senate report just briefly. | 57:15 |
There's a lot of talk that if Obama | 57:17 | |
doesn't add that Senate report, | 57:19 | |
it might be buried and disappeared | 57:20 | |
and we'll never get to read the entire act. | 57:22 | |
Do you think Obama will do something- | 57:25 | |
- | I'm just really wondering why somebody | 57:27 |
isn't just clicking send with a copy of that. | 57:31 | |
It's a 6,000 page report. | 57:34 | |
Please come on, whistle blowers somewhere, please. | 57:36 | |
I don't know how many copies there actually are of it. | 57:41 | |
So, maybe it is possible. | 57:44 | |
I've been reading that in the last few days. | 57:45 | |
It's like, yeah, it could be. | 57:48 | |
They could just destroy it and say gone. | 57:49 | |
I would love for him to do something about it. | 57:54 | |
But I don't know whether he is. | 57:56 | |
Peter | So, where do you see yourself going | 58:01 |
forward on this? | 58:04 | |
- | Well until the United States returns to the rule of law, | 58:06 |
as it was prior to the 9/11 attacks, then I'm still on this. | 58:10 | |
So, I think that it would be fair to say | 58:16 | |
that it's going to be more difficult to achieve justice | 58:21 | |
for the men left at Guantanamo after Obama leaves office | 58:25 | |
under Trump, I can't put the word president near his name. | 58:30 | |
Because we've heard terrifying things from him | 58:37 | |
on the campaign campaign trail | 58:40 | |
but I'm not sure that we can necessarily believe them. | 58:42 | |
I don't think he's gonna reintroduce torture. | 58:47 | |
This is less than, | 58:52 | |
I think he will be advised not to send people to Guantanamo. | 58:53 | |
So, he will be left with the legacy issue | 58:58 | |
that has been for Obama. | 59:00 | |
Obama didn't send anyone there, that's crucial. | 59:02 | |
He was dealing with an inherited problem. | 59:05 | |
What do we do with these people? | 59:08 | |
And I should, as an aside, say that one of the reasons | 59:10 | |
he didn't have to deal with present and future prisoners | 59:12 | |
under his watch is because he's been Gaily killing them | 59:17 | |
with drones around the world, which is no more acceptable. | 59:19 | |
But he's had this finite population at Guantanamo | 59:24 | |
and he, not quick enough, but has been working | 59:26 | |
to reduce that. | 59:31 | |
And the significant thing this year in 2016 | 59:33 | |
is that he completed the first round | 59:38 | |
of the periodic review boards. | 59:41 | |
So, basically when Obama got in | 59:46 | |
he made this lavish promise about closing Guantanamo, | 59:49 | |
we didn't know who he was holding. | 59:51 | |
So, then he appointed a review board | 59:53 | |
to find out who he was holding, | 59:56 | |
actually, Guantanamo Review Task Force | 59:57 | |
who spent a year deliberating. | 1:00:00 | |
He did very little in that first year | 1:00:03 | |
while the deliberations were taking place, | 1:00:05 | |
which is what allowed the Republicans | 1:00:07 | |
to start mobilizing against him. | 1:00:09 | |
So, they quite early on identified | 1:00:13 | |
that there were some people | 1:00:16 | |
that they thought were too dangerous to release | 1:00:17 | |
but then they didn't have the evidence to put them on trial. | 1:00:19 | |
And this has been a key problem. | 1:00:23 | |
Because if you're gonna decide | 1:00:25 | |
that you're gonna release people, | 1:00:28 | |
it doesn't really matter that you dress it up. | 1:00:30 | |
We approve them for transfer subject to security measures. | 1:00:32 | |
This all can lead to complications, | 1:00:36 | |
but you're basically saying we don't wanna hold this person | 1:00:38 | |
anymore, or you approve people for prosecution. | 1:00:41 | |
And that's problematical | 1:00:45 | |
because as I was saying, the military commissions don't work | 1:00:47 | |
but there is at least a set up there. | 1:00:50 | |
The limbo option of holding people indefinitely | 1:00:54 | |
