All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on chaos radio, Austin and the Liberty radio network.
And our next guest on the show is the heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer, the other Scott Horton contributing editor at Harper's magazine and keeper of the blog.
No comment at their website, harpers.org.
He just won the 2011 national magazine award for, let me get it just right.
Once I put it down here, excellence as exemplified by one article or a series of articles for the Guantanamo suicides that he wrote for a Harper's magazine.
And of course, a suicides is an ironic quotes there.
Welcome back to the show.
Other Scott, how are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you.
Very happy to have you here with us today.
Uh, congratulations, uh, about time.
You got some real notice for that thing.
Well, thank you very much.
I, I, I was there at the award ceremony and everybody had told me going in, not to worry, the Rolling Stone piece on general McChrystal is going to win this hands down, uh, so, uh, you might not even think about coming and then to my shock, uh, no, the, the jury, which consists of the senior editors for the from the, uh, magazine industry picked my piece.
So I'm delighted, humbled.
I should say.
Well, uh, I think you deserve it.
Of course.
So Michael Hastings also friend of the show and, uh, did a great job with that piece.
Um, and, and it got lots of attention as well.
It should have.
Uh, but, uh, I think yours certainly deserves the attention that you're getting, uh, for this or that you got for this.
And, uh, I really wish it had got more.
I was telling the story to the audience a couple of weeks back about how, uh, the only mentioned this article could get at all in the New York times was Ken Silverstein and writing them a letter to correct them for saying he was complaining that poor Harper's never gets any coverage in the times when, what he said was this article by you never got any coverage in the times and deserved it.
And that was the only time it got any mention at all.
Well, they subsequently did a whole article all about suicides at Guantanamo, uh, which had only an oblique reference to, uh, uh, to skeptics.
And then they installed a link to my article behind the word skeptics, uh, who didn't believe that all these suicides were necessarily suicides.
Of course, in this whole, this entire article, they didn't mention any of the evidence that had been compiled, uh, for the case that they weren't suicides.
They just presented that as a fact though.
They're suicides.
That's that, uh, which I think shows the level of objectivity.
And willingness to search in question you find in the New York times these days.
Yeah.
Well, by the way, I guess, uh, I mean, you don't have to answer anything, but, uh, do you know Charlie Savage and did you have a chance to ask him whether that was him or the editor's decision to do you like that?
Well, I'll just say, I know Charlie Savage and I think he's an absolutely terrific reporter.
He's one of my favorite writers on legal affairs, uh, uh, matters.
And I take no offense from, from Charlie's, uh, authorship of that piece, uh, because I'm quite sure that it doesn't reflect his thinking about these matters.
Okay.
Uh, very good.
Cause, uh, I tend to agree with you about him.
He's done a lot of good work over many years when he was at the Boston globe as well.
Um, all right.
So now, and here's the thing about this for anybody who's new to this story, maybe you're thinking that, well, uh, these, uh, the national magazine, uh, association, their society of magazine editors, uh, maybe, um, you know, for some reason they've been fooled by something that didn't make it past the sharp editors at the New York times or something like that.
This article has five named sources that pretty much leave no doubt that something very different than the official story took place the night of, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, uh, July 6th, 2000, July 9th, 2006, June 9th, 2006, when three men died and they called it a suicide and said that this was, uh, one of those terrorist attacks of asymmetric suicide warfare against us, trying to make us look bad by killing themselves.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, you know, we have our sources, they're named on the record.
Um, you know, they, their views were very, very clear and very well documented and corroborated and not a single one of them has in any way retreated from the account they've given, you know, to the contrary, I'd say there's a, there's a very substantial, uh, quantity of additional information that is building, which you're going to see, uh, in print not too long in the future, uh, which I think is gonna, uh, continue to drive home this case.
Uh, and everything we're picking up continues to corroborate the account we got from, uh, from those perimeter guards.
All right, well, come on, give me the scoop now.
Well, you, uh, you'll, you'll hear from, uh, in the future from some people who are on the inside and you'll hear a little bit more, uh, about the transfers and where they died, uh, but I, we still got a ways to go and, uh, and, and fact-checking and, and proofing all of this before anything else appears in print, so we're not quite that far yet.
All right.
Are we learning more about camp?
No.
Yes, definitely.
Yes, definitely.
