For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest today is Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, now in charge of Cuba issues at the New America Foundation.
That's newamerica.net.
He has what's called a guest post at Steve Clemons' blog, The Washington Note, called Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay.
Welcome to the show, Larry.
How are you?
Thank you for having me on, Scott.
I can't believe I'm on something called Antiwar.com.
Well, you have been before, don't you remember, last October?
Just pulling your leg.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I want to go ahead and recommend to people that if they want to hear us fight about your role in getting us into the war in Iraq, they can go back and listen to that, and it's not so much a fight as me accusing you and you giving a mea culpa.
So fair enough, and I don't want to go over all that again, because we've done it, and the archive is there at Antiwar.com right now.
I want some truths about Guantanamo Bay.
The premise of this article is that the American people just really don't know these truths, and so you're here to get them straight.
So let's just start with truth number one.
As you say in here, the U.S. Army and CIA, I guess, in Afghanistan just rounded up whoever they felt like.
They paid bounties to Pakistani intelligence, and people were just kidnapped en masse and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay just to fill the prison and make Don Rumsfeld look good.
Is that it?
Well, only one aspect of that really is, I think, incorrect, and it's not your fault.
Maybe I said it a little imperfectly, but it really wasn't the United States Army, Marine Corps, or anybody U.S. other than maybe a few special operating forces on the ground.
It was mostly Northern Alliance and allied forces like General Dostum and others who had more or less waged the initial stages of the war and come into Kabul all by themselves with the assistance, of course, of a few very carefully placed special operating forces, U.S., and some air power from the United States.
The Northern Alliance and its allies really beat the Taliban back and essentially, quote, won, unquote, the initial stages of the war, at least, in Afghanistan.
So most of the capturing was done by them.
We then collected these people who had been herded off the battlefield and shipped them off to Guantanamo.
And you say in this article that you think how many people were, that all of these who ended up at Guantanamo Bay at one point or another were actual al-Qaeda terrorist threats to the United States.
That's very difficult to determine, but based on what I've been able to determine through talking with people and research and so forth and my own gut-level feelings as a professional military officer, a lot of these people came back, maybe even as high as 80%, 85% of them, with, first of all, very little intelligence value because if they were Taliban, if they actually had been on the battlefield with a weapon in their hands, shooting it at one time or another against the Northern Alliance, they were so low-level that their intelligence value was virtually nil, if not nil.
Secondly, many of them were picked up on the battlefield just by happenchance.
In other words, they were in a position at a place and time that someone just swept them up, as they might have swept them up by just clearing a village or a township or whatever.
Third, there were some who were actually picked up because of this bounty practice.
If you tell someone you're going to give them $5,000 to turn someone in as a Taliban or an al-Qaeda, they're going to go out and get their closest enemy and get rid of him and also make $5,000 in the process.
And lastly, there was this very poor vetting.
If you were operating as the 7 February memo from the President of the United States, in February 2002, said, as if the Taliban and al-Qaeda were outside Geneva, but nonetheless in the spirit of Geneva, you would have done something on the battlefield.
It's called a status review tribunal or a commission, a board, whatever you want to call it.
It gets set up in the battlefield, and it's what we did in World War II, it's what we did in Korea, and you determine whom you've captured.
You determine if they're innocent civilian, and then normally you release them.
You determine if they are combatant.
Are they a soldier?
Do they advance all the necessary Geneva requirements to be a soldier?
If so, you declare them a prisoner of war, and they go down one channel.
If they are not a prisoner of war, if they're not a civilian, you have to figure out what are they.
And Geneva provides for this.
Are they guerrillas?
Are they insurgents?
It's an extremely important point, right, that there's already a system in place inside the military that dozens and dozens of generals, hundreds maybe, already know what they're supposed to do in circumstances like this.
Absolutely.
But they were told what?
Just grab whom you must, do what you want.
I think it was a combination of pressure from the top saying, get them back, I need intelligence, and the fact that they didn't have enough troops on the ground to do this kind of vetting.
And so what you get is you get increasing U.S. forces coming in and not wanting to be impeded in what they have to do by prisoners, by detainees, and so they comply.
They put them on a plane, they shackle them, put orange jumpsuits and hoods on them, and send them back to Guantanamo.
So by the time we find out about this in the State Department, we realize that we're encountering a huge, potentially enormous, problem with people of countries from which these people come, like the United Kingdom, like China, and so forth.
And we're also going to encounter a problem with somehow trying to come to final disposition of these people.
In other words, what do you do with these people?
