12/10/14 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate y'all tuning in today.
Coming up we got Guantanamo Andy, Andy Worthington, on the Guantanamo aspect of this past, present, and future.
As well as Jonathan Landay.
Mostly I think we're going to focus on renditions and Saddam Hussein lies with Landay.
But first we've got the brilliant genius Marcy Wheeler.
And I'm sorry, I know you don't call yourself that or anything, but that's what I call you.
Brilliant genius, Marcy Wheeler.
She writes at EmptyWheel.net.
And she's just got the insight, man.
She's just got the x-ray eyes like nobody you ever met.
Welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Great to be here.
So, I saw that on your blog, one of the first things that you wrote was about the legality here.
That you said they knew it was illegal.
Now, come on Marcy, we know that they knew that it was illegal.
What point are you making really there?
Well, I would make the same point.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was reading yesterday and he was doing the headline issues, I think.
Look, I mean, I think that one of the really interesting details that this is me being detail-oriented, but in November 2001, long before the CIA ever started telling members of Congress precisely what they were doing with these detainees, the Deputy Director of Operations, James Pavitt, gave a briefing to the intelligence communities, and he basically said, we're not going to torture.
And then said, well, maybe if there's a smoking bomb scenario, then we might torture.
And it was really interesting because they knew even then, November 2001, that they were contemplating torture.
They knew even then, and they were talking even then about this necessity defense to permit themselves to do torture.
And that's remarkable because we have known that they did the CIA, that we have known that they got DOJ to give them a rubber stamp for the stuff that was similar, but not actually what they were doing.
But immediately, almost immediately after they got given this task, they started figuring out how they were going to get away with torture.
And now when you say brief Congress, that amounts to the Gang of Eight, is that right?
Can you explain that to the audience of who would have been briefed?
Oh, not even the Gang of Eight.
Gang of Four only then.
Yeah, they claim that.
That's a lie that I caught Michael Hayden in that he made in 2007.
I caught him in back in 2010.
So you're supposed to brief the intelligence committees when you engage in covert ops, which this was run as.
Although the committees were briefed on the overall finding that they claim authorized torture, which said that they were going to hold detainees hostage, they were never the full committees were not briefed on all the torture that they were doing until 2006.
So Dianne Feinstein, for example, you can complain about a lot of things, but she was actually not briefed until the morning of September 6, 2006.
Before that they were briefing the Gang of Four.
So just the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee.
But even there, time after time after time, it's not clear they gave the briefing.
Somebody was absent.
They said they were using these prospectively, not historically.
One really good example is Jay Rockefeller, who again, he's somebody I regularly criticize, but on this issue he was far better than he has been on other issues.
The CIA claimed from the beginning that he was briefed as soon as he became a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003.
He wasn't.
He had a staffer there, but he wasn't.
And oh, by the way, at that briefing that Rockefeller did not attend, Pat Roberts, the Republican, basically shut down a really initial attempt that Bob Graham, his predecessor, had been trying to put into place to oversee this process.
Or the CIA alleges he said something like, well, I can think of ten reasons why we wouldn't want to learn more about the interrogation process.
And then another one of the little details in the report yesterday, he was supposed to have been briefed, should have been briefed on his six-month anniversary, what have you, in September of 2003.
And the CIA has long claimed that they were briefed.
He and Pat Roberts were briefed on September 2003.
They have no records.
There's no proof.
Rockefeller says it doesn't happen.
CIA has no proof.
And so it is quite possible that the chair of the well, he ended up being the chair, but the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee was first briefed on torture 15 months after he assumed that position.
And he was first briefed on it in June, July of 2004 after the CIA's inspector general did a report and said, whoa, this is out of control.
And that's the first, that may well be the first that Jay Rockefeller ever learned about torture.
Well now, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a Washington Post story from the winter of 2002 saying that, I think December 2002, saying that some of this was going on in Afghanistan or maybe even before that?
And weren't there reports of ghost prisons on Navy ships and that kind of thing in The Guardian as early as 2002?
Some of it, yeah.
There were the stories of detainees both in DOD and CIA custody, real vague stories about people dying.
And we find a lot more details about Gul Rahman, who is one of the CIA people killed in November of 2002.
And those, at that point, Bob Graham was, I mean that's one of the reasons he wanted to impose more oversight is because he was hearing these rumors of stuff going wrong but not getting any notice of it.
And then people were first briefed that this torture was going on in February of 2003.
So Jane Harman was briefed and she asked some questions but the response to her was, you know, she asked for example has the President approved of this?
And they refused to answer.
Have you guys considered the policy implications of this?
Refused to answer.
I don't think you should destroy the torture tapes.
No answer.
So I think there's definitely more that Harman and Rockefeller and Pelosi could have done.
I mean, I do think Bob Graham tried.
