04/28/14 – Karen Greenberg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Scotthorton.org is the site.
And our first guest on the show today is Karen Greenberg.
She's director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and a Tom Dispatch regular.
She's the editor of the Torture Debate in America and co-editor of the Torture Papers, The Road to Abu Ghraib.
And she's the author of The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First Hundred Days.
And she's got this piece.
It's at TomDispatch.com, the great Tom Englehart site.
And it's running under Tom's name here at Antiwar.com today.
Abu Ghraib never left us.
Welcome back to the show, Karen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Thanks so much for having me back.
Well, I'm very happy to talk with you again.
And I think this is a really great piece of work that you put together here.
And the occasion, I guess, is the closing of Abu Ghraib prison.
And then, of course, the soon, perhaps, publication of the Senate's investigation, their torture report into Bush era torture.
And so what you've done here is great.
I really hope people will go and look at it.
Abu Ghraib never left us.
And you go through chapter by chapter and take us back kind of down memory lane about how it was that this scandal unfolded, not just how the torture program was implemented, but how the public became aware of it.
And it's really great for kind of revealing how it was that they got away with it, the way that it was revealed in bits and pieces and the way that they spun each piece as it came out and whatever.
It's really well done.
So I guess take us back then to the spring of 04, if you could.
Yeah, I mean, the spring of 04, late April, early May, was when we found out both on television, where you could see the photographs, and in Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece, that there had been incidences of abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison.
And the interesting thing about this, at least to me, was that I think many of us who were alarmed by the stories thought as soon as they were exposed, it would be corrected.
And the people who did them would be sent home in some way or shape or form or punished.
But instead, the administration chose a tactic of at first denying that this was any kind of policy.
Instead, they said, well, these are rotten apples, these are rogue players, this has nothing to do with a policy.
And then bit by bit, as memos authorizing the torture appeared, as reports from internal to the government appeared, as reports internal particularly to the military appeared, it was apparent that this was more than just some rotten apples, as they had called them.
And so that's the debate we began with.
And what happened after that was that as it became more revealed in the public, the Bush administration finally said that they'd done it, that they were no longer going to do it, but that had been immensely valuable, and that American national security had been preserved because of it.
And so, you know, they piece by piece, as you said, spun out the story until essentially, they embraced it.
And that's where we stand today.
And sort of a he said, she said about whether or not this is a policy that the United States wanted to have, and whether or not it was good for the country.
And I find that astounding.
Yeah.
Well, and it's funny, because as clumsy as it all was, for those of us who would never even consider accepting something like this as being tolerable whatsoever, really worked so well on so many people.
I mean, I remember listening to conservative talk radio out of San Antonio, which is a military town as much as any town in America is a military town.
And they got all branches represented down there.
And it's conservative talk radio.
And the story came out.
And the consensus was absolutely not because this is civilization, because this is the West, because we have a constitution, because we have a rule of law.
And we would never torture and we would never accept as a society that anyone's going to get away with this for a minute.
And then the next day, oh, boy, it sure is good news to find out that it was just the night shift at this prison that got out of control here.
And then so that's spun on for a while.
But eventually they end up adopting the policy, owning it, bragging about it and saying, yes, it's torture, because we got to get them to tell us the truth, no matter what it takes.
But it's not torture, because that would be a crime.
It's just an enhanced interrogation and a bunch of jargon.
And basically what they're saying was we were lying before when we said that we didn't tell the night shift to do that.
We did tell the night shift to do that.
And back when you would want to see back when you were so angry about this that you would have wanted to see us punished about it, you know, and we blamed it on them.
We were lying to you.
And so that just is supposed to compound it.
But what had happened by then, by the time they came clean, half the country had sided with them.
Half the country had figured out whichever contradictory excuses had been put out there for them to glom on to that when the Republicans torture people, it's OK.
And so now you had to get the country to take it back when they had endorsed it.
So much of the country take it back.
And by then they just everybody skated scot-free.
Here we are 10 years later talking about in it.
Funny the way they got away with torture and all these people and including to death, you know?
Yeah.
