All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our last guest on the show today is Jason Leopold.
He's got a piece here with co-author Jeffrey Kay at truthout.org where he runs things exclusive guidebook to false confessions.
Key document John, you used to draft torture memo released.
Welcome back to the show.
Jason.
Hey, Scott, great to be back with you.
Good, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Very important story.
Do I have it right?
This was not your lawsuit.
This was McClatchy newspaper sued and got this document and didn't do anything with it.
So you went ahead and took the ball and ran with it.
Right.
That's exactly right.
At least from what I understand.
And, you know, in the land of the Freedom of Information Act, it becomes my scoop.
Gotcha.
Oh, sounds good to me.
Yeah, this is it is an important document.
And frankly, I don't know if McClatchy had requested it for a specific reason, but, you know, you'd have to really give a very, very, very close read to the Office of Professional Responsibility report.
That was the report released a couple of years ago that looked at the legal work that went into the preparation of the torture memo that John, you wrote and Jay Bybee, his boss, had signed.
Yeah, this is we're talking about for for people who are new at this.
This is the first Bush administration when Dick Cheney had the lawyers all get together and come up with a reason why it was OK to torture people.
Right, exactly.
And buried in that report was a reference to this particular document.
So it was, you know, I think they may have included one or two paragraphs.
So, you know, the fact that it was was requested and eventually cleared for release so late last year and just again, you know, it was sent to the requester.
So no one in the public would know about it until DOD, Department of Defense, you know, posted it on their website.
And I took a look at it because if you recall, you know, you and I spoke last year when I had published the story on Jessen's notes, Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who is the architect of this, one of the architects of the torture program.
And so I immediately knew what this document was, how important it is, you know, in discussing the origins of Bush's torture program.
And I was frankly kind of blown away that it was, you know, that it was released.
This is actually the first complete manual from the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape Seer, the school that U.S. military personnel go to in order to learn techniques, you know, that they may experience if captured by an enemy.
So you got to love it, too, the just the newspeak and the way the military talks.
It's like something reading this thing is like it reminds me of Robert Duvall in THX 1138, the operating instructions, they're called.
And there's the there's a scene where he's on the other side of the one way mirror and he's got a thingy on his head and they're torturing the hell out of him.
And but on this side of the one way mirror, it's just one guy training another.
No, no, you got it turned up too high.
And it's all just a technicality thing while he's on the other end going, ah, yeah, that's that pretty much what you would read, what you'd learn once reading this.
So, you know, this is so important because it's a manual that we know we now know we've known that the Bush administration looked at it, reviewed it in May of 2002.
And but we've never seen what these descriptions were, what they were actually looking at.
And, you know, it's clear that it's a complete guide to, you know, propaganda, exploitation, you know, what U.S. military would experience.
So the fact that they use this, that administration use this to to twist it, take bits and pieces of it and use it in the interrogation program, that's the quote guidebook for false confessions.
And that was actually told to me by Colonel Steve Kleinman, who is a veteran intelligence expert, interrogator associated in a senior capacity with the whole SEER program.
He looked at this and immediately knew what it was.
And so let me let me make sure I understand this thing.
Basically, what we have here is the adaptation.
This is the document where they have adapted the SEER instructions into how we're going to use it.
So in other words, the North Koreans use Mao's Little Red Torture Manual on Americans.
And then the Americans came up with this school.
That's basically what to expect if you're ever tortured by communists, how to resist it, S.E.
R.E. and including waterboarding and things like that.
And then what these Bush administration lawyers did was they took that training and I guess the psychologists that they had hired and whatever CIA guys, they took that training and they adapted it into this instruction manual, how to use these techniques not to train an American to resist, but to get Abu Zubaydah to claim that he's about to bomb a school in Texas.
That's what George Bush wants on the radio.
That is exactly right, Scott.
Perfect summary of what this is.
And, you know, the an important point to make is that in the torture memo, you know, there are there's 10 techniques.
