02/11/15 – Rebecca Gordon – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Here live from noon to 2 Eastern on the Liberty Radio Network on the weekdays.
All right, our guest today is Rebecca Gordon.
She teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco.
And she's the author of the book, Mainstreaming Torture, Ethical Approaches in the Post-9-11 United States.
Her website is MainstreamingTorture.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Rebecca?
I'm doing just great.
Thanks for having me.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here and happy to see that you're writing about this.
It sort of slipped out of the news.
There's so much else going on, important and not, that TV would rather pay attention to.
And that's what really counts, I guess.
Although, you know, I don't know, with the social media, writing probably means more than it has for a little while again now.
I don't know.
I think you might be right about that.
It's interesting.
Certainly people are not getting their news from the TV as much as they used to.
Right.
Yeah, that's true.
And they're fast-forwarding through all the commercials and just watching exactly what they want to watch instead of flipping through a lot, too.
So that's a big part of that.
All right.
So very importantly, you are still on this story.
You're pushing back against the mainstreaming of torture and trying to mainstream opposition to torture, which ought to be the default you'd think in this society.
But they really have pushed us so far the other way.
So I think it's just important that you're dealing with this issue at all still and continually as you are here.
So oh, and again, everybody, I'm sorry, not again for the first time.
The article is Bush and Cheney didn't have to do it.
It's at TomDispatch.com, and we're running it today under Tom's name at AntiWar.com as well.
Bush and Cheney didn't have to do it.
And you're talking about that big excuse, especially that they're invoking now that, hey, it's the fog war.
Even the president, I believe you quote in here, don't you, said, hey, you know, it was a scary time.
So it's understandable that they did what they did.
That's exactly right.
He says we shouldn't be too sanctimonious because we have to remember just how terrified everybody was.
And, of course, this is absolutely no excuse for torture, which is why the people who wrote the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. signed, have in Article II this very text.
No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture.
In other words, I was scared is not a legitimate excuse.
And they weren't even scared.
I mean, I guess you could say, you know, poor little Cheney had some PTSD from having to be dragged down to the basement by the security guards or whatever.
I acknowledge that there's probably a little bit of truth in that.
But other than that, I mean, give me a break.
Yeah.
And and honestly, it doesn't matter whether they were or not.
They are using that as an excuse.
And I think one thing they might have been scared of what it was, what it would do to their legitimacy and ability to stay in power.
If there actually were another attack, it would not have been good.
So they might have been scared of that.
And I guess, though, from the beginning, they had Addington there nodding and saying, you do not have to be scared of accountability.
You are the president and your word is law.
And the only part of the Constitution that matters says that you're the commander in chief.
And that's the end of that.
Right.
And, of course, the commander in chief had somebody as his right hand man, his vice president, who could actually command.
So and he was quite happy to take over.
All right.
Now, I guess they say that at the beginning, the torture was about, you know, tell us about more attacks.
And then it sort of evolved more into tell us about your friendship with Saddam Hussein.
Well, exactly.
And it's interesting, even before it was about tell us about more attacks.
The very first group of people who were tortured were actually people living inside the United States.
There were about 600 Muslims, some of them U.S. citizens, many of them green card holders, some of them here on visas, who were rounded up actually by the FBI and were turned over to police in Brooklyn, New York, and held in jail without access to lawyers or even their friends and families.
They were basically held incommunicado, some for as long as six months.
And while they were there, they were tortured.
They were exposed to extreme cold.
They were beaten.
They were put in stress positions.
Some of them were raped, at least one with the police flashlight.
And this was all literally within view of the Statue of Liberty.
And the reason they were arrested had nothing to do with future attacks.
It was because somebody thought they might know something about the attacks, the crime that had already been committed on 9-11.
Of course it turned out that not one of them had anything to do either with 9-11 or any kind of terrorism.
And none of them were ever charged for terrorism.
Some of them were deported because they had overstayed visas.
But this was the very beginning.
It wasn't even about future attacks.
It was about using torture as a form of investigation into a crime.
You know, I had completely forgotten about that for at least, I don't know, probably four years or something.
And I've covered that repeatedly, that subject.
James Bovard has written at length about it, whatever.
But there's so much of this.
There's an entire category of, you're talking about all the guys who were held under the so-called material witness statute, supposedly.
Right.
An entire category of people rounded up in American abuse that I completely forgot about.
Rebecca, jeez.
So, yeah, and if I forgot about it, you know, believe me, it's you and maybe the other Scott Horton are the only ones who've actually got this in mind.
I do, yes.
Yeah.
I imagine they remember.
Yep.
All right.
