12/08/14 – Jason Leopold – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, guys.
Welcome back now.
It's the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Jason Leopold back on the line here.
Jason, are you exclusively at Vice now or you're still writing for Al Jazeera?
I can't keep up.
Yes, I'm exclusively at Vice.
I'm their investigative reporter.
Been here since August.
And it's going great.
Great.
Yeah.
Well, your reporting certainly continues to rule.
So good.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Yeah.
Well, I'm a big fan.
All right.
You know what?
Let me ask about Hastings first.
Sure.
Real briefly here.
Primary sources, e-mails show FBI working to debunk conspiracy theories following Michael Hastings' death.
What do you make of that?
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I think that Michael Hastings' death is based on everything I've seen.
He died in a car accident.
I'm not going into any other area that somebody blew up his car because I don't have any evidence of that.
I'm a journalist, and I have absolutely no evidence to support that Michael Hastings was killed by government forces.
I think that the FBI was clearly looking at his work.
I think it shows that in these documents.
Beyond that, I don't have anything else.
Whenever I write about Michael Hastings, or when I've written about him in the past, certainly people, they're entitled to believe what they want to believe, and what they believe is that he was killed by the government.
Again, I don't have anything to support that.
My job as a journalist is to try to get documentary evidence to back up my reporting.
If anyone wants to step forward with some evidence that would show that, I would be certainly happy to take a look at it.
Right.
Well, for my part, I can at least recommend to people, for their interest anyway, a lengthy interview with Michael's brother, who explains what he was going through at the time, and how he is certain it was nothing but a terrible accident, and that kind of thing.
Of course, at any time, if the guy had died of anything other than a heart attack in his rocking chair at 82 years old, you would always be able to say that he was right in the middle of a story about something, something that was really important.
You would always be able to say that.
That correlation doesn't necessarily mean a thing.
He was a badass journalist.
That's why you could always make that correlation.
He didn't mess around.
Exactly.
That's not to say, Scott, that Michael Hastings was not nervous about his work, about what he had stumbled upon, what he was about to report.
But beyond that, and I want to make it clear, certainly to your listeners, that as a journalist, as an investigative journalist, my job is to work with documentary evidence to support anything that I write.
And I think that these documents that I have obtained, that Ryan Shapiro and I have obtained over the course of a year and a half, are very, very important.
They're important in terms of historical records, and important with regard to Michael Hastings' legacy, and that he was on the radar of these government agencies.
There's no question about that.
I also have documents to show that many other journalists, Scott, are also on the radar of government agencies, that they're watching their work.
That will be a future story.
That's a badge of honor in the mold of Michael Hastings, if you ask me.
I bet you your FBI file is something else there, Jason.
You know, I did have, I just want to make this one quick point, is that, and we spoke about this, Scott, a few years ago, I wrote a story about the brother of a high-value detainee, and I did obtain FBI records to show that, in fact, the FBI went out and interrogated him about me, about what I was asking him.
So the FBI was looking into my work as well.
That was very clear.
Right.
Well, that's because you're picking your targets well, that's all.
Now, here's the thing.
I have to ask you, at least, to allow me to break my promise to you, and keep you on the air here for another segment, because I want to ask you about the torture report, but I understand if you have important meetings, you've got to run out the house.
Sure, no, let's do it.
Okay, good deal, because the music's about to start playing, and there it goes.
I'll have to cut you off.
So when we get back, we'll talk with the great Jason Leopold about the torture report, which may or may not come out today.
The declassified redacted summary, I mean.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I've got Jason Leopold on the line, he's at Vice News, and writing about the torture report here.
Now, as of last week, I believe, Jason, you wrote that the torture report might come out today.
Do you still think so?
Actually, it will be out tomorrow.
So, last week, as you know, Scott, I believe we spoke about this before, but I have a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that I filed for this report, filed that more than a year ago.
In the course of that litigation, the government has provided various updates about when the Senate intends to release it.
Last week, a government attorney was due to respond to my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on this, and the attorney informed my attorney that the response would be delayed because the Senate intended to release the report today.
And on Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Dianne Feinstein to give her a call and tried to delay the release of the report.
And at that point, the report is already being printed.
There were steers that perhaps Senator Feinstein may cave into these warnings.
John Kerry was basically saying, consider the timing of the report.
Yesterday, on the Sunday talk shows, various former CIA officials said that this report will lead to deaths and attacks, put our foreign diplomats in harm's way.
