Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at Antiwar.com.
We need your help, and here's how you can help.
Stop by Antiwar.com slash donate, or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095, or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at Antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Now me and the next guest, military intelligence can't tell us apart.
Hope you can.
I guess I'm Scott in L.A.
Horton, and he's Scott in New York Horton.
For a time there, I guess we were both Scott in Austin Horton.
Good thing we didn't have this whole regular radio interview thing going on.
That could have been very confusing.
That's right, just as the transcripts are today.
Now, when exactly were you in Austin?
I was in Austin from 1978 to 1981, going to the University of Texas Law School.
Ah, I dig.
Well, 1981, so that was when the Columbia took off, so I was in kindergarten.
I was two in 78.
I turned two in 78.
You're another generation of Scott Horton.
That's right.
You know, I'd like to do one of those genealogy things and see how many generations we'd have to go back to find out we're cousins or something.
I bet you it's a lot.
I think you told me before your family's been here in America for a long, long time, right?
1639.
Wow, 1639.
Yep.
Wow, the original wave of Hortonian emigration from England.
Among the first.
Wow, very, very good.
All right.
So let's see here.
We've got so much to talk about.
How about let's start with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped organize the September 11th attack, not because of Islam, but because he hated what Israel was doing in Lebanon and Palestine.
Turns out they have tapes of his interrogation after all.
I wonder if they cut him with razor blades until he admitted that he hates our freedom.
Scott?
Well, I think the really interesting thing about this case is it's not a surprise that they have the tapes.
It's a surprise that the tapes survived the efforts to destroy them, because, you know, we now know a decision was taken by a guy named Jose Rodriguez, the very senior covert operative, one of the directors at the CIA.
And we know that it was approved at one point by the CIA director and opposed by the lawyers.
And, you know, it appears that a pretty rigorous effort was made to identify and destroy all these tapes, 92 of them that we know of.
But this one survived.
It seems to have been underneath somebody's desk at Langley.
Nah, come on.
Yeah, really.
They discovered, in any event, they know that it was there.
They weren't going to destroy it anymore.
But they continued, notwithstanding this fact, to repeatedly tell federal judges that there were no tapes.
So that means, you know, that means somebody lied to a federal court, and that could be viewed as obstruction of justice.
And this really goes back to John Durham now, the special prosecutor who's looking at these issues surrounding tapes.
You know, he's clearly established the tapes were destroyed.
It's clear that they were destroyed after lawyers gave advice they shouldn't be destroyed.
And here we've got a case of a survivor amongst the tapes that wasn't destroyed, and they lied to the court, denying its existence.
Well, now, I've got to tell you, you know, I don't know.
There's got to be an agenda behind the release of this, right?
Or they would have just destroyed this, too.
I mean, is it actually possible that an employee at CIA or at the Counterterrorist Center found this box of stuff, figured out what it was, and then they were so afraid that they would get prosecuted or something that they turned it over through the proper channels, rather than, there's an agenda at play here.
Somebody's doing something.
Otherwise, this would have gone right down the memory hole to the fire pit.
Well, I think it's quite likely that the person who had custody of these tapes wouldn't turn them over to allow them to be destroyed.
You know, I think the notion that this is just, you know, something that was just suddenly discovered and had gone missing for a long period of time, you can't rule that out altogether.
But it seems pretty unlikely, particularly given all the attention that was focused on these tapes and likely what's on them.
You know, I'm sure that there's something on those tapes that the CIA and the U.S. government doesn't want to have discovered.
Well, and they say in the AP exclusive, right, that the interrogation here takes place in Morocco, which is where, from at least what we know what they did to Binyam Mohamed in Morocco, that's where they were getting away with real blue-bloody murder.
Exactly right.
In fact, that facility in Rabat is a very, very interesting one.
You know, checking back the records, it looks like the CIA, working with the Moroccan Interior Ministry, co-funded the construction of this special prison, and a special wing within the prison was for state security crimes and was basically a CIA wing, so it's a cooperating facility.
The CIA denies it's their facility.
They say it's a Moroccan facility.
The Moroccans, in fact, say that, yeah, well, that wing is a CIA wing.
So we've got sort of a dispute going on about who's running the show there, but it's very, very clear that this is part of their torture-by-proxy system, where in cases where they're performing things that nobody, including John Yoo, would deny or torture, they turn people over to the Moroccans, the Egyptians, the Syrians, to actually do that.
And the Moroccans, of course, have a long-standing and very close relationship with the United States.
As far as I know well myself, my father was an Air Force officer stationed in Morocco, and I grew up in Parton, Rabat, not very far from where this prison is.
Really?
That's right.
Yeah, and you know what?
I've kind of started this interview off with so much small talk that I didn't really give you a proper introduction.
You're listening, everybody, to the other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture human rights attorney, writes for Harper's Magazine.
