12/09/14 – The Other Scott Horton – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org is where I keep all the interview archives, more than 3,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
And by the way, 2003 through 2005 work again, too.
Next up is the other Scott Horton, and I don't know why I didn't think of this before Scott, but how come we don't do it, we both go by our middle names and nobody wants to have their first initial because that sounds ridiculous.
So it's not like we're theater actors or something.
But what we could do is you're Scott Horton, Esquire, and I'm Scott Horton, JC, for junior college.
Right?
I'll go however you want, but I'd love to have the transcript say Scott Horton colon Scott Horton colon.
Yeah, yeah, those are fun.
It's the other Scott Horton, Scott Horton, Esquire, the heroic international human rights lawyer, anti-torture crusader, author of Lords of Secrecy, professor of law at Columbia University, contributing writer to Harper's Magazine.
And I could go on and on and on.
The book Lords of Secrecy, the National Security Elite and America's Stealth Warfare is on sale now at Amazon.com for pre-order.
It comes out January the 6th.
I thank you so much for joining us on the show.
So let's talk a little bit about this anti-torture crusading of yours, or I guess I'll just give you a space to do some.
What do you think is the most important thing for this audience to understand about the new declassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report?
Scott?
Hey, it's a huge day in this matter.
And of course, you know, since it went online at 11 o'clock, I've been focused on reading it.
But 600 pages, you know, it takes a while to get all the way through it.
I'd say, you know, from what I see already and from the executive summary up front, the report saying exactly what a series of leaks said it was going to say early on.
That is that for sure, the use of these enhanced interrogation techniques, waterboarding and other forms of torture did not contribute in any way to catching Osama bin Laden, nor did they contribute to actionable intelligence of any kind whatsoever.
And in fact, it's sort of the normal old fashioned kind of intelligence gathering that worked and proved effective.
So no surprises there.
But I think it's going at a big level to be very, very important on this question of what's the role of the CIA in our democracy.
And a lot of the pushback that's coming from former CIA directors right now reads like they're trying to preserve the CIA itself from an onslaught.
They're afraid that the CIA is going to be stomped out, put out of business, defunded or something like that.
And I would say reading this, I can understand why they have that concern, because it raises pretty fundamental questions about the way the CIA operates, about its management of funds.
So lots of corruption, lots of graft, great amount of criminality, very ineffective oversight, poor management of programs, including legitimate programs.
It's pretty sweeping in its criticisms.
But I think the big question is, you know, what's the role for an organization like this in a democratic society?
And how can an organization like this function without proper oversight, especially coming from Congress?
So even though this report looks incredibly detailed and meticulous, and that's just the 600-page summary, it also can be read in another way.
That is, you know, it is describing in detail a program that existed and was fully developed underneath this committee without the committee taking any notice of it for a period of, what, five or six years until they started their inquiry.
So that's a failing of oversight by the Senate Select Committee itself.
Yeah.
Well, and by the way, just how long was Dianne Feinstein in the dark?
Is it right?
I mean, I don't know the answer to this question at all.
Certainly she poses as being great on this subject and has clearly done the most work of any senator in trying to get this issue investigated and out before the public.
But like you're saying, she was responsible.
And certainly the Bush guys must have claimed, I'm assuming, that, oh, come on, we told her what we were doing and she was okay with it, right?
Just like Pelosi and the wiretaps, that kind of thing, no?
The Gang of Eight and all that.
Yeah.
And I think there's some really fascinating details in this report about that.
So there's no question but that the CIA did some briefing, but it characterized the techniques that were being used in the most positive possible way, left out some of them, and misreported exactly how they were being used.
And I would say maybe the most surprising thing I've seen so far doesn't have to do with the briefing of Congress.
It has to do with the briefing of George W. Bush.
So what we see here is that it wasn't until 2006 that for the first time the CIA saw fit to tell President Bush that they were waterboarding people.
They reflect that briefing going on and wait to be briefed on them.
So certainly there's a shortage of criticism to go all around here.
Let me get back to what you brought up there, the biggest question about whether we need a CIA at all.
Their fear that maybe people are going to start asking that, how much power they have.
It seemed like we saw a small taste of this.
I haven't had a chance to read the report at all yet, but the fight over the report and the CIA spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee staffers repeatedly, and all of that that was going on and the way, the entire attitude that the leadership of the CIA copped about it.
John Brennan and his staff against Dianne Feinstein, I'm talking just in the last couple of months here, and they're acting, never mind the executive, they're acting like the CIA itself is more than co-equal to the United States Senate.
Look here, you little debating society, you'll know what we tell you and you'll go out on C-SPAN and pretend you're the government and then we'll keep doing what we need to do.
That seemed to be the real lesson in that.
And I wonder, you're saying you think that people are going to be going up to the release of this report over like the last roughly 18 months.
And you look at how that played out.
You see that the CIA is a much smarter player of this game than the Senate is.
I mean, they know how to drag things out for months and months and months and years and years.
They make demands of the Senate, which are completely ridiculous, you know, like we're going to have an independent contractor come in and review everything before you get to see it.
I mean, that's what happens.
