04/30/09 – Andy Behlen – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Well, you guys might remember, yesterday I mentioned this awesome new website, which I really like, although I'm not so sure about the color scheme exactly, but still, it's brand new, I think, and it's really great already.
It's called sanstorture.org.
Well, right now I have on the phone Andy Balin, the guy that put the thing together.
Welcome to the show, Andy.
Hey, how's it going?
It's going real good.
Thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, no problem.
Well, so, great job putting this site together.
It's a bit of an Antiwar.com kind of thing, it looks like you got going on here, only a little bit more specific, just on torture.
How'd you get started on this?
Well, for a couple of reasons.
I'm a student over at St. Edward's University in Austin, and I'm taking this class right now where they had us engage in a civil engagement project.
They wanted us to go to some rally or something like that and participate in some kind of project like that.
But instead of doing that, I decided to put together this little website and maybe inform a few people about what our government is doing with torturing people and all that kind of stuff.
Oh, that's cool.
So you started out, did you get an A on the project?
Well, I'm actually going to turn it in tomorrow, my report.
I guess I'll find out what I do on it in a couple of days.
Okay, so I haven't actually had enough of a chance to really go through here.
I'm clicking on required readings again.
It's sanstorture.org.
And you've got the Bill of Rights, you've got the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Entry on Torture, looks like some good stuff.
You've got the Torture Memo.
And now, is this plural or what all do we have here in the Torture Memo section?
Yeah, that's just the 2002 report from the Department of Justice to the White House.
I guess that long 50-page thing that the, I forgot which newspaper.
The main Bivey Memo there.
Yeah, yeah, that one.
Yeah, I've just kind of gotten started on this project and hopefully here directly I'll have a few more things up.
But yeah, the idea is just to kind of give people a little bit of background on what's going on and the latest news and that kind of stuff.
A little bit like antiwar.com, that's kind of where I got the idea.
You know, try to inform some people about what our government's doing and maybe change a few minds.
Yeah, right on.
Well, you know, I'm looking at the front page here.
Obama, waterboarding is torture.
Washington Post.
Yeah, but what's he going to do about it?
A commentary by Doug Fever.
And yeah, I really like the setup there.
I don't know if you've got a pen handy, but I've got some recommendations for your sections if you want to.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't have anything handy with me right now.
Well, we'll just email back and forth.
That's kind of the idea.
I want this to be sort of like a community project and maybe get a few other people involved because I've only got so much time in the day to dedicate to this.
But hopefully a few people may want to help me out and send me some links and stuff like that.
Hopefully it can be sort of a community type project.
I don't want it to really be all about myself.
I'm a libertarian, and I think torture is one of those issues that we have allies on the right and the left.
We can get together with them and work on this and try to build the foundations of a free society before we can really argue about economics and that kind of stuff.
We really need to get rid of torture and bring back habeas corpus and all that kind of stuff.
This project is kind of what I'm trying to do.
Yeah, well, you're absolutely right.
It is a matter of putting our priorities straight, and as much as liberals drive me crazy on economics and conservatives too, still we've got to put first things first.
Getting back to the Eighth Amendment, stuff like that, I think very high on the list of priorities.
I really appreciate that.
Now, if people do want to contact you if they can help, I'm here to tell you it takes more than one person to put together Antiwar.com every day, and you are going to need some help with this.
If somebody does want to help you out, how can they contact you, Andy?
Yeah, the best way to get a hold of me is through email.
The email address for the website is info at sanstorture.org.
Info at sanstorture.org.
Yeah, just anybody out there, feel free to send me links.
Anybody want to help with the design of the website?
I know it's kind of pink, but anything like that, I'd be more than willing to work with people and try to make something out of this.
Well, I really appreciate your effort.
I think this is a great start.
Hopefully you'll get an A-plus on your project, and I'll certainly be keeping up with this page.
I mean, this is, as you may know from listening to this show, this is, of course, one of my big issues as well.
Yeah.
The basic theory of, you know, the very, very basic enlightenment principles about self-ownership from hundreds of years ago should have left all of this back in the dark ages in the wax museum, not in our headlines.
It's funny.
I think sometimes if you were to talk to somebody around the Vietnam era, like back in the early 70s or something like that, and ask them, what do you think about torture?
It seems like just about everybody would be like, oh, we're Americans.
We're past that.
We don't torture people.
And here recently, it's like you have to re-teach people that torture is wrong.
I mean, I guess it's from all the state worship and that kind of stuff.
It's where people get that.
But, you know, that's kind of what we have to do, you know, just teach people, yeah, torture doesn't work.
Like that article that Mark Danner, I think it's his name, from the New York Review of Books.
Yeah, Danner.
You know, he talks about how they were torturing these people, and they'd tell them anything they wanted them to hear, anything the interrogators wanted to hear.
I think we all remember back a few years ago all the orange and yellow alerts and all that kind of stuff, that bombs are on the way to schools and power plants and stuff like that.
I mean, it was all just bogus, you know, and it just doesn't work.
But if your motivations are to scare people, then, yeah, it does work.
Yeah, and, you know, I think that's really the irony of the situation, or the real point that I don't think we'll ever really get across on television, is that they knew that people lie under torture.
That's why they were torturing them.
That's why they adopted the tactics of the Soviet Union from their show trials, and of Maoist China from during the era of the Korean War.
How to elicit false confessions?
We need to implicate Saddam Hussein in Osama bin Laden's network somehow.
That was the mission, to lie you and your family and the people you care about into supporting the war against Iraq.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So if the motivations are to scare everybody, then it absolutely does work.
But, you know, if we're going to have a free society, then that shouldn't be allowed, you know.
Damn right.
All right, everybody, SandsTorture.org.
Put it in the top of your list O bookmarks.
And, again, anybody who wants to help Andy Balin out with this new project, info at SandsTorture.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Hey, thanks a bunch, Scott.
All right, y'all, I really do hope you guys will check that out.
And thanks to you, Andy, for putting together such an awesome thing.
I think that's great.