05/14/10 – Matthew Harwood – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, our next guest is Matthew Harwood.
He is a journalist out of Washington, D.C.
He writes for the Guardian in the U.K. and for the Huffington Post.
He's written also for the Washington Monthly and Columbia Journalism Review.
And he's got a chapter in the new book, Attitudes Aren't Free, Thinking Deeply About Diversity in the U.S. Armed Forces.
The chapter is 25 and Joining an American Nightmare.
Welcome back to the show, Matt.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
I appreciate you joining us today.
This is very powerful stuff here.
Good job.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
And so the nightmare that you're talking about is the torture regime of the Bush years, which I guess, you know, the renditions are continuing even now.
I don't know if Obama is sending people straight to Hosni Mubarak to be tortured to death or whatever still, but I guess that's how secrecy works.
Well, I think, too, maybe not physical torture still exists, but we still have tons of people in Gitmo that have been held indefinitely for, what are we going on now, eight, nine years?
Right, and have been told explicitly that even if they're acquitted by their military tribunal, which is a joke in the first place, that we'll still hold them forever anyway if we feel like it.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing, isn't it?
Yeah, and that is torture, too.
You know, being held without charges, without any method of remedy or a chance to tell a guy in a black robe, hey, give me a chance here.
These guys are wrong.
Stand between me and the government, please.
That's the best hope we have in this so-called limited constitutional state is the judges.
I'm going to say maybe it's my fault for not making this argument more forcefully, or more forcefully, I should say, but I agree with you.
That is a form of torture, to basically have your liberties ripped away from you for nine years, especially if you've done nothing, and they can't prove their case.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess it's not a big deal if you believe in reincarnation, but for the rest of us, you only get one life, you know?
I couldn't agree more.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, when I was younger, I was young and indestructible, and I was going to live to be 90 years old no matter what, and I don't know, I guess now I'm in my 30s.
Does that count as old?
I got a couple of gray hairs on my chin, and I one time got hit by a suburban, too.
That kind of changed things a little bit.
I got a different view now of the value of at least my own life, and how valuable each day is that passes, and I can't imagine spending the rest of it locked in some cell for some bogus charges.
Again, aside from the physical tortures, you're in here until we say so, but we probably won't ever say so.
But it's a resort down there, isn't it?
Oh, yeah, you know, Charlie Daniels went and did a PR stunt for the DOD, and I heard it was great.
They feed them lemon chicken, which is apparently wonderful.
The arguments that are made.
All right, now, again, it's Matthew Harwood.
The chapter, you can find this online at Google Books.
The book is called Attitudes Aren't Free, and the chapter is chapter 25, Enjoying an American Nightmare.
Well, you know, I'd like to basically just set you up to go off here.
Let's start off with the moral argument that you make, and you're making this argument with a military audience in mind, I take it.
Yeah, that's exactly, and that's basically the only audience of the book is the military.
Except for the audience of anti-war radio that's all going to read it later.
I hope so.
I'm sure the book deserves a little bit more exposure than it's gotten so far.
But, yeah, I mean, you're right.
It's basically, for me, the best argument is the moral argument, and it's about who we are.
And, you know, I think with the United States, especially with our supposed belief in enlightenment principles and the dignity of an individual, that we wouldn't do this to other people.
And, you know, then we can just get into the other things.
It's counterproductive.
It doesn't work.
There's also the practical argument that if you're in the military and you don't want to be considered a torture, part of a military that tortures, because you're afraid you'll be tortured in return, and you're captured.
Yeah, well, let's start off there with the moral argument and the core of the American identity there.
And, you know, this is kind of a dualistic sort of thing where, I mean, at the essence when you're talking about enlightenment principles, you're talking about individual liberty.
You're talking about every single person has the same divine right as King George III.
He doesn't have the divine right.
We all do.
And how do you like that, basically?
And so that's at the core, but it's also it goes to the core of the American Revolution and the foundations of this country and what we're taught as children America is, what it stands for, what it means, what makes us Americans, because we all believe these same few principles and premises that come from the era of the revolution against England.
I'm sure you know this.
I don't know if other people do, but, you know, in the Revolutionary War, General George Washington forbid the troops to torture anyone.