without charge or trial is the fundamental problem | 1:00:56 | |
and has been all along that's not acceptable. | 1:01:00 | |
But that's what they said about these people. | 1:01:03 | |
So, when he was told that, | 1:01:05 | |
then the ball started rolling on how are we gonna do this? | 1:01:08 | |
And then it took another two years | 1:01:10 | |
for him to issue an executive order in March, 2011, | 1:01:13 | |
approving the ongoing imprisonment | 1:01:16 | |
of this category of people. | 1:01:19 | |
There were 48 people in this category. | 1:01:20 | |
And he said that they would have periodic reviews | 1:01:23 | |
of their cases to decide | 1:01:26 | |
whether they were still regarded as too dangerous to release | 1:01:28 | |
or whether they might have become slightly less | 1:01:31 | |
too dangerous to release. | 1:01:33 | |
And that these would be completed within a year. | 1:01:34 | |
They didn't start for two and a half years. | 1:01:36 | |
They started in November, 2013 | 1:01:39 | |
and then they took place quite slowly. | 1:01:41 | |
And then you can see Obama seeing the end of his presidency | 1:01:44 | |
looming and the pressure it was being exerted | 1:01:47 | |
by those of us who've tried to exert pressure. | 1:01:50 | |
So, they speed it up, | 1:01:53 | |
they were galloping through them this year. | 1:01:54 | |
The Periodic Review Boards are a parole type process | 1:01:56 | |
for people who, unlike people who normally face parole, | 1:01:59 | |
have never been convicted of anything. | 1:02:03 | |
But in terms of addressing the issues | 1:02:05 | |
of the Guantanamo prisoners politically | 1:02:12 | |
in a way that the Republicans can't argue with | 1:02:15 | |
and in a way that satisfies their security concerns, | 1:02:21 | |
you can see that they made sense. | 1:02:26 | |
They require prisoners to be contrite | 1:02:28 | |
and to establish to this panel of people | 1:02:31 | |
from the agencies that they have a constructive plan | 1:02:34 | |
for their life after Guantanamo | 1:02:40 | |
and they mean no harm against the United States. | 1:02:41 | |
And it's raised bizarre issues where people | 1:02:45 | |
who claimed that they didn't do what they were accused of | 1:02:47 | |
have to be contrived to bad things that they didn't do | 1:02:49 | |
because claiming they were innocent | 1:02:53 | |
doesn't work in a parole type situation. | 1:02:55 | |
But it has led to dozens of prisoners | 1:02:58 | |
being approved for release. | 1:03:00 | |
And these guys are being released | 1:03:01 | |
and it's whittled the population down and it's ongoing. | 1:03:04 | |
These people have reviews, | 1:03:08 | |
administrative reviews every six months | 1:03:10 | |
and full reviews where they can present a case, | 1:03:12 | |
again, in front of the big wigs | 1:03:15 | |
who are seeing them by video conference | 1:03:17 | |
within one or two years. | 1:03:22 | |
There's a whole thing set up. | 1:03:23 | |
Trump could undo it, | 1:03:26 | |
could consign these people back to an oblivion | 1:03:29 | |
of indefinite detention without review, | 1:03:33 | |
and that would be a very negative step. | 1:03:36 | |
And we don't know at the moment. | 1:03:39 | |
Peter | The people who are secured for release, | 1:03:42 |
or cleared for release, | 1:03:46 | |
do you think those will be released | 1:03:48 | |
before Obama leaves office? | 1:03:50 | |
- | I think they're scrambling like crazy to find places. | 1:03:51 |
I don't think they're gonna achieve all of them. | 1:03:55 | |
And that's worrying | 1:03:57 | |
because Trump could suspend that immediately. | 1:03:58 | |
No further releases. | 1:04:03 | |
Hopefully on that, on all of these things Peter, | 1:04:06 | |
I would hope that there are sane voices | 1:04:10 | |
saying to him don't. | 1:04:12 | |
Treat this as a legacy that is still to be completed, | 1:04:14 | |
that needs to be resolved. | 1:04:21 | |