Are you fighting a hundred years war?
Are you prepared to keep these people in prison in Guantanamo for a hundred years?
Probably not.
Then you better not take them too far from some regime authorized, or to be newly authorized, in conjunction with the Congress, where you can deal with them and come to some kind of final disposition.
So one of the first things we tried to do at the State Department, Secretary Powell tried to do, Secretary Armitage tried to do, was to repatriate some of those people.
As I say in the article, some of them were United Kingdom residents.
And we felt, and I think rightfully so, and Jack Straw, the Foreign Minister dealing with Secretary Powell, felt the same way, that the UK had plenty of capability to take care of these people.
To imprison them, to check them out, to vet them properly, and if necessary, to bring them into a terrorist court, and to try them and put them in jail, or hang them, or whatever the hell you had to do with them.
Or let them go, if they were in fact innocent.
Yeah, or let them go, exactly.
Well, now, the important point here is that we're talking about 2002, and your employment as the Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and his other right-hand man, Dick Armitage, you say is there, and you guys knew from the very beginning that the normal vetting process on the battlefield was not taking place.
That innocent people, as you say, you know, very high supermajority percentages of these people are completely innocent.
You knew that from the very beginning.
Your government knew that from the very beginning, that when Dick Cheney or any of these generals went on TV and said, these men are terrorists, these men are the worst of the worst, they would chew through their own handcuffs to get out and blow up American kids, and all the things that they said, they all knew they were lying the whole time, and you guys all knew it.
I don't think that's true.
I think, as I say in the blog piece, that there were selected people who began to suspect this.
There were people like Powell and Armitage who understood that this was going to be a real problem in the long run and that we needed to repatriate some of these people as rapidly as possible and to begin to determine some of the questions that you just posed.
Were they innocent?
Were they guilty?
If so, how do you deal with them?
So my mistake was I'm taking your conclusions years later, and I'm putting them earlier in the story.
Yeah.
Okay, my mistake.
I want to make sure and get it right.
I only want what's right, not what I say.
No, if you move, your conclusions I think are increasingly correct as you move forward in time or backward in time, however you want to look at it.
Right.
I think high-level leaders, I think I animate this in the blog, there were some high-level military people who knew this almost immediately.
Now, how do you know it almost immediately?
You know it almost immediately because you can't get squat out of them.
If you can't get any kind of intelligence that's usable, that's actionable out of these people, you've got one of two problems.
Either they don't know it, or you're not using the right methods to get it out of them.
There just had to be suspicion at the highest level, and certainly down on the ground where they were actually dealing with them, that some of these people didn't know squat, and they didn't know squat because they either were very low-level Taliban foot soldiers or they were simply innocent people picked up on the battlefield.
All right.
Now, tell me, this is the part of the story where it gets really surreal to me, is what you call mosaic intelligence, which I guess is a great government term for a conspiracy theory generated by a computer?
They put in what they know to be information from people who don't really know anything, but they say it's all right because the computer is going to make something out of it anyway?
No, it's a little more sophisticated than that, and it actually has some reasonableness about it.
You're talking about picking up village information, community information, tribal information, group information that comes from all across a particular township, village area, or whatever, and you know that, as Myles said, the people are the ocean in which the fish swim, that is, the gorilla swims.
And so if you pick up those people who are going to know tidbits, they're going to know that Mohammed is 25 years old and has a gun in his house.
They're going to know that Ishmael is maybe a potential al-Qaeda member.
They're going to know that this guy or that guy is Arab and not Pashto or whatever.
So if you get enough of these people, and you gain enough tidbits from them through interrogation by whatever methods, and then you put all of these into a computer program so that you can search for connections, and you can then connect dots with lines, you can paint, this is where the mosaic comes from, you can begin to extract from that mosaic actual intelligence that might allow you to go after an al-Qaeda chieftain or a cell or a Taliban member or whatever.
It's a very reasonable approach if you don't consider the fact that you have to inter people who otherwise are innocent, and sometimes you have to do it for a considerable amount of time, and if you use harsh interrogation, it exacerbates the problem considerably.
Well, and that really is the important point, is that this becomes, I mean, apparently from your perspective, from what you know of it, it actually seems to work, but it becomes the justification for holding innocent people in prison.
Absolutely.
You can't do that.
What you're really doing is you're doing the same thing that you would do with some risk to your life if you put forces in a village and you went around and talked to people.
