Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to Next comes what from degenerate Art. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. This is Andrea Pitzer. Well, there were promises to unleash trauma with the arrival of the new administration on January 20, 2025, and Trump appointees are keeping to that plan right now in the US Those charged with carrying out the laws seem to be breaking a lot of them all at once and across the board. In response, judges are expressing concerns about the government running roughshod over national security issues and long established questions of citizenship, among many other things. There's not going to be any problem and nobody's going to question it at this point. Accountability is critical. And so today I'm going to talk about how when the law is broken, if there's no accountability, those crimes get absorbed into the system and become part of ongoing, everyday operations. Today, I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay. Most people don't even know about it. I'm going to tell you why paying attention in those situations, when it might seem utterly ineffectual, still matters. Because of the aggressive showcasing of immigrant deportations to Guantanamo in recent days. The administration acknowledged yesterday that the first plane carrying migrants from the US Mainland had touched down at the infamous detention facility. A plan calls for as many as 30,000 people to be sent there. Well, Guantanamo Bay, though it may have the physical space to hold the migrants that President Trump is proposing, it's going to take a lot of time and probably a lot of money to build the infrastructure to hold them. The flight last night contained just about 10 detainees. I mean, I know that they're not American citizens, but we do have an obligation to treat people humanely. This, to me, almost sounds like an internment camp. I want to tell you a couple stories from my time there. Guantanamo Bay is a pocket of America on the edge of Cuba. Off base, here are the comforts of home, even McDonald's. But the camp itself is downright intimidating. Razor wire guards, regular interrogations. When I wrote my global history of concentration camps, I opened and closed it with Gitmo. Not because it was the biggest or the best example of mass detention without trial in the history of camps, but because even a decade ago, it seemed to be a time bomb that needed to be dismantled because it held the possibility of becoming so much worse than it already was. A new UN Investigation finds Conditions inside the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are cruel, inhuman and degrading. More than 20 years after the US started sending detainees in the so called War on Terror to what's called camp justice, roughly 780 detainees have been held at the detention center since it opened in early 2002. We are now moving forward on that path in which much worse things could happen, both there and in the US Itself. They used to strip us all naked right in the beginning. They sliced all our clothes off and spat at us and punched us and degraded us in ways it's really hard to even now, hard to describe. And that's, that's what they wanted to do. They wanted to remove our sense of individualism, remove our sense of humanity and give us each a number. So I'll consider what's already happening under Trump today and I'll explain how people are fighting back. The 9, 11, 5. The men charged with 8 aiding the hijackings that brought down the World Trade center and hit the Pentagon have never gone to trial. Joint charges were brought in one case in 2008 and a plea deal had fallen through then with a second set of charges filed jointly in 2012. So at this point we're now well into the second decade of that later case. That case was three years old when I got on a military plane at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland headed to attend two weeks of pre trial hearings in the Expeditionary Legal Complex at Guantanamo Bay. After signing a 13 page agreement about what I was not allowed to photograph and acknowledging restrictions on access and agreeing to let the media officials there review any photos I had taken while I was there. I moved into a tent with Carol Rosenberg who witnessed the first arrival of the War on terror detainees in January 2002. Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times has covered the facility since it opened and she joins me now. Carol, thanks for joining us. You know, the defendants weren't taken straight to Guantanamo or straight to the United States for trial. When they were arrested a year and two years after the 911 attacks, they were sent to the CIA black sites for three and four years and that period has complicated the pretrial effort. The CIA doesn't want to give up all the information. The defense lawyers are insisting on more details and a judge and possibly a jury is going to have to decide which of the evidence is untainted. That Monday, the first hearing and against pretrial hearing. We're not yet in the trial. The first pre trial hearing opened with the judge counting off the detainees who were present and confirming who was representing them. When asked if there were any other matters to address before beginning, one of the defendants, Ramzi bin Al Sheb, made it known that he recognized one of the translators working in the court that day. He said the man's name and claimed to recognize this interpreter from a black site where he, Ramzi bin Al Sheb, had been tortured. Cheney wants suspected terrorists, enemies of the United States, to be held as far as possible from civilian courts and as far