All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Next up is the other Scott Horton.
He is the heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer and contributing editor of Harper's magazine.
He writes a blog there called no comment.
Harper's.org/subjects/no comment.
He's a New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict.
He lectures at Columbia law school, a long time, a lifelong human rights advocate Horton served as counsel to Andre Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet union.
He is a co-founder of the American university in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the central Eurasian region.
He recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York city bar association, where he has chaired several committees, including most recently the committee on international law.
He's also a member of the board of the national Institute of military justice, the Andre Sakharov foundation, the Eurasia group, and the American branch of the international law association.
Welcome back to the show.
Other Scott Horton.
How are you doing this morning?
Great.
And great to be with you.
And I guess it's only this morning for me.
You're over there on the other side of the country where it's the afternoon.
So good.
And that's right.
And I'm just back in fact, last night, because I spent last week in central Asia.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Well, start off with that.
Tell us what's going on there.
You're making pipeline deals.
Uh, well actually they have an election in Kyrgyzstan and, um, and I was there trying to figure out what's happening after the election.
It's the first and central, the first election in central Asia's history.
That's been completely free, fair, and open.
Really?
Yeah.
And, uh, and the result is that, uh, that, uh, the, the governing parties actually didn't win.
In fact, nobody won the vote was highly fragmented.
And now we've got the five parties that went past the post rep representing a spectrum of different views.
And they're trying to figure out how to make a coalition government.
But so it looks like the people who are the ruling party now are going to abide by this election and not just call out the police forces into the streets.
Yeah, they did.
They did a good job.
In fact, they issued orders that, you know, the government was not supposed to lobby for anybody and that, uh, every party had its own representatives at the polls and everything else.
So I think there's a broad agreement that the elections were, you know, generally fair.
They weren't, there weren't not to say that there weren't incidents and problems that occurred in different places, but, uh, but most people agree that, you know, there's highly fragmented result in which no party got more than 17%.
Um, you know, pretty much reflects the way people voted.
And now we've got to see if the spirit of consensus building can take hold so they can actually form a government.
That's not going to be too easy for them.
I don't think.
Well, I guess the last time we talked about central Asia, there were about Kyrgyzstan particularly, um, there had been, uh, you know, ethnic, uh, I guess almost like full-scale pogrom level violence between, uh, different clans and factions and people in power, um, refusing to back down and all kinds of madness going on.
So is that over?
And everybody's just going to work these things out of the ballot box.
I would say there's still concerns, some concerns about it, but I think the tension from the summer has died down quite a bit.
Uh, and it's clear that concerns about that played a big, big role because, uh, the, what I call the anti-nationalist, uh, vote was very, very strong.
An awful lot of voters went to the polls and mustered behind three separate parties saying they really did not like this extreme nationalism.
They wanted the government that was more tolerant, um, and that treated all the citizens regardless of their ethnic backgrounds fairly.
Um, which, you know, I think it's sort of a vindication of democratic spirit and surprised a lot of observers.
Yeah.
Well, I'm not the biggest fan of democracy.
I'd rather have no state at all, but it sure is nice when people go, ah, okay, so we lost this election.
Better luck next time, instead of just grabbing their rifles.
Uh, and then, you know, in fact, that was the, the message that president Obama sent to president Obama that, uh, you know, the election results were a surprise to everyone.
And that pretty much shows that they really were fair.
Right.
Okay.
Right on.
All right.
So now let's talk about the most important thing in the world, which is the biggest leak in the history of the world.
And that is the Iraq war logs that WikiLeaks, uh, put out over the weekend.
Uh, basically.
And one of the most important stories from that as told by the Guardian, for example, in their article, Iraq war logs, secret order that let us ignore abuse is about something called a fragmentary order or Fraggle two, four, two.
And apparently Scott, what this order said was if the AKA, uh, whatever you call it, the barter brigade/Iraqi army is torturing people.
Um, you don't have to do anything about it.
Yeah, that's right.
Um, and, uh, uh, you know, we can well understand why the U S would have kept this order and its conduct in the, in applying it secret because of course, this order was illegal.
Um, the U S had a very, very clear obligation under international law.
Uh, you know, to intervene and to stop torture.
It also had an obligation.
Um, if it knew that the government was engaging in torture, not to turn prisoners over and they basically disobeyed that.
And we have a couple of reported incidents, uh, back during the war, uh, in which, uh, officers in one case, the general, in one case, a, um, a, uh, troop of guardsmen from, uh, uh, Oregon, uh, observed, uh, the Iraqi police, uh, Iraqi military actively engaged in torturing people and they intervened and stopped them.
