09/25/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
All right, and not exactly on Guantanamo, but sort of along the same lines.
It's Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest, writer for the American Conservative magazine and unz.com.
He's got a piece at the American Conservative, The CIA's Torture Defenders, about this new book written by a bunch of guilty war criminals called Rebuttal.
The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee's Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Programs.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How's it going?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Must be better than you because I have not read this thing.
I can see you just sitting there, the facepalm, reading through this book in order to make your case against it here.
First of all, who's who?
Who helped write this thing?
It's basically just an edited compendium of articles by guilty torturers at CIA?
Well, actually, what it is, it's seven separate chapters, each of which is written by one of the seven co-author individuals.
And they were obviously edited together in some fashion.
They don't fit together real neatly, but the central theme, essentially, is that the detention program and interrogation program, which are better known as rendition and torture, were perfectly not only legitimate, legal, but also saved thousands of American lives.
This is kind of the central theme.
And you cite the authors here.
George Tenet, who was the director of Central Intelligence at the time in 9-11 and through at least the beginning of the torture program and all that.
Michael Hayden, who was the head of the NSA on 9-11 and then became the head of the torture program at CIA, or director of the CIA, and therefore head of the torture program.
Porter Goss as well.
And Jose Rodriguez, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, John Rizzo, and Philip Mudd.
And when we say Mudd, he's actually the one guy on this list of bylines here who was not actually himself guilty of war crimes and conspiracy in the torture case.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's because he was not CIA.
He's someone who was brought in by the other six to give them credibility, to give the impression to the reader that the entire, let's say, intelligence and security community agrees on this issue, which of course it doesn't.
But Mudd is kind of an outlier that was kind of brought in to minimize what the others are saying.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I don't know why they didn't just bring in John Yoo or Judge Bybee, but all right.
Okay, so now here's the thing.
You write in your article here, the CIA's torture defenders.
You're not buying it.
Yeah, that's putting it mildly.
I mean, the thing is, basically, of course, they don't refer to it as torture.
They refer to it as enhanced interrogation by a number of other euphemisms.
To them, it was all legal, and it was well within the bounds of what we'll consider acceptable practice.
But, of course, that's nonsense.
They don't really address that issue.
The clear consensus is that when you engage in the practices that were outlined in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, it's torture.
Japanese and Germans were executed for doing some of these things that U.S. personnel were doing as part of the interrogation program.
So there's no question about it.
And then they go on from there.
It was all legal, and it was this, that, and the other thing.
Basically, the whole idea is here to throw out a bit of propaganda, saying that, essentially, all this stuff was done in America's interest.
One of the interesting things, the first piece is by Kennett, and he says what is missing, essentially, in the Senate report, apart from the fact that the Democrats are out to get him and the others because, I guess, they presume they're Republicans or something like that.
But the other thing he talks about is context, and for him, context is the fact that because 9-11 happened, anything goes.
And what he's clearly saying is that there was a panic, and because there was a panic, we went out and tortured people, and that was okay because that's context.
And, of course, that's a stupid argument.
But Kennett is the one that flies that, and then some of the others kind of pick up on it in theirs that, essentially, you have to look at what was going on around the torture or around the enhanced interrogation.
And, of course, that's a bullshit argument.
Well, never even mind whether it adds up compared to the law, which specifically says, by the way, no excuse is good enough, national security or anything else.
But do you even think it's true at all, or it's just a made-up bunch of crap that they were even afraid or in any kind of panic at all?
They knew that Al-Qaeda was a couple of hundred guys and that they'd scored their Hail Mary pass.
Right?
I mean, this is a bunch of crap that they were terrified.
George Tenet was terrified.
Dick Cheney.
I can see Dick Cheney being terrified.
Well, you know, there are different ways to define terror.
What these guys were terrified of was Congress and the president jumping all over them because they weren't being seen to be doing something.
And this was doing something.
Kofor Black, who was not co-author of this thing, who was head of the Counterterrorism Center at the time, famously said he was going to bring in bin Laden's head on a silver platter and present it to the president.
And another occasion he said something about he would have bin Laden's flies walking around on bin Laden's dead eyes.
You know, this kind of stuff.
So this is the kind of rhetoric and everything to be tough and tougher and toughest was part of the game.
But, yeah, terror, no.
If they knew anything about Al-Qaeda, they knew basically that, as you say, it was kind of a lucky one-off that they would have extreme difficulty in ever producing again.
Well, we know the story of Ali Soufan and the FBI and how all they did with Abu Zubaydah was treat him with a little bit of respect, give him some ice chips to nibble on as they interrogated him, and he was perfectly happy to spill his guts.
