Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and we're going to move on to our next guest, Daphne Eviatar, she is a Senior Associate in the Law and Security Program at Human Rights First, and is an expert on constitutional law and post-constitutional so-called law, as it were.
Welcome back to the show, Daphne, how are you?
I'm good, Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, I appreciate you joining us today.
Happy to be here.
Who's Omar Khadr?
Oh wow, Omar Khadr, this is a pretty amazing story.
I was down at Guantanamo Bay last week watching the Military Commission hearings, and as a lot of people probably don't realize, the Obama administration recently restarted all of those cases.
So they're not getting a whole lot of press attention, but there are people now who have been in Guantanamo Bay for eight years who are starting to go on trial.
Omar Khadr is someone who was arrested when he was 15 years old, or he was captured actually during a firefight with U.S. forces, and he was the only person left alive.
He was in a compound, and he was the only person left alive.
He was brought into the Bagram Air Base, he had severe bullet wounds, shot twice in the chest and the shoulder, shrapnel in his eyes, they thought he was going to die.
Anyway, he was brought to the hospital and treated, and then just when he regained consciousness after about a week, and they started to interrogate him.
And what he's accused of doing is throwing a grenade at the U.S. forces that were entering the compound and killing a U.S. soldier.
And the question at the hearing that I was observing was whether he had been abused in prison at Bagram and then at Guantanamo Bay, because if he had been, his lawyers were claiming that the statements he made should be suppressed, and they shouldn't be admissible in his trial.
His trial, which is going on now?
His trial, sorry, his trial is scheduled for July.
So right now, this is all preliminary hearings here.
These are preliminary hearings.
I mean, what's significant about the case, first of all, he was a child soldier.
And under international law, you're supposed to treat children as victims as opposed to as warriors.
And you're supposed to avoid detaining them, if at all possible, and to provide rehabilitation for them.
Because usually kids who are fighting in wars have been forced to fight.
In this case, all of the testimony that was coming out, even from the government's witnesses, was that he'd been dragged around Afghanistan by his father and instructed to do things like, you know, help build IEDs and help his father's al-Qaeda associates.
You know, he was brought to Afghanistan when he was nine years old.
So it's not like he was choosing of his free will to do this.
He was doing what his father told him to do.
And so it's a little odd to prosecute him for it now.
Well, you know, he's right up there with the cook and the driver and all the rest of the terrible war criminals that they've got so far down there.
But so this would be like the son of the cook.
The son of the cook.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I think we should maybe stop and sing.
Aren't you proud to be an American right now?
Maybe onward Christian soldiers would be more appropriate.
Here's what I don't understand about this, though, man.
All right.
So not that you're man.
Pardon me.
That's just how I talk.
So some kid throws a grenade at an American soldier invading the country that he's in.
Right.
27.
What if he was 27 years old and he was one of the commanders or something and he threw a grenade at an American soldier?
How is that a war crime?
Well, that's a really good question.
So it's actually not a war crime.
Traditionally, it's never been a war crime to throw a grenade or attack in any way.
A soldier that is attacking you.
Right.
That's part of what we think of as a war.
But in the military commissions act that Congress passed, they decided to change that.
And what they said was that something called an unprivileged belligerent, which basically means anyone who's fighting who doesn't wear a uniform.
So what we would normally think of as terrorist forces, that they anything they do basically that is opposed to U.S. forces becomes a war crime.
And that's a complete, complete rewriting of international law.
And the laws of war do not provide for that.
But that's what they've decided.
So well, in the Geneva Convention, it doesn't matter, does it?
Whether the Taliban were signatories of the Geneva Convention, because even though they were, what matters is that the United States government is that the Senate has ratified it, that the Congress has passed laws enforcing the Geneva Conventions.
And it dictates our behavior, not creates a bunch of exceptions depending on how the other side behaves.
Am I right?
Right.
I mean, the Geneva Conventions are a little bit different than the laws of war.
The Geneva Conventions are have to do with how you treat prisoners in a war.
But but you're right.
I mean, a lot of the way we've even treated this guy.
I mean, he's been in prison for eight years without, you know, education.
You're supposed to treat children.
You're supposed to give them education and rehabilitation and all this stuff.
He hasn't gotten any of that.
So that's I mean, that actually violates a special U.N. treaty that has to do with the treatment of children in war.
