Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Some crucial unit for you guys in the chaos crowd there.
That's right, we're doing two radio shows at once.
One at chaosradioallison.org, the other at lrn.fm.
And then, you know, whichever radio stations are playing those shows.
Alright, so our first guest on the show today is Jason Leopold from Truthout.
He was here just a couple of weeks ago to talk about exclusive controversial drug given to all Guantanamo detainees akin to, quote, pharmacologic waterboarding.
That was co-written with Jeffrey Kaye at truthout.org.
And now the follow-up.
Ex-Guantanamo official was told not to discuss policy surrounding anti-malarial drug used on detainees.
Also co-authored with Jeffrey Kaye here at truthout.org.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks so much for having me back on.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
Now, before we get into this madness, I was wondering if you could clear up real quick the status of Dick Cheney's extradition to face felony charges in Nigeria.
That should be happening any day now, right?
Yeah.
Well, because of the rule of law and all that, right?
Put it in a nutshell, there was a bribe made for dropping bribery charges.
And that's ultimately what it came down to.
Halliburton, along with George H.W. Bush and James Baker, ex-Secretary of State, lawyer to the Bush family, were part of the negotiating team that met with, met and spoke with Haitian government, I'm sorry, Nigerian government officials and brokered a deal that the Halliburton pay Nigeria $250 million to allow the charges to sort of just disappear.
And let me just say that there's also been involvement by the State Department in this case as well.
So while it appeared that, hey, you know, Nigeria is just kind of being a bit rogue there to some people by indicting Cheney and eight other current and former executives at Halliburton, there was actually some real fear in this that perhaps Interpol would issue an arrest warrant.
And so the State Department got involved, at least as far as we know, to the point of just monitoring it and discussing it with Nigerian government officials.
But ultimately they're paying a bribe to drop a bribe, and this revolves around a suspect $6 billion contract Halliburton received.
Halliburton's subsidiary, or former subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Root, KBR received back in the 90s to build a liquefied natural gas plant.
And that took place while Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton.
And as the other Scott Horton has explained on this show, the guy that was the go-to guy on the entire project was brought in by Dick Cheney, was Dick Cheney's right-hand man, that the Justice Department was after him at the time, that Halliburton all these years has basically conceded their guilt on all this and paid numerous fines to the DOJ and to the government of Nigeria, that basically there never was any question as to whether Dick Cheney was guilty of being involved in this bribery scheme.
No, there isn't any question.
I mean, the only question is why did the Security Exchange Commission, on the civil side, and the Justice Department, frankly, just not follow it through, obviously.
You know, the easy answer is that Dick Cheney was the vice president, and that you just don't go there.
So now you're telling me that Bush Sr. and James Baker III, his former Secretary of State and the lawyer at Baker Botts for, I think, every oil company on Earth, they went and those two went to talk with the Nigerians or got them on the phone?
Correct, they had a conference call.
They were involved in conference call discussions.
And what's important about James Baker is to...
He's a Sith Lord, man.
He's one of the most powerful guys in the whole wide world.
Absolutely, and he was involved, his firm was involved in the...was hired by Halliburton in 2004, I believe it was, to basically investigate, to see if there was any evidence of bribery going on internally.
So they hired a lawyer from Baker Botts, who actually, by the way, that lawyer that they hired also worked at the SEC, SEC head under the first Bush.
That would be the Federal Election Commission?
I'm sorry?
You say the FEC, the Federal Election Commission?
Oh, I'm sorry, the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Oh, oh, pardon me.
We're talking about people that are just, you know, an incestuous relationship everywhere, connected everywhere.
So Baker Botts and James Baker were very, very involved with Halliburton in terms of just, you know, investigating all of this internally and dealing with the Justice Department, which just came down against certain executives.
Well, sure, and people remember James Baker.
If they're too young to remember him being the Secretary of State back when he told Saddam Hussein to go ahead and invade Kuwait, who cares?
Then they'll at least remember him rigging the election in Florida for George W. Bush in 2000.
Exactly.
He was the point man for the Bush team that went in there and took over the thing.
I just wish they listened to him on Iraq policy.
It would have been better than listening to Richard Perle.
Right.
