10/07/16 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing the great Kelly B.
Vallejos, regular writer for the American Conservative Magazine, and notably, historically right about everything she ever wrote about Afghanistan, that's for sure.
And a lot of other things to former writer for antiwar.com.
And this one is in the American Conservative.
It's called The Return of Torture.
CIA and Congress oppose Trump's push, but the public may not.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Kelly?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me again.
Very happy to have you here.
And well, happy to see you writing about this subject and in the American Conservative Magazine, where conservatives can see it because as you show in the article, it's a documented fact conservatives are worse on torture than liberals and other creatures, although not much worse because of how bad liberals are to not because of how good conservatives are in any way.
But you've got what some kind of super duper majority, I think on the right 85% say that they support torture right now.
Is that right?
Yeah, and it's, you know, I mean, this is all it all comes down to the politicized politicization of, you know, national security issues.
So when you're polling people, and they and they identify as Republican, or conservative, they're not, they're not identifying as American conservative, conservatives, or libertarian conservatives, they're identifying with the sort of Rush Limbaugh, you know, Republican establishment, you know, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Republicanism that defined, you know, our war era of the last decade.
And so when put to the question, they say, sure, we need to torture people and drop bombs and do everything we have to do to, you know, defend America.
So I'm not really surprised at that response, because I don't see those people as the kind of conservative that maybe you and I might identify with or recognize.
Yeah, well, and, you know, conservatism in the 1990s was no wonderful thing, as far as I could tell.
But certainly the Karl Rove, George W. Bush legacy is one of, you know, it's like the it's basically the Robert, the Roger Ailes model, which is, I think, Bush even said, you can fool some of the people all the time.
And those are the ones you want to concentrate on.
And then what he was underestimating, misunderestimating was that all the rest of the right would race to be just as foolish, you know, rather than be left behind.
I guess.
And then you get in it and everyone seems to get and not you and I, of course, and, and the conservatives, American conservative, but they, they find themselves having to check a box like the litmus test.
So if you identify with this, you know, right of center republicanism, conservative republicanism, then therefore you have to be this, you have to feel this way or take this position on interrogation and war and, and, and, and using, you know, harsh interrogation tactics against terrorists.
You know, these are the first principles of conservatism now.
Right, you know, and this happens, and particularly at election time, you know, we're in and this is why, you know, in many cases, you know, and, you know, in addition to so many other reasons that the party candidates don't do well, because, you know, Americans feel like that they have to check boxes in terms of who they support.
And when it comes to Republicans and conservatives, and you've seen this with, with Ron Paul, you know, back in the day where there would be all these guffaws on the stage, the Republican primary debates, because how dare he opposed the war policy, because that just isn't the box that they even booed him when he quoted Jesus.
He got there quoted from the Sermon on the Mountain, South Carolina, and they booed him near off the stage.
Yeah, so good times.
Well, and so the Democrats here in the poll, 53% of them are for torture at this point.
So break down all the reasons why you think that number is so high when they supposedly are the civil rightsy people, you know?
Yeah.
And I mean, I interviewed Catherine Hawkins from the Constitution Project in the piece, and, you know, she made a good point.
A lot of it depends on how the questions are asked.
And a lot of these questions relating to interrogation and torture over the years have said, you know, been something like this, you know, if you, would you support using harsh interrogation techniques or torture if you felt like it was going to save the lives of Americans, you know, almost like this sort of 24 scenario, like would you torture this terrorist if you knew that, you know, a bomb might be going off in, you know, Manhattan and within hours, maybe not that extreme, but a lot of times when these questions are posed, it's either right after an event like San Bernardino, you know, or where, you know, there was this suggestion that maybe, you know, the killer's wife might have known something, you know, and just the hint of that, like, maybe we could have stopped this from happening if we had these particular tools, then maybe so many people wouldn't have died.
And I think when you poll people right after events like that tend to elicit, you know, responses like, sure, let's just do it.
Right.
And meanwhile, they never do the poll.
They never do the poll in the middle of the week to just see how it is at a regular time.
You're right.
It's always in reaction to an event right in the middle of everybody being busy reacting.
