For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome the other Scott Horton, Heroic International Human Rights Lawyer.
He's a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine, and he writes the blog No Comment at their website harpers.org.
He lectures at Columbia University.
He's the former chairman of the New York Bar Association's Committee on International Law and the former president of the International League for Human Rights.
And, Scott, I think I heard somewhere or read somewhere that you're now teaching at a different college.
Yeah, I'm a visiting professor at Hofstra Law School this year.
Oh, there you go, Hofstra.
That's right.
That's what I heard.
Okay, so there's that for the biote.
Now, we've been talking for years and years now, and I'm very glad to have you on the show here today.
We've been talking about the Bush administration's flight from the law under the excuse that they're protecting us from terrorism and the various war crimes that they committed under their pretended theories of law as drawn up by some of their yes-man lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee and others.
And now here we are in the second day of the Obama presidency, and there are a lot of expectations and I think battles of ideas going on about what exactly should be done about the fact that we all know that these men basically have openly confessed, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, et cetera, have confessed to committing these war crimes.
And now I guess the question is whether the Obama administration is going to apply the law or not.
That's basically the situation as you read it, and what do you think he's going to do?
Yeah, I think it's one of the trickier issues that faces Barack Obama right now, and also Eric Holder, his attorney general.
And in fact, this afternoon, the Holder nomination ran right into a roadblock that was thrown up by Big Bad John Cornyn, the head of the Republican Senate campaign effort, also a member of the Judiciary Committee, in which Big Bad John says he's standing on a matter of principle, Republican principle, and that is for torture.
He says he's trying to block and hold up the Holder nomination because he doesn't like Holder's statement that torture is a crime, and he's very concerned that Holder will begin criminal investigations.
And Mr. Cornyn issued a statement this afternoon saying he wanted to get clarification about these Holder statements about an investigation because it's very clear he does not want any investigation to occur.
Scott, let me make sure I understand you right here.
You're saying John Cornyn, my former senator – oh, boy, that's nice to say.
They're from Texas.
He's not attacking Holder based on, you know, intervention in the Kenny Trinidad hearings or anything really scandalous as kind of a side issue, as a way to attack Holder.
He's actually attacking Holder because Holder has testified that waterboarding is torture and that torture is a felony, and he's worried that he might actually prosecute felonies.
That is John Cornyn's avowed position, his stated position?
That's the statement he issued just two hours ago, in fact.
Incredible.
And it's interesting because Cornyn – I've been told repeatedly by people on the Judiciary Committee that Cornyn and other Senate Republicans are taking advice directly from Karl Rove as to handle – how to handle this nomination.
And, of course, John Cornyn is a client of Karl Rove's.
They're very close going way back, and Rove has been involved in his campaigns, both of his campaigns, I believe.
And Rove seems quite focused on this torture issue.
I mean, Rove, of course, it's interesting that the Senate Republicans would pick a man who is actually the target of two pending Department of Justice criminal investigations to advise them on how to deal with nominations for senior people in the Department of Justice.
But, you know, that's the world of Washington.
It's a little wacky.
Well, one thing we do know, though, is that the Republicans are the minority in the Imperial Senate and on the Judiciary Committee.
So does John Cornyn really have the ability to hold up Eric Holder's nomination on this point?
Clearly not.
In fact, following the 2008 election, the Democratic majority is so large that the Democrats have a three-vote majority on every committee, including the Judiciary Committee.
So he can't block it in committee, and the Democrats clearly have the votes on the floor to elect him.
So I think they have no shot at that.
I think this is just an effort to embarrass, to slow down, perhaps to block or to slow down Obama's ability to get the new Department of Justice up and running.
Well, now I guess there's kind of a divergence in information in my mind.
It seems like Cass Sunstein and some of the other people who are legal advisors to Obama, and I forget whether he made this statement himself.
I think he did about we don't want to look backwards and this kind of thing.
And yet at the same time, we have his nominee for attorney general saying that waterboarding is torture and that torture is a felony.
And he's trying to get the job as top cop.
So am I to expect that – or do you expect that Obama is actually – he and Holder have discussed that they do intend to move forward with investigations, criminal investigations into the former administration?
I think Barack Obama is a veritable sphinx of a politician.
He makes these statements, and you go back and you parse them, and there's something for everybody in these statements he makes.
