01/15/15 – Jason Leopold – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager who provides his subscribers with a very real window into his investments, updating them on every move he makes in the markets.
Right now, Mike's anticipating a bear and is dumping all his stocks while the gettin' is good, investing instead in gold and the commodities.
Protect your assets and learn the wise ways of the markets, WallStreetWindow.com.
And check out Mike Swanson's great contribution to the history of the rise of the American empire and the war state, available at ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
All right, next up is our friend Jason Leopold.
He's a journalist over at Vice News, actually News.
Vice.com.
And we got a few different things to talk about here.
First of all, Guantanamo issues.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
Great to be back with you, Scott.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So, how Guantanamo became America's interrogation battle lab?
Well, how did it?
This is a new report by Seton Hall University Law School Center for Policy and Research.
And the revelations, I want to make note that they're not new.
We've heard this for quite some time, that it was a battle lab.
But it goes into much deeper detail than a report by the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2009, which documented some statements by former military officials who said that in 2002, when Guantanamo was being set up, it was being set up as, quote, a battle lab.
What the battle lab means is that the interrogation techniques that the detainees at Guantanamo were being subjected to were experimental in nature.
They were going to, that these interrogation techniques and the data, the data, that's an important word here, that the military officials or military personnel had obtained as to how these detainees would respond to these interrogation techniques, then found its way over to Bagram and notoriously Abu Ghraib.
So Guantanamo was the battle lab where experiments were performed on detainees.
And that's what this report detailed in using government documents to detail that.
And it goes into the, how joint task, this joint task force was put together that was responsible for not so much the detention mission, but responsible for the interrogation side.
And it's revelatory when you think about what Guantanamo is now and how we have Republicans who unveiled a bill earlier this week saying that Guantanamo should remain open.
And they're relying upon these recidivism details to say that the detainees in Guantanamo are, not just, you know, they're claiming that they're terrorists, but they're going out and rejoining the fight.
Now the White House has taken issue with the, with the data that the Republicans have used.
But what's most important about this is that they're relying on intelligence about these detainees, which was obtained many, many years ago in this battle lab environment through coercive means and through torture.
So it's, what remains unclear is that whether any of these detainees were actually ever involved in terrorist activity to begin with.
And certainly I don't mean all of them, but, but some of them.
Right.
Now.
Okay.
So quite a few things to go back over.
Oh, and let me just point, let me just point out, Scott, that report that my story was based on was, was written by a former Guantanamo guard named Joseph Hickman, Joe Hickman, former staff sergeant at Guantanamo.
He was a lead investigator on this.
So he provided some unique insight into the operation at Guantanamo, and he is also the former staff sergeant who was at Guantanamo in 2006 when three detainees allegedly committed suicide.
He's, he's the author of a new book called Murder at Camp Delta that goes into details as to, as to why they were not suicides and in fact murder.
Right.
And he's the star witness for the other Scott Horton's work in Harper's magazine, Guantanamo suicides and two or three different follow-up pieces since then.
And so that's interesting that I think other Scott Horton started working based off of a Seton Hall study.
And then, so I guess as a result of that original investigation, now Hickman has associated himself with Seton Hall in order to investigate Guantanamo Bay even further.
Exactly.
And it, it, it obviously provides him with a platform to look into these details further.
And as I noted, the, the Senate Armed Services Committee put out a very important report back in 2009 where they looked at the treatment of detainees in custody of the U.S. military.
And that meant at Abu Ghraib, at Bagram and at Guantanamo.
And they went into some detail about the experimental nature of the techniques at Guantanamo.
But this report, this new report that was released last week on the anniversary, we're now at the 13th anniversary of Guantanamo, goes into much greater detail and provides a snapshot as to how this facility really was all about, it provides a convincing case, if you will, that this was a, a, an experimental facility as opposed to a detention facility just to hold the quote, worst of the worst.
Right.
Yeah.
Importantly, it's their term.