And then, of course, as you say to the way the, and you quote the expert in here saying Hawkins talking about how it's all in the question.
And, you know, it's surprising really sometimes, isn't it?
Just how loaded the questions can be when you would think that the pollsters would be trying.
I mean, they're just people, but you would think that they would be trying to form these poll questions in a way that don't push so hard.
At least, you know, when we're talking about Gallup and this kind of thing, not political pollsters doing a push poll, but one that's supposed to be just a real gauge of opinion.
They really do say, yeah, but what if it was to save everyone in your city and you only had to torture the one guy one time?
Well, and, you know, and, and to be fair, you know, I came across a few polls, you know, cause I, you know, I had tried to go over as many as possible, you know, and there were a couple outliers where the pollsters would ask specifically about like particular techniques, you know, like hitting and slapping and waterboarding and slamming people and sleep deprivation.
I think when you get down to that level, people get a little squeamish and they say, no, of course I don't, I don't support that.
So I think I, you know, I'll be honest with you.
Um, I think my story, I think, you know, that is one angle, like where the people stand on torture at any given time might, you know, might support a president who wants to return to torture policies, uh, because the American public tends to be kind of fickle on this issue.
And right now they're probably, you know, when I wrote this story, I think it was, it was after one of the myriad mass shootings that, you know, occurred over the summer.
And so that you were getting a sense that the public would support a Donald Trump who was actually calling for torture at the time when I wrote the story.
Um, but I think the more important, uh, angle of the story is, you know, what would these two presidential candidates do if elected to office?
And is there a climate in Washington, Washington to actually support, you know, a return to torture?
And what I found that there really isn't the stomach for it anymore.
I mean, we can talk about the reasons why, um, but I think the last 10 years and the fight over the treatment of detainees and Gitmo and, you know, uh, Dick Cheney and his secret policies, you know, I think, I think people, there's some fatigue there on the policy side.
And I don't think that there's, there's any rush to, to, to get harsher right now, at least right now.
Although, yeah, I mean, then again, if we're talking about president Trump and he insists, and there is another attack here in Europe, whatever one with a double digit body count or, or worse, uh, then I, it was interesting to read the quotes that you have there of, um, especially Michael Hayden, who, uh, everyone remembers nine 11 happened on his watch when he was the director of the national security agency, CIA and FBI always get blamed for not doing their jobs that day, but where was the NSA?
Nobody ever even criticizes them at all, except for James Bamford.
But that was, you could just as well blame nine 11 on him as any other person in government, as long as we're at it.
But his quote here is, oh, well, boo, who, you know, when, uh, people are creating these star chamber persecutions of us, CIA heroes, cause he was later head of CIA then, uh, well, that makes us not want to do it.
And that was the way he framed it was that, you know, to have the Senate investigate him as a star chamber, a lawless trial, um, and, and the poor persecuted CIA officers are now terrified to do the right thing and torture people was basically the way he was, uh, you know, framing it.
But, you know, I wonder really how true that is when after all, everybody at the CIA did get away with it.
Nobody got in any trouble whatsoever.
I mean, the, the latest is that Jose Rodriguez is going to have to give a deposition in a civil suit, but I mean, come on, this is, I think they only did that just to show how cleanly everybody got away with this from the torturers to the lawyers, to the principals in the Bush administration who knew they're breaking the law when they ordered this in the first place.
So, yeah, I mean, as, as always, the truth is somewhere between the line, somewhere deep in, inside, you know, and any explanation or declaration like that.
And, um, and that's why I said there, there doesn't seem to be the stomach for it, but the reasons why are somewhat elusive because I would imagine that there's some fatigue with the investigations.
There's the ongoing Senate committee investigation into torture.
We're still getting revelations about it's ongoing.
Well, I mean, technically I think it's still open because open in the sense where they had sent the report, the final report was sent to all the agencies.
And now they're trying to make sure that the agencies are actually reading them.
And there's been a flurry of letters from the Senate committee, intelligence committee to these various agencies saying, have you read the report?
Um, you know, is there a response?
You know, we want to make sure the CIA actually dakenly destroyed their copy of the report.
So I say it's open in a sense that there really hasn't been any, any closure.
