For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing investigative reporter Alan Nairn.
He keeps the blog News and Comment at alannairn.com.
That's N-A-I-R-N, alannairn.com.
And has an article that recently ran at Counterpunch that we ran on Antiwar.com, The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture.
About how, despite all the celebrating, even on this show, about how, wow, Obama really did on the first day sign all these executive orders setting things straight about the law and war crimes and shutting down Guantanamo and even the CIA ghost prisons and so forth.
And yet you argue that there's a major loophole in the language of, I guess, one particular executive order, which continues to allow the American Empire to torture people.
How exactly is that, sir?
Well, Obama's executive order just bans Americans themselves from torturing or from torture being carried on in American facilities.
But it allows the U.S. to pay for, arm, train, sponsor foreigners who torture on behalf of the United States.
And, in fact, that is how most of the torture in the world in which the U.S. has a role takes place.
So what Obama has done is ban really an infinitesimal portion of the torture that the U.S. now sponsors and allowed the rest of it, the vast majority, to continue.
He's banned hands-on, essentially he's banned hands-on torture by Americans, but he's allowing proxy torture on behalf of the U.S. to continue.
And now, so as far as the actual American kidnapping and CIA tortures being a small proportion, is that as far as the war on terrorism is concerned, or that's as far as American support for any and all dictatorships in the world that torture people?
That's regarding any torture that's happening with U.S. culpability, with U.S. support.
For example, this is the way that Obama is doing it now.
It's simply the way it was done before Bush.
In the 1980s, for example, in El Salvador, the U.S., the CIA would have instructors who gave classes in interrogation techniques, which included torture.
The torture would then be carried out by the Salvadoran National Guard, National Police, and Treasury Police, and people from the Army, General Staff.
Sometimes the CIA or American military personnel would even stand in the next room as the torture was going on and feed questions to the interrogators and then get back the results.
Now, I know this because of extensive interviews I did with people like Ricardo Castro, who was a Salvadoran company commander who went to West Point, who worked on the CIA payroll, who took just such a CIA torture class, etc.
So precisely that kind of proxy torture is permitted today.
It can continue today.
And in today's world, there are still dozens of countries whose security forces are paid for, armed, trained, or otherwise sponsored by the U.S., who systematically torture.
It's a very long list.
Is it a very long list?
I guess I can think of a few.
Can you, I guess, name most of them or all of them?
I couldn't name all of them.
We don't have time to just, well, for example, just talk about the Middle East.
You have Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, all of these.
Morocco.
Well, going a little farther afield, Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and in those latter two countries, referring now just to the U.S.
-sponsored Afghan and Iraqi forces, now, in theory, the Americans in Afghanistan, the Americans in Iraq will be banned from torture.
But the Iraqis that they have trained, who they arm, who they essentially supervise, the Afghans who they have trained, armed, who they essentially supervise, they can continue with their torture.
And this goes on all over the world.
In Southeast Asia, for example.
In Indonesia, there is extensive torture by the military, by the police, by intelligence.
Even in Thailand, a place which most people don't really think of when they think of torture, you have special military and police who have been trained by American special forces, by the CIA, and they engage in torture.
Well, in fact, that's part of Jane Mayer's book, that the CIA, especially like Thailand, all their dungeons were deep underground, and they thought that was better.
Well, part of that pertains to the direct American-run so-called CIA secret prisons, which Obama says he is now shutting down.
But you're talking about a larger establishment of torture beyond that.
Yes, exactly.
Facilities that are Thai facilities, now that we're talking about Thailand, run by the Thais, and the Thais running them are U.S.
-trained or paid or armed, and they process large numbers of people.
In the deep south of Thailand, for example, in the Malay Muslim area where there is an insurgency, people are routinely captured by the Thai security forces.
Recently there was a famous case of an imam, a religious leader, who was tortured to death while in intelligence custody.
I interviewed one of the top Thai intelligence people who spoke very frankly about this kind of torture being done and about how it also happens to Burmese refugees who are coming across the border into northern Thailand and onto Thailand's west coast.
