04/04/14 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
You can see why I named it that.
Website is scotthorton.org, again with the name thing.
You can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest on the show today is Marcy Wheeler, the great Empty Wheel, as they call her online, EmptyWheel.net, and on Twitter as well.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Yourself?
I'm doing good.
Oh yeah, I should mention also that you're something or other over there at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald's project with First Look Media and all that.
Still getting off the ground, yes.
That's cool.
Very cool.
Alright.
Very lucky for them.
Okay, so there's lots of wheeling and dealing in D.C. over the release of the torture report, and I guess the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein's committee, has voted to release the summary of the report.
But I guess, you know what, I probably can't even get that far without getting it wrong.
So why don't you straighten us out on what's going on here.
No, no, that's right.
So they voted to release the executive summary, the findings, which include things like CIA lied to Congress, and then the additional and dissenting views.
And what you saw at the end was three people who were opposed to the report voting to release the report, people like Saxby Chambliss and I keep thinking Aaron Burr, Richard Burr, his descendant.
They voted to release it so that they could include their dissenting views so that they can beat up on the report.
And I guess because they were going to lose anyway, right?
And so they had to vote for it to include their part of it, is that it?
Yeah.
Susan Collins was the ninth vote to release it.
She's Angus King, who's independent, but caucuses with the Democrats, voted yes.
But once they had Collins as a Republican voting yes, I think it made it more attractive for people like Chambliss and Burr to come along.
Collins says she has her reservations about how the report was done, but everyone all of a sudden, this is actually breaking news, Collins, even Tom Coburn, have both called this torture this week.
So now all of a sudden, it's okay to use the word torture in D.C. unless you're a big media outlet, in which case you still use techniques or harsh or what have you.
Right.
Enhanced.
I like that.
Harsh.
We just harshed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.
Well, you know, I always kind of resent all the focusing on the waterboarding because that by definition excludes most of the people who were tortured, and that's even by the CIA.
Correct me if I go off the story.
My best understanding, and I'm not Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer, I'm just a lowly old, you know, Scott Horton, the radio show host guy.
But my understanding is, yeah, so the CIA tortured 100 and something people and murdered a handful of them, and the military tortured tens of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay and murdered nobody even is counting how many people.
Is that about right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, everybody goes, oh, you know what?
They only waterboarded three of the worst guys.
You know, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who gives a damn what happens to that guy?
You know?
Right.
One of the interesting things that came out this week in McClatchy, which has had, they've had good reporting on this, is that the report also finds that something like 29 of the detainees that were in CIA custody were in their custody illegally, which I suspect means everything from Khaled al-Mastry, who we, the German immigrant who we picked up and tortured for a number of months and then dumped naked, you know, just dumped him in Kosovo.
And then it probably includes people that we rendered from Iraq illegally because we are an occupying force and we're not allowed to do that.
And who knows what else, but there's, you know, almost 30 people that we detained completely illegally.
Yeah.
We, meaning the CIA, which I don't know how long you've been working there, but I don't.
They're not, they're not paying me.
That's for darn sure.
So, all right, now, well, tell me what it is that you actually have learned so far.
Anything really new to you here?
From the buzz leading up to the report, you know, not, not really, you know, I'm a pessimist.
I know a lot of human rights defenders are really optimistic about this report.
The kind of punchline of the vote to release the report is that the CIA, whom the report accuses of lying repeatedly, of making stuff up, they get to decide what to declassify or not.
So, right.
You know, it's just like, what are they going to actually going to give us?
So there are a few details, like I said, the McClatchy reported, which are new, such as the illegal detainees.
But a lot of it, frankly, you know, that the CIA lied to Congress repeatedly has been in the public record starting since 2009.
You know, they, there are briefings from those, there are notes from those briefings, which, you know, make it very clear they oversold how useful the intelligence from Abu Dhabi was.
They lied about where it came from.
They lied about how many lives they had saved.
They lied about what they were doing to them.
They lied about the tapes they had made of his torture.
They lied about what the review, you know, it's just a long list that we already know.
I suspect we'll learn when the actual report comes out more about the 2004 to 2005 time period, because there's a whole nother set of lies that we know less about.
So I'm, you know, that's something I'm looking forward to, but that hasn't, that hasn't leaked to the press yet.
Right.
I mean, this is what's got my hopes up is that at some point it's because of that number.
6300.
Like, wow, that sounds like a really thick book about torture by some Senate staffers with some access to some documents the rest of us have never seen before.
Can't wait till Marcy writes up her blog entry on that thing.
You know what I mean?
That's what I want to read is what you've got to say about that whole thing.
But just the summary, you know, I don't know, maybe if it may just help normalize the torture more that, okay, well, at least we admitted it.