Who, me?
Yeah, I'm a travel agent.
I know all about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, let me tell you.
He wasn't the number three guy in Al-Qaeda, but he sure knew a lot of useful stuff, and he was happily sharing it with the FBI until the CIA came and kidnapped him and tortured him.
And then apparently the first thing they did was lock him away in a box for three months, didn't ask him anything, just locked him in a box to drive him mad for three months without interrogating him at all.
So what the hell kind of crap is that?
Yeah, according to Ali Soufan, the excuse they gave was that they needed information faster.
And so what they proceed in doing, as you correctly state, is that they should be locked up and then talk to him for three months.
So, you know, there was a lot of nonsense going on.
There was obviously rivalry between the CIA and FBI in terms of how to do this stuff.
The FBI had it right.
Anybody who knows anything about interrogations and what comes out of interrogations knows that the most successful interrogations and most successful interrogators build rapport with the suspect, and that's how they get good information.
And that's the fact of the matter.
And here they were, you know, putting on the thumbscrews and torturing these people in the belief that that was a better way to go about it.
They didn't have a clue.
I mean, you know, they should be put in jail for being stupid apart from anything else.
Yeah.
Well, and, of course, now back to the question of how legal all this supposedly was.
All these memos that supposedly legalized this behavior have been repudiated even by Bush's lawyers.
Right.
It was.
And Goldsmith, I think he wasn't, you know, James Madison or anything like that.
But he came in and canceled everything that John, you and J.
And and Alberto Gonzalez and the rest had signed off on saying that this was OK and said, actually, no, you can't do it no more.
Am I wrong about that?
Well, you're right about that.
But obviously what what Kennedy and the others would argue was that they were acting under the the the U memorandum, which basically said it was legal.
And the White House at that time was going along and saying it also was legal.
So that was their authorization to do this.
But the fact is that, you know, that's that's again, that's blowing smoke, because the fact is that the United States is a signatory to international non torture treaties and that sort of thing.
These these these things basically exist so that people won't go out and torture people.
And they set up a they set up, in fact, consequences for it.
Any country that's a signatory has to prosecute people who engage in torture.
And, of course, we've never done that.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with more from Phil Giraldi, former CIA, not a torturer.
Right after this.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
Ha ha.
House Speaker's resigning.
I like it when the House Speaker resigns.
I don't care who he is.
Or she.
In this case, it's John Boehner, so that's kind of nice little Friday news for you.
I don't have to look at his ugly crybaby face on TV anymore.
Talking with Phil Giraldi, he's a former CIA officer, but was not part of the torture regime.
In fact, you could tell he's kind of mad as hell about the torture regime.
And we're talking about it and how the CIA guys who were the torturers have now come out with this new book, pretending to refute the Senate torture report.
But according to Phil, failing to do any such thing.
His article at the American Conservative is called the CIA's Torture Defenders.
It's the spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
Or was it yesterday?
Anyway, yeah.
Okay, good.
And yeah, so I wanted to ask you about Sheikh Ali and Saddam Hussein.
And of course, I think most people know the story now that this guy was an al-Qaeda guy.
But he was tortured into pretending that he was buddies with Saddam and that Saddam had taught him and his al-Qaeda friends how to make chemical weapons.
And I think this is also where the story came from that the anti-terrorist training camp that had an airplane fuselage there and everything outside Baghdad was actually a terrorist training camp.
Where instead of training cops how to kill terrorists, it was there for training terrorists how to hijack planes and that kind of thing.
Where that came from as well.
And so this gets right to the heart of the argument about whether torture works or not.
It all depends on the premise of your question.
Are you trying to get the truth or are you trying to get some lies?
Because if you're trying to get some lies, torture works every time.
Even the toughest guy will give in to torture.
It's torture, right?
So I wonder if they even attempt to address the accusation that they were brutalizing lies about Saddam Hussein out of these people.
No, they don't even come close to that issue.
In fact, in general, they don't even come close to the Iraq war at all in any way.
And it's just one of the big failures of their account.
Basically, they're essentially doing what they did when they were in office.
They're cherry picking information to support what they see as their argument.
And they're ignoring everything else.
And the fact is that, yeah, if you're torturing somebody assiduously enough, or as I say in the article, if you're torturing this guy's family right in front of him, he's going to talk.
But the fact is he's going to also be trying to screw you as much as he can.
And so he'll throw in maybe a little bit of truth and a lot of BS.
And at a certain point, he'll just be agreeing with whatever you're saying because he knows what you want to hear.
And so torture is a very inefficient way to try to get information.
