03/18/09 – Mark Danner – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
The big news this week, of course, is the new article in the New York Review of Books, U.S. Torture, Voices from the Black Sites, a leaked secret report from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Leaked to Mark Danner, Journalism Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Henry R. Luce, Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Welcome back to the show.
Mark, how are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm very well.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you very much for joining me on the show today.
It's a heck of a story you're bringing to the fore here.
Let's go ahead and get one thing straight from the very beginning, if we could.
The Red Cross, they're not just the charity when a hurricane hits your neighborhood or something like that.
They have a legal responsibility under international law of some kind.
What exactly is it?
Yes, this is the International Committee of the Red Cross, called the ICRC, which is based in Geneva.
They are the appointed body.
They're a very old institution, going back about 150 years, at least in its origins.
They are the legally appointed body under the Geneva Conventions to supervise the treatment of prisoners of war.
During wars, they have a right to go into prisoner of war camps, interview POWs.
Then they put together a report.
This is a thing they've done for a long time, a confidential report that they then hand to the government in question, who is responsible for the treatment of those detainees.
This particular report was based on interviews they did at Guantanamo in the fall of 2006 after 14 high-value detainees, these are the most well-known of the Al Qaeda prisoners, had been captured at various times after the 9-11 attacks and had been put into secret prisons around the world, so-called black sites, where they were interrogated.
Then eventually, in 2006, in September, all of these 14 were flown to Guantanamo, where the interviewers from the International Committee of the Red Cross had access to them for the first time.
They sat down with them, they conducted these interviews over many days, they put together this report, and the report was then handed over to the CIA, to the Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, and the idea was that it would be handed to the government, the government would look at it and presumably would make changes to put themselves in accordance with international law.
Well, does the Red Cross not have any kind of mandate to turn their conclusions over to some UN body or any kind of thing like that?
Their only obligation is to inform the CIA of their own program?
Well, exactly.
Their legally appointed role is to deal directly with the detainees and then, through intervention with the government itself, to persuade the government to change what in the treatment is against the law and other things that aren't what they should be.
So they don't intervene with international bodies, they don't make publicly available their report.
All this stuff is confidential.
And it's like that so that governments will allow them in, in the first place.
That's exactly right.
So the government will allow them in.
It also, though, for our purposes and for the purposes of the New York Review of Books article I wrote based on this report, it's important to note that it gives their reporting a rare authenticity and credibility because they do this professionally, they're used to interviewing detainees, they do it according to a set methodology.
In this case, they interviewed these people separately, they had had no contact with one another, they've been kept rigorously isolated.
So the fact that the stories they tell are identical is very persuasive in arguing for the credibility of the account, as the Red Cross says in the report.
So the methodology that they use and the fact that this was meant to be secret also gives the report in the first person account by the detainees, I think, a rare credibility that you wouldn't get with something that was meant, frankly, that was meant originally for the public.
So you have these first person accounts of interrogation techniques, what was done, and so on.
Well, they very specifically choose to use the words that this constituted torture, period, at the end of the sentence.
And they also say it also, less than torture, there were many instances of, quote, cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment.
So they're referring specifically to the Geneva Conventions and violations of it right there, but I guess not for any purpose other than maybe it'll get leaked to Mark Danner someday?
Well, I think you're quite right in underlining the use of those words.
They said absolutely, quote, this behavior, quote, constitutes torture, flatly.
They just said it right out.
And they said, as you also point out, that it constituted cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments, close quote.
And those terms are defined in international law, and the United States has undertaken by force of law not to do that.
The Geneva Conventions forbid it, including Common Article 3, forbids it against all prisoners, including legally conferred POWs, but all prisoners in general.
The Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory, condemns it and forbids it, absolutely, prohibits it, absolutely, in times of war and peace, as well as the War Crimes Act of 1996, which is a U.S. statute, and one could name other laws.
So in effect, with great credibility and authority, the ICRC is saying in this report that the United States broke international treaties and international law by torturing prisoners.
Well, it's funny, because when I try to think back of how many actual official statements do we have with the word torture in them, I can only think, you know, in this argument, which, you know, I guess in a way that might lead toward some real consequences, is the judge, Susan Crawford, at Guantanamo, who said we cannot prosecute Qatani because we tortured him.
So not even at our kangaroo court down here in Guantanamo can we give this guy a trial.
And then the now Attorney General, during his confirmation hearing, affirmed, as the previous Attorney General would not, that torture, or that waterboarding is torture, and that torture is a felony.
Right.
Well, I think it's quite to the point that you're recalling for readers the case of Susan Crawford, who was a fairly prominent official in the Reagan years.
She was an official at the Pentagon with the Army.
She was then appointed by President George W. Bush to serve, essentially, as the person who decides which of the detainees should be brought before military tribunals.