I would hope, but if he doesn't, | 1:04:23 | |
we the community of people who care | 1:04:26 | |
can mobilize like we haven't had to do for quite a long time | 1:04:29 | |
to really, really push it. | 1:04:33 | |
The problem is that it may be a problem | 1:04:39 | |
for some of these people that when receiving countries | 1:04:43 | |
want to take them. | 1:04:46 | |
Because most of these guys are Yemenis | 1:04:47 | |
and the entire U.S establishment agrees | 1:04:48 | |
that no Yemeni can be returned home. | 1:04:51 | |
And actually now it seems pretty sensible | 1:04:54 | |
'cause the country is so ruined by the Western backed | 1:04:56 | |
Saudi demolition of the whole of Yemen. | 1:05:00 | |
But we're culpable in a lot of ways | 1:05:05 | |
for everything that's going on there. | 1:05:07 | |
And there was quite a hypocrisy | 1:05:09 | |
about not sending Yemenis back | 1:05:11 | |
'cause this ban has been in place | 1:05:13 | |
since the underpants bomber at Christmas 2009. | 1:05:15 | |
Which, as I understand, it came about a week | 1:05:22 | |
after there had been a monstrous massacre of civilians | 1:05:26 | |
by U.S bombing raid in Yemen. | 1:05:29 | |
The whole thing is a horrible story. | 1:05:35 | |
But anyway, everybody agrees, no Yemeni can be sent home. | 1:05:36 | |
So, third countries have to be found for them. | 1:05:40 | |
And receiving countries are getting files on people | 1:05:44 | |
where they're making decisions | 1:05:49 | |
about whether they think one person | 1:05:51 | |
is more attractive than another. | 1:05:53 | |
So, if you're not perceived | 1:05:54 | |
as a particularly attractive person. | 1:05:55 | |
You might constantly be shunted to the bottom of the pile. | 1:05:57 | |
Also, I think there are a handful of people in Guantanamo | 1:06:01 | |
who literally have no representation. | 1:06:04 | |
There may be people approved for release | 1:06:06 | |
who are not communicating, | 1:06:08 | |
they have stopped seeing their lawyers. | 1:06:11 | |
There are people who still don't have lawyers. | 1:06:13 | |
How are they gonna be released | 1:06:20 | |
if they're just completely in limbo in Guantanamo | 1:06:21 | |
communicating with nobody? | 1:06:24 | |
I don't know, but they obviously they are working on, | 1:06:25 | |
there are currently 21 of these men. | 1:06:30 | |
Another one just got approved for release | 1:06:33 | |
just yesterday or the day before, | 1:06:36 | |
he won't quite achieved that. | 1:06:39 | |
And then we've got these dozens of people. | 1:06:41 | |
I think the review still need to go on, | 1:06:46 | |
but I don't know whether they will be the willingness | 1:06:49 | |
within the Trump administration. | 1:06:54 | |
Because there clearly was a willingness | 1:06:55 | |
within the Obama administration | 1:06:57 | |
to say look, if these guys will play ball, | 1:06:58 | |
we're gonna get them out of here. | 1:07:01 | |
It's like they've squeezed themselves into a narrower | 1:07:03 | |
and narrower field of opportunities to release these people | 1:07:06 | |
that they've been wrongly holding for so long. | 1:07:10 | |
I don't mean wrongly in that they, | 1:07:14 | |
well, they may or may not have done, | 1:07:16 | |
but the whole basis of detention is wrong. | 1:07:17 | |
And they've been trying to dig their way out of it. | 1:07:23 | |
And I don't see any reason Peter that many more people | 1:07:28 | |
than the 10 who were facing trials should be held. | 1:07:36 | |
They should also be put on trial | 1:07:40 | |
and we should just get it over with. | 1:07:43 | |
Peter | So, if Trump does send more people to Guantanamo. | 1:07:46 |
Let's say we capture ISIS prisoners | 1:07:48 | |
and send them to Guantanamo, will you catalog that? | 1:07:51 | |
- | Oh, totally, I'll be totally on it | 1:07:55 |
but I really hope it doesn't happen. | 1:07:57 | |
That would just be like some horrible war on terror | 1:08:00 | |
ground hog day, wouldn't it? | 1:08:03 | |
