08/25/09 – Scott Horton – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, a little MDC for you, Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest on the show today is the other Scott Horton, you know him well, he's a visiting professor at Hofstra Law School and I think also lectures at Columbia, he's the former chair of the International Committee on Human Rights and a million more credentials along those lines.
You can check out his awesome blog, nocommentatharpers.org.
Welcome back to the show, Scott, how are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you Scott, it's a very busy day.
Yeah, very busy day and well yesterday too, let's start with yesterday then we'll get to today.
Yesterday, two big pieces of news, the CIA Inspector General's report from 2004 about the torture program was finally released and Attorney General Eric Holder announced what you call on your blog a modified limited hangout, sort of halfway or less prosecution of those responsible.
So I guess let's get right to the meat of it.
First of all, let's talk about what Holder has announced.
Newsweek and you on your blog competing back and forth for who's breaking what story, I've been reporting over the last couple of weeks that, you know, you were saying and including on this show that Holder is in fact going to appoint somebody, a prosecutor and I guess he's gone ahead and got this special prosecutor that's already tasked with investigating the destruction of the CIA torture videotapes and he's kind of expanded that guy's jurisdiction in a Ken Starr kind of way there.
But so that sounds great, right?
The rule of law lives and the Attorney General has ordered up a prosecution and so everything's great, right?
Why is this a modified limited hangout, Scott?
I'd say it's a very modest step forward, okay?
Because he's not directed John Durham to undertake a wide-ranging investigation of torture.
What he's done is opened the door just a crack.
He said, look, this CIA Inspector General's report, which we're releasing today, makes completely clear that notwithstanding all the things that the OLC, the Justice Department, authorized, all the torture tactics that were authorized, including waterboarding and the cold cell and long-time standing and sleep deprivation, on and on and on, they did things that the OLC memos didn't authorize and moreover clearly under the OLC memos that clearly would be illegal.
So what's the justification for not investigating those things, right?
They don't have a get-out-of-jail-free pass on them.
And President Obama's statement at the CIA was those who relied in good faith on OLC memos would be in the clear to the extent they did, but, you know, that doesn't cover these things.
So it's this little crack that he's authorizing, but, you know, it's a positive step and it may lead to more, because a prosecutor, once he's appointed, is supposed to investigate a crime, not investigate people.
So he should start looking into this and he should follow the leads where they take him.
And it'll be very, very disappointing in my mind if all he does is just look at the people in the interrogation room and make judgments about whether torture happened, because very clearly it did.
Well, now, hold on a second.
Let me play defense lawyer here for, I don't know, the CIA torturer who held a power drill next to the guy, next to his head, and said, you know, we're going to put this power drill in your head if you don't do what we say.
Couldn't he just argue or his defense lawyer just argue that, wait, I did rely on the good faith of the OLC memos because those memos said that the Geneva Convention is quaint and that under the President's executive or commander-in-chief authority, there is no law and we can do whatever we want.
Well, you're playing it out exactly the way it is going to happen.
When Durham sits down with these people and starts asking them questions, they're going to say, well, we relied on the advice we understood was coming from OLC and it's not just what's in the memos, it's also things that were communicated orally.
And the message we were getting all the time was do whatever it takes and, you know, why doesn't that include power drills?
After all, you know, we saw that in the Dino De Laurentiis movie.
Yeah, well, and we saw it in the newspapers about, you know, Al-Qaeda versus the Ba'athists going on in the intra-Sunni split fighting in the war in Iraq a couple of years ago.
That's right, and we all watch Fox 24 and it's used there, so therefore that's Dick Cheney's favorite program, so it must be authorized.
No, I think we're going to get, I'm making it a little bit facetious, but I mean, no, we are going to get arguments that these practices were authorized, it was the intention of those higher-ups to enable them, and we're going to see that there were communications that went way beyond what happened in the memos here.
So it's going to open the door to what those communications were and what was said in them, and that's going to put in focus not just John Yoo and Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, but also people at the National Security Council and the White House and particularly the Vice President's staff.
One thing that becomes very, very clear from this Inspector General's report from the CIA is that all roads lead to Dick Cheney.
In fact, every time in this report we see discussion of influence coming from above, usually we immediately see passages all blacked out, and I'm told repeatedly by people who've read this that, yeah, those passages tell you that Dick Cheney and his staff were behind these operations giving advice and giving the go-ahead.
So we're going to come down to Cheney and his staff being involved in giving approvals, that's going to be interposed as defense, and the prosecutor's going to have to deal with that.
I mean, is that something lawful?
Is that legal?
Or does it not, in fact, suggest a conspiracy to torture, which is really being led and directed from the White House?
Right.