So whatever your viewpoint is, you can look at it and find an aspect of his statement that lines up with what you think.
What are his intentions here?
I'd say it's very, very clear that he does not want the controversy over torture or criminal investigations to be a front-burner issue in Washington that gets in the way of his affirmative agenda, which is going to be things like new policy for Afghanistan, health insurance, and dealing with the collapse of financial institutions.
On the other hand, I think it's pretty clear now, based on a whole slew of appointments he's made, that he's given a lot of thought to many of these legal policy issues.
Remember, he's a law professor.
He taught a lot of this stuff.
He's really well-versed in it, and he has deep views about this, but he's not going to push those views into the front of the stage.
They're going to be in the back.
And I'll give you a hint.
I used to blog for a blog site called Balkanization, and I think we can call this now the Balkanization Justice Department because people who've been put in the key policy formative positions in the Justice Department are all my old colleagues from Balkanization.
Don Johnson from the University of Indiana, David Barron from Harvard, Marty Lederman from Georgetown, Neal Katyal from Georgetown as well, all people who wrote in their blog site, major contributors there, in fact, and all people who are now in these key legal policy positions.
None of these people are remotely hesitant to say what they think about this issue.
They have been some of the most aggressive writers on the torture issue from the beginning, and I'd say three of the four of them have also made statements that they believe that there were clearly crimes committed here.
So I think that shows you that there's a pretty strong inclination to do something.
But I don't think that something is going to happen in the next six weeks.
Well, now, from what you say about these appointees, your former colleagues, I guess we could expect for them to write memos saying that the law says no torture whether you're military, CIA, or anyone else.
But would they be the same people in charge of deciding whether to carry forward with a grand jury or not, that kind of thing?
I think Eric Holder is the person who's going to make that decision in the first instance.
But the memo policy writers are also the people who are going to say whether or not the conduct would be viewed on a policy level as criminal conduct.
And I think they've told us what they think about that.
Right, and that means you're talking about from here on out.
From here on out.
And I think what I expect to see is not that – we're not going to see that Barack Obama or Eric Holder is going to say, yeah, go prosecute this guy.
That's not going to happen.
I think they're going to be beholden to traditional process, which means that somebody at some point is going to be assigned to conduct a proper professional investigation and come back with a recommendation about prosecutions.
But it's definitely not the case that the president or the attorney general is going to say prosecute X, Y, Z.
And I think that their attitude right now is that this is not one of the five things they most urgently have to address.
There's time.
Well, which means that – that means that pressure from people like you has got to be at full volume or nothing is going to happen at all.
I think what you're going to see is an investigation commissioned.
And I think their view is that that investigation can take a year or a year and a half to be completed.
And all the wind out of our sails.
Well, I'm not quite sure that it will work that way because I think the investigation, if it's run well, will grind slowly but will grind fine.
And I think it's going to result in the disclosure of a lot of deep, dark secrets that we don't know about now.
So I think one thing they're planning to do is review the files of the Office of Legal Counsel, pull out all these secret memoranda, declassify and publish them.
And also build an authoritative account of who did what when.
And I think that account is going to tell us that the administration's claim that torture was introduced as a result of requests that came from down below to give people more latitude that that's a bunch of hooey.
That's definitely not true.
I think we're going to hear in a definitive new account that torture came basically from Dick Cheney and his office.
They decided they wanted to do it and they pushed it through over opposition from people in the military and then the CIA in fact.
Right.
It sure seems to be that way.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, said that on anti-war radio that that was the case that he – from the paperwork that he saw.
It all came from Cheney and Libby and Addington.
And everyone I've interviewed both within the CIA and the military has confirmed that.
I've talked to some of the TJAGs.
I've talked to very senior intelligence people, both retired and currently serving.
The accounts I get from all of them is consistent, and it all says this all came out of Cheney's office.
And moreover, he was adamant.
He wanted this done.
So which laws are we talking about have been violated here?
I mean obviously America is a signatory to the Geneva Convention and to the Anti-Torture Convention.
And then I guess I understand that there's regular federal laws passed by the Congress, signed by various presidents, which enforce these international treaties.
Can you give us a brief rundown on if you were the prosecutor, what kind of laws you're talking about?
Yeah, specifically there are two federal statutes.