But the laws of war are sort of there's a it's sort of a different body of law.
It's not quite the Geneva Conventions, but it is a standing body of law that we've signed on to and that we are usually are supposed to be respecting.
And we're kind of ignoring it here.
But, you know, what might relate to people more is the idea that it's like they made something a crime after it was committed.
So in 2006 and then again in 2009, Congress passed a law saying, yeah, this thing is a war crime, but it wasn't a war crime when the guy supposedly committed it.
Right.
So even if Cotter had thrown the grenade, that wasn't a war crime when he did it in 2002.
Right.
And as all Americans know, yeah, yeah.
As all Americans know, because we learn it and we're forced to memorize it in public school.
That's Article one, section nine of the Constitution forbids such a thing ever.
Right.
You can't pass a law later and criminalize conduct that already happened.
And it's not to say that he couldn't be prosecuted in a regular court, you know, for for killing somebody.
He could be.
He could be prosecuted as a civilian, but it's not a war crime.
And so he doesn't belong in a military commission.
Yeah, well, he doesn't belong in prison for eight years without trial.
I mean, he shouldn't have been characterized as a war criminal ever.
And the whole thing about uniforms, I mean, the idea there is, you know, we're at war with the Germans and some guy changes out of his uniform into civilian clothes and gets behind the lines.
He's a spy, that kind of thing.
In this case, the only reason the Taliban and them didn't have uniforms is because Colin Powell hadn't given them quite enough aid money to buy that many.
Exactly, exactly.
And it's kind of an old fashioned notion that that everybody who fights wears a uniform or is part of the kind of a government that distributes uniforms.
Now, he did bring them millions and millions of dollars.
They could have spent that buying uniforms from an American company, you know.
Yeah, but maybe they figured they would they would spend it on weapons instead.
Yeah, well, their mistake, I guess.
All right.
Well, so now I read this thing.
I think it was your former colleague over there at the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman, who's been doing great work on this story here.
We're going to have him on the show next week, I believe.
But I think it was something that he wrote about how this kid has shrapnel in his eye still.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
Now, is that because the best Western medicine can't fix him or because they just let him lay there with shrapnel in his eye?
You know, I don't know.
I mean, there hasn't been any suggestion that they didn't give him the absolute necessary medical treatment.
He did lose his vision in his left eye, but apparently has shrapnel also in the other eye.
And there was some issue on the first or second day of these hearings where he said his eye hurt.
And so he didn't want to have to put on what the military calls the eyes and ears.
This is kind of amazing.
So when they take them from the prison in Guantanamo Bay to bring them to the courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, they have to put up they make them put on these really tight fitting goggles that are completely blacked out and these earmuffs that block out all sounds like in the pictures of Jose Padilla going to the dentist.
Yeah, except that now they were putting him in a van in the back of like an armored vehicle that had no windows and forcing him to keep wearing these.
So he was saying that the goggles were hurting his eyes and he was having an eye problem.
And the military still forced him to keep wearing them, even in the van where there are no windows where he couldn't see anything anyway.
So there was a whole conflict about that.
But then that problem seemed to go away.
I think his eyes better now.
We didn't really hear much after that.
Yeah, well, I mean, that sounds like torture to me.
It's not necessarily torture during interrogation.
But, you know, like Antonin Scalia says, torture as punishment is the only thing that's banned, not for interrogation or just for fun.
If you want to torture a prisoner for fun, that's not banned by the Constitution.
Well, apparently it's with the military things.
I mean, I think that the one thing that was interesting to see and something that I think is very problematic about the military commissions is that you had a military judge who said very clearly in open court, I will not question any security measures being taken by the military.
So even though the military was forcing him to wear these really tight fitting goggles that were hurting him inside an armored vehicle where he couldn't see anyway, he refused to question whether that was a reasonable measure.
And it shows you that within the military system, the military commission judges are going to be naturally very unlikely to question the military itself.
So it really calls into question whether you have a neutral judge.
Well, help me count now.
How many different Guantanamo prosecutors have said, forget this man, I'll give up my pension before I participate in this madness.
I've never been about seven.
I don't remember the latest number, but there are several, certainly about like a handful of them have said, this is just absurd.
Yeah.
