All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey guys, check it out.
It's our old friend Jeff Kaye.
He is a retired psychologist, an expert on and opponent of torture, and author of the book Cover Up at Guantanamo, the NCIS investigation into the suicides of Mohammed al-Hanashi and Abdulrahman al-Amri.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Jeff?
Hey, Scott.
Fine.
Good to be here.
Yeah, good to have you back.
It's been way too long since we talked, but you put out this important press release at the Institute for Public Accuracy about this woman, Averill Haynes, an advisor to Joe Biden, calling her an apologist for torture and an architect of kill lists.
Is that so, and why should anyone be concerned about that?
Yeah, well, you know, Averill Haynes is someone totally off my radar.
Not Averill Harriman.
That's totally different.
Yeah, he's off my radar too, but that's for another reason.
But anyway, until she showed up on Biden's transition team, and I began to look into who this woman was, because she's supposedly going to be in charge of helping make policy for Joe Biden and national security issues.
And I did know that she was a former deputy director of the CIA, but then as I began to look more into it, look at the timelines and everything, yeah, I mean, this woman has been a key advisor to Barack Obama, to a legal expert at the State Department, later, most importantly, at the National Security Council, where she was the legal advisor during the Obama administration before being promoted to her position at the CIA.
And there's a huge campaign going on to support her from former Obama administration officials, from John Brennan on down, and even former Bush administration officials.
So Valerie Jarrett from the Obama administration and John Bellinger over at, who used to work for the Bush, George W. Bush administration, calls her a superstar, and there was a glowing article- That's all I need to know right there.
Yeah, right, exactly.
There's been very few voices willing to go on the record to oppose her.
Former Senator Mark Udall was one of the exceptions, who spoke against her.
She has clear links to the policy.
She was an advisor who worked on the Obama administration's policies on assassinations.
I'm going to call them assassinations here.
I know the administration's Obama, Trump, Bush said, we don't do assassinations.
It's against the law.
But that's precisely what they are.
Just as when Trump took out and assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian special unit for accrued forces, I believe, in Iran earlier this year by drone.
And although it's presented that she's some, consistently, she's some kind of reformer.
She helped so that less people were being assassinated.
She's against torture, et cetera, all these things.
But in reality, under her leadership and as a legal advisor, these terrible kinds of human rights crimes continue under her, and presumably they will under a Biden administration as well.
And that's what people need to know.
I'm not going to say there's no differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
But when it comes to foreign policy in particular, there really are no differences.
If anything, a Biden administration will be even potentially more hawkish and warlike than the Trump administration.
Yeah.
Well, he certainly is running on, you know, having that centrist establishment, the foreign policy, you know, consensus that got us into Iraq and that same group of usual suspects as his supporters, as that's his strong point.
You know, they have this Lincoln project where all the W. Bushite neocons are all supporting Biden because he is reliably more pro-war.
Yeah.
And he puts a better face on the administration than Trump, who seems petulant, out of control, racially overtly racist instead of, you know, hiding the racism.
You know what?
And of course, from my standpoint, what stuck out was Haines' connection to torture and potentially the rendition program as well.
And that's the thing I'm looking into right now, because she's in the right place at the right time when the whole RDI program got underway in 2002, 2003.
What was her job then?
Well, what happened, she has very interesting history.
But as a, you know, coming out of Georgetown Law School, she got apparently her first job working at the State Department's legal advisor office in 2003.
And then later became, in fact, the main legal, you know, State Department legal advisor.
These legal advisor roles are very important.
They're little commented upon.
But these are the people who are giving the legal, legalistic rubber stamp to policies like torture, rendition, assassination, covert ops in other countries, right?
And giving it some kind of legal magic wand, pixie dust over it to make it look like it's all somehow legit, when in fact these are crimes.
So I don't know that she was in fact involved in the rendition program, but she did work in the treaties office.
And according to a 2013 article in Newsweek called The Least Likely Spy, which was a kind of a glowing paean to how wonderful this Avril Haines was, this is of course during the Obama administration, you know, it became clear that she was working on and looking at the treaties.
If you do a covert op in another country, you're supposed to report that to Congress.
And apparently this wasn't happening with the rendition program.
And Avril Haines, in her job at the State Department, saw that and apparently wrote a bunch of reports and got things, got the legalistic business up to date.
And certainly the rendition, torture rendition program went forward.
