05/20/09 – Jeremy Sachill – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And introducing Jeremy Scahill.
He's got an incredible new article at Alternet.
I've been, well you heard me yesterday begging you to go read it.
Little known military thug squad still brutalizing prisoners at Gitmo under Obama.
Welcome to the show, Jeremy.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you.
I've listened to the show a bunch of times.
This is my first time on the show, Scott.
Yeah, well, you know, I actually owe you an apology along those lines.
I have a rule that I don't interview authors until I've actually read the book.
And that Blackwater book of yours has been sitting in my to-read-very-soon pile for just way too long.
And I felt bad this whole time that I haven't had you on the show to talk about any of the other great stuff that you've done.
Because I wanted to read the dang Blackwater book.
And not that the issue is over.
I promise still to get to it someday.
But I figured with an article like this, I've got to go ahead and break my rule and bring you on to discuss this issue here.
Glad to be here.
And by the way, I've been a fan of yours since the 1990s when I saw you bust Wesley Clark's chops in public in front of a lot of people for murdering the makeup lady at the TV studio there in Serbia along with other civilians.
And actually, I have a question about some of your reporting from back in those days.
And I'm sorry to just hit you with this and put you on the spot.
But I remember the New York Times reporting that America bombed Iraq on average of every other day during the Clinton years.
And your work had a more conservative estimate.
America bombed Iraq every three days on average during the Clinton years and the days of the no-fly zones and the blockades.
And I was just wondering if you could explain where you got those numbers.
You worked that out yourself or do you remember what your source was for that?
Sure.
First of all, the Clinton administration carried out what was at the time the longest sustained bombing campaign, U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.
And they did it, of course, as you say, under the guise of the so-called no-fly zones in the north of Iraq and the south of Iraq ostensibly to, quote-unquote, protect the Shiite community in the south of Iraq and the Kurdish community in the north of Iraq.
What we found, though, and I traveled extensively to Iraq during that period, was that the U.S. bombs were often killing the very civilians that official U.S. policy said were being protected by those U.S. bombs.
As for the statistics that you're talking about, I had never seen that estimate from the New York Times.
But I can tell you that I was able to come up with that stat by reviewing United Nations incident reports that were compiled by a very brave diplomat named Hans von Spahnik, who was the head of the Iraq program for the United Nations and against the wishes of the U.S. government at the time and the British government at the time, began actually sending out U.N. investigators to the scene of every U.S. or British bombing that took place in the north and south of Iraq.
And he did it under the auspices of protecting U.N. personnel.
That was the most comprehensive database that we had of the U.S. attacks.
And I'm pretty certain that one out of every three days was the most verifiable estimate that anyone could have come up with.
I'd be very curious to see the New York Times estimate, because, quite frankly, the New York Times was atrociously silent for much of the Clinton administration's war against the people of Iraq, both economic war and military war.
Well, you know, it's been a long time, but the image in my vaguely photographic memory is of a couple of column inches and a little sidebar thing that was, you know, not...
Right.
That's what it was generally.
I mean, they would put in, and it's very similar to the way the corporate media continues to cover some of the most important crimes that the United States is committing around the world, where, you know, you'll have it covered.
It's like on page 25, buried somewhere, on the Saturday New York Times, the least read paper of the week.
Personally, my favorite time to read the New York Times is Saturday, because that's when they occasionally squeeze in something that actually means something.
But during the Clinton years, it was particularly dark, both in the Balkans as well as in Iraq, when it came to having the truth printed in the establishment press.
Well, and it's such an important story, and, you know, the blackout on the story is really all important, too, because how could the American people have ever believed that the Iraqis would greet us with flowers and candy, and it would be like when we liberated France from the Nazis and all this kind of thing, if they had really understood that, no, we've been bombing these people pretty much nonstop since January 1991.
Right.
I mean, and, you know, what I've said regularly over the years is that United States policy toward Iraq has been consistent.
It's been consistently anti-Iraqi.
I mean, you have the CIA supporting the rise of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party in the 1950s.
You had Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in 1983, and again in 1984.
At the height of the brutality of the Iraqi regime, the government was being taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism by the Reagan administration, being supplied with chemical weapons and other unconventional weapons, only when Saddam Hussein stood up against U.S. corporate interests and invaded Kuwait, basically an oil field with a flag, in response to Kuwait diagonally drilling into Iraq, did the United States say, oh, well, he's now an S.O.
