06/25/10 – Larry Siems – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Into the third hour here, anti-war radio.
Our next guest on the show is Larry Seams.
Geez, I hope I got that right.
I don't have it in front of me, I guess I should have.
Right?
Yeah, Larry Seams.
Good.
Welcome to the show, Larry.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Now, what exactly is your position at the American Civil Liberties Union?
I'm working with the American Civil Liberties Union as the principal author of something called the Torture Report, which is an attempt to sort of go through the 150,000 pages of formerly secret documents that the ACLU has gotten released under the Freedom of Information Act about the torture program under the Bush administration.
My job is to sort of go through them and try to put together a reasonably readable narrative of the document so that you don't have to read all 150,000 pages, but you can look at how the documents really do kind of clearly, emphatically, and quite damningly tell the story of the torture program.
Cool.
Well, let's start at the end of the torture program and then work backwards maybe.
Sure.
I'm sorry that I haven't had enough time to really delve into this.
I'm familiar with all the documents as they came out.
Well, not 1,500 pages worth, but I've read quite a bit of them and tried to keep up on all this.
But right now, breaking news today, Eli Lake has this piece in The Washington Times that Glenn Greenwald is citing where John O'Brien, Obama's head of counterterrorism, is claiming that there are dozens, or at least he's implying that there are dozens of American citizens on the list to be murdered by either the CIA or the military to receive the full brunt of American power.
Not just Anwar al-Awlaki, who apparently was born in New Mexico and is an American citizen.
There are dozens of people like this, and he says whether they attack our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, which is presumably a legitimate battlefield, at least for the sake of argument, but they could also be in Yemen or Somalia or anywhere else in the world.
And Barack Obama apparently believes that he has the right to have American citizens murdered.
And as Spencer Ackerman says at The Washington Independent, this is a power that John Yoo and Jay Bybee and David Addington never claimed for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's quite shocking.
There's no question about it.
I think it's the kind of story that should make the American people realize that as soon as you begin to bend the rules, then all bets are off and rules are going to get bent further and further and further.
I mean, the idea that the United States government can target and eliminate one of its own citizens, despite every single constitutional protection for those citizens, is every American should absolutely fundamentally rebel against that notion.
And I sure hope that there's a major reaction to this story.
I mean, you cannot meet out punishment without due process.
And to say that we've abdicated our responsibility as citizens and given the power to our president to, in fact, be prosecutor, judge and jury, as I say, I just think that every single American should be shocked by that in and of itself.
And then I think, you know, what you're doing sort of to begin to tell the torture story, as you say, from the end back from there, I think I would hope that people's reaction to this, you know, it should should persuade them that they should trace this trail backwards and say, how did we get to this point where we're contemplating this kind of, you know, just shockingly unconstitutional, shockingly un-American behavior?
Well, now there must be memos from the White House, White House Counsel's Office and from the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department that says that this is OK.
Right.
Let's see them.
Presumably.
Yeah, we we are.
You know, I think that there will be I think there will be litigation seeking those documents.
I think that's possible that there will be litigation, you know, challenging these this this the target list as a whole.
I certainly hope there will be.
And I think, you know, as I say, I think all Americans should should rise up and say, you know, wait a minute, what are we talking about here?
The president does not have the power to to eliminate American citizens without due process.
Well, now here's the thing, though, too, is that John O'Brien is right, that there are American citizens who've gone to fight in Yemen.
And I don't think that they refer to this.
But as we all know, America has been waging a covert war in Somalia since Christmas of 2006.
With the help of the Ethiopian government, they've renditioned people to Ethiopia to be tortured.
And, you know, the CIA and special forces apparently helped kidnap a bunch of people off the Kenyan border and all that.
And this has been going on.
And if I understand it, the whole thing's illegal.
The whole thing is that's why it's a covert war run by the intelligence agencies under the National Security Act of 1947.
The CIA can do things that the president directs and whatever.
So I guess the point I'm getting at is if you have a covert war going on all the time, it's a secret and illegal and covert war and whatever like that.
And Americans go and fight on the wrong side of it.
Then I guess John O'Brien has a case that they better look out.
Right.
And that they might get renditioned to Ethiopia to be tortured or shot.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's the logic of the, you know, the authorizations and the memos that, you know, that that you're laying out that that, you know, as you point out, we haven't seen.
But but somebody has laid out.
I think it's you know, I think we need to take a deep breath and say, well, first of all, just because programs are going on, you know, doesn't mean that it's you know, we ought to acquiesce to them or, you know, sort of bow to their momentum.
I think, you know, I think we need to, you know, be demanding to know more about what the programs are.