And there's one other wrinkle in it that I didn't really focus on in my piece, but that's important, which is that they've claimed particularly recently, particularly during the Obama years, that even if they did it, even if it's questionable whether it worked, even though they say it worked, it was legal, that it was made legal by these opinions written in the Department of Justice and authorized in the summer of 2002.
And one of the things about this, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report may very well be to show that even what was authorized that was legal did not cover what was done.
And I think that's one of the one of the real problems with having it come out, that if you're going to take the stand that it's legal because these these memos authorized it, then if things were done outside the parameters of what was authorized in the memos, then they're back into that space that they definitely did not want to be in, which is, was this possibly illegal?
And this is a part of the debate that they've categorically refused to participate in by relying on these memos.
Right.
Well, and this is where, as is always the case when law comes up against politics, it has to, the politics have to enforce the law.
In other words, if the Republicans, if the conservatives of America had absolutely refused to accept the legitimacy of the Bush torture program, then probably not the president, the vice president, but, you know, maybe Judge Bybee, somebody would have gone to prison for this, right?
Maybe, probably not Don Rumsfeld, but maybe Douglas Feith or Michael Haynes or some of the lawyers who did the advising.
Somebody would have gotten in trouble.
Somebody would have gotten in trouble.
It takes that, it takes that public pressure to say like, no, no, no, there has to be accountability here.
And it doesn't exist in America.
Right.
But there's an, you know, it's interesting because there's this concept, you know, of bystanders in addition to the people who actually knew about the program, which is a small group, many of whom you just named.
There were a lot of other people who knew about it, but were not necessarily in the chain of command that had official authority for it.
And even if they were, quietly raised objections, but then didn't do anything beyond that.
And in a way, I find those people just as disappointing and infuriating as the ones who did it.
I think they're culpable because if nobody's going to come out and resign, or like with surveillance, look, people resigned.
Top officials in the government threatened to resign.
The current director of the FBI, Jim Comey, over the surveillance program that warrantless surveillance on Americans that was illegal, but no one did this in the torture context.
And no one to this day has done it.
Not even John McCain has been willing to lead a national protest against this.
So I find that as mind boggling as the, as, as wanting to hold accountable the people who designed and implemented the program itself.
Right.
Yeah.
I think you mentioned in your article, it's your article that I read, right?
Where you cite John Rizzo's book as saying that Michael Chertoff at the department of justice before he was the head of Homeland Security, he was asked to sign off on this.
Instead, he just got up and walked out of the room without saying anything.
Well, apparently he said, they asked him for preemptive immunity for anybody who would participate in this or authorize it.
And he said, no.
And then saying that he had tickets to something that night, he just walked out of the room.
Yeah.
So yeah, that would be an example, but also Colin Powell, secretary of state, four star general who wrote a memo early in 2002 saying, look, it's not a good idea to bypass the Geneva conventions.
There could be repercussions to this.
We don't need this for our interrogations, et cetera.
He had a hunch if he didn't know and could have gone further than he did and didn't wrote the memo and, and walked away from, from the issue essentially.
Right.
Well, and he's got his own bureau of intelligence and research.
So if anything, they know what the F what the CIA and FBI are up to when it comes to interrogation.
And those are some more people who didn't rat either, right?
Ali Soufan and the FBI guys, they were as frustrated as could possibly be.
They told us years later that the CIA came in and tortured their suspects.
Well, more important, the director of the FBI, who, who in a way that we have to respect pulled his people, including Ali Soufan out of the interrogations that were going to be done by the CIA once they figured out that these techniques were being used.
But again, that's one step shy of saying, you know, making it public, look what's happening in our name, look what our policy is.
And so I, I think this really is important to deal with now that it's behind us.
Now that nine 11 is, is far enough in the past that we can address this perhaps with a, with a, with a more rational ahead.
Right.
All right, everybody, we're talking with Karen Greenberg.
She's the director of the center on national security at Fordham law school.
And she's a Tom dispatch regular.
We're talking about this piece, Abu Ghraib never left us.
It's under Tom Englehardt's name today at antiwar.com, of course, is that Tom dispatch.com.