And, of course, they always trot out—McLaughlin, in his piece, trotted out this ticking time bomb nonsense that you've got to torture these people because otherwise there'd be thousands of dead Americans.
And, of course, there is not a single example that anyone can cite, Israelis or Americans or anybody else, where torturing somebody produced information that interdicted or stopped a terrorist action that would have killed them in a sense of—it's never happened.
And did they try to— So it's the argument they always make.
Alan Dershowitz is fond of making this in his arguments justifying torture.
And it's an argument that's been picked up by all these people.
But it's a fake argument because this never happened.
And, you know, Jane Mayer at The New Yorker actually did a great story about how the TV show 24 was actually created by a partisan associate of Karl Rove for the purpose of normalizing this ticking time bomb scenario in the minds of the American people.
That was the purpose of the show, not to entertain you or to sell you dish soap, but to sell you torture.
And that was where it came from.
And so I wonder this.
In the book, did they pretend to go back to their story that torture led to the courier that led to bin Laden?
Or did they go ahead and de facto concede that they're lying about that all along?
There was a little bit of trotting around that.
Morel, in his section, talks about it.
And he makes the standard argument that, yeah, it was this, that, and the other thing that led to this, that, and the other thing.
And, of course, he's ignoring the collateral information or the information that was not produced as a result of torture that eventually actually led to the guy.
So, you know, this is, as I say, it's a cherry-picked type argument that they're doing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's one problem with even covering this story, you know, even as closely as we're covering it here.
You've got to stop and back up and remember that tens and tens and tens of thousands of people were tortured by the military in Afghanistan and in Iraq, far more than the CIA program.
And, in fact, when we talked with Matthew Alexander, I forget his real name, but that's his pseudonym, the military interrogator who got the information that led to the killing of Zarqawi.
He said on this show, direct quote, I was authorized to use all these techniques.
I just decided that I didn't think it would work, and so I did it my way instead, which was, you know, like you said, rapport building.
But whether we're talking under Petraeus and McChrystal at Camp Nama or as Fishback and Tony Lugaranis explained on the PBS torture documentary, The Torture Question, Tony Lugaranis said, man, we tortured these people in their living rooms.
We tortured them in their backyards.
We tortured them on the side of the road.
We tortured them with green eggs and ham in a box with a fox and the rest.
By the tens and tens of thousands all day every day for years, they tortured the people of Iraq because the word had gone down.
Geneva Convention cancelled.
Gloves are off.
Do what you want.
No rules.
And that went from the highest CIA torturer down to the lowest specialist.
Yeah, there's no doubt about that.
This argument does indeed keep surfacing in this book, that these were exceptional circumstances, and we were doing this because we had to do it to save the American people.
Tennant says at one point the world was in danger.
I mean, this is ridiculous hyperbole.
And all these lines about, yeah, we're saving American lives and everything like that.
We stopped terrorist acts.
You know, this kind of stuff is a very selective way of looking at what is a very serious problem in terms of how the United States basically went off the rails and has become the evil empire.
But, of course, that's not something they want to think about.
And let me mention one other thing that's not in my article, which I think your listeners and you will find very interesting.
The title of this book is Rebuttal, the CIA Response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Study of its Detention and Interrogation Programs.
And this is a book that would have been cleared by the censors at CIA.
The CIA, by law, is not allowed to influence public opinion in the United States.
So this book is illegal by its very nature.
It says the title, The CIA Response.
And since that book was vetted and cleared by the CIA, obviously they agree with the title.
And so it raises a lot of interesting questions about the legality of these guys even writing this book.
And these guys, of course, also have second careers now.
So there are other issues of conflict of interest and all kinds of things in terms of this.
And a huge question of just who the hell do they think they are, these guys, when they're spying on the Senate that's investigating their torture regime, for example.
Where, you know, we all know that there's really the deep state, as you put it in your article, that controls America.
But there are times where they reveal themselves as believing that they are far higher in rank than the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who created them and is charged with their oversight.
I mean, these guys are way out of control here.
They'll break any law.
They'll directly trample right over the articles of the Constitution.
Yep, yep.
Well, I say in my article, I said one might well ask whether publishing an ostensibly serious book justifying torture could even happen anywhere but in the United States.
Yep, yeah, that's really something.
And that's not a point about free speech.
That's a point of America turning into some, you know, old world despotism is what that sounds like to me.
Great work as always, Phil.
Thank you so much.
Okay, Scott, take care.
Appreciate it.
That's the great Phil Giraldi, former CIA, former DIA.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
He writes for UNS.com and the American Conservative Magazine where this article is entitled The CIA's Torture Defenders.
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