I think the possibility that there's a kind of global dirty war going on, you know, is one that ought to be, you know, that's that's the next step, I think, for for Americans and in sort of addressing the implications of this news story about a target list of Americans who, you know, who are overseas, you know, which is, is there a larger program going on?
What is the what is the basis of that?
What's the oversight for that?
What's the framework of that?
Obviously, disappearing people and extrajudicial murder.
These are the kinds of behavior that we called, you know, we characterized as dirty wars when other governments, you know, use these tools against, you know, insurgents in their own countries.
And and I think it's, you know, I think it's not an inapt analogy.
And and we obviously need to be, you know, I think, digging and delving and and and demanding to know if that's what's really going on.
Yeah.
Well, let me stick with this point, because the next one's going to be too big to fit in before the break here.
But they back down when the Supreme Court was going to rule on the Padilla case, an American citizen arrested on American soil turned over to the CIA and the military to be tortured out of his mind.
And yet they were afraid the Bush administration was afraid of what the Supreme Court might say.
So they back down on on lawless detention of an American citizen.
Now, Obama is saying, I'll murder him if I feel like it.
What?
Well, I mean, no, I mean, I think the questions that you're asking are exactly the questions that we need to ask.
I'm sorry.
And I'm going to phrase that in the form of a question.
I'm just kind of commentating.
No, no, no.
I mean, OK, that's what I mean.
I think you're I think your outrage in your commentary is absolutely appropriate.
And I think, you know, I mean, look, a lot of us, you know, we have we have hopes for this administration in terms of, you know, sort of unraveling the knot of deception and lies that the previous administration had tied and and, you know, dismantling this architecture which allowed, you know, a whole range of conduct that's clearly unconstitutional.
And, you know, I think I think it's absolutely fair to say that is, you know, is the administration.
This new administration has been disappointing at best.
And I would say that, you know, you're right.
These revelations of these kinds of programs, you know, make you wonder if it's not just a case of, you know, disappointment in terms of addressing the past, but in fact, moving forward with a series of programs and an approach, I think, to kind of conflict and detention and a number of issues that are fundamentally that touch on fundamental human rights.
That isn't actually quite shocking and disturbing.
Well, you know, to be fair to you, being disappointed, he did promise explicitly that he would not engage in this kind of thing while he was running for president.
Absolutely.
No, he made very, very clear promises, you know, in terms of even in terms of accountability for torture.
And I think, you know, to sort of bring the conversation back to that, I think, you know, I would I would argue that this is why accountability for torture is absolutely critical.
And that's where we're going to pick this conversation up on the other side of this break.
The Durham investigation.
It's Larry seems from the ACLU, the torture report dot org.
We'll be right back.
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All right, welcome back to the show.
Anti-war radio.
Hi.
All right.
We got Larry scenes from the ACLU on the phone here.
The Web site is the torture report dot org.
And a few things to ask here in the next 10 minutes here.
Well, we left off with accountability, the question of accountability.
And as far as I know, the closest thing to that is a preliminary investigation undertaken by a prosecutor named Durham into seeing whether there might be enough cause to have a actual criminal investigation into a few low level CIA guys who may have tortured people all the way to death.
That's about right.
I mean, you know, the Durham investigation was centers on two things.
One is the CIA's destruction of 92 videotapes that recorded the the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri in a CIA black site in Thailand.
Those tapes would have been subject to the to the ACLU's request for all documents relating to mistreatment of prisoners since 9-11.
They were not turned over.
Not only were they not turned over, but they were destroyed.
So Durham's investigation is looking into whether that was a criminal act.
And then also that that investigation of Obama widened that investigation to include some incidents that were covered in the CIA inspector general's report of 2004 in which CIA agents used torture techniques that were not among the 10 enhanced interrogation techniques that were supposedly declared legal and were supposedly legal under the by the torture memos.
Which is funny because even the Bush administration repudiated all of those memos.
So they couldn't possibly have legalized any torture at all.
Well, I mean, I think this is one of the really interesting stories about that.
The torture documents tell this this big trove of documents that, you know, is accessible through the torture report website.
You can actually just dive into the database of the documents yourself.
But what you know, I think what the astonishing thing to me as I, you know, my job was to sort of dig into these and sort of piece together stories with characters and, you know, and plot and everything.
And I think the part of the plot that I didn't understand before I got into it was how many people inside every single government agency said all along that this is torture.
Don't do it.
And that's, you know, and and and and I think if the American people knew that side of the story, if they were able to, you know, if they spent some time, got to know the story, understood that, you know, that this was something that, you know, if they were in this position, that there were people like them who were in this position who objected to this.