Now we can, now we've reckoned with it and now we can move forward.
Well, and you know, it, here's what else is going to happen is a John Brennan who only gets named a few times in the torture report, but nevertheless was pretty closely associated with it.
He gets to decide what we get to see, which means he gets to control the timing of it.
And the Republicans on the committee, especially I keep thinking Aaron Burr, but it's Richard Burr.
You know, they've already sort of targeted Mark Udall.
They sort of want to make this into an election year issue for him.
He's up for reelection in Colorado.
He's been very good on this and on NSA.
And so, you know, they're sort of where I see this going is precisely where everything went in 2009 when Nancy Pelosi made kind of a gentle critique and they spent six months claiming she had been briefed on stuff she hadn't been briefed on, which is not to defend the fact that she didn't do more to end torture, but you know, the CIA and the Republicans on the committee, I think are just better at working the press than most of the Democrats have been.
And therefore, it's just going to be another big PR battle for the entire summer about what the torture report actually says.
And given the experience, we know that, for example, John Rizzo and Jose Rodriguez have had pretty unlimited ability to speak to the press about what went on in the torture program.
And you compare that with Ali Soufan, who is the FBI officer who was involved in the interrogation about Louis Biden, you know, they completely gutted his book.
Same topic should be, you know, should be subjected to the same role of declassification.
And yet his warrant.
Same with Glenn Pearl, who was an interrogator, but his book, big gaping holes in it because of the censors.
So, you know, it's not going to be a fair debate.
And I also think the Democrats aren't prepping for the kind of debate that we're going to see.
So it's going to be ugly, nasty partisanship for most of the summer on this.
And many of the stories so far talked about Iraq and the role of trying to beat the name Saddam out of these guys.
I'm not about the report itself, but we know that they look at individual detainees and at least in 2009, there were hints that that included even Sheikh Ali, who's the worst case of that.
Right.
Even Sheikh Ali, under torture, said that al-Qaeda had helped, had gone to Iraq to develop chemical weapons, vice versa.
In other words, said not only that al-Qaeda and Iraq had ties, but also that they kind of tied it in WMD.
So it was like a trifecta that was used in Colin Powell's U.N. speech, which was what persuaded a lot of people on the fence.
And the guy retracted it, I think actually retracted it before even it was used in the U.N. speech.
Once he got into U.S. rather than Egyptian custody, he retracted that claim.
So there are cases like that and there are cases where, you know, and again, that's this stuff is in the public, much of it is in the public record.
Again, what I'm really curious about is, for example, Hassan Ghul, who was captured in 2004 by Kurds and started talking immediately and gave up the career that eventually led to Osama bin Laden.
And then we wanted more information out of him, and I think also we wanted, we being the Bush administration, wanted to gin up election year fever and so said we have to keep torturing him for more information.
And his case is one of the ones that the CIA lied about to DOJ to get approvals for.
I can say that with pretty high degree of confidence.
And so that's one case I'm really looking forward to, partly because he was so central in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
But also, you know, we captured him.
He was kind of doing the initial reach between al-Qaeda and and Mousavi in Iraq and therefore the original, the initial outreach that actually did lead to al-Qaeda being in Iraq because we caused a war there.
And, you know, I think that the details on his torture would be rather interesting.
And the timing, especially, I suspect that CIA lied to DOJ about when they tortured him and where, because it wasn't necessarily legal for them to take him out of the country.
Lots of stuff like that.
By the way, just now when you said Mousavi, did you mean to say Zarqawi?
I did, yes.
Between Saddam and Osama?
Are you correcting me now?
Thank you.
Yeah.
No.
Well, hey, I screw up all the time.
Yeah, I'm just trying to be helpful.
I thought I wasn't sure if Mousavi, I know him and his brother.
Well, there's a whole bunch of things to say about him, but that's different.
But no, the yeah, the fake Saddam al-Qaeda link, as Zarqawi was definitely, other than the the al-Libi lies, you're saying it was this guy, Gul, was who they tortured into claiming that Zarqawi was buds with Saddam and Osama.
Is that right?
Yeah, I remember that letter that came out in 2004.
He was the one carrying it.
And there were questions at the time about its provenance.
And then we found out later that he had already told Osama, no, I want to fight the king of Jordan, not fight with you against the Americans.
I don't care about them.
And Saddam had a death mark on his head and orders to the not just not just a Bolo, but APB, All Points Bulletin, if you find this guy, kneecap him.
And meanwhile, the Weekly Standard and all the neocons are pushing all these lies about how Saddam had given him a peg leg.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Peg Leg Terrorist.
That's how you know somebody's lying.
No, I mean, if I'm going to get the name wrong again, but I think Benitash actually does have a fake leg, which kind of made it especially hard for him to be hung by his arm.
But it happened.