His blog is called No Comment, and all he does is comment, and it's always the most interesting stuff, especially if you're into ancient poetry and classical music and all kinds of high cultural value stuff, as well as taking on the torture state.
And you know what, Scott?
There's just no question about it now.
You are 100 percent right that all of the push should not have been for John Durham, this prosecutor, to look into the torture.
All the push should have been first for a torture commission, so that this truth would be coming out and staying in the news and making people angry and wanting to do something about it.
Right now, this is the furthest thing from a political issue.
We are looking forward, not back.
Torture in Morocco or Thailand or in former Soviet and Nazi gulags in Eastern Europe?
Notwithstanding.
Well, that's right.
Instead, the national imagination seems to be focused on the construction of a mosque on the site of a Burlington Coat factory.
Strange as that is.
And issues like this get relatively little attention.
Well, hey, you're a New Yorker in part.
I guess you're a Moroccan kind of too, but you're a New Yorker.
What do you think about all this?
I'm interested to know.
You know, if you live in New York and lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, you know that there's a very substantial Muslim population there, and there are mosques all over the place.
In fact, my office building, Midtown Manhattan, has a mosque right next door to it.
So I have to say it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
And I'm just astounded there's such a controversy about this.
In this case, the imam who runs this cultural center is a well-known figure in the New York community, is considered to be an outstanding moderate who preaches tolerance in the months after 9-11, got a lot of attention.
In fact, he's been on talk shows in Fox and other places over the years.
No issue raised about this.
Now all of a sudden, going back about six weeks, suddenly some people in the Tea Party side of things have decided to make a huge issue out of this.
So it's emerging as an issue.
But I frankly don't think most people in New York care about it one way or the other.
That's good to hear.
That's pretty much what I assume too, that they're just shrugging about this, wondering why a bunch of people who don't even live in New York are all so worked up about it.
But you know what?
There's so many different angles here in terms of freedom of religion and property rights and everything else.
But the thing that's really getting me is it seems like it would be just as easy narrative-wise, for the right wing or really anybody in the American government, to just say, hey, look, we're America, and that means we're a tough guy.
And yeah, you know what?
We did take a real tough one on the chin, but it was a sucker punch.
And you know what?
We got our revenge, and we're all right, and you can't bring us down.
But instead, it's like this whole country is the Oprah Winfrey show, and we're all just supposed to endlessly be crying about our feelings, about what victims we are.
Like being a victim and a hero is the same thing or something.
Why can't we just be tough?
It's all rhetoric anyway, you know?
That's just my state.
Man, I'm sorry.
We'll be back after this show.
You're listening to the best Liberty-oriented audio streamed around the clock, on the air and online.
This is the Liberty Radio Network at LRN.fm.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And listen, you guys need to not trust WikiLeaks at all anymore, and you need to never believe for a moment that the motives of the people who run WikiLeaks are centered around journalistic ideas of getting truth out to people, because it turns out that that guy Assange is an evil rapist.
That's what I heard on the news.
Isn't that right, other Scott Horton?
Well, that's right.
That was up on the news for a complete 24-hour cycle.
And so it's true, right?
No, it's not at all true.
But you heard it on the news.
Oh, okay.
So those are different.
All right.
Let's start with that.
Okay.
So the truth is something different than what I heard on the news at first there.
Go ahead.
That's right.
So we had a spectacular story break in the evening on Friday.
The effect of the arrest of Julian Assange had been ordered by prosecutors in Sweden.
He'd been accused by not one but two women of having raped him.
Well, it must be true if there's two of them.
I mean, one of them could make it up, but two women making up the same story about a guy?
No.
Well, one day later, the prosecutor investigating it concludes that, no, there's actually no basis to these claims.
And then the next day, one of the alleged claimants gives an interview in a major Swedish newspaper in which she's backpedaling furiously saying, no, she never accused him of raping anybody.
That was just a misunderstanding.
It was just that she had some issues with his personal sexual practices.
And so that's not a crime in Sweden?
Well, evidently, they're going to continue to investigate it as a question of unwanted sexual contact, which is, I'd say, a rather minor offense.
But the prosecutors suggested they're not even sure it's that at all, and they quashed the arrest warrant.
And they have indicated a lot of suspicion about the people who've made the claim.
So Assange himself responded almost immediately, saying that this was a dirty trick that was being played by a foreign intelligence service.
He pointed a finger at the Pentagon.
And I have to say, if you look at the media in Europe, especially in Sweden, it's pretty much filled with those charges.
I mean, a lot of people looking at this saying, yeah, this looks like the handiwork of some foreign intelligence service, like maybe the CIA.
But, of course, we don't know.
We don't know who put these two women up to their strange little tale.
For the moment, I think it's backfired.