(Peter laughing) | 1:08:05 | |
Peter | Well, you might have a life in front of you | 1:08:08 |
where you just continually follow Guantanamo till- | 1:08:13 | |
- | Well, it may be. | 1:08:15 |
If that's the case then I'm prepared to do it. | 1:08:16 | |
It's hard to didn't do these kinds of stuff relentlessly. | 1:08:21 | |
It gets tiring, but what am I gonna do really? | 1:08:24 | |
I really don't feel like I can walk away from it | 1:08:30 | |
and if something new is going to come, then it's awful. | 1:08:33 | |
But it would at least renew the energy | 1:08:37 | |
of people having to deal | 1:08:42 | |
with some terrible injustice that's happening. | 1:08:44 | |
And it could be that it does Peter | 1:08:49 | |
because I've kept my focus on Guantanamo | 1:08:52 | |
and I haven't put much energy into drone strikes | 1:08:54 | |
because other people have been doing it, | 1:08:58 | |
but it's all part of the same thing. | 1:09:00 | |
It's all part of a problem, | 1:09:02 | |
a counter terrorism problem where the policies | 1:09:07 | |
that are being applied are wrong essentially. | 1:09:12 | |
I don't think that there is the justification | 1:09:17 | |
for the remote killing of people in countries | 1:09:20 | |
that the United States isn't at war with. | 1:09:23 | |
I don't see that's become acceptable. | 1:09:26 | |
Peter | John Bellinger said to us | 1:09:29 |
that we might criticize Bush for torturing, | 1:09:31 | |
but Obama just kills them and that is worse. | 1:09:34 | |
So, and similarly, you could focus on the drone killings. | 1:09:37 | |
I'm not sure that there are a lot of people | 1:09:40 | |
doing what you were doing in terms of drone killings. | 1:09:42 | |
It's not all that widespread. | 1:09:45 | |
- | Yeah, maybe I should branch out | 1:09:47 |
into another field of abuse. | 1:09:51 | |
(both laughing) | 1:09:53 | |
Peter | Well, believing the rule of law | 1:09:54 |
I don't have much else to ask Andy. | 1:09:55 | |
But one is, you said it before, I just wanna review it. | 1:09:57 | |
You chose to look at America. | 1:10:01 | |
And I think looking at America from outside the board | 1:10:03 | |
really helps 'cause it gives you a perspective | 1:10:05 | |
that Americans don't always have. | 1:10:07 | |
But you haven't really looked at the UK authorities | 1:10:09 | |
as to their participation. | 1:10:15 | |
And did they follow the rule of law, does that not matter? | 1:10:18 | |
Or are they back on the rule of law now? | 1:10:21 | |
Or do you just need to focus on Guantanamo, | 1:10:23 | |
which does speak for the war of terror | 1:10:25 | |
in a way that nothing else does? | 1:10:28 | |
- | Well, no, I have studied the British involvement | 1:10:30 |
over the years and it was particularly of concern, | 1:10:35 | |
actually under the Blair administration | 1:10:42 | |
and into the Gordon Brown's administration here. | 1:10:44 | |
Because after 9/11 the Blair government rounded up | 1:10:47 | |
foreign nationals who they claimed were involved | 1:10:52 | |
in terrorism and imprisoned them using secret evidence. | 1:10:56 | |
Peter | Imprisoned in the UK. | 1:11:02 |
- | And to be honest, Peter, | 1:11:03 |
a lot of British people don't know that this happened. | 1:11:05 | |
And actually what I've found over the years | 1:11:07 | |
is that when you confront British people on the left | 1:11:09 | |
with the crimes of the United States, | 1:11:13 | |
they're much more ready to get involved | 1:11:15 | |
than if you hold up the mirror. | 1:11:19 | |
Which is part of the reason | 1:11:22 | |
that we're talking about Americans | 1:11:23 | |
not wanting to look in the mirror, | 1:11:25 | |
there's a lot of misinformation, I understand that. | 1:11:27 | |
But there are also people who are supposed to be educated | 1:11:32 | |
and aware who do that thing of, isn't it closed, | 1:11:35 | |
or getting uncomfortable was mentioned. | 1:11:40 | |
