The military-industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power...
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
I'd like for you to read this book, The War State, by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large, it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role, and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important first-hand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast, and how the USA has gotten to where it is today, corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State, by Michael Swanson.
Available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com.
Or just click the logo in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
If you'd listened, he could have truthed you out of war with Iraq back in 2002, and he's been doing great journalism on the national security beat all over the place, and on torture and many other things ever since.
Welcome back to the show, Jonathan.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me.
I'm just fine.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
A lot of great journalism out of you guys on the torture beat, especially here in the CIA beat, I guess, on this issue in general.
First of all, a very important piece out here, I believe this is the latest, where you talk about 20 major findings.
Now, from what I understand, the way I read through between the lines here, it didn't sound like you've actually read the summary, but you've been talking to people who have.
Is that right?
No, we got the 20 conclusions of the report.
There are 20 bulleted conclusions, and we got them.
Oh, you got the list of the 20.
All right.
Well, so let's go ahead and go through it then.
Have at it.
Okay.
So the one we focused on, because a lot of them are known, you know, the sweeping ones are known, because committee members have talked about them before, and that is the basic finding that the use of what the CIA called, and the Bush administration called, EITs, or EITs, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.
Thank you very much.
Sure, sure.
The fact is that we've been told by the committee members that the report, four years, $40 million, 6.3 million pages of classified documents found that the EITs, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, did not produce very little intelligence of any value, and that the CIA misled the Congress, the Bush White House, and the American public on just how effective these were in producing intelligence.
So some of that stuff is already known.
But what we focused on in the latest story was the finding that appears to challenge the key defense on which the CIA and the Bush administration relied, the key legal defense on which they relied in arguing that the use of the EITs did not constitute torture.
And this was a finding that said that the CIA, let me read it to you verbatim, quote, the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, unquote.
And that's kind of a pretty devastating finding, in that the Department of Justice, a particular office there called the Office of Legal Counsel, was the office that produced the legal opinions that said these EITs, these ten harsh interrogation measures, which included waterboarding, did not constitute torture.
And this seems to pull the rug out from under that.
And that's because it seems that those opinions that were produced by the Justice Department were based on quote, unquote, facts about the program that were given to the Department of Justice by the CIA itself.
And so if those facts were wrong, then that raises serious questions about the veracity of these legal opinions.
And indeed, the legal opinions themselves, in the legal opinions themselves, which have been declassified, the Justice Department in fact says that.
It says we understand that these are the facts that you have given us, i.e. the CIA has given to the Justice Department.
But if any of these facts turn out to change, then that could undermine this legal opinion.
And so that seems to be where the report has gone.
Well, yeah, no, that's extremely important.
So in the bullet points here at McClatchyDC.com, you talk about how they evaded and impeded oversight from the White House and from the Senate, which we can get into that.
But most importantly, if I understand you right, what you're saying is that in the original John Yoo memos, which purport to legalize and cover these CIA men for whatever crimes that they commit by purportedly legalizing them within their threshold of organ failure pain or whatever, as they define it, that the CIA was providing such faulty information to the Department of Justice that it's even, as you say, in their memos, it says, if this information isn't right, this memo can't cover you.
So even if you buy the legal theory that this memo could cover torture, then now that is terribly undermined, too.
Well, yeah, I mean, my desk is awfully messy with lots of this stuff.
And I'm trying to find one of the opinions so that I can read that precise language.
And unfortunately, I think I lent it to a colleague, the one I wanted to read to you.
But yes, essentially what the Justice Department itself put in these memos to the CIA's then-Senior Deputy General Counsel, John Rizzo, was basically, our opinions are based on quote-unquote, facts that you yourself have given us.
And we understand that you have no other facts at your disposal.
But if you do, that could alter this opinion.
Yes.
And then, and I guess we already know, but now it's been reaffirmed that they were already torturing Abu Zubaydah and others, question mark?
No, no.
That I don't know about Abu Zubaydah.
But we do know that before they had been using, they had been subjecting detainees to some kind of harsh interrogation techniques before they went to the Justice Department to say, is what we're doing legal?
And that may be exactly why they went to the Justice Department.
Because someone said, hey guys, we're doing this stuff.
And do we know that this is legal?
Oh, well, we better go to the Justice Department and get them to weigh in on this.
The reason I couched my language the way I did was because the first legal opinion was issued in, I believe, August of 2002.
And it was seeking the Justice Department's legal approval to use the enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah, who underwent them later that year.
But it's been established that, in fact, other detainees, and perhaps he was one of them, were subjected to unauthorized or unapproved interrogation techniques prior to the CIA going to the Office of Legal Counsel and asking for the Office of Legal Counsel's advice, legal advice, on the use of these interrogation techniques.
