12/29/14 – Vijay Prashad – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Oh, headphones.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate y'all tuning in.
All right, so I'm not too familiar.
I think this is a new one.
Alarabi.com.
That's A-L and then Arab with a Y on the end.
Alarabi.co.uk.
First I've seen of it, and what a great article.
U.S. Looks to Israel to Justify Torture.
It's by Vijay Prashad.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
What a terrible article.
I mean, well done, but you know what I mean.
It is a terrible article.
It is.
It's horrible.
Footnotes, you begin.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
When I read the entire torture report, the executive summary, which is 600 pages, and when you read the summary, you know, there's a lot there that's just terrible.
I mean, it's appalling and hard to read.
And I was actually very interested because I found that over the years, in reading the footnotes of government reports, you learn things that are not there in the actual reports.
Government reports are written by senators.
They're written by people on the staff.
And occasionally they slip things into footnotes, which are like almost a little indicator to you that there are other things that you should look for.
So, I mean, in that sense, in this footnote, I found a very interesting thing about the Israeli example, and that's what I picked up because, you know, it wasn't in the main body of the report, but thrown into the footnotes, it taught us a lot.
Right.
Now, I just have to mention, because it helps underline the point that you make there about staffers and lower-down analysts and people who, for some reason, are kind of stuck to the truth and don't have higher political considerations in mind, for example, doing things like this.
If people remember back to the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002 on Iraq, there were some people from the State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Energy Department who insisted on footnotes debunking a lot of the nuclear stuff in there.
But you had to go to the footnotes to see it.
Yes, that's exactly correct.
Those two anecdotes together, I think, help encourage what you're talking about, which is a habit now that you're in, of always being very careful to check the footnotes because that's where the good stuff is going to be.
So, it's a very important point to make.
It's often in the footnotes, and sometimes it's in the margin here.
So, the other place to look is if a government report has a bibliography, sometimes the staffers will attach on, you know, a reference to a document that's not widely known because it has some kind of bureaucratic name.
But if you then go and find it, it's often in the public domain, and it contains quite interesting material which hasn't been highlighted partly because it's sort of buried in plain sight.
It's thought about 10 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the senator from New York State, in which he showed that most of what the government deems to be top secret is actually already available in the public domain.
You just have to know where to look.
Right.
Yeah, he's the guy that really was the driving force behind getting the Freedom of Information Act passed.
That was a project of his, secrecy.
That's right.
All right, so now to the point of this here.
Footnote 51.
Tell us, please, all about footnote 51.
Well, so in footnote 51, there's a very interesting note which refers to anxiety twice.
It comes up in footnote 51, comes up later in the report.
Anxiety in the CIA overmoves the foot in the U.S. Congress, particularly by about 2007 when the so-called McCain Amendment was being put through the Congress.
The McCain Amendment was to actually forbid so-called enhanced interrogation.
But even as early as 2001, there was anxiety within the CIA about using what was known at the time as enhanced interrogation.
But the CIA lawyers and officers knew very well that what they were doing was uncomfortable.
And so they sought out, among other so-called democracies, where they might find an example which allowed them to legally justify the use of what they very well knew was torture but weren't going to call torture.
And, of course, they found the example in an Israeli Supreme Court decision in 1991 which did an interesting thing.
The Israeli Supreme Court forbade torture, said torture is illegal, but it said that in certain circumstances, circumstances left actually to the torturing body itself, in certain circumstances, torture was legal.
And that, of course, drives a huge bus right through any, you know, prohibition against torture.
And the CIA lawyers and as well the high officers of the CIA found in the Israeli example sufficient legal justification to go ahead with the policies that they had been, in a sense, pushed to enact.
Amazing.
And now it's interesting here, as you point out in the article, that the American government tortures people all the time and they outsource torture, they hire people to torture in Latin America, in the old world, and all over the place.
That's what CIA stands for, we torture people for fun all the time, I'm pretty sure is the acronym there.
And yet, it's illegal.
It's officially on paper in America, no exceptions, illegal to do this.
So there's still sort of an opening for a possibility that someday a CIA officer might be prosecuted, some lower down agent could someday be prosecuted.
So in order to cover that base, just to make extra sure, they decided they would invoke Israeli court precedent.
But now, I'm confused, Vijay, because I'm not the other Scott Horton, he's the international human rights lawyer and all that.
I don't understand what the hell an Israeli court decision, I don't understand how they could even cite that or what that would even mean.