And then this man, this Thai intelligence man, took me into his back room and showed me a wall full of plaques and awards he had received from the CIA, from American special forces, from the Israeli Mossad, from Singaporean intelligence.
There was a photo of him with President Bush.
There was an award given to him by the CIA Counterterrorism Center.
He was talking about how he was due to head off to Langley, the CIA headquarters, soon.
I mean, this is utterly typical.
This is how most of the torture in the world in which the U.S. is involved happens.
It's done by foreign hands, and under the Obama administration that is set to continue, and in all likelihood is continuing at this very moment.
So contrary to myth, Obama has not banned torture.
You know, there was an American named, I think it was an American named Abu Ali, who was given that exact treatment in Saudi Arabia where the, I don't know if they were FBI or CIA guys, basically stood there and asked the questions while the Saudis did the torturing and forced this kid to admit, get this, that he was going to assassinate George Bush, of course.
And so then they brought him back here and prosecuted him in court in Virginia.
They didn't make him an enemy combatant.
They gave him a trial, but they used that tortured testimony against him in the trial.
Well, I'm not familiar with that case, but that kind of case is an interesting example.
Now, I'm not sure if, say, an FBI person standing there and directly asking the questions, whether that would or would not be permitted under the new Obama executive order.
But if they did it like they used to do it in El Salvador, and the FBI man simply passed the questions to the Saudi interrogator, and the Saudi interrogator asked the questions, I think that clearly would be permitted under the Obama executive order.
Well, actually, that was what I meant to say.
That's actually the more accurate.
I shorthanded who was asking the question to who, but that's what I meant, yeah.
And it also should be noted that in terms of direct American running of these kinds of torture operations, there are actually two big loopholes in the Obama order that even permitted for Americans, because the order essentially says Americans can't torture in situations of armed conflict, in wartime situations.
Now, is that supposed to be a geographical distinction?
I'm sorry?
Is that supposed to be a geographical distinction between a battlefield and not a battlefield?
Yes, it's a geographical and a legal distinction.
Some situations on various legal grounds are defined as being armed conflict situations, and others aren't.
So, for example, anything inside Iraq would probably now be classified as an armed conflict situation.
But in another country where there is no, technically speaking, no war going on, it's not.
And in such a non-armed conflict situation, under the Obama executive order, Americans could even personally get in there and torture themselves.
A second loophole is that although the CIA secret prison network ostensibly is going to be shut down by Obama, the practice of CIA rendition, of kidnapping people off the streets and shipping them off somewhere for whatever, is still allowed.
And there's even been a claim made.
There was a piece by Tom Hayden the other day where he said that this particular rendition permission was negotiated with the administration by some human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch.
Really?
That they had, pardon me, that they had negotiated with George Bush and said that they were, or with the Obama administration and said they were satisfied that the policy of renditions, extraordinary renditions I guess they call them now, should continue?
In some cases, that is what Tom Hayden wrote.
You can ask him about that.
Well, I'll have to.
But what is clear is that in non-combat situations, Americans are still allowed to torture under the Obama guidelines.
But most importantly, and this is the key, proxy torture, U.S.
-sponsored as opposed to U.S.
-done torture, which is what accounts for probably 99% of U.S.
-backed torture in the world anyway, is still allowed to continue under the Obama regime, under the Obama legal guidelines.
Well, and what about Indonesia?
That's where you are now, right?
Yes.
And is Indonesia a torture police state, dictatorship backed by the United States too?
Well, it's certainly still a torture and police state.
The army still dominates politics, as do the national police.
And they can pick up people at will, especially in the region of West Papua, which is occupied by the military and police.
Where outside observers like journalists are banned from coming in and seeing what is happening.
There are extensive arrests and tortures of the local population.
But now in Indonesia they have elections, minimal choice elections, as in many countries, where people do get to choose among various candidates, but none of the candidates stand for bringing in the rule of law and prosecuting military or police who kill people.
None of the candidates stand for reallocating wealth so that people aren't dying of starvation.
So it's not technically a dictatorship, but it still is very much a police state.
