Alright, y'all welcome back to the show, this is Anti-War Radio, that's what we do here, we anti-war.
I'm Scott Horton, and my next guest on the show is the other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture human rights attorney, writes for Harper's.org, legal affairs journalist there, and keeps the blog no comment.
Welcome back to the show, Scott, how's things?
Great to be with you.
Things are going well, we're getting ready for a hurricane party here in New York City right now, you know.
Well, is it getting that far north?
Yeah, well, you know, we're going to get some rain, it's not going to be anything serious here.
Oh, okay.
That would be kind of fun to see big waves off the coast of New York like that, it always seems so calm in the pictures, you know?
Like the city is built a couple of feet above sea level and that's it.
Yeah, well, I've seen times when the streetlights were bending over from the wind, so it does hit, you know, we do get hit by hurricanes once in a while, but it's only every few years.
That's cool.
Man, I've never even been to New York, I ought to go sometime.
Hopefully, you know, when it's not the target of any reprisal attacks on America, which it's likely to be again at some point, seems like, but anyway, you know, part of your bio is that you are the co-founder of the American University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, if I'm even saying the name of the country right, which I'm sure I'm probably not.
Can you tell us about that project a little bit and then tell us about what's going on in Kyrgyzstan now, but I'm just interested in the story of you being the co-founder of a university over there in the middle of the old world where you can't even get there from anywhere?
Well, that started about 15 years ago, and I was doing a lot of work out in Central Asia, spending a lot of time in Kyrgyzstan in particular, and you got the pronunciation pretty well.
And one thing I was really impressed with was the educators there.
In fact, the president at that time was a former college professor, and they were really enthusiastic about the American idea of higher education, the liberal arts and sciences college, and really wanted to set up something on the American model.
And so it was an initiative that started with the people in Central Asia to try and create an American-style college, and it won the support of a number of philanthropists and the U.S. government and got launched beginning in 1995, and now we've got a campus and 1,200 students there.
Wow, that's really great.
It's almost like you could teach a neocon a thing or two about spreading liberty around the world, huh?
Yeah.
In fact, you know, I know some prominent neocons who go out there and visit, and they all come away impressed and have more than once told me that, you know, it's clear that in fact we have more impact on this region through education and through teaching college courses than we've ever had by dropping bombs and using rifles.
I think there's just no doubt about that.
It's clearly the case.
Yeah, and then their next sentence is, so we ought to start a war there and start bombing people, right?
Well, the follow-up is they don't draw the obvious inference, which is that there are many more effective tools than war, although, you know, I think there are a handful of neocons who, you know, after the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, have come to realize that they shouldn't jump immediately to dropping 2,000-pound bombs on places.
There may be other more effective tools.
Well, and I think, you know, I would make the case probably that some of the more kind of intellectual, academic, and writer neocon types, not the most crass, you know, war propagandists at the Weekly Standard and whatever, but some of the intellectual neocons, I think, really did believe in that spreading liberty thing, and maybe even Paul Wolfowitz, but, you know, with Richard Perle and Scooter Libby and Douglas Fite, those guys weren't trying to spread liberty to anybody.
That was a bunch of propaganda for the rubes, probably including the president.
Yeah, the real question I think you see is when they launch these campaigns, what is the attitude towards the locals?
I mean, do they embrace them?
Do they have a positive attitude towards them, wanting to help them and improve their condition?
Or do they just view them as, you know, chattel?
And I think, you know, the experience certainly in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been a mixed experience.
So there's been some outreach and some attempts to protect.
On the other hand, you know, measures are taken that produce far too many civilian casualties.
And even Stanley McChrystal, you know, his final couple of months as he was on the way out there, he was openly and sharply critical of the tactics the U.S. had used in Afghanistan.
He said that there had been far too many civilian casualties, and that it resulted from the U.S. and U.S. soldiers not willing to be able to accept the level of risk that they in fact should accept for a mission of the kind that they were engaged in.