So, yes, it's truly unfortunate in the sense that they had a good case here.
They had evidence here in Nigeria.
This investigation, this issue with bribery on this natural gas liquefaction plant has been going on for more than a decade at this point.
Switzerland and France conducted their own investigations.
France, years ago, was looking at evidence about Cheney's involvement.
Again, the guy was the CEO.
We held CEOs of other companies accountable for a wide range of scandals that took place under their watch, whether they knew about it or not.
The fact of the matter is that Cheney, I think the evidence clearly shows, was aware that this was happening, maybe even went as far as to encourage it.
At this point, the case is over.
Well, you know what I think would be hilarious?
It would be if Nigeria could indict a former American vice president for the crimes that he committed when he was a private citizen that he's obviously guilty of, where they have a complete case, and he would be extradited and tried and put in prison.
I mean, that's the big joke, right?
It's considered the counterfactual.
Yeah, right.
Dick Cheney could ever be held to account for anything.
He can torture to death whoever he feels like, but he can't bribe some Nigerians?
Come on.
Right.
Right.
It is.
The whole thing is just stunning all around, when you just start to take a look at the corruption, the war crimes.
I mean, this has this footprint all over the world.
Well, you know, I learned as a little kid, and this still makes me angry, and this is why it still makes me angry, because I learned as a little kid that even Ronald Reagan, even the president, had to go before Congress and testify and explain himself for backing all those right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua and so forth and lying about it to them.
And I remember asking my dad, like, what is this?
The president has to answer these questions before these congressmen?
And my dad says, yeah, because he's just the president.
In America, we don't have kings.
He's just a citizen, just like the rest of us.
He's just temporarily running things up there because that's his job, that's all.
And what a joke that is, of course, you know?
Well, certainly.
That's how it's supposed to be.
That's what the American people believe the system is like.
But, of course, it's not.
Exactly.
And, you know, unfortunately, with the Bush years, you know, that changed.
And we're seeing that now.
We're seeing this sort of behavior continue with our president.
And the current one in office is no exception.
Yeah, the worse the crimes they commit, the more impunity they have, apparently.
All right, it's Jason Leopold from Truth.
I'll be talking about drugging and torturing Gitmo detainees after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on LRN.
FM and ChaosRadioAustin.org.
All right, so the first article was controversial drug given to all Guantanamo detainees akin to pharmacologic waterboarding.
And now the follow-up at Truthout.org.
Ex-Guantanamo official was told not to discuss policy surrounding anti-malarial drug used on detainees.
It's by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye at Truthout.org.
Jason is on the line now.
And so for the people who missed the first interview there or missed the first article, please give us the brief background on these anti-malarial drugs and your original story here, Jason.
Sure, Scott.
This was a very controversial decision that the defense department made.
When all Guantanamo detainees were transferred to Guantanamo, largely from Afghanistan in January 2002, one of the first things that they were given as soon as they got off the plane within 24 hours was a treatment dosage of a drug known as mefloquine.
Its brand name is Olarium.
Treatment doses are 1,250 milligrams.
This is a drug that has been linked to suicide, hallucinations, anxiety, homicide.
Our U.S. soldiers have taken it.
The drug actually has been directly linked to several murders over Fort Bragg.
It's now not recommended.
It's off the shelf, so to speak, for U.S. soldiers.
But it was given to detainees in treatment doses, whether they had malaria or not, before they were given any tests.
And experts that we spoke to said this is medically indefensible.
There's no justifiable reason to give detainees or any small population, if you will, this drug when they're coming from an area that actually, even though there are malaria cases, it's not a region that one needs to do what is referred to as mass presumptive treatment.
So the question is, why did they do this?
The Defense Department told us, well, you know, a decision was made, and we gave it to them.
And, again, this drug was given without any understanding as to what their medical history was.
So that was what the first story was.
This story was actually who made the decision, who was involved with it.
And while this story gets into who signed what's known as the standard operating procedure, the SOP, we tracked down the official, the Navy captain over at Guantanamo.
His name is Captain Albert J. Shimkus.
His name is on the standard operating procedure.
He absolutely defended this use.
I have to add that he's not a doctor.
