We have to work sort of the dark side, if you will.
We've got to spend time in the shadows, in the intelligence world.
A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful.
That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
All right, Joe, so that was a clip of Dick Cheney from September the 16th, 2001, his interview with Tim Russert the very next Sunday after the September 11th attack, explaining that it's secrecy time now, and you're not going to be able to know what we're going to do.
And now here we are, almost ten years on, and we're joined on the phone by the other Scott Horton Heroic Anti-Torture International Human Rights Lawyer Professor at Columbia, Professor at Hofstra Law School II, I believe, I forget still, Co-founder of the American University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, former chair of the New York Bar Association's Committees on Human Rights and on International Law, and welcome back to the show, other Scott, how are you?
Hey, great to be with you.
I appreciate you joining us today.
So here we are ten years on, and we really are living in Dick Cheney's world, aren't we?
Well, that's right.
I mean, I think there's no doubt that Dick Cheney and his policy decisions had a lot to do with how America changed and how we changed the way we go about fighting wars.
It had a lot to do with reshaping our alliances.
That is actually trashing a lot of the old alliances we had.
So Dick Cheney really sculpted this world the way almost no one else did in the American government.
And I think one of the interesting things about his book is it shows the extent to which Dick Cheney is behind key decisions all along the way.
Right, and he proudly admits it.
And why do you think that he's even coming out with this book?
Basically saying, yeah, I'm guilty what?
Yeah, well, of course he wants to defend...
He's trying to provoke you or something, I think.
Yeah, he wants to defend his legacy.
But, you know, I think he spends an awful lot of time talking about torture and the mistreatment of detainees and defending all that.
And, you know, you have to ask, what's that all about?
Because in most countries around the world, we have a lot of countries historically where this has been done, but the people who do it don't regale themselves in it.
They're very quiet about it.
Dick Cheney has a totally different attitude.
And I think that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson really put his finger on the why here.
He says that Dick Cheney is afraid that he's going to get the Pinochet treatment.
And he's trying to build political support for himself inside the United States.
And I think that's right.
Yeah, well, and I'm sure he won't do too bad in finding it.
He always has a certain pro-torture base of Americans who believe that anything the government does, especially if it's Republicans doing it, that they wouldn't do it unless it was necessary.
And necessary overrides laws.
They're the presidents and the vice presidents up there, after all, protecting us.
Yeah, we have a new Pew Charitable Trust poll that was out last week.
And they've been polling this torture issue consistently for many, many years right now.
And I think we're seeing a plurality in the largest numbers yet of Americans who are willing to accept that there may be circumstances where, in the interest of national security, torture is appropriate.
And that number has been growing gradually through the Obama years.
And I think that's largely a result of the fact that we've got lots of Republicans out there, certainly Dick Cheney and others, aggressively pushing this line.
And the response from Barack Obama is no response at all.
Barack Obama and his team don't want to talk about it.
Well, and we keep having these stories of people being tortured at the real prison at Bagram and turned over to torturers all across Afghanistan, the secret CIA JSOC torture dungeon in Mogadishu, Somalia, that Jeremy Scahill broke the story on.
And so, of course, progressives and liberals are going to start buttoning their lip if it's Barack Obama torture, it's wholesome and nutritious.
Well, that's right.
I mean, we hardly have a constituency around the world that is certainly in the United States.
We hardly have a big political constituency pushing this issue.
And I think it's something like if you contrast what's going on in the U.S. with what's going on in Britain, you see that torture is viewed as a prerogative of power.
And those who hold power at any given minute want to justify it and want to justify its use as another attribute of power.
So it's only the perpetually out of power who will raise questions about that.
Although in Britain, I'll give the conservatives, the Tories, the credit.
They've been consistent and they've been aggressive in criticizing torture and saying that they won't follow or apply it.
But they also haven't established a good record in accountability.
Well, now, this is something that we've talked about before, but I think it really gets to the heart of it.
There's this narrative, this established storyline of what happened here out there in the mass media, that three people were waterboarded and they were the very worst people ever to existed, at least since the days of Nazi Germany or something.
And so it was OK that it happened to them.
And the rest of this is just forget about it.
That's all it was.
And so what's the big deal?
I wonder whether you can explain how true that is or isn't, maybe.
Well, it's three people that the CIA has acknowledged it waterboarded so far.
But, of course, waterboarding is not the sum total of torture.
It's just one particular tactic which clearly was approved formally at one point by lawyers for the administration that constitutes torture.
And I think all the focus on waterboarding really misses the point because what's going on now is a whole palette of different techniques that get used over a long period of time that constitutes torture, that turns a person into a human eggplant.
And I think there's no question but that we're talking about hundreds of people who were subjected to very, very abusive treatment.
And the quality of treatment that thousands who were held in U.S. detention, I think it's more than 150,000 people all told in Iraq and Afghanistan, was really seriously degraded.