B.
He went from being our S.O.
B., in the words of Henry Kissinger, to just being an S.O.
B., and so they decided, well, we have to take him out, and all of a sudden he became tantamount to Hitler.
The Ba'ath Party became like the Nazi Party.
Clinton picked up the gauntlet and ran with it and turned the military attack on Iraq's civilian population into an economic war.
Bush then picked that up, invaded Iraq, overthrew the Iraqi government, and unleashed the hounds of hell on Iraqi civilians, and now Barack Obama is rebranding and downsizing the occupation.
So, in a nutshell, what we've seen is a consistent U.S. policy against Iraqi people since the 1950s, regardless of what party happens to be an official power in Washington.
Well, and we really have been bombing them outright.
I mean, support for Iraq and Iran at the same time in the 1980s, and a war which got, I guess, a million people killed on both sides, something like that.
That still, in a sense, is still Saddam's war, kind of, sort of.
We're responsible for that.
But America outright, our Air Force, has been bombing this country for now 18 years.
Right, and I think that one of the things that is really important to note here is that as big of a thug and a criminal as Saddam Hussein was, the fact is, and people can scream until they're blue in the face about this, but here's the fact.
It was a hell of a lot safer in Iraq for the vast majority of Iraqis when Saddam was president than right now when Barack Obama is the default emperor of the country, with these pliant puppet figures like Nouri al-Maliki hiding inside the Green Zone, or in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who would be murdered in about two seconds if the United States pulled out of that country.
The fact is that the United States has made these countries less safe for the majority of people, particularly for women and children.
Well, and certainly made us less safe by our interventions there as well.
Yep.
All right, now, so let's get to this most important article.
We ran it as our top headline on Saturday, or Sunday, I forget.
Oh, on Sunday we ran it as our top headline on AntiWar.com.
It's at Alternet.org also.
Little known military thug squad still brutalizing prisoners at Guantanamo under Obama.
So now we can dispense with, oh, this is all about waterboarding college Sheikh Mohammed a few times or something like this, and we get to the real fact that thousands and thousands and thousands of people, one counted, across the war on terror have been subjected to basically Geneva Convention-less treatment.
And this continues at Guantanamo Bay, not in the form of stress positions and loud M&M music and bright lights and sleep deprivation and interrogation, but simply the riot squad that goes around Guantanamo beating the hell out of everybody, apparently just for fun, or what the hell is going on there?
Right.
I mean, on the one side, and you did a good job of running through that, on the one side you have interrogators, as they're classified, who are using the tactics of torture that have been discussed in all of these various memos and that we all know about, and that includes the waterboarding and the sleep deprivation, et cetera.
And that certainly needs to be investigated, and the criminals who are responsible for that need to be prosecuted.
But on the flip side of it, Scott, you have a thug squad that is a military police unit known as the Immediate Reaction Force, the IRF, which is essentially like a bunch of big, thuggish bouncers from a bar, basically, that are sent in to mercilessly punish prisoners using any kind of abuse tactics that they want or torture tactics that they want.
And the ones that I've documented that were used under both the Bush administration and now under the Obama administration are the placing of prisoners' heads in toilets and then flushing them repeatedly, taking feces from one prisoner and smearing it in the face of another, breaking the bones of prisoners, squeezing their testicles, dousing them with chemicals, hog-tying them and leaving them for hours on end with their arms tied to their legs behind them.
This is a military police team that under the official standard operating procedures of Guantanamo was only supposed to be used if a prisoner was posing a threat to a guard or was engaged in some kind of an uprising or rebellion.
But what we find is that this force was used to brutalize prisoners and to make it clear to them that they were always running the risk, just by their very essence of life, breathing air, they were always running the risk of being beaten for the slightest act of resistance or defiance.
And those acts of resistance and defiance were things like having two Styrofoam cups in their cell instead of one that they brought back from the mess hall or from eating.
I mean, this is a despicable force that Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights says are the black shirts of Guantanamo.
And to me, and this is the last thing I'll say before I shut up here for a second, to me, this is one of the best arguments for prosecution, for holding these torturers responsible, for holding those Bush administration figures responsible, because Obama is sending a message to those who are doing these actual acts on the ground at Guantanamo and in other sites around the world, that we actually aren't going to do anything to you, so you do whatever you feel is necessary to keep your environment of brutality up and running at Guantanamo or Bagram or anywhere else where Obama is denying rights to any kind of due process to people.