But that's one of the damning aspects of our intelligence oversight process is they would have had to, and they probably should have had to, gone on to the floor of the Senator House and said, whoa, slow down, these people are torturing and, but that's the other problem, right, is because they were told that it was getting all of this information and that it was necessary, we now know that that's not true.
And that's one of the really cancerous parts of these lies is they made sure that the people who were officially briefed didn't have the information they could have used to really undercut the program, which is that it didn't work.
Well, although, you know, there was a great tweet yesterday by Sam Husseini.
He said the only lie worse than torture works is that it doesn't.
Because, of course, it does work if you change your understanding of what the goal is.
If the goal is you have a list of things that you want to hear, a list of words that you want to put in somebody's mouth, torturing them is a great way to succeed in doing that.
So, I mean, honestly, I don't understand why they didn't just make it up.
Like, why is it any more legitimate to torture al-Libi and to point his finger at Saddam Hussein than just pretending that al-Libi had pointed his finger at Saddam Hussein?
But I guess they needed to pretend that these orange alerts are coming from somewhere, guys.
And so that was really the purpose of the thing, right, was to scare the hell out of everybody's mom and to think we've got to start a war against Iraq.
Right, and I'm sure you're going to talk to Jonathan Landay about that, but I hope, because he's brilliant on that topic.
But that's sort of, you know, I made that point before the report came out, is the Carl Levin report, the Senate Armed Services Committee report in 2009 was very clear.
When DOD and CIA went out in search of a torture program, they were not looking for interrogation.
The language they use a hundred and some odd times in that SASC report is exploitation.
And exploitation includes interrogation, but it also includes getting people to spy on you.
And they did.
They got a number of people to flip and, you know, try and infiltrate al-Qaeda, and then they flipped back.
Oh, there's the music.
But anyway, so that's where we'll pick it up on the other side of this break, the exploitation, and then we'll get back I think to the legalities here and the chain of command at the top, which is something that's not in here is exactly the role of the bosses in the Bush White House.
It's Empty Wheel, the great Marcy Wheeler, EmptyWheel.net, y'all.
We'll be right back.
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Alright, you guys.
Something's screwed with my connection.
Hope that sounds okay to everybody out there.
Alright, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler.
EmptyWheel.net is her website, her great blog, and follow her on Twitter, at Empty Wheel.
There's obviously, you know, 100,000 subjects within the subject of the Bush-era torture regime to cover here.
What I'm going to do, Marcy, here, is I'll remind our audience and you, where we left off, you were talking about the purpose, as they put it, is not to find out the truth.
It's to make compliant subjects to exploit for whatever purposes.
You can say whatever you want to about that.
And then I'll ask you, if you could, to get back toward the general area of responsibility for this, and the applicable laws, and that kind of thing, if you would.
But other than that, you have the floor to tell us whatever you think is the most important thing for me and for the audience to understand about this report and about the torture regime.
In fact, even including what's not in there, if you want.
Yeah, well, I'll get into that.
Just to finish on the exploitation, and then I think Landay is going to cover it, because he's an expert on this, is that they're going to use it for three purposes.
Exploitation is used for three purposes, and one is interrogation, two are propaganda, and to get spies.
And there's plenty of evidence that we did all three with this program.
And so when somebody like Dick Cheney or Michael Hayden goes on TV and says this was successful, the proper response should be to turn to them and say, you mean it was successful in starting an illegal war in Iraq that got 4,000 Americans killed, because that is what it did.
As to why and who's responsible, one of the most interesting things about the report is that Dick Cheney's not in it.
I mean, he's in it, but he's barely in it.
And I think the reason why is that one of the things the report is pretty good about making clear is that rather than those DOJ memos that we always hear about, what actually authorized the torture program was a finding, a presidential statement, order, basically, signed September 17, 2001, that authorized a whole suite of things that we were going to do to fight the war on terror.
So it was detaining top al-Qaeda figures, but it was also partnering with friendly intelligence agencies in Egypt and Jordan.
We sent people to be tortured there as well.
But also partnering with people we hated, like Qaddafi and Assad, and we sent people to be tortured there as well.
But importantly, that finding also authorized drone strikes.
It authorized the CIA to use drones to kill top al-Qaeda figures.
And so if you think about it, Bush's black stain is the torture program.
Obama's black stain is the drone program.
And you see similar problems with both.
You see the CIA kind of lowering the standards about who can be tortured or drone struck.
You see CIA making egregious mistakes in either detaining and torturing or drone killing the wrong people.
And you see it getting out of control.
And so that's one lesson that I think we should take away from it, that this structure of telling the CIA to go do bad things is failing miserably, partly because of the secrecy, partly because it breeds a lack of accountability, both with the president and with the CIA, and partly because the people who are supposed to be holding them accountable, which are members of Congress, they're getting lied to.
And I guarantee you they got lied to about both drone strikes and torture.
So that's one of the lessons, is that this is a lesson as much about the failure of the way we run the CIA as it is about torture by itself.
But the other thing is I think one of the problems with this report is that the CIA, at the White House's behest, withheld 9,000 documents.
