All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the other Scott Horton, contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and author of the blog, No Comment There.
You guys know the other Scott Horton.
He lectures at Columbia Law School and is the co-founder of the American University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and was the chair of the New York City Bar Association's committees on human rights and international law and does investigative journalism, as well as a lot of great blogging.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you.
Hey, listen, so I think just real quick, unless you want to spend some time on it, I don't know.
I guess, you know, you decide.
But I just was hoping I could get a yes or no real quick as to whether you stand by your story, the Guantanamo suicides, which has been so thoroughly attacked since winning the National Magazine Award recently.
Oh, absolutely.
Not only do we fully stand by it, but I expect that there's going to be further installment coming out on this by about the beginning of next year.
Well, it's a complicated story, and I try to spend as much time as I can looking at some of the criticism and the assertions of, you know, your critics.
And it doesn't seem like it holds too much water.
But I don't know if, you know, I'm as much of an expert on it as you two.
And so everybody's got to try to play Matlock the best they can.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, the essence of what they're saying, of course, is that you should believe the Pentagon and how completely ridiculous it is to believe the firsthand accounts of the guards who were on duty that evening.
Who would believe them when we have official non-sourced statements from the Pentagon saying the opposite?
Well, but there's about to be I think there's going to be considerably more information coming out about this shortly that is going to further bolster the article and what was reported.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in that part of their arguments, absolutely ridiculous.
I basically just forgotten it.
I was thinking that I read some criticism about that road leads to all over the place and what have you.
I read on one of these blogs and then.
Dwight Sullivan wrote that.
And in fact, if you look, you'll see that the other soldiers that Guantanamo wrote into him when he wrote that thing, you're just wrong.
Yeah.
No, the report about the road section in the discussion there was actually, you know, I'm I'm from there.
I spent a few years there.
And here's how it really is.
I think that your criticisms off base.
That's right.
I mean, you just have to look at the map.
I mean, he was simply wrong.
I think he misread the article and he takes a wrong turn on the road.
So and I wonder whether that's an innocent mistake, frankly.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm glad you're standing by.
I can't wait to see more information.
I'll definitely recommend to people to I have to assume it's still online.
Your interview where your source, Sergeant Hickman, your primary source out of your six named soldiers, I think five or six, joins you on this Australian radio program.
Could you tell us the name of that so people can find it?
It's ABC.
Oh, it's ABC Radio there.
That's right.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
And I think it's called Four Continents Program.
So we're both interviewed.
The article is the Guantanamo suicides and Hickman and Horton and ABC Radio.
You should be able to find that online somewhere.
That's good stuff.
Anyway, so there's so much in the torture and illegalities department I want to discuss with you today.
I'm not sure where to begin, but maybe we could go from here to General Petraeus saying that maybe we do need to torture people after all, when I thought he'd take an opposite stance.
And I bring this up now, hopefully, because you can give us a comment we can dispense with and get to the real news here from your blog.
Well, he did.
I mean, he of course, he issued statements when he was a military commander saying quite the opposite.
So this came as something of a surprise.
But on the other hand, we know that the historical dividing line has been between the uniformed military and the CIA.
And of course, he was being interviewed to take over the CIA.
And we know that senior people at the CIA do not want to be bound by the Geneva rules or anything like them.
And I think that's the rationale for the statement he made.
Well, but then I guess, how do you see the, I guess, continuing of the investigation against two CIA officers for the murder in custody of a couple of people?
It's being spun, you know, mostly as far as I've seen as a real victory for the torturers that two low level guys are going to get it.
But I was surprised that that even happened at all.
Frankly, I thought we were already past the point where the investigation was even open anymore.
Well, I think it's it's not it's disappointing, but it's not terribly surprising because remember the instructions that were given to this special prosecutor, Durham, both by he was originally appointed by Michael Mukasey, and then he had his his mandate expanded a little bit by by Eric Holder.
And in the mandate he was given, he was basically he was told to essentially assume the torture memos worked, assume that anybody who was following the advice of the torture memos with plenty of latitude built in, you know, is OK, can't be prosecuted.
So this is so remember, Jack Goldsmith said that the purpose of these memos was to provide a golden shield.
And the instructions that were given to the prosecutor were that the memos constitute the golden shield.
So I guess it's not given that it's not surprising that he decided not to go forward on this hundred plus cases.
On the other hand, it's also true that homicides are a different matter.
And when the CIA inspector general says the homicide merits a criminal investigation, it's pretty much to be expected that there's going to be one.
I mean, we're still not at the point of knowing that there is going to be an indictment and a prosecution on those other two cases.
Not quite there yet.
So we'll see how all this develops.
But on the other hand, I think we have to say the Justice Department's making it quite clear that when the Justice Department delivers a wink and a nod, you can torture all you want and there isn't going to be any prosecution.
Wow, so even though all those winks and nods were officially repealed by the end of the Bush administration, most of them by what, 2005 or something, have been repudiated, right?