All right.
Well, and that's true.
And he also said every time you kill one, you create 10 more, which I only wish that people could, you know, try that on and then look back at the last 20, 30 years of history instead of, you know, from September 11th on only.
But anyway, and hell, looking forward, well, does it do any good to kill anybody in Afghanistan if every time you kill someone, you make 10 more enemies?
Other than nuking the place with H-bombs, what good does any of this do as far as defeating the enemy there?
I mean...
Yeah, well, we've had something of a roller coaster in Afghanistan.
The situation there now is about as bad as it's been, you know, since the year after the defeat of the Taliban.
And that's after a tremendous outpouring of resources from the United States, money, development assistance, and security assistance.
We're seeing, you know, a collapse of the position of the government, and most recently, a collapse of the banking sector in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Boy, in fact, thanks for reminding me, because I wanted to try to remember to play my Bart Simpson clip where he causes a run on the bank just by saying, like, hey, what do you mean they're out of money?
And then all of a sudden, everybody panics and the bank closes.
It's really that easy, isn't it, especially in Afghanistan.
They don't have the reserve currency of the world there.
That's exactly right.
You know, the de facto currency of Afghanistan is not the Afghan, it's the U.S. dollar.
Yeah.
Well, and they're going to get their bailout, aren't they?
Mm-hmm.
I strongly suspect they will.
I mean, I think this is another one of these situations where Washington is going to say they're too big to fail.
Yeah.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, so let's take a couple of minutes as we come up on this first break here, well, on the one break here, Scott.
Why don't you teach us a little bit about the Kyrgyz in general, then maybe when we come back, a little bit about, you know, what's actually going on there, the American empire and Russia's influence there, et cetera.
Well, they're the, I think they're, as Eugene Husky, my friend down at Stetson University says, they're natural born anarchists.
You know, the Kyrgyz were nomadic people dragged, kicking and screaming into the Soviet empire, you know, in the early 20th century.
But they always maintained their own parallel nomadic society.
And they had a tradition that was really somewhat different from most of the other Central Asians in that they would pick their own leaders at periodic gatherings, or as Timbleys, they called the Kurultai.
And if their leader wasn't performing up the snuff or did something bad or made some foolish mistakes, they would just dump him.
In fact, they would do that with regularity.
And one thing we see is now Kyrgyzstan's an independent country with its own sovereignty and its own institutions.
And they have distinguished themselves from all the other Central Asians by toppling their leaders with some frequency now, because we're on, you know, this year, we had the second revolution within five years in Kyrgyzstan, new government coming in, struggling to establish itself and winding its way towards parliamentary election in October.
And that's the real focus there right now.
And US and Russia, major powers on the periphery, both with big interest there, both with military installations there, and the Kyrgyz basically want everybody to be their friend.
They're perfectly happy to accommodate the Americans.
They've offered the American space for more bases if the US wants it.
They've made the same offers to the Russians and to the Chinese.
They feel that they benefit from the presence of all these military installations.
As long as these major powers don't break out into a fight on their territory.
That's that's correct.
But, you know, you know, they had they had a meltdown in the beginning of June with ethnic riots that occurred in the ocean, the southern part of the country, and the Kyrgyz invited both the US and the Russians to send troops to help them quell it.
And and both the US and the Russians said, no, thank you.
Well, that's better than them working together, like in that Chuck Norris movie, Delta Force Two or whatever, where they invade Iraq together.
I kind of worry about that.
I mean, I don't like the new Cold War as it is, but I kind of worry about, you know, a Russia-American alliance over the long term, Army of the North.
Like, you know, there were a lot of people trying to include Russia in the NATO toward the end of the year.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, I think let's hold that thought right there and we'll come back to it.
It's the other Scott Wharton, anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper's Magazine and Columbia University on anti-war radio.
You can put the Liberty Radio Network on the air in your area.