And do legal experts that you talk to, does anybody question whether these memos can actually legalize crimes like torture in the first place?
Well, you know, the human rights community has been up in arms over these memos ever since they were declassified or ever since they were reported in the press, raising serious questions about or saying that they seriously question the legal analysis.
And indeed, the Justice Department itself, I believe, and again, I'm shuffling through the papers on my desk, issued an opinion.
I think it was in...
Yeah, here it is.
I've got it right here.
It's a memorandum for the Attorney General, June 11, 2009, saying withdrawal of Office of Legal Counsel opinion, where they actually withdraw one of the legal opinions that was issued by the Department of Justice in this case.
And yeah, so yeah, so the Justice Department itself withdrew a whole series of these legal opinions that were being... that basically legalized the use of these... of waterboarding and other techniques that many people consider torture.
Yeah, I mean, I've spoken for years with the other Scott Horton, and he was the former chair of the New York Bar Association's Committees on International Rights and...
Human Rights and on International Law, both different committees there.
I just combined the two into one somehow.
But anyway, so he's a real expert on this.
And he's been all along comparing these lawyers here to mob lawyers, who the Justice Department is happy to put in prison on a regular basis for helping the mob get around the law.
That's not legal representation.
And it's... and I'm just a lawyer here is no defense.
They'll lock you in prison if you try that.
Yeah, well, I can't speak.
Yeah, I can't speak for the people who put these memos together.
I can only report what it is that I'm... that we're being told or we're being leaked.
Right, right.
But I just wanted to point out that I didn't want it to leave it where it sounds like, well, you know, they were torturing the guy before the memo.
So that's the scandal when really the memos shouldn't matter either way.
Yeah, because it's always a crime to torture somebody.
But I understand you're only reporting the facts here.
I just want to make sure that, you know, that was in there somewhere.
So now on the White House oversight, can you be any more specific about what they weren't telling the White House?
I simply cannot.
And whether or not... and I suspect we're going to get that once the executive branch, or what we would hope we would get that, once the executive branch completes the declassification review of the report's 480-page executive summary and the findings that underpin the conclusions.
Those are undergoing declassification review now.
We're not sure when that's going to be finished.
Diane Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that she would like to have had it done by, I think, very early next month.
But whether or not that actually happens is in question.
So no, it's hard to say what they're referring to, because I myself wrote a story back in 2009 about how interrogators were under pressure from the White House and others to use aggressive interrogation methods to try and obtain intelligence linking al-Qaeda and 9-11 with Saddam Hussein, because the White House, the Bush administration, was desperate to do that, to justify the invasion of Iraq.
And, of course, it never did, because that link never existed.
But it could be that this finding has something to do with that.
Yeah, that's a very interesting point.
Of course, that was on my list for subjects to get to here.
I was thinking of the ABC report about how all the principals were there, at least for a time.
Everybody except the president, but the entire National Security Cabinet and the head of the CIA and the vice president and the attorney general, they were all there while the CIA was torturing Qatani, I believe it was, down at Guantanamo Bay.
And then, of course, there was the famous quote of John Ashcroft saying, why are we doing this and meeting like this in the White House?
History is not going to look kindly on this.
And that made it sound like it was all a very, very top-down project, at least for a while there before they passed it off to their deputies, no?
Yeah, but no, I think that's absolutely right.
And so, yeah, that would be really interesting to see.
And perhaps what they're referring to is another finding, which is the main finding, which is that the use of these methods to obtain intelligence, in fact, produced very little valuable intelligence.
And perhaps what this means is that the CIA was misrepresenting the effectiveness of these methods to the White House in order to continue using them in the belief that they would produce, at some point, the intelligence that the White House was looking for.
It's just something we're going to have to wait and see.
The report, once it's issued, or what we're going to see of the report once it's issued, will illuminate us on.
And now, regarding your previous article that you referred to there about the torture and the Iraq connection there, if anybody wants to Google it up, it's Abusive Tactics Used to Seek Iraq Al-Qaeda Link at McClatchyDC.com by Jonathan S. Landay, April 21st, 2009.
And so the first person that comes to mind here is, and I haven't reread this one in a while, in fact, I just Googled it back up, but the first person that comes to mind would be a guy named al-Libi.
And he was the guy that had implicated Saddam in teaching the al-Qaeda guys in airplane hijacking and chemical weapons manufacture under torture in Egypt.
Is that right?
Yeah, I believe that.
I don't know if it was in Egypt.
I think it may have actually even been in Libya.
I'm not sure.
I'm having to dredge up because I think that, I don't remember, and perhaps Scott, you can correct me on this, but I do know that wasn't there one of the detainees who eventually, quote unquote, committed suicide?
That was him, yeah.
That was him.
