Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Karen J. Greenberg.
She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.
She's the author of The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First Hundred Days, and her most recent book is Rogue Justice, The Making of the Security State.
She writes regularly at tomdispatch.com, which means we reprint it all at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Karen.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks so much for having me back.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry, I looked and I didn't see anything very recent by you on this, but I just figured I'd talk to you anyway, because I know that you're the best on this kind of thing.
So there was this massive torture program during the George W. Bush years, CIA, military, Guantanamo Bay, the vice president's office, lots of important things here to tackle.
And I know, and I guess you know, too, if you're a professor at Fordham Law School, then that there are a lot of people who are grown adults now who were little kids then and don't know anything about this stuff and don't even know where to look to find a real history of George W. Bush's torture program.
So what's the deal?
Did they break the law or something?
So, yes.
And let me just say that I did do a couple articles on this maybe a month or so ago, one in The Nation, the other one on Vox about the nomination, just in case you want to see them.
I'll find those and mention them at the end here.
So torture is against the law and was against the law under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, under U.S. law, under international law.
So, yes, they broke the law.
What they're saying is that it was lawful because the commander-in-chief said it was lawful based upon some secret memos that had been written at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, which basically said that there was a new interpretation of the law.
However, if we want to subscribe to the notion that secret laws can be made and declared legal by the President of the United States, then really we're not talking about living in the democracy that we know.
So I love your point about the fact that we have a nation of individuals who are young, who are new to this topic.
And so I'm grateful that you're talking about this.
Yeah.
Well, as we're recording this, of course, I interrupted you and I have it on the TV in the background here as well.
It's the confirmation hearing, and she's sure to be confirmed, they all say, for Gina Haspel, who she denied today that she was in charge of the interrogation program under the CIA and says that John Rizzo, the CIA lawyer, got that wrong in his book and whatever.
Who knows the truth of it?
I don't believe her.
But anyway, she certainly was involved in the torture program there.
John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer, was on the show, said that they called her Bloody Gina because of how zealous she was about implementing this torture program.
And then, of course, she's also guilty of obstruction of justice, whatever legal niceties they try to hide behind, as far as that goes, in destroying the videotapes there.
And they're about to make her the head of the CIA, which is fitting enough, I guess.
But so that's why it brings all this back into the news, because instead of sitting in the Supermax next to Ted Kaczynski, she's sitting in the confirmation chair in the U.S. Senate right now.
So there's a couple of things there to talk about.
First is that, in a way, this is a little bit unfortunate for—just listen to me out here—you know, for Gina Haspel, in that look at all the individuals who were above her level, who are on record as and indisputed as people who, like Jose Rodriguez, said that the tapes needed to be destroyed and, like others, brought in the interrogators, supervised the interrogation program, created it, implemented it.
There's a whole chain of command that has not been held accountable for anything in designing and implementing and then covering up the torture policy of the United States in the period after 9-11.
And as a result, because we haven't had this accountability because Bush walked away from it and, more declaratively, President Obama walked away from it, we're finding that this is the moment that finally there is somebody in the public eye who can be asked about things, some of which she knows about, some of which she keeps saying she may not know about.
But it really highlights the fact that so little in terms of not just accountability, but a public discussion, has come out, and now it's coming out at this particular moment in time.
So, I just think that's something worth pointing out in terms of context.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing of it, right?
I think a lot of people probably, they certainly were under the impression then, and they may be under the impression now, that, yeah, some things got out of control on the night shift under the National Guardsmen at Abu Ghraib Prison, but still, when, in fact, this really came from the Vice President's office and then, of course, from the President himself and included the entire Principals Committee of the National Security Council.
Rice and Tenet and Powell and all of them were read in on this.
Well, what's interesting is that some accounts have said that there was pushback from within, particularly when some of the earlier memos were written that weren't necessarily about torture, but that opened the door for backing away from lawful principles and guarantees.
And among them were Colin Powell and his lawyer.
And it's interesting that the internal dissent that some have referred to obliquely, others more directly, never came out in public, that nobody was willing to take that extra step and say, hey, wait a minute, what goes on here?
And so it's, again, another way of just not confronting something.
And also, one of the things they keep saying is, look, after 9-11, you'll see in today's hearing a number of people, of the senators, are talking first in their comments about, well, it was after 9-11 and we had to do whatever we could do, et cetera, et cetera.
And one of the things that's really important is that there was never a moment when there could have been, let's say, 18 months after when the country sort of stabilized and there were new agencies and realities in place.
Nobody said, wait a minute, let's take a step back.
Let's stop this.
And let's say that we did the wrong thing and ask for understanding about why we did the wrong thing.