And there still is extensive torture, and the regime is being backed by the U.S. government.
And in fact, Obama has just chosen as his new director of national intelligence, the number one intelligence official in the U.S. system, a man named Admiral Dennis Blair.
Blair, back in 1999, when he ran the U.S. military forces in the Pacific, played a key role in a series of massacres in Indonesian-occupied East Timor.
At that time, East Timor was under occupation by the Indonesian military in defiance of the U.N.
Security Council.
The Indonesian military had murdered about a third of the population, the most intensive proportional slaughter since the Nazis.
In 1999, Timor was on the verge of having a free vote, a free election, a U.N.
-sponsored referendum, in which the Timorese would be able to decide their own future.
They would be able to decide whether they wanted to continue under Indonesian military occupation, or whether they would opt for independence.
Now, the Indonesian military wanted to derail this vote, so they set out on a series of massacres to try to intimidate the East Timorese population.
They particularly concentrated on religious people and churches, because that was the center of resistance in Timor at the time, because all the other institutions had crushed.
And as these massacres were going on, as they were going into churches, like the church in Likisah, East Timor, attacking people to death with machetes, Admiral Blair, the U.S. Pacific Commander, went in and met with the Indonesian Armed Forces Commander, General Wiranto.
And rather than telling him to stop the massacres, rather than telling him to shut his militias down, Admiral Blair instead gave support to General Wiranto, the massacre commander.
He offered him new U.S. assistance.
He invited him to be his guest in Hawaii, where the U.S. Pacific Command is located.
And as a result of this, the Indonesian massacre commander, General Wiranto, was naturally very encouraged.
He increased the pace of killing.
Admiral Blair ended up being complicit, himself responsible for the massacres that followed, which claimed more than 1,000 civilians and included, for example, a horrible slaughter at the church in Suay, where the Indonesian forces went in, raped nuns, burnt their bodies.
And this is the man who has now been chosen as Obama's new Intelligence Chief, his Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair.
Well, now, you wrote in your article, didn't you, that Bill Clinton had ordered that he go and tell them to stop, and he basically just refused to obey his order from the President of the United States at the time.
Well, it was a very unusual, kind of exceptional internal bureaucratic situation at the time.
And it's a little complicated, so let me explain it to the audience, because this was a bit of a deviation from the way things usually work.
For many years, for decades, the U.S. had backed the Indonesian military.
The Indonesian military had seized power in the country during the 1965 to 1967 period when they overthrew the government of Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno, who was a bit of a reformist who was challenging the Western oil companies.
And they put in instead General Suharto as the military dictator.
And Suharto and his army in that period launched a massacre of anywhere from 400,000 to a million Indonesians in order to consolidate their control of the country.
And that massacre was backed by the CIA and the U.S.
The CIA even gave them a list of people they said were communists, people to be assassinated.
So for decades, during the Johnson administration all the way up through Clinton, the U.S. was backing the Indonesian military.
In fact, when the Indonesian military invaded East Timor originally, they first asked permission from President Ford and Henry Kissinger, and Ford and Kissinger gave them the green light beginning that slaughter.
However, after the 1991 Dili massacre in East Timor, a massacre which I happened to witness and survive, things started to change in Timor.
The situation there as a result of that massacre got some international attention, and international grassroots movement grew up.
And in the U.S., that grassroots movement including the East Timor Action Network succeeded, which I worked with, succeeded in getting the U.S. Congress to start changing the American policy, to start cutting back the U.S. support for the Indonesian military.
And so year by year after 1991, we succeeded in getting the M16 rifles cut off, some of the helicopters cut off, some of the training cut off.
And by 1999, when the U.N. sponsored vote was coming up in Timor, there was building congressional support for the U.S. abandoning the armed forces of Indonesia.
And so as the massacres started taking place in Timor, and they started getting international press coverage because of the U.N. presence, Clinton's White House came under pressure.
They came under pressure from the Congress that had in turn been pressured by U.S. grassroots mobilization.
They came under pressure from all the bad press.