as possible from thick rule books and precedents under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Other defendants quickly chimed in with attorneys for those other ones, saying they also recognized the man. And within minutes, the judge had ended the session even without the debacle of the interpreter being present, who might have had a history in the case itself. Any mention of torture in the courtroom tended to have this effect because the government was asserting classified status over what had happened to those detainees in captivity, basically asserting ownership over their ability to share their own memories. It took a few hours after that hearing had ended to even determine what had just happened. Those of us there with press passes to cover the hearings, there was also family members of Those killed on 9 11, and there were representatives from nonprofit organizations who were there as observers. And we all were trying to parse what we'd seen. Had this been planned in advance somehow? Was it some kind of spectacle to try to derail the hearings? Or was it possible that the Pentagon had actually sent someone who might have been present during these enhanced interrogations? Torture, in the words of then President Obama, we tortured some folks into the courtroom to be face to face with one of the accused. It was just amazing to think about any of these possibilities with a few years under its belt. Already, there was a process of the court, which by this point had become automatic, which would generate the transcript taken by the court reporter for that given session. It was so short, because the session had been short, that it was sent out to the press not long after the session ended. And then almost immediately after that transcript was sent, it was rescinded and said to be classified. And those of us with press passes asked to meet with members of the prosecution to ask the government for clarification of what had happened. Was it possible that what Ben Al Sheb had said was true? Had he been in the courtroom with someone who had been present during one of these interrogation sessions? In the publicly available records, Ben Al Sheb seemed to be the most troubled with sleep disruptions and delusions and accusations of constant surveillance that pointed to an unsteady mental state. Was he Imagining things. That afternoon, a Pentagon representative acknowledged that Ben Al Sheb might have encountered the person he pointed out before that the person in question had previously worked for the CIA overseas. It was possible that other defendants had encountered him, too. Hearings resumed later that week where the attorneys for the defendants were reminded by the judge that the fact that the interpreter had worked at the CIA was not classified. But his name, his physical attributes, his appearance, and the issue of whether the man had ever visited Guantanamo, had ever been in the courtroom we had all seen him in not long before, those were all classified. Now, in the eyes of the court, discussing what had happened in court while not mentioning the translator's presence earlier that week or bringing up yet again the allegations of torture that had derailed so many prior hearings proved impossible. The planned two weeks of hearings concluded after just a few days and less than 8 hours of actual court time. We flew out of the tiny airport at Gitmo that Saturday, all of us crowding into the waiting area, prosecutors, defense attorneys, contractors there for other work on the base, the 911 families and press. It was the only flight out of the base for days, and as we waited to board, over the loudspeaker came the call for those who had not yet checked in. They announced the name of the translator, which had become, in the courtroom, officially classified information. I realized that the most mundane systems of. Of accountability checking in for an airplane flight had once more undermined what was officially, in the eyes of the law on Guantanamo, a secret. I want to address where we are today. With Trump sending immigrants from the US To Guantanamo for indefinite detention, I realize most people don't even know about it, so here's a quick summary. In late 1991, after a military coup in Haiti, tens of thousands of refugees fled for their lives in rickety boats trying to make it to Florida, where they had the right to apply for asylum if they could get ashore. Officials worry that hundreds of Haitians may have died in the rough seas. We went out of food, we went out of water. People was sick. We were in a predicament. You couldn't go back. President George Herbert Walker Bush's administration did not like the optics of tens of thousands of Haitians arriving on US shores wanting to stay. There's no doubt that it would have been an administrative challenge to process them there. But the government's answer was to cut them off at sea before they could get to Florida and detain them for processing at Guantanamo. American soldiers quickly built a holding camp at the naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was massive A massive camp, and it was fenced with razor wire. And you have the towel with the guards, and then just during the day, you just roam the yard. Some 34,000 were captured at sea in the first six months of this exodus. Conditions were miserable on the island. We had foreign nationals held at Guantanamo precisely because the government believed or took the position that there were no legal constraints. Years later, there would be another Haitian influx, and a Cuban one too. It was not the kind of military prison style detention that would make Gitmo famous