So a lot of those people suffered.
Well, and, of course, they want to say, well, there is these bad apples at the lowest level who went off as rogue soldiers and did these terrible things.
But really the bottom line is that it takes the guys in the pinstripe suits with the fancy printing and their little seals of officialdom to make all these things happen, right?
Well, I think this is the reason why Dick Cheney is writing his book.
I mean, he knows that at this point everyone's seen through this argument about the bad apples.
It's very clear that all these things occurred as a matter of policy.
And it's very clear that it occurred as a result, very largely, as a result of the dealings of Dick Cheney.
He's got his fingerprints on everything, every stage.
Even if we look at the lawyers who approved things and wrote the memos, these are lawyers who are very close to Dick Cheney.
And a lot of the disappeared e-mails that came out of the Department of Justice, I mean, we don't know the text of the e-mails, but we know that they were between John Yoo and the vice president's office in the White House.
So he clearly was the mastermind, the person who was pushing this forward very aggressively.
So if there's any one single person in the administration to get the credit for the introduction of torture, Dick Cheney is the man.
All right.
Now, real quickly on the laws that would be applied if we had, I don't know, someone who took their oath seriously as attorney general right now.
Well, I think it's principally the War Crimes Act, and we have a federal anti-torture statute.
So those two things have to be read in tandem.
And the anti-torture statute has a provision for conspiracy to torture.
And, in fact, that's been used by the federal government to prosecute the son of a former president of Liberia quite recently, a successful prosecution in which they argued how senior figures in the government working together with others established the environment in which torture occurred.
That's not the case.
It doesn't have to be the case that they actually tortured someone with their own hands.
So I think Dick Cheney, if we apply that same road of analysis that was used to Chuckie Taylor, I think he'd be a goner.
All right, everybody, hold it right there.
It's the other Scott Horton heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer, writer for Harper's Magazine, their legal correspondent there.
We'll come back and talk more about Dick Cheney and what he means to us after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is the other Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine, the No Comment blog there.
We're talking about Dick Cheney and his grim vision, as I think it was the Seattle Post Intelligence or something put it.
So the era of permanent war that we're in now, and I guess part one thing that has changed under Barack Obama, if I understand it right, Scott, is that unlike George Bush, he doesn't claim the inherent plenary authority between the lines of Article Two to do whatever he wants in the world.
He just claims that he has authority to do whatever he wants in the world based on the authorization to use military force.
But in effect, it's basically the same thing, right?
Well, that's right.
I think he's pulled back from the really broad commander-in-chief authority claims that Bush made, and I think what he proceeds on now is the basis of what I call more traditional interpretations of the Constitution that rely heavily on the authorization for the use of military force.
So I'd say Obama's view and his position is a lot like what you saw under Carter, Clinton, Nixon, for instance, whereas under Bush and Cheney, we just saw this expand so that there were no effective legal limitations.
Well, then again, there's the war in Libya, right?
That's right, and the war in Libya, he basically called it a not war in Libya.
So he didn't really claim that, hey, I'm the president and I say so, which was Dick Cheney's law.
He did not do that, and Dick Cheney complained quite loudly that he didn't do enough in Libya, that he should have done more and he should have put forces on the ground.
But it's interesting because Barack Obama acknowledged, seemingly, that the War Powers Act applied.
He just didn't comply with them.
It's a very, very interesting posture.
He didn't comply with them saying, well, you know, the limited nature of what we're doing means that it really doesn't require this sort of congressional vote up and down.
Now, I think at the end of the day, Libya seems to be winding up right now and never involved in any deployment of forces on the ground, so it winds up not being nearly as acute a test case as a lot of people thought it would be.
Yeah, well, I say that remains to be seen.
Well, that's also right.
I mean, we see a lot of triumphalism in the media now saying it's over and Qaddafi's trumped and what a great victory for NATO, but who knows what's coming in Libya.
We really have no idea.
And, you know, the opposition to Qaddafi was basically everybody who hates Qaddafi.
That was everyone from liberals and people who want democracy and a European-like form of government to radical Islamicists.
It's a broad spectrum.
And now we have to see who's going to come out on top.
Yeah, well, and then, of course, the war, whether I think eventually it'll have to be Americans because the UAE, they're not going to be able to cut it.
The French aren't going to probably, I don't think, do it.
But somebody's going to have to make sure that the guys we just fought for don't win and, you know, do a purple-fingered election and the rest of this madness, I think.
I'd give it 20 years.
Yeah, well, we'll see.
But, you know, there are some reasons to be optimistic about Libya.
I mean, Libya has, you know, in the Arab world it has very high standards of education, lots of people who have university-level training, very high level of income for the region and so forth.
So, you know, it's got a lot of things going for it that might lead to things working out positively.
But right now we know too little to make any triumphant proclamations.
All right, now, I want to ask you about all the censorship.