And this is exactly as the British were torturing American soldiers and American captives.
It's pretty amazing.
You know, we love our founding fathers sometimes too much.
We kind of forget that they're human beings, and they did some pretty awful things themselves.
But it's when they actually stand up principle that it's striking to me that that's not more forcefully put out in the media, that by not torturing, we're upholding our own values and what makes us who we are.
Yeah, and as you point out in your chapter here, this is an important part of the story of the American Revolution, not just because we like it as an example now, but because a lot of British soldiers and their German mercenaries quit and joined the Americans.
Said, well, geez, I'd rather, you know, as long as I'm a prisoner of war with you guys, can I just join up?
Yeah, yeah, and you would think today that that would also be a good argument against jihadism and jihadists, that they've been sold a lie, that we aren't this crusading, tyrannical, imperial machine that they make us out to be.
But then we go ahead and we basically make the argument for them.
Yeah, you want empire?
We'll show you empire.
And, you know, I don't know if this is because you listen to my show every day or what, but I've made this point for years and years and years, that Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were both nobodies until they were tortured by the respective puppet dictatorships of the United States in Egypt and Jordan.
Yeah, and that's something I don't think a lot of people know about.
It really is striking, the blowback of the global war on terrorism has just been, it's amazing.
It's amazing to me that you couldn't see it happening, that if you told me that we were going to torture people and indefinitely detain people that oversees that that would cause violence against us, I would say, that seems like human nature.
We can bet on that with certainty.
Yeah, it's just a failure of imagination, really.
I mean, you think about how people reacted after September 11th.
They just went and joined that day.
They woke up the next morning, ate their cornflakes, and went down to the recruiter's office.
I'll be damned if I'm going to let anybody kill a bunch of thousands of people in my country without getting a bullet for it.
They all joined up.
What's the same thing when we bomb them?
What's so hard to imagine about that, other than I guess people have never heard it stated out loud before in their lives?
You know, they think Iraq, they think the Middle East, and they picture the Disney movie Aladdin or something, where everybody's a cartoon character, and they act and feel however we say.
Well, you know, I think jihadism obviously plays a part in all this, and I don't want to minimize that.
But you have to think what makes people want to latch on to such a violent ideology.
And we should be honest about it.
It's imperial itself.
But right now, it doesn't have even close to the capability of doing anything that it wants to do.
The only thing it can do is make us try to do what it wants us to do and prove the argument, the jihadist narrative, for them.
And that's exactly what is going on today.
I mean, you know now with the Times Square bomber, I should say it's been reported that he was really angry, one, over the Iraq war, and number two, over drug strikes that he may have witnessed in Pakistan.
I mean, that seems like blowback.
Yeah, in fact, I've been kind of beating the dead horse about this all week, Matthew, in that even David Sanger, who's Barack Obama's go-to guy, head liar about the Iranian nuclear program at the New York Times, even wrote an article where he, I think reflecting discussions that he had with his administration sources, sort of posited, wow, is it possible that using robots to shoot Hellfire missiles at women and children in Pakistan is counterproductive?
Hmm, maybe, you know, Washington, D.C. is all a Twitter this weekend with the possibility that people might commit a terrorist attack in retaliation for something that America did, huh?
Write it down, it's May 2010 as we're discussing this right now.
Seems like an iron rule of universe committee.
Jeez.
All right, well now, so, let's talk about the pragmatic and practical things going on here, because, you know, there's this whole tough guy attitude that says, yeah, yeah, yeah, the law, yeah, yeah, yeah, morality, and the divine right of every human being to their own life, etc.
These guys are bad guys, they're evil jihadists, and screw them, I don't care about their rights, they don't have rights, torture them.
That's how we get good intelligence and prevent L.A. from getting nuked, like on TV.
Yeah, like I said, I think you make the argument to them that it's basically self-interest.
Well, one, the first point, there's been no empirical evidence that torturing someone makes them more likely to give you good, actionable intelligence that you can use later.
And number two, it really comes down to simple self-interest.
If you're known to be part of a military that tortures, I would say you could at least expect the possibility of being tortured in return if you're captured.