As though anybody could really argue that the Vice President has the authority to suspend all laws and order people to do whatever they want.
Well, Dick Cheney, you know, has a different copy of the Constitution from everybody else's copy.
I guess so.
The Constitution for the New States of America or something.
His Constitution basically vests all power and authority in Dick Cheney.
All right.
Now, in your blog entry here at NoCommentAtHarpers.org, you point out a specific example of this where you say that in this IG report it's very obvious that the CIA agents themselves, the torturers themselves, were extremely worried that they could be prosecuted for this later, and that the push to go ahead and have them continue clearly came not only from above them at CIA, but from above the CIA, from above the Justice Department, from the White House, and that the OLC memos were really issued after the fact, that all the torture regime had already been going on, and the CIA guys were so worried about it that they said, I will make it legal.
And then they did.
That's right.
We've got a gap.
We have the torture regime, the Bush program, so-called, being put in place at least by April of 2002, and the first memo is written out of OLC in August of 2002.
You know, that's a gap of four months in which the program is operating with no authority from the OLC, and I think that shows exactly what the relationship is that's going on here.
That is, these memos are being written as get-out-of-jail-free cards, basically, not to provide any kind of legal advice, and so they're instrumentalizing the introduction of this regime.
And that goes on down the line, too, because the Inspector General discovers that the guidelines that OLC gave on waterboarding, for instance, have been exceeded.
I quote that passage in one of my blog posts.
And what do they do?
They go back to the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, himself, and he says, well, I don't care.
You know, they can waterboard all they want.
That's fine.
So John Ashcroft personally gives the go-ahead, and this is when we're talking about 183 times someone being waterboarded, and Ashcroft just doesn't care, so he's basically expanding the parameters of the permission that were given by the OLC memos.
Well, you know, I saw that video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded, and they were just kind of barely pouring, and that radio show host guy, Man Cow, they were just barely pouring a little bit on there.
That's not, you know, stuffing a rag down their throat and pouring a gallon on their head.
Yeah, which was being, you know, measured by bottle over and over again, so, yeah, it was pretty amazing.
Well, let's get into that a little bit.
I'm afraid that this argument becomes a bit too academic about which lawyer signed which memo and what have you.
What exactly was going on here?
We're talking about a little open-hand slapping and a little bit of threatening, right?
But nothing really medieval happened in these secret prisons, right?
No, what we're talking about is really medieval.
You know, I mean, we don't have the Iron Maiden exactly, but we do have the Strapato, and we do have waterboarding.
Those are the two key tools that were used by the Spanish Inquisition.
Why don't you call the first one there?
We have a lot of psychologically refined tortures going on.
Why don't you call the first one there before the waterboard, Scott?
The Strapato.
And what's that?
That's a stress position.
Ah, where you're made to squat, chain to the floor for a few days kind of thing at a time.
That's right.
In Spain, during the Inquisition, they would bind people by their hands and then hoist them from the ceiling to break or dislocate the elbows.
That was a favorite technique.
But actually, anything that constitutes a stress position is comparable.
Well, go ahead and elaborate.
I know you're very familiar with the Red Cross report and all the different legal memos and investigations and everything that's come out here.
If you were, I don't know, the average detainee at a CIA dungeon somewhere, basically, what's your day like?
I mean, what do they really do to these guys?
Because, you know, there's a lot of stuff that I've heard of in the press that's not even in here, wrapping people in Israeli flags and putting them on their knees outside with a gun to the back of the head and then dry-firing it and mock executions and people being locked in solitary for months at the salt pit outside of Kabul.
I mean, there's some pretty bad stuff here that went on under the name of, take the gloves off.
That's exactly right.
But I think we need to focus on the fact that it's two periods of time in particular where things get really, really rough and like things out of the Middle Ages.
And that's basically in the two months before the invasion of Iraq and then the period right after the invasion.
So it's this key period, basically, in 2003, that's the really, really heavy time.
And some of the things that are introduced that we learn about in some detail now include threats of death.
I mean, that's what's going on with, you know, cocked and loaded gun and with the drill and with mock executions going on in a neighboring cell to give the person the sense that, you know, he might just be killed.
And then we have threats to family.
You know, we're going to hunt down and kill your children.
We're going to seize your mother and rape her in front of you.
So threats of physical violence against the immediate family of a prisoner.
Now in terms of the law, there's just no question about any of these techniques.
In fact, the definition of torture says threatening someone with imminent death is torture.
That's part of the definition.
So, you know, there's no John U. Royer magic that's going to make whipping out a gun and pointing it at someone less than torture and legal.
These things were clearly illegal.
And the same thing with the threats to family members.