It's fun to see all the doe-eyed innocents on Twitter saying, oh my God, they threatened to rape somebody's mom.
Yeah.
Omar Khadr.
We already knew you can get Omar Khadr to say anything if you threaten his mother or Sheikha Libby is who I was referring to there, obviously.
But it's definitely right up in the front and the conclusions that is, you know, one of the reasons torture is not reliable is that someone under torture will try and figure out what's the answer this guy who's questioning me wants to hear.
And they're going to say that.
Yeah.
But that still sounds like spin to me.
It does work is the point.
It works.
And Dick Cheney knows it works.
And that's why he ordered them to torture people.
Right.
Is because it produces.
Let's.
Let's.
Sorry about that.
It's all right.
Tell that.
Tell that dump truck to back up again.
No.
Yeah.
I mean, I think they've got, you know, they have the science and literature on that.
Sure.
You know, lined up and they address the pushback that's coming, you know, from the Jose Rodriguez's and others.
And, of course, you know, there's a question that underlies all of this about the nature of the CIA.
Again, you know, should the CIA be out there engaged in operations or should it just be doing analysis or should we not, in fact, have a division between the two things?
Because I think one thing we see in the background to this whole battle over the torture report is the CIA doesn't want to accept that it made mistakes anywhere.
You know, there is this absolute massive drive to say we did the right thing and it worked and why that's for institutional reputation and to save careers and to get dollars for the budget and so forth.
If you go back to the launch of the CIA in 1947, I mean, Harry Truman said, no, the CIA should be pure analysis.
It shouldn't be involved in operations because precisely this sort of problem flows from mixing analysis and operations.
People who do operations always want to say that every operation was a great success and got us everything we needed, right?
And, you know, most of the time that's not really true.
Yeah.
I wonder if we could go back to your idea from 2009 and really push for a commission on this so that people just keep being subpoenaed and stories just keep being told.
I know there are already people saying, well, I was tortured by the CIA and nobody came and interviewed me for this damn report and that kind of thing.
So, you know, I wonder maybe if that would be a good approach to take at this point.
It's not like they're going to appoint a special prosecutor, but maybe at the end of a commission they might have to.
No, I think that's exactly right.
And, you know, this same issue is played out in many other countries, especially in our hemisphere, you know, down in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, you know, where intelligence services tortured at some point during their civil war and their guerrilla war that, you know, they were there.
There were sort of sham investigations that produced nothing.
And then what you had was over a period of 20 years exposure of the truth of everything that happened and the public woke up to it.
And then there were demands for accountability, including prosecutions.
And that's resulted in the last five years in octogenarian military leaders and political leaders being tried, convicted, and sent to prison 35 years after the fact.
And I think, you know, in the United States it's entirely conceivable we could see something like that happen here too.
It's not going to happen anytime soon, but, you know, it might well happen over a period of a couple of decades.
Yes.
And I think that is what, you know, Michael Hayden and Hayden and several of the others are worried about.
I mean, they're worried over this lengthy process.
In fact, it even shows up inside this report.
I mean, they had some one amazing thing is how the CIA manipulates the media and why.
They've got just a fascinating passage here about how the CIA constantly leaked all highly classified information about these programs to the New York Times, the Washington Post and broadcast media.
All this was done as part of a coordinated campaign to make people think positively of the program, to give them a sense that it was effective, that it worked very, very well.
And this was done, as they say, and they quote one of the deputy directors, we either get out and sell or we get hammered because this has implications beyond the media.
Congress reads the papers, cuts our authorities, messes up our budget.
Either we put out our story or we get eaten.
There's no middle ground.
Now, let me ask you this.
Aside from the CIA lawyers and commanders and officers and everybody who carried it out and all of the guilty there, when we go higher up the chain from there to the White House and the cabinet secretaries and that kind of thing, there really is after Hershey's book and Philip Sands and all these other books have been published on the subject.
Jane Mayer, of course.
There's really no question about who all the guilty are, all the principals and their lawyers.
And I guess now there's a little bit of a question about what Powell knew when that kind of thing.
But otherwise, we know Tenet is guilty already beyond a shadow of a doubt.
He's bragged about it.
He's admitted it.
Dick Cheney is guilty.
George Bush is guilty.
There's no question that they are felons.
They have broken the law, the torture statutes, correct?
Well, I again, there's absolutely no question this went all the way to the White House and was approved in the White House.
That's out here.
Clearly, a very interesting footnote showing up about Colin Powell, because one thing we see here now, several passages where they're quoting CIA papers that acknowledge we lied to Colin Powell.
We didn't share this information with him because if we did, and here's the quote, he'd blow his stack, close quote.
You know, Marcy pointed out that that ABC leak that he was in on it was probably a lie back then.
She said she got that one.
Remember that ABC story where they choreographed it?
She said the purpose of that story was to try to implicate Powell.
So it probably wasn't true.
Oh, man.
See, I wanted to ask you so much more stuff, but now we got to go.
But thank you so much for your time and all your great work on this important subject.
We'll be speaking again soon.
Great to be with you.
Thank you.
That's the heroic anti-torture lawyer, the other Scott Horton.
Check him out at Harper's.
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