Welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
It's chaos in Austin.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest today is Daphne Eviatar.
She's a lawyer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Legal Affairs, Mother Jones, The Washington Independent and many others.
She's a senior reporter at the American Lawyer and was the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow in 2005 and a Pew International Journalism Fellow in 2002.
Welcome to the show, Daphne.
Thanks.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
I enjoy this article in The Washington Independent.
Torture by any other name.
Who would have thought that simply semantics could make torture not torture anymore?
Apparently, I guess you're denying those with power the right to do that to our English language and to get away with torturing the words that we use to describe the reality we perceive as well as, you know, obviously people that they crucify and hang from the ceiling.
So, this is basically the theme here.
It's the question of whether these men in the Bush administration who are guilty of torture and hopefully we'll have time to go through and name them by name, whether they will be prosecuted for their war crimes in the next administration.
Do you think there's any hope of that?
You know, I think it's going to be tough.
I think that while there is some pressure to do it, and obviously it depends who wins the presidency, but even if we assume that Obama wins the presidency, I think there's a lot of pressure not to actually bring prosecutions even within an Obama presidency.
I think they're worried that they'll lose the support of some of the country that still supports the Bush administration or that doesn't want to look backwards.
They want to look forward.
And so I think politically it would be tough.
A lot of people are saying that they don't expect to see any prosecutions, at least not in the first term of the next president.
Well, and you quote this guy Cass Sunstein, law professor at Harvard and a legal advisor to Barack Obama, as saying, oh, no, you know, we can't do that.
It would be partisan, et cetera.
Yeah, he's been kind of wishy-washy about it.
I mean, he hasn't said absolutely we shouldn't, but he sort of implies that that would be seen as partisan and, therefore, probably not a good idea.
And there have been other advisors to Barack Obama that have suggested that that would not be a good idea.
So that seems to be the consensus is that he's not likely to.
I mean, he might make some statements, but it seems unlikely that he's going to bring criminal prosecution.
And now beyond holding people accountable for horrible crimes, of course, any private citizen who tortures somebody, in fact, as you demonstrate in your article, and hopefully we can get to some of this, even lower-level government employees who torture without permission from George Bush, they get prosecuted for this kind of thing.
And it brings up the larger question of whether, in fact, this society is ruled by law or not, whether the president has plenary authority to make professional torturers out of people, or doesn't he?
Yeah.
I mean, what kind of shocked me and what motivated me to write this was that I learned that in the past there was never any question whether techniques like waterboarding, which is something that came out the CIA was doing on prisoners, there was never any question that that was torture.
And, in fact, even in just the 1980s, not that long ago, the Department of Justice itself prosecuted a sheriff in Texas that was waterboarding people that he picked up on the street, and they were being imprisoned, and he was trying to coerce them to confess the thing.
And so he and his deputies were using this exact same waterboarding technique, which historically has also been called water torture.
And they were prosecuted for it, and they went to prison for it.
And the United States, after World War II, prosecuted Japanese soldiers for using it on U.S. prisoners.
They prosecuted U.S. soldiers for using it in the Philippines.
I mean, this is something that historically has always been considered a form of torture.
I mean, you take them, you drown them to the point where they're almost about to die, and obviously they think they're going to die, and that's the point.
You try to get them to confess.
So that's kind of a definition of torture.
So it was very strange to learn that and then realize that the Bush administration had gotten its Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department to write a memo justifying the use of this and saying that it was not torture.
Yeah, and you really go through in this article in the Washington Independent, it's WashingtonIndependent.com, and you really go through the precedent here.
I think you quote the judge in the Texas sheriff case where the three-judge panel or whatever at the end in the final decision called it torture, in their words, in their opinion, that sent this guy off to prison.
Yeah, actually, and this is the Federal Court of Appeals, and these are usually pretty conservative courts.
These are not like going out on a limb here.
They called it torture 12 times, 12 times in their opinion.
It was never a question.
And that's why I just thought it was fascinating.
And apparently John Yoo, when he wrote this famous memo that's come to be known as one of the torture memos, justifying waterboarding as not being torture, he never even mentioned any of these cases.
And he went into all sorts of obscure law.
He cited some Medicare federal regulations that defined torture in some very extreme way but ignored the most obvious law.
I mean, normally, as a lawyer, when you're doing legal research, the first thing you look at is how have other courts in the government in the United States ruled on these issues.
So you just look at case law.
He ignored all of that.
