07/10/14 – Rebecca Gordon – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, y'all, welcome back.
We are back.
It's the show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Rebecca Gordon.
She's the author of Mainstreaming Torture, Ethical Approaches in the Post-911 United States and she's got this new one at Tom Dispatch that'll be running tomorrow on antiwar.com.
It's called A Nation of Cowards and or The 25th Hour, Still Living with Jack Bauer in a Terrified New American World.
Boy.
Welcome to the show, Rebecca.
How are you doing?
I'm doing just great.
Thank you very much.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
So well, I guess bottom line, as long as there's no accountability, we will continue to live in a torture state.
I'm afraid that's absolutely true.
And this is really the crux of what I'm trying to say in the Tom Dispatch article, that we still don't have a full accounting of everything that the United States and its myriad sets of organizations has done in terms of torture since September 11th.
And nobody except for people at the very lowest level has been held accountable for what happened.
And there are any number of people who have pointed out that the responsibility goes to the very highest levels of our government.
And that's the crux of the problem, right?
Is that exactly if it was widespread at the fifth level of CIA officers or something, even if you had to put 10 of them on trial, maybe they would do that.
But when you're talking about putting the entire Bush cabinet in prison for life for torture, it's it's not happening.
It's not happening.
And and they are the guilty ones.
There are the responsible are the guilty ones.
There's no question about it.
And unfortunately, the responsibility doesn't end with the Bush administration.
Not that the Obama administration in any way instigated this torture.
But the reality is that it hasn't stopped.
It's still going on in Guantanamo.
And honestly, we don't know what's happening in other places.
For example, the executive order that Obama signed upon entering office said that the CIA couldn't do any more of these things except for rendition.
They're still allowed to do that.
But it didn't say anything about the Joint Special Operations Command or any of the other myriad of intelligence agencies that are all snarled up together in the NSA.
So honestly, you know, the black sites that the CIA was running are supposed to be closed.
Do you know if they're closed?
I don't know if they're closed.
Does President Obama know if they're closed?
Yeah, I certainly don't know that they are.
I guess there are indications that they still exist somewhere.
I mean, even if they're just doing the kidnapping regime, they still have to land their plane somewhere and base their operations somewhere.
The U.S. has very specifically said that it's going to continue to do what you and Tom and I might call kidnapping and what they call extraordinary rendition.
In other words, picking somebody off the street in one place and sending them to another country where they can use interrogation methods that might not be acceptable in this country.
And the thing that's really so absurd about the whole thing is that, in fact, it's not really about getting information in the first place.
Torture is a really bad way to get actionable intelligence.
And this is a big fight that's going on between the FBI and the CIA, for example.
The FBI is very clear that their methods of gaining the respect and the trust of the people that they're interrogating, you know, while lying to them, is a much more effective way of getting information than torturing people.
Well, it depends on your mission though, right?
Yeah.
It's ultimately not about information.
It's about terrorizing people.
Right.
I mean, if the FBI is trying to figure out, is there a real al-Qaeda plot headed this way?
What might we do to defend from that?
That's one question.
If the CIA is on a mission to collect a lot of anecdotes that could amount to a lot of orange alerts in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, then mission accomplished, right?
Exactly.
And this was really interesting because, it doesn't mention this in the article, but in my book I talk about the fact that one of the main reasons why the torture was ramped up at Guantanamo was specifically because Donald Rumsfeld wanted somebody that they were holding prisoner there, anybody, to establish a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
And when none of the interrogations produced that link, that's when he wrote the famous memo listing the new things that they could do to people.
And that's when things began to ramp up at Guantanamo because they wanted this specific piece of information that wasn't true to be confirmed by somebody under torture.
Right.
Yeah, same thing with Sheik Al-Libi, who they tortured into accusing Saddam of teaching al-Qaeda how to hijack planes and make chemical weapons.
That it was clear that...
Exactly.
They just made it clear to him that, look, if you want the pain to stop, just say Saddam, okay?
Just say this.
Right.
And frankly, the same thing was true with Jose Padilla, the guy who's accused of being the dirty bomber who's now in jail for the rest of his life.
They made him crazy, and he was so crazy, he was cowering in the corner of his cell and talking to people who weren't there in order to get him to agree that he was involved in bringing a dirty bomb into the United States.
And another guy named Mohammed Binyam, he's a British citizen, was sent to Morocco where they tortured him horribly.
And the thing they wanted him to say was that he was working with Jose Padilla on this dirty bomb.
So the torture is, in some ways, about establishing things that aren't true and making them appear true by getting people disabled.
Yeah, and that point always gets obscured in the, how well does it work, ticking bomb scenario and all that kind of stuff is, well, you know, if Dick Cheney tells the CIA, get me some stuff about Saddam, there are ways of getting things.