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All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Wharton on the anti-war.com, Scott Wharton, the anti-war radio, Scott Wharton.
And on the line is the other Scott Wharton, or maybe I'm the other Scott Wharton to him.
But anyway, for purposes of this show, he's the other Scott Wharton.
He's a heroic international human rights lawyer.
He teaches law at Columbia University in New York.
He's the co-founder of the American University in Bishkek and was the chair of the New York Bar Association's Committee on Human Rights and International Law and on and on.
That's just from what I remember off the top of my head.
Go read his bio at harpers.org.
Read his blog.
No comment.harpers.org.
Now, Scott, back when I was a kid, George H.W. Bush used to talk about the New World Order.
And I used to think that that meant that now that the Cold War was over, that it was sort of a Hegelian dialectic kind of a thing, right?
You have your thesis, your antithesis, and your synthesis.
So you have these two former opposites in the bipolar world.
And then now, I remember even reading an interview of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the hardcore right-winger Russian in, say, 96, 97, saying that, yeah, this is the deal.
Now we will join together in one big alliance of the white north versus particularly the Islamic southern border of Russia.
He saw that America would have a problem with the Muslims in the future in extending our hegemony over that part of the world.
And he saw that they had the same problem that we did and that this is the natural alliance.
I think Tom Clancy even wrote a book where there's a war with China and we bring Russia into NATO.
And this is the way they had the Russian NATO Council and all these kinds of things.
And then it turned out that maybe the New World Order, as meant by Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby, just meant the U.S. government lording it over everybody, including the Russians, and that this alliance isn't going to happen after all.
And so I just wonder what you think about all those crazy things I just said.
Well, I think we definitely did enter into a new stage of world history following the collapse of the Soviet Union, because the world had been really dominated by an ideologically based struggle between the market economies and the socialist nations, the Soviet bloc and China, the communist nations up to that point.
And today I think, you know, Marxism is a spent force intellectually, certainly on the world political stage it is.
And we moved to a new era.
And I think a lot of people thought, and I think this is really what was behind Bush's idea of a New World Order, that we had reached this Hegelian sort of end times and that the end times were the triumph of free market liberalism, by which I don't mean liberalism the way we talk about it in politics in the United States today, but liberalism in the sense of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, classical liberalism, market economics.
I think now it's pretty clear that that's not the case, that, you know, we do have a world that's dominated to an extent by market economics, but we have an alternative model that's been embraced, especially on the territory of these formerly communist countries, and that is of a sort of state capitalism.
And I think that's what we see today in Russia and China.
And there certainly are frictions between, you know, our Western idea of market economics and theirs, but they're nowhere nearly as acute as they were during the Soviet era.
In fact, I'd say, you know, broadly, there's been quite a bit of convergence between the United States and Russia since the fall of communism.
The countries have come closer and closer together.
But that has not been all just Russia accepting our notions of economics and our political models, our ideas of democracy, because it's clear they have not fully assumed either of those things.
Rather, to a certain extent, it's been the United States converging much more closely towards the Russian model of a national security state.
So it's been some, I think, some very negative developments on our side, too.
So if we look today at the world in terms of, let's call it the surveillance state, countries and governments that have the capacity and the ability to snoop on everybody, including their own citizens, there are four nations in the world that stand out at the top of the pyramid that have the most aggressive surveillance state.
And those are Russia, the United States, the UK and China, absolutely at the peak of this pyramid.
All right.
Well, so now that kind of fits my model as far as, you know, it was a simplistic thing.
I'm saying, I guess, my view of the world, the way it was working and where we were headed in the 1990s.
We become more like them.
They become more like us until our systems are compatible.
After all, that was what Rowan Gaither, the head of the Ford Foundation, said back in 1953.
Our goal is to eventually merge comfortably with the Soviet Union and create a world state.
But Dick Cheney said, nah, screw the U.N.