One is the War Crimes Act of 1996, and the other is the Anti-Torture Act, which was passed at the time the U.S. ratified the Convention Against Torture.
So although we have international agreements, it's just plain vanilla federal criminal law that is the enforcement mechanism here.
And it's very, very clear that what was done is a violation of both of these statutes.
And I think subsequent statutes that were passed by the Bush administration, the Military Commissions Act, created immunity for the people down on the ground.
So all those interrogators, CIA interrogators, military interrogators, they really don't have anything to worry about.
I mean they're covered.
They have immunity.
But the people who made the policy, they are also subject to these statutes, and they have no immunity under the shield that the Bush administration created.
So they're the ones who are most at risk.
In fact, I'd say out of the entire group, probably the lawyers are the ones who are most exposed.
In fact, I would note last night on German television, Manfred Nowak, Professor Nowak, who is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, he's the person who has oversight responsibility to ensure that countries enforce or live up to the obligations they made under the convention.
He issued a statement in which he said, George W. Bush, having left the office of president, no longer has head of state immunity.
And he said now it is incumbent upon the new government to initiate a criminal investigation.
He said that in his investigation there was no question but that torture had been introduced by the Bush administration as a matter of policy, that this was clearly a violation of the Convention Against Torture.
And under the convention, the member states are obligated to enforce the convention through criminal prosecution.
So he said the clock is ticking.
You have to begin your prosecution.
And if we don't, then other countries have universal jurisdiction so that I guess my understanding is that if one German was harmed in the invasion of Iraq or in the torturing of a citizen at a ghost prison somewhere or something, then they then have standing to carry out these prosecutions that the Americans won't.
That's right.
You wouldn't even have to have a German harmed, although that would give them a stronger basis to act.
But yes, it is subject to universal jurisdiction.
So even, I don't know, Chile or Angola or anyone could indict.
That's correct.
They could.
But if you have one of your nationals involved, you have a much stronger basis.
So I'd say the countries that have the strongest basis right now are probably Spain and Italy, both of whom have citizens or nationals who have been held in Guantanamo or in one of the black sites.
And both of them have open criminal investigations right now which are targeting U.S. government officials.
And I'd point out, by the way, that these are both NATO allies of the United – not just NATO allies of the United States.
They're NATO allies of the United States that sent troops to Iraq supporting the United States.
That's not the issue here.
The issue is upholding the Geneva Convention and the Convention Against Torture, which they have a very serious attitude about that.
Well, that's all very interesting.
But at the same time, America would invade Spain before they let Spain prosecute American government officials outside of our law, right?
I don't think so.
I think right now – I've talked to the investigating judge in Spain who tells me that he's very sharply focused on four lawyers, David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, and Jim Haynes.
And I think if any of them were to land in Europe, they'd wind up being at the other end of an extradition request instantly.
The 25 nations of Europe have a convention under which they automatically extradite.
So they'd land in a jail in Spain in a matter of 48 hours.
And what would the reaction of Americans be?
I think actually the reaction of most Americans would be to applaud.
Well, I actually agree with that, and I was thinking earlier about how the last time I saw a poll like this, it was years ago, three or four – well, maybe it was 2005, something like that, which, yeah, I guess it is going on four years ago now, where I think 55 percent said they favored impeachment if it could be shown that they lied us into war or something like that, which basically means that the American people were pretty open to the idea of holding these people accountable short of waiting for another election one way or another then.
So I kind of – it seems to me like the American people would probably be much more willing to see prosecutions of these men than, say, the opposition party in Washington, D.C.
Well, I think that's right, and we have a new poll out just released in the last hour by the Washington Post and ABC.
It will be on the news this evening showing that a substantial majority of Americans agree with President Obama's commitment not to use torture.
They're also very critical of the Bush administration about its use of torture, and a smaller majority of Americans believe that it's time now to begin a thorough investigation of what the Bush administration did.
Well, and the problem there is with – whether it's Congress pushing to create a special prosecutor or to create a commission, something like that, we already know it was in the Washington Post that all the Gang of Four, I guess they call them, or the Gang of Eight even, I forget, they were in on this.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and other Democrats, they knew that the president was breaking the law and ordering people to be tortured.
That's really probably the main reason why these men weren't impeached years ago.