So at the exact same time that Bush was expanding the CIA's black site rendition program and renditioning people to torture, you know, everyone knows about the waterboarding right now.
Everyone knows about the anal rape that was taking place, forcing, you know, foodstuffs at people's rectums, you know, putting them in cages and in confinement boxes, you know, sleep deprivation, the whole bit.
And you know, in the State Department side of it, it was to, you know, when you make a rendition, renditions go against, she's in the office of treaties, but rendition is specifically, the extraordinary renditions were specifically illegal according to U.S. treaty called the Convention Against Torture, which was actually written during the Reagan administration and ratified, I think, in the very early, finally in the very earliest days of the Clinton administration.
And it's signed by dozens, well over a hundred countries, the United States, you know, just about everybody really.
And you know, you're supposed to get, you know, they said, well, we're going to get diplomatic assurances.
That's the legal cover.
And this is what they did in the time she was working in an office that would be looking at these kinds of issues.
I cannot say that she had any involvement in the rendition program, but you know, where there's smoke, there's often fire.
And one of the problems with Haynes right now is that there's just not enough journalistic looking into her actual history for someone who's about to ascend to a great deal of power.
In fact, even during the Obama administration, ascended to a great deal of power.
Not much is known about this spook.
She certainly looks like a nicer person than John Brennan, you know, and she presents herself as a against torture and a champion of diversity, particularly the champion of diversity at CIA.
You know, a woman, look, we have blacks and Hispanics torturing people too.
It's a very open policy.
We've completely desegregated our torture core.
We're very progressive people.
I ask people, would they feel better to know that among the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus Christ, that one of them was a woman?
Yeah.
Would that be better?
Yeah.
A gay woman.
Yeah.
Gay woman.
Yes, it was there.
So somehow that was better.
That was a step forward.
So you know, anyway, there's just, there's a lot, you know, as more starts coming out, articles that come out, of course, there was one in the intercept about her connections to working for Palantir, the CIA funded data mining, you know, company.
What's her connection to that now?
Well, let's see, she, she was a consultant for them, right?
She consulted.
I don't know exactly what she consulted on.
We don't know.
Because they're, they're, but she has a business relationship with, she has a business relationship and Palantir's clients are private.
You know, they are, of course, intelligence agencies, but there's a lot of different businesses, business people, financial services firms, et cetera.
She's currently a principal, I believe she still is, is something called West Exec Strategic Consultants.
You know, one of these strategic consultant firms in D.C. that, you know, it's one of the revolving doors for people in government, right?
And there's a good chance that there's some kind of weird conflict of interest going on between her clients there, where she, you know, is supposed to be, again, a principal of that, of that consultancy firm.
But we don't know, again, the clients are.
This was an article that just came out.
So she's starting to get the, some people looking at her.
This was the article by Jonathan Geyer at the American Prospect a few days ago, maybe almost on the same day, or just about Spencer Ackerman at the Daily Beast did another article about, you know, the left kind of being outraged at Biden's pick of Avril Haines.
I don't, you know, I was surprised to see that because frankly, I've hardly seen anybody really that upset about it.
And in fact, he had difficulty getting people to go on the record on the left to do that.
Either they're afraid of, you know, right now it's like you're supposed to bow down to Joe Biden because look at the alternative.
It's Donald Trump.
And if you're not for Biden, then you must be for Trump.
This is their strategy four years ago.
Don't say anything bad about Hillary or how she's doing it because that could hurt her when, hey, you know what?
If her victory is what you really want, maybe some tough love and some healthy, constructive criticism could be useful right now.
Like, hey, Joe, don't cozy too close up to known torturers because that might cost you some votes.
Right.
Instead, let's just pretend to not know that it might, and maybe that'll make it go away.
But there's one thing that they're having difficulty covering up because it's so egregious, it's so right out there, and it's so recent.
And furthermore, it's being trumpeted by the Trump administration.
She was in their press release that they put out during the Gina Haspel confirmation.
And that's, you know, that Avril Haines came out very strongly for the nomination of Gina Haspel to, you know, directorship of the CIA.
And Gina Haspel was quite clearly involved in the destruction of the CIA torture tapes along with her boss, or at least her senior, Jose Rodriguez, and furthermore, Gina Haspel had been allegedly chief of station for a while in the CIA Thailand black site.
She was been reported to have been involved with the CIA black site at Guantanamo.
And although I'm the only one to report on this, in the military commission's trial transcripts it comes out that she also was in some unspecified capacity involved in the CIA black site in Poland as well.