And so the State Department at the time, the Clinton State Department and the White House decided, okay, we should send Blair in and have him tell Warranto, shut the massacres down.
So that was the instruction that went to Blair from the White House and the State Department.
But Admiral Blair, as the military chief for the Pacific, chose otherwise and decided to back Warranto instead.
And an increase in the killings is what resulted.
Now, do you know where was the ambassador during this or who was the ambassador?
Did they have a role?
At that time, the ambassador was a guy named Stapleton Roy, who himself had been a very strong backer of the Indonesian military all along.
But the pressure to change the U.S. policy, which he didn't really like, he didn't like that change, was coming from the states because the grassroots mobilization there had built up so much support in the U.S. Congress.
And so that policy change was basically being imposed on Ambassador Roy as it eventually was imposed on Blair.
In the end, Blair did come into line, but not before he'd gotten many hundreds of people killed through his support for General Warranto.
Wasn't there a regime change in there somewhere, too, where the IMF bread riots and all that had led to the fall of Suharto in 1997 or something?
Do I remember that correctly at all?
Starting with the Asian financial crisis of 1997, there were protests in Indonesia itself.
People took to the streets because the currency was collapsing, the economy was collapsing.
The IMF came in and imposed an austerity, what they called an austerity plan on Indonesia, which made matters worse.
And those popular protests eventually brought down General Suharto, the dictator.
He fell in 1998.
And it was after Suharto fell that the door was then opened for the new president of Indonesia, a man named Habibi, to allow the U.N. to come in and sponsor this vote in Timor.
And Habibi's thinking in permitting this free vote in Timor was in large part he was hoping to try to get his full U.S. military aid restored.
He saw how much the Indonesian military's repression of East Timor had hurt them in the U.S. Congress.
So he was hoping that if they granted this free vote to Timor, maybe then they could win back their U.S. military aid.
And so the 1999 Timor vote was scheduled with the results I described earlier.
And so, well, basically, what's the status of East Timor now?
They're more or less independent there?
Timor did become independent.
Despite that intimidation, despite those massacres done by the forces of General Wuoronto and backed by Admiral Dennis Blair, despite all that, the Timorese turned out very bravely and overwhelmingly, in excess of 80 percent, voted for independence.
And Timor is now an independent country.
It's one of the poorest countries in the world.
There are problems of hunger.
There are also problems of government bickering and corruption.
But they are normal problems, as opposed to the daily massacre they were experiencing under the Indonesian military occupation.
Timor is actually a great victory, in a sense, a very inspiring story of how when people stand up and refuse to be crushed, and when foreign and U.S. activists say, our governments should not be supporting mass murder, sometimes you can win.
And that's what happened in Timor, in spite of people like Admiral Blair.
Yeah, you're right.
That really is an important lesson.
I think so often, well, so much of the time, it's really true that we all are so powerless to do anything about this.
But that is a great example of a reason to keep trying anyway.
You never know.
Demand total liberty, you might get to keep some kind of a thing, you know.
It's true.
And, you know, you're right.
Lots of times people think we're powerless, but we are not powerless.
Those who run things, those who are very rich or have the guns, they cannot run things alone.
They need people to go along with them, or things won't work.
They even need some measure of popular support.
And if people get fed up enough and are brave enough and decide they're going to withhold that support, decide they're going to stand up, say, for the idea that everyone should be able to eat well, that people should be able to live a life and walk around without being abducted and tortured by the army or police, they can win sometimes if they stand up.
And especially in these times when the world financial system is in such crisis and you have the most powerful corporations, financial giants, going to the governments, begging for trillions of dollars, that gives tremendous leverage to government.
And if at this moment people recognize clearly what is going on and don't get swept to the side by the illusion that the Obama administration is somehow changing what they are not changing, if people now stand up and demand of government, say, look, if these companies are going to be bailed out, we're going to demand basic changes in how they are run, in how they pay people, in what they do to their workers in the U.S., and how they allow unionization and what they do to their workers overseas, then there's a good chance you could get it, because government has tremendous leverage now.
And it's the corporations that are begging at this moment, but that can only happen if people force government to impose those policies.
