For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
For now, we're going to go straight to our first guest today.
It's the other Scott Horton, heroic international, anti-torture, human rights lawyer.
He's a professor at Columbia University, legal affairs correspondent for Harper's Magazine, and keeps the great blog No Comment there.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
All right, so you've got yourself in some hot water here, it looks like.
We have your piece, which we covered on the show, which is called the Guantanamo Suicides, quote-unquote.
A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle, and we covered this on the show.
It didn't get too much mainstream media coverage, but according to Jack Schaefer over at Slate, you're lucky it didn't, because actually your article is just terrible and it falls apart on the closest inspection.
Has it got you pegged here?
Did you get your deduction and induction backwards or something?
I think Jack's central premise here is that we journalists are terribly unfair to the government, and it's completely unreasonable for us to not believe the government when it issues an official report filled with anonymous names.
So Jack says, for instance, that it was absurd of me to believe the five soldiers who came forward, identified themselves by name, and gave detailed accounts of what happened that evening.
He says, instead, I should believe the heavily redacted, classified accounts provided by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, all based on discussions with anonymous people.
Well, now here's the thing.
Five witnesses – well, you have five witnesses to, I guess, something.
You have four witnesses, basically, to your narrative in the article of what you think happened that night.
But, well, I kind of think that Jack Schaefer might be a red herring, because he didn't even really try that hard to debunk you.
There's this guy over at First Things who's been on your case all week here.
Joe Carter.
Right, Joe Carter, exactly.
And he's saying that, you know, listen, you're ignoring 50 witnesses.
Did you try – who say that the guys were discovered in their cells?
As opposed to in your story, where it seems to you – and I think you said this on the show the other day – they were not found in their cells at all.
They were taken from the mysterious Camp No directly to, I guess, the medical center or whatever, without anyone seeing them being removed dead from their cell block.
But Joe Carter says, wait a minute, man, look at this NCIS report.
There are 50 people who say that they were removed from their cells.
Did you talk to any of those people?
Well, we don't know who those people are.
They're all anonymous people.
If you look at the NCIS report, you'll see the names are blacked out when they're names.
And generally, they're defined as detainee blank or they're defined as AG1 or ABG1, I should say, something like that.
So not by name.
So we don't know who those people are, first.
Second, we don't know what the full accounts were that they gave to NCIS, because what we see is sort of snippets here and there taken from their statements.
We do know that quite a few of them are not describing things they saw with their own eyes.
They're describing things that others have told them.
We also know that the timeline of the narrative here is beginning after 1230 in the morning, which is to say long after the time that's the subject of the narrative that Sergeant Hickman and his soldiers provided us.
So it's at a different point in time.
So I would say there's not necessarily a contradiction between these two accounts.
It may be possible to reconcile them on some points.
But I would say inevitably we're going to see that there is disagreement in the accounts on some key points, such as the time when the deaths were first discovered and the reaction to the deaths when they were first discovered and where the deaths were first discovered.
So, yes, are there conflicts between the testimony of these different witnesses?
Absolutely there are conflicts.
Who's the more credible witness here?
Well, the key narrative in the NCIS report comes from the Alpha Block Guards, and they're the ones who say that they found the prisoners hanging in their cells feet off the floor.
Now, if you know the physical appearance of that cell block in those facilities, you couldn't get 50 people in there.
There's not the space for it.
We're talking about the four main guards and three other guards who were present there that evening and what they saw.
And let's keep a focus on something else.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service people didn't believe their testimony.
They were all read formal warnings after this investigation began that they were suspected of having given perjured testimony.
And remember, these guards being on duty that evening, a prisoner dies on your watch, and you're under strong suspicion of dereliction of duty because your duty is essentially to prevent things like these suicides having happened.
So they're under a lot of pressure, a lot of suspicion, facing possible charges.
Any reason to be concerned that their account might not be correct?
Hmm.
And then let's compare that with the perimeter guards on the outside.
They have no worries of that sort.
Their accounts corroborate and stack up with one another.
They have no agenda or need to pursue anything.
And moreover, none of them really have a theory of what happened to these people.
They just know that there are certain factual claims that were made in the government account that just can't be right.
Well, now, have you been able to confirm with any more sources about the existence of this so-called Camp No that these men were apparently taken to that night?
We'll have another piece running in the next, maybe later today and if not, certainly Monday, which is my conversation with a marine biologist who was in Guantanamo in 2003 and 2004 and who was able to give a very precise physical description of the camp.