And I think, you know, what you've gotten is this great sort of, you know, public relations campaign throughout the Bush administration.
And then even now with the, you know, Cheney and and and Mark Beeson and a number of people who are still out there, you know, even the president himself saying, you know, not too long ago that he waterboarded and he would do it again.
Their suggestion is that, you know, they were doing things that they absolutely had to do under the circumstances and that any anybody who was in their position.
Trust us, if you had been in this position and knew what we knew, you would have done this, too.
The fact of the matter is the documents prove that, you know, almost, you know, many, many, many people who are in those positions and in those circumstances, you know, working under the same pressures, knew from the start this was illegal, declared repeatedly it was illegal, risked their careers to declare it was illegal, resigned, protested in every possible form.
And, you know, for me, I think that's that's again, that's a part of the story that's not told.
There's lots of heroes.
And it reaffirms that, you know, we we as a as a people, as a nation fundamentally abhor torture.
Not only that, but many of the people who are objecting are, you know, career interrogators, people with great experience in the field who understand that this is not how you get information from people.
The entire FBI, the FBI prohibited its agents from from participating in abusive interrogations in Guantanamo that were, you know, that were sanctioned under a Rumsfeld memo that that permitted a number of enhanced interrogation techniques that mirrored the CIA's interrogation techniques.
The FBI pulled its agents out of those and said, we do not do this.
It's morally wrong and it's ineffective.
This is not how you get information from people.
So, you know, I think, like I said, this is a crucial part of the story.
And, you know, it's absolutely right.
Durham's investigation doesn't touch on anything, even if he returns recommendations for indictment, you know, is to leave everything that was under the umbrella of these torture memos and these, you know, these these these documents that supposedly authorized and gave legal cover to these things.
It's to it's to leave all of those things off the table in terms of accountability.
Now that's you know, there were.
Well, he told The Washington Post or somebody told The Washington Post that now even the unlisted torture techniques, that's not enough either.
They have to be cases.
And even then, we know from General McCaffrey and others that it's more than 100 people were tortured to death, whether by crucifixion or other means.
And this is still just a few of those where people actually died under the unauthorized torture techniques.
And again, it's still just a preliminary investigation to see if there ought to be one into that.
Well, and I think, you know, look, I mean, if if the United States existed in a vacuum, you know, it might be possible to I think it would be morally corrosive to maintain, you know, somehow to put the past behind us or whatever.
The fact of the matter is that in all human rights abuses, there's inevitably a momentum toward accountability.
And while the United States is systematically shutting down and inhibiting and obstructing investigations and accountability, meanwhile, the process is moving forward in other countries.
You know, hundreds of people have been released from U.S. custody who have suffered torture and mistreatment.
They've gone home.
Many of them are free because they were innocent to begin with.
They have initiated legal processes in other countries that are moving forward.
I think, you know, and you look at the accountability and it goes beyond, obviously, the administration.
The three branches of government are, you know, co-responsible for the lack of accountability.
Pelosi knew in 2002.
Absolutely.
And I think that, you know, if Congress is reluctant to investigate, it's probably because a number of people in Congress are self-protective about what they knew and their, you know, their acquiescence, if nothing else.
But if you look at something like the Supreme Court refusing to hear the Maharaj case in the past couple of weeks, you know, Maharaj, this Canadian who the U.S. detained.
Real quickly here.
Sorry?
Real quickly here.
Okay.
The U.S. detained, sent to Jordan.
He was tortured brutally.
We realized we had absolutely the wrong man.
He was released.
The Canadian government conducted an official national investigation, concluded that he had nothing to do with terrorism, that he was, you know, that the Canadian government had wrongfully participated in this absolutely, you know, brutal violation of international human rights.
He was awarded $10 million U.S.
-Canadian dollars.
The world knows he was tortured.
Everybody knows that he was, you know, that he was subjected to extraordinary rendition in violation of international law.
There's no question about these things.
And yet the U.S. will not allow a process goes forward in which we ourselves admit that.
So, you know, it's becoming not only a matter of, you know, of conscience for ourselves, but of, you know, I think the world is justifiably concerned about the ability of the United States to face responsibility for its own actions.
Right.
And if we don't want our leaders to end up on trial with some foreign judge, then we have to insist on the accountability ourselves.
We're risking our independence.
I agree.
I agree.
Now, I'm sorry we're out of time.
I thank you for yours, Larry.
It's great.
I appreciate it.
Thanks.
Thanks very much.
Everybody, the website is the TortureReport.org.
That's Larry Seams from the ACLU.