Colonel John Custer, as you write in your article here, his term, America's battle lab for experimenting on tortures here.
And now, so now let's see, when you talk about, you know, most of these guys don't have a damn thing to do with terrorism anyway.
That more or less that excludes the ones, well, most of the ones, I guess we don't know everything about all of them, but most of the ones that the CIA was holding up through 2006, who may have actually had something to do with Al-Qaeda.
That was kind of the proof that the rest of the guys there were a bunch of nobodies.
Was that anybody who was anybody was being held by the CIA, not by the military at Guantanamo Bay, but being held in, in Poland or Lithuania or Morocco or Thailand, or God knows where else.
Ships at sea, Diego Garcia and these black sites.
And so, but one exception that might be, and I capitalize might there would be this guy Katani who they said was the 20th hijacker.
But I'm confused, Jason, do you know whether he was in the custody of the CIA down at Guantanamo or whether he was in the custody, because they did have that black site.
That's where the murders took place at Penny Lane Camp, no.
But was it the CIA that was doing all this experimenting, Mitchell and Jessen?
Or this is basically Donald Rumsfeld playing me too, and he's got his own guys experimenting like the CIA trying to come up with the best methods for torturing people here.
Sure.
This was the military.
As far as we know, what the documents show, what the evidence shows thus far is that this was the military.
The military was putting together a parallel program at the same time that the CIA was putting together their program.
So the techniques, and we've spoken about this, Scott, fear, survival, evasion, resistance, escape, the so-called reverse engineering of the survival techniques taught to US military personnel on how to resist torture was adopted by the CIA and at the same time was adopted by the military.
In 2002, when the high-value detainees were being subjected to these techniques, Al-Qahtani was also being subjected to the same techniques using the same means, or the fear had informed that.
What's also notable, it's gone somewhat unreported, is that Ali Soufan, who was the former FBI special agent, who was present at the black site in Thailand when Abu Zubaydah was being tortured by the CIA, and he left the black site at the CIA in 2002, well, that summer he went to Guantanamo to interrogate Al-Qahtani.
So this question comes up as to, well, we know what Al-Qahtani was subjected to, but why didn't Ali Soufan apparently object to that?
Very interesting question right there, and I'm sorry, that's where we've got to stop for this segment.
When we get back, more with Jason Leopold, and we've got other stories to cover here, drone strike stories, and oh no, American assassination.
We'll be right back with the great Jason Leopold, news.vice.com.
Hey, Al Scott here for MyHeroesThink.com.
They sell beautiful seven-inch busts of libertarian heroes, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, and Harry Brown.
These finely crafted statues from MyHeroesThink.com make excellent decorations for your desktop at work, bookends for your shelves, or gifts for that special individualist in your life.
They're also all available in colors now, too.
Of course, gold, silver, bronze.
Coming soon.
Hayek, Hazlitt, Carlin.
Use promo code Scott Horton and save $5 at MyHeroesThink.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm talking with Jason Leopold.
He's writing for news.vice.com, and yeah, talking about Guantanamo here, the battle lab.
It's an important point that you mentioned there, Jason, about how the torture program, the CIA and the military torture program at Guantanamo Bay migrated to Afghanistan and then maybe started there at the same time, and then from there kind of migrated to Iraq.
It kind of became a general order that no one that you abduct in any circumstance is protected by any kind of law.
You can do what you like with them.
Matthew Alexander was on the show the other day.
Tony Camerino is his real name, the former interrogator in the Iraq war.
He said he was authorized, they were all authorized to beat the living hell out of these guys.
I don't know whatever limit may have been placed on them, but they were basically to a man at the sergeant level and lower authorized, gloves off, do what you feel like to these guys.
That whole lawlessness of the theory of power being implemented by George Bush and Dick Cheney at the time is a whole huge thing, so I'd like for you to address exactly how that happened if you could a little bit more, but then also if you could talk about what sort of experiments are we talking about here anyway?