But I worked on the British issue. | 1:11:44 | |
So, the other thing that was happening under Blair | 1:11:47 | |
was that British nationals who were suspected | 1:11:49 | |
of involvement in terrorism were, | 1:11:54 | |
and this was some of the foreign nationals | 1:11:57 | |
were held like this as well. | 1:11:59 | |
They were subject to basically house arrest | 1:12:00 | |
with an enormous amount of restrictions on their freedom | 1:12:04 | |
of movement and kept prisoners in their own homes. | 1:12:07 | |
Quite extraordinary, again, | 1:12:12 | |
people don't really know about this. | 1:12:13 | |
And this was, we're only talking dozens of people. | 1:12:16 | |
And then they subjected people to internal exile. | 1:12:18 | |
So, they forcibly moved people from one city | 1:12:21 | |
or town to another often hundreds of miles away, | 1:12:26 | |
again on the basis of secret evidence. | 1:12:32 | |
So, the parallels with Guantanamo | 1:12:35 | |
are not coincidental. | 1:12:37 | |
Britain was doing its own version | 1:12:41 | |
of what the United States had been doing? | 1:12:45 | |
And the reason that I haven't been doing as much on it | 1:12:47 | |
is that it kind of got resolved in a way. | 1:12:54 | |
It's not entirely been resolved | 1:12:57 | |
but most of the foreign nationals | 1:12:59 | |
that the British government had been trying to deport. | 1:13:03 | |
So, basically completely going against the non-reformal | 1:13:09 | |
part of the convention against torture. | 1:13:15 | |
That you aren't allowed to send people | 1:13:18 | |
back to places where they face the risk of torture. | 1:13:20 | |
And the British government got obsessed with Abu Qatada | 1:13:23 | |
who was a preacher from Jordan. | 1:13:26 | |
And this story carried over | 1:13:30 | |
into the conservative government. | 1:13:32 | |
The ludicrously scary authoritarians, Theresa May, | 1:13:35 | |
who is now our unelected prime minister | 1:13:38 | |
chosen by 199 of her fellow MPS and nobody else. | 1:13:41 | |
Who was a home secretary for six years, | 1:13:45 | |
and is, I would say openly Islamophobic and a racist | 1:13:49 | |
and severely dangerously anti-immigrant. | 1:13:55 | |
She was obsessed with sending Abu Qatada back to Jordan. | 1:13:58 | |
As with everything, if a guy's committed a crime | 1:14:03 | |
why are you not putting them on trial for it? | 1:14:05 | |
What was so nebulous about this | 1:14:08 | |
that you couldn't put him on trial | 1:14:12 | |
but it was hugely important | 1:14:13 | |
that you sent him back to Jordan | 1:14:14 | |
where he was in danger, but she obsessed about it. | 1:14:16 | |
And she got her way eventually. | 1:14:19 | |
And he was sent back to Jordan | 1:14:22 | |
and in fact they ruled out evidence in his trial | 1:14:23 | |
and he was not successfully prosecuted. | 1:14:27 | |
But she also wanted to send back | 1:14:31 | |
a whole bunch of nobodies from Algeria. | 1:14:32 | |
And they quietly have dropped that quite recently. | 1:14:36 | |
And it has not been very widely reported | 1:14:41 | |
because everybody wants to keep quiet about it. | 1:14:43 | |
They didn't maintain quite the same. | 1:14:49 | |
I don't think that concept has maintained | 1:14:54 | |
quite the same level of persecution | 1:14:56 | |
against perceived terrorist suspects who were British, | 1:15:00 | |
who they can't put on trial, | 1:15:04 | |
the whole secret evidence thing. | 1:15:05 | |
But their apparatus is still there. | 1:15:06 | |
And still almost entirely ignored | 1:15:09 | |
in the British consciousness. | 1:15:13 | |
Peter | Well, that's important | 1:15:16 |
to have people know that too. | 1:15:17 | |
I only have a couple of questions | 1:15:19 | |
and it goes a little on this. | 1:15:21 | |
One is why do you think Shaker Aamer | 1:15:22 | |
was kept in Guantanamo for so long? | 1:15:24 | |
We know all the other Brits | 1:15:27 | |
were let out so much earlier? | 1:15:28 | |
