All right everybody, it's Anti-War Radio, the third hour, here on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM, and our next guest on the show today is Nick Bauman, and he's the author of a very disturbing piece at Mother Jones today.
Did the Bush administration experiment on detainees?
Nick, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
Is that a rhetorical question, or can you answer it?
It's a little rhetorical.
The article is based on this report by a group called Physicians for Human Rights, which is a watchdog group.
They actually won the Nobel Prize a couple years back for some of their work on landmines, I believe.
So they're a pretty credible group, and basically they put out a report arguing that when the Bush administration medically monitored interrogations of terrorist suspects, that that medical monitoring basically amounted to experimentation on the detainees because of the data that was being collected and how it was used.
And what's wrong with that?
Well, the big deal is that what the Bush administration was trying to do, their theory was that, you know, they were obsessed with proving that their interrogation program did not amount to torture.
So they came up with these guidelines for what they believed torture to be.
And one of the most famous things was John Yu, who was a deputy assistant attorney general, wrote a memo saying that anything that caused pain that was less than the pain you would get from death or major organ failure didn't constitute torture.
So unless pain reached that level, it wouldn't be torture.
So part of the purpose of the medical monitoring was to figure out what the pain thresholds of the detainees were, according to the report, so that they could interrogate them without getting up to that very high pain threshold of organ failure and or death.
Well, and it seems like if I read your article, right, there's a little bit of question of the cart and the horse in which order they come in, too, because it seems like some of the experimentation was to determine how the memos were to be written in order to legalize the kind of tortures that they were doing in the experiments.
Yeah, that's that's one of the really interesting parts of this is that the U.S. hadn't really done a lot of this sort of stuff before 9-11.
And I mean, there had been some work done because we trained soldiers to withstand torture techniques.
But that was a controlled environment where people could say, you know, all right, stop.
So, you know, according to the report, one of the things that the Bush administration was interested in figuring out was how can we most effectively use these techniques that we've decided that we can use?
You know, how long can you waterboard someone?
And that was how they developed these guidelines that they put into the so-called torture memos about how long you can waterboard someone or whether you can combine use techniques and combinations.
So can you get someone in water and, you know, hit them against the wall or do you have to do those one after the other?
Well, and that's been a major part of this debate, as though, you know, once you're past the line of debating specific torture tactics, this is one of the things that happens is some of the reports have been that, you know, sleep deprivation is pretty bad, but sleep deprivation and hypothermia and drowning and stress positions being crucified from the ceiling, et cetera, like that.
This is now we cross the line into torture even without pain amounting to organ failure or death.
Right.
I mean, the Bush administration would disagree with you about that.
But, you know, that's a position that many people.
Yeah, that's a typical Democrat position, I guess, at least in Congress.
Yeah, I mean, it seems so.
But that's not what they said in, you know, what the Bush guy said.
This is a memo from the head of the Justice Department division, the Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA's acting general counsel.
He said that we understand the experience involving the combination of various techniques.
The medical and psychological personnel who were observing the interrogations did not observe any increase in susceptibility to pain and that those techniques were applied to more than twenty five detainees.
And there was no.
And they claim, according to this monitoring, that that when you were using them simultaneously, it didn't increase susceptibility to pain.
Now, you know, I've talked to some doctors about this, actually, and they sort of questioned whether this was the sort of thing that you could actually accurately measure.
Can you measure someone experiencing pain equal to organ failure?
But that's a whole nother can of worms, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, it's simple to close it right back up.
No, you can't.
There's no scale of one to ten.
Pain is not a quantity.
It's a quality and tying somebody up and then beating them up is torture.
And it's as simple as that.
There's your whole can taken care of for you, pal.
Yeah.
You know, I think that, you know, one of the things that this story really shows is that as soon as you start, you know, blurring those lines and getting into what some people consider to be gray areas, you get all sorts of other things happening.