What were they doing to these guys, and what was it exactly that they were figuring out or attempting to figure out?
Sure.
Well, first of all, let me answer the last question that you asked.
In terms of experiments, they were trying to collect data.
They were trying to figure out at what point these detainees would break and give up whether they believed it was intelligence or just say whatever they wanted them to say.
These experiments, and we've discussed this before in past shows, the use of mesloquine.
Mesloquine is an anti-malarial drug.
It's a drug that has an LSD type side effect.
It now has a black box warning.
They were given, every detainee that arrived at Guantanamo, even if they were, no matter where they were from and even though the majority of them were from countries where there was no malaria, they were given massive doses of this medication and then isolated for about a month and observed to see what the response would be.
They were subjected to, we know, hot and cold and loud music and battering of their senses to get them to a point where they would just completely break down and say whatever it is that the military or intelligence officials wanted them to say.
Now, obviously, there will be some intelligence officials that will dispute that this was the case, but it was very clear from the government's own document that some of this was improvised.
Some of these techniques and other techniques were put together or were used in a way that has never been used before.
That alone made it an experiment.
We've certainly seen that with the CIA.
They were winging it on a lower level too, right?
I remember they were talking about, I forget now who it was a few years ago, who admitted that, yeah, they would sit around and talk about it.
They watched Jack Bauer on 24 the night before and they got some new ideas and these are lower ranking people.
They're totally just winging it.
We can, you know, let's just.
The lower ranking people are the ones that are the ones that for the most part were held accountable if that's the case, but as you noted, they were getting their orders from way up top, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz even.
They wanted to get, these are the folks that wanted to get what they call intelligence to make their case for a war against the law.
So what they were interested in was not so much gaining actionable intelligence to thwart a pending attack, but they were interested in gaining information through any means necessary to justify what their plans that were already in place were.
And they presented that evidence to the United Nations Security Council, to members of Congress, so then they could go in to Iraq and elsewhere and there would be regime change.
So the, and that's important because that's actually what the CIA report as well notes is that the intelligence, they call it intelligence, but it was used to justify these invasions.
So the thing to keep in mind is that we're still learning about this.
We're still 13 years later discovering what really went on there, just as we're discovering how these detainees were killed.
Yeah, as controversial as what you just said sounds, as far as whether it's true or not, it's not controversial.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's right-hand man at the time, confirmed as much on this show again, just what, two, three weeks ago, that yes, in fact, at first they were looking for are we going to be hit again, but very quickly they realized no and got over that and turned to what do you know about Saddam?
You want me to quit hurting you?
Say the name Saddam.
Give me anything.
You know, I, and I'm glad that you brought the controversial aspects of this because I've been reporting this for quite some time, Scott, and it was often met with quite a bit of skepticism.
Here we are, you know, many years later and now we see these government documents being released and it certainly confirms that this was the case.
Speaking of Lawrence Wilkerson, many years ago, he put together a sworn declaration in the case of a Guantanamo detainee.
And Colonel Wilkerson said that the vast majority of detainees who were held at Guantanamo, he later learned, were innocent.
And the fact that they were innocent was known to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George Bush, but it was justified if it supported their sort of larger war on terror.
And it's interesting in what he said in this declaration, because if you go back to what Dick Cheney said on one of these Sunday talk shows, after the Senate's report on the CIA torture program was revealed, he was confronted with one of the revelations in the report, which was that the CIA had a detainee in custody, and it was the wrong detainee, and this detainee ended up was killed.
And Dick Cheney was asked about that, and Dick Cheney said, well, he was okay with it if it sort of supported their overall mission.
He had no problem with that.
So it really does confirm what Lawrence Wilkerson said, and obviously shows that this was not the story that the American people were told, that we're trying to stave off pending attacks.
There was no ticking time bomb here, Scott.
That's what's important to note.
Right.
And it's interesting, too, I used to have both these soundbites lined up together somewhere, but Dick Cheney's definition of what we must do to keep America safe is George W. Bush's exact definition of what is terrorism.