Do you have a thought on that? | 1:15:31 | |
- | Yeah, I think that somebody somewhere | 1:15:33 |
thought that Shaker Aamer was something that he wasn't. | 1:15:35 | |
Because I think we heard in the end that Shaker | 1:15:41 | |
was not unilaterally signed off for his release | 1:15:45 | |
because it requires consensus | 1:15:49 | |
across the government departments and agencies. | 1:15:51 | |
That there was some stumbling blocks somewhere | 1:15:53 | |
which I think was in the department of defense. | 1:15:56 | |
Somebody at some level or other was obstructing it, | 1:15:58 | |
was essentially obstructing the will of the government. | 1:16:03 | |
And Shaker, he's an extraordinarily charismatic individual, | 1:16:10 | |
he really is. | 1:16:16 | |
I suppose I've met him half a dozen times | 1:16:21 | |
since he was released. | 1:16:23 | |
He's really quite something. | 1:16:24 | |
It amazes me that people would think that this man | 1:16:27 | |
who talks of love and justice was a threat, it amazes me. | 1:16:32 | |
But if it wasn't that whoever didn't want to let him go, | 1:16:39 | |
if they weren't concerned by his behavior. | 1:16:47 | |
Because his behavior in Guantanamo got him into trouble. | 1:16:50 | |
He was persistently unruly | 1:16:53 | |
but so were a lot of the prisoners. | 1:16:55 | |
But it was his ability to mobilize his fellow prisoners | 1:16:56 | |
that they isolated him. | 1:17:00 | |
He spent, I think, at one point 2 years | 1:17:02 | |
and eight months in isolation. | 1:17:04 | |
So, they thought he was a dangerous individual. | 1:17:10 | |
And you can see how that ability to influence | 1:17:12 | |
your fellow prisoners has you pegged | 1:17:16 | |
as a senior Al-Qaeda, all that. | 1:17:18 | |
I think that some of the other elements of history | 1:17:23 | |
were the ones that worried them, | 1:17:26 | |
but it may have been both. | 1:17:28 | |
That various people lied about him | 1:17:30 | |
and said that he was a big shot in Al-Qaeda. | 1:17:32 | |
Abu Zubaydah lied about him. | 1:17:36 | |
Some of the other notorious liars in Guantanamo | 1:17:38 | |
lied about him, | 1:17:41 | |
but this is not a story that's well enough known still. | 1:17:42 | |
And I worked with WikiLeaks | 1:17:47 | |
on the release of those classified files. | 1:17:49 | |
And they have not to this day been properly analyzed. | 1:17:52 | |
I actually went through about half of them | 1:17:57 | |
in an obsessive project of assessing everything | 1:17:59 | |
that was in them and challenging | 1:18:03 | |
what I thought needed challenging | 1:18:07 | |
which is a huge amount of it. | 1:18:08 | |
But what does come out is these serial liars. | 1:18:10 | |
And I'm not blaming them, | 1:18:18 | |
some of them were people that I was evading. | 1:18:20 | |
You could see they're torturing the guy. | 1:18:21 | |
And he's saying things | 1:18:23 | |
like he might possibly be somebody | 1:18:24 | |
that I might've seen in an Al-Qaeda safe house | 1:18:27 | |
in Kabul in 1999, the guy's flailing. | 1:18:30 | |
It's horrible when you think what they were doing to him. | 1:18:34 | |
And he couldn't say, I don't know this person, he couldn't. | 1:18:38 | |
You can see him having to come up with something. | 1:18:42 | |
And then there were the people who lied in Guantanamo, | 1:18:45 | |
who can blame them? | 1:18:49 | |
When you put under that much pressure | 1:18:50 | |
and we know now some of these people who lied | 1:18:53 | |
about the other prisoners. | 1:18:58 | |
But there were a lot of them, | 1:18:59 | |
there were a lot of people who some of them chose | 1:19:00 | |
very consciously to be rewarded for lying. | 1:19:04 | |
Some of them just couldn't handle it anymore | 1:19:08 | |
and started saying yes to whatever they were told. | 1:19:11 | |
So, much of that information is discredited, | 1:19:15 | |
Peter, I really do think. | 1:19:18 | |
And I think when historically that stuff is analyzed | 1:19:20 | |