So it's raised a lot of questions, and senators like Senator Whitehouse, who I quote in the story, have raised this issue with hearings saying, you know, what kind of shoddy lawyering is this?
It looks like an intentional avoidance of the law.
I mean, it's not like these guys were stupid and they don't know how to read the case law.
They obviously just decided they didn't want to see what the law was.
And so it certainly makes it look like they're just choosing what law they want to follow.
Right.
Well, and to be clear here, because I don't think you or I want to live in a society where lawyers are prosecuted for defending their clients and that kind of thing all the time.
But what we're talking about here is the kind of thing that our government routinely does prosecute lawyers for in mob cases, which is you're not a lawyer defending these people.
You're helping them avoid the law.
You're helping them find their route around the law as like a consigliere or whatever.
And so you're just as guilty a conspirator as the rest of them, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
There's actually, I forget the name of the case.
There's a case in Florida pending now where the Justice Department is going after a lawyer for advising clients.
And you know that Michael Mukasey, the attorney general, his defense in this has always been, well, you know, we had these memos written by lawyers and they advised government officials and the CIA and the Defense Department that it was okay to do these techniques, so we can't consider it illegal because they were acting on the advice of counsel.
But all, I mean, I wrote a previous piece about this for the Washington Independent also, about when the advice of counsel defense applies.
It's just, you know, saying I just relied on my lawyers is a typical defense, but it doesn't work if it was clear that the lawyer's opinion was wrong and that anybody would have known that that lawyer's opinion was just contrary to basic law.
You know, so saying that torture was legal, well, there's an anti-torture statute in the United States.
There's the Geneva Conventions, which is international law.
I mean, any of these government officials would have known that.
But you can't just say that you relied on the advice of your counsel because that wasn't reasonable advice and that's sort of the standard.
It's got to be reasonably relied on that advice.
Well, and also we know from many great reporters at this point and lawyers who've written books about it, people who aren't even journalists, but lawyers.
I forget, was it Philip Sands wrote The Torture Team and all that?
We know that Dick Cheney and David Addington decided they wanted to torture people and they went to the lawyers and said, write me up a memo.
It was not the other way around.
Right.
That's definitely the sense that we've gotten from the books that have been written, even by Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel.
I mean, I don't think he was quite exactly that explicit, but he certainly suggested that the quality of these memos that they were writing were terrible and that they were ignoring the law, which certainly suggests that they were coming up with law to justify what they already wanted to do.
Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, he was the Secretary of State at the time, and his former Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, on this show just a couple of weeks ago said that the trail of orders on all of this torture stuff went straight to Dick Cheney at the very top.
And, of course, they actually worked quite hard, didn't they, in making it seem as though the military jailers at Guantanamo had requested permission to do all this?
You know, I think so.
I mean, they certainly tried to make it seem like it was just a few bad apples went too far, and that sort of has generally been what they've suggested.
And then, you know, when you saw the Abu Ghraib photos and the horrible things that were done there, there was just a suggestion that, like, oh, a couple people got out of control.
But then the more we've learned about it, the more we realize, no, actually, they were told to use extreme interrogation techniques, intentional humiliation.
These things have been against international law since 1949.
The kind of humiliating, you know, nakedness and sodomy and all sorts of things that we saw happen at Abu Ghraib and that apparently have happened at Guantanamo Bay as well, I mean, these have been blatantly illegal for, you know, more than half a century.
Well, now, you know, I fear that we're kind of focusing maybe too much on 2002.
I mean, things have changed a bit, and basically the court in three different cases in three different ways, Hamdan, Rasool, and Boumediene, have struck down this theory of Bush as, you know, unlimited emperor who can make up the law as he wills.
And so they went to Congress, and John McCain helped them pass the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which makes it illegal for American military people to torture, but keeps it legal for the CIA to do so.
And so does the Military Commissions Act, passed a year later, makes it legal for the president to determine what's torture and to allow the CIA to do that.
So I wonder whether all those old torture statutes that are the signature to the Geneva Convention, the federal laws that enforce it and all that, that's all rendered null and void now, right?
What does the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act say?
Go ahead and torture people as long as you're a CIA employee.
Well, we've never said we're not a party to the Geneva Convention.
I don't think it does render it null and void.
It does amend some of the U.S. statutory law, but we're still a party to these international laws, and the next administration is going to have to make clear what rules we're abiding by and what rules we're not.
I don't think they can just pick and choose which laws they're going to abide by.