I mean, why not cite a court decision from China or from Iran?
How is that supposed to be binding on Americans, or how any Americans are treated under American law whatsoever, anyway?
Well, this is a very good question.
Firstly, in 1984, that is 15 years before this Israeli Supreme Court decision, the United States was a signatory, in fact, champion, the convention against torture.
And that convention against torture, which was signed on to by the majority of the world's countries, it's a UN convention, is obligatory on the United States.
That means it's not only that torture is illegal under US law, but actually higher than that, the United States has joined on to an international convention against torture.
That's very important, and I'll come back to that in a minute.
So, in the case of the 1999 decision, yes, exactly, there were many, many precedents, legal precedents, to have found elsewhere.
You know, we could have gone back to the Spanish Inquisition for a legal precedent.
Yeah, or Joe Stalin.
Exactly, they conducted that with legal risk.
That was not randomly done.
You know, the United States had actually a manual from the 1950s, which very specifically and in detail had descriptions of what was permitted in the way of torture.
By the way, this is just after the United States had prosecuted Japanese prisoners of war for using torture across East Asia.
So the thing I want to just impress here is that there's an awareness, there's an acute awareness that torture is bad, torture is illegal, and torture is something that one can get accountable for.
All right, now hold it right there, Vijay.
We've got another segment coming up.
I'll just ask you to hold on, please, during this commercial break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Vijay Prashad on Americans citing Israeli courts for torture excuses.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, here on the Liberty Radio Network.
I'm talking with Vijay Prashad.
He's at Al Arabi.
Arabia.
I think Arabi.
Well, I'll ask him.
How do you say it?
Which means the new Arab.
The new Arab.
Okay.
Good deal.
And the article is called, U.S. Looks to Israel to Justify Torture.
You can find it in the viewpoint section today on AntiWar.com.
And I'm sorry about the heartbreak interruption there.
The question you were in the middle of answering was about, who cares what an Israeli court says anyway?
How could any American lawyer invoke a foreign court to justify breaking an American law when, as you said, they could just as easily cite the Spanish Inquisition, as long as they're making up stuff?
Yes, exactly.
I mean, look, there's something actually decidedly perverse about citing the Israeli judgment.
Because the Israeli judgment comes in the context of an internationally recognized occupation.
And even the Israeli government understands that it is occupying the Palestinian land in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.
And given that context, the Israeli government has to decide what are the limits of torturing people who are under Israeli occupation.
To cite that as a legitimation for torture strikes me as remarkable.
Because technically, the United States does not occupy any part of the world.
Technically.
That is the self-understanding.
Even the entry into Iraq was technically not seen as an occupation.
There was a brief moment of occupation power, and then there was the creation of the government of Iraq.
To take it out of its context, the context of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and to pretend that that is, in some ways, a democratic state's decision about the limits of torture, is perverse.
And of course, I think Americans should question the fact that the CIA lawyer was seeking a foreign court justification for things that American courts deem completely illegal.
Yeah.
And so, tell us about some of the Israeli tortures, and is there much similarity between what it is that they do to the people that they're occupying versus what the Americans do to the people they're liberating?
Well, you know, frankly, the most interesting thing about the torture report was the section where in the cables, particularly in Afghanistan and Bangkok, the CIA officer wrote in their emails, in their cables back to Langley things like, we are disgusted, I want to recommend a transform for myself, I was crying yesterday.
I mean, it's extremely moving.
This is the section of the torture report that I'm surprised the American media hasn't made much more of, where the officers themselves suggest that they were heart sick by what they had to do.
And I think we need to recognize that.
That the issue here isn't the individual CIA officer who was put inside a box, essentially in Bangkok, and told to be very hard on somebody that they didn't know anything about.
But it's the orders they received, and that they felt that through the chain of command they had to go through.
And even when they went through it, they repeatedly said, we're not enjoying what we're doing.
So I just want to say that, because when you start describing the actual tortures, for most people they say, well, it doesn't sound so bad.
Sleep deprivation for 72 hours.
Well, you know, what's that?
Being thrown up against a wall.
Well, what's that?
Being put into a 2x5 box, and stuck in there for 18 hours.
Well, I'm sure you can live through that.
Waterboarding, etc.
However sanguine the attitude is toward these forms of what are internationally recognized as torture, I'd like people to recognize that the people that the U.S. government sent to do these things to other people made them sick.
And, you know, these things are almost identical to what the Israeli Shin Bet does to the people that they have to torture.