They can't just make it up out of whole cloth, but they can put the words in the mouth of the torturer, of the tortured.
Exactly.
Sorry.
Exactly.
And that's unfortunately the case.
You know, another thing, though, that I didn't mention in this article that I think is important that we think about is the fact that in addition to torture in the war on terror, torture actually goes on every day in this country, in our jails and prisons.
And this is something that's kind of hidden and clear in plain sight, and it's so common we don't even think about it.
But think about the television shows that you see every night in which the police have some guy that they're sure, and of course, they're always right.
He actually did commit the crime.
They put him in a room and they threaten him.
Unless you tell us the truth about what the crime you did, we're going to send you to Rikers or wherever.
And you know what happens to pretty people like you in jail, right?
The implication is you're going to get raped unless you confess to a crime.
And that is actually a form of torture and it's illegal under the U.N. Convention.
But it happens so commonly that people accept it as a normal plot device in an ordinary television show.
Yeah, it's mostly just a joke.
People accept it as part of your sentence to, hey, if you did the crime, off to rape camp.
Exactly.
And it's very interesting.
In fact, not part of my sentence was the title of a report that Amnesty International did about rape in U.S. prisons in the early 2000s.
And in fact, it's so common that it is part of many, many people's sentence.
And in addition to rape, there is the horror of solitary confinement.
And you know, human beings are social animals.
We go nuts when we are separated from all human contact.
And it happens very quickly.
And there are something upwards of 80,000 people in this country who are in solitary confinement.
In my state, California, there are 30,000.
And among those, not all of them in solitary confinement, 30,000 who were participating in a hunger strike last year against it.
But there are people who have been in solitary for more than three decades.
And the fact that they maintain any kind of of sanity is just a miracle because it makes you crazy.
Yeah.
Well, that was part of the narrative about Abu Ghraib.
That was really right.
That some of the, you know, Charles Grainer and some of these others really had already known how to do this stuff from working at the state pen.
Now, I'm sorry, we got to take this break, but we'll be right back, everybody, with Rebecca Gordon.
Check her out at TomDispatch.com.
One sec.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm on Liberty Radio Network and ScottHorton.org.
Of course, I keep all my archives there.
More than 3,000 of them now, going back to 2003, ScottHorton.org.
And I'm talking with Rebecca Gordon.
She's the author of Mainstreaming Torture, Ethical Approaches in the Post-911 United States.
And there's so many things that you brought up that I want to go back over here to talk about.
I guess, first of all, you mentioned how torture is widespread in American jails.
We could also cite all kinds of, you know, pain compliance measures, as they're called, that cops use on everybody from little kids to old grandmas and everybody in between, and that kind of thing.
But also, there's the question of torture by proxy.
And this is, of course, the history of Latin America.
As you mentioned in your article, it's clearly part of the history of America's war in the Philippines and that kind of thing.
And if you look at, well, the way that, especially you mentioned the Joint Special Operations Command, the special forces above all, but really the whole army now colonizing Africa with an empire of bases there, that this is the kind of thing where, for example, they hire the proxy soldiers in Somalia to run prisons, one exposed by Jeremy Scahill, another exposed by Eli Lake, of all people, as existing in Somalia, where, in effect, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, to varying degrees or whichever responsibility on whichever day, are overseeing these torture prisons run, quote unquote, by the, I love this, Somali National Security Agency.
And so that's really, if you, Iraq, you could say, is an aberration.
Most of the time, America just hires death squads to torture people for us, right?
Right.
And in fact, in Iraq, oddly enough, we did exactly the same thing as in Somalia.
There was a guy who first started his military career in Vietnam under the Phoenix program, which was an assassination and torture program when the U.S. was fighting in Vietnam in the 1970s.
He then went to El Salvador, where he worked with the United States, training the right-wing death squads to do their work.
And I actually have known people in El Salvador who were tortured as a result of that work.
He then shows up with McChrystal in Iraq, where he set up and trained some of the people who are running the prisons, the political prisons, in Iraq today.
And the problem with those is that they are absolutely full of torture.
And I've got another piece about that that's up on the web that you can find.
But the point is that right now, the terrible explosions that we're seeing and the sectarian violence that we're seeing in Iraq, in part, were fueled by the horrible tortures that were done under the Maliki government against Sunni opposition.
And so the story just goes on, and wherever torture is planted, it causes these kinds of problems.
I'm glad you brought up Africa, because I think, you know, Africa is a continent that at least white people in this country don't pay a whole lot of attention to sometimes.
And it's one of the places where the big struggles over resources are happening in the world right now.
