All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is V.
Noah Gimbel on the phone from Spain today.
He's an intern with foreign policy in focus.
That's fpif.org, the great John Pfeffer's website there.
So many great writers at foreign policy in focus.
Noah is currently working on a book on universities and empire.
Well, isn't that interesting?
Tell me about that first.
Welcome to show.
Sure.
Hi.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be here.
Well, basically, this is the work.
I went to Georgetown University.
I graduated last year in 2010.
And while I was there, I took notice of a whole lot of unsavory people on the faculty.
George Tenet, Doug Feith, uh, uh, not the former president of Spain and now Alvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia.
And so I got to wondering, you know, just what a place that's supposedly interested in knowledge was doing, providing legitimacy to a bunch of war criminals.
So I did a lot of research.
And this is basically a history of Georgetown University from archival research and whatnot.
And it touches on some of the connections between the university system in the U.S. and also the construction of the U.S. empire, especially over the 20th century.
Well, he who pays the piper calls the tune in that the way that is so.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm very interesting.
I'd like to read that.
Can't wait till it's out.
I hope you write a an article about foreign policy and focus.
That's how I'll be sure to see it.
All right.
All right.
So now the piece today is an extraordinarily important piece.
And I'm going to go ahead and thank you now for not being ignorant of American intervention in Somalia and having an entire part of this article about the rendition program in eastern Africa.
That is just great.
But the article doesn't start there.
So let's start where the article starts.
It's called Has the Rendition Program Disappeared?
It's by V. Noah Gimble today at F.P.I.F. Foreign Policy and Focus FPIF.org.
So Obama abolished all the bad abuses of the Bush years and everything's fine.
What's your problem?
Well, he did, you know, on a piece of paper, but that doesn't really have the sort of lasting and transparent implications that we might hope a piece of paper signed by the president would have.
Obviously, one of those executive orders was to close Guantanamo Bay, and we know very well that that hasn't happened.
As for the other ones, namely abolishing secret detention, black site facilities, completely ending the use of torture and having all interrogators abide by the conventions on torture in the Geneva conventions, as well as sort of opening up the war on terror and allowing those accused to get their proper rights and their day in court.
Those have not exactly been met either, although to some extent they have been addressed.
All right.
Well, now, in that first statement, January 21st, 2009, his first full day in office, he signed this order.
And at least in the speech, I don't know how it was written in the order, but in the speech he said, I have banned torture.
And I noted then and I think we talked about on the show then how that was a pretty awkward kind of statement the way he said it.
He certainly did not say, I have ordered the government to acknowledge that torture is illegal in America.
It always has been in America.
And we have the anti-torture statutes and all of the laws implementing the Geneva conventions, et cetera.
Instead, he basically was it sounded like taking the Cheney view that it's up to the president to legalize torture or illegalize it, and that he's just made the policy decision for now that he could reverse if he wanted to.
Yeah.
Well, during the Bush administration, you know, they basically put everything behind a curtain.
And the a lot of the torture was being conducted at these black sites, which were totally classified.
They the only information that came out of them was through the people that eventually got released.
As for the U.S. stance on torture, I mean, it was, ironically enough, Ronald Reagan that signed the U.S. into the U.N. convention on torture.
And I mean, ever since then, it's obviously been illegal, both domestically and internationally for a government to engage in torture.
So so you're absolutely right that that what Obama was doing was sort of going along with this saying, you know, the previous administration took one view on things.
They had a team of lawyers that told them that it was OK to do these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.
And, you know, now it's not OK anymore.
And, you know, so far, the administration has shown a total unwillingness to hold the previous administration accountable for any of these incursions of international and domestic law, which sort of lets you know where they stand.
Absolutely.
Well, so now let's talk about Bagram prison a little bit.
And the was that it's the temporary kind of holding facility where JSOC gets you first and decides whether to turn you over to the regular jails, more or less that.
Yeah, I'm not I'm not exactly sure if all detainees are processed through Bagram.
I know there's a major holding facility there.
And there's also a smaller one there that is much more inaccessible to lawyers, human rights advocates and the like.
It is accessible by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
But the reports that they issue on such facilities are given only to the executive of the detaining power.