So this woman, Gina Haspel, is very much involved in the torture program, and she helped cover it up.
And Haines is covering up for her.
It makes her an accessory to torture in my mind.
If in fact, as I suspect, she didn't in fact have other associations with the torture program or covering it up while she was at the State Department or on the National Security Council in the early days of the Obama administration, because, you know, torture was continuing at Guantanamo, even after the black site shut down, it was perhaps continuing on prison ships, it was continuing by proxies in places like Somalia, as Jeremy Scahill reported.
And of course, you know, most likely, although no one has asked her this, has been a supporter of the current Army Field Manual Appendix X, which was condemned by the UN's Committee Against Torture, which is the UN's policing agency for the treaty, which is the Convention Against Torture, to look at states that are involved in torture and to call them out and tell them to get their act together.
Some of the toothlessness, I hate to say, of international law at this point in history is that stern warnings are about all that get given.
But the UN did go on record calling out the United States government post, I mean, during the Obama administration, during a time that Avril Haines was a top legal advisor for Obama, for using instruments, guidance on interrogations in the Army Field Manual that amounted to what they called ill-treatment, raising questions of torture to the level of torture.
That included things such as, and still do include things such as sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, severe isolation, manipulation of temperatures, things like this, that are meant, well known in the literature on torture, are in fact constructed to break people down, you know, to make them, and to exploit them, either by producing false confessions or putting them on for show trials, as already has been happening at Guantanamo, as is in the case of Omar Khayyar and David Hicks some years ago.
There's just nothing good I can see in this person.
You know, if she's the moderate, you know, she's at the moderate wing of the torture wing, which is to say, she's an extremist.
See, language starts to lose all meaning, at least in political politics, as George Orwell pointed out.
I mean, to zoom out a little bit, it's been the biggest lie of American politics for my whole lifetime, that the centrists are moderates compared to the wingers.
Now the wingers are extremists on some things, but they're also good on some things.
The centrists aren't good on anything.
The centrists are the extremists on every single thing in the world.
There's nothing moderate about them at all, except for how well they get along together.
You know, John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, as they set the world on fire.
Right.
Yes.
And it's the centrists who want to, you know, so even Trump can be like a broken clock can be right, you know, twice a day.
And Trump is right in wanting to, you know, get people out of Afghanistan.
You know, you wrote a book yourself, you know, pointing out the senselessness as well as the crimes of the United States in Afghanistan.
An excellent book.
I hope your readers read it.
Thanks for asking.
You're in.
You didn't ask me to give this plug, but I'm giving it anyway.
Well, I did ask you to give me one in print and you did.
And I also cite you in the book in the torture section, of course, as well, because whoever whatever your listeners read about this, they do need to know that, you know, Afghanistan now is America's longest running war.
And since unless you want to count the non the state of kind of what's going on with North Korea, but the Indian wars kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you can make this.
But in general, in terms of people on the on the battlefield right now, you know, anyway, so Trump wants to supposedly pull people out of Afghanistan and every time he seems to be getting close to doing it.
Some new, you know, both, you know, piece of propaganda is put out there, like the thing now about the bounties of Russia, you know, all aimed at making sure that the centrist backed war state, you know, keeps its war on terror engagements, you know, wherever they are in the world.
And they, in fact, expand them as Obama did in Africa.
And Trump continues, you know, with AFRICOM, African command.
And now, of course, Trump moving into space with the, you know, with his new space command, which would be fine if they would just send him up there and leave him or be OK.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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But now on this Hanes lady you talk about here, too, in the press release at Accuracy.org here about her, well, two major things on the drone program here.
One, helping drop the list on a regular basis.
I guess for the Terror Tuesday meetings.
Everybody Googled Terror Tuesday.
And so she's drawing up the list of who to murder on one hand, but also she helped to revise the process to make it a little less murderous or something, although you say in here that the ACLU says it still fell far short of legality.
Yes.
Yeah, because it's full of PR, right?
The drone program is going to make this better somehow.
They were going to pull, supposedly, she was going to pull the CIA, the drone program away from the CIA and give it to JSOC, you know, in the military.
But in fact, she was, if that's truly what she wanted to do, she was unsuccessful in doing that.
The CIA drone program is, you know, kind of bigger than ever right now.
But even perhaps more importantly than drawing up the kill list, although that's very important, was in fact, yes, her work on helping fashion is a key advisor to Barack Obama in fashioning his new version of the Bush era drone program.
