Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Chase Medar.
He's an attorney in New York and a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
He writes for Tom Dispatch, the American Conservative Magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Huffington Post, the Nation, and the London Review of Books.
His new one in the American Conservative Magazine is called Torture's Comeback.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Chase?
I'm doing great, thanks.
Thanks for having me again.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us here and, boy, you got it right.
The shadows saw Bin Laden in the head and immediately came the leaks, most of them anonymous, that yeah, it was because we tortured this guy that we got the information that led to that guy.
What do you say?
What is up with that?
I mean, I think that our execution of Bin Laden certainly raises all kinds of questions as to the nature of our alliance with Pakistan's military, as to our overall response to 9-11 and just how counterproductive and destructive most of it has been.
But I don't think it ever would have occurred to me, if left to my own little devices, to think that, oh, the execution of Bin Laden suddenly calls back into question the virtues of torture.
Oh, don't you know that five years ago they got some intel that stayed fresh for five years and led them right to our head bad guy?
I know.
I mean, the case of the torture lobby, of their desperation of connecting the OBL rub-out to torture is just so desperate and so flimsy and so attenuated, I'm almost embarrassed for them.
Well, why don't you take us through that a little bit, because maybe some people have heard a little bit on the radio here and there, but haven't had a chance to read all about it.
Okay, well, let's start with the fact that so many people, intellectuals, media people, politicians, have just rushed to give all the credit to finding Bin Laden to torture, saying that this redeems torture, this vindicates torture, this proves that torture works.
You have Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, who's a very principled foe of all terrorists who aren't Irish, who said that, oh yeah, it was information gleaned from torture that directly led, his words, directly led to finding Bin Laden.
And you have former head of the CIA, Michael Hayden, who said anyone who questions the effectiveness of torture and the great contribution of torture to the intelligence that led to finding OBL, well, they're just like the birthers and the truthers.
It's that crazy and far out.
And this is in addition, of course, to all the usual suspects, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and the like.
But if you look at the chain of reasoning tying torture and information supposedly gleaned from torture to finding Bin Laden, it's incredibly attenuated and flimsy, and I would never make an argument like that.
Isn't it funny, too, how never even mind the morality at all, we're all utilitarians now, and I guess could we expect to read in the Washington Times then that, well, China's justified their torture program by saying it works.
And so therefore the Washington Times no longer has a problem with the communist government in China anymore, because after all, they proved their point.
You know, they were able to torture the location of other peaceful protesters out of this one guy and led to the shutting down of peaceful protester cells all over their country.
Sounds just like the kind of thing the Washington Times would support, you know?
Oh, good lord.
I hope that's not a real column that you just described.
Well, you know, shoe other foot and all that kind of thing.
You know, if a Chinese cop gives somebody a ticket for jaywalking, that's a cause for war in the Washington Times, right?
And the fact that it's a torture state over there is the kind of thing they like to harp on all the time.
But then when it comes to us, well, it works.
Simple as that.
Yeah, well, you know, human rights.
That's for other other nations, not for us, I guess, nowadays.
But it's been this huge resurgence of this debate.
And people desperate to to justify torture with the OBL like that.
And what I what I think this really shows is that there is a fairly strong torture lobby here in the United States.
I think this is a subset of what political scientist John Mueller calls the terrorism industry, you know, a permanent lobby for more and more security measures, a sprawling national security state that really no one even is able to grasp just how far it goes, how much money it spends, how much overlapping functions, how intrusive it is into the lives of of all of us everyday Americans.
And the torture lobby is part of this.
And, you know, what I'd like to talk about is just the appetite we have in this country for torture, because I think it's it's something it's an appetite that's been growing rather than shrinking over the past 10 years, which is unpleasantly surprising.
It would be understandable in a way if in the initial freaked out, panicked reaction to 9-11, you had suddenly people saying, well, maybe we need to do torture.
But it's very distressing that 10 years later, the appetite seems to be growing and it's growing, you know, not just among the authoritarian right, you know, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Hayden, but in other sectors, too.
You have even the evangelical right saying we need more torture.
Mike Huckabee, he's prayerfully pro-torture.
I think that's what his bumper sticker probably says.
And he rarely misses a chance to to defend torture.
You have moderates like Susan Collins, Republican senator of Maine.
She was very upset that the would be exploding underpants bomber was read his rights after being apprehended rather than instantly being tortured.
And then you even have some establishment liberals like Michael Ignatyev, the Harvard human rights guy, former head of the Liberal Party in Canada, who led his party to meltdown and defeat.