Well, I would settle for just total opposition to any bailouts, rather than two wrongs making a right and that kind of thing, but that's where we'll differ.
I guess that's all right.
But back on the issue, I mean, what we're really talking about is, the most important thing is what we need the American empire to stop doing to people, and kidnapping them and torturing them, aggressively invading their countries being the most important parts of that.
And I wanted to bring up something that Chris Hedges said, the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a reporter, of course, I'm sure you're familiar with, who's covered a dozen wars or more, something around the world.
And he talked about when America sponsors torture states in Egypt or Morocco or Thailand or wherever, for example, that, you know, we like to pretend that we have this rule of law here, and all the torture and dungeons and terrible lawless things that happen to people are all the rest of the world's problem.
But since we are so involved in supporting the governments that do these things, in fact, directing them to do these things, that really, we are them.
I mean, Egypt really is, you know, it's a matter of degrees to which Egypt is a satellite in our empire or is simply just part of America and the American empire in the world.
And it's the American empire-Egypt division that is torturing these people, and that comes back on us.
And we end up having a situation where, like for now, like you said, you know, Americans could still be subject to this.
They haven't repealed the Military Commissions Act.
It still says that they can turn us over to military custody, you know?
Well, that's an important question, and you don't even have to look at it in terms of, say, empire.
I mean, even if, you know, there's a person who doesn't think well that the U.S. is an empire, all you have to do is look at it in terms of criminal law.
In criminal law, if you give a gun to someone and they go out and rob a convenience store and shoot the clerk, you will be indicted.
You will be indicted as an accessory to murder.
And depending on the laws of the state you're in, you will go to prison for varying amounts of years.
President Bush, I think, said it well.
He said, if you arm a terrorist, if you back a terrorist, you are a terrorist.
He was right.
And what is a terrorist?
A terrorist is someone who kills civilians for political purposes.
That is how it's defined in law.
That is the common sense understanding of it.
And when the U.S. backs governments and forces that kill civilians for political purposes, the U.S. is itself engaging in terrorism by President Bush's definition, and it is also engaging in crime, either breaking local murder laws, the local murder laws of Indonesia, or Egypt, or Israel, or Pakistan, or Colombia, or wherever the crime is taking place.
And they're also breaking international law, the international laws against crimes against humanity and crimes of war.
So these things are illegal.
And what we need to do is enforce the murder laws, get tough on crime, even when that crime is committed by officials acting in their official capacity.
Well, yeah, that's very well said.
And I guess I didn't even really think of it that way, but I guess there is a whole pretended rule of law in Egypt.
It's just everybody knows it's a joke, and that's what's happening to us now.
As in so many other places.
Just recently as Israel was assaulting Gaza, it was committing a series of what in other situations the U.S. has described as war crimes and crimes against humanity, the use of white phosphorus bombs, the bombing of U.N. facilities, the bombing of schools, the killing of civilians with reckless disregard, the disproportionate use of force, an operation in which more than 1,000 Palestinians are killed and roughly one hundredth as many Israelis are killed.
Imagine if Iran launched such an operation.
Imagine if North Korea launched such an operation.
The U.S. would justly and rightly describe such acts as crimes, and it would justly and rightly say that the Iranian or North Korean or whoever leaders should be brought before the International Criminal Court and put on trial.
But in this case, the U.S. doesn't do that.
In fact, in this case, the U.S. supplies the weapons and the money that generates the shrapnel, that tears the bodies of the people in Gaza, and this happens in dozens and dozens of other countries as well, where the U.S. supports forces that illegally kill civilians, and Americans have to put a stop to it and don't think that Obama has put a stop to it because he hasn't, and that's just a fact.
If we want a stop to be put to it, we have to make him stop it.
We have to make the Congress stop it.
We have to stand up and say, enough, no more, we don't want to be murdering anymore.
Yeah, well, and as you've explained in your writings and your statements about Dennis Blair and his appointment, he certainly seems to be heading in the wrong direction there.