Hey, how many times has that ever happened in civilian life in the United States where the DA, the assistant DA resigns rather than follow the orders and prosecute an innocent person?
Never.
Never.
But seven Guantanamo officers have said, man, I can't prosecute under these circumstances.
This is not a fair fight.
Right.
Especially it's happened around these sort of cases where they're prosecuting children.
And, you know, the other thing that no one talks about is you're prosecuting somebody eight years after a crime that was supposedly committed, but there isn't any actual hard evidence that was committed.
You know how hard it is.
I mean, the reason we have a speedy trial act and the reason we have statutes of limitations in the law is because people forget because evidence becomes old, it becomes stale.
And so it's very hard to prove a case the longer you wait.
So just the fact of prosecuting a case like this eight years after it happened is really problematic.
You could never do that in a federal court.
It would just be too late.
Well, that brings up a question right there about the future of what are supposed to be 9-11 trials for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shib and a couple of others.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's strange.
I mean, the administration, you know, when the last thing they said was that they were going to bring these guys to trial in a civilian court.
But then, of course, there was this whole uproar by a lot of Republicans in Congress saying, they should be brought in military commissions.
And the administration really hasn't said much about it.
They said that they're going to decide soon, but they've been going to decide soon for quite a while.
So I don't know.
I mean, Eric Holder just yesterday was testifying about how he still has faith in the federal court system.
But it's just not clear if they're going to have the guts to continue to bring this in a civilian court.
Rad.
I love that faith in the faith in the civilian court system means faith that it can successfully convict anyone it chooses, because that's what would shake faith in the system is if anyone thought that the defendant might stand a chance.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's that for the government, for the federal government to be standing up and saying, we don't believe in our own federal court system is kind of outrageous.
I mean, that's that's a very sad commentary.
Maybe they should be impeached and removed from office.
I don't know.
I don't know.
That's kind of beyond my expertise.
I'll let you handle that part.
OK, well, isn't it a war crime to do this ex post facto outside the laws of war outside the Geneva Conventions, pseudo some kind of torture slash bogus prosecution of a 15 year old?
I mean, isn't that in violation of the laws of war?
Doesn't that isn't it a war criminal activity for the Obama administration to be doing this to Omar Khadr right now?
I don't know if it's a war crime, but it's certainly a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
And, you know, one thing that was amazing that came up at the Carter case, too, was that the government said several times the U.S. Constitution does not apply here.
This is the Guantanamo Bay.
Right.
And, you know, the defense said, yes, it does.
So and the judge is like, yeah, we'll leave that to another day.
He doesn't want to get into that.
Right.
He doesn't want to contradict the military and say the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply.
But this is an American military base.
And the Supreme Court has already said that at least some part of the Constitution applies because these guys have the right to habeas corpus, which means they have the right to challenge their detention in a federal court.
So, you know, a lot of this hinges on whether the Constitution applies at Guantanamo Bay.
And no one's really decided that.
And it's pretty astounding to me that the Obama administration is continuing to make the argument that it does not apply so that you can do that.
You can pass new laws that these guys apparently committed eight years ago.
And now you can make it a crime.
You know, you can see you can violate the ex post facto clause.
You can violate the rule against self incrimination.
You know, none of these guys who were brought who are being tried down there were ever given Miranda rights or ever told that they had the right not to speak.
And that's one of the big issues in the Cotter cases.
Were any of his statements voluntary or were they coerced?
And now you can't really prove it either way because they were never told what rights they had.
And the government, of course, says they have no right.
It's really a mess down there.
I mean, and so if this stuff violates the Constitution or any other laws, the U.S. just says that doesn't apply.
Yeah.
Well, you know, people have been remarking more and more lately about how the Internet, especially, has helped kind of create a situation.
I guess the establishment really resents it, that instead of just all of us gathering around and watching Tom Brokaw at night like it used to be, everybody has their own different sources of information.
But what it ends up one of the consequences is people who disagree with each other have totally separate conversations from each other.
So you and I can sit here and talk about this in a way that, you know, from our point of view is, well, OK, objectively speaking, is, you know, grounded in the reality of the situation.
But you can have the almost the entire right side of the political spectrum, all inclusive, almost with a narrative that does not include the facts that what, 700 something of these worst of the worst have been released already, that the only really dangerous guys there were the ones who were brought way after the fact from their secret torture dungeons in Eastern Europe and Thailand and ships at sea and so forth when they closed down the ghost prison system or claimed to anyway, and that pretty much all the rest of these guys are at worst cooks and drivers and sons of cooks and drivers.