He was out there working next to it.
He observed it.
He wrote it up.
And he's telling us essentially the account that's given by the 629th Military Intelligence Guard is exactly right beginning to end.
They've correctly described its location, its functionality, the way it's constructed, how it's approached, and everything else.
Hmm.
Yeah, because, I mean, obviously that's a big part of this.
Let's note, you know, no pushback on this from the Pentagon.
No one said that there's no such camp.
I mean, nor can they say that there's no such camp.
I mean, we have the satellite photograph of it.
You can see it.
And there were five separate witnesses to Camp No.
So that's not an issue.
The issue that we see pushback on, as in Jack Schaefer's piece, is that, you know, this is a CIA facility where, you know, people were tortured to death.
And let's just take that apart one by one.
CIA facility.
We don't know, and I don't say in my piece that I know who the landlord was.
In fact, just the opposite.
I ask a question.
Who's the landlord of this facility?
Because one thing we know from talking to the military people is that they were led to believe it wasn't theirs.
It didn't belong to Joint Task Force Gitmo.
And they didn't know who ran it, but they associated it with some contractors and people they thought might have been CIA agents who were present there.
So we just have a question over that, no resolution.
And what happened to the prisoners when they were there that evening?
I think we have pretty good eyewitness testimony that they were taken there and that they came back around 1130 and that they weren't alive when they came back.
Now, what happened to them at that facility and in whose hands they were held, on that we really don't have any information.
We can only – we can speculate based on what happened to Chakramar that it might have been like that, but there's certainly no eyewitness testimony of what happened.
On the other hand, there's also no eyewitness testimony in the NCIS report that contradicts this.
There's no eyewitness testimony that puts those prisoners in the Alpha Cell Block or committing suicide in the Alpha Cell Block at those critical hours, up to 1230 in the morning of the following day.
Well, there's a few things here.
On that point, I think the guy at First Things, Carter at First Things, makes the point that lazy guards might not discover them for a few hours.
I think he quotes another Guantanamo detainee saying, yeah, sometimes the guards wouldn't even walk up and down the hallway.
It was a really long hallway and sometimes we'd call for them to bring us some toilet paper or whatever.
They wouldn't even come all night long.
Well, let's make two points here.
One, this was not any cell block inside of Gitmo.
This was a special cell block for troublesome prisoners, and the standard operating procedures required physical inspection of the prisoners, of every prisoner in his cell, so that flesh was observed or movement was observed every ten minutes.
So we're not talking about missing one beat or one walk.
We're talking about missing 13 of them, right?
And that's a little bit hard to believe.
But then the next step is, well, let's assume that the guards were sleeping or drinking or having a fistfight or something.
The examination is concluded, the report is concluded, and there is no discipline meted out whatsoever to these soldiers.
I mean I've talked to JAG prosecutors about this who tell me that in a situation like this, a prisoner commits suicide in a cell block, guards not paying attention and don't notice it.
The absolute minimum that would happen would be gross dereliction of duty, which is prison time.
But it could be worse than that.
But the reaction in this case is absolutely nothing.
It's all just fine.
That doesn't make sense.
Something here just doesn't add up.
Well, now, and on your five witnesses, or your four witnesses who were on guard duty that night, basically what you have them saying in this article is that not just that they didn't see these dead bodies taken from their cell block and to the infirmary or whatever, but that they saw that not happen.
That it could not have happened and escaped their attention.
What they saw were these men were taken to this camp, no, and then from there they were brought apparently as corpses to the medical facility.
Is that right?
That's right.
It was their duty, especially the two opposed guard towers, one and four, to note if anything unusual happened that resulted in movement down that central alleyway between the alpha cell block and the detainee clinic.
As one of them told me, no prisoner on the stretcher, no prisoner on the gurney, no prisoner being carried by two guards passed between that cell block and the detainee clinic.
Didn't happen.
Nope.
Okay, and then now there's the question, too, about them having rags stuck down their throats.
Now, I believe it was one of Carter's pieces there at First Things where he says that from what he can tell, one of them, or from one of these reports he's quoting, one of them had a rag down his throat.
And it wasn't that he stuffed the rag down his throat and then while choking hung himself.
It was that he had the rag in his mouth in order to muffle any noise he might make.
And then the inhaling of the rag was actually just part of the choking while he was hanging.