Um, and, uh, we were hearing from back channels after these incidents occurred that, you know, it seems like people actually not so much the Baghdad command, but political figures in Washington really didn't like this.
Uh, and it seems that, you know, there was a decision made in the Pentagon or in Washington, maybe even in the white house, uh, to stop this process of intervening to block torture.
And I think the attitude seems to be, well, you know, I mean, torture is a legitimate practice of government.
Then, you know, if the Kyrgyz government wants it, the excuse me, the Iraqi government wants to go out and torture people, you know, that may not be great, but you know, it's their prerogative to torture.
We're not going to stop them from doing it after all we do it too.
Um, and you know, this convention against torture, who cares about that?
Um, I'm, I'm putting a little bit of sarcastic twist on it, but not, uh, not that much, but I think the real, the real major objection that they, uh, they articulated went like this, you know, our drawdown, uh, in Iraq, uh, assumes that we're going to be turning over all these prisoners to the Iraqi government.
And, you know, all these international law requirements would block us from doing that.
So the solution is we just ignore those international requirements and we turn people, we turn people over to a government that will torture them anyway.
So that was the decision of the rum cell Pentagon.
And it was carried forward by Gates.
Yeah.
Now, you know, I was kind of clumsy in the way I explained it, but I think it is kind of important to note that the Iraqi army, especially at the beginning when Donald Rumsfeld was still, well, he was there through 2006 hell, but, um, in the beginning of the war, uh, the Iraqi army was basically the barter brigade of the Supreme Islamic council, partly the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr.
And, um, uh, they had what was announced at the time by the neocons who didn't know they were supposed to be embarrassed or keep this a secret or whatever was that we're going to use the El Salvador option.
They put it in newsweek.
We're going to use the El Salvador option where we're going to hire these, the leaders of the Shiite militias who after all they're Iraqis they're from here and they know who to kill and we're going to use them to do these decapitation strikes and we're going to use them to take out the leadership of this Sunni insurgency and nip it in the bud.
And, and this was clearly all from Rumsfeld down.
And, and these were the people doing the torturing of those arrested that we're talking about here.
That's absolutely correct.
In fact, that newsweek story, I remember speaking with the people who wrote it the week it came out.
Uh, they had some pretty, uh, pretty amazing documents about the El Salvador option.
Uh, they, they also had a lot of evidence that in fact, uh, a Colonel who had been involved in the implementation of the El Salvador option was brought back in and sent off to Iraq to try and re-implement it.
And, and you know, copying what would have been done in Salvador, uh, in Iraq.
So they were really quite literally trying to, uh, to follow as a positive precedent what had been done, uh, in El Salvador.
But I think we've got to back it up a little bit here too and note that remember the Iraqi army was destroyed.
I mean, this was the controversial, uh, original decision, um, made against the advice of all the people on the ground in Baghdad, uh, who said that you have to keep the army in place.
You have to preserve them because the only way you're going to have an order, uh, instead of the decision was made to stand down the army and, and, uh, and basically disbanded it.
Yeah.
Uh, so there was no right there.
I'm sorry, Scott.
We were up against this hard break, but hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
Everybody with the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer, harpers.org/subjects/no comment.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, antiwar.com, Scott Horton out here in LA.
I'm on the phone with Harper's Scott Horton, the heroic international human rights lawyer over there on the East coast.
He just got back from Kyrgyzstan where he's helping monitor a democracy that no doubt in some measure was inspired by the teachings at the university, uh, the American university in Bishkek, uh, that he co-founded.
Uh, so, and put that one in your pocket to keep Scott.
That's a good one.
Uh, all right, but we're talking about, uh, the Iraq war, uh, and the giant WikiLeaks dump from over the weekend, uh, approximately 400,000 documents leaked and, uh, orders that torture be ignored.
Now, when we went out to the break, Scott, we were talking about how, uh, the Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi army.
And I don't know whether maybe it would have worked out the same anyway, but certainly once that was done, the Ayatollah Sistani said, we want one man, one vote, and if you don't give it to us, you're going to have to start this war all over again.
And from that point on the whole caucus system and the whole, uh, you know, uh, Paul Bremer is going to set this thing up in a Lebanon style, uh, confessional system or whatever, all that was thrown out.
We're turning the country over to the Iranians, damn.
And that was in what the spring of 2004.
Yeah.