later, but it was a kind of awful purgatory at best for a group of HIV positive detainees who were segregated from the rest of the population and not given real access to medical care or legal counsel. It was a nightmare. Well, that's when we find out all the remaining people were HIV positive. And unfortunately, my dad was one of those. They have been cleared to enter the US but are stuck here because of a US ban on HIV infected immigrants. Because of that policy, more than 200 HIV positive refugees and their families were told they could be stuck at GTMO indefinitely for 10 or 20 years, or even until a cure for AIDS was found. It's a death trap. When plaintiffs attorneys tried to file cases on their behalf, one judge declared that the US Courts didn't have jurisdiction, that the base at Guantanamo Bay was not US Soil. But another judge prepared to hear a case from those HIV positive detainees who had been segregated, indicating a belief that the court did have jurisdiction. These people had not even been charged with a crime, but they were treated worse than criminals. Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. Presided over the trial. How can you take a human being, take him into custody, tell a court that I'm going to do whatever I want to do with you? Bill Clinton had campaigned in 1992 on undoing this immigrant Gitmo detention. But once in office, he had more to lose politically by sticking to that earlier principle. His administration settled the case with the HIV positive patients, agreeing to their release and processing for asylum in order to make the case go away. So this effectively left Guantanamo in a gray area. But with that prior court decision that had tilted away from requiring constitutional actions and protections for the people who were there, Guantanamo would remain in legal limbo, leaving the door open for it to be used as a detention center outside the reach of US Law. Then we fast forward to for seven years. It's really exciting for me to be here. I want to thank Ms. Daniels for being a teacher. I want to thank Gwen for being a principal. And I want to thank you all for practicing reading so much really important to when 911 happened. Open your book up to lesson 60 on page 150. Three months into the first administration of George W. Bush. This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while and the American people must be patient. I'm going to be patient. Officials wanted to capture and quickly punish those responsible for the mayhem and the death of thousands of U.S. residents and U.S. citizens. I'm not going to be distracted. I will keep my focus to make sure that not only are these brought to justice, but anybody who's been associated will be brought to justice. And all in all, some 780 people are known to have been detained at the base altogether under War on Terror authorizations, with many of them arriving due to simple overload in Afghan detention. Maybe the local prison was overflowing. Gitmo became available as an option and suddenly people were being sent there. The people who arrived there had never been clearly determined to be enemy combatants on an individual basis. Some of the ones who would arrive years later would become Gitmo detainees after stints being tortured in black sites around the world. Through these tactics that had been approved by the White House as enhanced interrogation during the Bush administration. Are we going to restrict ourselves to reading them? Miranda rights providing them a lawyer and right to remain silent and trying them in federal court despite the fact that they must have knowledge of the names of Al Qaeda operatives who may be in the United States and in Western Europe and who are planning attacks on the United States. These tactics later of course were condemned by Obama. There are multiple CIA records describing the ineffectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques in gaining KSM's cooperation. I think what's important to know is that waterboarding KSM 183 times did not work. And essentially by the CIA's own standard of why they did this, they did not receive otherwise unavailable actionable intelligence, but no one was prosecuted, would be released without any charges. In the seven years under George W. Bush's administration, more than 150 more would leave the island without charges against them during two terms under Obama. The nation had a choice under Barack Obama to pick up Guantanamo and move the remnants of it to the United States or to continue to fund and run this remote faraway prison down in Cuba. And Congress prevented the closure that would have allowed some of these war prisoners have been taken to the United States. Releases nearly stopped completely under Trump. Biden pushed a few more through, leaving just 15 in place by the time that Trump took office again. So that's the Executive branch. And during those 23 years of war on terror detentions, the Supreme Court at first declined to interfere with the president's power to make speedy and difficult decisions about national security. I'm going to be patient. Then it began to acknowledge some rights for those who were held there. And the American people must be patient. In a landmark case in 2004, the Hamdi case, the judges on the court declared habeas corpus rights against indefinite detention for a Gitmo detainee who was a U.S. citizen. Another case, Rasul, expanded that protection to non citizens and foreigners who were held there. Justice Kennedy remarked about the Russell case that aliens held at the base, no less than American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal court's