And we don't even have to talk just about al-Qaeda and jihadists.
I mean, with what I read, within the military themselves, there are these JAG members that were released, and that was a big fear in the JAG memos, that not al-Qaeda was going to torture people, but in future conflicts, U.S. service members could be tortured because of what happened in the global war on terrorism.
Well, you know, I wonder how many people driving around listening to the show today, maybe accidentally tuning in, flipping through classic rock and top 40 and stuff, even really know that it was the Bush cabinet that deliberately ordered all of this.
I mean, it's not the kind of thing they really discuss on TV all that much.
And the phrase, bad apples on the night shift at Abu Ghraib, I think, that spin in 2004 really did stick with a lot of people, especially the Bush voters who had invested so much in defending everything that the Bush regime did that they didn't even really notice that they were throwing away the very core of what America is that makes it different than the old world, in order to do so.
And they just blinded themselves, a lot of people, I think, just blinded themselves to all the evidence that came out later, from the Toguba report on, that this was Bush and his cabinet, that, especially like in the case of Qatani down there at Guantanamo Bay, they literally sat around and choreographed the torture of this guy, step by step.
The Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the head of the CIA, all of them.
Everybody but Bush was there for that one.
What I find, I don't know if you find this interesting, but it was President Reagan that signed the Convention Against Torture in 88.
So you would think this would be a bedrock conservative principle, because they love Ronald Reagan.
We do not torture, that is not us.
And yet, 12 years later, we're torturing people.
Well, never mind the fact that Ronald Reagan was a torturer.
Just ask the people of El Salvador.
Yeah, probably even bigger, most of South America at the time.
But at least it sounds good.
It does sound good.
And it does make the worst hypocrites out of the people who pretend like he was the greatest president ever, on one hand, and yet, never mind any of the actual positions he took on the other, whether we're talking about torture or nuclear weapons or anything else.
Well, talk to me about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
Well, Abraham Lincoln, it was another one.
Civil War, you know, he suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War, but he still didn't torture.
And one of, it was called the Lieber Code.
That's different than the Lieber Man Code?
Most different.
Unbelievably, universes away from each other.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, the Lieber Man Code is kill them all and let Yahweh sort them out or something like that?
Pretty much something like that.
But it was Francis Lieber was a professor at Columbia College in New York at the time, and he basically drafted one of the first laws of warfare.
And one of the basic things was you will not torture to extract confessions from someone.
And then afterwards, that was drawn upon to start creating all the international laws of war leading up to the Geneva Conventions.
So you really have it where the United States itself, again, put its flag into the earth and said these are the principles that we abide by, and that we fight to uphold in the world.
And the world listened.
Yeah.
It's funny that we're violating our own principles while the rest of the world, who used to do these things, looks at us in horror.
You know, it's funny.
It's sort of like the dollars, the reserve currency of the world, because it used to be based on gold and was actually good for something back in the day.
It's sort of the same thing with all this war, where the American people kind of accept that it's okay for us to violate any of our own principles in order to wage war because we're so good.
We already have the Superman costume on.
It doesn't matter whether we actually do bad things, because we're us and we know how good we are.
And sooner or later we find out that actually we've given up every last thing that made us better and different than the old world.
Well, don't you think it's interesting, too, that when we do these overseas, these things overseas, and I don't mean terrorism attacks when I say it starts to come home to us.
You really have to look at the things that we're thinking about.
You're ripping someone of their citizenship if they're just even accused of being a terrorist.
And then you also have what's going on in the Hill, which is talking about taking away Second Amendment rights for someone that's put on a terrorism watch list.
Now, that sounds commonsensical, but at the same time, if there's not real due process going on there, you're ripping away one of the Bill of Rights away from people.
Sure.
Well, and of course, especially when we live in an era where we already all know that the government will call anything that they feel like terrorism.
They'll go ahead and, you know, they've already been busted using the Patriot Act in regular drug cases and surveilling some strip club where there was some, you know, money laundering going on in Las Vegas or whatever.
They don't care.
They'll use and abuse the laws however they want.
They'll go up, the head of the FBI will go up to Congress and say, oh, yeah, the national security letters and the administrative subpoenas, we abused the hell out of those.