properly as it should be over time | 1:19:25 | |
it will become more and more apparent | 1:19:27 | |
that those documents which, actually, have been more used | 1:19:31 | |
by the right wing than anybody else | 1:19:35 | |
since they were published by WikiLeaks. | 1:19:37 | |
Because all of those idiotic right wing, | 1:19:39 | |
far right sites, they cite it as though it's all true. | 1:19:42 | |
Peter | I'm glad you telling us all this, | 1:19:49 |
I think, for history, | 1:19:51 | |
Andy, it's important that people hear it. | 1:19:52 | |
- | Yeah, well, the thing that I would like posterity | 1:19:54 |
to know about the Guantanamo story | 1:19:58 | |
is the absolutely unforgivable role | 1:19:59 | |
that has been played by the justice department | 1:20:05 | |
in all of this. | 1:20:07 | |
So, I hope I've stressed enough that my blame | 1:20:09 | |
to the judges of the Appeals Court, the DC Circuit Court, | 1:20:13 | |
for blocking the prisoner's habeas corpus petitions. | 1:20:18 | |
Mainly 2010, 2011. | 1:20:21 | |
Around three dozen prisoners had their release | 1:20:25 | |
ordered by judges. | 1:20:29 | |
The only time that the law | 1:20:30 | |
really has come to Guantanamo was when the judges | 1:20:32 | |
looked at these people's habeas petitions | 1:20:35 | |
and said to the government, | 1:20:37 | |
looked the government in the eye, if you will, | 1:20:38 | |
and said, "You have not got a case | 1:20:41 | |
against this Bush, Mark, let him go." | 1:20:43 | |
Very powerful, and they shut it down. | 1:20:45 | |
But the Justice Department, | 1:20:48 | |
the Civil Division of the Justice Department | 1:20:50 | |
deals with the Guantanamo issue. | 1:20:53 | |
So, these guys and these roles | 1:20:57 | |
under Bush had a disproportionate power to dictate | 1:21:01 | |
the kind of movements of lawyers for the prisoners | 1:21:05 | |
and to disrupt them. | 1:21:09 | |
But primarily what they've done is that seamlessly | 1:21:10 | |
from Bush to Obama, these guys have fought | 1:21:14 | |
as though their life depended on it | 1:21:17 | |
to keep everyone in Guantanamo. | 1:21:20 | |
To never concede anything on the habeas front. | 1:21:22 | |
Peter | And what's the goal there? | 1:21:29 |
Where's that coming from? | 1:21:30 | |
- | Well, who knows? | 1:21:31 |
It involves a lack of leadership. | 1:21:32 | |
So, the president is in charge of everything. | 1:21:34 | |
He has to be responsible. | 1:21:38 | |
Eric Holder had to be responsible | 1:21:40 | |
when he was in charge of the Justice Department. | 1:21:42 | |
Loretta Lynch has to be responsible. | 1:21:44 | |
They were defending the ongoing imprisonment | 1:21:50 | |
of people who had been approved for release | 1:21:52 | |
by the Guantanamo Review Task force | 1:21:55 | |
that president Obama set up. | 1:21:56 | |
The left hand doesn't care what the right hand is doing. | 1:21:58 | |
How did that situation arise? | 1:22:01 | |
And they have only ever not fought a case | 1:22:04 | |
which was in the case of a seriously ill schizophrenic | 1:22:08 | |
Sudanese guy where they dropped the challenge in his case | 1:22:13 | |
because he was so ill, | 1:22:19 | |
that the part of the authorities at Guantanamo, | 1:22:21 | |
who were even vaguely concerned | 1:22:25 | |
that they would rather not have people die there, | 1:22:27 | |
were adamant that they needed to get this guy out | 1:22:30 | |
before he died. | 1:22:31 | |
He was released yeah. | 1:22:32 | |
Peter | Who was he? Do you remember his name? | 1:22:34 |
- | His name is Idris, Ibrahim Idris. | 1:22:35 |
Peter | And do you think Obama is responsible here | 1:22:39 |
in telling the Justice Department | 1:22:41 | |
to block every case they'd won in the trial court? | 1:22:43 | |
- | I don't know who's managing them | 1:22:47 |
at the level that nobody told them to stop. | 1:22:49 | |
I can't believe that it's like an automated system. | 1:22:52 | |