That's right, although one of the big breakthroughs we've had in the course of this week is that Nancy Pelosi, who up until this point had been strongly against an investigation of the torture issue, has shifted her position and she now supports it.
And I think that means she's prepared to see her own conduct be subject to scrutiny here.
I'm not quite sure what happened in these briefings.
I mean, I've been told by some people, congressional staffers, that the Gang of Eight, that's the group you're talking to, that they got briefings, but they were told at the beginning that everything we tell you is completely secret.
You're not permitted to comment on it, to reflect it.
You know anything about this, and I was also told that the briefings they got were very cursory.
I mean, they didn't go into any detail of what the techniques were.
They were told, for instance, that there are a series of new coercive techniques being used, but they've been carefully reviewed by the lawyers at the Department of Justice, and the lawyers have concluded that they are completely consistent with our legal commitments.
Well, that's not much notice, actually.
Although I think the criticism of them is going to be, why weren't there hearings?
Why didn't they push to get more information and so forth?
I think this is all turf that needs to be covered.
I think we need to know a lot more detail, but I'm not really convinced that they bought in or acquiesced to this, which is what others, including John Cornyn in his statements today, he's saying they knew, they agreed.
No, actually there's no evidence whatsoever that they agreed to these things.
They were briefed on them and told to shut up.
I guess one of the things at least that it said in the Post was that they wanted to make sure that there was a presidential order for it, and as long as there was a presidential order for it, that that was okay with them.
Yeah, and that suggests their view that the president took the heat for it, and I think that's one of the issues we have right now because the White House has been totally ambiguous about the existence of this order.
I think in the course of the next week or two weeks, we're going to hear a lot more about what Bush did.
Oh, which reminds me to ask you about the FBI memo, which is another indication.
I think there are probably three or four now piling up that there's an executive order with George Bush's signature on it ordering torture beyond which we've ever seen or been told, or in fact that the government has denied exists.
Yeah, that's an FBI email that came out of Afghanistan, and that was produced early in one of these litigations.
When it came out, everybody went immediately to the White House and said, �Is there an executive order?
� The White House vociferously denied the existence of such an executive order, but I've been told and others have too that there are directions that came out of the White House that were being cited in the field as presidential authority for the abuse.
If you saw the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, there's an Air Force colonel in a highly sensitive film that was published there for the first time in which he, in the middle of a meeting, is saying, �Ah, but this was directed and approved from the top.
� I don't believe the White House's denials that Bush didn't give authority for these things.
In fact, I'm convinced that he did give authority for these things, and he's been trying to cover it up, so we're going to see more about that soon too.
Okay, now one more issue I'd like to ask you about before I let you go here, Scott, is Guantanamo Bay and what's going to happen.
I guess so far we haven't heard anything about Obama issuing an order to close it yet, but apparently… Well, we have a stand-down order.
The stand-down order was issued last night.
Oh yeah?
And what does it say exactly?
The stand-down order was issued to the military commissions, basically telling them to discontinue their work.
The way it happened is the president, through the chain of command, directed the senior prosecutor in Guantanamo to make an application to the military commissions to suspend all the proceedings.
That application was made, and this afternoon orders were issued by the military judges in Guantanamo, suspending all the proceedings for 120 days to allow them to review and make plans for the shutdown of Guantanamo.
Well, as our last president would say, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
I kind of like the sound of that as a good start, but… Well, I'll tell you what.
Some more news is that my friend David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney in New Mexico, has now been appointed as the new chief prosecutor in Guantanamo.
Well, now I saw that on your blog, and I was going to ask you, what does that indicate?
He was appointed there by Bush or by Obama?
No, he was appointed through military process by the JAG Corps.
So it was something that was kind of already in motion.
Well, my understanding is that they wanted to do it, but they were very, very cautious about doing it while Bush was in office, so that this has been announced and implemented immediately after Bush left.
But it was done by the military.
Well, but so then doesn't that indicate that they're going to go ahead and continue, or I guess it's sort of beside the point if Obama decides otherwise?
It may be beside the point if he decides not to commit it, but I think it was a recognition that the criticism of Guantanamo was that the prosecutors were being subjected to political manipulation.
Remember, six of them quit or requested reassignment, and so I think picking David Iglesias, who, remember, was fired as a U.S. attorney because he refused efforts by Karl Rove to manipulate prosecutions, that choice is designed to respond to these concerns about political manipulation.