Um, well, and that's such an important point, right?
I can't remember.
Uh, maybe it was Gelman in the post reported that there is a copy of this almost 7,000 page Senate torture report that's sitting in a safe at department of justice headquarters where no one will read it because they know if they do, they have to start arresting people for committing felonies.
They're afraid to look at it at a FOIA request as well.
So it's deniability, plausible deniability.
Like, I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't have, I haven't seen it.
I don't have it, you know?
And, and the other, the other point is that there's still a big struggle to get the complete report even published or in the hands of journalists at all.
So all we have is the, what is it?
600 or 800, uh, uh, page summary, um, which is damning enough, but the 7,000 words, 7,000 pages rather are still out there that God knows what's in it.
So, I mean, I'm not wanting to give props to a congressional committees for their work.
I mean, very rarely do you see a committee that actually produces something, but they produce something here.
And I think that they were, you know, the senators were taken aback by what they found because what they found was a lot of egregious torture happening that they were told wasn't happening during the war.
And then there, there find out like a lot worse that was happening than they had believed.
And that not only that, but that they were lied to because all along the CIA was saying that they were, that the torture or the techniques rather, uh, were eliciting information like actionable intelligence and what the report was telling them that it didn't.
And so they were steamed on a couple of different levels.
Um, and so I think they did good work.
It's just, will anything come of it other than, you know, scared bureaucrats afraid to torture again?
I don't know.
I don't know if the lessons have been learned and I don't know if we can trust that torture or, you know, whatever you want to call it is happening right now, isn't happening right now in places like Afghanistan or even, or even, you know, Iraq and Syria and Somalia and all these other hot spots we are in, in, in North Africa.
I just, um, I'm working on a story now about private contractors, um, you know, working in, uh, on, on the U.S. behalf in Iraq and in Syria and Afghanistan, it was almost sort of got inured to the, to the, the fact that, um, you know, there's this spike in, in Afghanistan, there's a three to one ratio of private contractors there.
And they're also operating in places where politicians want to keep the whole boots on the ground level down.
And so when they do that, they continue to put us contractors in there because they don't count quote unquote as our boots on the ground.
And I'm doing a story on whether that'll just keep increasing because putting U.S. forces in places like Syria is such a hot potato right now that we'll just keep putting contractors out there.
We don't know how many contractors in Syria, but the daily beast had reported over the summer that there was a Pentagon contract bid had gone, a no bid contract had gone out for $10 million to a subsidiary intelligence company, you know, for intelligence work overseas, including Syria.
So, you know, my sources say that could mean it could mean interrogation.
It could mean just plain intelligence, human intelligence.
We don't know what it is, but let's just say that, that, that the mention of that bid is disappeared from the web.
So I don't know if we'll ever know and call for the Pentagon and that and khaki have gone on and returned for me.
But yeah.
So what if, what if we are putting private interrogator, private military and interrogators back into the war zone like we did in Iraq?
And, you know, khaki was involved in the Apple Grabe scandal, you know, so this stuff could be going on under the radar while people like Hayden are telling reporters, oh, we'll never go back to that again, because we don't have the stomach for it.
So.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
Well, you know, and we know from Jeremy Scahill's reporting, you mentioned Somalia there that the CIA quote unquote helps the quote unquote Somali government run the torture prison, a dungeon really, beneath Mogadishu there.
And then forgive me because, you know, really to quote Eli Lake as a source for a thing, but dammit, it confirms my bias when Eli Lake says that, yeah, there's another secret CIA torture prison in Somalia too, up there in Somaliland as well.
So make what you will of that, that it's an Eli Lake story, but it didn't seem to be tied to any anti-Iran agenda in the article or anything like that.
For the first time ever.
Well, since he lied us into war with Iraq for Iran accidentally, but he didn't do that.
Now, so here's the thing, though, the Bagram prison.
Well, let me ask you this, because we can go back to Bagram in Afghanistan.
You mentioned Afghanistan.
I want to go back to that.
But what about actual CIA black sites?
As far as we know now, is there any reporting that says that they really do still have these things?
Would that thing in Somalia not count?
Because that supposedly is a Somali thing.