Well, I'm just concerned with, because believe me, I'm no legal mind here.
That's the other Scott Horton, you know.
I'm just the radio show host.
So I'm just trying to get it straight that if torture is illegal, but then John McCain passes a law that legalizes torture, those old laws are null and void now.
Well, I don't think that it actually legalizes torture.
You know, I'd have to look at the wording of the law.
I don't think it legalizes torture so much that it says maybe that the CIA can't be prosecuted for torture.
I'd have to look at the exact wording.
I don't think it legalizes torture.
Well, in a splitting hairs kind of way, it sounds like it does even under that standard.
Well, that's the problem.
I'd have to have it right in front of me, but I think it was pretty clear at the time that it did, in fact, legalize torture, and so did the Military Commissions Act.
I remember reading the language of the Military Commissions Act, and it clearly says that it's up to the president to decide what amounts to torture.
Torture is illegal, but the president decides what that means.
Well, you know, I guess it's not clear if that can survive a constitutional challenge.
I'm not sure that the international treaties normally trump domestic law unless you actually revoke an international treaty.
So I'm not sure how that would survive.
I mean, if that was tested in the court, they're not sure how that would go.
I think what they were trying to do clearly was to insulate Bush administration officials from being prosecuted, and that was clearly what was going on there, and they're still trying to do that.
And, you know, there was a ruling just yesterday in a case which I thought was really interesting.
The ACLU has been trying to get documents from the government that detail their statements made by prisoners who have been held at Guantanamo Bay that describe what they've been through, that describe the various kinds of interrogation techniques and the conditions of detention.
And the court ruled that they're not entitled to get those documents because the government has said that they're classified.
And the government and the court is required to presume the good faith of the government when the government says that these documents are classified and that releasing them would endanger national security.
But how can you presume the good faith of the government anymore?
I mean, I think that all of this stuff that's come out about the way that they've crafted these legal memos and deliberately violated the law, it makes it impossible for a court to assume good faith.
And I think it's really raised a big question in how courts can enforce the law against the government anymore.
And can they?
I mean, doesn't the government have to abide by the law just like anybody else does?
And what does it mean if they don't?
I mean, at the end of the day, the judges only have the marshals or something like that as compared to the rest of the executive branch.
Yeah, and if you're going to have a president that keeps issuing executive orders that says he's above the law, that's a big problem.
I mean, that's why I think it really is important for the next administration to do some sort of investigation of what happened.
Because you can't create that precedent of letting the executive just decide this is the law I'm going to abide by and I'm not going to abide by that, and I'm going to issue an executive order and change the law.
That's a big problem.
I mean, that's a bad precedent for the United States to be setting.
And really, up until this point, it's basically simply been tradition, right?
I mean, Andy Jackson said that John Marshall's made the law, let's see him enforce it.
And the court was powerless to do anything against the awesome power of Andy Jackson, who went ahead and had the death march to Oklahoma anyway.
But since then, presidents have basically said, when the Supreme Court ruled, all right, you got me.
I guess I have to go by what you say.
And they do that, right?
I mean, it's only really a matter of tradition and trying to keep from being impeached, I guess, by the House.
I mean, that's all it is, right?
It's tradition and old law left over.
If Bush wants to go ahead and set this precedent, that could be a major change, as though the Andrew Jackson precedent from back then had stuck all along or something.
Right.
Right.
I mean, it would be a major change.
And unfortunately, as you pointed out before, the Supreme Court has come in and several times struck down what the Bush administration has done and said, no, these prisoners are entitled to some rights.
But, you know, then what they do is they get around it.
What's fascinating about the Guantanamo Bay situation to me is that people keep saying, oh, close that place down.
And, you know, now it's a terrible place, but we've at least ruled that people there are entitled to certain minimal level of rights.
Well, they haven't been sending people, new people to Guantanamo Bay.
Now they send them to Bagram in Afghanistan or to these prisons in Iraq where they say no law applies.
I mean, no constitutional law applies and no rights apply.
So you have more than 600 prisoners now being held without charges, indefinite detention on a U.S. air base in Afghanistan.
No one talks about that.
You can't put Guantanamo Bay down.
Those guys are going to be sent to Afghanistan.
Well, you're absolutely right that nobody talks about that.
I think even my impression was that people are brought from Bagram to Guantanamo, not that the I don't think I've ever heard that the population of, you know, so-called al-Qaeda detainees or whatever at Bagram was steadily increasing like that.