And we're going to continue to.
Thank you very much for your time today.
And then he walks right out.
Well, it's kind of funny, too, when you bring up national security letters.
As far as I know, I don't know how many terrorist convictions they've led to.
If they've led to any, it's been minuscule with the number of letters that they've put out.
So you're right.
I mean, it's an abuse of power.
We've given them the power, and now they're abusing it.
I would think people would understand that, that that's going to happen.
I guess it's funny.
I think back on it.
The other Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine, he was really right, that all the pressure should have first been for a torture commission, because that would have kept it in the headlines.
It would have kept the leaks coming out and kept the outrage building.
And instead, what we got was a preliminary investigation that they already announced in The Washington Post has been narrowed to the question of just a few cases on the lower level where the actual torturers went beyond their torture instructions and tortured people all the way to death.
That in some of those cases, they're having a preliminary investigation to see whether there ought to be an investigation into whether there ought to be any criminal charges for the lower-level CIA guys actually doing the torturing, which I'm for, as far as that goes.
But it ends up where, just like Abu Ghraib, we have some master sergeant as the highest-level person convicted for these crimes.
We all know it went straight to the top.
It's that simple.
And you're right, they're kind of cleaving out this small little legal area to prosecute these people.
I think the tragedy is that the torture itself isn't on trial.
It's whether or not they went beyond what their superiors said they could do.
They're absurd, the torture memos that legalize this stuff.
The Bush Office of Legal Counsel and the Bush White House repudiated their own memos themselves before the Obama team even came to town.
Well, it is funny to think that it only amounts to torture when you know you're torturing someone, and I believe it was number two that you cause basically enough damage to cause death.
Because people don't think sleep deprivation and stress positions are torture, even though they are.
I mean, I've read accounts of soldiers that were tortured with sleep deprivation, and they say it's the worst thing possible.
I mean, it starts the fracture of the psyche.
So the wounds may not always be visible, but they're there.
Yeah, well, and anyone who wants to quibble about any of these techniques actually rising to the level of torture or not is just kidding themselves.
What are they defending them for?
Why not give them steak and eggs and a back rub?
The whole point is to make them waterboarding people, slamming them against the wall, keeping them awake for weeks and shackling them to the ceiling and squatting to the floor with their wrists chained to the floor.
Oh yeah, no, this isn't in order to hurt them so badly that they finally do what you say or anything.
Here on one hand, these people are saying, yes, torture them until they break and do what we say.
Oh, but it's not torture.
And that works.
In government, school, educated America in the 21st century, that works.
I mean, people, regular non-government employees adopt these arguments.
We've got to torture them, but it's not torture.
But the scary thing among the people in power know what they're doing.
They know it's torture.
And to be honest, I don't think the American public is that stupid that they don't think it's torture.
I mean, I think when we talk about sleep deprivation or stress position, sure, people could argue and say that doesn't sound like torture.
But when you start getting the waterboarding and slamming people around, people know that's torture.
So the question becomes whether they care or not.
Is it because they're fearful or, as you say, that we just feel we're supermen?
We can do what we want.
I just really can't buy the argument that people don't think most of this stuff is torture.
Yeah, well, you know, a big part of it, too, is what they don't know.
I mean, I've heard a lot of people talk about men.
Yeah, no, when I heard that they waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, believe me, you know, that's pretty bad.
I'm against it.
But, of course, the easy war party argument against that is, oh, you care a lot about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, huh, and two or three people were only ever waterboarded, and not that many times.
And actually, the 183 is the number of pours, not the number of different waterboarding and all that.
And yet, meanwhile, we've already known, Matthew, for years and years and years, that they tortured thousands and thousands and thousands of people all across Iraq.
Tony Lugaranis spilled his guts to PBS Frontline in the torture question and said, listen, Abu Ghraib is nothing.
You should see what we do to these people in their houses.
Let me tell you about the people who we would freeze almost to death and then stick dogs on them and then strobe lights and drugs and then beat the hell out of them.
And this went on for years.
Corporal Fishback came out and spilled his guts about, yeah, we call him a puck, a person under control, which means not a human, right, because they have an acronym now.