I mean, instead of having a professional trained army, which had problems, but was still a professional trained army, suddenly we had a dozen different sectarian militias who had no, you know, formal proper training, uh, and who, uh, battled using, you know, terror tactics.
And by the way, these are a lot of militia groups that we were supporting an army and giving guidance to.
Uh, and then we, uh, decide to make them into the army.
Um, and, uh, so of course they were, uh, engaged in a horrible abuse, uh, and, uh, we were, uh, we had advisors attached to many of these groups.
We could monitor what they were going on constantly.
And one of the things I think that emerges from WikiLeaks is that, you know, the American soldiers on the ground were doing a very good conscientious job of documenting exactly what they saw.
And they were sending notes back to headquarters saying, Hey, we're observing this, shouldn't we do something about this?
Shouldn't we do something about it?
And the response that would come back would be no, stand down, don't do anything.
Uh, so, you know, I think frankly, the, the WikiLeaks documents speak well of the American soldiers on the ground.
They speak horribly of the Pentagon.
Well, and you know, in case people aren't too familiar with this, maybe they, you know, weren't paying attention to foreign policy back then, but now they are something like that we're talking about absolute medieval worst forms of torture drills through the shoulders and into the brain and, and the worst kinds of electroshock and the wax museum of torture.
That's what was happening to the Sunni insurgents abducted by the Badr Corps and the Mahdi army.
Anything that is remotely borderline.
This is like, no one is going to, I mean, you know, the, there were many, many documented cases of the use of the electrical drill.
I mean, actually being used to drill into people's skulls.
Yeah.
Uh, well, and so when I first saw this, uh, guardian story, the first thing I thought of, and I, I thought it was, I couldn't figure out whether it was Tommy Franks or Richard Myers, whatever.
I'm Googling around trying to find it.
Finally, I found it.
And it was, uh, uh, general pace who was the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and it was in the end of 2005.
He did a joint news conference with Donald Rumsfeld and the subject of detainee abuse under the so-called Iraqi army came up and general pace said, quote, it is absolutely the responsibility of every us service member.
If they see inhumane treatment being conducted to intervene, to stop it.
And Donald Rumsfeld basically interrupted him the way I remembered it and said, yeah, but I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it.
He said, it's just to report it.
Pace stood his ground.
I'm now reading from, uh, an article at 89.3 KPCC's website, uh, Pace stood his ground informed by the U S is military's own guidelines.
Quote, if they are physically present, when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.
This is the general correcting Rumsfeld's attempted correction of him about what is the military law when it comes to things like this.
That's right.
And what general pace says is exactly correct.
I mean, there's never been any ambiguity about what military doctrine and military law require.
They require intervention to stop it if it's observed.
Uh, and it's very, very clear here that Rumsfeld and his political, and we're talking mostly, you know, the neocon, you know, little cohort of advisors around him decided they wanted to stop that.
And, you know, just as you saw in that press conference, it's clear that what happened behind the scenes is that the professional military and their rules were overridden by Rumsfeld and his team who basically required them to disobey the law because the requirements of the law are completely clear.
Rumsfeld required them to ignore the law.
Uh, and what this means is that responsibility for this misconduct and these violations of the law doesn't rest with the American soldiers out in the field.
It rests directly with Donald Rumsfeld.
He's the one who made that decision.
He's the one who pushed it through.
He therefore bears the legal responsibility for the violations.
Well, and here's the thing.
Well, there's a couple of things here.
Um, I guess just put this one aside.
Cause I'll forget by the time I get to it.
Um, there's American laws that enforce these international treaties that we're part of that are passed by the Congress and signed by the president.
And so I want to know about those, but it's worth mentioning here that this didn't work if the El Salvador option was to decapitate the leadership of the insurgency, uh, by using the Badr Corps, then it was based on ignorance of the fact that the Badr Corps and the Supreme Islamic Council, and for that matter, Murtad al-Sadr and his Mahdi army had their own priorities, such as for example, taking Baghdad for themselves.
And what happened was they precipitated a civil war that killed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.
And, and then, you know, they only won by giving up because they helped install this brutal, uh, you know, torture drill wielding, uh, political power, uh, that doesn't need us anymore.
And so all of this was for nothing.
It didn't accomplish any of his goals for, for anyone who says, yeah, well, screw them, we got to be tough and do the things we got to do and whatever.
Well, all it did was make everything worse for everybody and accomplish nothing.
But then you're, you're contradicting the major narrative in Washington today, which is the surge worked, God bless General Petraeus.
Yeah.