You have this this thought that they're doing that basically amounts to, you know, the line is that they whether they did it intentionally or not, they may have committed a war crime while they were trying to prove that they weren't committing a different war crime.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and very interestingly, you note in your article, I'm not sure if this is if you came up with this one or the the Physicians for Human Rights noted this as well, that that was that when they passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, that they quite apparently seems like to me and you, I guess, from reading this article, they were looking for retroactive immunity and they rewrote the part about experimentation on captives.
Yeah.
This was mentioned in the PHR report, and it's pretty it's pretty clear.
I mean, that that language was severely weakened under the Military Commissions Act.
Please elaborate.
Um, in 1996, the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed the War Crimes Act, which was the first law to basically impose U.S. criminal penalties for violations of the Geneva Convention.
And in 2006, that was amended.
And one of the things that was changed is that the language on illegal biological experiments was weakened.
So the new law doesn't require that an experiment be carried out in the interest of the subject in order for it to be legal.
So you can you can now carry out an experiment that's not in the subject's best interest.
And obviously, you know, if you're researching to figure out how you can better torture someone, that's not really in that person's interest.
And in addition, they changed it so that experiments that don't endanger the subject, quote unquote, endanger those were also allowed.
All right, we'll hold it right there.
And we'll be back after this break with Nick Bauman, journalist for Mother Jones magazine, motherjones.com.
Did the Bush administration experiment on detainees?
Yeah.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest liberty oriented audio content, 24 hours a day at Liberty Radio Network dot com.
Was a man.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Liberty Radio Network at LRN dot FM. And I guess a few different stations around.
I don't even know which yet, because today's my first day on the Liberty Radio Network.
Did the third hour all last week.
But from now on Monday through Friday, three hours, nine to noon L.A. time.
That's where I'm at.
LRN dot FM for antiwar radio.
I'm in the middle of talking with Nick Bauman about George W. Mengele.
And, you know, here's the thing, too.
He's this guy, Nick.
He's such a calm and reasonable journalist, sort of soft spoken gentleman here that I think there's kind of a problem where we're so lost in details and we've all been so inoculated to these torture stories over the years that this is almost like no big deal.
Right.
It's just another ten minute segment on a radio show or something.
Let's pretend we hadn't heard any of this before.
OK, there was no torture in the Bush administration as far as any of us have ever heard of.
And now comes out the headline.
Did the Bush administration experiment on detainees?
Yes.
Nobel Prize winning physicians for human rights say so.
Nick, welcome back.
Hi.
Yeah, it's shocking stuff.
I agree with you.
I think that we have been sort of inoculated against this stuff.
And that's because there hasn't really been any accountability for anything that for anything that went on in terms of torture interrogation.
And so I think people start to get numb to these sorts of revelations.
But, yeah, you're right.
I mean, you know, there should be people should be really concerned about that.
But, you know, it's almost like the story broke too soon.
Right.
If the story broken after Katrina or something, maybe we'd have stood a 10 percent chance of somebody going to jail or something other than a sergeant at Abu Ghraib, you know.
But what happened was the story broke in the spring of 04, when so many people were still so married to George W. Bush that they decided, forget all of American history and all we've ever claimed to believe in.
We love this guy and we will defend torturing people to death in their cages.
Yeah, I hadn't heard that point before, but that's that's an interesting point.
It did.
I think there is an element of that there that if we had found out about it later, when people were more skeptical of the Bush administration, it might it might have been different.
But, you know, you see in surveys that people are still really scared about terrorism.
And a lot of people say that they think it's OK to torture people sometimes.
And, you know, part of part of the fight, you know, for people who oppose torture is changing that and changing the culture.
So, you know, I think that in countries that have had these sorts of things happen, you know, the accountability often comes after the culture, the culture changes and people have different attitudes.
Yeah.
Well, George Bush will live another 30 or 40 years at this rate.
So there's plenty of time to still lock him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life after he gets a fair trial.
Yeah, there's still there's still a lot of time to study this stuff.
You know, the worry, of course, is that evidence and documents and people who are involved might die and documents and evidence might might disappear.