That's not what you're hearing.
You're not hearing anybody say, this was wrong.
Instead, they're saying, this was justified because we were caught off guard on 9-11.
And, you know, there was such a—and that's just—it seems to me that until somebody is willing to actually say, this was wrong, people should be held accountable for it.
And that we're really never going to get beyond this period in a constructive way.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
Here's how to support the show.
Patreon.com slash scotthortonshow if you want to donate per interview.
And also, scotthorton.org slash donate.
Anyone who donates $20 gets a copy of the audiobook of Fool's Errand.
Anyone who donates $50, that'll get you a signed copy of the paperback in the mail there.
And anyone who donates $100 gets either a QR code commodity disc or a lifetime subscription, not only for $100, not two, a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks, Libertarian audiobooks, listenandthink.com there.
So check out all that stuff.
And of course, we take all your different digital currencies, especially Zen Cash and all the different kinds of bitcoins and whatever are all there at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And get the book, Fool's Errand, and give it a good review on Amazon if you read it and you liked it and review the show on iTunes and Stitcher and that kind of thing if you want.
All right.
Thanks.
All right.
Now, so, well, what is it that's the problem anyway?
Beyond Abu Ghraib prison, beyond, I don't know, rumors of Guantanamo.
I'm trying to think like a regular kind of pop culture consumer or whatever, which would mean I guess I know nothing about it.
So what's going on here?
I'm sorry.
What was going on in the enhanced interrogation program?
Yeah, sure.
Because he had, the CIA had their black sites.
He had Iraq and Guantanamo and Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo theaters and all these different things going on.
Right.
So the global- The rendition program.
Right.
So the global view of what happened was that after the war on terror, it became clear that the United States had fallen down in many ways in terms of understanding what the threat against it was.
And in many ways, the intelligence community bore the brunt of that criticism, that it was a failure of intelligence.
You'll often hear that.
Actually, it was a failure of a lot of things, but that was one of the thematic analysis.
And what happened was that the CIA decided that it needed to launch an interrogation program.
They hired individual psychologists who could help them determine how best to break people so that they would talk.
And they set up sites in countries around the world that they thought would not throw them out for having these, what were called black sites.
And they took what they considered high-value detainees to these black sites.
I think there were 117 people subjected to the enhanced interrogation techniques.
And they did brutal, cruel, and actually things resembling medieval torture to these individuals, locking them in coffin-like boxes, depriving them of any kind of sleep for enough period of time that it could cause psychic breakdowns, waterboarding them, which was mock drowning so that people thought they were drowning in order to get them to talk, banging their head into walls, putting them in stressed positions for long periods of time, threatening their lives with power drills aimed at their heads, threatening their families.
There were a lot of things that happened at these black sites.
At the same time, there was the scandal of Abu Ghraib, which actually was a little after some of the more egregious incidents that I've just described to you, in which a number of individuals did get out of control and abuse prisoners.
And so that is what brought it to American attention.
And then we uncovered a much larger state-sponsored enhanced interrogation regime.
And then at Guantanamo, there were also brutal interrogation techniques used on occasion.
And so it was a vast network.
But most of what's being talked about with Gina Haspel and with the CIA is what took place at the black sites on the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency.
All right.
And then, so Donna Rumsfeld basically was jealous of this, right?
And said, hey, Haynes, let's figure out how we can get in on this.
I don't know about that.
I don't know if he was jealous of it.
I think he was.
I think that he was supportive of it.
I think he was in on a number of the conversations.
But again, I don't associate him, nor do I think anybody else does, with these black sites.
I think that he...
No.
No, so...
Well, but like Bagram Prison amounted to a black site, right?
It was a black hole, the salt pit torture dungeon outside of Kabul there.
It's not exactly county lockup.
You're not going to find good guys in that dimension of the story.
There was just a sense, as Vice President Dick Cheney said, that they were going to take the gloves off.
And they did.
And what's worrisome about that is not just the human rights issues, the civil liberties issues, the definition of America as a constitutionally driven country, but the real problem is the degree of desperation that it shows about the United States, feeling that the intelligence services that we had, the military forces that we had, the rules and regulations that we had weren't enough to keep us safe.
And the real...
One of the deeper problems about having gone head first into this enhanced interrogation regime is the degree to which it showed the way in which American confidence in itself and its professionalism and its laws were undermined.
And so it's just a sign of weakness to have to go down this path.
And so it's really...
This is why I keep coming...
It's really a chapter we need to move beyond.
And it's hard to imagine that they couldn't find somebody at the Central Intelligence Agency from within the ranks who's competent, who's capable, who's smart, who's had a long career there, who wasn't attached to the story of enhanced interrogation.
