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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington02182008.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington02182008.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>February 18,
2008<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5><b>"We're
Making This Up as We Go Along"<br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Michael Goldfarb on Guantánamo and the War on
Terror</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5>By ANDY
WORTHINGTON<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">A</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2> week ago, I was invited by the BBC to be a
guest on Richard Bacon's show on Radio 5 Live as part of an hour-long
discussion about whether or not the six Guantánamo detainees charged in
connection with the 9/11 attacks would receive a fair trial. The other
guest was Michael Goldfarb, the online editor of WorldwideStandard.com,
the Weekly Standard's Blog, who subsequently published a post that
attempted to undermine my point of view, by mentioning one of my
articles,
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington01312008.html">published
on CounterPunch</a>, in which I reported claims made by one of the
Guantánamo detainees, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, that he has been infected
with AIDS during his imprisonment at Guantánamo. <br><br>
Mr. Goldfarb was dismissive of the article, which came as no surprise to
me, because it also revealed -- as confirmed by the Chief Medical Doctor
at Guantánamo -- that Mr. al-Ghizzawi has contracted tuberculosis during
his imprisonment, and that he also suffers from hepatitis B, which was
dormant before his arrival at the prison. <br><br>
Those who read the full article would also have discovered that Mr.
al-Ghizzawi's case is central to complaints made in sworn statements last
year by military officers, who worked on the tribunals at Guantánamo,
that the entire system was rigged, through the use of generalized and
often generic information masquerading as specific intelligence against
individual detainees, to rubber-stamp the administration's untested
claims that everyone who had ended up in US custody -- however randomly
-- was an "enemy combatant," who could be held indefinitely
without charge or trial. <br><br>
After the members of his first tribunal decided, based on the
"paucity and weakness of the information provided both during and
after the CSRT hearing," that there was "no factual basis"
for concluding that Mr. al-Ghizzawi was an "enemy combatant,"
-- and that, by extension, it was probable that the true story, as Mr.
al-Ghizzawi explained, was that he was a shopkeeper, married to an Afghan
woman, who was seized by Afghan bounty hunters and sold to the US
military -- the US military dismissed the members of his first tribunal
and held a second, secret tribunal in which they concluded that he was an
"enemy combatant" after all.<br><br>
In the interests of shedding some light on Mr. Goldfarb's opinions, I
reproduce below a transcript of part of last Monday's show, in which he
helpfully described how, after 9/11, the US administration turned its
back on 232 years of the law, replacing it with an ad-hoc system in
which, to quote his exact words, "we're making these things up as we
go along."<br><br>
About twenty minutes into the show, Richard Bacon discussed the greater
transparency that would be involved in the cases if they were transferred
to US federal courts.<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>Richard Bacon</b>: Why can't they be tried in front of a jury in a
federal court?<br><br>
<dd>Michael Goldfarb</b>: Well, frankly, there are security issues. You
know, we're not going to expose American citizens to sitting on a jury
for al-Qaeda members ... <br><br>
<dd>Richard Bacon</b>: ... So a terror suspect has never been tried in
the United States in a civil or federal court?<br><br>
<dd>Michael Goldfarb</b>: Terror suspects have been tried in a federal
court <br><br>
<dd>Richard Bacon</b>: Well, why was that jury exposed to them?<br><br>
<dd>Michael Goldfarb</b>: I mean, if you arrest someone in this country,
we've dealt with these things differently. The fundamental issue here is
that we're making these things up as we go along. There was no way to do
this. ... <br><br>
<dd>Andy Worthington</b>: It's an extraordinary confession that
"we've been making this up as we go along." That's exactly what
seems to have been happening since 9/11 in terms of the detention,
interrogation and prosecution of these detainees. You know, what
interests me is the issue that you raised of successful prosecutions that
took place in the United States of terrorists before 9/11, and this is
something that seems to be missed out on, because we're led to believe
that the world started anew on 9/11. Whereas in fact, those of us who
have longer memories will remember that there were the African embassy
bombings and that there were earlier events, and that there were
successful prosecutions.<br><br>
<dd>Richard Bacon</b>: And those juries were exposed to
terrorists?<br><br>
<dd>Andy Worthington</b>: Yes, exactly, and it goes deeper than that
<br><br>
<dd>Michael Goldfarb</b>: And that really worked out to prevent 9/11,
didn't it? That really worked out to stymie the onslaught of these
terrorists <br><br>
<dd>Richard Bacon</b>: Are you saying that it somehow contributed to
9/11?<br><br>
<dd>Michael Goldfarb</b>: I'm saying it was an ineffectual response to
terrorism, to simply put them in civilian courts and say, "oh, we're
going to treat this as though they're just criminals like any
others." They're not criminals like others.<br><br>
<dd>Andy Worthington</b>: I don't see that that's an issue at all, and I
see that they are criminals like others, actually. And the point I wanted
to raise is that there's an interesting man named Dan Coleman, who was a
former FBI interrogator, and he worked with a lot of these terrorist
suspects before 9/11, and the interesting thing, the particularly
interesting thing about the way Dan Coleman worked, which is germane to
the whole thing we're talking about here, is that he -- and other FBI
interrogators -- said, you might be able to get some tiny bit of
information by beating the crap out of somebody, by torturing them, but
that is not how to get to dig to the real truth about what's going on.
You do that by building a relationship with the prisoners that you have,
and a good interrogator can do that. And then you take them through the
court system, because they're criminals.<br><br>
</dl>Andy Worthington</b>
(<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/">www.andyworthington.co.uk</a>
) is a British historian, and the author of
'<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga">
The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's
Illegal Prison'</a>. He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:andy@andyworthington.co.uk">andy@andyworthington.co.uk</a>
<br><br>
<br><br>
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