12/10/14 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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Well, we've got Landay on the phone here.
Sorry for the trouble to Jonathan.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Welcome.
Thank you very much.
Good to be back.
All right.
So now, I was telling the people earlier, if they just go look at McClatchy DC and search there for your name and Iraq, they'll learn a hell of a lot of stuff going way back.
The same thing is true if they search site, McClatchyDC.com, Landay torture.
And there are dozens of stories here.
I go, well, 422 results.
I don't know how redundant some of them might be, but you've done a hell of a lot of work on this story for years and years here.
The biggest highlight, I think, to start with, if it's okay with you, would be this report from April 21st, 2009, Report, Abusive Tactics Used to Seek Iraq-Al Qaeda Link.
And I know much of this will have to do with rendition, which is also not included in this report.
This is only torture done by CIA, not at the request of CIA by outsourced torture dictators like Assad, Mubarak, and Qaddafi.
But so if you could please just explain that piece of journalism to start here and a couple minutes before this break.
Sure.
You're taking me back a bit, but that's a story, as you said, I wrote in 2009 that basically says that interrogators, military and otherwise, were under pressure from the very top of the Bush administration to elicit information from detainees using tough interrogation methods that would link Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda and thus corroborate and justify the Bush administration's, one of their major justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
And the fact is that that information didn't exist.
It may very well be one of the reasons why Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.
My story says that I believe and I'm reaching back here that that was one of the things that they wanted to know from on high in the Bush administration in order to obtain justification or at least corroboration of one of their main reasons or one of the main reasons they put forward for invading Iraq.
Part of that reporting there, if I remember right, Jonathan, is that there was a real spike in the torture and in this Iraq information pressure that you're referring to here right before the invasion and right after it, too, especially when they were suffering all the criticism for there not being weapons.
That was when word came back down again.
Get me something about Saddam and Osama, right?
I can't remember sort of what you're describing, and I think there may well have been the surge that you talk about only because at that point the United States had been in Afghanistan for more than a year and the so-called war on terror was really up and running and spinning away and they needed some hard information that would justify this invasion and subsequent occupation, and it just didn't exist, and it wasn't just on those two gentlemen, on the interrogators of those two gentlemen on which this pressure was coming to get that information, also interrogators down in Guantanamo who were under this pressure to obtain that kind of information from the detainees there.
So, yes, it was a full court press.
Well, and we know that Dick Cheney and Cheney's Cheney, Scooter Libby and Newt Gingrich, working with Richard Perle at the Defense Policy Board, made repeated trips to CIA headquarters to say, give us more about Saddam and Osama all the time.
Give us more about the weapons of mass destruction.
Right, and that's highly irregular, right?
Well, you know, for the senior officials at that level to be doing that is irregular, yes.
So, yes, no question there about, you know, what was motivating them and what they were up to with that.
Well, and let's not forget, though, I mean, as I said, I think that was one of the main reasons that they were pressing these guys, but at the same time, don't forget there was this huge flurry of information that was coming out of the CIA.
There was this huge flurry of activities.
There was this, let me back up, there was this enormous concern and consternation within the U.S. government and the intelligence community in particular about, you know, new attacks.
We got to get information on new imminent attacks because we're hearing all of this chatter, however it is they hear chatter, about, you know, new plans, new attacks that were in the making on the United States and, of course, at least according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report that was released yesterday, none of these people had any information about pending attacks.
Right.
And of course, I don't know how well people remember, but I sure remember really well all through 2002 and 2003, top of the hour radio news on ABC listening to talk radio driving around all day for a living and, oh, just orange alert after orange alert.
I love, my favorite one out of all of them, and there were banks threatened, dams were going to be exploded, planes were going to fall out of the sky, but my favorite one was there is an Al-Qaeda terrorist threat to a school in Texas.
Well, I'm sorry, but there's only, I don't know, 650,000 schools in Texas.
I mean, what in the world are they talking about?
All Texas schools be on the lookout for an Al-Qaeda attack today, they said.
I mean, they knew they were lying with that.