He has said ambiguous things about torture.
I remember when I was in law school, the fall of 2003, I was shocked when a guy with the impeccable liberal credentials in my class started defending torture.
You know, this is someone who fresh out of the Peace Corps.
He had the liberal goatee.
I mean, he was really quintessential.
But he started parroting Alan Dershowitz's ticking time bomb hypothetical, which is supposed to be this, you know, foolproof justification for torture.
And that's something that's really seeped into the consciousness and only grown in, you know, among not just authoritarian conservatives, but also moderates and even some liberals.
Well, and I guess the leadership of this still is the Cheney family, right?
I mean, they have their own personal interests.
They and their neocon lawyers and the rest of these guys in trying very hard to push this campaign to normalize the idea of torture in the minds of the American people.
Otherwise, they could get the death penalty for their war crimes, because that's the law in America.
Yeah, yeah.
Good law, too.
You have, I guess it's Liz Cheney.
The only death penalty offense that I support.
I'm against capital punishment set for war crimes offenses.
Mm hmm.
Well, you know that the Cheney family is, of course, self-interested.
So are former CIA officers who would prefer not to be indicted.
And, you know, that's that's all entirely predictable.
But what's disgraceful to me is just how many American intellectuals, the media and academia and and politicos are willing to go along with this nonsense.
Yeah, well, and especially that it's already 2011.
It seems like we to learn some kind of lesson by now.
For example, how many of the lies about Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden came from the torture?
The lies about Jose Padilla that led to his torture came from the torture of Binyam Mohamed.
And, you know, we have a decade worth of truth that's been coming out about this here to to sit here and pretend like, oh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got waterboarded three times or whatever is.
Yeah, I don't know how anybody could justify this at this point.
Anyway, we got more like this and even better with Chase Madar right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Chase Madar.
He's writing in the American conservative magazine, Torture's Comeback.
And I made a wild assertion chase before the break there.
So I wanted to back it up here real quick, as you probably already know.
There's a great piece, one of a million pieces of evidence along these lines.
But this one is Jonathan S.
Landay with John Wolcott and Warren Strobel in McClatchy newspapers.
Those are three actual journalists whose names have credibility.
Believe that.
And this article is called Abusive Tactics Used to Seek Iraq-Al Qaeda Link, and it's about an IG report where the interrogators are saying the pressure was on us to torture assertions about Saddam Hussein out of these people.
And then, of course, we know that for one example, there was Sheikh Al-Libyan.
There's another I'm trying to think of who came up directly with false assertions about Saddam Hussein.
But both of them were relied on in the building of the case for war.
So there's something that torture is good for getting people to lie and say whatever you want them to say so that you can start a war.
I mean, you couldn't ask for a better smoking gun piece of evidence to show the stupidity, not to mention the evil of torture.
If you look at the disaster that led to and the dangers of extracting information, that's just what you want to hear rather than what might be the truth.
That's what torture usually does.
So I want to talk a little bit about a point you just raised before the break.
And that's it's 2011 now.
It's not 2002 or 2003.
And yet we are more attached to torture than ever.
Why is that?
Shouldn't we have regained some perspective?
Ten years now, nearly ten years after the 9-11 attacks.
And why?
Let's look at why we turn so eagerly to torture to begin with.
I mean, we, of course, panicked.
We lost our heads as a nation a bit after 9-11.
That's one reason.
And there's a lot of truth to that.
Another reason is that, well, whenever we're dealing with noncitizens, we're not quite as careful as we try to be with our own people.
There's some truth to that.
But there's another very powerful argument.
And I think that is mostly true.
And that's that all the horrors, the sensational horrors of our war on terror at Abu Ghraib, at Bagram, at Guantanamo, that these are really just extensions of many of our everyday normal domestic practices from our own domestic prisons, from our own domestic criminal justice system.
And this argument is expressed very cogently by a law professor named James T. Foreman, an article called Exporting Harshness.
It's available online, published in the NYU Law Review of Social Change.
But what he points out is that legal black holes, you know, lawless zones are not something that just sprouted up after 9-11 at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
That we have a few decades now of shredding the rule of law here in America with our war on crime and our war on drugs.
And by using the same kind of martial rhetoric, the same kind of rhetoric of fear, panic, we have shredded the civil liberties and the constitutionally protected rights of a great many people here in America.
And things like, oh, solitary confinement before a trial, pre-trial detention in solitary.
You know, that's just been done to Bradley Manning for almost a year.
It's horrible.
And, you know, many people have rushed to see that as a kind of leakage of the war on terror's harsh tactics into our domestic sphere.