The surge worked, Asimov, Murtad al-Sadr, who rules Baghdad.
He'll tell you it's him.
In fact, uh, this guy, I'm sorry, the name of the author is escaping me, but the book is The Good Soldiers, um, Washington Post guy wrote it and I interviewed him on this show.
And in that book, it's the story of guys who were fighting against the Saudis in 2006 and seven.
They had no idea that they were on the side of the Saudis in the civil war whatsoever, as they're patrolling the Saudis neighborhoods and killing people.
They don't even know even their commander, cause large who himself, uh, I believe is guilty of war crimes, two different people under him on this show.
Uh, soldiers on this show, uh, said that he gave them orders to fire 360 degrees at anything that moves anything that could possibly be a target in the event of any IED going off.
And, uh, but even that war criminal, a parent accused war criminal, Scott didn't even know he was fighting on the side of the people he was fighting against in the middle of this stupid war.
And I guess I'll ask you about more legalities when we get back from this break, everybody.
It's the other Scott Horton.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Scott Horton.
He's a heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer, contributing editor at Harper's magazine, the oldest continuously published, most prestigious magazine in the country's history, you know, all that.
Um, and, uh, now what is this New York times torture euphemism generator I'm looking at Scott?
Oh, boing, boing, boing.
That's where it is.
You'd have to go check it out.
But, uh, you know, a couple of people looking at the New York times coverage of WikiLeaks.
We're absolutely amazed at how they're discussing and thousands of words, instances of torture.
And they never use once the word torture.
And, uh, so, so, uh, you know, the recommendation here is to make life easier for the writers at the New York times, let's create a machine that'll give them a thousand and one euphemisms for torture so they can live up to their editor's rules of not using that word.
Cause the New York times rule is that nothing the United States does or is involved with constitutes torture.
So if there's us involvement, they have to use a different word than torture.
It's harsh interrogation techniques to yeah.
Put a drill through somebody's head or burn them to death or that kind of thing.
But you just have to go to boingboing.net/2010/10/22 torture, and you'll see there, uh, the proposal for the device.
Awesome.
That sounds like a lot of great fun.
And you know, this brings up something that, uh, Glenn Greenwald, uh, wrote about yesterday and something that, uh, just Romano also mentioned in his column, which I think is really notable.
And that is that the New York times and the Washington post are acting just as the state's henchmen in the character assassination of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization.
And as Greenwald writes it, you know, it was Nixon's thugs who handled this when it came to trying to smear and destroy Dan Ellsberg as part of what got him removed from office.
Was breaking into Ellsberg psychiatrist's office to try to get dirt on him.
And now we got the post and the times are leading the charge, both of them with really long and, and I don't know what to call them, but pathetic kind of hit pieces on Assange to go to, to, and as, uh, as a Greenwald points out, I think the, uh, at the New York times, they're running it as, or more prominently than any of the rest of the stories about the 400,000 documents that is the lead.
And, uh, and in fact, you know, when you look at their review of the documents, they give very, very prominent play to documents that cast the government in a positive light.
So they're saying basically how, you know, the U S government was struggling with evidence with, uh, with Iranian terrorism going on in Iraq.
Oh yeah.
Michael Gordon had a whole piece justifying himself.
Exactly.
Uh, and which I talk with people at the Pentagon, they say, well, you have to understand that in the Rumsfeld Pentagon, people were under immense pressure to write reports and ginny up, uh, studies and, and claims to justify, uh, the Rumsfeld, uh, Pentagon's claims about Iran.
And we, you know, whenever there's top down pressure to do this, of course, people write pieces of paper that, uh, that support what the leadership wants.
So it's really nothing.
Well, and Gates Pentagon too, because what we're talking about is right.
When Gates came into power in the first six months of 2007, the time when they basically just said, ah, forget the nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist for a while.
Let's just accuse them of being responsible for everything that's wrong in Iraq.
Even though, as we already talked about, America was fighting on Iran's side from 2000, late 2003.
Well, really from March, 2003 on, we're fighting to install the Iranian revolution and they blame the Iranians for being behind any roadside bomb that had a copper core to it, even though it was proven 10,000 times that those things were being manufactured all across Iraq.
Gareth Porter show that they got the technology from Hezbollah in Lebanon, not from the Iranians in the first place, but they were being made domestically and they never, Michael Gordon, nor Petraeus, nor Gates ever provided any real evidence at all for the accusations that, uh, the reason the Saudis were resisting was because the Iranians were making them do it and giving them the bombs to do it with.