So Congress doesn't get to see those.
You and I sure don't get to see those, although there is apparently some movement now to to open those up to congressional eyes.
But, you know, Bagram famously for as you've seen that very great documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side.
You know, people have been tortured to death there.
It's we don't have photos like we did in Abu Ghraib.
But, I mean, it's a little more of the cab driver.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
And and Bagram's not alone.
There's a story released, I think, of the Associated Press or maybe Reuters about a month or two ago about the 20 secret prisons in Afghanistan that I guess they passed from the hands of the CIA into the hands of JSOC, who I mean, there's been some great reporting on what JSOC is up to.
Jeremy Scahill, Seymour Hersh.
And there I wouldn't say that they have a real leg up on the CIA in terms of human rights.
Well, and unbelievably, almost there's even less accountability for them, because the CIA at least has to send somebody up to lie to three or four senators every once in a while, where JSOC is accountable to nobody but the Secretary of Defense, if even him, really.
Right.
The president.
Yeah, they're given a long leash.
Yeah, I heard an anecdote long ago about, you know, a guy who knows a guy who is, you know, I don't know, SEAL Team Six or Delta Force or something, but very kind of high level veteran special forces guy and talked about how and this was back in the 90s that they called the president by his first name.
Look, Bill, here's the deal.
All right, here's what we can do.
Here's what we're going to do for you.
And, you know, whatever, whatever.
There was they were completely outside of the chain of command.
William Cohen was not their boss.
Which I guess I can't verify that, but it just is interesting to me that that was the way they operate.
And who knows?
Bush may have changed that.
Some Obama, maybe.
Yeah, well, I know that Cheney had a very had a very hands on relationship with the JSOC, and that was I think it was McChrystal that was the officially in charge of them back there.
Yeah, running.
Yeah.
Well, Cam Bone, Stephen Cam Bone and and I guess McChrystal was running Delta Force.
All right.
Well, we'll be back after this break.
This is an excellent article.
Very interesting conversation so far.
Check it out.
FBIF.org has the rendition program disappeared.
Come on.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Wrapping up for the week here on the line with V.
Noah Gimbel, an intern with foreign policy in focus, and he's got a great piece at FBIF.org today.
Has the rendition program disappeared?
And I forget where we were, but I'm looking at this very important article of yours and I'm paging down looking for the indications that this is still going on under Barack Obama other than in Afghanistan.
What do you say?
Well, and this is this is where a little linguistic change has come to mean a lot to some people, a little to other people.
And that is the difference between extraordinary rendition and rendition to justice.
And under Obama, as far as I'm aware, there haven't been any cases of extraordinary rendition, which is basically kidnapping and disappearance where the detainee is taken out of any legal system.
Their very existence becomes classified and they are stored in comunicado in various secret facilities throughout the world and tortured in some really gruesome and frightening ways.
Now, that was extraordinary rendition that sort of peaked.
It was invented by George W.
Bush administration after 9-11, and it peaked in about 2004, 2005, 2006.
And it's estimated that about 1300, some estimates as many as 3000 people were abducted through the extraordinary rendition program.
Now, rendition to justice.
It came to be as part of the war on drugs, either under the Reagan administration or the first Bush administration.
It's not exactly clear, but that only up until 9-11 only resulted in about a dozen or so people being taken from one country or another into the United States.
And importantly, those people were charged upon arrival and they were processed through court systems.
And given, you know, basic legal rights.
Such as suspects in the coal attack or the embassy bombings or other terrorist acts like that.
So I don't believe that any of those.
I'm not sure that any of those terror suspects were rendered prior to 9-11.
Now, since 9-11, people that were on the list.
I guess you'd have to go back to like Ramzi Youssef or something like that.
Grabbed, grabbed by cops in Pakistan and then not extradited by regular legal process, but just taken and grabbed and brought back to the United States, is that it?
Yeah, yeah.
And and again, after 9-11, the gloves came off for anybody with any sort of a connection to a terrorist attack.
And I mean, obviously, the large majority of the people that were rendered didn't have any connection and were just taken because of their name, their nationality, their religion, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I mean, any number of reasons.