It seems like the argument has been he keeps appointing all these hawks to guard his right flank so that he can really act like a dove, and I guess it remains to be seen.
It's only been a little while, but it seems less likely that that would even work if it really is his motive.
If he puts a bunch of people in to guard his right flank, they're going to be the ones instituting his policy, and they're going to do it their way anyway.
Well, Obama, the way the U.S. system works, the U.S. system is so vast in terms of the number of weapons itself.
It's the world's number one arms dealer, the world's number one trainer of paramilitaries, the world's number one sponsor of intelligence units that torture, the world's number one detonator of bombs, and so on and so forth.
This system works on autopilot, and it works every day, every night.
And so when Obama took the oath on January 20th, if he did not on that day issue orders, to the extent that the president has executive power, and the president has executive power over most of these things, to the extent that he did not issue orders telling that system, stop, that system continued on the afternoon and evening of January 20th.
And so even though he's only been in for a short number of days, Obama has already been responsible for countless civilian deaths and tortures around the world.
There is absolutely nothing to indicate, absolutely nothing, that he intends to reverse that practice of U.S. sponsoring of civilian killings.
Richard Perle, who many rightly considered to be kind of the arch-advocate of mass civilian killing on behalf of the Bush administration, he was one of the main architects of the Iraq invasion, for example.
Perle said that he was so delighted with Obama's foreign policy and national security appointees that he thought maybe they would turn out to be better than the Bush team.
And Kaine has said that the people now working for Obama in those fields could have worked for him.
We're now in a transition from a Pentagon run by Robert Gates to a Pentagon run by Robert Gates.
If people think that this is a change in U.S. policy in regard to murder and terrorism overseas and sponsorship of illegal acts, they're just not looking at the facts.
Well, and see, that's really the rub.
Even though nothing has really changed in D.C., the American people have, at least the politically opinionated of them, have mostly just done a big flip-flop as the right pretends to be the dissent, and the liberals are now in the permanent position, it seems like, many of them, of simply defending the administration no matter what.
And I guess that's really the question is, we've already seen the kind of diminishing of the anti-war movement because now everything's changed and everything's great from Obama.
The question is, how long is it going to take to get everybody motivated and back again to opposing war and demanding peace in this society?
Well, that's an important question, and this is not an issue of liberal or conservative, right or left, Democrat or Republican.
This is an issue of being for murder or against murder.
If you look at the actual records over the years of U.S. Republican and Democratic administrations, they're basically roughly even in terms of body count, in terms of the civilians they have caused to be killed.
You can't really say that one has been worse than the other.
They have been equally culpable on a massive scale.
And in fact, in recent years, if you look at the records of people in Washington, you will find some figures who are considered liberals and other figures who are considered conservatives who have, in fact, stood up against this.
You have someone who's called a liberal, like Dennis Kucinich.
You have someone who's called a conservative, like Representative Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, who have both been very firm opponents of U.S. support for terror overseas.
But, of course, their views have not prevailed.
It's the Democrats and Republicans, it's the liberals and conservatives who have supported mass murder, who by and large have been setting U.S. policy up to now, and who continue to be setting it during the Obama administration.
The question for the American public is, do you agree with that?
Do you think it's a good thing to go in and massacre churches, as was done in Timor, under the patronage of Obama's intelligence chief, Admiral Dennis Blair?
If you do think it's a good thing, good.
Back Blair.
Tell Obama congratulations.
If you think it's a bad thing, then tell Obama, no, don't appoint Blair, indict him.
If you were truly against torture, regardless of whether you're a liberal or conservative, then don't congratulate Obama for eliminating perhaps 1% or less of torture.
Instead, criticize Obama for maintaining the 99% plus of torture that the U.S. sponsors by proxy, and say to him, stop it, this is completely intolerable, this is illegal, and you yourself are now becoming complicit in crime because you allow it to continue.
This is not a partisan issue.
This is not an ideological issue.
This is a murder, non-murder issue, if an issue of decency.
All right, thanks very much for your time on the show today.
All right, you're welcome.
All right, everybody, that's Alan Nairn.
Again, his website is alannairn.org.