And Assange has stated, in fact, sources in Australia have backed him up, that Australian intelligence warned him to be weary of honey traps.
A honey trap is something used by intelligence services for decades.
It's where an attempt is made to entangle someone in a sexual encounter, and then that's used to blackmail or tarnish reputations.
A well-established trick.
Evidently, Australian intelligence had word that something like that was going to be used against him.
And lo and behold, here we have these incidents and these claims.
Well, you go back and you look at recent history.
They've successfully entrapped, it looks like, apparently, I should say, they've successfully entrapped Scott Ritter, who otherwise would be the most credible anti-war voice in this whole society in sex game stuff.
And there was, if you remember back, I remembered this only because I went back and looked at Jess Raimondo's article from 2002, Target, Scott Ritter.
And he makes reference in there, remember this, the weapons inspector who was involved in Iraq and who was much more truthful and honest and upfront than Hans Blix and them.
And they outed him for liking to go to S&M clubs or something like that, as though that had anything to do with what his actual job was or whether what he was saying about his job was true or not.
And it was just enough to create the pressure to get him out of there.
And, of course, it worked.
So I guess the lesson is if you're taking on the war party, get married or never get lucky again because they're looking to set you up.
Well, I think the Ritter case is a striking one.
I mean, actually, if you go through historically, there are dozens of cases like this.
And the sexual innuendo is considered to be particularly good because it can damage somebody's reputation.
So people don't pay any attention to him anymore.
This person is a child molester or something.
Yeah, and I think in this case, certainly it has all the looks of an attempt to sully him with sexual innuendo.
And it seems to match perfectly the game plan.
I remember the Army Counterintelligence Center put together a 32-page memorandum just a few months ago, in which they advised the Secretary of Defense Gates how to deal with WikiLeaks.
And they proposed a strategy for taking WikiLeaks down.
And in this memo, they identified Julian Assange as a target.
They described his publication of these leaks as criminal acts.
And they said the U.S. government needs to pursue successful prosecutions that destroy the center of gravity.
And they also talked about damaging or destroying the reputation of WikiLeaks.
So when Julian Assange says that this looks to him like something the Pentagon might have done, I think one thing – well, we don't really have evidence that shows the Pentagon did this.
On the other hand, this does perfectly match the Pentagon's published game plan for how to deal with WikiLeaks.
And, you know, as Jess Ramando points out in his article today, the whole sexual thing is really an American hang-up.
It's that Puritan influence here, where really around the rest of the world, sexual smears aren't nearly as big of a deal.
But here it just makes someone beyond the pale immediately.
I mean, this is how they justified burning all those children at Waco, is they said that Koresh was touching them.
Well, yeah, I wouldn't say around the world, but I'd say in Europe that's the case.
I mean, the Europeans have – Oh, yeah, I guess I should speak a little more narrowly.
You can go to places like Africa and South Asia where people are every bit as hung up, I suppose you'd say, as the Americans are.
But the Europeans – I mean, especially Sweden, of course, is notorious as a promiscuous, open society.
In fact, if you've ever spent some time in Sweden, you know it's not really quite as promiscuous as it's made out to be.
I mean, most Swedes are Lutherans, and they have pretty conventional morals.
But nevertheless, society as a whole is rather more accepting.
Yeah, so anyway, that was – Justin's point was that's what makes him suspect more so that this really is a Pentagon or a CIA invention directed at an American audience.
And you know what?
The leaks on Wikileaks are downloadable right now.
It doesn't matter what anybody says about Julian Assange, does it?
They got all your liberated, classified information in order by country.
Go and check it out, everybody.
And by the way, our friends at the Department of Defense are not denying that these are the genuine thing.
They're accepting that.
They've leveled very, very heavy charges at Julian Assange, saying that he's got the blood of American collaborators or informants on his hands.
And they had to come back last week and say, well, actually they can't identify a single person who has died as a result of these publications.
So that's – evidently that's phony blood.
Yeah, well, and I thought it was hilarious that that accusation actually came from – it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said that, right?
As the headlines read, dozens of women and children dying every day over there at his hands.
That's right.
And when pressed for evidence of this, they had this to acknowledge that, well, actually there isn't any.
Geez, all right.
Now, we're almost out of time here, but really quick, if you could tell us, has there been any update on your groundbreaking, should have been Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting about the Guantanamo, quote-unquote, suicides of July 2006, and or any new media coverage of that?
And then maybe if you could just give us the rundown really briefly on the, quote-unquote, conviction of Osama bin Laden's cook.
Al-Khazi.
Well, I'll start with the Al-Khazi case.
That's an interesting one.
He was convicted, and everybody knows, of course, that he was convicted of material support, and he's going to wind up serving 14 years in prison, right?
Sure.
Yeah, the headline, in fact, at the top of the hour news was, we got a conviction, everybody.