They, they accused them of that a million times and the best I can tell, they never proved a word of it.
Well, that's right.
In fact, you know, the public editor in the New York times asked me to write a piece, um, after I had a discussion with him about this very subject, because I was a living and working in Baghdad and the spring of 2006, I was there, uh, working on an assignment for CBS news.
Uh, and while I was there, I observed public affairs officers, uh, for the Baghdad command come around and repeatedly attempt to peddle exactly the story that Michael Gordon wrote, uh, with the same sites and the same so-called evidence and so forth.
Uh, I saw this happen at least two separate times.
Uh, and you know, he then presents the stories like his original reporting with this information, but I mean, really it was a prepackaged, uh, you know, uh, public affairs message from the Pentagon.
And I know a lot of other really more serious professional journalists looked at it and said, you know, this is, um, borderline crude propaganda.
Uh, but I, I, one other thing I want to, one other point I want to make is that when we look through all these documents, it's, it really is pretty clear that you get to the end of 2006 and there's a shift from Rumsfeld to Gates.
And when Gates comes in, he really does make an effort to pull back from some of the most serious abuses.
So one thing that becomes quite clear from the, again, from these documents is that when the shift from Rumsfeld to Gates comes, there's a new attitude introduced towards the treatment of the prisoners held by the United States.
And Gates really does send people in and start cleaning that situation up.
So, you know, we have this period that runs after the disclosures of Abu Ghraib through roughly the end of 2006, where, you know, pretty bad abuses are still going on in detention facilities all over, uh, Iraq.
I'm talking about abuses, you know, by the United States, uh, involving the detention facilities it's operating, not involving the Iraqi forces.
And it's beginning of 2007 that we see finally a pretty significant shift away from the most abusive practices.
Yeah.
I mean, Abu Ghraib is absolutely horrible and everybody who hasn't read the Taguba report really needs to, but you know, there's also a great documentary that Frontline did called the Torture Question where, uh, at least one of the guys in there, Tony Lugaranis, who I think later wrote a book about it, said, Oh, forget Abu Ghraib.
We torture these people in their own homes.
We torture them on the side of the road.
We torture them in their front yard.
We torture them in their backyard.
We torture them in front of their daughter.
We tortured them from, uh, as, uh, Tom Friedman would say from Baghdad to Basra.
And, and for that matter, up through Fallujah and Tikrit as well.
Mosul.
Yeah, that's right.
That's Joshua Phillips book.
None, none of us were like this before.
And which he documents that, uh, out in the road.
Yeah.
I think that's, that's pretty clear.
But, you know, I do want to give, uh, you know, a bit of a bouquet, a small one to, to Gates, because, you know, it does seem to be pretty clear from these documents that, uh, he pulled back from the worst abuses and he did this almost immediately when he came into office.
So that's good.
That's true.
Although, you know, it seemed to me, and I think Robert Perry did a really good job writing about this at Consortium News, that the reason they got rid of Rumsfeld was because he's enough of his own self-interested jerk that he was willing to just cut his losses and say, let's stop this thing.
That's what, uh, he was finally proposing was, you know, the phrase, let's take the training wheels off and let them see if they can stand on their own.
They're like, uh, uh, dependent, uh, on welfare and we have to let them, you know, cut our losses and go now or whatever.
And that was why they brought in Gates was because he would give the realist stamp on the Fred Kagan surge, the AEI, uh, Petraeus surge to escalate the war and to stay another couple of years longer than James Baker and then we're recommending in the commission report.
I think that's, that's, that's definitely correct that, you know, that, uh, Rumsfeld had, uh, really rigorously opposed the surge, you know, was in favor of, he wanted to be in and out very quickly.
And he was arguing steadily for drawing down and leaving quickly.
Um, notwithstanding what you heard in the, in the press and the papers about that time, the inside word was that Rumsfeld wanted out, um, and, uh, Gates was, you know, committed to, uh, I think the surge approach and, you know, had that commitment before, but we also have to remember, you know, after the election in November of 2006, uh, Rumsfeld was a real political albatross for the Bush administration.
His poll numbers had plummeted and people viewed Rumsfeld as the man responsible for a clearly failed war.
So there wasn't too much, uh, too much question about what was going to happen to him after the votes were counted.
Yeah.
All right.
Geez.
If they'd only listened to Sandra Day O'Connor and James Baker, the third of all people, we'd have been out of there in 2008 or at least down to these troop levels in 2008.
All right.
One more segment with the other Scott Horton.