Security Council, man, we have the National Security Council.
We can do whatever we want.
And Vladimir Putin basically did a coup against the drunk puppet Yeltsin.
And he's a nationalist and a patriot, and he's not putting up with sacrificing his independence to America.
It doesn't seem like.
So where are we in this?
I mean, you know, in fact, I've spent quite a bit of time, you know, studying Putin and his theories about the state and his theories about national security.
And I would say at the end of the day, you could put Putin together in a peapod with Richard Bruce Cheney.
Their views are almost identical.
They both fall into the same category of what we would call great nation conservatism.
They're convinced of the righteousness and rightness of their country.
They want they don't want it to be constrained by anybody's laws or limitations.
They want it to be able to exercise power violently as it needs to.
And I think one of the reasons that Cheney despised Putin so much and that Putin despised Cheney is there's so much alike.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as long as they don't nuke each other with hydrogen bombs, I prefer that Russia stay independent from America.
It seems like when Boris Yeltsin was over there, that the Americans just completely took advantage.
And, you know, instead of trying to build up the Soviet economy and give them a helping hand, they just kicked them while they were down and liquidated all their debt and helped a bunch of Israelis run off with all the money and a bunch of oligarchs and criminals take over.
They needed somebody like KGB Putin to take over that country, didn't they?
I think, you know, the idea of one world government is some of the greatest nonsense of the last century.
It's really weak minded people who think that way.
And in fact, you know, there's never really been any serious movement towards one world government.
What there has been is a movement towards international organizations that can act as some sort of effective brake on warfare and conflict.
But there's no way that these organizations are ever going to assume some sort of global governance role.
I think that's just a ridiculous idea.
Well, I mean, if Russia joins NATO, then that's your world army right there.
Right.
Which is, of course, we've defined for a generation, we've defined NATO as a consolidated force opposing Russia.
So if Russia became a member of it, it would really cease to have any purpose.
No, we just use it against Iran or whoever else, invade Africa.
Well, there are people who think that way, but this is not going to happen.
Well, good.
I mean, you know, I got to tell you, I basically I thought I was right up until the Iraq war when I saw that Colin Powell really tried to.
We got to go through the U.N.
He convinced Bush to go through the U.N.
Cheney wanted to just go right ahead.
And I thought and I also thought that they would try to make the deal sweet for the Russians and the French on the Security Council, even the Chinese and say, well, you guys can have the oil in the north and we'll take the oil in the south and that it would be a U.N. war.
And it did not work out that way.
And I realized that the way I saw the world just wasn't making sense.
Dick Cheney did not believe he certainly didn't carry out that war the way Bill Clinton would have carried out that war.
I think that's right.
And of course, a lot of people forget that the they think of the war of the United Nations, the institution that arose at the end of World War Two.
And they tend to forget that actually the United Nations had its first incarnation during World War Two.
That was the formal name of the military alliance that the U.S. led against the Axis powers.
Right.
Now, I thought it was funny when you talk about the ideology, the end of history and all that.
I mean, you really do make it kind of sound that George George H.W. Bush was really kind of an ideological cousin with Francis Fukuyama.
And that but then the irony is that it's not liberalism that won.
It's mercantilism that won, which was what Adam Smith wrote, the wealth of nations to refute and successfully did refute out of existence, I thought, or out of intellectual propriety back in 1776.
Scott.
Well, you're showing that you're a good libertarian.
I mean, you know, that is, of course, the the the core critique of Von Hayek and Mises.
And I think, of course, it's a it's a proper critique.
You know, that is, you know, we really want to have a free market system.
You always have to be carefully on your guard against the dominance of the manipulation of the system by specific mercantile interests.
And you're right.
I mean, Adam Smith highlights this from the beginning is a big problem.
Hey, can I keep you after the news?
One more segment?
Sure.
Wonderful.
Everybody.
The other Scott Horton from Columbia, from Hartford.