And now, but see, it seems to me, too, that when they're saying, oh, tell us about future attacks, that that's actually a smoke screen, too.
What they were really doing was saying, give us some fodder for some fake orange alerts so that we can keep everybody scared up until it's time, you know, we have enough equipment in Kuwait to go ahead and go forward with this thing into Iraq.
And yet I'm confused about that because I don't know why they needed to get orange alert lies or Saddam Hussein lies by torture.
Why not just make them up if you're going to torture them out of somebody and he's obviously lying?
So this is a very interesting thing, and I think it has something to do with the psychology of torture in general, that there is a sense in which they needed to convince themselves of the truth of what they knew was not actually true.
And so in a way, one of the main purposes of torture is not really to get at the truth or to bring it out, but to establish the truth, to make somebody say something that you want to believe is true.
And I also think that part of the purpose of torture is to create enemies.
And so when we hear that our government, which we think of as a good government, is forced to do such terrible things, that lets us know that the people we are doing it to must be really terrible and that our danger must be really extreme, because otherwise a good government like ours would not be driven to do such things.
And it's also, yeah, I guess, warning too to those who would cross us.
Absolutely.
No, and that's how institutionalized torture in a country has worked historically.
And certainly if you look at the torture regimes of the 20th century in Latin America, in Greece, in the Philippines, all of them worked by creating a climate of fear in the organizations that might otherwise have represented some kind of a threat to the regime.
That's the main function of torture in a repressive regime.
It's terrorism, in other words.
What you're saying, it sounds exactly like what Juan Paul said about the French shooters, that they're trying to sharpen the contradictions between the Muslim population and the rest of France.
Right, exactly.
No, it's state terrorism at the level, practiced at the level of the individual.
But the real target isn't just the individual.
It's the organizations that that individual is part of, whatever we may think of those organizations.
So the US torture in Afghanistan, in Iraq, had this traditional function of attempting whatever we might think of the groups that were opposing the US occupation in Iraq.
And some of them now have turned into Daesh, into ISIS.
Whatever we may think of them, the goal, the purpose of the torture was to dismantle those organizations, just as it was in Chile, in Uruguay, in Argentina.
But I think also in the US, there was this other audience.
All right.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, y'all, with Rebecca Gordon after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Rebecca Gordon, author of the new piece, Bush and Cheney Didn't Have to Do It.
That goes for Obama, too, of course.
Obama of the rendition program and the secret Somali prisons and still Bagram.
Does Bagram still hold people to this day, Rebecca?
Do you know?
Actually, the prisoners at Bagram have finally all been turned over to the Afghan authorities in the last few weeks.
So the U.S. supposedly is no longer holding anybody at Bagram.
They may still be there, but they're now in the hands of the Afghan government.
Whether that's an improvement or not is another question.
We know, though, that for years they had a kind of separate Penny Lane-style prison there, separate from the rest.
Absolutely, yeah.
Well, can you tell us more about that since I brought it up?
Okay, so there were actually several prisons in Afghanistan, of course, and Bagram was one of them.
And it's an Air Force base, and that's where, in fact, people were held and tortured by the CIA.
And some of the stuff that was done there is really horrific, people literally crawling over crushed glass, crawling over barbed wire.
I mean, really ugly stuff.
And even worse than that was a place called the Salt Pit, which was literally a salt mine outside of Kabul.
And again, many people who were rendered in the rendition program spent time at Bagram or in the Salt Pit and then went to Guantanamo.
And Philippe Sanz has done a very good job of documenting that.
There are a number of books about this.
This is the amazing thing about all of this.
This is all hidden in plain sight.
It's not as though you have to look very far to find this information because really good reporters have done a really good job of exposing all of this.
And yet somehow it just sort of sinks into this sort of soft morass of news, and it never seems to reach people's attention.
Well, it's because the costs of political accountability would just be too high for anyone else in the state to go along with it.
Right.
I mean, I guess that's it.
Put the whole Bush regime in prison.
Can you imagine that?
Sooner or later, somebody in a position of power is going to speak up and say we actually need to have prosecutions.
President Obama clearly, for whatever reason, made a decision very early in the day he took office that we were going to look forwards, not backwards, and that there was no point in casting blame on people for things that have been done in the past.
But in fact, there will be – I believe there will be – prosecutions eventually.
It may not be in the U.S.
It may be in some European court, and it may not be this year or next year, but I believe there will eventually be prosecutions, as we're seeing in Argentina today, for what was done in the dirty war, as we saw in Chile.
Do you know – what's your best source for the extent of the rendition program in the Obama years?
I mean, I know they say kind of as a cliché, well, no, he just kills everybody with a drone instead of capturing them, but that's not entirely true.