Or that would be a strong indication that Obama did really did continue the Bush policy of letting the CIA kidnap and detain and then treat people who knows what way, at least within the torture rules of the rewritten Army Field Manual.
But I wonder whether, you know, maybe we just all assume too quickly that when Bush shut down all the black sites in 06, that they all were shut down, and that they all stayed shut down.
And that Obama, you know, it's almost like a lure, right, that Obama decided, well, he's just going to kill all the Al Qaeda guys instead of capturing them.
That way, he doesn't have to deal with the torture question as much, or that kind of thing.
But I don't know if we really know that that's true.
We don't really know that it's true.
And I think depending on you and who you talk to, you know, some, some, you know, some folks would say, you know, there, there, there, there's no evidence that the CIA is still operating these black sites because of, you know, you know, Obama's, you know, edict or executive order, which banned, banned torture and black sites.
Then there's others who say that it's still going on.
But there's just no transparency, obviously.
So it's, it's really difficult for journalists to really get at this.
I mean, there was a story that came out about a week ago, about two ex-CIA prisoners.
I don't know if you had seen this.
And they were- Oh, yeah, about the electric chair?
Yes.
Now, they were just released last year.
So that's clearly right in the purview of the Obama administration.
The CIA is denied that this ever even happened to these guys.
Although that thing, the part about the electric chair, at least, I think they were talking about the salt pit, which that would have been in the Bush years of earlier experience, unless I'm wrong about that, I guess.
Right.
So I don't have this story in front of me.
I'm not sure how, you know, how long they're- Well, you know, I think we know that, that back in, in 2010 and 11, that, and later than that, maybe, you know, in, into the surge, there was plenty of reporting right about, there's the Bagram prison, but then there's also the wink nudge over the hill, secret Bagram prison, where there's a whole other level of, whether it was CIA or military, I guess I'm not certain exactly who was doing the torturing, but it was Appendix M tortures allowed.
So not the old John Yoo rules, but still sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation and stress positions.
And some of these things that when they passed the law that said you have to stick to the army field manual, they also said, but you got to rewrite the army field manual so that you can still torture people to some degree.
Yeah, exactly.
But I guess we don't know.
Do we know if that prison, if the Bagram prison has been fully transferred over to the Afghans now or not?
I thought it was.
I guess.
I mean, if there's only 10,000 American soldiers there now, then that's probably too many to be running or not enough to be running that prison too.
Yeah.
Right.
But, you know, you raise a good point that I noted in the story was, you know, under the Obama administration, the transfer of detainees to countries with, you know, poor human rights records has, has continued.
Oh, the extraordinary rendition stuff, right?
Yeah.
Because he, because his band didn't, didn't address the practice of rendition.
So I think that there are, because even the Bush administration said that, oh no, we would never export someone to a country where we knew that they would be tortured.
So Obama didn't even really change that.
If anything, he just said, oh yeah, we're sticking by that same standard.
Yeah.
There, I just think that there is a real muddy gray area that things could be occurring.
And I'm sure Jeremy scale is all over this himself.
He's done, like you mentioned, some amazing reporting about what had been going on in Somalia.
I don't know.
And, you know, that whole issue of the Pentagon putting out bids for intelligence services for Syria, that doesn't even address what, you know, the CIA might be doing over there, you know, and who they might be putting in there.
Well, if anything, they're renditioning Al Qaeda terrorists from around the world and bringing them to Syria where they can be heroes and moderate rebels and serve America's interests.
You just don't know.
And Donald Trump has sort of lowered the volume on talk about torture.
I think it hit its peak over the summer, maybe June after, you know, I think there was the bombing in Turkey was the last time he was really, you know, hot and talking about this publicly where he talked about, well, we'll just have to change, you know, somebody asked him, well, you know, are you going to, are you going to break the law?
Because really there's no torture allowed, you know, something very broad brush like that.
And he said, well, I won't break the law, but I'll work to change it, you know, meaning, you know, Institute new torture policy.
He hasn't talked too much about that recently on the campaign trail.
I don't know.
I think you're right, Scott.
I think if there is a major terrorist attack overseas, another one, you know, that you would see some chest thumping again, and probably have some support from the usual suspects in Congress.