Oh, yeah.
They're not.
Ever since the Supreme Court ruled, I think it was in Handan, that they have rights at Guantanamo Bay, they don't send them there anymore.
It would just hurt their interests.
This way they can keep them in Afghanistan.
They don't have any rights.
They don't have rights to see a lawyer.
They don't have rights to see family.
You know, the only people that are allowed to go in there every once in a while is the Red Cross, and they can't issue public reports.
I actually just wrote a story about this for The American Lawyer.
Really?
It's something that I'm, yeah, it's a really fascinating situation and something the next administration is going to have to deal with, too, because you can close down Guantanamo Bay, but you're not going to be dealing with the problem.
And Bagram, this is, the salt pit torture dungeon is featured in the movie Torture Taxi, right?
Not Torch Taxi, Taxi to the Dark Side.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, it was a notorious torture chamber under the previous Afghan government, and actually under the Soviets.
So it's something that has a long history in Afghanistan.
And actually, you know what?
I'm sorry.
I'm confused, and that was this other prison called Policharki, where they're sending some people from Bagram to.
That was under the Soviets, was a big torture chamber.
Bagram is a U.S. air base, but it's very much like Guantanamo.
It's totally controlled by the United States.
But they just haven't, the case that went to the Supreme Court, the decision was limited only to Guantanamo.
So it's only prisoners that are there that have been determined to have any right.
Well, now, what about the other black sites in, you know, Morocco and Thailand and Diego Garcia and that kind of thing?
Same thing.
We know very little about what's going on there.
People outside the government are not entitled to get any information.
Those people have no right to see a lawyer.
They don't have any right to know what the charges are against them.
It's a very serious situation.
You have thousands of people around the world being held indefinitely without, you know, in indefinite detention, without access to anyone, some of them held completely incommunicado, some of them in isolation.
And this is supposedly because of the war on terror.
They're prisoners of the war on terror, which has no end, according to the Bush administration.
So how is the next administration going to define the war on terror?
Is there going to be an end to it?
I mean, I have some faith that if Barack Obama becomes president, he at least wants to end the war in Iraq, and I think I have some faith he'll have some more rational ways of defining the war on terror.
But it's been set up as a very dangerous problem of complete indefinite detention of thousands of people around the world.
Well, I don't know about all that, but I guess I am under the impression at least that the law has already prepared over a couple of hundred years of trial and error in this country under the military code of justice.
They already had a system of military commissions and basically court-martials and so forth, a system of weeding out those who were accused or happened to be sold by the Pakistanis or something, versus someone who actually was a so-called high-value target.
They had a way to do that.
If they hadn't scrapped the law, then they could have, you know, really figured out how to do this under the old law, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, what the Bush administration did under these new laws and these executive orders was say, these guys don't fit under the old laws.
These are enemy combatants, which is this sort of new thing that didn't really exist before, and that just means they have no rights.
They're not prisoners of war.
They're not people who are just prosecuted and held in a U.S. prison, which would give them some rights, which is traditionally what we've done with terrorists.
We prosecute them the way we prosecute any criminal, you know?
It's organized crime.
But they've decided they've created this new category so that they don't have rights to anything, and that's what makes it such a big problem.
It's not clear what you're dealing with, you know?
I mean, no one's saying let them all go free, but at least give them either, as you said, the basic military rights if you're a prisoner of war, or the defendant's rights that you get if you're in a U.S. prison and you've been accused of a crime.
Well, you know, like in Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side, the FBI agents were doing a great job and were getting all kinds of great information from the few actual high-value detainees they had, and it wasn't until the CIA came and got them and took them off to the torture dungeons that they started going crazy and making up all these things about Saddam Hussein taught us how to hijack planes and whatever else.
Yeah, well, that's the problem.
I mean, you know, even if you decide from whether you think torture is just a bad thing on a moral level, the other problem is you just get a lot of bad information.
You torture people, and they'll say anything.
John McCain was tortured and apparently confessed to all sorts of things that I'm sure he didn't do.
You know, that's just what happens.
They'll say anything to get them to stop, and it's not reliable information.
So that's the other big problem.
Yeah, it doesn't help prosecution.
It doesn't actually further the government's interest.
Oh, another legal development that happened this week was a judge at Guantanamo, I guess a quote-unquote judge under this kind of made-up system.