But that it was just the one who had a rag down his throat, not all three of them.
Now, let me just note something here.
When this was going on, I was having some correspondence, or one of my editors was, back and forth with the Department of Defense with the public affairs officer there who was sending statements and trying to discuss them with us.
And I have to say, Joe Carter's comments throughout his posts perfectly match.
They are identical to the emails we were getting from this public affairs officer at the Department of Defense.
So, Joe, original research?
I don't think so.
I think he basically picked up the screed from the Department of Defense and has turned it into a series of posts.
And that's too bad for him because these claims aren't true.
And I'll give you, this one's a key one with respect to the rags in their mouths.
Yes, it's correct that when we get down to the final stages, there's rags in the mouth of only one detainee, of one of the three detainees.
But if we go back, we'll see that there are statements from guards and medical officers who describe removing the claws from the mouths of the other two.
And they state, in one case, that this was done in order to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
In fact, in one case, they describe how they break teeth, prying open jaws to get the rags out.
In another case, they describe how they had to use forceps to pull it out.
And Joe says that I suggest some bizarre or sinister tampering with the bodies to remove evidence.
And no, I don't suggest anything of the kind.
I mean, you just read the NCIS file, and it describes the removal of the rags from their throats.
So, I mean, I'm sorry.
He's just wrong about that.
But given the idea, just think about this for a second.
A prisoner stuffs rags down his throat and puts a mask on to hold the rags in place to muffle his cries?
Does that strike you as a little strange?
Yeah, sure.
Well, but then again, I mean, it strikes me as strange as well that they would take these three men and murder them that night.
You know, what for?
Well, let's start.
Murder.
This is another thing.
Jack Schaefer, in his piece, says that I accuse the CIA of grabbing these people and just murdering them.
I mean, in fact, if you look at the existing literature studying deaths in detention during the War on Terror, you're going to see that there are now well over 100 prisoners who have died in detention.
And there are also several dozen cases in which the deaths in detention have been tied to the use of very heavy-handed interrogation techniques.
Is there evidence in any of these cases that the interrogators grabbed someone intending to murder them?
No.
That's ridiculous.
I mean, so why – this is one thing I don't understand.
Why does Jack set up this completely nutty proposition?
I don't see anything of that sort.
In fact, I don't know what happened to them at Camp No.
You know, I don't know what procedures were applied.
I don't know who did it.
I certainly don't know that the CIA did it.
But, you know, we have pretty good evidence of them being taken to that camp and them returning from that camp about 1130.
And the pathologist and all the medical evidence agrees they died at 10 o'clock.
So it's while they're there at that camp.
And I'd say the most plausible scenario here is certainly not that the CIA grabbed them to murder them and can't know.
That would be ridiculous.
The most plausible scenario would be that they were being subjected to some sort of very aggressive interrogation technique with restraints and something went awfully wrong.
Well, but even there, this is a bit late in the game.
Summer of 2006 for interrogations, right?
Well, these people were – in fact, I've been doing a lot of research on this specific issue.
There is nothing to suggest that these people would have been interrogated in connection with the war on terror broad issues.
In fact, we know military intelligence had concluded that they weren't tied to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
In fact, we know two of them were going to be released.
So why would they have been taken and why would they have been interrogated?
It had to do with something entirely different, and that is at that time, there was a lot of concern about the hunger strike that was going on at Guantanamo, which was getting a lot of press around the world, which was building sympathy for the prisoners, which was very damaging for the Bush administration.
And there was a very strong concern to find a way to shut down that hunger strike.
The four people who on June 9th were taken away, the three who died, and the fourth, Chakramar, were united by one fact.
They were all leaders of the hunger strike movement.
And I think the interrogation session that was going on was focused on that hunger strike movement, an effort to figure out who its leaders were, how it was organized, and ultimately to figure out some pressure points that could be used to bring it to a conclusion.
But this is only speculation.
I think what we really need is an investigation that establishes what was going on that night.
It can't know, and that can't be a secret to the government.
Right.
Well, another Scott Horton, I think this is really the crux of the debunking and the debunking of the debunking issue going on here, which is that you're being accused of calling speculation fact and jumping to conclusions rather than really demarcating what it is that you know to be true versus what it is that it looks like, but we still need to know more.
Well, the key technique that's used by both Joe Carter and by Jack Schaefer is that they concoct speculation and put it in my mouth, things that I never say and never suggested, but they put it forward as my ideas, and that's what we call the straw man.