They are willing to kill innocent people in order to, and do anything in order to achieve their objective, and that's the exact terminology that Cheney uses in describing his own decision and describing the Bush administration's policy of why it is that they commit the crimes that they commit and do the things they do, because we must do anything to achieve our objective, even if it means, as you just noted, he admitted when specifically asked, killing innocent people, people who he acknowledges were not even the right guy they were trying to not kill maybe.
Right.
And I'd like to also point out that earlier this week, when Senate Republicans unveiled sweeping new legislation to try and block the transfer, continued transfer of detainees out of Guantanamo, Kelly Ayotte, the Republican from New Hampshire, during a news conference, she made this remarkable statement.
And she said, the primary responsibility of our government is to keep the American people safe.
And she was speaking in terms of Congress, which is not the primary responsibility of Congress.
I think we've all taken our civics lessons, and we know that that's not their primary responsibility.
But it's part of this sort of larger theme, which you just talked about with Dick Cheney and other officials.
So this issue with Guantanamo is so political.
It's not about these detainees, quote, rejoining the fight.
Very few of them have.
It's much bigger than that.
And what's also interesting, as I pointed out in my report this week, on that legislation, is that it's not just that they want to keep Guantanamo open, or excuse me, it's not just that they don't want these detainees to be transferred, they want to keep Guantanamo open.
They even say, we don't have an interrogation program, or at least that we know about, or that the senators claim that they didn't know about.
So they want Guantanamo to be, to continue to be this battle lap, in a sense.
And Lindsey Graham said that, and other senators said that as well, that when this administration captures suspected terrorists, there's nowhere to send them.
They're not being interrogated for the time that they should be interrogated.
And so I believe that their efforts to stop the transfer of detainees is more to keep Guantanamo open so the next president, perhaps if it's a Republican, will continue to put detainees there.
Yeah.
Well, Hillary or Jeb.
And you know, the irony here is, and maybe there's a counter-argument to this, but I've never heard it.
It seems to me if the president can start a war in Libya on his own say-so, he can sure as hell close down a military prison.
He's the commander-in-chief, he can order those soldiers to move, and they have to move.
Sure.
So that's it.
Close down the prison, and put them on a boat to Miami, and then Eric Holder will figure out what the hell to do with them when they land in Miami.
But Guantanamo's closed, because I say so, is absolutely within the power of the president, even according to the old constitution that nobody even goes by anymore.
He's got that authority.
Sure.
To his credit, five detainees were released last night, Yemeni detainees.
It's notable that they were Yemenis because the Yemenis have not been moved.
They make up the majority of the detainees at Guantanamo.
So it's clear that the administration is now, maybe many years too late, is starting to move on these efforts, and that it was done one day after Congress received, or these Republican members of Congress unveiled this legislation.
We're down to 122 now.
Well, I hope they have a real fight about it, because it's just crazy.
And when George W. Bush said he was in favor of closing it, that ought to be all the argument that Obama needs political cover on the right, that he needs to go ahead and do it.
But I see what you mean, though.
And I'm sorry, because I basically lied when I promised I would let you go on time today.
So go ahead, Jason.
I appreciate it, man.
Well, it's always good to talk with you, Scott.
Thanks so much.
Thank you again.
That's the great Jason Leopold, y'all.
He's got to go sue the government for documents some more.
That's what he does all day long there, news.vice.com.
What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing war with Syria last summer?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran right now?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
Why doesn't the president force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
The Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and educating the people about what's really at stake in the Middle East.
Help support their important work at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it.
You probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at darrenscoffee.com.
Darren Merian is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darrenscoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and you get free shipping.
Darrenscoffee.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or a peacenik?
Do you live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world, Iran, central banking, political realignment, and well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out scotthorton.org slash speeches for some examples and email me, scott at scotthorton.org for more information.
See you there.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
The War State Swanson examines how presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
This nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone.
We are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.