Hey, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, tell me another one.
I'm trying to scare these guys' moms into supporting an invasion of Iraq, and scared is a great substitute for good information about weapons of mass destruction.
Yeah, exactly.
And they knew what they were doing.
You know, I mean, there's so many examples of that where they're trying to spin up public support for the invasion.
Let's not forget, that effort really kind of began, kicked into high gear in the summer of 2002 with a speech that Vice President Cheney made to the Veterans of Foreign War in which he said, you know, some of us believe that not only has Saddam Hussein reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction, but he may soon have a nuclear weapon.
And then he goes on to connect that with the idea that Saddam may have been in cahoots with bin Laden, and what happens if he gives bin Laden this nuclear weapon?
That's really where all that began.
And of course, that was all predicated on supposition and a parallel intelligence operation that the administration set up to process the bull crap that they were getting from various people, and in particular, one man by the name of Ahmad Chalabi, their favorite Iraqi opposition leader.
He's an Iranian spy.
He's going to come after you.
Yeah.
I ain't so afraid, actually.
But yeah.
So, all right.
Now, let's get back to this current report.
Just tell me, Landy, what do you think is the most important thing in here for people to understand?
I think, you know, without too much tooting our own horns, we here at McClatchy had the 20 main conclusions in April.
So the fact that they are still the same 20 main conclusions is not, for me, wasn't the biggest sort of revelation about this report.
I think what the biggest for me are all the nitty-gritty, grisly, grim details of what was actually done to at least, you know, 39 detainees on whom these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were used is probably more than that, and the 119 at least people who were detained in the so-called CIA black sites to include at least 26 individuals who were innocent, who were not terrorists, who were picked up, probably mostly by mistake, and subjected to these not just, you know, I mean, not just to an abduction, which is what happened to them, but also to these procedures and the mistreatment.
And those details are really some of the things that really are most stark to me, but also one of the things that I think is one of the most effective on behalf of the committee laying out why it is that it, one of its main conclusions was that the CIA misled Congress and the American people is in the appendix where they take testimony by former CIA director Michael Hayden to the Congress in 2007, I think it is.
They put it on one side, and on the other they say, well, on one side they say, here's what Hayden says, and on the other they say, but that's not supported by what's in the CIA records, over and over and over and over again.
Yeah, that's really something, that part.
I just thought that was in terms of if you want to see something that really kind of has this immediate impact without having to, and I've got to tell you, Scott, I'm still plowing through, you know, 520 pages, I mean, there's so much there.
I spent most of last evening late going through that appendix.
I love that Mitchell Prothero, man.
I invited him on the show yesterday, and he said, nah, man, I'm reading the torture report, but he's reading it because he's interested in learning everything he can about Al-Qaeda, and so he's interested in the torture aspect, I'm sure, I don't mean to put words in his mouth too much, but he's an Al-Qaeda guy, you know, expert in these terrorist movements, and he's looking for, you know, new nuggets of truth about relationships between these men and that kind of thing too, so I really like that attitude of his.
He's a good reporter.
Let me ask you this because it's something I want more answers.
They say in here, oh, the salt pit.
Yeah, we knew they killed this guy at the salt pit for a decade now, and we knew, I thought we knew that it was the CIA, not others, but it was CIA who murdered the guy at Abu Ghraib prison by hanging him from handcuffs with his hands behind his back in a way that compressed his chest and suffocated him to death, and he's the guy in the pictures that everybody's got their thumbs up.
Yeah, but the reason he's not in the report, his name is, I think he was a former Iraqi general by the name of Janabi, I think it was his name.
Very close to that anyway, yeah.
Is because he was not, he was not, this is only about the so-called rendition interrogation and, right, and detention program.
Okay, but what about Penny Lane down at Guantanamo?
And also he was, he was, let me just finish this, he was picked up by U.S. Special Forces to begin with, and so that doesn't make it any better, but so the question is, you know, who was it who was responsible for his death?
And I'm actually just going from memory there, but I just thought that I knew.