And you know, they touted this as transparent.
But in fact, it wasn't transparent.
They covered up how many people were being killed, you know, thousands of innocents still being killed.
You know, it was she's just part of putting lipstick on a pig, really.
You know, as I said, you know, she tried her job seems to be whether it's torture, whether it was her job covering up the CIA's attempts to or not just attempts, they're spying on the Senate investigators looking into the torture program.
She also helped cover up or redacting the torture report once it came out.
God dang.
Really?
I can see why they like her so much, though.
You know, she they love her.
She is kind of like Gina Haspel Jr.
Yeah.
So on the assassinations, I think just the word, it tends to imply one shot, one kill or this kind of thing, you know, as a guy sneaking up and capping a guy in the back of the head or maybe sniping him from a rooftop or this kind of thing.
We're talking about dropping 500 pound bombs on cars, on mosques, on, you know, neighborhood meetings and these kind of things.
So, yeah, and it was leaked to Skahill.
They ended up making a whole book about it, the drone papers, and a guy ended up going to prison.
He got very little attention for this, but they caught the guy that leaked to Skahill.
I'm not sure how and and prosecuted him for this.
But anyway, and they just showed in there that they don't know who they're killing.
And even when they're talking about, OK, we want to kill this guy, this guy, this guy.
They're just talking about this phone number who, you know, is connected to another phone number and this kind of thing.
They have no idea who they're killing.
So assassination, just the term itself implies that they know what they're doing and that they're killing the people they're trying to kill.
But that's really not true at all.
The thing is total chaos.
You know, it's smaller than a full invasion from Kuwait, but it's an absolute horror show if you're on the receiving end of it.
You know, Avril Haines, possible, I mean, her connections to this might go back all the way to 2011.
It was in 2011 that she became the National Security Council's legal advisor, which is the top person kind of legal, again, rubber stamping all sorts of missions done by the United States, like the targeted killing, shall we call it, but really blowing up a car and killing a number of people of Anwar al-Awlaki, remember, the U.S. citizen who also became a cleric associated with al-Qaeda.
And the U.S. killed him and blew him up and some other people back in September 2011.
Well, that was when Avril Harriman was now the legal advisor of the NSC.
Did she, was she already, was she involved in the, you know, giving approval to the killing of al-Awlaki, which many people believe was obviously illegal and a war crime?
In fact, remember at the time, John Brennan, Brennan at the time was in the White House.
And when they killed al-Awlaki's son a few weeks later, he said, hey, what's going on here?
I suspect something, you know, like he was trying to distance himself from it and blame the CIA for doing the wrong thing.
And I think even implying that it wasn't an accident, you know, that there was a real reason that they had targeted this 16-year-old American-born American citizen who was no terrorist whatsoever.
He wasn't even suspected.
He went over there to find his father and bring him home because he was a good kid.
Well, I find it difficult to believe John Brennan on that.
I mean, these people, they lie for a living.
It indicates that something's going on there.
That's that at least he felt he had to distance himself from it alone is a story, right?
Well, yes, it is.
But, you know, maybe the bigger story behind that is how the United States has made a practice of going after the families of its opponents, which itself is a war crime.
They did it with KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
They threatened in Guantanamo over and over the cases in which they told people anyway that they were threatening the families.
Back just a year ago or whatever it was, I wrote a I got a FOIA release on the army investigation into the death of Guantanamo of a guy who was in the Pentagon called Inayatullah, his name was Nassim.
And, you know, they had tortured him at Bagram before sent to Guantanamo.
And he did, in fact, give up information.
By the way, it's a lie that torture only produces false confessions.
If you have some kind of information, you might say, you know, yeah, I know my cousin Joe, you know, or or whatever.
But it's unclear how much he really knew.
And in fact, the United States kept thinking that he was withholding info, whatever.
They gave him special privileges.
He ended up killing himself because of the torture and in the fact that he couldn't give them what they they wanted from him and at Guantanamo.
Yeah.
And the reason they bring him up, they went after his family, right?
They told him, well, maybe we're going to bring, you know, your family and have them arrested.
Right.
It's in the record, you know, so it's a documented news, not just me asserting this.
There are other cases on record in which the United States persistently goes after the families of the people it opposes.
Well, you know, I'm not sure which branch it was, but some part of the Special Operations Command ended up killing a Lockheed's daughter, too, under Trump in 2017.