And these are things that went on, as is documented in the Inspector General's report, all over the world in CIA black sites.
But we know these same things were also going on at Abu Ghraib and they were going on in Afghanistan.
And, you know, I don't think that's coincidental.
It seems pretty clear that someone high up was giving guidance that this is OK, that this has been done.
Remember, the Department of the Army study of Abu Ghraib says these techniques migrated.
CIA officers will be involved in interrogations.
They come into the army prisons and they tell people, well, we know at this other site that this, that and the other thing are being done so that all these techniques, once they were approved and authorized and used by the CIA, wind up spreading all over the detention systems and the war on terror.
Well, yeah.
In fact, they talked about how it kind of migrated from Guantanamo to Iraq, but also from Afghanistan to Iraq.
And some of it, like you say, was just sort of word of mouth.
Also, though, Don Rumsfeld went and plucked General Miller from Guantanamo and said, listen, I want you to Gitmo-ize the process in Iraq, which in practice, according to Tony Lugaranis, for one example, meant widespread torture of Iraqis, even in their own homes, never mind what was going on at Abu Ghraib.
That's right.
And the introduction of dogs, for instance.
I mean, there's just no doubt about it that Donald Rumsfeld, you know, he was described quite vividly in one interview I had with a senior officer, pounding his hand on a table, saying he was angry at the quality of the intelligence he was getting, and insisting that he wanted to get Miller out to Iraq and get the situation there Gitmo-wise, by which he meant introducing the harshest techniques that had been authorized for use in Guantanamo, which of course was clearly illegal, because even his own legal advisors and his own general counsel agreed that the Geneva Conventions did apply in Iraq.
The question, you know, they had just tried to make arguments that they didn't apply in Guantanamo.
All right, now let's get back a little bit more to the direct hand of Dick Cheney in this.
You point out in your blog entry that after Jay Bybee quit, he was replaced by Jack Goldsmith, who was John Ashcroft's pick, rather than John Yoo, who Dick Cheney wanted.
But then they basically just shut out the DOJ entirely, and they just went with the White House.
What exactly does that mean?
Yeah, they're basically, there's about ten pages in this report that are fascinating, because the language that's used is very, very guarded and distant, but it's dealing with exactly these facts.
What happens?
The OLC under John Yoo and Jay Bybee is giving them a green light for whatever they want.
What happens when Jay Bybee and John Yoo leave and Jack Goldsmith comes in?
Jack Goldsmith starts pulling back all these authorizations that Bybee and Yoo had given.
He describes how he discovers them, how he's upset with them.
He's in communication with the CIA saying, you know, don't rely on this, this isn't valid anymore.
There's a lot of discussion about a set of bullet points, which I still haven't seen, I'm trying to find them, which they say the CIA is relying on, that were prepared by OLC and Jack Goldsmith is insisting that's not legal advice, you can't rely on it.
So how does CIA deal with that?
Suddenly they stop talking to OLC.
Suddenly they go to the White House, and there's a description about briefings and discussions that occur in the White House.
We don't hear everyone who's present there, but it clearly involves the National Security Council and it clearly involves Vice President Cheney and his senior associates, I'd say particularly David Addington involved in this.
And suddenly, instead of getting approval from OLC, the approval's coming from the White House and the National Security Council.
So Dick Cheney basically steps into the gap when Jack Goldsmith begins to pull back authorization.
And what else happens?
Well, Jack Goldsmith is pressured out.
He's forced out of the Justice Department.
And then they start a search for new lawyers who will issue all the torture memos they want.
It does seem kind of strange, just from the average Joe kind of point of view, that Condoleezza Rice could admit that she was involved in, I think in her words, transmitting the orders from here to there.
You can have ABC break a story, what, almost a year and a few months ago now at least, that the Cabinet choreographed the torture of, at least I think it was Catani down at Guantanamo Bay in that story, where Rice was involved, Ashcroft was there, Powell was there, I believe Stephen Hadley, Rice's right-hand man at the time, obviously George Tenet from the CIA, and I think Dick Cheney and his lawyers as well.
They were all there, and step-by-step, I'm sorry?
Don't forget John Ashcroft.
Right, and John Ashcroft, the Attorney General.
So now we have an investigation.
It's like they're trying to make, you know, a Whitewater investigation out of a Waco investigation or something.
Well, I think they're basically throwing up obstacles at every step along the way, and one of the problems with what Holder has done is that he focuses on what happened in the interrogation room.
Let's stop for a second and say, first of all, that's correct to an extent, because when they appoint a prosecutor, the prosecutor has to start with the factual account of a crime.
Okay, well the crime that went on here was that somebody was tortured.
Okay, so that is what happens in the room.