Wasn't that in Libya?
Yeah, it was, but I guess, see, I don't have a footnote for this, so I'm sorry.
I better be sure.
I was under the impression that he was in Egypt, tortured there, and then was turned over to Gaddafi.
That's very possible.
And then Gaddafi might as well have tortured him more and then eventually murdered him, it sounded like, but...
That may very well have been the case because, you know, there's so much of this stuff to remember.
I gotta admit, I'm having a hard time remembering the exact details of that case, but what we did learn was that he told his interrogators this stuff to stop the abuse, and it turned out to be wrong.
And by the way, did your sources ever make it clear whether that was really their purpose was, we know it ain't true, but just beat it out of somebody?
We don't want to make it out of a whole clock.
No, they were convinced that it was true.
Let's not forget, this began before the Bush administration.
This began with a book that was written by an author named Lori Milroy, in which she basically proposed the preposterous idea that Saddam was behind the first World Trade Center attack.
And that book was received, I believe the foreword was written by James Woolsey, who was on the Bush administration's defense advisory board, it's an outside advisory board, along with Richard Perle.
And these were some of the main advocates of the idea that Saddam was behind 9-11.
And so that's kind of where this came from.
This is the genesis of this idea, which they went on to promote rather aggressively after 9-11, both within the government, you had Wolfowitz, I think it was Wolfowitz who wrote the intro to Lori Milroy's book, it's either him or I can't remember because I don't have it here, or Woolsey.
But nevertheless, these were all people who believed that Saddam had to have been behind 9-11, because no terrorist group was capable of doing such a thing without state support.
And that's where they sort of convinced themselves of this, and then went out to try and find that intelligence.
And don't forget, they set up their own parallel intelligence system, because they didn't trust the CIA, or the DIA.
And they had this effort centered in the office of former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Fyfe, and in the office of what's known as the Office of Special Plans.
And they thought they'd found this evidence or this intelligence that the CIA had missed, and they produced their own intelligence report, which turned out to be bogus.
And so no, they didn't know it was wrong, they actually thought it was right.
And it was just a question of having to get the intelligence to confirm what they believed.
Mm-hmm.
And then I think you say in this report, too, if I remember it right, that there was a real uptick, and it wasn't just al-Libi, there were others too, and the torturees figured out real quick, the victims figured out real quick, these guys want to hear something about Iraq, I'd better come up with something.
And I think you say that there was a real uptick in this right before the invasion, and right after it, because if we don't have any warehouses full of VX, we'd better have something here.
Well, I don't recall that, but look, this interrogation began, these interrogations...
I hope I got that right.
I'm sorry if I didn't.
That's quite all right.
But I mean, this stuff began after the invasion of Afghanistan and continued right through 2006.
So we know that at least as far as 2006, this was one of the main things that they were trying to obtain, issues they were trying to confirm through intelligence, quote-unquote intelligence, which didn't exist.
And let's not forget, the CIA was very quick to tell the Bush administration that it had no intelligence, there was no intelligence linking Saddam with al-Qaeda.
Almost immediately after the World Trade Center attack and the attack on the Pentagon, they were asked to go back and look at this, and I believe they produced at least three, if not more, major reports which said, no, there is no intelligence implicating Saddam or showing that Saddam has been cooperating with al-Qaeda.
And that intelligence, the Bush administration chose to ignore, and at the same time, chose to accept the CIA analysis that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction.
And hence we get the cherry picking of intelligence by the Bush administration.
Now, there are two guys mentioned in your most recent report here who were killed in CIA custody during a regime of enhanced this or that, whatever they call it.
Gul Rahman was basically died of hypothermia at the salt pit in Afghanistan.
And he's the same guy that we've known about for a long time, right?
Or is this a different guy?
No, no, it's the same guy.
Same guy.
Okay.
And I believe someone, you know, a contractor was...
No, that was another case.
I don't know that anyone...
There was another case involving the death of a guy in Assadabad, another part of Afghanistan, that a CIA contractor, I believe, was convicted of.
But this case, no.
I know this was the hypothermia case where a guy was drenched in water and left to freeze and died of hypothermia.
I don't think anybody ever...
There was never any prosecution.
There was an investigation, let's not forget, that after the destruction of the videotapes of Abu Zubaydah's interrogation, the Obama administration appointed a special prosecutor to look at that.
And the special prosecutor, also Dunham, I think his name was, or Durham, looked at alleged, at detainee cases and ended up investigating two.
And I believe Gul Rahman was one of the two, but no charges were ever produced.
In other words, never any.
The case, both investigations were dropped.
And then, I don't know how to say it.
Is it Manadal al-Jamadi?
He was the guy that was crucified to death, suffocated to death, basically, by the way he was hung from the ceiling in the Abu Ghraib prison, right?