But I think, I don't know.
And to be honest, I don't think Hillary Clinton would be much different on this issue.
She's a hawk.
Yeah.
Hey, you were just talking about her extraordinary rendition program, right?
Yeah.
I mean, she doesn't shy away from this.
She's the secretary of state in the first Obama, first four Obama years, uh, obviously involved in this very stuff.
Yeah.
So, um, I guess, you know, I think what this is all saying, um, since we have all these question marks flying around, um, particularly on where the country is going, a lot of it is, we don't know because they're not addressing these issues at all.
And the debates on the campaign trail and their speeches, they don't talk about drones.
They don't talk about, um, Gitmo.
They don't talk about the war.
I mean, at any granular level at all.
I mean, um, very, we, we, we hear about whether or not to have a no fly zone, you know, uh, that's about it.
And whether or not you're going to put, they're going to put more boots on the ground.
Um, but we don't, we don't know.
We don't know how the next president, the next white house is going to address, you know, um, killer drones, for example, or, you know, whether to close Gitmo and, you know, how, how we're true, how we treat detainees and how long we keep them without charge.
It's just not been an issue that either candidate has wanted to address.
But then again, they haven't addressed it in the previous two or three president presidential elections either.
They just, that seems to just get dropped off the table, which is great for the Obama administration because it was able to carry on this sort of like manhunt policy, you know, for all these years with no accountability to the press.
Yeah.
I guess Hillary would just do the same.
Yep.
Well, you know, I think the real problem with Trump and Hillary has said before, she told the New York daily news, Oh, what a ticking time bomb scenario.
Yeah, sure.
You got to torture people if you got to kind of thing.
So she's willing to flip flop around on that.
But with Trump, you can tell that he's just never considered he doesn't even have it within him to be able to consider that weight.
What makes us, you know, supposedly enlightenment, Western civilization here is that we're too good to torture even the are very worst enemies.
And that's part of what makes us so great, right?
Not just that we live between Canada and Mexico.
But that we're the kind of where torture is the kind of thing that barbarians do.
And barbarians are what we're not, or at least we're striving to not be your way.
He doesn't even think this he go, he says, literally, hey, if they can cut people's heads off, how come we can't?
It's all about the red meat for him.
I mean, like, I don't think he's considered it the issue at all in any depth.
I think what he says what he thinks is, the audience wants to hear and the audience, but that's what he wants to hear, too.
That's why he that's, that's why it's his good guess as to what they want to hear is because that's what he would want to hear politicians say, let's cut their heads off.
Yeah, no.
Oh, absolutely.
And I, I am no fan of Senator john McCain.
But on this one issue, he has been consistent.
I mean, for all the obvious reasons, he was a POW.
But he has always been consistent on the torture issue.
And, you know, thanks to him and others, you know, across the aisle, that they push to have some of these changes made in the National Defense Authorization Act, and they push on the floor of the Senate and in the house.
So, I mean, and he's a Republican of good standing, you know, it doesn't have to be a Republican issue to torture.
It's just that in the spirit of this political climate, it's like, it's all about the red meat.
It's all about being tough.
It's all about law and order.
And there's no gray area.
There's no saying wait, we're better than this.
Or wait, we didn't get any actual actionable intelligence by water by boarding that guy 63 times or however, 80 times.
You know, that's just that there's no time for that sort of like reason in this election.
So they just I think that most of the part they most most of the time they just skip these these issues because they are complicated.
And I think I you know, I think that most Americans really in their heart know that we are better than that.
It's just that we live in such a politicized environment that you have to take sides.
Right?
Yeah, I mean, when Abu Ghraib broke, conservatives, I mean, conservative talk radio in Texas, for example, I don't know what, you know, Rush Limbaugh, I guess, played it down from the beginning.
But a lot of conservative talk radio in Texas was, hey, man, whoa, we don't torture people.
And a lot of these guys are veterans, and they swore oath to the Constitution and this and that they actually know a little bit about this stuff.
And that's one thing that we're not supposed to do.
And then after a couple of weeks, it was like, Okay, I guess.
Damn, right.
We're torturing people is the conservative line.
