Andy Worthington Discusses Bagram on the BBC World Service, and 9/11 and Guantánamo with Scott Horton

This week the legacy of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” is under the spotlight, as is the response to it of his successor, Barack Obama. Tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that first prompted George W. Bush and his administration to discard all domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners, and to hold those seized in its “war on terror” not as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, but as “enemy combatants,” who could, the administration contended, be held without them having any rights whatsoever.

Today is also significant for the fallout from the first war on which the Bush administration embarked — the invasion of Afghanistan, which began a month after the 9/11 attacks. As has been extensively reported, this morning US officials handed over formal control of the Parwan Detention Facility, the replacement for the notorious Bagram prison, where several prisoners were killed in the early days of the “war on terror,” to Afghan control.

This morning I was delighted to be asked by the BBC World Service to comment on the Bagram handover on the “Newshour” program with Robin Lustig, which was live at 1 pm, but is repeated regularly, and is available online. Although it was announced that the US had transferred 3,082 prisoners to Afghan control since reaching an agreement in March, I was particularly interested in commenting about those still held by the US, including recently captured prisoners, who will not be handed over until the US has screened them, and, more particularly, the foreign prisoners — thought to number around 50 — who will continue to be held by the US.

These men — who include Pakistanis, as well as prisoners from the Gulf and elsewhere — include men seized in other countries, including Thailand and Iraq, who have been held for up to ten years. In 2009, three of these men secured a court victory in the US, when a judge granted them habeas corpus rights, judging, correctly, that their situation was essentially no different to that of the prisoners in Guantanamo, who secured habeas rights in 2004 and again in 2008.

That ruling, however, was overturned by the appeals court, the D.C. Circuit Court, leaving the men in limbo. Earlier this year, President Obama hinted that he would be releasing some of these men, as I reported in my articles, Obama Considers Repatriating Foreign Prisoners from Bagram and Bagram: Still a Black Hole for Foreign Prisoners, but there has been no further news on that front, and they therefore remain in a legal black hole.

However, while doubts remain about whether the Afghans will be either more lenient or more brutal that the US, what also concerns me — as I also had the chance to explain — is that Bagram has always been the focal point for the Americans’ unilateral decision to discard the Geneva Conventions, a situation that has never been reported or discussed as widely as it should have been, and the handover of the prison to Afghan control also needs to be seen in this context, as, since discarding the Conventions, prisoners have been held in a peculiar legal limbo in which their cases have been subjected to a cursory review some time after their capture, and decisions have then been made about whether to release them, continue to hold them or transfer them to Afghan control. As I have often explained in the past, imagine the uproar there would be in the US if the military of another country captured Americans in wartime, tore up the Geneva Conventions and subjected them to a similar scenario.

On the 9/11 anniversary, and with reference to its umbilical relationship with Guantanamo, I have already written an article, Eleven Years After 9/11, Guantánamo Is A Political Prison, and following its publication I spoke to Scott Horton, formerly of Antiwar radio and now supported by the Future of Freedom Foundation (for whom I write a weekly column), in a half-hour interview that is available here. Scott and I have been talking to each other for five years now, ever since the US “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla was tried back in the summer of 2007, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to him.

This is how Scott described the show, and I hope you have time to listen to it, as Scott and I covered much more than just the anniversary and the depressing situation in Guantánamo, where 168 men are still held, including 87 who have been cleared for release:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses his article “Eleven Years after 9/11, Guantánamo Is a Political Prison;” the many Gitmo prisoners still held despite being long-ago cleared for release; why liberals give Obama a pass on his broken promise to close the prison; Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to prosecute Bush-era torture; and how a corrupted US justice system invites terrorist blowback.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.