You're doing the same thing by extracting the people from the village, incarcerating them, and talking to them in a risk-free environment, and then collating the information you get in order to create a picture of that village and a picture of the people in that village, and to pick out of that picture those who might be potential Taliban or al-Qaeda.
The problem with that formula is all of the innocent people that you're keeping incarcerated.
Yeah, and perhaps even torturing, etc.
Right, and this became way out of proportions and much more damaging with regard to Iraq and Abu Ghraib, because that's essentially what we were doing there, and we had thousands of people imprisoned at Abu Ghraib and under very, very poor conditions.
Yeah, I mean, they were really just doing sweeps and grabbing fighting-age males in Sunni areas, that kind of thing.
Pull them off the streets, stick them in jail, they can't shoot you.
Well, Dick Cheney says that, listen, this saved American lives over and over again.
Many terrorist plots were stopped.
I guess he doesn't want us to remember at all that September 11 happened on his watch.
We're just supposed to forget that.
That doesn't count.
He was only on the job for nine months at the time, after all.
But ever since 9-11, nobody ever attacked us, and that's because he tortured people, and that's his defense.
I think that's preposterous.
The reason we haven't been attacked again is, one, Al-Qaeda has not had the plan to attack us again that they could operationalize, and two, the main reason they haven't is because our military and the CIA and others have done some fairly substantial damage to the leadership, to the cell structure, to the actual existence of Al-Qaeda in various places, particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they have also, through a very, and I can't talk about this in any great depth, but I'll just say that through a very sophisticated program, they have really disrupted their ability to transfer and use money.
That is a huge impediment to them, even though 9-11 only cost them about $500,000 to conduct, and incidentally we spent $2 trillion, if that gives you any idea of the disproportion here, $500,000 to kill 3,000 Americans, we spent $2 trillion to go to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.
That is not sustainable.
But at any rate, what we've done financially means that now what Al-Qaeda has to do is mostly they can only communicate by talking face-to-face.
That's a real impediment.
They can only transfer funds by carrying it from place to place.
They can only plan by going and meeting face-to-face, because we have done such devastating things to their ability to communicate, transfer funds, and so forth, and we've broken up their leadership, their operational leadership, as well as their high-level leadership, to the extent that they can't attack us.
In that way, Cheney and Bush, and certainly the military and the CIA, deserve some credit.
There's no question about that.
But it hasn't been because we interrogated people and got this great wealth of intelligence from them, and therefore were able to act this way or that way.
In fact, the most dramatic example of that is a contrary to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all the rest of them's attitude completely.
This new book that's finally been written by a pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, who was an Air Force interrogator...
Yeah, I talked to him on this show.
Yeah, he got Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, probably the most evil man in Iraq.
Bin Laden didn't even like it, and didn't want to pull him into Al-Qaeda initially, until he realized he probably didn't have any other choice.
This Air Force interrogator, bringing a very soft, sophisticated, educated, linguistically capable, culturally sensitive interrogation method to Iraq, and fighting his bosses, and fighting some of his colleagues, was able to build actionable intelligence that allowed us to get Zarqawi.
Proof positive that the other way, if you will, the soft way, the educated, sophisticated way of interrogating, which the FBI espouses, for example, is much better than this torture and this harsh interrogation.
Well, the flip side of that is Sheikh Al-Libi, who was tortured and said that he was...
I don't know if he really was Al-Qaeda or not, but he at least said he was Al-Qaeda, and that Saddam Hussein taught him how to make chemical weapons, and all kinds of other things.
And we used that information at the UN Security Council.
In fact, Secretary Powell was getting ready to throw out everything in the presentation about terrorist contacts, Baghdad and Al-Qaeda, until that information was dramatically revealed to him about Al-Libi.
And it was not dramatically revealed to him that Al-Libi had rendered that information under torture.
Do you believe that that was the purpose of the torture, was to get incriminating information, whether it was true or not, or in fact deliberately to beat lies out of people?
Let's put it this way.
It's not out of the realm of possibility.
All right.
And now let me ask you, too, about this.
One thing, you mentioned how the disproportion in the money spent by Al-Qaeda for September 11th, and all the money spent since then, and bin Laden really has said all along, but most explicitly in 2004, he explained in his October speech, that the whole name of the game is tricking America into bankrupting our empire, basically.
He says, I can take two Mujahideen and send them to the furthest point east with a flag, a piece of cloth, and write Al-Qaeda on it, and you'll send all your generals and all your billions of dollars, and you're going to bankrupt yourself on the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, that kind of thing.
That seems to be the point.