And they did it citing White House equities, but they didn't make the White House invoke executive privilege.
So in other words, 9,000 documents that implicated somebody in the Bush White House, and a lot of that somebody would be David Addington and Dick Cheney, those were withheld.
So you've got these gaps.
There's this wonderful one where they talk about John Bellinger coming back to George Tenet after having said he'd go brief President Bush about the torture.
And he said, well, it was decided the president would not be briefed, but you have the authority to go ahead and torture.
And there's no agent there.
There was no like, you know, Bellinger didn't say President Bush has, without being briefed on torture, authorized it.
He basically said you have the authority.
And, you know, the best guess, and I would place a lot of money on this, is that Dick Cheney is the one who authorized it because that's what Dick Cheney did.
But he's not in the report, and we don't know whether CIA has documentation that that's how this whole authorization process went down.
He's not in the report because Obama didn't want him to be in the report.
And that's really important for people to understand.
Well, then Obama turned right around and sent John Brennan, who was, well, if you want you can get into what his role in all this was back then, but he's the current director of the CIA, and Obama sent him out or allowed him to go out and defend the program, which is basically that's Obama's statement on the thing is it was worth it, shut up.
Right, right.
And remember, I mean, you know, John Brennan to many extents is Obama's Cheney.
He's the guy who for a long time, like Cheney, was the one who served as gatekeeper on national security issues and made sure that certain things didn't get to Obama or claimed to run things by Obama and may or may not have, including on drone strikes, by the way.
And so it's not surprising.
And, of course, John Brennan knows where all of the bodies that Obama is responsible for are buried because he put them there.
And I think that this way of authorizing covert ops basically insulates the president, both from accountability and from any legal kind of repercussions, and that's one of the things that's going on right now.
It exposes the people at the CIA who do it, and that's another thing.
And I'm actually fairly sympathetic with the torturers who've been hung out to dry because they were ordered to do this, and no one is talking about George Bush and Dick Cheney's role in it.
Well, still, they could have pulled out pistols and blew their own brains out before torturing somebody.
They could have quit.
And a lot of people did.
I mean, a lot of people did.
Don't feel too bad.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I don't.
Okay.
But they raise a good point.
They raise an important point, which is that they're getting all the blame and Dick Cheney is getting none of it.
Right.
And so you've got this mutual complicity, and it works across.
I mean, I made a point, and I've got another piece coming out that makes the same point.
On the second day that Bush was in office, he prohibited most kinds of physical torture.
On the third day he was in office, a drone strike he authorized, a CIA drone strike, killed 11 civilians.
And from that point on, he was implicated in this system where you authorize the CIA to do things and you're stuck.
And I think he's been stuck ever since.
Yeah.
Well, and now, so, and back to the Bush crew then, because, you know, obviously it is just Bush's fourth term now with Obama, but at the time where Cheney, his lawyer, Addington, and the rest of these guys, along with President Bush, were deciding these things, is it really in dispute at all whether they knew that they were just outright breaking the law, but they just decided we can get away with it?
You know, the other Scott Horton has compared these, you know, DOJ memos and so forth to basically like the kind of thing that the DOJ would prosecute a lawyer for doing for a mobster, right?
You're not a lawyer.
You give legal advice for how mobsters can get around the law.
And that's different.
And we'll put you in jail for that, says the DOJ.
And other Scott Horton says that the guys that came up with these memos, that basically they're not in good faith at all.
That's really what I'm asking you.
These guys just basically said, oh, yeah, sure, Mr. President.
You can suspend the Geneva Conventions.
You can torture people to death.
You can do whatever you want and no one can touch you because you're the commander in chief.
I mean, is that, to me it sounds like it's total hogwash, but maybe, I don't know, maybe the commander in chief clause really says that or maybe David Addington really believes it.
What do you think?
Well, and that's the trick because the National Security Act says CIA can't do anything that's unconstitutional.
But we do expect them to break other countries' laws.
What has happened with both torture and drone strikes is they've been breaking our laws.
So, you know, torture is illegal by anyone in the United States.
Nevertheless, CIA did it.
Killing an American citizen overseas is illegal.
Nevertheless, they did it with Anwar al-Awlaki and collateral damaged both his son and Samir Khan.
And it is, in fact, the case that CIA believes that that language in National Security Act, which says CIA isn't allowed to break the law in the United States, is sort of fluid.
If the President orders it, then the CIA is allowed to break the law because this law, you know, I don't know what secret memos they have, but that's what's going on, and that's what needs to change.
Right.
All right.
Well, I'm so sorry that we're out of time.
Obviously, I could talk to you for the rest of the week about this stuff, but I'll direct everybody over to Twitter.com slash EmptyWheel and EmptyWheel.net for the great Marcy Wheeler.
Sure do appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
Take care.
Talk soon.
All right, y'all.
We'll be right back with Jonathan Landay in about five minutes.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
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