There were two, as you point out, there are actually two that we know of, people who were in this program who were killed, who died, whether or not, the guy you're talking about is Ghul Rahman, I think his name was, he was an Afghan.
At the salt pit.
Yes, at the so-called salt pit.
Suspected hypothermia is what we're told.
Okay, but now let me ask you about.
There was a second guy, there was a second guy, and that second guy was this man who I think was beaten to death, and a contractor was in fact convicted of that.
And this is, these would have been the two that Durham had his preliminary, included in his preliminary investigation on the obstruction charge for the obstruction of the tapes, right?
Declined not to continue.
And now, do you know where that, where that was, the guy that was beaten to death?
You know, I'm going to try, it's somewhere in eastern Afghanistan.
I want to say Ghazni, but I don't remember precisely where it was.
Okay, and then one more thing is about Penny Lane, which was the CIA operation down there at Guantanamo, where the other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer, has reported that these three guys were murdered, and they called it a suicide, and it seemed like that was under CIA control.
Does Penny Lane not count as a black site, or was that not the CIA, do you know?
Rather than answer that question, I'm going to ask you to wait to the end of the day, because I believe we have a story coming from my colleague Carol Rosenberg, who's probably the most knowledgeable of any reporter anywhere on the goings-on in Guantanamo, and I believe she may be writing on that subject today.
Okay, good deal.
Because that's a story that, you know, really didn't get nearly enough coverage at all.
Everybody who tried to dispute it and attack other Scott Horton for his work, all of their criticisms have completely been blown away now, and what he called Camp No, we now know was called Penny Lane.
It did in fact exist, and everybody who said it didn't, the place didn't even exist, that was the basis of most of their so-called debunking.
Yeah, I think you should wait and read what I believe is going to be this story that's coming from Carol later today.
Okay, great.
Yeah, that sounds really good.
And then, let's see, I'm trying to think of one last question.
I guess I'll just comment then, since it jumps out at me here from my notes.
They're really saying here that the CIA torturers themselves asked for permission to stop torturing different guys on numerous occasions.
There was, yeah, yeah.
Overruled.
Yeah, I mean, there's Norm, we found a whole bunch of examples.
There's a whole bunch of examples of that.
I mean, one of the things that jumps out at me when I talk about the gritty details, there's a description here in this report of the waterboarding.
They spent a lot of time on it, or the, I should say, the interrogation of this guy, Abu Zubaydah, who they thought was some big Al Qaeda cheese, and turns out he wasn't.
But it talks about how CIA officers who were witnessing this thing were so upset by what was being done to Abu Zubaydah that some of them were choking and tearing and crying because they themselves were unable to stand what they were watching.
And I thought that was...
Yeah, they locked him in a coffin for two weeks.
Right, right.
And I thought that was pretty devastating stuff.
Yeah.
After he had given up information that contributed to several dozen intelligence reports when he was being interrogated before all of that by the CIA and the FBI.
Yeah.
Oh, and remember Ron Susskind reports that when George Tenet told George Bush that, hey, it turns out that this guy Zubaydah actually is like kind of half a crackpot and wasn't really that high up and didn't really know that much, that Bush got all angry and said, well, I have already said publicly that he was important.
You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you, George?
And Tenet said, no, sir, no, sir.
We'll keep on pretending that this guy was going to kill us all.
And there's also the thing about, at least it appears that the public was badly misled on the number of detainees because you had, I think, Hayden go before Congress and say 119, no more than 119, finds out from somebody at CIA headquarters that it was probably more than that.
No, 97, yeah, no, it was 97.
And he says, actually, sir, we had more than that.
He said, I don't care.
It's going to, it stays 97.
Yeah.
And the guy sent an email to himself of that conversation.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
No, that's all I was going to say.
All right.
Well, you know what?
I got to go ahead and go.
I already kept you over time and I got to move on to the next one.
But thanks very much for coming on the show, John.
Anytime, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That's a great Jonathan Landay, guys.
Keep your eyes on McClatchyDC.com for all the best coverage of the torture and the wars.
Back in just a sec with Guantanamo, Andy.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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