But then you've got to step back and trace that, and remember when the U.S. Congress enacted this anti-torture statute, it enacted it as a conspiracy crime.
That is to say, it's not just what happened in the room that matters.
It may be a long step of acts by government officials or people acting in official capacity that authorized this or made it possible to happen.
So that, in this case, would be the senior people at the CIA, it would be the people in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, it would be the National Security Council and the approvals that were collected there.
So you've got not a really large group of people, but at the end of the day you've got somewhere between 12 and 20 people who are involved in this process who would be the logical target of any criminal investigation of torture that occurred using this program.
So in a perfect world, we really are talking about, you'd have wide-scale indictments of basically the former cabinet of the Bush administration and their lawyers.
I think the lawyers are probably the most vulnerable group because when you look at the entire scheme, the lawyers are the people who can't rely on advice of counsel.
They're the people who gave the advice, and they gave false advice very, very clearly.
And their advice was instrumental in making the whole thing work, avoiding the prohibition of the statute.
And all that means that, frankly, if you're a prosecutor trying to pick out who are the most culpable people and who are the best people to indict, it's probably not the interrogators at the bottom of the scale who are the most likely target.
It winds up being John Yoo, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury, I'd pick as probably the three, and probably David Addington, I'd add on as number four, most likely people to be indicted and prosecuted.
Right.
And then let Addington snitch and turn state's witness like the rat he is.
I mean, that's what I would expect for him to do, and let him testify against Dick Cheney.
Well, I'd love to hear the inside story, according to David Addington.
That'd be great fun, which he would never tell it unless he was facing life in prison.
But anyway, here's the thing, though, Scott.
There's this undercurrent the whole time you're talking where I figure you just don't care about America being protected from the dangerous people.
Dick Cheney has said over and over again that if they will only just release the actual documents that he's talking about, then we'll see that he saved all of our lives over and over again.
You and your legalities aside.
Well, let's take these two points one at a time.
Throughout this entire debate, we constantly hear, no, we have to protect these poor CIA agents who will be demoralized if there's an investigation.
Now what do we discover when we get the IG report is it's launched by complaints from CIA agents.
In fact, a very large number of them.
Just recounting in case after case after case where highly valued career CIA people see what's going on, they're horrified by it, and they go pull the alarm box.
They say, this can't be happening, this is criminal conduct.
One of them talks in one of the interviews about having these nightmares about being hauled before the world court and made the answer for this.
Several others say, but this is criminal, how could we be doing these things?
Career people say, you know, I remember from the time I joined the service being taught we will never do this in the description of some of these specific acts.
So yes, there were a large number of people inside the CIA who were completely demoralized by the Bush program being introduced and objected strenuously to that fact.
On the other hand, we have a very, very limited number of people from the CIA who've stood up and supported the program, and I'd say you could probably count them on all the digits of one human body, not more than 20 people total in the agency.
Those are the people you hear about all the time.
They're a very small number of people, but they start with tenant and they go down, and they include people in very powerful positions.
Now Dick Cheney tells us lives were saved, attacks on America were avoided as a result of the use of these techniques, and he said repeatedly, there are two CIA documents which I would like to have declassified which will prove my case.
And yesterday, those two CIA documents, one of which is a study of the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the second is a sort of broader-based study of the effectiveness of these techniques, these documents are out, and surprise, surprise, they don't at all say what Dick Cheney claims they say, not remotely.
What they say is, the CIA got valuable information from these sources.
And there's no disputing that.
It did.
In fact, look at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
We got valuable information from him starting when he was interviewed by Al Jazeera.
In fact, one CIA agent told Jane Mayer that probably the most effective technique to use to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be to sit down and eat tea and crumpets with him.
Because he was happy to say everything he knew, you didn't have to torture him or do anything else.
He was proud of all the stuff he'd done.
Well, and after they tortured him, he admitted to global warming and killing all the life that used to live on Mars, and every attack that ever happened in the world.
That's right.
I mean, he admitted to lots of things we know he didn't do, so in fact, there's a general consensus view that after the torture was introduced, he became far less reliable and credible as a witness than he was before.
And he was freely volunteering all the information before, so there was no need to torture him.
And with respect to the other cases, again, we've got pretty much the same track record.
We got valid, useful intelligence from them, but there is no evidence presented, and not even any claim made, that we had to torture them to get this evidence.
In fact, all the available information shows the opposite.
That is, that rapport-building techniques that were applied by the FBI were by far the most effective, and that's how we got most of the useful data we got from them.
All right.
So just to recap this point for its importance here, Dick Cheney has maintained, since he left office, basically, throughout this entire year, that you just don't know the truth.