Yeah, well, I've actually heard of that and dealt with that a bit myself.
So, well, now let me ask you about the autopsies here, too, because you do seem to find it in the article, and I think you said on the show the other day, very suspicious as how these autopsies were done and the parts of the throat that were removed and what have you.
Has anything that Joe Carter or anybody else has written caused you to perhaps rethink that, that maybe when they brought in the autopsy expert from the mainland of America and all this, that there's just no way they could be covering up here?
These are medical professionals, and if they removed the throat, it was for legitimate reasons, not because they were hiding something.
Well, again, the comments that we get from Joe are sort of an effort at misdirection.
You know, they suggest that my conspiracy theory is saying that it's a horrible, sinister thing to remove the throat organs and internal organs of the body, but that's not the focus of my concern.
In fact, it's a completely normal thing for a pathologist to remove internal organs, and somewhat less normal, but it also happens to remove the throat organs.
The problem here was not providing those materials to the pathologists who performed the secondary autopsy.
And what we see stated today is, quote, well, the families never asked for them, and that is a lie.
I have – I interviewed the families.
They confirmed to me they asked for them, and I have the documented written requests that were provided for the turnover of all these materials.
So they're just not telling the truth about that.
Moreover, why did they have to ask for them?
I mean, the expert pathologist I interviewed about this said it was absolutely irregular to retain and withhold those organs, that if the body is going to be buried somewhere or going to be turned over for secondary autopsy, you turn over all the body.
You don't withhold the internal organs or the neck, and that's what was done here.
Well, this is – I guess part of the problem then would be from the skeptic's point of view is that the secondary autopsy doctor apparently didn't make a big official complaint about this and say, you know, he kind of went along too, and now you have all the guards, you have the Navy medical people, and then soon enough we have the Department of Justice and the FBI coming in to cover it up, and now you're talking about something that just couldn't be all these different agencies and different people in the government all working together to conceal a crime.
Well, the second – I mean, the doctors in the secondary autopsy demanded that all the materials be turned over, and they didn't get them.
I mean, what else were they supposed to do?
Do you think they're supposed to come file a lawsuit in the United States or something?
I don't know.
No, the pathologists are supposed to cooperate with one another, and if someone doesn't cooperate, that says something.
Now, the grand conspiracy theory, which is, you know, this is what Joe Carter advances in a big way and Jack Schaefer picks up, you know, Horton's one of these conspiracy kooks, and here he's assuming that all these different agencies are engaged in some massive conspiracy.
Well, I hope they're not just confusing you with me.
I'm sure not, but in any event, let's just say that – think about a movie that you've seen called A Few Good Men.
That movie occurs in Guantanamo, and it involves someone who dies as a result of choking on some cloth.
The Code Red.
And one of the points in this movie is that the commanding officer who, in that case, took some decisions that resulted in this guy dying, I would say by accidentally, negligence, not intentionally, then engaged in a cover-up of it.
And the movie shows, in fact, how incredibly easy it was for him to cover this all up.
And why was it easy?
Because of the remoteness of Guantanamo?
Because it's a tightly controlled military environment?
Because of the doctrine of command that allowed him to put a clamp on things all over the place?
And in this case, we're dealing with even more complications, the presence of a prison environment, which is even more restrictive in this regard.
Was that movie based on a true story or something?
Absolutely based on a true story.
Oh, I didn't know that.
It really happened.
And one of the things people remarked was how easy it was to do a cover-up of a crime in Gitmo because of all these different circumstances.
Although, in that case, you didn't have the Department of Justice and the FBI come in and do their own part of the cover-up, did you?
We did not have them involved.
We had only NCIS, and we had the JAGs involved.
And here we have the Department of Justice and the FBI involved at the beginning.
The FBI involved because of a leak investigation.
Who commissioned that leak investigation?
We don't know, but people I've talked with tell me that they're fairly certain it wasn't commissioned inside the Department of Defense, and that it was commissioned in Washington somewhere.
But I think the bottom line is – The implication there is that they open up a leak investigation, you're saying, into this particular story?
Absolutely.
And so then that was – I guess you're saying it seems to you kind of the excuse to get the Department of Justice involved.
That was used to help clamp the lid on what happened to ensure people wouldn't talk about it, which is sort of the traditional way that the FBI gets involved in leak investigations.