But we know from a lot of the cases that have come out from people that have been released that that very frequently there was no criminal behavior by those that were kidnapped and subjected to torture.
But this most recent case of rendition to justice by the Obama administration that the Department of Justice likes to refer to as an expulsion was the case of a Lebanese businessman named Raymond Azar, who was working for a defense contractor.
And as part of a sting operation, he was he and an associate were lured into Kabul by the FBI, where he was his associate was, I believe, a Honduran American, and she was arrested.
She wasn't rendered in the same way as was Raymond Azar, who was stripped naked, subject to a cavity search, blindfolded, shackled, sensory deprived with the earmuffs and what have you.
And brought to Bagram, where he was strapped to a chair for several hours.
Allegedly, he was not given food.
And then eventually they brought him back to Virginia, where he was arraigned.
And he is now free already.
The charge was, I think, bribery or conspiracy to commit fraud.
And what happened was he pled guilty to the charges and eventually he got into a plea bargain and got only six months out of a possible five years in prison, which by that point, a good chunk of that had already been served.
So I had completely forgotten about that story until I read it again in your article today.
I really ought to try to get him and or his lawyer on the show or something to tell that story, because that really is amazing.
And FBI agents basically doing the CIA or JSOC style grab of this guy.
Yeah, and it's very weird.
I mean, I don't I don't really understand why they wanted to do this, because I mean, this is a guy who's, you know, a bureaucrat, basically a salesman.
And I mean, we know how much corruption there are in defense contract processes.
And and here they set up an elaborate sting operation.
It started in December of 2008 after Obama had been elected.
But while the Bush administration was still in office and they send a they send a jet halfway around the world to come and get this guy because he gave a hundred thousand dollar bribe.
He and his associate to an FBI agent posing as a contractor.
It doesn't really make any sense.
I mean, he's not posing a threat to anyone.
And meanwhile, and Afghan officials had maintained that they were unaware of this while the US insists that they were aware and that they had indeed agreed to it.
But if they if they're telling the truth and they didn't know about it, that's a clear violation of the status of forces agreement with Afghanistan for having basically taken this guy from Afghanistan without any input from their legal structure.
And I don't know.
To me, it seems very strange that it happened in the interim administration period.
And, you know, he does allege torture or he did.
He's not pursuing any charges.
His lawyer is a guy named James Hybee in in Washington.
And I sent him an email to ask if he was pursuing any further charges.
And he's not at this time.
But the abuses that he faced at the hands of his interrogators certainly, I think, had something to do with his being given such a light sentence when they were original.
I mean, the the book has five years for that crime and he got six months.
Perhaps that was part of the agreement.
You don't sue us and we'll let you off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, these sorts of plea agreements.
Hey, that's what they told that the Australian David Hicks, right?
We'll charge you.
We'll convict you and sentence you to fifty dollars and time served and let you go back to Australia.
But you have to promise not to tell anyone how we tortured you for at least three years or something was right in the deal.
Yeah, I think that they wanted to close this thing out and and sort of keep it as hush as possible.
I think, you know, it it did sort of pass by under the radar when the story came out.
And so I was glad to have the opportunity to to raise that issue once again.
And and just remind people that this bizarre occurrence did take place so that, you know, the administration embarrassed by such a sort of flop of a use of a very sort of draconian means of extradition will be extremely cautious before using it again or, you know, just avoid it altogether.
Well, and this is how your article ends.
I'm sorry we have very little time to talk about it, but it's the decision made by the Obama team.
Man, kidnapping all these people can be really messy.
And what do you do with them all anyway?
And let's just kill them all with robots.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the drones, I mean, the drone strikes have increased tremendously.
Obama in two years has fired more drone strikes into Pakistan than Bush did over eight years.
Killed that many more people, too.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I'm sorry, civilians.
We're all a large majority.
Right.
And that's in the article, too.
I think it's a 90 percent or something.
I'm sorry we we have to leave it there.
It's the end of the show for the week.
But that's been the Noah Gimbel.
It's got a great piece at FPIF.org today.
Has a rendition program disappeared.
Thanks again for your time.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