The truth is, in these classified documents, they prove that this torture saved Americans.
And you're telling me that you have these documents, and what they say is that people that we know were tortured at some point gave up information at some point, and they don't prove a damn thing along the lines of what Dick Cheney claims that they would prove.
Surprise.
In no case, in either of these reports, did they link valid, actionable intelligence to the use of these highly-coercive techniques.
Never.
Well, yeah, this is going to be fun.
All the conservatives now are all obsessed with the Constitution, because socialized health care is unconstitutional.
I wonder about the part where the executive is mandated to enforce the law, and including the torture statutes against the previous Republican administration.
Yep, well, that's a key issue here, and of course, you know, the charges being brought – in fact, Dick Cheney, look at the statement he released last night.
He says, Barack Obama is politicizing the Justice Department by ordering the opening of a political prosecution, he says.
So, of course, we've been through eight years in which the Bush White House notoriously used the Justice Department for partisan political purposes.
We now have two major congressional investigations concluding that.
We have a special prosecutor appointed, who may very well be bringing indictments in connection with that, the U.S. attorney scandal being a great demonstration of all of that.
From Cheney's viewpoint, that's all life as it ought to be.
But when another administration says, we're going to take the stick out of the wheel and allow the wheel of justice to turn the way it normally should, that's partisan.
It's pretty amazing here.
And you know – Especially when we're talking, again, about a modified limited hangout, not an investigation of Dick Cheney and David Addington at all.
Very, very limited.
And moreover, who's the prosecutor who's doing this?
It's a prosecutor who was appointed by the Bush administration.
Right.
And this guy, Durham, it's already been reported by the Post.
Again, he's the guy who's already been investigating.
He has a grand jury, I think, looking into the destruction by the CIA of the videotapes of their investigations.
And the Washington Post has already said, nothing's going to come of that.
So I don't know this guy, Durham – maybe you do – but I don't know why any of us should believe that he has any other job other than saying, ah, no, it was all fine.
Well, political agenda, we can rule out right away.
I mean, just start with the fact that John Durham, for his entire life, has been a registered Republican in Connecticut – that's something I recently checked – and is known for active interest and involvement in Republican politics.
A Connecticut Republican, just like George Bush.
Exactly.
So the idea that this is some sort of partisan political thing by the Democrats is ridiculous.
And you add to that the fact that it's the Bush Justice Department who selected and appointed him.
All that Holder's done, effectively, is expand the scope of his investigation a little bit.
That's about all.
So to call this a political investigation is just completely absurd.
Well, do you have any reason to believe that he's really going to even try for an indictment here?
Or is this not all just part of the cover-up, Scott?
Well, I spent some time up in Hartford, where he worked most of his career, interviewing people who worked with him.
And they tell me that he's a diligent, thoughtful, careful prosecutor.
I mean, basically, I couldn't find anybody who had a negative word to say about him.
And he's viewed as someone who meticulously, methodically works his way through a case looking at all angles and leads, and makes a decision to go only if he thinks he's got all the necessary material to actually secure a conviction.
Well, that's exactly...
Those are the standards a prosecutor is supposed to follow.
So frankly, I think it's good.
And I'll tell you, I think he will look at it rigorously and carefully.
And I think if he decides not to bring prosecution, then it's probably because the evidence won't support the conviction.
This is something that I can, I guess, celebrate, that when some federal court judge said that the executive branch had to release Mohammed Jawad, the guy who was arrested when he was 12 years old, and his family threatened until he would confess to throwing a grenade that a bunch of other witnesses say he didn't even throw, and which isn't even a war crime anyway.
And they were talking, I think, again, in the Washington Post about, well, we might just indict him anyway and hold a kangaroo trial, I don't know, maybe down in Miami like we did for Jose Padilla, and keep him anyway.
But instead, they decided to go ahead and let him go, and he's back in Afghanistan now, where he might get bombed from the sky, but at least he's not being held in Guantanamo anymore.
Is that progress, that Mohammed Jawad has been set free?
I give them credit for that.
They did the right thing in this case.
And Mohammed Jawad's case, I remember when I first looked at it and was talking with, you know, and looking at the evidence they had, thinking, you know, there really isn't any evidence, I was pulled aside by a pretty senior person from the Justice Department who said, well, if only you knew what we knew, you'd know that this guy really is a terrorist and is a grave threat, and we have very, very good reasons to be holding him.
And I said, well, why don't you produce the evidence that you know that we should know so we can see that there's a reason to it?
And I think when we got years later down the pike and pretty much all the material the Justice Department had was exposed, we discovered there was no there, there.
They had no evidence.
I mean, this guy...
