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