When we get back more on the detainee treatment act, torture continuing under Obama, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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All right.
Well, we're in the middle of a conversation here with Karen Greenberg.
She, um, is director of the center on national security at Fordham law.
And she's got this great piece at Tom dispatch.com Tom Englehart site.
It's called Abu grave never left us.
And it's also running at anti-war.com today.
And it's a chapter by chapter takes you through, uh, the evolution of the torture scandal in the George W. Bush years.
And then, so one thing that you had mentioned, uh, Karen, that I wanted to talk about or, uh, get back to is the detainee treatment act of 2005.
That was John McCain's bill.
And I, the way I remember that happening, correct me if I'm wrong, was that he originally wanted it to apply to the CIA and to the military.
And then Dick Cheney talked him into excluding the CIA, uh, and saying, okay, just the military.
And they must go back to nevermind what you've been told.
You must now go back to the detainee, uh, the, the manual.
Right.
I'm sorry.
I forget the exact name of the manual at the top of my head, the army field manual.
Exactly.
Thank you.
I don't know why I couldn't find that word field in my brain, uh, the army field manual, but then they just amended the army field manual appendix M to allow temperature manipulation and sleep deprivation.
And I guess not the, I'm not altogether clear about the stress positions, but, uh, it seemed like, um, the whole thing was just riddled with loopholes from, and it was, you know, here put forward by if anybody's anti-torture in the Senate, it was John McCain, uh, at the time, a victim of torture himself, as you said.
Yeah.
I mean, the detainee treatment act essentially ended up as so much of this conversation, uh, government conversation has as a compromise, it was negotiated.
The problem with something like torture, which is illegal under domestic law, under military law and under international law is that how do you negotiate a space of something that's illegal, but for political reasons, as you suggest, they did.
And to this day, we still have, the question is, is the CI kit, do you want to distinguish between the military and the CIA?
And if you do that, is it for purposes of making the military accountable, but keeping the CIA in a, uh, a relatively law free zone.
And I think that is a question that still remains with us today.
Remember that some of the lower level people, the, those people who were caught in the pictures, uh, at Abu Ghraib were held accountable, were punished, were sent to jail for prison sentences, jail sentences, um, in the military.
So there was, uh, an intense focus on separating what happened in the military and what happened in the intelligence community.
In some ways that makes sense as the five or six first military official military reports that came out about Abu Ghraib indicated the military was not read into the policy or involved in the policy the same way that the intelligence community was, whether it was contractors, CIA people, or foreigners who were hired to do this interrogation.
And so it's still a very murky zone.
The Detainee Treatment Act was much too much of a compromise very early on, but it set the scene for what we live with today.
Yeah.
Well, and, um, as far as that, I mean, the guys, the people who were prosecuted at Abu Ghraib, none of them were even the rank of even a non-commissioned officer, right?
All the officers got away and all the intelligence guys who had told them soften these prisoners up for us, go ahead and get them, you know, three quarters of the way tortured for us so that, you know, we can get in and out of here and then, and back to base in time for dinner, I guess.
I don't know.
All those people got away with it, right?
Right.
I mean, never even mind the administration and Donald Rumsfeld and the whole organization in charge, but even at Abu Ghraib, nobody with a single stripe actually got in trouble.
Correct.
Correct.
That's unreal.
I mean, really.
It's been the same story from the very beginning.
And, and I think one of the pernicious narratives that exists now is this is so much in the past, let's just move on and keep it behind us.
And this is a narrative that President Obama has embraced from his earliest days in his presidency.
And in, in retrospect, it doesn't seem to me to be a good one because it's not just about getting the bad guys and setting, proving that justice will out and that you can't overstep these lines.
It's not just about that.
It's that if it isn't, if people are not held accountable, then it lies out there as a potential option in the future.
And it's dangerous to think that national security needs to hinge on this technique.
So it has repercussions and they may be repercussions that compromise, not just our legal system, but that compromise our national security.
And that's the issue.
We haven't been able to get to that part of the debate because there's a freeze on asking about accountability.