It's great.
Terrorists going away for a long time.
Except that's completely untrue, notwithstanding that this was reported in headlines everywhere.
What actually happened is that there was a plea bargain deal, and under the plea bargain, he'll be sentenced to two years, and then he's going to go home.
And the prosecutors insisted that for public media consumption, this 14-year sentence would be trotted out and would be in the headlines everywhere, and nobody could contradict it, even though they know that that's not the plea bargain sentence.
So, yet again, tremendous machinations to deceive.
Who's being deceived here?
The American public.
The only people who are being deceived.
With respect to the suicide cases, we've got more information coming up.
Well, actually, you know what?
Most people end up listening to this in the archive format anyway, Scott, so I've got the top of the hour news down.
Let's just go over time a little bit and stick with Kosey for a second, if we could.
I think you wrote on your blog that they just wrote his confession for him, that this whole thing is a big put-on.
I mean, please explain a little bit more.
Well, that's right.
I mean, I've talked to lawyers who are involved in the plea bargain process, and they tell me that this confession that was read very dramatically in court was negotiated, they say, with the prosecutors, which is to say that the prosecutors stipulated exactly what he was going to say in the confession.
That is, it was just written by the prosecutors.
It's not really a free or fair statement.
And the prosecutor himself or themselves told you this?
Well, I'm not going to identify specific sources in this case, but I'll say it's lawyers who were involved in the case that told me this.
And I would say it's also not an unusual practice.
I mean, if you're involved in these sorts of things, you know that the prosecutor may give up on the sentence, so they gave up then for two years on this case.
And what did they get in exchange?
You know, they wanted some powerful stuff for the news.
They wanted 14 years, and they wanted this confession showing his deep involvement, when in fact what he did was he was a short-order cook.
That's about it.
You know, as I noted, if you go back and look at the end of World War II, that the cook for Adolf Hitler was held in prison overnight one day, and they asked him some questions.
That was it.
But here, what this really points to is who do they not have?
They don't have Osama bin Laden.
They don't have Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The two big names they really need.
So instead, this prosecution effort's being launched with really small fry.
I mean, people like al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda.
Well, in fact, you know, Abu Zubaydah was a nobody, it turned out, after all they made out of him, huh?
That's right.
After we read for two years about how this guy was a kingpin, critical figure, you know, now I think everything's in.
And all the serious analysts and the intelligence service have come to the conclusion this person was really not significant.
So I think there was tremendous pressure, political pressure, on the Bush administration that's carried over into the Obama administration to claim they got big, important people basically to justify themselves.
But, you know, the facts are really pathetic.
That is, there are two really powerful figures, three if we add Mullah Omar from the Taliban.
And, you know, we haven't succeeded in capturing any of these people.
It's a horrible failure.
Yeah, and you know what?
Before, I guess it's a kind of meaningless segue, it's not very good, but it's still my favorite George W. Bush quote you just reminded me of.
I believe it was Ron Susskind that reported that Bush had an argument with George Tenet about Zubaydah when Zubaydah explained to George Bush that he was a nobody.
And Bush said, you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
And insisted that the CIA continue with the lie that he was some big shot.
And if you want to comment on that, fine.
Otherwise, please go ahead with the Gitmo quote unquote suicides.
Well, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, really, the American public wind up being victimized over and over.
Because so much of what they do is geared to making politicians look good in the eyes of the American public and not making us safer and not actually picking up the really big culprits.
It's a disaster.
It is.
All right.
Now, you should have won a Pulitzer for this thing.
I mean, that's what Pulitzers are for, right?
It's the journalist who sets the standard of how the other journalists are supposed to be acting but aren't.
And that's you and the Gitmo suicide story.
What I still have not done is established exactly how they died.
Of course, what we did is we established very clearly the official narrative of how they died certainly isn't true.
We established that on the basis of testimony that's come from six different soldiers who were on duty that evening who observed everything that was happening and who say that the official count isn't so.
Moreover, it was something that was invented after the fact is cover for what went on.
What we've learned subsequently, a little bit more about what the CIA was doing at Guantanamo during the time in question, they were definitely there and they were definitely operating.
But what we haven't gotten, in fact, we also have information concerning the placement there of recording equipment at this facility.
Can't know.
A place there by the same people who placed the equipment at the CIA interrogation center in Thailand.
But we still don't have any details about what transpired that critical evening when these people died.
All right.
Well, you stay at it.
I know you will.
Certainly will.
And we'll get to the bottom of this.
It may take a while.
All right.
Well, I'll keep my eyes on no comment and we'll keep you back here on the show so that the audience can hear you explain what you learn as you learn it.
Scott, I sure appreciate it.
Great to be with you.
Everybody, that's the heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer, the other Scott Horton.
He writes no comment at Harper's Magazine.