It wasn't Saddam that gave it to him, was it?
No, no, it was probably CIA money.
Yeah.
Laundered through the ISI, right?
Yeah, at some point anyway, along the chain, it all comes back to the central bank, doesn't it?
The reserve currency of the world.
All right.
Let me see here.
Oh, I know I wanted to ask you about the people who believed them.
Do you think that matters that the Senate report?
And I'm sorry, because I know your your beaten path is really the little details.
But, you know, also just think back to how many people took on all the talking points in defense of the torture regime.
I mean, the Bush administration and Roger Ailes and whoever co-conspirators with them, they really normalized torture in American society where this isn't a thing that a barbarian does.
This isn't a thing that a bad guy does in a movie.
This is the thing that your heroes do now.
And, you know, people really internalize this truth.
And so then I wonder if you think that now they're going to be mad that, hey, I use those talking points and fighting with my family in favor of torture.
And now you're telling me that it was really all for not because you have a pretty, you know, extensive list of lies that they told to Congress, that they told to the people here about what was going on.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to see a range of that, I think, as I said, Coburn actually admitted that some of this could be, you know, it was a very hedged comment, but he did say that, well, it could be considered torture.
That's fairly big because he's pretty uncritical of the CIA in his position on the Intelligence Committee.
But I think that, you know, the people close to Cheney, they're going to double down.
John Rizzo going to double down.
Jose Rodriguez, they're going to double down.
And the reason they can do that is because the press is not going to hold them to account because CIA is going to prevent the press from getting from figuring out where the details are, where they can, you know, like I'm very confident in saying it have been for four or five years that CIA lied to Congress because CIA's own documents make that crystal clear.
But I'm one of maybe three people in the press who's actually gone into those documents and looked at them in that kind of detail.
And therefore, you know, the press will go, well, you know, Nancy Pelosi told me one thing and Porter Goss told me the same thing, but I haven't actually looked at it that close because I'm instead listening to what Pete Hoekstra said, Porter Goss said.
And I mean, that's what happened the last time.
And and I do think that the people who really stake the reputation on torture aren't going to back down because they, you know, partly they can't legally, partly they can't.
You know, Cheney should go down as a war criminal, but he's going to do what he can to avoid getting that reputation, at least while he's still alive.
And I think the other I mean, here's here's the other really important thing is people listen to the way this debate goes out.
You always hear torture doesn't work, and the assumption when you hear that comment is that torture is intended to find intelligence.
Right.
And even from the documents that have already been declassified, make it crystal clear that torture was meant to exploit detainees, which can mean get intelligence from them, but can also mean, as you said, get false confession, get somebody to say that Saddam and al-Qaeda were building chemical weapons together, as happened with with even Sheikh Alibi.
And then a third use is to recruit, recruit informants, recruit people to flip and go back into al-Qaeda.
And there's been a there's been some details of Penny Lane at Gitmo about this.
There are other public details that I think it's not something I've really tried to pursue, but, you know, they're sitting out there in plain sight of these people that we tortured and got them under torture to at least claim that they were going to flip for us.
And so it's, you know, I guess what I'm saying is people should think of this as exploitation.
And that's a technical term, but it means that that range of things, actual intelligence, fake intelligence, flipping, getting them to do propaganda for us, all of those are the purpose of torture.
And for that purpose, torture works great.
And the people who are going to defend torture till they're blue in the face, they're the ones who wanted it, not because it gave them intelligence, but because it gave them it gave them the ability to exploit these detainees.
Right.
And it really goes back to the first premise.
You can look at it when these psychologists are talking about learned helplessness.
If you torture a dog and at random all the time where there's no way the dog can even figure out any way to try to resist or avoid it at all, at some point they just completely break down and become putty in your hands to whatever degree.
And I guess these psychologists like to torture dogs all day to find out these things.
But anyway, they said, so that's what we'll do to these people.
We'll come.
We'll teach them learned helplessness.
We will completely break not just their human spirit, but their mammalian spirit to even try to, you know, persevere at all.
And it doesn't sound like they wanted the truth out of these guys.
I think people might picture Kiefer Sutherland going, you know, I punched you in the ribs twice and I'm going to punch you three more times if you don't talk.
They don't imagine putting people through a regime of what kind of Nazi insanity for weeks in order to drive them mad, to drive them out of their humanity so that they become helpless.
If that even works, you know, I'm sure they tried.
Right.
And I'm sure part of it's just ego, you know, we're the United States, we must make everyone submit.
And all the better if we can make Khalid Sheikh Mohammed submit.
It's not, you know, he's running us ragged down in Gitmo at that kangaroo trial that we've got rather than bringing him to New York and putting, you know, you know, quick, easy trial done, go to jail for the rest of your life.