We're learning.
We are learning quite a bit more about camp now.
That's fine.
I'll tell you when I received this award, one of the first, uh, uh, notes of congratulations I got was from a very senior official in the Pentagon responsible for detainee affairs, uh, telling me that it was, uh, to my credit to have asked these questions.
So, you know, whereas we've got some people out there saying this is nutty, crazy conspiracy theory.
I mean, there are a lot of people who are very senior positions and the Pentagon who know about it, who certainly don't think so.
Okay.
Well, I don't guess I have to, uh, recommend to you that you get back with him and see if he has any comment he wants to give you for your next piece.
You can, you can take it as a given that there's a dialogue going on.
Yeah, there you go.
I'm looking forward to the six questions there.
Um, ripping off my format, Scott.
All right.
Well, uh, almost.
Yeah.
So it's, uh, the heroic anti-torture attorney, uh, the other Scott Horton.
He writes for Harper's magazine.
Now I want to ask you about this.
Uh, it turns out you're all wet in all along the pro-torture mongers in America.
We're right.
That, uh, torture delivered up to us, the bad guy, Osama bin Laden.
And now you have to take back everything you ever said against torture.
Well, there you go.
You know, especially the arguments you made in court like that, you know?
Yeah.
Mark, Mark Teeson, uh, John, you, uh, John Rizzo.
We've got a whole series of people, all of whom are deeply, deeply tied to torture policies all over the media today saying, uh, we got Osama bin Laden only because we tortured.
Um, now the problem with that is it's completely untrue.
I mean, just start by noting, of course, that, uh, president Bush himself pretty much put an end to the torture practices in September of 2006.
He sort of brought the curtain down on them.
Uh, and, and the capture of bin Laden's occurring five years later.
So I think you've got to start by asking what possible connection could it have?
Uh, and the argument that they make is that, uh, two people who have been water boarded said that they couldn't recognize names of couriers who were used to identify the, uh, bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
And you got that they couldn't identify.
They wouldn't.
Uh, so they got nothing positive that helped advance, uh, the case by use of waterboarding.
And Leon Panetta told, uh, John McCain and John McCain put this in an op ed in today's Washington post that, you know, none of the use of these enhanced techniques in any way led to evidence, not even a bit of evidence out of the massive mosaic that was compiled over years that led to, uh, taking out, uh, uh, bin Laden.
But you know, the big lie is a tried and proven technique.
Well, and you know, my favorite part of it in this particular case is that they invoke the former Nazi and then Soviet base that was turned into a torture prison in Poland as reported by Larissa Alexandrovna.
That's right.
The Szymanski base of course is where, uh, the, the waterboarding occurred as best we can see right now.
Yep.
Uh, I guess they're really proud of that.
You know, I don't know.
Uh, and yeah, you would think that would be a connection to cover up.
Yeah.
Nope.
But instead they just brag.
Well, uh, you know, and here's the thing too, and we've discussed this on the show before, I think you gave a pretty good estimate.
Not, this is a point I try to, uh, remind people in the audience as much as I can that the reason TV or at least the politicians, uh, people like John, you, Don Rumsfeld trying to defend themselves talk only about waterboarding is because they try to narrow our focus to just waterboarding, which after all happened to only three different people.
They say anyway, after destroying all the tapes, um, and it was three really bad guys, uh, Ramzi bin al-Shiv and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah turned out to be not that bad, but still one of those bad guys.
And so who cares about them?
But, uh, that really wasn't the deal with the real deal was that Bush had really changed the law to allow torture.
Uh, the, the widespread regime across the terror war of, uh, torture and outsourcing for torture rendition extraordinary and otherwise.
And, you know, I was hoping you could kind of give people a picture of, uh, in all your study of this over all these years, uh, just how vast and, and, uh, horrible this system that they set up really was.
All right.
Well, I break it into three different categories and I'd start with the, with the CIA.
Remember the CIA was operating the extraordinary rendition system.
We've got somewhere, it looks like between about 150 and 200 people, uh, in that system and the history of the global war on terror before president Bush remember, shut it down and September of 2006.
Uh, and, uh, everything about that system was built on torture.
So you even look when people were seized and they were prepared to be put in airplanes, they were roughed up, shot up with drugs, uh, had an anal suppository, uh, very rudely, uh, put into, uh, their rear ends, which would constitute rape by instrumentality under the law.