Do you agree that that was basically the purpose of September 11th, was sort of judo to get us to overreact and bankrupt our empire?
And then did you and your bosses all fall for that, or what?
I think that's some very exquisite post-operational thinking by Amin al-Zawahiri, who is really the brain behind bin Laden.
And I think a lot of that is him looking at what we've done in response to 9-11, and then accommodating what we've done with his own strategic approach.
But even with that said, and even with that, I think, being the case, he's right.
Well, I mean, there were people who understood at the time of September 11th that the action is in the reaction.
They're trying to get us to react, and what we ought to do is not react the way that they want us to, but our own special intelligent way.
I agree with you.
One of the age-old principles of insurgency, of guerrilla warfare, is to get the oppressing power, if you will, the preponderant power, the great military power usually, is to get it to overreact.
And you get it to overreact by terrorist acts and other things like that, and when it overreacts, it becomes its own worst enemy, and you are then able to defeat it.
That's an age-old principle of guerrilla warfare.
And what about the great game and the idea that really September 11th, notwithstanding, the purpose of the American occupation in Afghanistan now is all interconnected with the pipeline politics of the Caspian Basin and rivalries for power with Russia and China and Iran, et cetera?
I think you're attributing too much strategic coherence to the American ability to think.
That very well may be.
But I do think at the base of all of our otherwise inexplicable moves during especially the first four years of the Bush administration, rest oil.
I do think that if we could scratch Dick Cheney and bring that very cold-hearted man, that very methodical, realist, hyper-nationalist man into some sort of truth test, and we could get the truth out of him, at the base of that truth would be oil.
And so do you think that that's still the motivation of the people surrounding Barack Obama who apparently want to continue all this policy in Central Asia rather than scale it back?
As a strategist myself in the military, I'll have to tell you that there's some rationale behind this kind of strategy.
If you were looking at, for example, the depletion of petroleum, say, by 2075 or so, which is kind of the projection I'm hearing out of folks at ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and other places when they really tell the truth, not that it won't still be around, but it'll be ever-dwindling, and we'll have to be adapting ourselves to a basket of other energy sources, whatever they may be eventually, wind, solar, and so forth.
If you're looking at that kind of projection in just one lifetime, and you understand what that means for our economy and how much change we're going to have to confront and how much massive effort we're going to have to put into it and how little political will we have for that effort, then you probably want to preserve what's left of non-renewable fossil fuels, oil, gas, as long as you can, and you want to preserve it under your control if possible.
So this is not an inexplicable strategic outlook.
Except that it seems like we could save a lot more money if we didn't have an empire in Eurasia at all, and then we could afford all the alternative energies a lot better.
Well, you're pointing out the sane, sober way of assessing this situation.
See, I never worked for the government in my whole life.
No, I agree with you.
Oil has its own dynamic.
Gas has its own dynamic.
Although Putin and others have proven that you can use it as a political weapon and very effectively, still I think the market dynamics around oil and gas, at least for another quarter century, and just the fact that some of that oil and gas is going to be needed by others than just the people producing it, like the United States, like Japan, like Europe, and so forth, there has to be some reasonable accommodation for this dwindling resource over the next 75 to 100 years, and we can come to it in ways that don't involve bombs, bullets, and bayonets.
But, I mean, I'm talking sanely and soberly now, too.
Back to the torture issue for a moment here.
You've said before publicly, and including on this show last October, that you identified while you were still working in the government that, and I don't know if it was exact paperwork or it was just kind of an amalgamation of information you were getting from different places or what, but you determined while you were still there that Cheney was at the top of the torture regime, that he was the one who had decided on this policy.
And I wonder if you have said on the record, or will you say on the record, that you think he should be prosecuted and whether or not you're willing to testify in a war crimes trial.
I think the Vice President of the United States, and by implication the President, too, and particularly in terms of crafting the legal framework, his arch-companion, David Addington, who really is at the top of this legal framework, I think he's the brainpower behind it.
I think both of those individuals ought to be held to some kind of accountability.
But I'm the first to admit that there is not the political will, nor in the case of the Vice President is there the mechanism, because he's out now, you can't impeach him and pay him the ultimate insult.
I'm not sure there's the mechanism, and I'm quite sure there's not the political will to do it.
Well, if there was, for some reason, say for example, Eric Holder had a nightmare where his testimony before the Senate that waterboarding is torture and that torture is in fact a felony kept coming back to haunt him and he decided he just absolutely had to put together a grand jury and a special prosecutor to look into this.
Would you be willing to testify?