In fact, you can find hundreds of people in solitary already awaiting trial and pre-trial detention right here in America.
That's a common practice here in our everyday criminal justice system.
And the ACLU and other fine groups like to condemn the war on terror's harsh tactics, including the use of torture, as being un-American.
And I can see why they do that.
That's a good rhetorical tactic.
You know, no one wants to be un-American.
I guess.
And, you know, it's a way to appeal to people's patriotism and and, you know, the good side of American values.
But it has to be admitted that, you know, American values include a tradition of torture right here in our domestic justice system.
You see this with the recent perjury indictment of a Chicago police unit.
Commander John Burge, who was convicted, wasn't he?
Well, he was he was convicted of perjury because the statute of limitations was over, but he he's essentially been charged with torturing dozens and dozens of of prisoners.
And according to the criminal defense attorneys that I talked to, torture inside interrogation rooms and threats of torture.
It's not systematic the way it was early on at Guantanamo and at Bagram, but it is common enough.
And, you know, Chase, when you talk about, you know, what's American and what's un-American and that kind of thing, obviously there's it's both.
But principle wise, you know, I learned and Lord knows Ronald Reagan was torturing people probably at the minute that I learned this when I was a little kid.
But what I learned was tortures, the kind of thing that, you know, like the Chinese water torture from a long time ago or the the medieval period when people would be tortured for blasphemy and burned at the stake and these kinds of things.
And that we're better than that now because, you know, at the very least, we've had the Renaissance and the and the Enlightenment period.
And we have our Declaration of Independence.
And, you know, it's like slavery or something.
This is something that we all now, you know, agree is a thing of the past, that we're better than that now.
And yet here we are acting just like what I learned is the exact opposite of the American way here.
You know, when I was growing up.
Yeah, absolutely.
But then as a character in a Faulkner novel says, hey, the past, it isn't even past and it's still with us.
What a great quote.
I like that.
And I never come up with good quotes like that.
It's just disturbing that that support for torture seems to be growing because it should be a thing of the past, we should have learned that waterboarding, which was invented by the Spanish Inquisition, is a barbaric practice, utterly immoral, cruel, nasty, barbaric, as well as ineffective for getting intelligence.
But our appetite for torture seems only to have grown and grown.
And, you know, one one parable that I bring up in my article is that, you know, think of the parable of the three men and the newspaper column.
The first man is a guy named Matthew Alexander.
He's a former senior military interrogator.
Right.
Great experience.
He writes well, and he is adamantly against torture.
Second guy is Ali Soufan.
He's a former FBI agent of vast experience.
He writes well, and he is completely against torture.
The third man is this guy, Mark Thiessen.
He's a former George W.
Bush speechwriter and Hill staffer.
He really has no military or intelligence experience.
He's published a book in defense of torture that is just a flaming mess of inaccuracy and willful misrepresentation.
Now, guess which one of these three men gets a Washington Post column?
Thiessen, of course.
Of course, it's Thiessen.
And this is a guy who's capable of finding, you know, justifications for torture in his bowl of cornflakes every morning.
And he writes about it frequently.
And, you know, there's a thing, too, here that I don't think we should leave out, Chase, which is that torturing people and this is part of Matthew Alexander's argument, certainly, is that torturing people is what creates terrorist enemies against us.
You go back and look at why they attacked us in the first place on September 11th.
It wasn't because they hate freedom.
It was because they hate our support for Israel and the occupations and, you know, Lebanon and Palestine support for the dictatorships across the region, the occupation of Saudi Arabia in order to blockade and bomb Iraq, et cetera.
And you just add their torturers, just like in our worst predictions of them to the propaganda.
And all you do is strengthen the argument of our enemies.
And Matthew Alexander said that as an interrogator, he's the guy that that found Zarqawi, figured out where Zarqawi was when they, you know, led to the bombing of that guy.
And he said over and over and over again, he would interrogate these al-Qaeda and Iraqis, Syrians and Libyans and Saudis, people who had traveled to Iraq to fight.
And they would say, I'm here because I saw the pictures from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
And I said, if that's who they are, then I guess Osama's right.
And I'm on my way to go and join up the fight against them.
So this is absolutely counterproductive, no matter how you measure it.
Seems like to me, that's an important point.
Sorry I made it so long.
Anyway, all right, well, we're all out of time, but I highly recommend that people go and read the American Conservative magazine today.
Amconmag.com.
The article is called Torture's Comeback by Chase Medard.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
Have a good weekend.