In fact, uh, uh, a lot of them were, uh, were regularly roughed up on the way to prison.
They were subjected to all these enhanced interrogation techniques and included, uh, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, long time standing and so forth.
And of course we also had three of those people being subjected to, uh, to, uh, waterboarding.
So these, these, this group got the worst of it really.
And I'd say, and the fact that there's a, a very senior CIA terrorist, a CIA interrogator rather, who's got a book coming out in just two months now and which he says that would be very reasonable for anybody to conclude that what's done to these people is torture.
In fact, he says he viewed it as torture.
And so that many of his colleagues at the CIA, um, even though they were involved in the process.
So that's one group.
Next group, we look at Guantanamo, Guantanamo.
We have 778 prisoners and the course of, um, of that program, all of them were subjected to some procedures that, uh, Mark, uh, that could be called torture, including, uh, isolation techniques, long time standing, uh, uh, hypothermia techniques, um, and also, uh, some beatings, uh, and, uh, some of, some assault, uh, special drug regimen and so forth.
Uh, I'd say we've got about, uh, 150 to 200 of that total who got far worse treatment, including the so-called frequent flyer program, uh, that, that really constitutes torture, no matter how you cut it.
Um, and then we come to the roughly 150,000 people who were held in us prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And we can't say all those people were tortured.
Um, but we can say in the period between 2002 and roughly 2005 to the beginning of 2006, a large portion of them were subjected, uh, to abusive techniques.
So it looks altogether like we've got tens of thousands of people who are put through this system.
So it's not a tiny number and it's certainly not just the three people who are waterboarded according to a U S government acknowledgement.
Well now, so, um, what about today?
There's a still appendix M of the army field manual and the sort of semi secret real prison at Bagram air base.
Are there still extraordinary renditions going on?
People exported to Morocco and Syria to be tortured that kind of thing?
Well, I've written two articles about, uh, in which I've chronicled two renditions that occurred in the Obama era.
And I think it's very clear that Obama shut down the Bush type program.
So what he's got now, or what we would call renditions to justice, where people are snatched and they're put through pretty aggressive and harsh treatment and preparation for the ride.
But then in the end they're turned over to the regular criminal justice system where they're charged and faced where they're charged and stand trial.
Uh, so it's not really like the Bush era, but there's some issues with it for sure.
Well, but there are some people who've been arrested in other places and then brought to Bagram like Bush was doing, right?
That's, that's exactly right.
I mean, um, both of the cases I looked at were people who've been arrested in Afghanistan and brought to Bagram and then Bagram, they were put on board a plane and flown back to the U S and the U S they were charged.
I see.
Okay.
So we've got, so I'd say it's not really comparable to what happened in the Bush era, but there's certainly a lot of issues surrounding it.
Uh, and, and the judge in one, one of these cases really took the justice department to task for what they'd done, uh, asking, uh, point blank, who authorized this because it seemed ridiculous.
So it looks like even that sort of practice has been stopped.
Now, when, uh, the WikiLeaks, uh, came out with, uh, some Guantanamo files, I guess the files on all the different prisoners, uh, over the years, there are a couple of weeks back.
Did you have a chance to go through there and did you find out, was there, uh, you know, any big new truth that, uh, we need to get our head around from that WikiLeaks dump there?
Well, you know, it's an interesting dump.
It was not like most of the prior WikiLeaks dumps, the way it came out and the materials that came out.
I think the thing that struck me first looking at these security analyses, that's what most of the package was.
It was that a couple of the ones that would have been the most interesting were missing from the pile.
Um, they focused on people who have been collaborators and then the dates of the reports we have, they weren't current reports.
Indeed.
They weren't the current reports as of the time of the, of the big WikiLeaks occurrence.
And that led me to that.
That just puzzled me about what was going on here, uh, with these leaks.
But I'd say, uh, you know, what we have in these documents is a struggle, uh, by a military intelligence analyst to come up with a justification, any justification for continuing to hold people.
And the justifications you see advanced are pretty lame.
I mean, it's like this guy's anti-American.
They act disrespectfully towards the guards.
They're unhappy about being prisoners at Guantanamo.
Well, you know, what rational person would be happy about being a prisoner at Guantanamo?