It's to send a message to people who might have loose lips and talk about this that they're in serious trouble if they do so.
And then after that, what we had was – I mean, is it a conspiracy theory?
I mean, I would call it government agencies and spokesmen being on message.
I mean, once the government has settled on its view about what happened, and it's adopted that view – and by the way, in this case, that happened.
The bodies were not – were still warm when that happened.
We had Secretary Rumsfeld's office making the statement, these people died by hanging themselves.
And we had the commander at Gitmo saying that.
And we had other people in Washington saying that, very aggressively.
So the government was settled on that message from the beginning.
And then the rest of the government chimed in with the same message, that's the way governments work.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's what I call being on message.
Yeah.
Well, and it's the same way it works with the major media, too.
Whatever the FBI spokesman or official government spokesman says, that's the news.
And most of them don't have the incentive, they don't imagine, to go and find out whether these claims are necessarily true or not.
But, well, tell us again real quick the story of – you have five witnesses to this.
I guess one of them remains unnamed.
Is that right?
And it's about Bumgarner's speech.
And this is an important part of the thing to me, is here – well, it's the story of the rags and the hanging and the rags again and all that.
So I guess if you could just rehearse that for the people.
That's right.
And that's right.
There are five witnesses to this, one of whom was not named because he asked not to be named.
But in any event, they all gave us an identical account of what happened in the theater.
And it starts with Bumgarner assembling all the guards, between 50 and 80 of them altogether, and telling them, you all know that these prisoners died by choking on rags, but tomorrow you're going to hear something different.
What you're going to hear is that they committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells.
And he said, you're not to undermine that in any way.
In fact, you shouldn't even talk about it.
So that's exactly the same recollection of everyone we've interviewed as to what he said.
Now, not only that, but Colonel Bumgarner around this same time is giving an interview to a reporter with the Charlotte Observer.
And guess what?
He says almost the same thing to the Charlotte Observer reporter.
He says, these prisoners were found with rags in their mouths.
And moreover, that gets published.
And the day it's published, Colonel Bumgarner recounts that he's summoned to the office of Admiral Harris, and that Harris has this article in his hand, and he's shaking it.
And he tells Bumgarner, you're going to cost me my command with this.
Very, very upset.
So who threatens the admiral in charge of Gitmo with loss of his command?
And then I look side by side, the account in the Charlotte Observer quoting Bumgarner with the official Pentagon account, and there's only one detail where there's a difference between what Bumgarner had to say and what the Pentagon had to say.
And that's rags in the mouths of the prisoners.
Well then, so help me out with the chronology.
Like for how long?
Is it still the case then, I guess, that the official conclusion is nothing about rags or something?
Or at some point, after Bumgarner was quoted by the observer saying this, then they had to reincorporate the rags back into the hanging story somehow, right?
Well, I would say rags were completely airbrushed out of all official accounts, until we got to the NCIS report being released under FOIA.
And there they couldn't avoid it, because it's in the pathologist's report from the autopsy.
So then even, what you're saying then is, even after Bumgarner admitted the thing about the rags, apparently accidentally, to the observer, that still stayed out of the story until finally this...
The official account.
The official account was released, the formerly classified version was released.
That's correct.
It was out until then we saw it appear in unredacted passages of the NCIS report.
This information is there, and I think there's probably quite a bit more of it there.
And the medical experts we've talked with have said that, yeah, well, you know, death by hanging and death by choking as a result of cloth, the physical signs and manifestations of these two different forms of death are not very different.
They're subtly different.
And the Swiss pathologist who looked at this said, you know, it's strange because I look at the next year and I see a lot of marks and signs that are not consistent with death by hanging, which is the American conclusion, as he calls it.
And he ultimately says, you know, I can't make any final call here because I'm not able to examine the internal neck material, which would really be essential to judging that question.
Well, I guess I'm kind of surprised.
I'm no executioner or anything, but it seems like if you die by hanging, it's the broken neck and your spine getting pulled out of the bottom of your brain and stuff like that that kills you rather than suffocation, right?
Well, not necessarily.
It depends on how far they drop you?
It depends.
Yes.
I mean, so, you know, a professional execution hanging will involve quickly dropping the body in a precipitous way that causes the snapping of the neck.
But I would say a hanging of this sort, and the key thing here is the hyoid bone inside the neck.
Don't want to get too technical here.
But, you know, that bone would break in the event of strangulation with extremely violent force coming from a noose.