He's a nurse by training who was in charge of the Naval Hospital over at Guantanamo and the chief surgeon to JTF-160, Joint Task Force 160, or 60 rather, that provides health care to the detainees.
And what we found out is there was a lot of people, a number of different agencies involved in making this decision.
One of them that certainly caught our interest was the fact that Dietrich, Maryland, weighed in on it.
And the reason that that was interesting to us or raised more questions is, you know, Fort Dietrich has a very dark history in terms of developing certainly drugs used for experiments.
The Naval Environmental Health Center was involved in this.
The CDC for disease control.
All these agencies that we tried to get comment from refused.
And with the CDC, what's truly disturbing is that the way that this drug was administered to detainees and the justification for it is entirely, it contradicts the CDC's own guidelines.
So it absolutely makes no sense, but this is perhaps one of the most interesting reasons that was to us in terms of why this decision was made.
Well, suddenly we found out that the U.S. is concerned about what the Cuban government thinks.
And this Navy Captain Albert Shimkus said that Cuban government officials, some doctors there, were concerned about whether detainees being brought over to Guantanamo would be spreading malaria.
There's no malaria in Cuba.
It's gone for about 50 years.
And he told us that that factored into a decision partially as to whether they were given this drug.
And that just doesn't make sense, Scott, because we have a very harsh policy toward Cuba.
So to think suddenly we cared what they thought and would be making policy decisions based on their concerns is just ludicrous.
And then finally, there's the idea that we tried to find out about, which is what did this do to the detainees?
We don't know because we don't have the medical records, but there's about 700 or so detainees at Guantanamo.
And there is no question that this drug actually contributed to hallucinations, anxiety, suicidal thoughts.
No three detainees committed suicide there.
One of them was actually, as far as we can tell from his medical records, he had taken this drug.
So the medical records are not being released out of privacy concerns.
Another funny sort of answer regarding that.
And the question that still exists is, why was this unprecedented practice?
Why was it done?
The Navy Captain Albert Shimkus told us that the benefits outweighed the risks.
He couldn't remember the names of the other individuals involved in this.
So, once again, just on a final note, this policy directly contradicts what the Defense Department did a decade earlier with Haitian refugees brought over to Guantanamo.
Thousands of Haitian refugees who came from malaria-endemic areas are actually carriers of malaria.
There were only three over at Guantanamo that had malaria, and they found out early in January and February of 2002.
And the policy that we had in place for Haitians was far different.
We tested them first, and only when they had malaria were they given medication.
This was mass drugging of everyone.
Now, hold it right there, because we've got some things to follow up on here.
First of all, when you mention the suicides, are those three actual suicides, or are you referring to the guys killed in July of 2006 in Sheldon's work in Harper's?
I should clarify that.
These are the alleged suicides that took place in June of 2006.
Okay, because I thought that there were some actual suicides.
Those three, I wouldn't think, count.
No, because there's...
You get ironic quotes around suicides there, like an old friend of Bill Clinton's or something.
Exactly.
Excuse me.
There were many, many suicide attempts taking place in 2002.
Dozens.
Obviously, again, we don't have much of the information, because they won't allow any of these documents to be released.
So we do rely heavily on what the detainees say and what some people who serve say.
And I've spoken to some former guards who were there.
There were many suicide attempts.
And certainly, I'm not going to say that all of it was linked to a particular drug.
I mean, they were in Guantanamo.
But the fact is that this practice was medically indefensible.
This drug was given to them immediately after they arrived.
And by the way, right after they arrived, they were sort of brought into isolation before being interrogated.
I'm sorry, Jason.
I'm sorry.
We're so short on time.
I just wanted to try to nail down here.
This guy, Shimkus, you talked to him, and he says basically he's got an alibi, which is, hey, this is medicine.
We decided to do this and whatever.
But did he have an explanation as to why he was giving treatment doses instead of preventive doses at all?
No explanation.
Could not explain it.
All right.
Well, we're going to keep our eye on this.
I'm sorry we're all out of time here.
But great reporting, as always, there at truthout.org.
Appreciate it, Jason.
That's Jason Leopold.
Jeffrey Kaye is the co-author.
Ex-Guantanamo official was told not to discuss policies surrounding antimalarial drugs used on detainees.