authority. But in recent years, as Trump appointed candidates supported by the far right have advanced to various courts, including the supreme court, rulings have shifted and have a more limited willingness to rely on these cases as meaningful precedents for, for addressing what has turned into a generation long indefinite detention project on Guantanamo. Abu Zubaydah was originally picked up on the battlefield and thought to be a top Al Qaeda leader. That turned out not to be true. But at the time, he was subject to extreme interrogation. He wanted access to two CIA contractors who were involved in his interrogation. For a lawsuit that is being filed on his behalf in Poland, the justice Department, under both Republican and Democratic administrations has said no, he can't have that information. Now. What Abu Zubaydah's lawyer said is everybody knows now. It was Poland. It's an open secret. Why are we still pretending like it's a state secret? But today the Supreme Court said no. The government has the better argument here. So Abu Zubaydah cannot get this information that he wanted. During Obama's years in office, a Senate committee wrapped up its investigation and the facts that emerged were scandalous. Two psychologists had been paid $81 million to develop the torture program. Mitchell and Jessen had created interrogation methods inspired by things the North Koreans and Chinese had done in the 1950s, absurd brainwashing efforts that we had always regarded as emblems of tyranny. An executive summary and findings of the and conclusions of the study appeared near the end of 2014, with some items redacted. But the report as a whole remained classified, with the full classified versions sent to the relevant agencies. In a recent meeting with the people who put this together and you know, I sort of jokingly asked, well, where's the, where's the rest? Can't I take the. The full thing? And they said to do that you would need a wheelbarrow. In May 2016, while Obama was still in office, the CIA's inspector general told Congress that its copy of the report had been accidentally deleted. In contrast to CIA representations, detainees were subjected to the most aggressive techniques immediately straight, stripped naked, diapered, physically struck and put in various painful stress positions for long periods of time. They were deprived of sleep for days in one case, up to 180 hours. That's seven and a half days over a week with no sleep, usually standing or in stress positions at times with their hands tied together over their heads, chained to the ceiling. I still have that publicly released executive summary version on my shelves here, and it represents heroic work on the part of the committee, on the part of the legislative branch as a whole to reveal and address a stain on the country and a mark against history. The use of coercive technique methods regularly resulted in fabricated information. Sometime the CIA actually knew detainees were lying. Other times the CIA acted on false information, diverting resources and leading officers or contractors to falsely believe they were acquiring unique or actionable intelligence and that its interrogations were working when they were not. But there is still so much that we don't know. I want to underline this is not some ancient history that has set Trump up for what he's doing now. On Monday, a story appeared from Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who's still reporting this story. She notes that the 911 defendants had a deal in place to plead guilty in exchange for the government no longer seeking the death penalty in the case. But this plea agreement was thrown into turmoil last year by Biden's secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, withdrawing the agreement today, the Times revealed that part of the price for the accused plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in accepting this plea deal was to never disclose secret aspects of his torture by the CIA if he is allowed to plead guilty rather than face a death penalty trial. It's worth noting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the man who was waterboarded 183 times. We'll see if the courts uphold the deal or not. It's currently challenged, but it's clear that the deal as planned was an agreement to convict a monster on lesser charges if he agrees not to tell the world what monstrous things have been done to him. It's emblematic of Gitmo as a whole, and it shows how invested those in power are in making it a showcase for the worst of the worst, while ensuring that the worst can also be done to anyone who happens to end up there. This story reminded me of my second trip to Gitmo, when a Florida news crew was going to do an interview with the rear admiral in charge of the detention side of the base, and we were all there together and they wanted to do a nicer standup interview at a different location than we were at. So at the last minute, Gitmo's media shop was able to arrange a different location. And shortly after we arrived, we were startled by the sight of an actual detainee outside, heavily cuffed and shackled, looking like some biblical prophet with his long beard. He called out this very odd and chipper hello in English before the guards could rush him out of our line of sight. Oh, what a fuck up. One of the media team members whispered under his breath, and another one said, somebody is not going to be happy about that. Our whole time there had been an attempt to let us see the machinery of detention, even sometimes to see detainees through two way glass without ever having contact with any of them. But somebody had screwed