Yeah, by 2006, I think they were mostly out.
But of course, we're talking about it took place while they were in effect.
Exactly right.
So so I think so I think the Justice Department would still still tell people that, you know, someone doing the same things that they did now would be prosecuted.
Hmm.
And I think there's a certain sense in which that's fair, because, you know, it's really not the the case officers, the people down the line following instructions who should be the target of the criminal investigation and prosecution.
It's the people who made these policies.
It's the John Hughes and Jay Bybee's who really should have been the focus of the criminal investigation, which is, in fact, what the criminal court in Spain that looked all this said when they handed down a decision.
They said it was the policymakers who should be prosecuted, not the CIA agents.
And they launched their case on that basis.
Well, it seems to me like the CIA agents should be last on the list for being the lowest in rank involved.
As far as that goes, I agree.
But as this guy, Glenn Carl, who you've interviewed, the author of this new book, The Interrogator, makes clear he's a human man and an individual and has his own conscience and his own idea of what it is that we do and what crosses the line and what doesn't.
And whether he ever had memorized the Geneva Conventions or not, he knew whether he was committing a crime or not, regardless of what Alberto Gonzalez said.
Right.
I think that's right.
And, you know, and I think it's it's it's fair to say that there were many people like Glenn Carl out there who were appalled by the introduction of these practices and didn't want to have anything to do with it.
In fact, you know, we've been able to document, you know, more than 100 agents who resigned as a result of this.
Some some of them like Carl stayed on but battled the use of these techniques, as he said in an interview with me.
You know, he did everything he could to stop this from happening to his prisoner.
Right.
Well, I want to get back to that in a minute, but I still want to focus on Eric Holder and all that for a second.
Does he have the authority?
I guess he does.
You're telling me, but I'm confused that he can say, OK, you're appointed to begin a preliminary criminal investigation to see whether there should be a criminal investigation into these things.
But you may not look at things here, there or the other place and limit it in such what sounds like such an arbitrary way.
I mean, it seems like, as you said, a homicide case is a homicide case.
According to Colonel Larry Wilkerson and others, there's more than 100 of them.
Yeah, well, the bottom line is he's appointed by the attorney general, the attorney general gives him the scope of his investigation.
And in this case, he put very, very narrow blinders on him.
And I think a lot of people had hoped that he would ignore them.
And instead, he would start the way a prosecutor should normally handle something, which is looking at the crime and going back through investigation from the crime to find who might be a potential defendant.
Instead, he was he was expressly limited in the number and the people he could look at and the sorts of cases he could seek to build.
And I think we see what was a predictable result.
But how can it be two murder cases, but not 98?
I mean, if it's murders, look into murders only, not torture, but just torture to death.
Yeah, the other 98 cases were cases of abuse.
It was like a gun held to someone's head, a drill pointed at Colonel Wilkerson and General Wesley Clark and no, pardon me, General Bradley Tank.
I forget McCaffrey.
They've said that more than 100 people died in custody during this.
And there were more than 100 people died in custody, but not not in the CIA custody.
Oh, I see.
So where do you he was dealing only with the CIA case?
There were really only two that were murdered by the CIA.
In the if you look at the inspector general's report from the CIA, there are two murders he identified.
I mean, I think the total number of deaths in captivity are substantially larger, but they're not covered in the CIA investigation base that he started with.
All right.
Well, OK.
And so now I wanted to get to your great piece here at No Comment at Harper's Magazine on redacting the interrogator.
First of all, why would anyone redacted the interrogator, Scott?
That's a great question.
You know, I got a copy of this book from the publisher before it was released.
And I was just astonished.
It was like 40 percent of it was blacked out.
And I started reading through it and said, you know, it's odd.
I feel like I can like see almost through the blackouts here.
It's pretty clear who the prisoner is.
They've required him to be redacted.
They've redacted out the places and so forth.
And the CIA has a right to protect means of gathering intelligence and the identities of foreign agents who cooperate and things of that sort.
But it looks here that they were clearly trying to block the book from being published.
And it also is very, very clear, I think, that they were afraid of the embarrassment that these disclosures would cause to the CIA and to some senior personnel there.
The bottom line is, in this story, we're talking about a businessman from Afghanistan who was seized in the fall of 2002 and was held for eight years until he was released, held under conditions that Glenn Carl says a reasonable and well-informed person may very well conclude constituted torture.
And he was innocent.
He was not the person the CIA felt he was.
And the case officers who handled the case, both Glenn Carl and his successor, succeeded in figuring out within a matter of a few months that he wasn't the right guy and he shouldn't have been held.
And they gave that analysis back to the agency.
And what was the agency's reaction?
Hold on to him.
Don't let him go.
Because if you let him go, word would get out that we seized an innocent man and held him all this time.
So if you just throw him in a dungeon somewhere, people will forget about him.
And maybe he'll die.
Interrogating him the whole time?
They were interrogating him very aggressively at the beginning.