Hartford.
We'll be right back.
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All right, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks for listening.
I'm Scott.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm on the phone with the other Scott Horton.
He teaches at Columbia.
He writes for Harper's dot org and he opposes torture all the time.
And we're talking about the end of history and the last man.
And geez, well, on the subject, Scott, of the economics of, you know, mercantilism as opposed to liberalism, conservatism, really, as opposed to liberalism being, you know, the current state of the world.
It also seems to me like right now this is the end of the American empire.
I think it'll be funny, really, in future history, looking back that America's peak strength when it blew its brains out was under George W. Bush.
Ha ha.
And then.
But he ruined it.
Right.
And we're doomed now.
And so maybe the end of history is going to be something totally different than what Fukuyama, H.W.
Bush, Cheney or any of the rest of these guys thought.
Yeah.
Well, I definitely don't subscribe to this idea that history ever finds an end.
Rather, it's a process that always continues and that has a certain cyclical nature to it.
And I think, you know, right now the United States has had, as you as you call it, an experience with the empire that's been that's been very painful.
You know, certainly the the exploits in Iraq and in Afghanistan are not working out successfully.
I think, you know, that lesson is being internalized by the American public, although, you know, the American media and the American political elite seem very reluctant to take it on.
And I think, you know, that'll lead to some changed attitudes in the United States.
But as long as those neocons are still out there pushing their their tired old ideas, who knows?
Yeah.
National greatness.
Here we come.
We're still coming towards you.
And you know, and, you know, by the way, they really wanted they always wanted three wars for President Bush.
You know, the third war was going to be the attack on Iran.
And I think many of them harbor this secret hope that they'll be able to pull that off before Obama completes his term, that somehow they'll be able to corral Barack Obama himself into their stable.
That strikes me as a rather long shot.
But who knows?
He has been very accommodating to them.
And remember, we had Bill Kristol the other day saying how much he admired Barack Obama's speech about the the drawdown from from Iraq.
Well, not in the first time either.
Everyone Google up all hail Obama.
That's a quote from Bill Kristol.
And you know, the only the only thing I would quibble with there is the secret part.
There's no secret.
This is an open conspiracy, a blueprint for destroying everything by William Kristol.
Everybody knows exactly what they're doing.
In fact, Trita Parsi's article was titled Brand New Push for Iran War Begins.
And Tom Englehart made reference to Andrew Card talking about, well, you don't debut new products before Labor Day and where everybody knows it's on a brand new propaganda push about Iran's legitimate, safeguarded nuclear electricity program.
And Jeff Goldberg, you know, leading the charge this time with his piece in The Atlantic.
Yeah, the same guy who wrote all the New Yorker articles about Saddam Hussein working with al Qaeda to kill us all and has never admitted any mistakes or errors from his prior writings, even though they were filled with mistakes and errors.
Back to Kyrgyzstan.
Did I give you enough chance to really let us know what we need to know about Kyrgyzstan here?
I see you've been writing about it and I had a chance to read some of it, but not all of it.
And I just want to make sure that we understand what we need to about that today.
Well, he's out there doing a bit of investigating recently for a couple of weeks, you know, looking into the American relationship there.
You know, we have a congressional committee, the House Committee on Oversight and National Security that's been doing an investigation.
I've been working with some of the committee investigators and I helped set up a number of interviews for them there.
And they're looking into aviation fuel contracts, the United States wrote.
You know, there were about $2.1 billion with a B dollars in aviation fuel contracts that were written and went through the American Air Force Base in Kyrgyzstan, used to be called Gansey Air Force Base, now called Manas.
And the Kyrgyz, after this revolution, said that all this was a cover for bribing their former dictator, Bakhia, that he was on the receiving end of these contracts.
And this is the way the U.S. government was sliding hundreds of millions of dollars under the table to Bakhia's family.
The U.S. has, of course, said that that's absolute nonsense, poppycock, ridiculous.