If it were a grand jury and a special prosecutor, I think that would be the to get to the end result that you're aiming at, that would be the best way, rather than a special commission, presidential, congressional, or joint, or whatever.
Yes, I would answer your question directly, but I still don't think we'd come to the kind of accountability that you're hinting at.
Well, I'm not trying to pretend that it's a possibility or within the anywhere near possibility, but just for the record, I'd like to nominate the other Scott Horton to be the independent prosecutor.
That's just me.
Okay, now one more thing I want to ask you about is the future of the U.S. relationship with Israel.
We have Hillary Clinton actually criticizing expansions in the West Bank and expressing frustration with the Israelis in a couple of ways.
At the same time, the supposedly more peaceful, less lacunic Obama-Biden government has come into power, right when Benjamin Netanyahu, in alliance with very right-wing forces in Israel, is coming to power.
Do you think that the dynamic between America and Israel from the Bush years is about to change significantly in any major way?
I think it's already changed, maybe not in a major way, but in a subtle way.
But what you said at the very beginning is the impediment to any change, and that is the fact that the expansion and building of settlements in the West Bank and in the Jerusalem area is rapidly, if not already having done so, making a two-state solution utterly impossible.
The other state would be untenable, economically, security-wise, and so forth, by what the Israelis are doing.
It's almost at that point now in terms of, I guess you're referring to walls everywhere across the West Bank, where little Bantu stands.
Exactly.
And I can see a one-state solution, and it would be an apartheid state, and I can see under that solution the Jewish state or the democracy, or both, disappearing eventually, much the way South Africa's apartheid disappeared.
So this settlement expansion and settlement creation and settlement acceptance by the Israeli government is not sustainable if we want a two-state solution.
And so is your view close to the consensus view in Washington, D.C., that the settlements in the West Bank have got to be turned around, or else they're not going to be able to get the deal that they actually want, or do they want it that much?
They do have to be turned around, and we'll see how much the government that Netanyahu is able to put together, if it's a unity government, I'm hearing that labor may come in now, if it is a true unity government, we'll see how much they want it, because the first thing they will do if they want it is they will begin to reverse the settlement policy in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.
Do you think that there's anything like the political will in Washington, D.C., to stand up to Netanyahu if he determines to go ahead and continue the expansion?
You just put your finger on one of the most vital aspects of this happening.
If there isn't, I'm not sure it can happen.
I'm not sure the Israelis, it's like the Israelis are saying, help me, help me, help me, and we don't have the will to help them.
Like they're trying to put us in a position of forcing them to do the right thing?
It wouldn't be the first time.
It wouldn't be the first time.
When you have a fractured leadership, when you have, dare I say it, a democracy, when you have a Knesset that is so divided between different interests and different parties and different groups, and you can't forge the consensus and therefore the political will to take the steps you need to take, you don't create the moral courage to do it, you need somebody to kick you in the butt and make you do it.
And I'm sorry to, this is completely off topic.
I haven't seen where you've written about this or anything, but I wonder if you've reviewed the new DoD reports about the future, or I guess it's a GAO report about the future of AFRICOM, and the new DoD report about the strengthening of the Chinese military.
Can you comment on either of those?
I can comment on both of them.
AFRICOM has been something that I've been looking at for years.
We who thought about the region, that is to say that area of the world, had always thought that the unified command plan, which is what divides the world up for the military, a document signed by the President of the United States, as a matter of fact, and therefore a very important document, ought to break out European command into two separate commands, because Europe being in Stuttgart and being really oriented on NATO, and on originally, of course, the Soviet threat, never really paid any attention to Africa.
And so there were lots of people who said throughout my history in the military, change the UCP to reflect an African command, and put it in Morocco or Liberia or someplace, and give us some emphasis on Africa.
That's the military point of view.
My point of view as an American citizen now about AFRICOM is I think it's a bad idea.
It's a bad idea because we're militarizing yet another region of the world and another aspect of our foreign policy that doesn't need militarizing.
Africa needs more guns, more arms, more military people, like it needs another hole in its head.
What Africa needs is development.
Now I would be perfectly willing to accept AFRICOM as a good development, a positive development, if we did certain things.
One, elevate the undersecretary of state for African affairs to an undersecretary, and move that person out to be commander of African command.
I'm sorry, we're going to have to leave it right there.
I hope we can turn this into another interview soon.
Surely.
Colonel Larry Wilkerson from the New America Foundation, thank you very much for your time today.
Take care, Scott.
Bye-bye.