A reminder that the exact same statements, claims were made in 2009 when Obama was gearing up to release the infamous torture memos.
Nothing happened.
So, at this point, sort of today, grasping and considering what John Kerry had said, everyone came to an agreement that this report will be out tomorrow.
In fact, the White House has already confirmed that as well.
So, tomorrow will be the day.
Five years in the making, $40 million, it's a 500-page executive summary, a sliver of what the full report contains, which is 6,300 pages.
So, it will be very interesting to see what, in fact, the Senate has found and what this report says.
Dianne Feinstein called it the most significant oversight effort in the history of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Yeah.
Well, and again, that's referring to the 6,300 pages.
I guess we'll see what gets left in this redacted summary, but at least you've got to give Feinstein some credit.
She's fought to have, you know, at least some of the truth still included in the thing after they tried to black out, you know, as much as they possibly could.
Absolutely.
Check this out, everybody.
Jason, check this out.
Y'all are going to be shocked.
Jason, tell them.
What's not in the report?
Because I know you already know what they didn't even bother asking.
Well, the report does not find that the – it does not go into the – how the torture program came to be.
It does not go after the Bush administration.
It does not go after John Yoo.
In fact, there's no fault or blame being placed upon George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Yoo.
It simply looks at the CIA.
In addition to that, the report simply looks at the efficacy of torture.
Does torture work?
They don't even say that it necessarily doesn't work.
They just simply say that the intelligence that was gleaned from detainees who were subjected to these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques did not provide any valuable or unique intelligence.
So they don't even do – So they don't even ask, did it succeed in getting false intelligence that Dick Cheney needed to justify the invasion of Iraq or anything like that?
It actually does look at – that's, from what I understand, one of the case studies is the detainee who was tortured in – I believe it was – I'm not sure if it was Egypt, but this was in January of 2002.
And the information that he provided, which ultimately led to the Iraq invasion, I think they take that apart.
But the report, it should be important to know that it doesn't even use the word torture.
So the word torture does not appear in it.
But what the argument is, is that once you read it, you will walk away, Scott, with the impression that, oh, yeah, this is torture.
But that begs the question as to why they did not even use the word.
It doesn't even say that what they did was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which completely contradicts Dianne Bockstein's own statement to the contrary, her own individual statement.
So this report was – they put this together very carefully.
They certainly put it together carefully to make sure that perhaps no one is charged or there's no – anything that would force the government to legally investigate this, to investigate this on the legal side.
I wonder if the word Pentagon or Army or Rumsfeld are in there anywhere at all.
Nope.
This is completely CIA.
So this is – I mean, the CIA, I am not trying to let them off the hook in any sense for the horrible things that they've done.
But I think if we just – and I'm just – this is a ballpark estimate for me based on, I don't know, years of this, that overall, if we're just looking at quantity of torture, the military did about 95 percent of it.
The CIA tortured the living hell out of a few people, quite a few people.
But the military tortured Afghans and Iraqis wholesale for years.
Right.
We do have a report on that, though, by the way.
That came out in 2009 from the Senate Armed Services Committee.
So that was a report that Carl Levin did.
It's a – it's quite an explosive report.
But this report simply looked at the detainees in custody of the CIA, the black site program, how these detainees were treated, the value of the intelligence that was obtained through the use of torture of enhanced interrogation techniques.
And that's it.
And the report – or I should say the executive summary has 20 case studies, 20 case studies of detainees, many of which I'm sure you and your listeners will be familiar with.
But there are 99 other case studies that are contained in the larger report because there were 119 detainees in this program that, as far as we know, that we will not get to read about.
We will not get to read about what was done to them.
The report really singles out former CIA Director Michael Hayden for over briefings, over claims that he lied to the committee.
But it does not say that Dick Cheney was responsible for anything.
Even though, as I reported, that when they're looking at the history of this program, because there will be a chunk of this report that goes into the history of the program, even though the report does say that this program came to be as a result of a presidential finding in September of 2001 from George Bush.
So, it ends there.
Right.
All right, well, I'll let you go, man.
I know you're in a hurry, but thank you for staying over time.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Take care.
All right, so that's the great Jason Leopold.
He's at VICE News, and he just sues them with that FOIA all day.
He's the master of the FOIA, and he's got the documents you're looking for.
Jason Leopold at VICE, and we'll be following up with him later in the week probably, I guess, about what we found out in this thing once it comes out.
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Scott here.
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