And I'll just tell you, after spending a couple of weeks on the ground, looking into this in some detail, interviewing dozens of people, examining hundreds of pages of documents, I'd say the charges that the Kyrgyz revolutionaries make about the U.S. bribing Bakhia are absolutely correct.
They stand up.
You know, we found that the companies that were on the receiving ends of these contracts were in fact controlled by the deposed president's son.
Very clear the U.S. government knew that all the way.
And then when we look at the way the contracts themselves are written, they are staggeringly lucrative.
I mean, far, far, far more money being paid than the fuel was costing.
So there were enormous profits being racked up by the people on the other side of these contracts.
I'm talking certainly nine figures, that is hundreds of millions of dollars.
And you know, all this being done by the U.S. Department of Defense using taxpayer money, you've got to sort of ask why?
Yeah.
Well, because they want to have bases.
They're continuing the Cold War.
They want to have bases on the Russian border all around it.
And they believe that the cheapest way to do this is just to grease the palm of public officials.
And they're right.
It's amazing.
And so the government does this in Kyrgyzstan.
At the same time while I was there, the Department of Justice announces a plea bargain deal with some Americans from North Carolina and Virginia who had paid a couple of very modest bribes – we're talking tens of thousands of dollars – to tax authorities to avoid paying taxes on tobacco purchases.
And the U.S. is throwing the book at them, sending them off to jail, you know, destroying their reputations with press releases.
And I read these press releases and I said, you know, here's the Department of Justice, you know, destroying these people, throwing them in prison.
But the U.S. government is doing something 100 times worse, and the Justice Department appears to have signed off on it as perfectly fine.
Yeah, of course.
And we'll get the memos.
They'll repudiate the memos five days before they leave office.
I think it's another one of these cases.
I mean, this definitely happened during the Bush era, and it's another one of these cases where the Justice Department determines that the administration can commit all the crimes it wants with complete impunity, because the Justice Department decides who to prosecute, and the Justice Department will not prosecute itself.
Yeah, which makes them just like a deputy sheriff.
Like a license to commit crime.
Right, yeah, well, that makes them the same as a deputy sheriff in any town in America.
They can do whatever they want with impunity.
That's what, you know, when I was a kid, I was, you know, seven, I used to watch the Dukes of Hazzard, and Boss Hogg would just say, I am the law.
And that's what I, that was the definition of the law, what I understood was the local tyrant is the law, and that means what he says goes, and he's got a jerk with a gun that makes it that way, and it turns out the Dukes of Hazzard pretty much had it right, you know?
Boss Hogg never could get prosecuted, no matter how corrupt he was, Scott, that's just the way it is.
But now the flip side, we have to look at the dark side, and what are the consequences of all this making corrupt payments to local government figures?
I mean, one of the consequences seems to be that they get overthrown in revolutions, when the people say, this is wrong, this is corrupt, and we're going to topple your government violently, which happened twice.
And you have two revolutions in a country like this, it results in a sort of weakening of all the fabric of the state.
And there are a lot of people in Kyrgyzstan who are concerned, I mean, while they generally don't like a big, strong state, they nevertheless feel they do need police, and they do need some level of order and security, and they need public services, utilities, water, streets being maintained, things like that, there's a lot of concern that this whole system is just going to come down and collapse, and they'll be in a state of anarchy, which people really don't want either.
Well, yeah, and the bad kind of anarchy, things on fire.
And you were pointing out that earlier about the ethnic divisions that have been exacerbated by all this, right?
Kind of minor pogroms or something?
Yeah, there have been these pogroms that have gone on between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the south, and this is an area where they've lived together harmoniously for more than a thousand years, no problems, and then suddenly, recently, we're seeing these conflicts occur, and it seems that these things have been instigated by political figures who want to use this as a cover for their own machinations, a lot like what we saw in Yugoslavia.
It's America spreading liberty.