Um, and it's hard to take that sort of conduct and that sort of act, uh, reaction and equate it with someone being a likely terrorist or likely to bear arms against the United States, which is really the standard they have to apply.
Um, so I think what the most striking thing about these reports is the weakness, uh, of the case they have against most of the prisoners.
I think it's quite clear from them.
You've got 200 prisoners, roughly, um, who, uh, of this batch who clearly were innocent and everybody believed they were completely innocent and they're still held for years on end.
Uh, and then the group that really seemed to be bad guys and the serious security threat are, you know, not more than 150, uh, of the total group.
So, uh, so that means roughly we've got 150 people held at, um, Guantanamo and the whole history of the facility that actually belonged in Guantanamo.
Okay.
Well, so I want to ask you about the current state of the federal courts, I guess, in Virginia or DC or wherever, uh, about, you know, letting these innocent people go.
But did I get you right?
That you said that some of these leaks here, uh, some of these documents in the wiki leaks come from, uh, after a time when, uh, Bradley Manning supposedly, uh, got his, uh, upload to, you know, done last year.
No, just the opposite from before they're, they're old.
Uh, they were, they were not the current report at the time of that upload.
And that's what struck me as very puzzling.
So those are somewhere else.
They're somewhere else.
And I know that there had been another round and that the new round had substantially changed the analysis in many cases, uh, pretty much all going in the other direction that is against recommendations to hold.
Um, so, and so that's just odd to me that the, that they weren't the then current reports, uh, they got released and I don't understand what's going on there.
I mean, I I'm suspicious.
I guess this is the first set of wiki leaks documents.
I'm a little bit suspicious that they just have a bad flavor, not that they're bogus or bad documents, but that they weren't the then current documents.
Right.
Why is it if we assume, uh, Manning's, uh, heroism or guilt, as the government would call it here, uh, why would he only have access to old ones and where are the new ones?
How come they're not on the same server yet?
Kind of thing, huh?
Exactly.
Right.
All right.
And now, so then, uh, I think the Supreme court just refused to hear a case or something and sent it back to the federal courts, which have decided that no matter what the lower court says on the, Hey, this corpus hearing, we're still just going to keep all these guys locked up as long as the president may continue to keep these people locked up at his whim forever or whatever.
Is that right?
But that's right.
I mean, uh, and, and, you know, it looks like the Supreme court was quite closely divided.
And remember, we have the, the, uh, issue, uh, with, uh, justice Kagan who was a solicitor general at the time, a lot of this happened and who might not be able to participate.
So that seems to me to be the reason why they wouldn't take them on.
Um, and, uh, it's, it's raising some problems because we've got a block of four judges on the, uh, DC circuit who are, uh, all very conservative Republicans who are all very concerned about protecting the political record of the Bush years.
And they, and they openly complain about the Supreme court's decision in Bomidian.
They openly state that, uh, granting habeas review was a mistake.
They're very grudging about it.
And they're very actively trying to shut down the habeas review process that the Supreme court ordered.
Um, and that's, um, odd.
I mean, it's odd that they do it and they can get away with it and they can get away with it basically because of the change in the Supreme court, uh, that leaves one judge who would, who would uphold most likely to a Median ruling, uh, who can't participate in the argument or decision.
Just terrible.
And, uh, it doesn't sound like there's a solution to it coming.
We're talking life terms for good behavior here, right?
Yeah.
I'd say it's, it could be resolved over time perhaps, uh, because over time we'll have new matters coming up as to which Kagan was not involved previously and on which she can participate.
Uh, but it's certainly creating a time problem.
And I think, you know, we've got, uh, an obstructionist objective, both with Republicans in Congress and with this, uh, Republican, I think radical political block in the DC circuit.
Um, you know, they want to block the president from shutting down Guantanamo or winding up the cases.
And that's what they're doing.
They're doing everything they can possibly think to do to stop that.
Sounds like they're doing a pretty good job at the constitution's expense, but there we have it.
All right, well, we'll have to leave it there, but I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Scott spend good as always.
Hey, my pleasure and good luck to you.
All right, everybody.
That's the other Scott Horton, anti-torture international human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Harper's magazine, the oldest continuously published magazine in America.
His blog at their website is called no comment.
Harper's.org/subjects/no comment.