And I don't know if she just happened to be at the place they were assaulting or not.
I doubt she was the target of the thing, but she was shot in the neck and it took her three hours to bleed to death.
They said eight year old.
I don't I don't I vaguely now remember the case, but another American citizen.
It's horrible.
Another American in the case of a Lockheed's son, which is quite well known, is I think he was deliberately targeted because the idea is to strike terror and fear into the hearts of their opponents and to show that they're omnipotent to those they rule over.
Or just to shut that kid up about how much he knew about how his dad used to be an FBI informant before they let him go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, as a macabre, but to say no more than two birds with one stone.
Yeah, exactly.
No, these are these are barbaric.
You know, we're led by a barbaric, you know, some people call it a death cult, whatever you want to call them.
You know, a barbaric group of people who use crimes and then lie about them consistently every day.
I think it's more of like a self-congratulations cult than a death cult.
I think it's really just a bunch of back slapping.
Ain't we great?
Sort of like how you and me are like, yeah, good old you and me.
We're reliably against all this stuff.
You know, that's how they feel.
They're like, yeah, good old you and me.
We always are out there fighting a good fight, you know, and doesn't they don't notice that they're the bad guys.
They have no idea.
That's what I think.
You're right.
They either do, but they, you know, they believe that they are at least I believe most of them believe that they are doing the right thing, that it's OK.
This is what we become.
You can be made into a monster without realizing it.
It's crazy.
I mean, I apologize in form.
They're completely nuts, but it's easy to see their own point of view that like, hey, I must be right.
Otherwise, how come I'm so rich, you know?
Yeah, he's a danger.
He's against our military bases abroad.
So therefore, he's against, you know, he's a danger to our national security.
And so, you know, and so back to Biden then.
And what does it mean that Biden is relying on this lady that, OK, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to get everybody who's the most reliable people from before and we're going to put them back.
Well, Biden has a history with names as well.
So back in 2011, excuse me, before 2011, back when she was working at the State Department and working on these treaties and whatever she was doing, she came to the attention of Biden, who at that point was still a senator, not vice president.
And he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And he hired, he took her on and hired her to be a legal advisor to that committee.
She worked under him.
Right.
So he she has a history with him.
So he took her on, you know, of course.
And then the Obama administration, you know, she was brought in very early on, first as a deputy advisor to the president and then later as the main advisor to the president and put on, you know, which also includes being the senior legal advisor for the National Security, the NSC Council.
And and then Obama promoted her to deputy director, in other words, number two person at the CIA.
So, you know, that's the Biden, you know, Obama Biden administration.
And Biden was put in charge of, you know, there's also a lot of other connections that I haven't fleshed out entirely.
You know, she was involved in probably in legal decisions about what to do in Iraq and also during the Iraq war early on when she went to work for the State Department in 2003.
And and what about Syria under Obama?
Syria?
Absolutely.
Yes.
She was in an article in Newsweek in 2013.
Again, this Daniel Clayton article, she was the legal advisor and and supportedly involved in the, quote, legalities of the US intervention in Syria, highly classified actions against Iran's nuclear, nuclear program, as well as the legalities, of course, of the drone assassinations and her work on the presidential policy guidance.
Wow.
She sounds like she could be the president.
She said she is a key national security figure.
She's been flying a little under the radar, although if you get a full profile in Newsweek magazine, you know, you're you're not that far under the radar.
But, you know, but for most of us, you know.
One article in Newsweek isn't necessarily makes her doesn't make her John Brennan level of fame.
But I think she stepped into it now.
She sure sounds like a war criminal to me.
I mean, the entire CIA operation in Syria was absolutely treasonous in every way.
They can try to hide behind their moderate rebels all they want, but we all see through that and always did.
Absolutely.
No, right.
There's nothing worse in the world than that.
You know, fighting the war against terrorism the way they did, as we're talking about the drone assassinations in Yemen and Pakistan, for example, killing all these innocent people and terrorizing even more.
And all this stuff is horrible.
But the war for terrorism directly bankrolling al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, in their so-called moderate revolution there.
I mean, that is absolutely bananas and treasons and killed, you know, half a million people.
And she was led to directly to Iraq War Three against the Islamic State and all of that.
I mean, the idea that any of these people can show their faces in public whatsoever at this point is amazing.
I know.
I totally agree.
It is amazing.