The one that was issued in August 2002, seven of the 10 techniques come directly from this manual.
The most controversial waterboarding was not in this manual.
However, there is a very detailed description of water torture.
You know, they have something called the water pit.
You can be immersed in water using water dousing.
But, you know, seven out of 10 made it into, you know, that that torture memo and, you know, where the torture memo and this manual differ is in the descriptions of the purpose of these techniques.
So, you know, we've heard time and again Bush officials say imminent threats.
That's why we had to resort to these alternative techniques.
And and so in torture memo would say, OK, you want to subject a detainee to something called walling, which is basically, you know, slamming a detainee against a wall over and over again.
And in the in this manual, this what is called pre-laboratory operating instructions, it gives the purpose, you know, why a U.S. service member, for example, would be subjected to that, talks about the psychological effects.
It's it's about insult.
It's about humiliation, fear, despair.
These are these are key words.
These are key words that revolve around exploitation.
That's not about intelligence.
It's very clear when you read this document and you hold it up next to the torture memo that, you know, this wasn't about intelligence.
That was, frankly, a cover.
It was about, you know, exploiting these detainees to get them to say, you know, to admit whatever you wanted them to.
And, you know, I didn't just pull that one out of the air, although most people don't have it in their own memory bank.
I got it in mine and I just heard it was a top of the hour radio news thing at some point in the fall of 2002.
Orange Alert, Al Qaeda may be targeting a school in Texas.
Well, Jason, I'm from Texas and I'm just guessing, but there's probably seventy five thousand schools in Texas.
Could you be a little bit more specific with your threat?
But they didn't want to just make these up.
They wanted to be able to say they got it from somewhere.
So they tortured Abu Zubaydah into saying it.
They tortured al-Libi into saying.
That's right.
That's exactly what they did.
And, you know, it's really important.
And you mentioned al-Libi at this time is that this is around the time that they were obtaining intelligence.
You know, and I use that in quotes for, you know, their campaign, the, you know, the pending war that they were putting together against Iraq.
So many of these detainees and I can tell you that, you know, we know that al-Libi was was was asked those questions.
It was it was to get false confessions about a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Right.
Just like the North Koreans got false confessions from their American POWs back in the 1950s, the model for this whole thing, the communists.
It wasn't about protecting your local soft target from attack by al-Qaeda terrorists.
It was all about getting you afraid enough to let them have their war in Iraq back in 2003.
Jason.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Got it.
I mean, you made an important point.
This is highlighted in the story.
This document was shared before that memo, before that legal memo was issued.
And, you know, May of 2002, this is a May 7th, 2002 document.
But I want to make clear that it's it's unconfirmed whether it was accessed on that date, whether it was created on that date or whether it was filed.
Either way, it was a it was a paper that was shared with the principals committee in May of 2002.
That was the first of several that took place between May and July.
And May happens to be a very important month.
It's an important month in the evolution of, you know, the so-called rapport building techniques related to Zubeda's interrogation led by a couple of FBI special agents into that world of torture.
And Ali Soufan, who was one of those FBI special agents that was down at the black site in Thailand, he left and he writes about this in his book.
He's already testified about it.
He left in May of 2002 and he said the last straw for him was when a confinement box, a confinement box for Zubeda was introduced.
Well, guess what?
In this manual that they were discussing in these in this principals meeting in May of 2002, you know, one of the techniques is placing someone in a confinement box.
So it's clear and we sort of know this, that verbal authorization for many of these techniques were had already been provided, you know, by the Justice Department, by Rice signing off on it, Condoleezza Rice.
So it lends more credence to suspicions that people have that the torture memo was simply written to more or less, you know, which I believe you indicated to just cover what they were already doing, you know, for quite some time, which was, you know, torture.
They were torturing Zubeda.