And they've said – I mean, there's been some reporting he's got a rendition program, but it seems like it's very buried in secrecy.
And the answer to that is I don't know.
I should go and do some research on that.
I do not have a good source.
Really, the only thing I know about the rendition program is that both Leon Panetta and he said that they were going to continue the program, although they were going to put in extra safeguards to make sure that nobody would ever be rendered to a country where they might actually be tortured, which is what, of course, the convention says you're not allowed to do anyway.
So that was nothing new.
He, that supposedly ended the enhanced interrogation techniques, CIA torture, he did not end rendition.
And so extraordinary rendition, by the way, what makes it extraordinary is that we don't have a – we don't have an extradition treaty with the country to which we render people and also that we are not sending them back for trial in another country, but we are sending them for some other purpose.
All right.
Now, I'd like to give you a chance to talk about some of the people in your article who stood up against this.
Well, so first of all, I wanted to ask you about John Kiriakou because – well, I guess I just don't know exactly what whistle he blew.
When I first was introduced to him, he was on TV saying, oh, come on, they only waterboarded three guys, which we know is not true.
And he was a major arrow in the war party's quiver at that time.
And yet now supposedly, oh, he's a whistleblower hero, and I guess he has done his time a couple of years in prison, although not for the crime I'm mad at him for.
But so can you tell me what's so great about Kiriakou anyway, what it was that he did?
Well, I think what he did was – I think he had a change of heart.
I think he actually came to recognize what was wrong with waterboarding.
And what he did was he actually disclosed to ABC News in 2007 that the CIA had used waterboarding.
Now, at the time, what he said about it was it's torture.
I think he also said, I think it worked.
But of course, he – I will say that his story has changed a little bit over time.
So what he told the Daily Beast in 2014 was, I was at the CIA when the torture program was conceived.
I refused to be trained in the techniques, and when I left government, I confirmed that torture was official US policy.
So what he did was, without taking a stand on whether it was right or wrong, he actually called it out and was the first CIA official or former CIA official to give it its proper name, not enhanced interrogation techniques, but actually torture.
And so since at the time the CIA was denying like crazy that they were torturing anybody, this is definitely whistleblowing.
It may not be the position that you or I would have taken, but we probably wouldn't have had 14 years in the CIA to begin with.
So I think that for somebody who is deeply steeped in that culture to be able to step back enough to look at something that's happening in front of him and actually identify it as what it really is, is something that we should give some credit for.
Well, and they did put him in prison for a couple of years.
They did.
Now that was for something else, although I suspect that it was really retribution for the torture, for saying that it was torture.
What he actually went to jail for was giving the last name of one of his fellow agents to a reporter as somebody who might be a potential source for a story the reporter was working on.
But yeah, revenge, much more likely answer there.
Yeah.
And then now I think the other most important after that would be the story of Alberto J. Mora.
Well, go ahead and tell us.
So Mora is an interesting figure and he is not as well known as, say, Antonio Toguba.
But what Mora did was he very early on saw these memos that John Yoo and Jay Bybee had concocted that were – whose purpose was to give legal cover to anybody in the CIA who was torturing people.
And when he saw these, he became very concerned, and he also heard from the head of NCIS that these abuses were going on already at Guantanamo.
So he went to William Haynes, who was the Pentagon's general counsel and was a protege of David Addington, who was then the chief of staff to Cheney.
And so on December 20th, he went and talked to William Haynes about this, and William Haynes said, oh, no, no, that's not torture.
But Mora was really upset, and he thought that maybe he had actually gotten through to Haynes and that Haynes would say that either this was an aberration or it was a mistake and it would stop, but he was wrong.
And the torture went on at Guantanamo, and he launched a full-scale memo-writing campaign against the torture regime, and he was in the Navy at the time.
He was the general counsel to the Navy, but he couldn't stop it.
His intervention also, as he must have known at the time, pretty much screwed up the rest of his career, and he left his post in January 2006, so four years later.
And he eventually told his story to Jane Meyer of The New Yorker, who, by the way, is another one of the real unsung heroes of this story, who are the reporters who consistently kept after this story, developed their contacts, were able to really get deep into the story.
Oh, man.
I remembered that one wrong.
I had thought that it was Mora's intervention that finally made Rumsfeld pull back the military end of the torture regime at that point.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
It's been too long since I read Philip Sands, I guess.
My mistake.
But anyway, still an important one to point out, though.
Yes.
Even though it's not what I thought you were going to say.
All right.
That's Rebecca Gordon.
She's at Tom Dispatch and at Antiwar.com today.
Bush and Cheney didn't have to do it.
Thanks, Rebecca.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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