Right.
And yet no, these are all dangerous terrorists and they'll kill us if we give them trials.
They'll turn our country upside down if they're to have access to the courts.
But meanwhile, how Daphne, 700 and something of these guys have been sent home with a pat on the head and a sorry.
Right.
Well, and, you know, what's also disturbing is that they, you know, eventually both the Bush administration and under the Obama administration, too, they realized, OK, yeah, I guess you guys didn't do anything.
We should let you go.
But they don't actually help them then.
I mean, if you've just been imprisoned without trial for seven years and then you're sent back somewhere, you're kind of in a difficult position, right?
Like there's no effort to reintegrate these people into society or help them get an education or somehow kind of help them have some way to do something other than join up with a terrorist group, because they're probably really mad at the United States having been wrongly imprisoned for so long.
I mean, it's amazing how little foresight there is to what's going to happen to these people afterwards once you do find that they're innocent.
Yeah.
Well, they don't care enough to put foresight on.
I mean, the most obvious thing to me is that any one of them who tries to go home, everyone's going to assume they're a snitch.
What do you mean you were in Guantanamo and then they let you out as though you're not here to entrap me?
Stay away from me at best, you know, if not a bullet in the head.
Right now, it's very dangerous for them.
And, you know, at the very least, they're not able to get a job because they've just been imprisoned for being for being a terrorist.
So it's a really tough situation.
The United States owes a lot to these people.
You don't just, you know, what was it, 80% that Rumsfeld, that Lawrence Wilkerson testified that Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney knew that these guys, about 80% of them were innocent.
There has to be something that we do to help them afterwards.
It's just unconscionable.
You know, going back to your point about how everybody is just talking to themselves, I think that is a big problem.
And you're right, like, we can talk about this, but, you know, the right wing isn't listening.
And they can have people like Joe Lieberman going on television and saying, we need to have, we need to strip every suspected terrorist of their citizenship.
What?
I mean, he may as well say, we need to just imprison everybody we suspect of a crime before giving them a trial.
Right.
Well, and of course, especially when he says this within, what, a day or two of the judge up there in Michigan saying this huddery case of Rachel Maddow and the federal prosecutors is a bunch of bunk and let them all go free pending their trial as that case falls apart.
And what were these guys?
But American citizens accused of terrorism and attempting to overthrow the government and all these kinds of things.
That's exactly the kind of thing that Joe Lieberman and John McCain would have them given the pedia treatment over rather than giving a judge a chance to say, this is preposterous.
Get out of my court.
Right.
Right.
Right.
I mean, that's crazy to start imposing punishment before we've even had a trial before you have even any idea who these people are.
Well, that's what Joe Lieberman and John McCain are for.
That's why they call them moderate.
See, they're the centrist.
They take all the worst ideas of all sides and combine them together.
Remember John McCain used to be considered kind of a liberal Republican.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, he's he's the big supporter now for throwing everybody in a military commission.
Yeah.
Well, his his primary opponent down there in Arizona is running on a let's torture people.
Yeah.
Platform.
So John McCain's got to move to the right heart.
Right.
And since he has no shame or principles or decency or wisdom whatsoever, it's not very difficult for him, apparently.
But now I think I just want to add one point that has been really disturbing to me about the Cotter case.
So when I was down there and there were like maybe thirty five journalists covering it, almost none of them were from the United States.
You had a lot of journalists from Canada because Omar Cotter was born in Canada and he's a Canadian citizen, but he's being held by the United States.
You had a handful of U.S. journalists, many of whom left after the first few days.
There was no one from New York Times down there.
The Washington Post reporter left after a couple of days.
The mainstream major news media were not there.
And that is a real problem.
I mean, this is a big issue to be having military commission cases going on in this remote, you know, this part of Cuba on an island where we don't even have relations with with the country and nobody that the mainstream news organizations don't care.
Yeah, this is the whole thing.
You and Spencer Ackerman, you're the Americans covering this, basically, right?
Basically, I mean, there were a few other NGOs.
You know, the ACLU was down there.
Human Rights Watch was down there.
Who else?