That's the really surprising part, I think, in the nomination of Haspel.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and the thing is...
And people argue about this, about whether torture works or not.
But, I mean, isn't it really the case that it's not so much that Dick Cheney and David Addington were scared.
It was that they wanted...
They couldn't just make it up whole cloth.
They needed to torture al-Qaeda guys into pointing the finger at Saddam Hussein.
And torture works really well at getting people to say what you want them to say, whether it's true or not.
Well, that's the interesting part, because...
So that's correct, that torture was used to get al-Libi to say, yes, there are deputies in Iraq.
Yes.
And so that's also an interesting part of it, because you often hear, well, torture doesn't work, right?
That's one of the reasons people say don't use it, which is always a kind of not really sure what that means.
But it is the conclusion of the Senate torture report that Dianne Feinstein supervised, which detailed in ways we haven't seen, because it's 6,000 pages long and we've only seen 600-page executive summary of it, but that detailed what was done, when it was done, to whom it was done.
And in addition to graphic details and sequence of events, one of the things it concludes is that torture just didn't work to release the kind of information that the authorities were hoping for.
And so it's a really hard one, because torture would work on a number of people, but my whole thing is, who cares whether it works or not?
It's so fundamentally wrong in so many different ways, and so often doesn't work.
And if it does work, what does that mean it worked?
They got al-Libi to say what they wanted him to say, which wasn't the truth.
So it's just a rabbit hole you don't want to go down, and it's a threshold moment in American history that this was done.
And this confirmation hearing doesn't seem to be making the country get beyond it.
Instead, people are just digging their heels in to fight this out one more time, to defend a program that never should be defended.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, too, is when you talk about the Afghan and Iraq theaters, bin Laden and his few dozen friends already got away to Pakistan, right?
So all you're talking about is just Afghans and Iraqis who are all being treated like somehow they were the ones whose brother crashed into the towers or something like that, are somehow guilty.
And over years, I mean, this went on for a full year and a half in Iraq, I guess, or at least a full year before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, right?
That was in the spring of 2004.
Correct.
And so, and during that time, as the other Scott Horton put it, the international human rights lawyer from Columbia University and Harper's and all that, that yeah, no, tens of thousands of Iraqis were treated in violation of the law, to say the least, because they're doing these mass sweeps.
You know, the CIA has this program, but they're getting, you know, people who might actually know something, I guess, go to the CIA.
Everybody else just gets treated as though they're just as guilty by the military, even though it's actually just some schmuck from the neighborhood.
Well, actually, the substitution of quantity for quality would be another way of saying it, that from the beginning of the war on terror, the sense that we hadn't really done our homework to prevent the attack led to the idea that more was better.
And so, Guantanamo, you rounded up 800 people, you know, brought them to Guantanamo, and George Bush, who was no softie in the war on terror, let more than 500 of them go home because they weren't a threat, they were the wrong guys.
You instituted a surveillance program that tried to pick up every piece of information rather than selected pieces of information.
So you had this broad sweeps of getting content, as well as, you know, the details of how long a conversation was, to whom it was, which we call metadata.
You're just collecting mounds of information with the idea that more was better.
The fact is, as good law enforcement individuals will tell you, the more targeted, the more insightful, the more following the evidence you employ when you're trying to figure out who's a threat to you, the better off you are.
And so, it not just defied constitutional principles, civil liberties, but it also defied common sense in terms of trying to target and figure out who might wish the country harm.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, not just the occupation, but especially torture under the occupation has been a huge driver, not just of local insurgency, but of terrorist attacks against the West as well.
Yeah, I think a lot of things.
I think the war in Iraq was, when you try to figure out what are the instigators, the war in Iraq, Guantanamo, the stories of torture, all of these things combined to make it harder for the United States to quell some of the anger around the world.
Yeah.
Well, and in fact, by the end of the Bush administration, that was even George Bush's position, although he didn't do anything about it, but that was what he said, right?
Robert Gates and Colin Powell and all these guys said that, yeah, you know, well, Guantanamo served its purpose, and now it's time to wrap this thing up.
I think, yes, before the end of his presidency, George Bush was declarative about the fact that he thought it was time to close Guantanamo.
What that meant, we don't know, but, you know- Apparently nothing, just like when Obama said that's what he was going to do.
Yeah, and Obama, I think Obama very much wanted to close it, gave himself that one year horizon and eight years after he took the presidency, it was still open, and it's still open now.
And that is a flaw and a potential vulnerability going forward.
Hey, let me tell you about the sponsors of this show.
First of all, Mike Swanson.