All right, well, a couple things here.
First of all, basically what we're talking about, and we see this kind of thing on TV in American prisons, MSNBC will do that series that they, I guess, are still doing about American prisons.
So what we're talking about basically is like the shock team or whatever.
They're dressed up like riot police, basically.
They have shields and riot helmets, and if a prisoner is completely out of line in his cell, the theory goes, you send in five or six guys so that it's overwhelming force, everybody grab a limb, and then we can restrain the guy and give him a shot of Thorazine or whatever the hell.
That's basically what we're talking about, only in your story what's made abundantly clear is that this is punishment itself and for the slightest thing and amounts to simply torture for, I don't know, the fun of the guards doing it or what exactly the purpose is.
I've heard from people who have worked in these riot squads inside of prisons since my article came out, and what they say is that sounds very similar in terms of the approach where you go in, the five-man team, you use pepper spray or some other chemical agent, each member of that team is assigned a different body part of the prisoner that they're restraining or pinning down.
They go in, they restrain him, and they remove him from the cell.
They're generally called extraction teams.
But what these prison people that I've been hearing from are saying is that what's being described here is using a force that is supposed to be defensive in nature as an offensive squad to brutalize people, and that really is where the huge line is crossed.
It's not that these guys are going in and stopping a prisoner from stabbing or shanking another prisoner or that they have a guard held hostage.
The overwhelming majority of the times these forces have been used, it seems, is as a punishment force or as a force to try to scare prisoners into exhibiting the slightest bit of resistance to U.S. captivity.
Well, and you also say in here that when Obama got elected that all the prisoners were celebrating and thinking, hey, we're finally going to get out of here.
It was announced that he was going to close Guantanamo.
And this is something that I think usually goes unmentioned but I think is important, the idea that even, I don't know, let's pretend that there's one wing of Guantanamo where the guards are real nice and the people are treated with basic respect or whatever.
Simply being of the belief that you have no hope of ever being released, that you have no hope of ever really even having the chance to plead your own case, is itself torture, an indefinite detention without any sort of available remedy.
That is torture itself.
Right, and you're absolutely right.
And I'll give you another specific example of something that's happened since Obama's inauguration.
In February, there were 16 Guantanamo prisoners who had that kind of hopelessness that you're describing and they engaged in a hunger strike to both protest their treatment there but also because it would be better to die at their own hands than to be continuously tortured.
What happened at Guantanamo is that these Earth teams, these immediate reaction force teams, were sent in with tubes that were the thickness of two fingers, shoved down their nose into their stomach with no even basic analgesic or any kind of painkiller.
They were then force-fed Ensure milkshakes, overfed to the point where they then end up vomiting it back up.
And the tube is yanked out of their nose again, causing several prisoners, in this case, to pass out.
And this, in and of itself, is an act of torture, shoving this tube down with no painkiller and then yanking it back out violently by grabbing the prisoner's head, putting a boot on their chest, and then yanking it as though you're picking a weed from your garden or something.
And once again, medical professionals participating in the torture.
So Obama can pay all the lip service in the world he wants to the Geneva Conventions or to upholding U.S. law or the U.S. Constitution.
The reality is that the status quo is alive and well at Guantanamo.
And unfortunately, we see the Democratic leadership, Harry Reid and all of these others, making these ridiculous arguments to deny due process to the individuals being held there, because their guy is in power now, everything is fine and dandy.
Guantanamo is like a paradise if you listen to the Democratic leadership.
Well, and that's the thing, too, is, I guess, that initial relief that, hey, Obama said he's going to close this place and we'll eventually get to go somewhere.
That's already gone.
And everybody, all the prisoners there, most of whom, I mean, except for the few that I'm already convinced are guilty as hell, like Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, maybe that Qatani guy, the rest of them, I presume, are innocent.
They haven't had any sort of real due process, and they're all right back to that state of hopelessness again.
Right.
I mean, there's no question that there are, you know, brutally evil individuals that have participated in attacks on civilians, on U.S. civilians, and that there has to be some way of dealing with this in a law enforcement capacity.
But the fact is that you have right now 240 people being held at Guantanamo with no charges whatsoever.
