Transcript: Interview with Andy Worthington, Author of Guantanamo: The Definitive Prisoner List

Jonathan Hafetz: This is Jonathan Hafetz, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. Today I am speaking with Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files and Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List. Andy, it’s great to be speaking with you. You’ve been one of the most important chroniclers and commentators on Guantánamo and related detention issues over the past years. This is an incredible resource. The one thing I wanted to ask was, there are other databases out there about Guantánamo and detainees, what makes this database different?

Andy Worthington: Well, all credit absolutely to the people who did the work many, many years ago, before a large amount of information was made publically available by the Pentagon. I know The Washington Post and the British human rights group Caged Prisoners, and some groups in the Middle East, spent a long time trying to work out who was there before it was easy to find out who was there at all. In the first four years, as you and I know, and everybody who was involved in the process at all, it was extremely difficult to find out who was being held until the names were released. Now, recently, the New York Times went through the documents and did a very useful job in separating out the allegations and transcripts of each individual prisoner, so there is database there that provides all the allegations, and where the prisoners took part — the transcripts, tribunals and review boards — where they answered the allegations. It’s a very useful resource, but it doesn’t provide any context, really.

My big mission over the last three years has been to move beyond seeing the prisoners on a kind of individual case basis, where you could look at the government’s allegation and think that they say that this guy did this, this and this, and see the context where its possible for people to have an understanding of the circumstances under which they were captured, because a lot of the times, that makes quite a big difference, whether we are looking at somebody who was possibly involved in terrorism, there would be some context for it. But when we are looking at, for example, prisoners captured in Pakistan, where we have at least somewhere around 100 prisoners who were captured far from the border of Afghanistan, far from any battlefield, and were generally rounded up because bounty payments were being offered, then we can already see that there is going to be possibly a very large disconnect between the allegation against them and who they actually are, because they were all rounded up because opportunistically it was great to see any Arab in a Pakistani town and sell them to U.S. forces as a terrorist.

So, it’s the context really, that I hope I’ve been able to bring to it. And one other part of the context is the quality of the evidence, whether is plausible to believe everything that the government says. So, the New York Times database for example, which provides all these documents, doesn’t make any attempt to draw any connections between them, to regular allegations that surface, where unidentified other prisoners have made allegations against prisoners. And I think that when that is looked at in detail, it’s very clear that these allegations are not trustworthy at all, and were made by other prisoners either because they were put under duress, or some of them were tortured, or perhaps more benignly, they were encouraged to come out with stories because they were bribed effectively, they were given better living conditions. And, the important thing to work out the stories, of what’s happened at Guantánamo, is to keep looking for these connections and this context, otherwise it becomes just a random collection of information.

JH: It seems one of the casualties at Guantánamo was not only due process and human rights, but the truth itself. Does your research lead you to that conclusion?

AW: I think yes, that’s fundamentally true. There were two levels on which things were very badly wrong with Guantánamo. Obviously, one was, even if they have managed to capture Osama bin Laden and all the people closest to him, genuinely dangerous people in significant numbers — which they didn’t do — then, this was still no one to be treating people, to hold them outside the law, neither as prisoners of war nor as criminals to be put forward for trials.

It’s compounded and made so much worse by the fact that they didn’t get the people that they were supposed to be getting. They got largely either completely innocent people who were at the wrong time and the wrong place, and because these bounty payments were made available, were handed over to U.S. forces. Or, significant number of Taliban foot soldiers, who travelled to Afghanistan before 9/11, before the attacks, to fight other Muslims, essentially. The Northern Alliance, the Talibans’ opposition in Afghanistan.

And this is the kind of crucial error the administration made in the beginning, equating the Taliban with Al Qaeda, because the majority of these men had no connection whatsoever with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or international terrorist plots. Knew nothing about the 9/11 plots or any other attacks. And had basically gone on a — what was sold to them — I might have my disagreements with, and we all might — sold to them as a religious mission to help the Taliban establish a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan. So yes, the truth has been a horrendous casualty in what has been taking place.

JH: I was wondering if you could talk about one detainee, who happens to be a client of the ACLU, where he falls in this spectrum — named Mohammed Jawad.

AW: Okay, well yes, I’ve been following Mohammed’s case for quite some time. I did find out when I was doing my definitive prisoners list that he didn’t even make it into the final cut of the book. But I think I’ve made up for that in the years since by writing about him, because Mohammed was a teenager at the time he was seized in a marketplace in Kabul in December 2002, after a grenade attack on a jeep containing two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan interpreter.

And for some time, obviously, he was in Guantánamo with all the other prisoners, with the authorities not really necessarily knowing who they had there. I think it’s important for people to know that in the beginning they really had no idea who the majority of the prisoners were. The Brigadier-General Mike Lehnert, who ran the base in the beginning, is on record as saying that. That they identified a small number of Al Qaeda, slightly larger number of Taliban, and a considerably vast number in the middle that they had no idea about. It helps to explain why they basically had blank slates as prisoners, and then had to grasp allegations onto them.

So for some time, I think Mohammed Jawad, like so many others, was held in this position. And then when they started fishing around for prisoners that they felt they could mount successful prosecutions against, in the military commission trial system, which to my understanding was the particular brainchild of Vice President Dick Cheney and his closest legal advisor, David Addington, for some reason they decided that Jawad would be a good case.

Now, what they had against him, and this emerged over the years, is that he had been captured by Afghan forces, and made a confession after he was captured, and was then handed over very swiftly to U.S. forces, and repeated his confession. It took a long time for it to be revealed, but he had been severely threatened when he made that confession, and it took a judge finally, to decide that it had been torture that had been used on him.

But there were so many other extraordinary problems in the case of Mohammed Jawad, as with the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian, who was also put forward for trial by military commission, because both of these guys were teenagers when they were captured, they were under 18. Omar was 15, and Mohammed 16 or 17 at the time he was captured. Now, according to the UN Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child, so juveniles in war time, these people were supposed to have been rehabilitated, rather than subjected to the kind of horrendous punishment that they’ve both been subjected to.

And I’ve always been amazed that if the Bush administration was really testing the waters to see whether it’s novel trial system would work, that it put forward two juveniles so soon. In the eye of the world where prosecuting juveniles is really not acceptable, they thought that this was appropriate behavior. This has always amazed me.