In fact, what was going on was their concern about being embarrassed by exposure of their mishandling of this case.
This guy was a teenager who really was not involved in any serious misconduct or a hostile act against Americans.
There was no evidence for that, and yet he was held and mistreated for many, many years before he was finally released and turned over.
Now, let's go back to the IG report here.
One of the things that sits in the back of that report is statements from a lot of CIA agents that they're concerned that even though they think they've got a number of people who are completely innocent, after all the stuff we've done to them, they're scared to death that these people will be set free and will explain to the world what the CIA does to people in these black sites.
And therefore they're arguing, well, we have to retain them and we have to demonize them.
We have to tell everybody these are horrible, hideous terrorists because that's the only way we can justify keeping secret what we've been doing there.
So this is how this perverse system and the horrible things that go on it completely corrupt the way we operate them.
Well, and you know, how true is that?
I mean, Zawahiri and Zarqawi both were tortured by American satellites in the Middle East, Egypt and Jordan, or strike that, reverse it.
And before they became terrorists, you might conclude that perhaps there's some causation to that correlation.
And, you know, I don't know why anybody who's been tortured in Guantanamo Bay wouldn't want to go and become a warrior when he gets home.
Well, that's fair enough.
In fact, I interviewed a couple of Guantanamo guards who told me, you know, we don't know if these people were terrorists when they came in, but, you know, when they left, they sure ought to be after all the stuff we did to them.
So, you know, this is Guantanamo and the black sites were certainly a system for creating terrorists if people weren't already terrorists when they came in.
A real stroke of genius there.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's kind of an elementary sort of argument, but this whole thing started off really on the day of September 11th, George Bush said freedom itself was attacked.
And that was the lie that they push.
And I guess there's still some great percentage of the American people who that's the only explanation of motive they ever got a chance to hear.
And as far as they know, that's it.
But in fact, they hate us because we torture them.
And our government has been torturing people in the Middle East and a lot of times by proxy.
But still for decades.
And that's why they attacked us.
It's because of oppression, not because of how great we are, but because of how evil our government is.
Simple as that.
Well, Major Matthew Alexander, you know, our lead interrogator in Iraq, says exactly that.
You can read his book or you can talk to him.
And I know you have actually, you know, and he says he did the debriefing of all the terrorists who were held in Iraq over a period of several years.
And he says in almost every case when he asked how you recruited, you know, what happened that caused you to sign up with this terrorist group and to start hurling IEDs at American troops, what he heard over and over again was torture.
Yeah.
And Guantanamo Bay specifically.
And Guantanamo Bay, that's right.
Which happened after Rumsfeld Gitmo-ized the process because the insurgency was giving him a problem and he needed some good intelligence so he could nip that insurgency in the bud That's right.
Yeah.
Very productive, I think they call it.
Oh, counterproductive.
Sorry.
I always get those confused.
Hey, listen, let me ask you about FBI rendition.
I read the headline, Obama is putting the FBI in charge of all the interrogations now.
And I thought, well, that's progress, at least, because we know the FBI would rather, you know, do the tea and crumpets thing, like you said, than, you know, just torture people.
But then again, you know, they are the Waco killers, too.
And then I remember just last week, you know, well, and also September 11th happened on their watch.
So that doesn't inspire much confidence either.
Then I remember just last week, I was reading an article that you wrote, I forget, was it at the Daily Beast or at No Comment at Harper's there about the FBI renditioning a guy from Afghanistan.
And they've basically turned into the CIA in order to do this.
And they've done it not on the Ali Soufan method, but on the CIA, you know, put a bag over their head and all this stuff, renditioning a guy for what you describe as, you know, some low level white collar crime.
What's going on there?
Well, I wrote that story up.
In fact, it appeared in the Huffington Post, you know, principally because of that discovery.
I mean, I had looked at the FBI for a long time and thought that their conduct, I mean, was not always above a reproach, but generally it was pretty good.
I mean, they provide a pretty strong counterexample to what the CIA was doing.
And I was astonished when I started tracking the details of this case, in which they use hoods and shackling and sleep deprivation, all things that I've been told by the FBI are not authorized, but, you know, nevertheless were used in this case coming out of Afghanistan.
I think it points to some serious problems.
But overall, I think the idea of putting the FBI in charge of the process is correct.
In fact, the one thing, there's really no dispute between the FBI and CIA as to who has interrogation expertise.
In fact, if you look at the Inspector General report from the CIA, they're acknowledging this is not something that we historically have done as a part of the CIA's mission.
Historically, it has been done by the FBI.
It's been their side of the aisle that's handled the interrogation.
So it's been really FBI and military intelligence who've had the expertise.
CIA is a newcomer to the process.