They have not been given any access to any ability to plead their case or to see any evidence against them.
And what we see the Obama administration doing is picking up the Bush administration's line on this and saying, well, we're going to continue this military tribunal system where there's going to be secret evidence, where there's going to be very little choice in the counsel that these individuals are presented with, and that there's going to be witnesses who are not going to be able to be cross-examined, whose testimony is going to be presented against them.
Obama said, oh, well, we're going to tweak it and we're going to make it so that it's a more effective system and ensures greater rights for them.
However, yesterday in the New York Times, big story, Obama, actually, it's all cosmetic changes, not according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, not according to, you know, independent journalists, according to military lawyers.
People who actually work in that system are saying that Obama's changes are cosmetic and that the same violation of the rights of these individuals is continuing.
Tell us the story of Mr. Degg Hayes.
Right, Omar Degg Hayes.
Well, the way that I really found out about these teams, I mean, I had heard about them in some form or another here and there because of Brandon Neely.
Brandon Neely was one of the guys on these teams at Guantanamo, and I was familiar with his story because he's spoken out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has come forward and really tried to present what happened and what he participated in at Guantanamo.
So it was on my radar a little bit.
And then I read the Spanish judge Balthazar Garzon's investigation of the Bush torture team, and in his investigation he cites the case of a British resident named Omar Degg Hayes and describes him being irked, in other words, attacked by one of these IRS teams repeatedly, where he was blinded in his right eye.
And so I then began to investigate who these teams are and what exactly they do at Guantanamo, at the Guantanamo prison camp.
And so Omar Degg Hayes was a guy who originally was from the U.S.
His father was killed by the Qaddafi government in the 1980s.
They fled to Britain.
He was living there.
He married an Afghan woman in the 1990s when he was a law student in Britain, ended up spending time traveling around Afghanistan and Pakistan and was arrested after 9-11 in Lahore, Pakistan, and was sent through a series of U.S. secret prisons where he was held underground for weeks on end in the dark, where he was forced to watch other prisoners being tortured.
He was bounced around before ending up at Guantanamo.
When he arrived at Guantanamo he was repeatedly tortured, not just by interrogators during the course of what happened to all these other prisoners, but by these IRS teams where they actually came in and they would beat him.
They would gang beat him.
And I detail in my story numerous earthings of Omar Degg Hayes, where he had the feces of another prisoner smeared in his face, his head was placed in the toilet, and it was repeatedly flushed over and over and over.
The teams came into his cell and intentionally tried to break his nose, saying, you know, one of the guys said, quote, if his nose is broken, that's good.
We want to break his effing nose.
They also tried to drown him through something that sounds like waterboarding, except these guys, the IRF teams, physically took a hose, put it up to his nose, and turned it on at full blast, sending water shooting at a high speed up into his nose.
And he said that happened to him three separate times.
This is just one guy.
And there are independent medical reports that indicate that what he's saying is true.
But the other thing, Scott, about what happened to Omar Degg Hayes and others is that according to the standard operating procedures, all of these actions on the part of these teams, number one, were supposed to have been videotaped, and number two, were supposed to have then had sworn statements from all the people who participated in it afterwards.
I reviewed hundreds of pages of declassified incident reports, and they almost seem to have been written by the same person with different handwriting, because they all say the same thing.
Went off without a hitch.
Prisoner wasn't injured.
Prisoner was sent back after medical evaluation.
Cleared him.
The videotapes.
Brandon Neely, who was on one of these IRF teams, said that they used to videotape with no tape in the recorder, or they would point the camera away from it.
The ACLU tried videotapes.
The Bush administration argued that it was national security, we can't release them.
No one has ever seen any of these tapes.
So if they followed procedure, presumably there would be videotapes that would either show that this is all propaganda from Omar Degg Hayes and the other prisoners who were beaten up by this thug squad, or it will show war crimes being committed by U.S. soldiers at Guantanamo.
Well, here's the thing, though, and I know you know this as well as I do.
When people are brown and speak a funny language, people can't understand and wear funny hats, and the government says they're bad, people really don't care about that.
So how about this, Jeremy?
How about telling the story of the IRFing of Army Sergeant Sean Baker?
Right.
Sean Baker was a Gulf War veteran and was in the military police during the 1991 Gulf War, and then ended up being deployed to Guantanamo in 2002-2003 to work as a military police officer.