Ali Soufan's book is on the subject of torture and it's so important.
But I kind of wanted to also talk about, you know, this Post series is just, you know, the tip of the iceberg of what's been written about this.
But it's, you know, kind of the 10-year anniversary.
Everybody's looking back and saying, where are we now?
And where we are is, as The Washington Post said, an era of permanent war.
And it's from now on too.
And the Department of Homeland Security and the transformation of both halves of the CIA into this drone warfare killing machine all across the world and the expansion of JSOC all across the world, that this is just who we are now or whatever.
This is becoming us.
We're not the USA.
We're the homeland at war.
And it seems to me like, well, to take that Washington Post piece, which I'm sure you saw it, to mark the tone, still, what are you going to do?
There are still Muslims with rifles in the world.
And so, you know, this is just the way it is.
And I wonder if you think people are really feeling that in New York and D.C. where the people with power live.
Do we really want to do this to ourselves just so that Raytheon can make a buck and some general can get another little ribbon for his shirt?
I mean, this is getting crazy here.
Well, I think we should start by saying that, you know, Greg Miller and Julie Tate, who did that first piece in the Washington Post, did a great job of putting together a lot of material.
I mean, they took material that was in the public sector and they also pulled out a lot of stuff that had been carefully obscured for a long time.
And I think one of the really strong things about this article, I mean, one is perpetual war.
They say that up front and they say it very plainly.
I think that's an extremely important point that too frequently goes unobserved.
And then the second thing is, you know, what has happened as an institution to the CIA?
So if we go back and we look at 1947 when the CIA was born, you know, it was pulled out of the military.
It was created as a civilian institution that wasn't going to train to the laws of war, wasn't going to apply them, and was not going to be a military institution.
All military activities were going to be left to the Department of Defense, which was created that same year.
And, you know, I think the boundary lines, they're difficult to police and govern because there's a lot of borderline issues.
But I think one thing we see is that after 2002, this border has been destroyed completely.
I mean, the CIA has been turned into an institution that is at its very core a military institution.
It's intelligence gathering.
The big focus in intelligence gathering is find that target so we can go bomb it.
Well, you know, we have military intelligence and reconnaissance operations that exist to find those targets so we can go bomb them.
You know, now we say the CIA is going to do that.
And the CIA has been given control over, you know, the most powerful, most state-of-the-art new weapon system, which is the predator drones.
And it's got its hands all over all this developing new robotic warfare.
And in the past, that was always controlled by the Pentagon.
So we're seeing the CIA move itself into the military sector, becoming essentially a part of our military establishment, but without any of the traditions that our military has to set rules, hold people to account, court-martial them, and so forth.
It's the unaccountable military, and that's really troubling.
Yeah, well, and you have the whole expansion of JSOC.
And for that matter, I mean, the federalization of police here with all these joint task forces and fusion centers and this and that, it's sort of really changed what America is, even as the principle.
Like, hey, this is America.
It used to have all these connotations to it that don't really count now.
Well, you know, I think there's no problem with there being coordination across agency lines and different law enforcement agencies talking to one another.
They need to do that to perform their function.
But, you know, there's a lot of consolidation going on.
But the biggest problem we should all focus on is law, legal boundary lines, and accountability when security agencies cross those legal boundary lines.
And what we see now is no legal accountability.
And that's been justified by pointing at civil libertarians and saying, you're talking about rights of terrorists.
Who cares about them?
But, of course, in the end of the day, no, that's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about the Constitution, the laws of the United States, and whether they protect Americans.
And, you know, it's a slippery slope, obviously.
And what we've seen consistently is that the rights of Americans are going down.
They're being dragged in the mud as a result of these changes with very few effective protections of those rights.
And, by the way, to come back to that Pew poll, that was the other thing that was interesting in that poll.
So it showed more Americans willing to accept torture.
It also showed that Americans increasingly were rejecting the idea that they had to give up civil liberties for their security.
We found a large majority now saying that is a radically false notion.
Things should not be working that way.
The whole notion of security is to protect their civil liberties.
So, of course, we shouldn't be giving them up in order to be safer.
Well, you know, I guess I just always thought there was nothing more simple or easy to remember than innocent till proven guilty.
But what do they think?
That only people convicted of terrorism will be tortured or what?
Yeah, and, of course, when we're talking about drones and bombing people, it's not a question of them being guilty in the criminal law sense, but it is a question of them actually being belligerents and actually being our enemy.
Yeah, I mean, we have a whole CIA war that basically is not bound by any laws of war.
The targets all live in civilian homes, basically.
That's the war in Pakistan today.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry we didn't get to talk about Ali Sifan and all the censorship, but maybe next time because it's a very important story.
Thank you very much for your time, Scott.
Great to come back and talk to you again.
Take care.
All right, everybody, that's the other Scott Horton, heroic international anti-torture human rights lawyer, harpers.org.