But, you know, two of the prisoners had their hyoid bone intact, and the third had his hyoid bone broken.
Now, in one of the autopsy reports, one of the doctors says, well, I broke it.
I made a mistake when I was removing the throat material.
I accidentally broke it, which is, I'd say, troubling.
Well, is it, I mean, why is it so troubling?
Does it seem like the kind of thing that couldn't happen?
It could happen, but it certainly would be very unprofessional conduct of the pathologist, and it would damage the evidence because, you know, the breaking of the hyoid bone usually is taken as key evidence of strangulation.
All right, well, when can we expect a follow-up about this?
I think you're going to see some more things over the next couple of weeks because, you know, we've had more people come forward and contact us with more information, and we will be putting some of it, I think, online in the course of the next two weeks.
And I think there's quite a bit more.
I think we're also going to be publishing our back-and-forth with the Department of Defense, in which they've explained why they think we're wrong.
By the way, we challenge them.
They said that our report is full of mistakes, and we repeatedly press them, tell us a mistake.
They still have not identified a mistake anywhere.
I mean, they basically say, you disagree with the NCIS report, and that's a mistake.
Well, you know, that's an opinion.
But we're focusing on the facts.
You know, is there any factual error in our account?
They have yet to identify any factual errors.
Moreover, in the statements they've made to us, they're riddled with factual errors where their statements do not match up with the NCIS report itself.
All right.
Now, I want to give you a chance to bring up anything important that I forgot to mention.
I mean, as far as, you know, arguing back against those writing about you here.
But one thing that I wanted to mention real quick was about the FBI investigation and how you say in the article that your main source here, Hickman, was contacted by the FBI.
And they said, well, you know, we're wrapping up our investigation here.
And he said, yeah, but I'm in contact with the other witnesses, and they tell me that you still haven't even talked to them.
And then at that point they basically just blew him off again and said, oh, yeah, well, there's a couple other things to wrap up, such as talking to the rest of the witnesses who can testify to the same negative as him.
That's exactly right.
So that goes to the question of why did the Eric Holder Justice Department terminate its investigation here?
They issue a statement saying we conducted a complete comprehensive investigation and we found that there was nothing to corroborate Sergeant Hickman's account.
And, of course, what we know is a matter of fact that they had been given a long list of corroborating witnesses who would back up every point of his account.
And at the time they initially told his lawyer that they had closed the investigation and had found no corroboration, they had not contacted these witnesses.
Meaning, and moreover, when he disclosed that he knew that fact, they suddenly got very embarrassed and quickly checked off the rest of the list.
Well, this shows very clearly that their investigation was not closed because of an examination of the evidence.
It was closed for other reasons.
And I think those probably have to do with keeping secrets.
All right.
And anything else?
Well, I would just say that, remember, the point here is not to accuse someone of having murdered someone.
The point is to say that we have three deaths under extremely suspicious circumstances where the official government explanation just doesn't stand up to the light of day and there is a pressing need to have a real, serious criminal investigation conducted that will get to the bottom of it.
That's all that's being demanded.
Which is funny because that goes back to every interview you've ever done on this show since 2004 or 2005 is we need a real investigation about all this stuff, and that's exactly what never happens.
Our Justice Department is developing quite a track record, I think, of not investigating anything.
Yeah, well, not anything the government does anyway.
That's right.
Not investigating, yes.
Of course, that's sort of the oldest joke in Washington.
Jack Schaefer seems to think the idea that government investigates itself and says, no problem, that that's fine and we should all just accept it.
And I think that, no, allow me to be a little skeptical.
Yeah, it's funny.
A friend of mine quoted me a part of I Think It's Common Sense by Thomas Paine where he's talking about what a joke it is that the parliament and the king are supposed to check each other.
Either one has the power over the other to check it or it doesn't.
And, in fact, all they end up doing is empowering each other and kind of throwing a giant cast of doubt over the entire theory of checks and balances.
And that was before we ever got started with this constitution.
All right, anyway, that's my own tangent I'm off on now.
I'll go ahead and let you go.
I appreciate your time on the show today, Scott.
Hey, great to be with you.
Take care.
All right, everybody, that's the other Scott Horton, heroic international anti-torture human rights lawyer.
You can find his blog at harpers.org slash no comment.
And I think we'll all be keeping an eye on the no comment blog there at Harper's as this story continues to develop.