So it makes perfect sense that the FBI, with their widely acknowledged expertise and much longer track record, would be the people running the show.
And I think, although there's some problems overall, they've got a pretty good record.
Well, but so is that what we can expect in the future then, though, is FBI agents?
It's not that the CIA is kidnapping the guy and hooding him and doing all this crazy stuff and then turning him over to the FBI.
We had the FBI, which already was kind of internationalized in what I thought was a legally dubious, weird kind of way in the 1990s, but now they're actually acting like the CIA agents.
I mean, do they have tortured taxi jets here and everything?
They do.
I mean, that's what I'm saying.
Secret prisons in Morocco?
They're using a Gulfstream 5.
So I think one of the questions, one of the problems is that the FBI needs to better police its own people with respect to these tactics and procedures.
That's the real problem.
Because if they were using the Ali Soufan method, I don't think we'd have these problems.
Okay.
And now, when the, I was a little confused when I saw this headline.
The military is saying the Red Cross is now going to have immediate access and so forth.
I thought that George Bush already declared on TV that he closed all the secret prisons, he sent all those guys to Guantanamo Bay, and that the Red Cross knows everything about everybody who's detained by the American forces, and yet somehow this is news.
Well, we're talking mostly about military detainees, but it would include anybody else as well who holds them.
And the key thing here is that the identification of these people is turned over to the ICRC, and ICRC will have visiting rights.
In the Bush administration, there was a conscious decision made to withhold the identity of a large number of the detainees, including virtually all the detainees in Guantanamo, over long periods of time, from the Red Cross, so that they didn't know.
That was a violation of the law.
The law required us to inform the Red Cross of those individuals and their names.
And remember, there was a Navy Lieutenant Commander, Matt Diaz, who was so upset by this illegal refusal to notify the Red Cross of these names, that he, violating military rules, turned over a copy of the list of the detainees, so that they would be known to the Red Cross.
And he wound up being court-martialed, stripped of ranks, being forced to serve time in a brig, and everything else, because he did that.
The decision he made, and for which he was court-martialed, was to follow the law.
So this is one of those paradigm cases where, under the Bush administration, the Bush administration decides to be lawless, and if you decide to follow the law, they will prosecute you.
The law is standing on its head.
Well, and that's kind of the underlying thing about all this, right?
It's another level of precedent set.
I mean, in the 70s, a president was forced to resign.
But those days are over now.
I mean, we're in a situation where we have basically complete lawlessness, handed from one administration to the other, and we all know, it's just, as you said on your blog, a limited hangout, that it's going to go nowhere.
There might as well be an investigation in some tin-pot dictatorship, where they pretend to have an investigation, like when Hillary Clinton was lecturing Kenya.
That's right.
And we have the David brothers and the Chuck Todds who dominate the media landscape, particularly in the Washington crowd, who just have this view that, oh, well, of course, when Republicans are in power, they completely disregard the Constitution, and that's okay, because they're Republicans, and that's the way the Republicans view the world.
And when Democrats are in power, then they're all feathered and restricted, because Democrats have a different view of the Constitution, and you think, no, there's only one Constitution.
And what's illegal for a Democratic president is illegal for a Republican president.
There really isn't any difference based on the partisan worldview.
But the Beltway media culture is highly permissive.
It lets these people do what they want to do, because, well, boys will be boys.
Right.
After all, the people elected them, and so that's the ultimate seal of approval.
Like Bush said in 2004, hey, this is from his balcony.
I am democracy.
This is my accountability moment.
Exactly.
And no, accountability moment, you know, that is, you are subject to accountability for a split second at the polls, and that's it.
That's certainly not the way that James Madison understood the system was going to operate.
Well, and speaking of James Madison, last question for you here, other Scott Horton.
The indefinite detention law, when are we going to know exactly what are Barack Obama's plans for this?
And I guess it's not even worth asking, is it going to just sail through the Congress that forget the Bill of Rights, we're making Dick Cheney's secret illegal program legal?
Yeah.
Well, I have to say, I am happy that the task force decided to take another half year.
I'm happy because I saw where they were going, and I certainly didn't like what I saw.
So if it takes them another half year, maybe there's a chance that with more time, they'll get a little bit more reasonable about this.
But certainly what was in the process of gestation looked pretty bad.
But, you know, I'll call that question when they actually put forward a proposal, then I'll look at it and have some opinions.
Now I'd say we got a very complex soup with a lot of different people with different views that are sort of tossed into the pot.
And I'd say, you know, from what I see, the position that's been taken by the attorney general and Barack Obama's counsel, Greg Craig, that's sort of palatable.
But what I hear coming out of the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, that's really worrisome.