It's testimony to either the ability of the US rulers to tamp down knowledge of their crimes or make really, of course, what's going on now, make the population feel so powerless and their struggle for existence, you know, take up so much of their energies on a day-to-day basis that they don't have time to appropriate and work through ways in which they can truly oppose US policies abroad.
But, you know, I questioned what, you know, their propaganda, you have to hand it to them, has worked very well.
They have the bully pulpit and they pounded over people's heads day after day after day.
And, you know, if Biden were to get rid of Haines tomorrow because of what, not because of what I wrote, but what things like are being said about her in my article and other people's coming out against her, I don't think that's going to happen.
But if it did, he would just find somebody else to shoehorn into that position.
You know, when Obama wanted to appoint John Brennan as director of the CIA back in 2009, there was incredible pushback by the, quote, left because of Brennan's association under working for George Tenet with the torture program.
But then Obama just turned around and made him his national security advisor, which didn't need to have Senate approval, and kind of thumbed his nose and showed everybody, you know, what his true colors were going to be when it comes to the CIA and the war on terror and the crimes that have taken place in that and the name of that.
And Biden's going to do the same thing.
And if Haines were taken out, you know, in terms of if she were to have some high position, I don't know that Biden will even subject.
He might be more savvy or his advisors may be more savvy because his mental status is some question, I think.
Yeah, well, they're talking about making Michelle Flournoy, the secretary of defense, the lady who lost the Afghan war.
And then, you know, Biden's whole thing he says about Afghanistan, he's definitely not pulling troops out and he wants to send troops to Pakistan.
You know, like we're having this exact same conversation a decade later about the AfPak war and the real solution to the war in Afghanistan is to solve the problem in Pakistan.
Yeah, a few more drone strikes will do that for you.
And this guy, he's way too old for this right now.
He's just stuck in the past.
You know, you mentioned Michelle Flournoy.
She is also she Haines works under James was a principal at this West Executive Consultancy in D.C. that I've told you.
But when the higher than her co-founder or whatever, Michelle Flournoy.
So she's connected to Flournoy to do this West Executive Consultancy in D.C.
It's all you know, it's all a clip, really.
Yeah, exactly.
And people will remember that Obama almost appointed Flournoy to be secretary of defense after Hagel quit, but she didn't want the job or maybe it was later, but she didn't want the job because she was going to wait to come in with Hillary Clinton and the whole fresh team and be the secretary of defense for her.
And then she ended up right through her greed.
She ended up not getting the job at all.
Yeah.
But I guess we're going to see whether she's able to.
She might.
They're saying that she might be the secretary of defense for a Biden administration.
But the only thing that she ever did, her only accomplishment ever is doubling, tripling the Afghan war and then losing it anyway.
That's the only thing she's known for.
It was secretary of defense for policy overseeing implementation of the surge under McChrystal and Petraeus.
The whole thing that went completely nowhere.
She's a complete fraud and a complete failure.
She's got tens of thousands of innocent people's blood on her hands and accomplished nothing, has absolutely nothing to show for it whatsoever.
But to them, it's like, wow, what a good Democrat.
And did you notice she is a woman in that?
Great and neat and makes her wow.
She'll be the it'll be historic.
She'll be the first female secretary of defense to have lost the Afghan war.
Right, right.
It's really, it's a crime how, you know, when there really is still, sad to say, obviously, discrimination against women in this country of a major sort that, you know, that they put forward, you know, that these, you know, put forward, you know, a travesty of what diversity would mean by saying, you know, we will get a handful of women, you know, or various minorities in certain key positions to serve, you know, the racist and imperialist policies of the United States.
We will, you know, we will have a woman who, you know, this is, you can see this in the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, in which, you know, a woman climbs the career ladder in the CIA, you know, by becoming a torturer.
Right.
And sure enough, and that's what I said, that was my take on the movie.
And I'd say I predicted it because a few years later, Gina Haspel becomes director of the CIA, who climbed up the ladder by being a torturer.
Yep.
So, you know, I think there's probably more we can find out, obviously, over time about April Haynes and her career.
I really want to look and find out what connections she may have had to the rendition program.
Unfortunately, I tried to also find out what connection Hillary Clinton found, Hillary Clinton had at the State Department to the torture program and, you know, the so-called delivery of diplomatic assurances that there wouldn't be torture and all this stuff.
My FOIA is still out there that they are dragging.
It's been out there for years now.
You know, it's very difficult, you know, the whole FOIA process.