You're going somewhere where I cannot...
That's not something that I can talk about, because I'm not familiar with that.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's quite all right.
I was thinking he's the...
I believe he's the corpse that everybody's posing in the pictures with their thumbs up and everything.
Right.
I thought, I don't want to really opine on that, because my recollection is pretty hazy of that.
But I recall that he was dropped off.
It was either by the...
I just don't want to go there.
I don't...
Yeah.
Yeah, because what I was wondering was whether were these the two that the investigation picked up on that you just talked about?
I don't think so.
I think one was Gul Rama, and I forget who the other one was.
Okay.
Well, and then...
I think that's right, though.
But I think you're right.
I do believe you're right.
And now, I mean, the reason I'm getting to that is because you talk about in your reporting about the discrepancy in the numbers here.
And I talked with Jason Leopold yesterday, and some of his sources were telling him that there was a discrepancy, and some of these people are missing.
They've been turned over to...
Presumably, they were turned over alive to Egypt or Syria or somewhere else, and were never seen again.
And I guess I just want to...
They're not accounted for.
I'm sorry?
I don't know.
The thing is, and let me admit that I wasn't here last week.
I was on my first vacation in more than a year.
And so I wasn't involved in the reporting on that particular aspect of this story.
But I do know that there was a dispute over the numbers as the Senate investigation proceeded.
And I know myself that I've reported on one case where an Egyptian cleric who lived in Milan was abducted, rendered, in the official term, by the CIA and taken to Egypt, where he claimed he was tortured, and then never charged with anything.
And I've reported on how...
And this was from a former CIA covert officer with knowledge of this case, how they ginned up the case against him in order to justify the rendition.
And it turned out that the Egyptians never...
Didn't have anything on him.
And while he may have been an inflammatory, radical preacher, there was no solid intelligence or evidence linking him to any particular...
Any terrorist act.
This is a guy by the name of Abu Omar.
So he was one of them.
I'm sure he's one of the 26, I believe, who are identified in the report as being detained in violation of whatever legal principles were established for the CIA detention program.
And then lastly here, real quick, is it a big problem?
Do you think that the CIA gets to take the black magic marker to this summary report before it gets released, or is most of the truth going to come out of it anyway?
It's hard to say.
There's a dispute going on.
Senator Feinstein has said that she wants the White House to lead the declassification process.
I don't know what's going on with that.
There's a letter that's been issued today by Senator Mark Udall, who's also a member of the Intelligence Committee, has been pretty outspoken on this stuff, who also says that the CIA should not...
He says that the White House should limit the CIA's involvement in the declassification process.
And let's face it, I mean, some people could make a conflict of interest case where you have the agency that's the subject of this report determining what or what not the public should see.
Yeah, you might think, oh well, I mean, it's not like any of them are going to be held accountable anyway, so I don't know what they're worried about, but okay.
Oh, and I'm sorry, one more thing here real quick.
Can you give us an update on the status of...
Are there two different Justice Department investigations?
One into the Senate Intelligence Committee staff and one into the CIA at the same time for the same problem?
We know that the CIA asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the alleged unauthorized removal of classified material by the Senate Committee staff from the secret facility set up by the CIA, where they did most of a lot of their research, where they were the only place where they were allowed to look at the documents they used as their source documents for their report.
But that referral, and that referral went to the Justice Department, it's called a criminal referral, and the Justice Department has, in fact, asked the FBI to investigate.
That referral, however, went from the CIA after the CIA's own Inspector General's office asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation into the alleged monitoring of the committee staff's computers in that secret facility by the CIA.
Now, as far as we know, the FBI has not begun an investigation into that allegation, but at this point, yes, there are two criminal referrals over at the Justice Department, one of which is being acted on.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you, Jonathan.
Sure.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, that is Jonathan Landay.
He is a national security beat reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com, and they've got some great stories along these lines lately, the torture report and the controversy between the CIA and the Senate there at McClatchy DC in their national security section.
Go check them out.
Now, we're late for the news, so we'll be right back after this.
Hey, Al Skye here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
Now, I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first, and just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
It's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think, so whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
Hey, Al Skye Horton here for CashIntoCoins.com.
So, you want to buy some bitcoins?
CashIntoCoins.com makes it fast, easy, and safe to get bitcoins.
Just deposit the money into their account at any of the major banks they support, and then just email them a picture of the receipt and your bitcoin address, and you get your bitcoins, almost always the same day it clears.
In a tough, competitive new market, CashIntoCoins.com has the advantage, a great system, and great customer service to keep you coming back.
That's CashIntoCoins.com.
Just click the link in the right margin at ScottHorton.org.
So, you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at ScottHorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
Stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