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We'll be right back with other Scott Horton and some more.
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All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
We're talking Kyrgyzstan with Kyrgyzstan, I think I put too many K's in there, with the other Scott Horton, harpers.org, slash subjects, slash no comment, lots of comments though, good ones.
I was lucky enough to be on the email list long ago, back before it became a blog, and now it really is one of the most important blogs out there, and I apologize to you, Scott, and to y'all in the audience for not having been prepared for this interview and reading all what you've written here about the corruption racket in Central Asia, as you call it, and the upcoming elections here in Kyrgyzstan and what have you, but anyway, when we left off at the break, we were talking about, you were saying, I think, that there hasn't been ethnic strife in this part of Central Asia in a long time.
This has been manufactured as part of the crisis of the corruption that America has engendered there?
Well, when I go down there and interview people, everyone, everyone, without exception, tells me that these pogroms that occurred were carefully instigated, carefully plotted.
They talk about signal flares being set up before the attacks began, about military and police vehicles being used, about people in uniforms, and so forth.
So, you know, this wasn't the eruption of some long-simmering ethnic conflict.
That's ridiculous.
It's a decision by some extremely cynical political figures to try and spark an inter-ethnic conflict, and to do that is cover for their own political designs, whatever they are.
But what we see disagreement about is exactly who the instigators are.
We see fingers pointed at the deposed former president, and local crime lords, and local political figures, and others.
So, you know, I'd say that part of it's still unclear.
Okay, so I'm overstating it to say that this has somehow caused an effect from America's intervention there?
Well, I think there's really no doubt, and pretty much all the people I talk with in Kyrgyzstan agree, that the United States played a very negative role in all of this.
That is, you know, its habits of bribing local officials and doing it in a way that became just, like, obvious and publicly known within a matter of months, that this discredited the government and led to the collapse of these governments.
And so it's really sort of weakened the state as a whole, and may lead to the collapse of their country.
There are a lot of people who fear that.
But we'd also have to say it's not just the fact that the U.S. is bribing foreign officials with these huge aviation fuel contracts, it's a lot of other things that are going on that caused this to happen.
And of course, you know, the Kyrgyz politicians are no angels themselves.
Yeah, of course not, they're politicians.
Exactly.
All right, so now, it's kind of ridiculous to do this with only just, I guess, five minutes to discuss it, but I've got to hear an update from you, if there is one, about your groundbreaking work in Harper's Magazine about the Guantanamo, quote-unquote, suicides of July 2006.
Well, I'd say the latest information that I've got has to do with the informants, because we had five soldiers who came forward and provided their narrative.
And what I'm hearing right now is that there seems to be some sort of concerted effort going on to drive them all out of the military, because they were all still serving at the time I researched this and interviewed them.
And some of them were fearful that they would suffer some repercussions from speaking.
But others told me that they heard from senior officers who told them, just tell the truth and don't worry about it.
But it seems now that the forces of retaliation are weighing in.
I'll have some more details about that shortly, but I can't get into that right now.
Another thing I've been looking at is the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, NCIS, which of course handled the investigation.
And I'm looking at their involvement in the investigation of a series of other deaths that occurred in detention, not necessarily Guantanamo, but elsewhere.
What I'm seeing is a consistent pattern of NCIS being involved in covering up and providing cover stories for the deaths that wind up being exposed.
So that's troubling.
And now, I think I've asked you this before, but I don't remember what your answer was.
Colonel Larry Wilkerson and General Barry McCaffrey both have said more than 100 people were tortured to death or died in torture custody or whatever their euphemism, but basically that.
But I think somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that somebody found out that the number was much more than that, or at least twice that or something.
Well, of course, the U.S. government won't agree that there's anybody who was tortured to death except perhaps maybe Al-Juwad.
In all the other cases, they will reject the use of the word torture.
They'll say that people died of causes other than the administration of these techniques.