And so everybody climb on board, and they all climbed on board.
You know, they started out shocked.
They couldn't believe that, you know, but yeah, it was almost like when the evidence was irrefutable, then the spin became Well, what's the problem?
Right?
You know, like, Oh, yeah, sure.
That was just part of the interrogation process.
What's the problem?
These are terrorists.
These are bad guys.
You know, it's important, I think, in your article, where you quote, David Petraeus, of all people being right about something only in a way, I mean, you can tell he doesn't really have wisdom, just knowledge when he says that basically, this is really bad public relations for us.
And the pictures of the Abu Ghraib, you know, tortures from then will never go away.
They live on the internet forever.
And this kind of thing haunts us.
And he's talked about this, you know, in testimony, I think, before Congress a little bit before as well, about how torture undermines America's position in the Middle East.
And, you know, if you just extrapolate that out a little bit more, what he's really saying is, they hate us for our foreign policies, including when we torture them.
Yeah, that's one of the things that they really hate, that motivates them to kill us.
And all you have to do is realize that actually, the 20th century existed before the 21st.
And that America was involved in policies like, for one extraordinary rendition to places like Syria and Egypt, long before the 911 attacks.
This is one of the reasons they hate us in the first place.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a nobody two bit rapist until America's sock puppet king of Jordan tortured him, which turned him into a very serious man who went off to Afghanistan to become a warrior.
And then this Ayman al-Zawahiri, who's the current leader of Al Qaeda and bin Laden's right hand man.
He was a surgeon until he was rounded up in the post Sadat assassination round up in Egypt and tortured, at which point he joined the Islamic Jihad, and ended up joining with Osama to create Al Qaeda.
This is where our enemies come from, is from torturing them.
You know, in fact, they say the same thing about Baghdadi, right, the current leader of the Islamic State, that he was tortured in America's prisons in the Iraq war occupation there.
So, you know, Petraeus, I guess the way he says it is as close to them really catching on as we're going to get.
But I think regular people who hear that could, you know, if they stop and think about it for a minute, you know, if tortures bad public relations, why?
I mean, what are you saying?
They hate us for something other than how good and pure and innocent and wealthy we are.
But what a shame that that's actually as close as you're going to get to that kind of insight in DC is that this is making my occupation a bit more difficult, right?
Yeah.
Well, you know, and David Petraeus is anything but a he is a media public relations maestro.
And something tells me if he was able to keep all this under a lid somewhere, it'd still be going on.
It's just that once it came out, you know, came the lid was off, and the pictures had started her, you know, public relations wise.
Now it's a bad thing.
But I mean, the sad thing is that, you know, he and all our other military leaders are fully on board with what was going on in places like Abu Ghraib until it got out, you know, and it only got out because of a journalist.
And they fought it tooth and nail, as you can recall, during all those investigations.
Right.
Well, and he wasn't, as you point out in the article, he wasn't directly in the chain of command of Abu Ghraib prison.
But he certainly was when he was the general of the entire Iraq war, there was still torture and abuse going on at the hands of the Joint Special Operations Command, including his sidekick McChrystal.
Right, exactly.
So it's the fact that it got out, that became a problem.
Because he knows, he knows the value of the, you know, information operations.
And this was like the worst thing that could have happened in terms of, you know, his, the machinery, the propaganda machine that he had so carefully put into place, you know, to further the agenda of the Iraq war policy, was to have these pictures come out, like you said, they don't go away.
And all the subsequent revelations about his support of the Shia death squads, for example, that doesn't go away either.
And McChrystal and the Joint, you know, the Special Operations, black jails, or whatever you want to call them, torture cells that were operating in Iraq.
I mean, we still fully don't know what's going on, what happened there.
But it doesn't go away.
And so they lost control of the message.
So yeah, he's out there talking against torture.
And that's great.
But he has his own reasons.
He has his own agenda.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for giving us your time again on the show today, Kelly.
It's been great.
Well, thank you, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Always good to talk to you.
That is the great Kelly B. Vallejos.
Everybody can find her at the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
This one is called The Return of Torture.
CIA and Congress oppose Trump's push, but the public may not.
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Trying to get these wars ended.