And in January of 2003, he was ordered by one of his superior officers to take off his BDU, his battle dress uniform, and put on an orange jumpsuit and pretend to be or play the role of a restive Guantanamo detainee.
He was told that he was being used in a training drill for these immediate reaction force teams and that all of his fellow soldiers were going to know that he was a U.S. soldier and that it was just a training drill, and that if it was a case where he felt that it was getting too excessive, he could call out a code word, red, to call off the hounds and that they would stop in their attempt to, quote-unquote, subdue him.
Well, when he went in there that day to the cell and his fellow soldiers came in, they gang-beat him into a pulp.
And even though he was calling out, red, red, they didn't stop because the superiors had not told them that he was a U.S. soldier.
And so he gets beaten up really badly.
Even after he said, I'm a U.S. soldier, I'm a U.S. soldier, they continued to beat him.
He now has permanent brain damage.
He did survive, but he has permanent brain damage and suffers seizures, sometimes as many as 10 to 12 seizures a day and never had any such condition before.
And so Scott Horton, the other Scott Horton, who I'm sure you're familiar with, the military and constitutional law expert, said to me, look, if they did this to Sergeant Sean Baker and he was a U.S. soldier, imagine what they're doing to a bunch of detainees who have no access to getting their story to the outside world except for the occasional lucky visit from a lawyer.
And this individual, this soldier, Sean Baker, has an ongoing lawsuit against the Department of Defense and several Bush administration officials for his treatment.
And the brutalization of Sean Baker is a gut-wrenching story.
And it quite frankly pales in comparison to some of the allegations of what's been done to the Muslim prisoners inside of Guantanamo.
Who each and every one of whom is also an individual and has human rights just like everybody else.
But I think that really is the thing, though.
It's important to say, hey, listen, here's a kid who could have been your neighbor, and this is what they did to him.
You say in the article he's got, what, 10 to 12 seizures a day from his brain damage that they gave him.
And this was, he got beat up by these guys once.
Right, he got beat up once.
I mean, some of these guys have beaten up the SPUG squad multiple times in the same day.
Some of them eight or nine times in a week.
Some of them are also subjected to what's called double-earthing, where instead of five people beating them, they'll have ten people beating them or even more than that.
And I think that while it's important not to act as though this force is somehow disconnected from the broader system of torture, I do think that there should be particular attention paid to this, because it's not even part of a system.
It's basically taking five thugs and saying, just go hog-wild on this.
It reminds me of the gang initiation things, where you just have people that just beat the living hell out of another human being with no thought whatsoever about what they're doing.
And think of the most sick, twisted, and sadistic ways to harm another individual.
Were these guys all people that killed squirrels as kids or something?
Because it really seems like they have a Ph.
D. in just sadistic, murder-like tactics of people.
I'm sorry, I'm completely drawing a blank on where I read this, but it was just in the last week or something, where one of these guys was describing the interrogators at...
Oh, I know what it was.
It was the 2006 Esquire article that features McChrystal as the guy who kept the Red Cross out of the military camp there in Iraq.
And they talked about... one of the quotes in there was, I think it was from Ian Fishback.
And he talked about how the... see, good old memory kicking in there.
And he's talking about how, listen, to a lot of these interrogators, torturing these people is fun.
Let's get to the point here.
This is fun, to tie somebody to the wall and beat the hell out of them, that's a certain kind of American, and that's the kind of American that Uncle Sam is looking for.
That's the few and the proud, right there.
Right.
I mean, they would say that...
I think they would say in their drills, like James Yee, the former Army chaplain there, who then tried to imprison him and say he himself was involved with terrorism.
He writes in his book that they used to have these kind of pep rallies before they would go in and beat somebody to a pulp, and would refer to, you know, we need to go and get ours, or get some when we go in there.
They very much viewed it as we can do whatever we want to these individuals because they're the terrorists, and heck, it's like a sporting event.
You know, they would go in and just punch people in the back, even prisoners who were already on the ground with their hands interlocked behind their heads.
They would still go in and just beat them to a pulp, even though they were there to surrender it.
They were giving it.
And so you're right, I do think that there were some particularly sick and twisted individuals who were treating this like it was a sporting event, and just beating the living daylights out of other human beings for fun.