Even he ruled, although I thought it was interesting that it was in a case where the problem had come from Afghan authorities rather than American soldiers, but that threats to prison persons' family members amounts to torture itself, that having a helpless person in your custody who couldn't possibly defend their family since you're holding them and telling them, oh, yeah, we're going to kill your family if you don't tell us what we want to know, that that is torture.
And I guess I wonder, you know, first of all, any insights you have into that, but especially if you could address maybe this would set a precedent for other cases involving even American soldiers and other detainees in other circumstances, because we've heard, I think, over the years quite a few anecdotes about just that kind of thing.
Well, you know, it is.
I mean, traditionally that is part of the definition of torture.
And, again, if you go back to the Geneva Conventions and you look at how torture is defined there or in other places where we – I mean, even in the U.S. anti-torture statute, torture includes not only threats to that person but threats to their family, especially threats that would endanger the life of the individual themselves or their family.
So that wasn't really going out on a limb.
I mean, that is really traditionally part of the definition of torture.
And so, absolutely, that was the correct decision.
I'm sorry.
I should have looked this up.
I keep forgetting to.
But I think – wasn't it in the torture team that in the three different categories of degrees of tortures that can be used on these people that that was right there in the list as prepared by John Yoo and David Addington?
I think so.
I think so.
You know, I don't have it in front of me, but I think so.
I think that was absolutely one of the things that they were allowed to do was to threaten their family.
I mean, that's really – you know, like when you talk about that famous Yoo memo and all the precedent that he ignored in writing that thing, finding some obscure Medicare language or something to cite, he was basically just making up a new law as though he was the House and the Senate and the President too and saying that, no, the definition of torture is not any of the things that have defined torture in American jurisprudence and history up until this point.
It's what I say it is, organ failure or death.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the interesting thing about this is that, like, when you cover the law enough, you realize that lawyers can come up with ways of justifying things in all sorts of ways, and it's – I mean, we impeached President Clinton because of the way that he used what is is, right, or like what sexual relations was.
You know, the way you define things in the law, you can split hairs and try to come up with some definition that puts the cases together in a certain way, but it's really, really hard to justify the way that John Yoo came up with his definition.
I mean, that's one that I just haven't seen anybody outside of that little office and his colleagues be able to justify.
James Bamford has written this great new book about the NSA, and he retells the story in there of when the Justice Department rubber stamp was set to expire and the acting Attorney General Comey would not re-rubber stamp it, and John Ashcroft was in the hospital, and Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzalez came to try to get very sick post-operative John Ashcroft to take back his authority as Attorney General and rubber stamp their thing, and there was – they threatened a mass resignation, right?
There was going to be, you know, 10 or 15 people at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the FBI, including Mueller, the director of the FBI, including Ashcroft, the Attorney General, said, Don't resign without me.
Wait until Monday so I can quit too.
And yet none of this over torture.
This is over the tapping our phones, which, hey, I'm glad that there was some kind of controversy finally, but nothing like that when it came to rewriting the law in secret and instituting this torture regime.
You know, I'm glad you mentioned that because I've been struck by that as well, but there seems to be sort of a lot more discussion about the NSA laws and the wiretapping than there was about torture.
I mean, the only thing I can think of is that people feel like, well, you know, I don't want to be wiretapped.
You know, you don't want to be wiretapped.
People can sort of imagine that themselves.
They can't really imagine being in a situation where they could be tortured.
But the truth is, if you were in Pakistan or in Afghanistan or any of these places and you had a Muslim name or you looked Muslim, you could have been picked up off the street or you had some enemy who was in detention and wanted to name you or was trying to get some money from the U.S. government and decided to basically give your name out to get some money from them.
You could have been picked up off the street for doing nothing, and you could have ended up in indefinite detention for years and years and being tortured.
And I think the problem is that people here generally don't think that they personally could be in that situation.
And even within the government, people tend to think, well, you know, those guys must have done something wrong.
I mean, they worked the house, but they ended up in prison.
I think people don't understand that it was extremely random in 2002 and 2003 how people ended up in those prisons.
Well, and you know, Pakistan, I guess, seems kind of far away and alien, and you certainly, you know, if somebody's in a deep, dark dungeon in Thailand being held by the CIA, you can't hear them scream from here.
But, you know, the way I think of it is we could be talking about that nice guy that works at the corner Quickie Mart that sells me coffee in the morning.
He's from Pakistan.
It could have been him.
That's an individual, a human being, my neighbor now.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, there are people, you know, who there was a guy, I'm forgetting his name, who was a Canadian guy who was just coming back.