And she's a former judge.
So she has a lot of credibility, and she looked over the case of Mr. Qatani, as you mentioned, who was a prisoner at Guantanamo.
He is not among the 14 in this report.
He was at Guantanamo.
But the record of his interrogation is quite extensive, and some of it's been published in Time magazine and other places.
And she essentially looked at this record, and this guy, you know, he was supposedly going to be the 20th hijacker, but he was on 9-11, but he was stopped at the Orlando International Airport and not admitted to the country.
And she looked at the record and essentially decided that he could not be tried because he had been tortured.
And she said this explicitly and on the record to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post in January.
So this was a decision undertaken under the Bush administration by an official, you know, who had been a Reagan administration official and was appointed by George W. Bush, which essentially said, look, you can't try these people or this particular person because he's been tortured.
And, frankly, the behavior and the techniques detailed in the ICRC report, which is interrogations of 14 people who were actually sort of at black sites, unlike Qatani, seems on balance rather worse than what happened to Qatani.
And it seems hard to imagine that many of these prisoners could be tried in a legally sanctioned court or tribunal because of that.
Well, you know, you make the point in the article repeatedly about George Bush's weasel words about this is an alternative set of procedures and so forth, and yet it seems like we have steadily racking up more and more official statements such as what Holder said.
I mean, we know they've admitted they've waterboarded people.
Holder said that waterboarding is torture under oath.
We have Susan Crawford and now this Red Cross report that uses the term explicitly, I guess, I'm waiting for some automatic grand jury thing to kick in here somewhere.
Well, as I say in the New York Review piece, there is a very obvious contradiction between Eric Holder's statement.
Eric Holder is the Attorney General of the United States, the highest law enforcement official in the country, who said bluntly under oath, as you say, that waterboarding is torture.
There's a contradiction between that and the fact that the former Vice President is among those who basically has admitted that the United States waterboarded prisoners.
And this is a matter of record.
So on the one hand, you have the Attorney General saying this is behaviors torture, and then you have former officials, including the Vice President, say we did it and we're glad we did it.
And the former CIA director also has admitted this publicly that this was done.
And now we have a rather detailed description of waterboarding from the people who were subjected to it in this ICRC report.
So you have a kind of circle being closed here.
And as I write in this piece, you know, there's a contradiction staring us in the face, which is that, you know, our Attorney General says this is torture.
Our Vice President and former Vice President said that he did it.
So what is going to happen exactly?
And I don't know the answer to that, but people have proposed various solutions, from the Truth Commission that Senator Patrick Leahy wants, he's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to the investigation that the Intelligence Committee and the Senate is undertaking, to the calls by many human rights organizations, including the ACLU and others, for investigations leading to prosecution.
So you have a lot of proposals on the table, but it's unclear how exactly these contradictions are going to be resolved.
Well, yeah, and let's hope all the different ideas don't serve to kind of blunt the force of each other and lessen the possibility.
It does seem like we're right up against either there's a law or there's not, and you can't pretend that this is just an alternative set of procedures anymore.
We have a word in English for that already.
We know what it is.
It's torture and it's illegal.
And if you or I waterboarded somebody, they'd put us in prison for it, right?
I think you're right.
It ought to be as simple as that, I thought.
Well, there have been prosecutions for this, you know, beginning in 1901 under U.S. law, and as recently as 1983, I believe, in Texas, actually, that someone was prosecuted for using this on prisoners, a sheriff, if I remember rightly.
So, you know, there's a precedent for actually prosecuting this.
Even government employees.
Wow, not just private citizens.
And, by the way, when you talk about these specific descriptions of the waterboarding here, as never before in this Red Cross report, one of the things I'd certainly never heard was that doctors were present and would hook some kind of gadget to their finger to measure the oxygen level in their blood to make sure, this is the quote-unquote simulated drowning, to make sure that they were almost all the way dead before they stopped, basically.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't think that's been anywhere before either.
You buried the lead there, buddy.
Yeah, well, it's a lengthy piece with a lot, as you know, with a lot of quotations.
And I think it's the accumulated detail from the report that makes a difference.
So I'd certainly urge listeners who are interested in this subject to either go out and get the New York Review of Books, or it's on their website, which is www.nybooks.com.
Are you going to make the actual Red Cross report available?
Well, that's not up to me.
You know, that's up to other people.
So we'll see.
I hope so.
That means it's up to your source or it's up to the New York Review of Books?
It's up to the people who actually possess it.
Okay.
Well, first of all, I guess I'd like you to help me complete my list of countries where black sites were located.
If you could kind of just run through off the top of your head or I could get you started.
Well, we know, you know, this has been reported to a greater or lesser degree by other people before, notably in the Washington Post.
Goodness, I'm blanking on her name now, a wonderful reporter there.