Oh, there's the Miami Herald has Carol Rosenberg is a terrific reporter who's been covering Guantanamo Bay like nobody else.
She's really great, but she's pretty much the only American press.
Even the AC didn't have someone down there.
Is Warren Ritchie from the Christian Science Monitor show up anymore?
No, he used to do some really great work on this could be down there this week.
I don't know, but I haven't seen anything is written on this recently.
All right.
Now, help me understand the role of the attorney general in American society, because honestly, I don't understand it, really.
I mean, he is the head of the Justice Department.
He's appointed by the president.
He serves at the pleasure of the president who can fire him.
Right.
But he's supposed to be somehow more independent and more insulated than, say, the Interior Department or something from the influence of the presidency.
And this is, you know, maybe you can help fill us in with maybe some past examples or something.
But this is the kind of thing where attorney generals and presidents have come into conflict.
And sometimes it's led to resignations over principle and things like that.
And yet, it seems to me that in this case, it sort of goes without saying, at least on TV, that this is up to Obama, whether the 9-11 guys get trials or not, rather than it's up to Eric Holder, who has already announced that they will get trials.
Right.
I mean, technically, they've made it sound like it's up to Eric Holder, because he's the attorney general and that, you know, it makes him sort of the chief, the chief prosecutor in the country.
But you're right.
I mean, ultimately, the attorney general is a political position, and it's a politically appointed position.
And it's clear that Holder is in conflict with people inside the Obama administration who want this stuff tried in military commissions.
And I think it's pretty clear that Eric Holder knows that these cases belong in civilian courts, but that he obviously feels some political pressure not to say that clearly.
So, you know, he hasn't been a very strong attorney general in that way.
And I think it is a problem.
He's supposed to be upholding the rule of law, but he is still, you know, a functionary of the president.
Yeah, you know, and this kind of it's funny, because his relationship with the president here is easily translated into Obama's relationship with the right in that sense, in that a half argument doesn't usually win.
And so instead of Holder saying, no, damn it, the law, he kind of says, well, you know, we'll give some of them trials and then others we won't.
And then even if they're convicted or even if they're acquitted, we'll hold them for the rest of their lives anyway.
This kind of thing.
So how's he supposed to win an argument like that?
The same way that Barack Obama doesn't win an argument with the right by saying, no, look, man, there's nothing more important in the whole world than preserving the writ of habeas corpus for the next few generations.
And I'm not arguing with you about it anymore.
I'm right.
You're wrong.
That's it.
He would win that argument, but he won't make it because he doesn't want to.
He doesn't believe in it.
The best he has is one of these half Eric Holder type arguments himself.
Well, it's a really good point.
I mean, no one no one in this administration and in a long time, it seems to be willing to stand up on principle and say, no, this is what is right to do.
This is what the law says.
This is what we're going to do.
Everyone feels the need to compromise in some way or sort of not contradict people who might politically oppose them.
And so whether it's Obama trying to appease Republicans and as a result, not getting what he wants or Eric Holder trying to appease Obama, you're absolutely right.
And I mean, one of the things that also becomes clear when you watch these military commission cases is that because all of these people who were captured abroad, captured in Afghanistan or wherever they were brought to Guantanamo Bay were never read their rights.
They fucked up.
Excuse me.
They really messed up their cases.
And the government is really messed up their cases.
And it's become really hard to bring many of them to court.
So the reason you have this idea that there are some people we're going to have to hold, we won't be able to try, but we'll have to hold them indefinitely.
I think that's because they know that if they brought it to a real court, even a military commission, it would get thrown out.
It would, any confessions would be unreliable.
The evidence would be unreliable, but they're afraid to let them go because they, you know, maybe believe based on classified evidence that these guys are dangerous, but they, maybe they were tortured in some black site overseas somewhere, and you can't use any of the information they got from it.
So part of the problem they have now is because all these laws were broken early on and nobody was treated the way they were supposed to be treated.
You can't prosecute a lot of these cases and politically they're unwilling to let them go.
Yeah.
Well, those are the consequences of abandoning your principles.
It's sort of like, this is what happens when you botch the prosecution of OJ Simpson, he gets to go free.
It's not that he didn't do it.
It's that the prosecutors should have been fired and replaced by somebody competent.
And so, you know, they're kind of on trial.
They got to prove their case.