It's one of the places where the U.S. and China are essentially competing over very important rare metals that are used in electronics, a lot of which are located in the Congo, and where, as you point out, the United States has several bases, clandestine and open, and where we are doing the kind of training that we have gotten so good at in practicing in everywhere from the Philippines to Greece to Latin America.
Unfortunately, it's a hard problem to unravel, but I honestly believe that we can stop it.
It's not going to be easy, and, you know, the U.S. is a pretty big behemoth, but like any really large organization, it has chinks.
It has places you can drive a wedge, and that's our job to do, to make it stop.
Yeah, absolutely.
I also wanted to say something about, you were talking before the break about Charles Grainer, and you're exactly right, that that whole group of reservists who were running the preliminary part of the quote-unquote interrogation process at Abu Ghraib were from West Virginia, and they were most of them corrections officers in their private lives.
And there's a famous quotation something Grainer wrote home to a family or a friend in which he said, the Christian in me knows it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me loves to see a grown man, and then he used a word I think you can't use on the radio, but urinate on himself.
And that is really sort of the quintessential story of Abu Ghraib.
I love to see a grown man urinate on himself.
And we saw what happened there.
Yep.
Well, now, a few more things there.
First of all, when you talk about Negroponte and his helpers that put together the El Salvador option in Iraq in 2005, that was the big, it was supposed to be the great solution to the problem of the Sunni-based insurgency.
We'll decapitate their leaders, because these Bata Brigade guys, they really know who to kill, and all it ended up doing was causing the civil war and giving legitimacy to Zarqawi as a leader and fighting against him.
Zarqawi, who was a two-bit rapist nobody until he was tortured by America's proxy kingdom in Jordan and then turned into the monster that he ended up becoming.
Yeah, exactly.
And you're exactly right about the El Salvador option and Negroponte.
And of course, he's familiar to me because I spent a bunch of time in the 1980s in Central America.
I lived in Nicaragua in the war zones for six months.
And there I met people who had been captured by the Contra, carried to Honduras, and tortured there by methods that sound very familiar if you listen to what we're doing now.
And they were tortured by the Contra, but there were always in the description some big blonde North American guy in the background.
And of course, what they did was once they had been tortured, they'd been through that, they came back into Nicaragua and were part of the Contra force, and they turned around and did the same thing to other people.
And this is important because it's one of the ways that torturers are made.
They are made by being brutalized themselves.
And you see this in a funny way in basic training for ordinary soldiers in the U.S.
What basic training is all about is taking people, breaking them, and remaking them in the mold that you want.
And as a result of having survived that, there's a feeling of eliteness.
You are part of a special crew now because you've been through this, and the reward is you get to turn around and do it to other people.
It's a terrifying thing.
And something else I want to talk about that you mention in your article that's so important, Rebecca, is the TV.
And you mentioned it before about the cops saying, admit it, tell us where the body is, or whatever.
Right.
But especially, it seems like every cop show now, the premise of every single one of them, not just Jack Bauer and all that, but all of them, is that the cops must break the law that supposedly restricts how they're allowed to operate in order to get whatever it is done.
And that goes for any kind of illegal search or brutality or anything else.
It's like they only exist to prove that one point, that any restriction that the law places on the cops is only going to get you killed.
And we just can't tolerate this kind of liberal namby-pamby crap anymore.
And that's on every episode of every different kind of Law & Order that they've ever produced, you know?
You're absolutely right about that.
And it's, you know, I have a few friends who work in the court system, and they say another part of it is this whole idea that asking to have an attorney, which is a constitutional right, is a guaranteed proof that you are guilty.
And that the whole purpose, once you've broken the law and captured the person and got them in there, is to do anything you can to prevent them from asking for the thing that they have every right to, which is a lawyer, to help them through this stuff.
But yes, you're absolutely right that the premise is that there is the noble, loner, hero cop who takes the risk himself because he knows that if he's caught something terrible, he'll lose his badge, whatever.
And he answers to a higher power, a higher law, than mere human law, right, in order to do the right thing.
And this is a theme, a plot device that you see over and over again.
And it's interesting, in the world of philosophical ethics, it actually has a name.
It's called the problem of dirty hands.
And some famous philosophers have actually given it a whole, they've sort of dignified it with this whole picture of the noble leader, and they often use the example of torture, the noble leader who, in order to save his people, has to do something that's going to put a permanent stain on his soul and maybe condemn him to hell or something.
But he does it because he's a brave, heroic creature, and he turns around and tortures someone because that's what's required.
And boy, isn't that the story of the American government employee, unsung hero.
Thank you so much for your time, Rebecca, and for your great writing here.
I'll look forward to your book.
All right, Scott, thank you very much.
Take care.
That's Rebecca Gordon, everybody.
She's at Tom Dispatch today.
We'll be running her on antiwar.com tomorrow.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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