And it's why it's so important that the summaries of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence come out and sooner rather than later, you know, they've said it will take about a month to get them out.
It'll probably take longer now because it's been being vetted through the White House and through the CIA.
But it's very important that we see that report, that we understand the conversations that went on internal to the intelligence community and the CIA, internal to the government in a larger way, and how this actually happened and where we stand on this issue right now.
Well, you know, I mean, they even say, remember when Obama first came back into power or first came into power in 2009, they said, or at first he was going to publish more pictures and then they decided not to.
And the reasoning was because this would generate blowback against us.
So all the arguing that, well, you know, sometimes the information we get out of the people isn't a lie and it becomes useful.
And they try to quibble about that.
I don't know if they have any actual examples or not.
I don't think I've ever really heard one, but they completely leave out the costs anyway.
What if you, you know, torture somebody into stopping one bombing, but you recruit 10,000 new jihadists against you when they find out about what you did to that guy?
Just, you know, a little ways down the line here.
And there's a real good real world example.
This too was pseudonymous Matthew Alexander, who was an interrogator, a non-torture interrogator, military interrogator in Iraq, said that anytime that he interviewed foreigners who had come to Iraq, Saudis, Libyans, Syrians, Jordanians, et cetera, who had come to Iraq to fight on the side of the Sunni-based insurgency against the Americans, he asked them, well, what made you decide to do this?
It wasn't, well, my religious beliefs became very extreme.
And then I came to fight you.
It was, I saw the pictures of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison.
And I said, you know, I'll be damned if this is going to happen on my watch.
Just the same way Americans joined up when they attacked our towers to go and fight innocent people had nothing to do with it.
They saw those pictures of Abu Ghraib and they went to Iraq to join up in the war on the other side.
And that got American soldiers killed by the, nobody knows the exact numbers, but by quite a lot and helped to grow that entire Sunni jihadist movement in the Sunni provinces of Iraq that is now spread on to Syria and Libya and continued to destabilize the entire Middle East.
Right.
The issue of blowback, which began to be articulated with the opposition to Guantanamo, then to the revelations of Abu Ghraib, went on to become important to the surveillance issue that we're living with today and also to the drone issue.
And eventually all of these things pile up on top of one another.
And the blowback of 10 years ago is now magnified to the extent that it's something we have to deal with on all different levels.
Now, other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer, he was on the show back a couple of weeks ago and he said he has it from unnamed sources, but apparently he sure trusts them that there are more homicides in the CIA torture report.
So far we know for a fact of two, and this guy Gull, I think was one that we already knew about, who was frozen, died of hypothermia at the salt pit torture dungeon outside of Kabul in 02, I think 02.
But other Scott Horton says he hears that there are, I don't know, some number of other homicides in there.
I wonder whether you think that this report, what declassified portion of it is ever released, whether you think that that'll really be enough to make a change and go ahead and look backwards and get some accountability on this issue?
It's a very good question.
And I'm not hopeful about a lot of things, but I am hopeful that this report in whatever shape it's released in is going to confirm things we suspected and tell us things we didn't know.
And what the nature of those things are, I really don't know, but I think they're all going to be important.
Yeah.
Well, and now, so what about, and I'm sorry, there's so little time left, but what about Scahill's work?
And for that matter, Eli Lake, I mean, it seemed plausible.
They both reported on secret American run torture prisons in Somalia.
And of course, in Afghanistan, they've continued to house prisoners outside of the Geneva Conventions, right?
Or at least under Appendix M. This is a very hard thing to get our heads around, particularly the Somalia allegations because of the stance that the Obama administration has taken about what they don't do and ending the torture policy, which I think was a legitimate ban.
I think that he, that the president genuinely believed that.
And so I find it so hard to square that with the reports we've had from Scott and others on what's apparently going on in our name around the world.
And again, we just don't know enough to know what happened.
All right, everybody, that is Karen Greenberg.
She's at TomDispatch.com.
Thank you so much for your time, Karen.
Thank you so much, Scott.
And you can find her piece again today, y'all, at Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back with David Rhoad on Ukraine right after this.
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