They got to do their diligence here.
They abandoned all their principles.
Now they're in a situation where even if they had some, they have a real difficult job in trying to apply them.
But I guess that's just the way it is.
Well, you know, I mean, the other thing though, is it's kind of a weak claim because if they have classified evidence that really shows that these people are dangerous, they can bring that into court.
You just close the courtroom.
I mean, that's done all the time.
They use classified evidence.
So it must be that the only evidence they have was elicited through torture and therefore they can't use that.
And therefore they want to hold them indefinitely.
I mean, that's the only thing I can imagine because nothing else really makes sense.
Classified evidence is usable in a court.
Yeah, well, we'll see what happens.
But, you know, I guess I've stopped asking for real grand juries and real investigations or even for Congress to do their oversight job anymore.
It's all up to journalists like you, frankly, activists and journalists who are willing to dig into these stories and tell the truth.
I mean, they can create 15 blue ribbon commissions and I don't expect to have any answers at the end of any of them.
So, well, you know, I gotta say we can't.
I know it's not very popular, this whole accountability idea, the idea that anyone is going to be held accountable for these actions, but we can't really give up on that because I really strongly believe that if no one is held accountable for authorizing torture and abuse of people who are suspects in cases, then that's just going to repeat itself.
I mean, it's just a really, really dark chapter in this country's very recent history, perhaps ongoing.
We don't know.
And that's just something we can't tolerate.
Yeah, no, I'm totally with you on that.
And I'm sorry to be such a pessimist all over your interview because you're absolutely right that, you know, and that's the word, you know, everybody should get this tattooed on their arm or something.
Accountability.
That's the whole point.
There is none.
There's no accountability from the smallest case of a prosecutor framing somebody in a small town all the way up to the president United States, killing kids in Pakistan and everything in between.
There's no accountability on the part of those in charge of making the laws, enforcing the laws, interpreting and applying the laws.
They can do whatever they want.
And if we don't find a way to make them do what we want and apply the same laws to themselves that they apply to us, then, you know, we're all going to end up in the equivalent of Guantanamo Bay at some point, the legal equivalent of it.
Yeah, whole country will.
If the American people don't hold the government accountable, then we just keep sliding down the slippery slope until we have no more law where the law does not apply to the state.
It only applies to us and they can do whatever they want with us.
And it ends up not even being a law anymore at all.
It's just, you know, the various edicts of sovereign emperors.
They can torture people to death and get away with it.
We can't.
They can hold bogus trials for people that they know they can't convict there.
They're in so many different ways.
The government is outside of the law right now that I'm just trying to agree with you, really, that if we don't do something about it and force some kind of accountability, especially on the most important things like torture, then, you know, we're going to live in one big lawless Gitmo.
That's what I'm saying.
Wow.
Well, you know, one little optimistic note is that some of these people have actually kind of turned around like there's this guy who one of the interrogators at Bagram testified yesterday in the Cotter case, and he had been court-martialed, but he won his case.
He was not convicted, but he testified that, yeah, he and other people were abusing prisoners.
No question.
He said, yeah, like we were encouraged to abuse them as much as possible because we were under huge pressure to get intelligence information and we would do whatever we had to do to get it.
So, you know, we'd chain them to cages and, you know, when they're clearly in extreme pain.
And he was describing all these things they would do, threaten them with torture, because that's what they were essentially told to do.
So, there are people who are kind of turning around and coming out with that stuff now.
That doesn't exactly mean that anyone's going to get prosecuted, but at least people are kind of getting a conscience about it.
Right.
You're talking about the Navy SEALs who did the dry firing, mock executions and all that?
This was just an interrogator.
You know, they didn't name who he was, but he was an interrogator at Bagram who testified at the military commission yesterday.
Oh, at Bagram.
I'm thinking of a different case from Iraq, I think.
No, he testified and I think he'd been involved in the abuse of prisoners at Bagram.
Yeah.
So, it wasn't just bad apples from the National Guard on the night shift, huh?
No, definitely not.
It went all the way up and down.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
It's not like anything's ever been published proving all of that before.
Listen, I'll let you go.
I really appreciate your time on the show, as always, Daphne.
Great to talk to you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Daphne Eviatar from Human Rights First, and you can find her at The Huffington Post and much of her older work at The Washington Independent.