And so I'm going to go smoke a puck means I'm going to go burn one with a cigarette.
And I'm going to go beat a puck means I'm going to go hang him from the ceiling and use him like a heavy bag and practice my Muay Thai kicks.
And this went on across Iraq for years.
Well, Iraq and Afghanistan, too, what needs to be said in this is that the Geneva Conventions apply in Iraq and Afghanistan regardless.
I mean, it is an active combat zone.
Well, right, and it binds us.
It doesn't depend on whether we recognize the Taliban's signature to the Geneva Convention, even though they were members of it and even though they were winning their civil war at the time we intervened there.
It doesn't matter that they claim it was a failed state and so their signature doesn't apply.
It's our signature that applies.
That's true.
And also that just if you're a human being, it applies.
You may lose specific Geneva rights.
I mean, you know, they always talk about if you're a guerrilla or you're a terrorist, if you're not wearing a uniform.
But that doesn't mean that you lose your right to humane treatment.
And that's what happened.
And that's scary.
Yeah, well, you know, you brought up when we talked about Ronald Reagan and all that, it really wasn't that long ago, 1983, I guess I was in second grade.
And this is when a Texas sheriff was prosecuted by the federal government for violating the civil rights of a man that they had waterboarded.
And you actually wrote something in here that I had never seen before about this case, a quote from the judge when he was sentencing the sheriff and his deputies for torturing this man in 1983.
What did he say?
He basically said that his behavior was like a dictator of a small country.
Yeah, would embarrass the dictator of a small country.
Oh, I'm sorry.
He didn't even just, he didn't even embarrass, that's right.
I'm sorry, I don't have the quote in front of me.
Yeah, no, that's all right.
But, you know, I don't know, there are a lot of people who were born after that, and it's easy to look at even the day before you were born as the olden days and kind of intangible and metaphorical.
But, nah, you know, that really wasn't very long ago.
It was just 30 years ago.
Jeez, I'm old.
But still.
You wonder within the public, I don't know, I hate being the person who thinks now is always worse than what it was in the past.
But you've got to start wondering, is there something in this country now that rights are considered my rights and not everyone else's rights?
Like certainly I have the right not to be tortured, but other people don't.
Yeah, well, and that's how it is with everything.
I don't know if it's just the human condition or if it's, I think a lot of it really is, the government schools.
Everybody, well, unless they have a real ideological conviction about it, basically the default in this society seems to be that nobody else can be trusted with freedom.
I mean, what would that mean?
That's true.
And actually, if I could pick a fight with you, because I do listen to the show, Scott, I love it.
You know, you always rail against government-controlled schools, and that's fine.
But there is a responsibility of a citizen that when they're done in the government school to go outside and educate themselves.
Absolutely.
I mean, all the things that we learned, we didn't learn because we read a textbook.
We went out and we actively pursued this type of information because we care about it.
And we think it's our responsibility as Americans to uphold the best of what America means and stands for within the world.
You know, as it gets worse and worse, more and more people get it.
So maybe there's a chance here that we can get near a position where we can hit a reset button and get a little bit back on track.
Unfortunately, that whole hope change thing from 2008 really diverted a lot of people.
You know, as someone, I didn't drink the Kool-Aid on Obama, but I was at least hopeful Guantanamo was going to be shut down.
It's been a real wake-up call on what's going on, especially now with the drone attacks and also with the idea that you can kill an American citizen overseas far away from the battlefield without giving them their due process.
It's scary, scary things.
Yep.
I think we're already standing at the bottom of the slippery slope looking up, just waiting for the other shoe to drop, man.
That's what I think.
But anyway, I've got to go.
I'm sorry because we've got more on the permanent crisis with Chris Hedges next.
Thank you very much, Matthew.
I appreciate it.
No problem.
Anytime, Scott.
Everybody, that's Matthew Harwood.
You can read what he writes in The Guardian and The Huffington Post, Washington Monthly, Columbia Journalism Review.
And check this out.
This is really good work.
It really is.
It's Enjoining an American Nightmare.
It's chapter 25 from a book called Attitudes Aren't Free.
You can read the whole thing for free at Google Books.