You know, we have the tapes of a lot of the interrogations were destroyed, of course.
Well, forget that I could indict him right now myself.
And I'm just the radio show host, the anti-torture human rights lawyer, other Scott Horton from Harper's magazine.
He could get a conviction in 15 minutes against George Bush.
The evidence is already there.
Just call Jane Mayer to the stand, man.
Yeah, Jane Jane's amazing.
She's a she's really great journalist.
And yeah, one of my heroes, you know, it is it's and, you know, speaking of other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Columbia University and Harper's magazine, his proposal was a commission because he said, you know, the political pressure for a real prosecution is not here.
If we have a commission, yeah, it'll be a half a cover up and whatever.
But enough will continue to come out that the outrage will build and the American people will be able to find themselves on the side of I'm against this man and I want something done about it.
And then we can maybe have a prosecution.
It's funny, though, and I think, you know, maybe there really was something to that.
And apparently it's too late now.
But I kind of wonder whether we would have just been even more inoculated against it.
And George Bush would still be sitting on his porch sipping tea, you know?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know what would have happened.
But I do know that the the human rights groups, including positions for human rights, still very much want, you know, a commission to investigate this and sort of create momentum for accountability.
And a lot of these groups hope that this this report and these these revelations will create momentum towards the commission.
So we'll see if that happens.
Yeah, well, it sure would be something.
Now, right now, there's an investigation, a preliminary investigation to decide whether there ought to be a criminal investigation into some of the CIA agents who may have gone beyond the memos in torturing people to death.
Although the Washington Post, as the Washington Post has said, it's narrowed all the way to people who died in custody in certain cases.
But even then, the memos say, if you kill them, we know that you meant well and you were trying to prevent a greater harm.
So that's covered, too.
That's in the memos.
Right.
It's crazy.
And, you know, they really thought or maybe they didn't really think this, but they said that if you had doctors there, that that was well, that was proof that you had good intentions with regards to the people you were interrogating.
I mean, that just seems ridiculous to me.
Just because you want to make you know, want to make sure you don't accidentally kill someone while you're you're waterboarding them doesn't mean that you have good intentions towards them.
Yeah.
Well, I think even in the memo, it says you have good intentions.
You're trying to save Americans.
So forget this guy.
Wow.
This is OK.
So back again to this most shocking headline.
I have a disorder where I'm I can't get desensitized to anything.
I'm just as shocked as always.
The first time here again, the Bush administration experimenting on detainees.
This this reminds me of the Red Cross report about the doctor standing there with oxygen meters somehow attached to the fingers of the people being waterboarded so that they could have monitored the amount of oxygen in their bloodstream to bring them all the way into the death spiral before setting them up right and making them puke up the water and doing it all over again.
And, you know, is this is all this experimentation.
Was this all with doctors, too, or this is just CIA thugs playing around or what?
The the evidence presented in the report suggests that this was medical professionals, which I think they're saying to encompass doctors and psychologists and nurses and so on.
Now, those psychologists, they don't have to take the Hippocratic Oath, do they?
Right.
And, you know, psychologists actually played a pretty significant role in the CIA's sort of interrogation program.
But who in the report says that these people were working for and on behalf of the CIA.
So that implies that some of them were contractors.
Probably not technical, technically CIA employees.
But, you know, it seems pretty clear from the report that there's widespread sort of monitoring along the lines of what you were describing with waterboarding, all sorts of interrogation techniques, you know, walling and which is throwing someone into the wall and water dowsing and temperature extremes and all sorts of stuff like that.
Some of which still exists legally under Appendix M of the Army Interrogation Manual.
And who knows what the CIA is still doing?
Yes, we never will.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Nick.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's Nick Fowlman.
The piece is at Mother Jones and it's at Antiwar.com right now to the Bush administration experiment undertainees.
It's about a Physicians for Human Rights report.
That's PHR Torture Papers.org PHR Torture Papers.org.
We'll be back.