Daphna Lindsay, right?
No, Dana Priest.
Oh, Dana Priest, right, right.
Wonderful reporter who reported this in 2005, also been prominently reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.
But some of the sites certainly include Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania, probably Morocco.
There may be others as well, but I think the ones I've named are pretty clearly indicated already that there were secret facilities in those countries.
Was there any indication in the Red Cross report of prisoners being held on ships at sea or at Diego Garcia?
Not in the Red Cross report.
Okay.
That wasn't in any of the stories of the people that they interviewed.
But now, when you say they interviewed 13 people, that wasn't everybody that they moved from the black sites to Guantanamo, was it?
That was like their random sample?
Well, the number is 14.
I'm sorry.
That's who they interviewed.
According to Dana Priest's report in 2005 in The Washington Post, probably about 100 prisoners went through, in some way, the black site system.
Some of those people ended up at Guantanamo earlier.
She divides it into a kind of first and second tier, the first tier being 30-odd prisoners and the second tier being another 70 who were then brought to Guantanamo, mostly.
So the number seems to be approximately 100.
And now there's also apparently kind of, if you're going to run a torture factory, you have to keep a lot of doctors on staff to keep people alive so you don't accidentally kill them.
So do you have any indication of how many doctors were in on this?
And is that already officially in the law, against the law, or only against the moral law?
There isn't any indication of how many doctors might have been involved or other professionals.
Remember that what we have here is the results of interviews with detainees themselves.
And they would have had a view, obviously, that was necessarily limited.
They were in cells, they were restrained, they saw only the people who came to them.
So the passage you referred to earlier had to do with the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, very much a high-value detainee who is thought to be one of the major planners of the 9-11 attacks and other terrorist attacks.
And he is the one who mentioned that a doctor was present while he was waterboarded and had put a kind of gauge on his finger to continue to monitor his heart rate and perhaps blood pressure and oxygen content in his blood.
So it is important to point out that the information that's in the report came directly from the views of what the detainees could see.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm getting too far off track here.
Not at all.
I'm trying to fill in all my gaps.
Well, and this guy, how do you say it, Kiriakou?
Kiriakou.
Kiriakou, I'm sorry.
He is the interrogator, an interrogator of Abu Zubaydah, who was the first high-value detainee taken in March of 2002.
He did an extensive interview with ABC News about a year, a little more than a year ago, I guess.
And I quote from that interview, from the rough transcript of it.
And he gives you a very pretty detailed account of the fact, first of all, that when Abu Zubaydah woke up from his coma, he'd been wounded badly in the operation to capture him, shot three times with an AK-47.
When he woke up, Kiriakou was the first man he saw of a CIA agent sitting on his bedside, and he tried to speak to him.
Kiriakou tried to speak to him in Arabic.
He wouldn't answer in Arabic.
He insisted on speaking English.
He said he wouldn't talk to him in God's language.
And his first words were to ask Kiriakou to smother him, to kill him.
And Kiriakou said, no, no, we have plans for you, because obviously they wanted to get what information he had out of him one way or another.
Well, you know, I was surprised to read about Zubaydah that he went, I guess, after they stopped letting the FBI agents interrogate him, he then went two or three months before the CIA interrogations began.
Is that right?
That particular sequence is unclear.
What is clear is that the original methods that were used in the interrogation were so-called more traditional methods used by the FBI.
And then at a certain point, the FBI interrogators left and the CIA took over and started to use this enhanced interrogation procedures or alternative set of procedures.
But the actual time sequence there is not absolutely clear.
It's just that the FBI began and CIA continued.
You refer to the ABC report where the principal committee was all there in the White House.
And I believe that was in the case of Khatami again, choreographing his torture at Guantanamo Bay.
But was this the same time frame?
The torture of Zubaydah was right at the same time they were doing this to Khatami?
No, no.
The principal committee that I talk about in the review piece was being brought information day to day by George Tenet.
This is according to ABC News about the interrogation of Zubaydah in the spring and summer of 2002.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That was about Zubaydah then?
It was.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
I appreciate you doing it.
I hope people will look at the New York Review piece.
And I hope you'll get it across that it's absolutely easily available on their website, nybooks.com.
And the piece is there, and I hope they'll read the whole thing.
A large excerpt was published in the New York Times last Sunday, about 3,000 words.
But the original New York Review piece is what has the long extracts from the CIA interrogations, and I hope they'll have a look at it.
Yep, and it's on the newsstands now, and if you just go to the viewpoint section at antiwar.com, you'll find the link there as well.
Excellent.
I appreciate that.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time on the show, Mark.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
It's good to be with you.
All right, everybody.
That's Mark Danner, journalism professor at UC Berkeley, regular writer for the New York Review of Books.
And, again, it's available on their website right now, US Torture Voices from the Black Sites.