Now, you learn a lot of this that you report in this article, as you mention there, from a report by the Spanish prosecutor who has begun some sort of criminal proceeding there.
I'm not sure how far along it is.
The other Scott Horton could tell you for sure.
But, well, I guess I'm learning, I learned in your article that it has gone this far, that there's this report that has such detail about the I.R.
F. squads.
Well, I mean, here's what I would say about that.
There is detail about the I.R.
F., the IRFing of Omar Deghayes and one other individual who's at the center of the Spanish investigation.
But a lot of the detail on this that I got was from lawyers who have been documenting the abuse of their individual prisoners that they're representing, as well as the testimony of people who are former I.R.
F. operators at Guantanamo.
And I guess the broader point I'm trying to make with this story is, if no one in the United States, not the Congress or the Justice Department, nor the President is going to take this on and actually stop this, first of all, but secondly prosecute it, the Spanish could well be, the Spanish investigation, the only way that the lid is blown off of this terror squad that's being used by the U.S. at Guantanamo right now.
In short, what's happening with the Spanish investigation is that there are two investigations.
One, which is against the back of Douglas Feith and you and other lawyers, probably is going to go nowhere.
But the one that this one is a part of, that this story is about, is a wide-ranging investigation into the entire torture system at Guantanamo.
And Michael Ratner and others are saying that they think that the Spanish are going to issue arrest warrants very soon for specific officials from the Bush era, meaning that it would be very difficult for them to travel to Europe.
Now we may poo-poo that, and people in the United States might say, oh, well that's just the Spanish government.
Remember what happened to Augusto Pinochet when he was facing prosecution in Europe.
He was put under house arrest and it sent shockwaves.
I remember...
Well, and he was arrested in England on his indictment in Spain.
Right, exactly, that's the point.
So when that happened, there was sort of a joke, but I think it's probably true.
Henry Kissinger was afraid to leave the country when Augusto Pinochet got arrested.
You know, if we're not going to uphold the U.S. Constitution here, and we're not going to respect treaties that we've signed as a nation, maybe Spain needs to do it for us.
Yeah, well, and you're right at the heart of this point too, because this is, you know, the birth of this country came from the Declaration of Independence.
If we want to maintain our independence and not have American citizens of any description, whether they're from Vice President Cheney's office or anywhere else, being subject to trial without their American Bill of Rights to protect them, then we are supposed to take the responsibility and do the prosecuting.
It's not supposed to be up to the Spanish.
It's supposed to be up to us.
Right, well, and that's one of the reasons, unfortunately, why the Democrats are so spineless about this.
I mean, there's the broader point that they're always spineless, particularly when it comes to war policy.
You have these hawkish neoliberals that are just like the neocons.
I mean, they're one big happy family.
But the Democrats were not only aware all of this was happening.
Nancy Pelosi can fumble for papers all she wants and try to figure out what the line is that some aide of hers has written for, but we've known for years that Nancy Pelosi was briefed on this.
All of the senior Democrats on the Intelligence Committee were briefed on this.
They knew it.
They funded it.
They didn't raise a peep when it actually mattered, when this was getting off the ground and running.
The Democrats, during the Clinton administration, laid the groundwork for almost all of the most repressive aspects of the Bush administration's policy regime, from the policy in Iraq and Afghanistan to domestic policy, the Patriot Act and others.
They're complicit in this.
They don't want an actual investigation.
That's why Obama says, reflection, not retribution.
Look, I think all of us should try that the next time we get pulled over by a cop.
Say, oh, I'm sorry, officer.
The president said reflection, not retribution.
No ticket for me, please.
What message does this send to common thugs on the streets of our cities across the country when the president of the United States says, we're not going to look backward.
We're not going to investigate the most heinous crimes.
That basically is a permission flip for every dictator around the world to do whatever he or she wants to do to their own people, to other people's people, when the most powerful nation on Earth has no respect for its own laws and does it in full view of the rest of the world and allows this kind of systematic torture, it means that everyone else around the world can say, we can do it too.
That's Jeremy Scahill.
He's an independent journalist who reports frequently for Democracy Now!
, spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia.
He's currently a Puffin writing fellow at the Nation Institute and is the author of Blackwater, the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
His website is rebelreports.com, and this most incredible and important article is called Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Jeremy.
Let's do this again soon.
Alright, cool.
Scott, thanks for all the work you do.