Worthington, Andy - Interview master file / Witness to Guantanamo / Duke Digital Repository

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

Worthington, Andy - Interview master file

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