And among the Palestinians who get tortured, a theory has risen up called Adil, which means normal torture.
You know, they come out of prison, and if an investigator asks them, were you tortured?
They say, no, no, nothing really.
Well, what do you mean nothing really?
Well, we just got normal torture.
We were just sleep deprived for a week.
You know, we were just thrown up against a wall, things like that.
We didn't have anything really bad happen to us.
Right.
Well, and, you know, there's actually a link today, Justin Raimondo's article, to a report about Israeli torture of children.
You spoke before about, you know, torture without representation kind of thing, where it's not even a democratic decision to have the government do this for whatever, you know, legitimacy that supposedly provides since the Palestinians are completely occupied and completely voiceless in the way the government works.
But how about for minors?
You know, it's almost unreal to me to read about what the Israelis do to the children that they abduct out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem primarily, I guess, and how they hold these kids for extended periods of time with no charges and in solitary, and that seems to be the least of it.
And it's not that I'm actually shocked that the Israelis do it.
The part that I'm shocked about is how little this is talked about, even though if you just Google it up, you'll find plenty of very official reports by doctors and NGOs and human rights activists and Israeli peace groups and the United Nations and, you know, whatever kind of legitimacy you need for the sourcing for this kind of thing.
They just routinely brutalize minors.
Is that a court decision too?
This is go ahead and beat the hell out of a kid who, even if they went ahead and annexed the West Bank and gave everybody the right to vote, these kids still wouldn't have the slightest bit of representation.
Not that that really means anything, but you understand what I mean.
Well, I mean, you know, there's a difference between military jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of courts, of a democracy.
And I think that's why I wanted to point out specifically that the Israeli case is special because it's a military jurisdiction.
You know, they treat the Palestinians as an occupied people, so they have military jurisdiction over them, which, of course, is exactly what should outrage people that the CIA lawyers picked a situation of military jurisdiction as a parallel.
I mean, you know, the Israelis have, for instance, a place called Camp 1391, where they've never allowed international, you know, Red Cross, Red Crescent, anybody, you know, various human rights organizations.
Nobody has had access to Camp 1391.
It was only revealed by accident because of a map that showed its existence.
And now the Israelis say, yes, it exists, but nobody has the right to go and see inside there.
Even Guantanamo, even Guantanamo is visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
So, I mean, you know, the situation in Israel is far worse than the archipelago of the war on terror.
And that the CIA sought an example there shows you, I think, how poorly Americans understand the situation of Israel.
Right.
All right.
Well, we know for a fact from multiple different sources, including Colin Powell's right-hand man on this show just a week and a half ago, that a big part of the agenda behind the torture after, I guess, for a little while, they were trying to make sure there were no more impending al-Qaeda attacks, but it very quickly, he explained, turned to tell us about your friendship with Saddam Hussein and that kind of thing.
And I wonder if that's also the history of the Israeli torture program here, that mostly it's about generating lies about people that they would like to go and get.
Well, that must have been Larry Wilkerson.
Yes.
Who was an extraordinary patriotic American, and he served a man who, by the way, was kept in the dark about this.
There's a section of the torture report where the officials talking about the acts of what they knew was torture said, don't tell Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, don't tell Colin Powell the details because, and this is to quote them, he'll blow his stack.
They kept people like Colin Powell in the dark.
They knew they were doing something wrong.
This is why it's wrong to have a discussion.
They didn't know it was torture.
They thought it was advanced interrogation.
No, no, they very well knew it was torture.
They were writing emails saying, don't tell Colin Powell, because he has people like Larry Wilkerson beside him who understand the law and understand what's really going on.
So I'm glad you had him on your show.
But, you know, the thing is that very early on it became clear that the information that the FBI interrogators, people like Ali Soufiane was getting, simply by old-fashioned interrogation techniques, that had brought dividends.
It had brought enough information.
After a year, these people were dried out, and they continued to be waterboarded.
And it is exactly, there's only a few reasons to continue to torture them.
One is that you're just being vindictive, and this is just fun for somebody.
I doubt that that's the issue.
I think it's very much exactly what Larry says.
It was to get cherry-picked information to go after the cherry-picked agenda.
Yep, very true.
All right, well, thanks very much for coming on the show and talking about this and highlighting this very important point in your article here, Vijay.
It's good to talk to you.
Thanks a lot.
All right, so that's Vijay Prashad.
He's at alarabi.co.uk.
U.S. looks to Israel to justify torture.
Find it at antiwar.com today.
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