But I would say right now, it's quite clear that the total number of people who died from the use of extraordinary techniques tops 100.
Extraordinary techniques.
Extraordinary techniques, which would include waterboarding, long time standing, sleep deprivation, you know, any of a long list of techniques.
George Carlin, I miss you.
Half of those techniques clearly are torture.
And the others used in combination could well constitute torture.
Yeah, you know, American language is a wonderful thing, I've got to tell you.
Just change rain into sunshine with the turn of a phrase.
Well, you look at the New York Times, they're really great operators on this front, you know, and if you go back and you look at their reporting, you know, they'll report stories out of the former Soviet Union, out of China.
In fact, quite recently, they had a major article, front page article, talking about a woman who'd been subjected to sleep deprivation and other forms of torture.
So they're like openly describing what happened to this woman as torture.
She was an ethnic Korean who had escaped from China and sought asylum in the United States.
They openly describe it as torture.
And of course, one of their readers points out that these exact techniques you're calling torture here are being used and sanctioned by the United States government.
And your own executive editor has defended the practice of not calling them torture.
So in the New York Times attitude, country, we can call it torture, but not with the United States.
Yeah, it really is the the center of the agenda and the double standard on a pretty much daily basis over there.
I mean, there's a million examples.
I mean, you talked about the neocons push for war with Iran.
Here's America's got 5000 hydrogen bombs and holds the entire world hostage all day, every day, talking, going mad about Iran's civilian electricity program that's safeguarded by IAEA inspectors, you know?
Yep.
It's very same thing.
And, you know, it's funny when you talk about the the way that they never admit that the torture caused the death or those extraordinary measures caused the death of any of these people.
It's just like the conversation we were having earlier with Will Grigg about when the cops taser someone to death.
It's never the taser that did it.
It's always, well, their heart condition and they just chose this time to die when the taser happened to be going off.
It really is the same thing.
We're bringing this warfare state home to our own communities.
Well, and it's a failure of independent investigation, because, you know, in theory, there should be an independent organ that, you know, conducts the investigation and tells you what's happened.
And, you know, that's not happening with respect to the military.
In fact, the organizations that conduct the investigation, like you look at the NCIS and you look at their own charter, you know, their first responsibility is helping to prosecute the war.
And their second objective is preserving the government's secrets.
So law enforcement is way down the list.
And I think that results in, you know, these people die.
And then we hear this, you know, really feeble, made up explanation for why the deaths occurred.
And you know, the problem with that is that, obviously, we need to change this entire system and get rid of the procedures that are causing these deaths.
And as long as there's a refusal to acknowledge what's actually going on, it's difficult to get at the problems.
So I will give Barack Obama credit, because, you know, when he came in, within a matter of a few weeks, there was, you know, there was definitely some heavy modification of some of these procedures.
So they became considerably milder.
But I'm not happy with them.
There's still problems with them.
Well, and they're still criminal, right?
Appendix M is what you're talking about.
That's what we're reduced to is just the Army Field Manual, but they rewrote it.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think generally, the uniformed military went back to acceptable practices.
The problem really became JSOC, you know, which is running its own secret prison system, and which really has not towed the official Department of Defense line on procedures, and which has, you know, ready access to use these Appendix M techniques.
Right.
Well, and we still don't know if there are other CIA secret prisons in the world.
They still may be operating prisons in Morocco and Thailand, for all we know, right?
Yeah, I think what's happened is that the separate self-standing CIA black sites have been closed down.
But I think the CIA does continue to operate what I call proxy prisons.
So we know about the one in Rabat, and there seems to be similar arrangements like that in Egypt and a handful of other countries.
My goodness.
All right.
We're all out of time.
Thank you for giving us this whole hour.
I really do appreciate it, Scott.
Hey, it's my pleasure.
All right, everybody, that is the other Scott Horton heroic international anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper's.org and Columbia University.
Check out his great blog.
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