If you're a mainstream, you know, media outlet, you know, like the New York Times or Washington Post or even BuzzFeed, you know, you have more clout, you've got lots of money to file lawsuits, et cetera.
But for the citizenry out there, despite new tools like at muckrock.com in which citizens can file for FOIAs, you know, if they want to drag their feet, particularly the Defense Department, the State Department and the CIA, they will and they do.
And, you know, I just discovered the other day, I filed a FOIA on the 1957 Inspector General Report on the MK-ULTRA program.
I just wanted to see the whole thing.
I read seven pages of it that had been released some years earlier.
And there was a lot of there was connections, as it turned out, and I've written about between the MK-ULTRA program and the CIA torture program instituted under Bush and Cheney and George Tenet.
And so I wanted to see this full report, which had never been released.
Well, now they turned around and reclassified the entire thing and they wouldn't release even a word of it.
I now have an appeal out on that.
But that appeal has been going on now over three years.
And I was only found out a few months ago that supposedly because of COVID-19, the office handling such appeals has been closed.
And when it will reopen, who knows?
So the appeal is dead in the water.
So, you know, how convenient, how convenient.
Oh, look, everybody, an excuse.
We'll just hide behind that.
Yeah, they can run the rest of the Defense Department apparently just fine.
Right.
They can run everything else they do fine.
But actually, an appeal on a FOIA, actually, this wasn't a FOIA.
Technically, I made a different kind of request.
And your listeners may not be familiar.
It's called a mandatory declassification request, which is a different kind of request.
It's not statute under statutory laws via an executive order that you can do this other thing.
It's supposed I do it that way to speed up the timeline.
Ironically, of course, it didn't.
I learned that if they deny you that request, which they must do within one year, which is, you know.
And in fact, I did get a version of the CIA's torture manual, QBARC, declassified a substantial portion of it that had never been declassified just a few years back, using that method, mandatory declassification request.
But it turns out that if they don't want to do it, your appeals process, though, is much more difficult.
And so it's just it's just hard to move forward.
But, you know, in a society like ours, where there still is at least a simulacrum of a free press, where people there are some people out there, not enough, but some people still doing the digging, you know, stuff does come out.
Right.
So a lot about Avril Haines really has just been journalism that's been done in the past years and some of it goes back years.
But, you know, more is coming out, the stuff about her work on Syria, stuff about her work, you know, helping rubber stamp the so-called Accountability Review Board that the CIA instituted to look at its crimes during the torture, you know, that were reported on in the Senate's torture investigation.
You know, these are all things that we're, you know, learning recently.
And, you know, her connections to Palantir, whatever that might be, you know, how far that goes.
You know, Palantir, of course, had been advising ICE on how in its immigration detention program, it advises the police, it advises the NSA, it advises the CIA, it does data mining.
There was some kind of connection, and I'm embarrassed to say I didn't understand it because it was so complex with what was going on with Facebook and Cambridge Analytics.
I don't know, there's something there, but because I haven't quite grappled with that yet, I can't say exactly what it was.
But if your readers want to look, they could probably investigate it because there are articles about that online.
But whether or not Avril Haines had anything to do with it, I don't know.
I think the best place to start is with what we do now.
Yeah, of course.
Which is a lot already, you know.
In Syria.
Yeah, there's so much we know, and we don't know everything.
Speaking of which, could you take this press release that you put out with Sam Husseini here, could you really kind of tune this up into a real article to run at antiwar.com?
Because I'd like to.
Yeah, okay, thank you.
All right, I will do that.
Okay, great.
I mean, this is a pretty substantive press release as it is, you know.
Yeah, I try to keep it as short as possible, because I knew more.
I guess the press release, this is about as far as I can go.
Sure.
But yeah, just take it with that and get it kind of tuned up, and I'd love to run it.
Okay, I will do that, definitely.
All right, cool.
Definitely do that.
Well, listen, I should let you go and have a great rest of your weekend and everything, man, but it's great to talk to you again, Jeff.
Great to talk to you, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
Talk to you later.
All right.
All right, you guys, that's Jeff Kaye.
He is a retired psychologist and expert and opponent of torture, and he wrote the great book Cover Up at Guantanamo, and you can read this press release and follow the links to the proof of his assertions at the Institute for Public Accuracy.
That's at accuracy.org.
It's called The Biden Advisor, an Apologist for Torture, an Architect of Kill Lists.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