Instead, we've got to have the kangaroo, the kangaroo court, which actually serves his purposes.
Oh, man.
And you know what?
You couldn't say it better either.
When he's gotten the judge to rule down there, he gets to wear a camouflage hunting jacket to court like he's a general in some war instead of some low life thug scumbag criminal who, like you said, any judge would have locked him up and thrown away the key years ago.
Right.
It's amazing.
I don't know how the hell they got away with that.
Seriously, they're letting him wear camouflage to court.
I mean, I guess that does serve the empire's purpose, too, right?
It always has to pretend that Al-Qaeda is some giant Islamo-fascist caliphate rather than just a band of pirates on the run somewhere, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and also, you know, when you talk about the uses of torture and you mentioned this, too, I forgot your exact word that you used, but you referred to just all the scares that came out of the torture, too, from this guy, Gaul.
And I know a lot of them came from Zabata, too.
Oh, they're going to bomb a bank in New York or New Jersey somewhere at some point.
Call out the SWAT teams to patrol out front all the banks.
I remember driving.
I'll never forget this one.
Top of the hour AM radio out of San Antonio in 2002 or maybe it could have been 2003 right before the invasion of Iraq.
Be on the lookout.
There's an Al-Qaeda terrorist threat against a school in Texas somewhere.
Right.
And there's like seventy five thousand schools in Texas, right?
Like you couldn't count them all.
Ridiculous.
Right.
And and one of the other remaining big lies to DOJ that we know got told was one of the detainees, a bunch of detainees were arrested in Pakistan leading up to the 2004 election and starting as early as July.
And and, you know, July 1st, they were like, oh, election year, election year, election year, election year.
And the basis for that actually was this guy who had come and scoped out the United States in like 1999.
I'm going to get the year wrong, but something like 1999 gone back to the gone back to the UK and done nothing with it except that his his his documents were scoping out the United States had gotten into a database in Pakistan.
And that was the basis of the election year scare.
But then they kept detaining all these guys and to get them to invent some kind of election year scare because you need an election year scare.
And one of those guys is another one of the detainees that DOJ that CIA lied to DOJ most egregiously about.
So, you know, that's another one I'm really looking towards because it's this case where they needed a scare and went and beat some detainees and got the scare and incidentally used the initial parts of the scare as justification to roll out the phone dragnet at the court level that actually brought out the Internet dragnet at the court level.
They went to the judge and they said, oh, scary, scary, scary.
And so she approved it.
And and some of that stuff goes back to torture.
So, you know, torture led us into into the dragnet to which she would have done it anyway, probably.
But still, no important point.
You know what I wonder now, too.
There's been Trevor Aronson is the best on this for Mother Jones and his great book, Terror Incorporated, about the FBI and the at least 50 outright entrapment cases.
Now, there have been hundreds of bogus terrorism charges and terrorism convictions in America, guilty pleas and who knows what to.
But there have been 50 that are pretty much you can tell outright entrapments.
And he does a brilliant job of explaining how at the FBI all the incentives are to keep doing this and never to stop doing this.
If they can trick some idiot into saying he loves Osama and they can make a terrorism case out of it.
Brilliant.
But it's got me wondering this conversation, whether Karl Rove invented this thing and whether somewhere there's memos that say, hey, listen, go and find retarded kids at Islamic bookstores and get them to say something stupid.
We need cases.
We can only torture Zabata so much into making up nonsense about malls under threats.
We need people to parade on TV.
So go and get us some.
You know what?
Isn't that suspicious?
Like maybe this began at the top.
Obviously, it's one of them self-licking ice cream cones where every FBI agent in America now wants to make his stripes by entrapping some idiot.
But I wonder if that's really where it started, if there's a chicken egg thing there.
I don't even think you need to go there because, you know, it's kind of like the logic of bureaucracy.
You tell people that they get promotions if they go and trap 19 year old kids and that's what they're going to do.
And that's what's happened.
I mean, I think one of I think Trevor's work, Trevor Aronson, as you said, is really great on that.
And I think his work is really instructive when you compare it to what happened to Jahar Tsarnaev, to the Boston attackers, because many of those kids who get and who get entrapped are picked up because of because they read Inspire, the AQAPU magazine.
And we know, or at least the government claims in the Boston Marathon case, that the younger brother figured out how to make a pressure cooker bomb from reading Inspire.
So how come he didn't get the same entrapment treatment as all of these kids around the country?
Yeah.
Well, now, have you written that up, your masterpiece on Boston yet or what?
Because that sounds like a whole other interview or two there, Marcy.
I've written some of it up.
All right, well, we're going to have to catch up on that here soon.
That's the great Marcy Wheeler, EmptyWheel.net, everybody.
Thanks, Marcy.
Hey, all Sky here.
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