And after that, the frequency of interrogations came almost to a stop because they realized that there really wasn't anything, especially after what they gained at the very beginning.
There really wasn't good additional information to be seized.
It was just he was an embarrassment.
So they were holding him for that reason.
And the government of Afghanistan was pressing him for him to be released.
Justice Department lawyers, when there was a habeas case filed, went running into court making false statements about who he was.
They didn't tell the court that the CIA case officers handling his case had recommended that he be released and that there was no basis to bring any charges against him.
So, you know, it was courts misled to continue to hold the guy.
And the advice of the analysts handling the case ignored.
But if you look at my piece, I figured out, you know, who the person was.
Haji Pasha was here is his name and the name of his brother as well.
I've also figured out where he was held originally in Morocco, right outside of Rabat, where he was moved to the salt pit in Afghanistan.
Number of other details.
And the salt pit, that's where one of these murder cases is actually being pushed.
The guy that was chained to the floor and froze to death.
That's exactly right.
The salt pit is the name of an American jail in Afghanistan.
That itself is amazing to me.
Yeah, it's an abandoned brick factory just, you know, just north of Kabul.
And so now what exactly when Glenn Carl says some of this guy's treatment amounted to torture, he's saying, but not what he did.
He played it like rapport building instead of threatening and intimidation.
He says, right.
He says when the harsh stuff was used, he didn't get any information that there was just resentment, that basically rapport building is the technique he used, that it was effective and that he intervened repeatedly trying to stop people from using the harsh stuff because that cut off the flow of information.
And this is a witness who was cooperating, was providing good information, was providing information that was honest.
But he was not saying I'm Osama bin Laden's banker, which was not true, but it was what what the CIA wanted to hear.
And do I have it right that the information that Glenn Carl and the other CIA officers had determined that this guy was not who they thought he was, he he only knew so much and was basically innocent of what they thought originally, etc., was withheld from the federal court during his habeas corpus hearing.
That's right.
In fact, Glenn describes in near the end of his book, one of his last sessions, he wrote up his final cable with his conclusions.
He said it was pretty bitter, you know, saying that there was really no reason to hold this guy.
And it was contrary to American values to have done it.
And he says he discovered subsequently that cable was never sent.
It was never put in the files.
And we know certainly the other cables and the other information was never shared with the district court that was looking into the habeas matter.
And in part, that's probably because we know that the federal courts and the other habeas cases coming out of Guantanamo look very closely at what the CIA analysts said and thought about the cases.
And that tends to tip them one way or the other.
So, you know, I think the Justice Department fully appreciated what would have happened had that information been disclosed.
So they decide not to make it available to the court.
Amazing.
And, you know, it's funny that the worst that they ever fear out all this, all this classification is to avoid embarrassment.
That's like the common conventional wisdom, even the term embarrassment used in that context.
It's never I think you have to think you talked about at the beginning.
Accountability is never a factor whatsoever.
Embarrassment is the worst they ever have to suffer for these things.
I think that's exactly right.
So here, you know, what's the reason for redacting the name of the prisoner?
I mean, he's out.
He's free.
His freedom was forced.
And of course, it's through him that I was able to ascertain that he is the guy who's discussed in part, although he wouldn't agree to an interview on the record.
But, you know, it's you know, what's the reason for censoring out his name?
The answer is very clear.
The answer is that his whole story is an embarrassing chapter in the history of the CIA.
It shows how they behaved abusively when they learned that this person was innocent.
Instead of letting him go, they held on to him and they held on to him because they were concerned that his story coming out would have only further embarrassed them.
And of course, this is what we heard happened earlier with Khaled al-Masri.
Remember, that was a German greengrocer who was seized, where Condoleezza Rice ordered that he be released and went back and looked two weeks later and found he was still there in prison because the CIA didn't want to let him go.
They were concerned about embarrassment.
So it's the same sort of problem.
And I think all this justifies why the CIA has no business serving as prison wardens.
But it also shows the dynamics of this whole detention program that was created in the Bush era and has been carried forward.
They're so concerned about their own misconduct coming out that they don't want to let people free, even when we conclude that they're innocent.
Right.
OK, now, at your blog, no comment at Harper's magazine website, Harper's.org/subjects/no comment.
You have, first of all, this piece on redacting the interrogator where you go through and figure out who it is that he's talking about and and reading through the black out there.
But then secondly, you have a great interview with him.
Six questions for Glenn Carl.
What was it that you learned from him that was most important?
Well, I think the most important thing that he elaborates on is the reaction he got back from the CIA when he disclosed to him what his conclusions were, and that is they just ignored him.
Right.
He was not telling them what they wanted to hear.
So they just closed their ears.
I hadn't got to it yet.
I can't wait to now.
Thanks very much for your time, Scott.
I really appreciate it as always.
Hey, great to be with you.
Take care.
That's the other Scott Horton, everybody.
Columbia University, Harper's magazine.
New York Bar Association.