I mean here's someone who has tested and has proven metal in this regard as an absolutely independent prosecutor.
Right.
Yeah, I just would hate to see it kind of lend credibility to the whole process, which needs to be suspended immediately.
I think the Obama plan is going to be to review all the cases, and they're looking at four different baskets.
Most of the people who wind up being prosecuted are just going to go into regular federal court proceedings.
If there are cases where there's a conventional war crime involving a battlefield capture, then there might still be a military commission, but it's not going to be these military commissions.
It'll be a reconstituted military commission, but I think most of the people will wind up being turned over to other nations.
People who came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Pakistan and Afghanistan are going to go back to those nations.
That'll bring us down from roughly 200 people to, let's say, somewhere between 60 and 80 in the course of four months.
And note that all the Europeans, for instance, who refused to cooperate with us in the Bush administration, as soon as Obama was sworn in, they're all issuing statements that they will now be delighted to take people from Guantanamo, including today the Swiss foreign office said that the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Germans, the British, the French, the Swedes have all now agreed, now that Bush is gone, that they will cooperate with us in bringing Guantanamo to a close.
Well, that's certainly good, but now when you're talking about giving the people back, do you think that includes the handful of people that you could make a credible case are really guilty of being al-Qaeda guys against us or whatever, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a couple of others?
Or you're talking about the rest of them?
I think we've got some number less than a dozen people who really were involved in 9-11 or other terrorist acts, very serious terrorist acts that we can document, and I think those people are going to be headed for prosecution in the federal court.
In regular federal court with a lawyer and all that, just like they should have done from the very beginning?
Exactly.
Before a regular judge, regular process, the cases will be handled just like the trade center bombing case, the blind Sheikh case, and so forth.
They'll be the same sorts of cases.
Right, which, by the way, all those guys were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
That's right, and I think there's an expectation that these cases can be brought up, moved quickly, and that they will lead to successful prosecutions and convictions in a matter of less than a year.
Okay, now, geez, I had one more question.
Oh, I know what it was.
Glenn Greenwald wrote about this.
I forgot which interview it was, where Obama sort of implied, at least for a day or two before another statement seemed to contradict him, that, well, we're going to have to spend a year or so figuring out what the process is going to be.
Sort of implying that they would set up another new court system from scratch, basically where torture evidence would be allowed, as opposed to regular federal courts.
Do you think that idea is going anywhere?
No, and that, to start with, was a misinterpretation.
I mean, that was based on an AP story, and when the AP story came out, I called my own contacts inside the transition team and asked about it, and they explained to me, here's what we said, and here's what the guy wrote.
He just misunderstood what was being said.
I think they are looking at potentially some changes in civil procedure regarding handling of classified evidence and things like that, but that's just on a separate track.
That's not going to affect these cases.
These cases would just go straight through.
Right, but we're not going to deal with any kind of ad hoc new court system with all the same problems we've had at Guantanamo.
No, I think that it's possible that you'll see the administration at some point propose a couple of modifications and rules regarding handling evidence and a few other things, but an independent, self-standing national security court that's sort of a military court, the way it's been proposed by Glenn Sulmasy, for instance, or Andrew McCarthy, no.
In fact, note that even though that was tossed around in the Bush administration and they were receptive to it, Attorney General Mukasey never mustered the courage to actually propose it.
Well, it could have been that they were just sort of putting it off and hoping Obama would do it.
So if you're the prosecutor, are you up against a real problem here if you're trying to convict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and yet everybody in the world knows this man's been tortured?
I mean, I believe he's guilty.
Hell, he admitted it to that reporter from Al Jazeera, and he's the uncle of the guy who did the first World Trade Center bomb and all that, so he's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
I read Bamford.
I know he's guilty, but I also know he's been tortured.
So how do you convict a man like that in court?
Well, I don't know all the evidence they have.
I haven't seen the files, but I'm really struck by the fact that Susan J. Crawford, who is the convening authority here and is a lifelong Republican, very close to David Addington and Dick Cheney.
I mean, she had reviewed all this stuff, and she says that he was tortured, and she doesn't beat around the bush.
She says it's torture, plain and simple, no doubt about it, and she says that she decided not to prosecute him because of that.