Arar?
Yeah, Arar, who was transferring planes and was picked up in Kennedy Airport totally mistakenly and held for, I think, two years indefinitely and tortured.
And then he was released, and he hadn't done anything.
I mean, they found no evidence against him whatsoever, and they held him for years.
And that's just because his name was Arar.
You know, I think his name was similar to someone else's name who was on some terrorist list.
It's really scary what happens.
And, yeah, it could be the guy in the corner who sells you your coffee.
I mean, I'm in New York.
There's a ton of people with Muslim names and Middle Eastern names here that probably feel a lot more scared than I ever do.
Yeah.
Well, and, yeah, with good reason.
I mean, there's been cases where their family members are the ones, you know.
I have one more question.
No, I have two more questions.
I only remember one of them.
One of them is tell me again about this article you've written for this lawyer journal, where I can find it.
I don't think it's online yet.
It's AmericanLawyer.com, and I'm not sure if it's online yet because it's the November issue.
It's actually a litigation supplement to the November issue of the magazine.
So it will probably be online by next week.
And it's about the prisoners at Bagram Air Base and a couple lawyers that are representing them in these cases.
It's really a disturbing situation that I think not enough people know about.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
Well, you know, we'll end there with the Bagram thing.
And, you know, I'm sorry if you don't have a comment on this, and I'm just kind of walking all over your interview here.
But a Christian friend of mine pointed out after watching Taxi to the Dark Side when they discussed how these men are hung from the ceiling by their wrists in a way that compresses their chests and pulls their arms out of their sockets.
And my friend Phil pointed out to me, that's what the Romans did to Jesus.
It's called crucifixion.
That's what we're doing at the Salt Pit torture dungeon at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
What in the hell?
It's bizarre, you know, and when I first learned about that, because at least two people died when they did that.
And they were beaten to death while they were hanging from their wrists.
It's bizarre.
When I heard that, I was thinking, what?
U.S. officials are doing that?
And these were guys, again, they just picked up off the street.
They hadn't been charged with anything.
Who knows what the evidence was against them?
They just beat them to death.
Like, that is so disturbing.
You just used to think, you know, a few years ago, the United States just didn't do things like that.
But there were certain things that they didn't do.
And beating people to death in a prison was one of them.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's an amazing thing.
And what's so disturbing is that there's just no public access to these places.
They have no, by saying that they have no rights, by holding them in these sort of black holes, it means that nobody knows what's going on there.
Nobody has a right to know what's going on there.
And that means that anything can be going on there, right?
I mean, there's no check on it.
So that's what I think it's really, yeah, it is, you know, kind of what they did to Jesus.
I mean, I don't want to equate those people most fairly with Jesus, but it's a bizarre thing for the United States government to be doing.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
The thing is, though, when you look at, okay, 500 people who were the worst of the worst were released from Guantanamo, and you look at the poor kid that drove the taxi, I mean, what's the difference between that kid that drove the taxi and Jesus?
I mean, I'm not saying he walked on water, but he was certainly innocent.
And they beat him to death.
Sure.
I mean, so it's not like these people are all terrorists or anything by any stretch.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the taxi driver for Osama bin Laden, you know, who knows?
Oh, no, I don't even mean him.
I mean the poor kid who was just giving two guys a ride and got framed up from the one in the documentary.
I don't mean Osama bin Laden's driver.
Screw him.
I'm sorry.
My mistake.
I should have been more clear.
No, no, that's all right.
That's all right.
Yeah.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
It's the kind of thing we sort of thought that our culture, and it's also kind of funny because you have all these presidential candidates who talk about God and belief in Jesus and Christianity and their Christian government, and yet we're engaging in these sort of things that are certainly not very Christian.
Because the reputation of the United States has gone down so much, the whole meaning of America has really changed.
Well, I sure appreciate that there are people like you out there writing about this stuff and bringing it to people's attention and in a way to really arm them with the facts if they need them for later, too.
Well, thanks so much for your interest.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Now I'm going to cross my fingers and try to say your last name right.
Daphne Eviatar.
Eviatar?
Daphne Eviatar.
Eviatar.
Good enough.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time today.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
All right, folks.
Daphne is a lawyer and a freelance journalist.
Her work appears in The New York Times, The Nation, Legal Affairs, Mother Jones, The Washington Independent, The American Lawyer.
This one in The Washington Independent is called Torture by Any Other Name.