These are career lawyers in the Civil Division | 1:22:56 | |
of the Justice Department | 1:23:01 | |
who are carrying on aggressively resisting any effort | 1:23:03 | |
by any prisoner to get out of Guantanamo. | 1:23:07 | |
They're not doing that without leadership. | 1:23:11 | |
So, is it their leadership within the Justice Department | 1:23:13 | |
that is not being told by higher up, we're changing this? | 1:23:17 | |
I don't know. | 1:23:23 | |
I just think that it's a big story. | 1:23:24 | |
I think hopefully more will come out on it over the years. | 1:23:27 | |
But just on that issue alone. | 1:23:31 | |
That there was no attempt to compare | 1:23:33 | |
the decisions taken by the task force | 1:23:38 | |
with what the Justice Department was doing. | 1:23:41 | |
Because what happened in those habeas petitions | 1:23:43 | |
was that people who had been approved for release | 1:23:44 | |
were having their ongoing imprisonment upheld in the courts | 1:23:48 | |
because of what the justice department was doing. | 1:23:52 | |
Peter | There was some talk that the president alone | 1:23:53 |
wanted to make decisions on who's release, | 1:23:57 | |
and didn't want the courts to be involved in that. | 1:23:58 | |
And that was behind what you just described. | 1:24:01 | |
- | Didn't want the courts to do. | 1:24:05 |
Peter | They want it to be an executive decision. | 1:24:07 |
Every person who's released, | 1:24:09 | |
it always should be executive decision. | 1:24:10 | |
- | Well then somebody was overriding that | 1:24:11 |
because the Justice Department was overriding that. | 1:24:15 | |
It was the Justice Department making decisions | 1:24:17 | |
to carry on holding people | 1:24:19 | |
that the executive had said it wanted freed. | 1:24:21 | |
Peter | Well, the courts who agreed | 1:24:26 |
that someone should be freed in the trial court | 1:24:30 | |
were over ruled by the Court Of Appeals. | 1:24:32 | |
And that just probably got involved in to appeal | 1:24:35 | |
and they didn't have to appeal those decisions, | 1:24:38 | |
they could have released them. | 1:24:39 | |
- | Exactly, yes. | 1:24:40 |
Peter | And that's what people felt the government | 1:24:43 |
was involved in, they didn't want the courts | 1:24:45 | |
to make the decisions at any stage. | 1:24:47 | |
- | No, they didn't want the courts | 1:24:50 |
to approve the release of anybody. | 1:24:51 | |
Peter | They didn't want courts involved. | 1:24:55 |
It is a complicated issue | 1:24:59 | |
and you're right that hopefully over time | 1:25:00 | |
someone will write more about it. | 1:25:03 | |
And I think a lot of your work help will help | 1:25:05 | |
whoever does write about it. | 1:25:07 | |
- | Well, and I'm always up for writing about it | 1:25:09 |
if someone one will pay me to write about it. | 1:25:12 | |
(Andy and Peter laughing) | 1:25:14 | |
- | Maybe the new administration will- | 1:25:16 |
(Andy laughing) | 1:25:18 | |
Is there something I didn't ask you | 1:25:20 | |
that you'd like to share with us | 1:25:21 | |
before we shut down this interview? | 1:25:23 | |
Peter | That you're thinking about when you came here | 1:25:28 |
that maybe you want to talk about? | 1:25:30 | |
- | No, I can't think of anything | 1:25:31 |
that we haven't really covered, | 1:25:32 | |
that I wanted to mention the Justice Department thing | 1:25:33 | |
that didn't arise in the conversation. | 1:25:36 | |
But I feel like the donkey | 1:25:39 | |
has almost had its hind legs torqued off it? | 1:25:44 | |
Peter | Well, it'd be interesting to see | 1:25:48 |
where you go with your work in the next generation, | 1:25:50 | |
and the next administration. | 1:25:53 | |
And we need 20 seconds of quiet time or room tone | 1:25:55 | |
where we just have to sit here and Johnny's gonna do- | 1:26:01 | |
- | Sure, okay. | 1:26:03 |
Johnny | Okay, getting room tone. | 1:26:05 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund