Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org is the website.
Keep all my interview archives there more than 2,500 now going back to 2003.
And our next guest is Alfred W.
McCoy, J R W Smale, professor of history at the university of Wisconsin, Madison, a regular at Tom dispatch.
He's the author of course, of the politics of heroin and a question of torture, CIA interrogation from the cold war to the war on terror.
And the brand new one torture and impunity, the U S doctrine of coercive interrogation, the brand new one at Tom dispatch is called perfecting.
Illegality impunity at home rendition abroad.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing professor?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you're welcome.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us.
A very important story here.
Torture, I guess, ever since Obama announced that it was all over, it's really fallen out of the headlines.
I don't even have too many arguments trying to justify it anymore.
Although there still are some, it's sort of just fallen away.
But as you point out in this article, torture continues under the Obama administration up to, and including this day, right?
The key difference between the cold war and the Bush administration is very simple.
During the cold war, the United States had what I called a comfortable contradiction at international for us, such as the UN.
Uh, we advocated international human rights and we took a very strong stand against torture.
Secretly.
However, the CIA developed new psychological torture techniques in contravention, in defiance of those same international conventions.
Now under president Bush, what happened was that he resolved that contradiction by attempting to, in effect, legalize torture in the United States, instead of outsourcing torture to allies, as we did during the cold war, president Bush authorized the CIA to open up its own prisons and they opened up eight black sites from Thailand to Poland.
Uh, president Bush allowed them to lease their own fleet of executive jets to fly the detainees around and they made nearly 3000 flights during the Bush administration.
Um, and then he authorized extreme techniques, which by any standard constitutes torture, uh, most spectacularly wall slamming and water boarding.
Now, when president Obama abolished, uh, the CIA black sites and ordered that the CIA comply with the standards of the army field manual, in effect, um, he brought us back to the, uh, us policy during the cold war and, and restored that comfortable contradiction.
One thing that, that everybody missed until actually the New York times pointed out in its major expose just recently was that at the very moment that president Obama made that dramatic announcement on day two of his administration back in 2009, that he was closing the CIA black sites and that we were out of the torture business.
Uh, none of us noticed, but that there was a footnote to that executive order, uh, with a definition.
And in that definition, he said that, you know, that, uh, facility, the detention facility or facilities, uh, excludes any facility in which someone is held for a short period of time.
And none of us at the time knew what that meant.
Uh, what had happened was, is when president Obama showed that draft executive order before he announced it to the CIA's legal counsel, the CIA counsel said, if you make that order, if you issue that order as it's written, you will put us out of the rendition business.
That's almost a verbatim statement.
Uh, and so president Obama inserted that definition, allowing the CIA to operate detention facilities for short term transition or transitory, um, holding of prisoners.
And without that, they wouldn't be able to do rendition.
And then a month later in February, 2009, uh, president Obama's incoming CIA director, Leon Panetta announced before the U S con uh, Congress at his confirmation hearings that the, that he believed in rendition.
And he announced that the CIA would conduct rendition.
And indeed we have, we've continued, we've continued to use that policy under the Obama administration.
So in effect, we've gone back to our Cold War policy of outsourcing torture to our allies and conducting rendition in order to deliver the prisoners to our allies.
And that, by the way, is a violation of the UN convention against torture, which the United States ratified back in 1994.
And of course, pushed, uh, in public, that's that second tier of our torture policy, the public one that we talked about now, do you have any good ballpark estimate of the numbers of people kidnapped and renditioned?
Because of course, at least the conventional wisdom is, uh, as Noam Chomsky put it, uh, Bush kidnapped and tortured the people he was after.
Obama just murders them.
Well, we can come back to that.
First of all, the numbers of people subject to rendition, um, when president Clinton sent the UN convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, as ratified by the United States, we accepted the conventions prohibition upon what's called extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners to other countries where they are subject to possible torture.
All right.
Uh, and, and then the very next year, uh, president Clinton allowed the CIA to conduct rendition and between 1995 up until about 2001, the CIA director, George Tenet stated that the agency had, uh, conducted rendition of 70 detainees.
Um, under the Bush administration, we don't know the number, we know the number, uh, we don't have a number of detainees, but we know the number of rendition flights, and it's in the area of about 2,600 flights by a fleet of some two dozen least executive jets operated by the CIA.
And that involves ferrying prisoners, um, from let's say one, uh, Afghanistan to Guantanamo or from a CIA black site in Thailand or a CIA black site in Poland.
It also involves sending detainees to Middle Eastern prisons in places like Morocco, uh, Syria, uh, Uzbekistan, where they would be subjected to some perfectly horrible physical tortures.
Uh, now under the Obama administration, we don't have good numbers.
We know, for example, that the Obama administration has continued to operate the CIA, uh, sort of subcontracted site in Somalia, uh, known as the hole.
And it's in the bottom of the Somali national security directorate in Mogadishu.
And the, uh, CIA has been since, uh, uh, the Bush administration snatching people all across East Africa, uh, Al Qaeda suspects, and then flying them to Mogadishu where they're turned over to the Somali security services.
Um, we, we pay for the prison they operated.
We have full access, uh, to both prisoners and the information that the torture interrogation might yield.
Uh, so we know what's been going on.
The other, the other aspect of this outsourcing of torture and interrogation, of course, uh, developed in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And as a result of that scandal, the U S forces stopped, uh, uh, holding prisoners on their own as much as possible.
And they began delivering the prison to the Iraqi police and military and the Afghan police and military.
Um, and U S forces gave in Iraq were under express orders that if you come across Iraq, Iraqi allies, abusing detainees, you are not to do anything.
And we now know from the Wiki leaks that the U S forces between 2004 and December, 2009, uh, encountered 1,365 instances of Iraqi forces abusing detainees and did nothing about it.
Similarly in Afghanistan, uh, we began turning over all our detainees after the Abu Ghraib scandal to Afghan authorities and the Afghan national security directorate, according to a UN report done just last year, practices systematic torture at all of its prisons across Afghanistan.
Uh, and the UN, uh, offered some, some really chilling descriptions, uh, of the, of the tortures being conducted by the Afghan authorities and the U S is still turning over detainees to Afghan authorities.
All right.
Now we have to hold it right there and go out to this break.
We're talking with professor Alfred McCoy about his new piece, perfecting illegality, torture, and impunity at tomdispatch.com.
Uh, he's also the author of the new book, Torture and Impunity.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture.
And the new one, Torture and Impunity, the U S doctrine of coercive interrogation.
And he's got a piece here at, uh, Tom dispatch perfecting illegality.
So, uh, that's the real point here, right?
Is that when Barack Obama's joint special operations command and CIA torture people in some filthy dungeon beneath Mogadishu, he's ratifying the Bush administration revolution in the claimed power to torture and murder people.
Uh, because the only political difference allowed in America is the difference in opinion between leaders of the two political parties, that's all we've gotten.
So as soon as the new party comes in and continues the old party's policy, especially at least just letting them even get away with it and never holding them accountable to the law, then it all just becomes very official.
Isn't that what we're up against here?
And that what you mean about perfecting illegality that the time to challenge the legality of this is over.
We already lost that argument.
Well, that's right, Scott.
And it's happened as I detail my book, uh, torture impunity through the processes of impunity, which is a very little understood process.
Impunity essentially means, uh, through a political or ad hoc legal process, allowing individuals who are politically connected to get away with the crime.
In this case, impunity means getting away with torture.
And in the United States over the past, uh, four years, it's really become really over the last 10 years, it's been a, a five stage process.
It started right with the, uh, Abu Ghraib expose by CBS news back in 2004.
And then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said that this was the work of basically a few bad apples in the U S military, a couple of low ranking military police men and women.
And that's a line by the way, that president Obama, you know, rather curious bit of bipartisanship, uh, echoed.
He virtually, um, repeated Donald Rumsfeld's words when he visited the CIA in 2009 and said that basically this was the work of a few individuals.
The next step in impunity when you get beyond the bad apple, because the very quickly the, the investigations established that, that the responsibility went much higher in the chain of command.
So the next step in the logic of impunity, uh, is to, to make the argument that this was necessary, unfortunate, but necessary for our national security.
And that's a line that's been pushed by, um, uh, Dick Cheney and his beautiful daughter, Liz, uh, in dozens of, uh, television appearances, uh, during the first two years of the Obama administration, which Cheney argues that enhanced interrogation saved thousands or tens of thousands of lives.
Then the third step in impunity is, okay, look, this is all very unfortunate.
Uh, and whatever may have happened in the past, we need to put it behind us for the sake of national unity.
And this is a position that's been articulated by president Obama.
And then what we saw as a fourth step, which is really vindication when the perpetrators and the powerful who, um, authorized their abuse demand, not simply impunity, getting away with it, but they want vindication.
They want to be, uh, publicly hailed as having been right.
And we reached this step ironically last year with the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
And immediately after that assassination, a chorus of ex Bush officials appeared on television to claim that somehow the enhanced interrogation, the CIA's tortures led those Navy SEALs, uh, to bin Laden, which by the way, it did not.
But, but in any case, they made the claim.
And within, within weeks, the U S attorney general, Eric Holder announced that, that the ongoing investigation by a special investigator in his department of the CIA for crimes of torture was over that there would be no prosecutions.
And in the past year, uh, in its ongoing right to the present, we've reached the fifth and final stage in full and absolute impunity.
And that's through history.
Uh, and the 10th anniversary of the nine 11 tax, uh, late August of last year, Dick Cheney publishes memoirs and he claimed in his memoir that the CIA has enhanced techniques applied on an Al Qaeda captive back in 2000 to a man named Abu Zubaida, uh, turned this hardened terrorist into what he called a fount of information, producing intelligence that saved thousands of lives.
Just a week later, a former FBI interrogator, top counter terrorism interrogator, a man named Ali Sufan published his memoirs.
It turned out that he was actually the one who conducted the interrogation of Abu Zubaida back in 2002.
And he is the FBI's non-torture, non-coercive empathetic techniques.
Ali Sufan simply spoke to Abu Zubaida in Arabic and conducted a nonviolent, non-coercive, perfectly legal interrogation, established empathy through speaking Arabic, uh, and began to extract information such as the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which we didn't know at that time, the identity of Hosea Padilla, whom we didn't know at that time.
Um, and what happened was is through four stages, the CIA started off, I'm sorry, um, uh, Ali Sufan started off at great intelligence.
Then the CIA got jealous.
They sent in their, their rough guys and they went up the steps of a course of interrogation towards torture.
And each time they, the CIA ratcheted up their abuse of Abu Zubaida, he clammed up, gave them information.
Then they brought in Abu Zubaida.
Okay.
And he uses empathetic techniques, reestablished rapport, got more information.
This went through four cycles, establishing almost in a scientific experiment that the CIA coercive techniques were counterproductive and the FBI empathy worked every single time.
Now this fragile, but important truth has been obscured because when Ali Sufan's memoirs were published, they were published with 181 pages of CIA excisions that returned that, that turned those passages about the interrogation of Abu Zubaida into a, a mass of black and blinds that no regular reader can understand.
And just in April of this year, a former CIA counterterrorism chief named Hosea Rodriguez, uh, published his memoirs claiming once again, uh, that the CIA is enhanced techniques work brilliantly on Abu Zubaida and an interview on 60 minutes, he called the FBI's claims to effectiveness with empathetic interrogation.
Uh, he called it, well, he called it BS.
Uh, and, and so what's happened is that as far as most of the American people are concerned, okay.
That those techniques, although whatever they might've been enhanced interrogation or torture, you know, uh, they worked, we believe they were necessary for our national security.
And therefore we have now achieved the state of full and total impunity.
Good.
Which just means that from here we can expect this kind of thing to be more and more widespread.
Well, actually Scott, there is one kicker in the deal, right?
Because in a globalized world, uh, and with a, um, with the UN convention against torture, being a crime against humanity, uh, many nations around the world, particularly European nations such as Spain, uh, and Belgium, uh, and Germany recognize what they call universal jurisdiction.
Uh, and we recognize in the United States for crimes against humanity.
So, uh, uh, any torture who comes to the United States, even if they committed their crimes outside the United States under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction or the alien tort claims under us law, we can prosecute that perpetrator for crimes in another country against another foreign national.
And the Europeans are even broader than this.
Uh, they lay claim to universal jurisdiction that this is torture is a crime against humanity and anybody, uh, can be prosecuted before European court.
So for example, in 2009, uh, an, uh, an Italian court in Milan convicted two dozen CIA agents and a U S air force colonel for the act of rendition, snatching up a Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan, flying him to Egypt, where he was subject to brutal tortures by the regime of Hosni Mubarak.
Uh, the Polish authorities have recently indicted the former chief of Poland's intelligence service for facilitating the establishment of a CIA black site in Poland.
And the London metropolitan police are conducting an ongoing criminal investigation of British M I five and M I six agents for allegedly collaborating in torture at Guantanamo Bay.
So in other words, uh, and just last year, president Bush was going to go to Switzerland, but, uh, international human rights activists filed a, uh, a motion for an indictment of him before Swiss courts and he had to cancel the trip.
So through international pressure, this policy of impunity at home is no longer, uh, sustainable and we are going to slowly unwillingly have to comply with international standards of human rights.
Well, I don't know if that's true, really.
Um, they can just torture all the human rights activists and keep going on.
It seems like, I don't know who's to stop them.
I'm less pessimistic.
Maybe someday.
Anyway, thank you very much, everybody.
Please go read a professor Alfred McCoy, perfecting illegality at Tom dispatch.com also the new book is torture and impunity.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate the conversation.
Bye-bye now.