Well, if she's reached that decision, then I think we may very well have a problem that any federal prosecutor would have with prosecuting him, and I think that's going to be part of the Bush-Cheney legacy, which is things they have done to people will make it very, very difficult to secure convictions in the criminal justice process, and that would be just as Susan Crawford said, that this blocks the military commissions, right?
So it's just as true for the military commissions as it would be for federal court.
I would think even less true for the military commission than for federal court.
But the basic rule – I mean the basic prohibition on torture is implemented regardless – it doesn't matter whether you're in federal court or a military commission or a court-martial.
That rule still applies.
Well, that's going to be the number one argument against closing Guantanamo or at least turning these men over to the regular federal court system then, right, is that we're not going to be able to convict these men we've tortured who are guilty.
That's right, and I think in a lot of those cases we'll wind up turning these people over to other criminal justice authorities.
Yeah, the American Empire-Egypt division.
Have them hold them for us.
Yeah, I'm not so sure Egypt is one we'll turn them over to, but countries we cooperate with where we get some assurance that we can believe that they won't be tortured.
But, you know, in part remember the United States has its interests and it has its criminal justice process.
Most of these people were not active or involved in things dealing with the United States.
I mean most of the people we grabbed, we grabbed in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a few other places.
And the great majority of them, we have no evidence of anything linking them to plots against the United States.
Now those people may have committed crimes and may have been involved in dealing with terrorist organizations and so forth, but there's no U.S. interest in them.
And those may be cases that get turned over to Saudi Arabia or Yemen or other governments or Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Afghans have wanted their people back now for more than a year.
I think they'll get them back and they'll make up their own minds as to how to deal with them.
So the ghost prisoners, I think the last time we spoke you pointed out that Guantanamo is really the least of them.
The CIA still has secret prisons God knows where all over the world.
And those people, something has got to be done with them too.
I guess they'll just all go in the same boat back to wherever they can ship them.
Well, that's one of the – I've been trying to figure out what they're going to do with this.
I'm told that Obama is issuing an order to the CIA telling them that the Bush Extraordinary Renditions Program is over and that the CIA has to abide now by the same field manual that applies to the military.
But what to do with all the black sites, I can't get any information from them about what they're going to do there.
I mean I know that the existence of the black sites is very, very sensitive because of course the U.S. doesn't want to embarrass foreign governments that want to cooperate with us like Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt for instance.
They're very, very closely tied to us in these programs.
The U.S. doesn't want to publicly admit that they are or give any details about that.
I can understand all that.
But I think they've got to come down with a plan to wind that up very quickly.
And a lot of the career CIA people have been saying from the beginning that they didn't like the black sites program because the CIA doesn't have people who are professionally trained and understand how to run prisons.
Yeah, well that's not supposed to be their business.
It's not their job actually.
Yeah, so I mean I think a lot of people at the CIA really want to get out of that line of business.
And I think Obama will be happy to oblige them.
Well now, so as the military commission system winds down and is replaced with regular federal law again, do you think that they're going to go ahead and repeal the Military Commissions Act?
Because I mean it says in there that you and I could be turned over to the military.
We get one habeas corpus hearing, but if the judge likes the prosecutor that day, you and I can be sent off to the brig just like Jose Padilla at this point under that law, right?
Yeah, well I know that in several informal meetings that occurred in the course of the campaign in which Obama was asked what his attitude was towards the MCA, he responded saying that he believed that the MCA should be repealed flat.
So I think that's his policy.
On the other hand, I would say this is not a priority.
And remember the MCA basically says we, Congress, surrender all authority and discretion to the president as to how to deal with these things.
And even what the definition of torture is.
And as to how to set up trials and many, many other issues.
They say basically you, president, decide.
And I think as a result of that, repealing the MCA is almost certainly not going to be an immediate priority for Obama.
Because he has authority to deal with it however he wants to under the terms of the MCA itself.
But I think sometime before he leaves office, he's going to probably take some steps designed to address its abuses.
I think one of the most dangerous ones is what it says can be done with U.S. citizens.
I think we're going to see that changed.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your advice to this show yet again.
And I look forward to talking with you and keeping up on further developments on this subject.
Because whether it's the new administration or the old, I'm not going to forget about these crimes.
Well, absolutely.
You're with me.
And enjoy life out there in Los Angeles.
Well, I love it so far.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
Take care.
All right.