And I don't know who's going to wind up on top at the end of the day.
Yeah, well, it probably isn't going to be Liberty.
I think almost certainly not.
I mean, you can you can you can check that trend over the last hundred years.
It hasn't gone our way for a long time.
Well, and that's really the conflict, right, is having a permanent state of world empire and warfare and still trying to pretend to be a constitutional republic.
It's really one or the other.
And the choice has already been made.
Right.
I mean, we're talking, you know, the book X America was written 60 years ago.
What we're seeing is it's a one way street.
I mean, the president accumulates more power and he may be replaced by another president who criticizes that accumulation of more power.
But once that person becomes president, he's really happy to have all that power and he doesn't give it up.
The president never sees the power.
So we've got this one way ratcheting going on.
And I think, you know, if you think seriously that at some point the president is going to wind up losing power to other institutions, think again, it's not going to happen.
But we can work as hard as we can work to slow this process of accumulation of power down.
That's true.
And I guess it's possible that complete and total financial catastrophe will bring Washington D.C. back down to size at some point.
Well, although a catastrophe tends to be an opportunity for dictators to come to power and people when they when they see a collapsed government and see a state of disarray, that's when they really like the Leviathan, as Thomas Hobbes tells us, the strong man comes to power.
So it's not necessarily a good time for people who are advocates of personal freedom and liberty.
Right.
That's true.
But again, you can only inflate so much.
I mean, what do you do when the crisis is that?
Well, wait, no, I didn't like the way that question was going.
What do you do in the crisis is your Weimar Germany and you've destroyed your currency?
I guess the answer is you get the National Socialists and a new Reich market.
That wasn't a happy experience.
But, you know, one of the problems we've got here now, of course, is we're all focused on Barack Obama.
We're focused on war powers.
We should really be spending some time looking at the Federal Reserve Bank system, because it's exercised historically unprecedented powers in the last couple of years, tossing around massive sums of money, making loans, becoming involved and engaged in the market in ways that were never intended before.
And there's been no oversight or accountability for it.
And that's, I think, a really, really distressing development on the American public stage that has not gotten nearly as much attention from the public as it deserves.
Well, I'm so glad you said that.
You know, it seems to me that its first order of business after it was created was inflating the currency in order to pay for Woodrow Wilson to fight World War One or to get a bunch of other people to fight it for him.
And it's done nothing really but inflate and fund wars ever since then.
Right.
You know, I step back a little bit, Scott, and say that, you know, modern history shows if you're going to have if you're going to have a currency and stabilize your currency, you can't get away from having a currency bank.
So it probably is, to some extent, an indispensable institution.
But like all institutions that wield power, it's got to be subject to checks and balances and oversight.
And it can't be allowed to operate privately and in secret.
And that's what's been going on in the United States.
And we're talking about, you know, mass shifts of wealth.
I mean, particularly all the things that have gone on involving Goldman Sachs are just absolutely astonishing to me.
And it's, you know, Goldman Sachs has benefited from these dealings like no other institution in American history.
And it's benefited with people on the deciding side who have non-transparent relationships with Goldman Sachs.
That just shouldn't be happening.
Well, yeah, I mean, it seems like at this point, this is about as open as it could be, where the word oligarchy is just kind of inescapable.
That's what we have here.
It's not a democracy.
There's an entrenched power structure in America that wages endless war and tortures people and appropriates itself trillions of dollars with the printing press, if it feels like it.
And none of us, the rest of us have any control over it whatsoever.
Yeah.
Well, at least we're entitled to more information to know what happened, and we don't even have that yet.
So, you know, of course, today, Barack Obama has nominated Fed Chairman Bernanke for another term.
And he's also said that he wants to see accountability.
He wants to see the information come out about how the bailout money was spent.
And I guess he, of course, I'm happy to hear him say that.
I just don't really believe he's going to force the disclosure of this information and force transparency.
Well, I mean, hey, if he really wanted to do that, there's a perfect opportunity right in front of him.
Ron Paul has a bill in the House.
And Bernie Sanders, the socialist, introduced the almost identical bill in the Senate.
And it already has more than half of the House of Representatives, including a great many Democrats have signed on to Ron Paul's bill.
And all Barack Obama has to do is get behind that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'd like to see something that that mandates and provides more oversight here.
But, you know, again, I'm not an economist.
I guess I should leave this to the economist.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate all your efforts on the torture story and all the other stuff and even the translations of foreign literature stuff you do on your blog.
It's all great stuff.
No comment at Harper's dot org slash subjects slash.
No comment.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Scott.
Hey, great to be with you.
All right, folks.
It's anti-war radio.
We'll be right back after this.