He was the first one subjected to this, you know, and Soufan's partner, this is what I found very interesting, particularly when you put it into the context of this document, Soufan's partner out there, a FBI special agent named Steve Godin, when Soufan left, Godin said, yeah, I'm going to stay behind.
And he told this to the FBI inspector general when they did an investigation into, you know, into these matters a couple of years ago.
He said he was going to stay behind that month, May 2002, because he didn't morally, he didn't have any moral objections to what the CIA contractor was doing to Zubeda because he himself had gone through that in SEER training.
Oh, isn't that interesting?
But he still and I guess he wasn't worried at all about the legalities because there were none.
Right.
You know, if you start putting all these pieces together and this is what's important is really, you know, if you take Jane Mayer's book, you look at what some of the documents have, you know, state the contractor who was out there was James Mitchell, Air Force psychologist.
He was a partner up with Bruce Jessen, former Mitchell and Jessen associates.
And he was one who kept waving around this, you know, this paper saying, you know, I have the legal authorization.
I've got it.
I'm able to do whatever I want out here, even though, you know, people were objecting.
And basically what he was waving around was a cable.
And it was a cable that came from headquarters, supposedly, you know, saying, yeah, you know, you got the permission to use this.
And it's, you know, it's fascinating.
And that's why this becomes, you know, such an important piece of the historical, you know, record when we years from now, when we really start, you know, talking about the origins of this program, this torture program, we can now see, you know, when things changed, what they were discussing.
And I also do want to make it clear, they did look at other SEER documents, but this is the earliest one that we have.
And it provides, you know, the first look at, you know, what they were discussing as early as May 2002.
Let's not forget that, you know, the data was captured in Pakistan, March 28th, you know, flown to a black site shortly thereafter.
And around April 16th, you know, Mitchell's partner, Bruce Jessen, that's when he started distributing this so-called draft exploitation plan.
You know, the military and the CIA had already been talking about these alternative set of techniques.
But, you know, here you go, here's the manual, this is what we're going to use, we're going to use this manual.
And, you know, what's really important to also note about this manual is that they stressed the instructors who are subjecting trainees to these methods, they stressed safety.
And look, we need to make sure that our trainees don't fall into a state of learned helplessness, because that would damage them psychologically, you know, physically and psychologically.
So, you know, one thing that if you recall, you know, Rice has said this, you know, I was assured that this was safe.
Well, one of the techniques in here, which I had mentioned, which is cramped confinement in the manual, it said you you the trainee can only be in a confinement box for 20 minutes.
Well, guess what?
In the torture memo, it actually said up to 18 hours, depending on the size of the box.
Right.
And they're worried about leaving an American trainee in there for very long is that he might actually be tortured.
I mean, he might the torture rather than an inoculation against torture for him training against it.
It might actually just amount to torture and break him.
And we don't want to do that.
Right.
That's exactly it.
So, you know, how did they get from 20 minutes up to 18 hours?
I don't have the answer.
I have no idea.
But that's the point that, you know, Colonel Steve Kleinman had made when when, you know, during our interview was that, look, you know, there's nothing about this that is safe.
You know, how can right say that this is safe when, you know, we're putting them in a box for, you know, as much as, you know, between two and 18 hours?
We only put our guys in here for, you know, for 20 minutes so they wouldn't fall into the state of learned helplessness.
And what exactly does that mean?
Well, learned helplessness is is is basically, you know, where you just become so dependent on your captor, you know, the your your your at their sort of whim, if you will.
It's you're dependent on them for everything, you know, and they did not really want the trainees to, you know, to get into that state.
But learned helplessness was, you know, the basis of the entire program.
So it was the exact opposite.
This is Winston Smith, the third act of the book, 1984, where O'Brien, his torturer, becomes his father, his lover, his brother personified.
Exactly, exactly.
That's exactly it, Scott.
Well, that's the American way.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Thank you very much for your time, as always, Jason.
Jason Leopold, everybody.
Truthout.org.