up and it was seen as a disaster that we got a glimpse of unscripted life under the veneer that had been planned for us. So as I said a month ago, There were only 15 detainees left in War of terror detention on Guantanamo. If only it had been closed, something Republicans in Congress and even some Democrats were never willing to do. It would be a different thing to reopen Guantanamo as a detention facility today. But in the world as it is, Trump has already ordered detainees sent there, and some have already arrived. There are questions that Pentagon lawyers and the Department of Homeland Security lawyers are looking at like how long? As you raised, how long can these detainees be held there? The idea is they cannot be held there indefinitely, but what is an appropriate amount of time? Other questions are how will they have access? What kind of access will they have to legal services and social services? Since Gitmo detention was never fully resolved or fully repudiated, it provided this opening through which the current administration is able to drive a Mack truck. They are relying on the long history of Gitmo as an immigrant detention facility and as a holding pen for indefinite detention in the war on terror to paper over its uses for a fusion of the two categories, creating an imaginary archetype of the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. The story goes that these immigrants are so bad, some of them are so bad, we don't even trust the countries to hold them, that to preserve law and order here in America, they have to be kept under all the possible punishments of the law while being offered none of the Law's protections and tough. That's a tough, that's a tough place to get out of. But sometimes we are going to see actions toward accountability or questions asked by people who can have an immediate effect. Over the weekend, Judge Kenneth Gonzalez of the Federal District Court for New Mexico issued a temporary restraining order that would keep three Venezuelan migrants in ICE detention currently from being sent to Guantanamo absent the ability to represent those who have already been transferred this month because we don't know who they are. Lawyers have sought to represent the detainees still in the US who have the most similar profile, the ones most likely to go next. Charlie Savage at the New York Times wrote that the judge issued his order during the Super Bowl. The men asking for protection from transfer had recognized some of those who were sent already to Guantanamo in the photos that the government published. When DHS started putting out pictures of the first people sent to Guantanamo, I made a video about it on TikTok and I was reading the comments and someone said, hey, that's my brother. We've been looking for him. He's not a criminal. He has no criminal record, no nothing. And I think that's him. So I followed this person, I started messaging them and yeah, they started sending me evidence, proof and I started sharing the story, made a video about it. New York Times picked it up, confirmed that he's in Guantanamo and it appears he has no criminal record. The government, of course, was putting these photos out to present their own version of what was going on. But those pictures opened doors for others who were working to protect other immigrants from the same fate. Foreign the evolution of Gitmo is worth looking at because it's a high stakes microcosm of what's happening in the country. Those claiming they're punishing the worst people and other programs of the government will use this kind of rhetoric as a fig leaf to benefit themselves. And they will do it in clumsy and ridiculous ways that devolve to a comedy of errors even as they carry out horrific and inhumane actions. The translator's classified name will be read out over the pa. The detainee they don't want you to see will appear in your path without warning. They will do as much as they can possibly get away with while trying to make it a crime for others to reveal what's actually happening. It seems ludicrous and extra legal, but sometimes they will be able to make the most transparent lies stick. But sometimes they won't. This kind of overreach is often undone by even intermittent attention from those who document what's happening and those who speak up against it stay aware through all these public spectacles. It is so much easier to do horrific things without consequences if no one is watching. This is one of those cases where calling your representatives, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, can make a difference. Demand an end to raids and detentions that are terrifying US Residents and even citizens. Demand an end to black hole detentions for anyone, let alone the 30,000 people the administration is threatening to send to Gitmo. Know youw Rights in filming ICE arrests show up to support immigrant rights at public demonstrations. Those who are physically at risk or unable to appear in public because of health conditions or citizenship status can find other ways to work behind the scenes. I'll post links to all these things in the Friday roundup. Each of us has a role to play toward accountability, toward moving our public officials out of a fantasy of authoritarian delusion into the real world. These actions can't be hidden forever. Every example of the undoing of this kind of harm has not been a natural evolution of the system toward kindness, but has been accomplished by people standing against elected leaders who have embraced the worst they can do for as long as they believe they will get away with it. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.