He is the author of the great book, The War State, about the permanence of America's World War II military empire through the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations, the rise of the new right military industrial complex after World War II.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
And also, get his great investment advice to protect your financial future there at wallstreetwindow.com.
He has a great understanding of what the hell is going on in these financial markets.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
Unless I know, he'll tell you, you have to have at least some of your savings.
You must know.
Some of your savings, however much it is, you have to have metals.
And so, what you do is, you go to Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
Gold, silver, platinum, palladium.
They have a very small brokerage fee in order to process for you and get you the very best deal.
And if you buy with Bitcoin, there's no premium at all for your purchases of gold, silver, platinum, palladium.
So, check those guys out.
Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. at rrbi.co.
You ever play baseball?rrbi.co.
And as I mentioned, Zencash is a great new digital currency.
It's also an encrypted method of internet messaging and document transfer and all kinds of things for your business, for your secret conspiracies.
Zencash.com.
Check that out at zensystem.io.
You can read all about how it works, every last detail, of course, at zensystem.io.
And then, there's this book about how to run your technology business like a libertarian.
It's called No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
And each of those is one word, three words.
You know, get it?
Yeah.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
It's by Hussain Badakhshani.
And it's about how to run your business right in a libertarian way.
LibertyStickers.com.
And Tom Woods Liberty Classroom.
If you like learning things, I'll get a commission if you sign up by way of the link on my website.
And listen, if you want a new...
And the reason my website is down is my own broken servers.
But if you want a new good-looking website like the one I do have when it's up and running at scotthorton.org, then check out expanddesigns.com slash scott.expanddesigns.com slash scott.
And you will save 500 bucks on your new website.
Well, I don't know if you saw this one, but Jonathan Schwartz has this thing in The Intercept about the new AUMF and how it actually goes further, I guess, in sort of ratifying presidential claims on the authority to have the military detain even American citizens.
Yeah.
Yeah, my heart sank when I read that.
And, you know, I haven't seen the text of the new AUMF, you know, the draft or any of the suggestions.
But this has always been the worry about keeping Guantanamo open, having a detention facility that is outside the law, where you could just be put there indefinitely, if not for the rest of your life.
And having it spread beyond the population that's there has always been one of the chief reasons to close it, so that that couldn't happen.
And so this is very concerning, if in fact this is the case.
Yeah.
And you know what?
I'm glad you mentioned that, because it just so often goes unsaid.
There are still individual human beings locked in cages down there at Guantanamo Bay who've been in there for 16 years or so with no trial whatsoever.
Yeah.
So there are 30 individuals, I believe, there now who are not among those being charged and tried.
You know, the 9-11 defendants are there, a couple of other defendants.
But the two and a half dozen who are there are there without charge, without a sense of being released.
And five of them had been released under the Obama administration, but the details of their release had never been finalized.
And so as a result, they're still there.
And it's hard to imagine that they're going to get out under this particular administration.
I mean, and even if you assume, you know, the most guilty, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Nasiri and these guys who attacked the U.S., who the U.S. ought to be able to get a conviction of, they deserve a trial and a conviction and an end to this charade when these things have been going on for years.
Even those bastards, right?
Right.
And what they say is they don't have enough evidence to try them, but they're dangerous and they put them through — Well, I'm talking about the ones who actually are on trial.
It's just the hearings go on indefinitely and go nowhere, it seems like.
Sorry.
Yeah.
No, this is — Well, there's so many different categories of detainees down there.
I know it's easy to — No, but you're hitting on a really good point.
The military commissions are a failure.
If they move at all, they move backwards.
Every single time they seem to proceed, something comes up.
Either there's an interpreter who turns out to have been somebody who happened to be an interpreter during the CIA enhanced interrogations, or there's a bug, you know, a listening device in the rooms of the defense attorneys.
And so that's — it's an endlessly — it's never — they're never going to come to trial.
Now they say that maybe in 2019 they might be able to begin the 9-11 trial.
As you point out, we have a whole new generation that's come of age since these people were first put in custody.
The fact that this country has not tried the individuals who are considered responsible for 9-11 is unfair to the American people, who are all victims of 9-11.
And so this is — and torture has everything to do with the fact that these proceedings cannot happen, because the individuals being accused were tortured, because much of the evidence they want to use against them comes from torture, and they are just not proceeding.
So thank you for pointing that out.
All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Karen.
No, thank you for having this conversation, and now we can both go back and watch this hearing.
Yep.
All right, thanks again.
Thanks.
Bye.
All right, you guys, that's Karen J. Greenberg, and she is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.
She's the author of The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First Hundred Days, and her most recent book is Rogue Justice, The Making of the Security State.
And you guys know me, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org, foolsaron.us for my book, Fools Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, now out in audiobook.
And follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