We've got some legalities and some WikiLeaks to talk about here.
It's anti-war radio.
Hang tight.
Yeah.
Gates of hell.
All right.
That's this song by the bruisers.
So, Hey, I finally figured out, uh, which page I'm supposed to be looking at for the New York times, torture, euphemism generator recommended to me by the other Scott Horton who's on the line here, uh, here we have a reports of possible distressing truth, finding metrics, and you just click, get a new headline.
It refreshes for you.
Reports of possible conversational, physical expediations, amplified intelligence, ultimate, uh, permanent soul removal.
Okay.
I'm having fun.
Boing, boing.net for the, uh, New York times, torture, euphemism generator.
And we're talking about, uh, uh, the hell that was the Iraq war.
That still is really in a way it's that finally our combat forces are removed to their bases instead of out kicking in doors all day, every day.
Although there's an article on antiwar.com today where a soldier talks about how bored he is because he wants to be the guy kicking in doors, but now it's the Iraqi army kicking in doors.
So that's what armies are for.
That's what Liberty is.
Uh, exporting freedom to Iraq means they're under permanent martial law, getting their doors kicked in by soldiers.
Um, but so anyway, uh, I want to nail down some specifics with you, Scott Horton, since you are an international human rights and international law expert, lawyer, attorney, and formerly with one of the most powerful law firms in New York city.
Uh, I want to understand and the committee chair of the committee of the bar association in New York.
Um, I want to understand about the laws that, uh, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, Dick Cheney, uh, their neocons, et cetera, committed here.
Uh, it seems like there's a prima facie case.
I think they call it right.
Uh, but which laws are they in violation of?
And please don't cite the Geneva convention because that's pinko commie, baby blue UN things.
Tell me about American laws.
That's what counts.
Yeah.
You go back to, uh, to Abraham Lincoln's general order number 100, uh, which contained the, uh, the no torture injunction in it and was binding on the armed forces and has been carried forward as military doctrine every year, uh, you know, up until the arrival of George Bush.
Uh, so that's the first, but then we have a, what's called the anti-torture statute, uh, which is a federal law that basically prohibits, uh, torturing individuals and it applies, uh, outside of the United States.
So it's binding on American actors when they leave American soil.
Uh, and it, uh, governs how they can deal with other people violation that statute, the felony, and we have the war crimes act as well.
So the war crimes act says, uh, if you engage in a, um, uh, in a, uh, in a serious breach of the Geneva conventions, here we go, but they're codified inside of the U S statute, that is a crime.
It's a felony under us law and it can be prosecuted.
And in fact, the U S does routinely prosecute people for violation, uh, of those statutes.
We had the, the Chuckie Taylor prosecution just a couple of years ago.
That's the son of the, uh, former dictator of, uh, of Liberia prosecuted in a U S court.
Uh, the case was called the United States against Belfast.
That's Pat Robertson's friend, right?
A good friend of Pat Robertson, uh, prosecuted and convicted now serving time in a prison, uh, uh, for torturing people overseas.
So it's a domestic American criminal law.
And now the war crimes act and the anti-torture statute, one of those was signed by Ronald Reagan.
The other was passed by a majority Republican house and Senate under Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, right?
So this isn't just like Jimmy Carter and the, and the wimpy Democrats or something like that.
No, no, no, no, no.
We got to cover our right flank here.
Scott, let's be clear about this.
The anti-torture laws in America are completely Republican beginning to end every one of them.
Uh, the, you know, the original anti-torture, uh, acts and orders came from a Republican administration in 1863, Abraham Lincoln.
And the subsequent, uh, statutes, both of them came from Ronald Reagan.
Uh, and the impetus to push them forward came from Dwight Eisenhower.
So in fact, we don't have any democratic fingerprints on any of this.
It's 100% Republican beginning to end.
Well, wait, one of them was the war crimes act, right?
Was some kind of a update or what in the 1990s where it was Gingrich and Lott, right?
It was important signing the act, but I mean, it was actually originally put forward by the Reagan administration.
I see.
Okay.
So it didn't finally get approved and passed until 1996, but the original proposal was by, uh, well, originally it came as implementation of treaty commitments of Ronald Reagan.
And the, and the legislation was drafted by the Bush administration.
The original Bush administration, 41, not 43.
Um, all right.
And now, uh, let's talk a little bit about WikiLeaks.
Cause I forgot what my awesome quest next question about the law was going to be there.
But, uh, really at issue, I guess a couple of things.
Um, well, primarily the, sorry, I'm distracted.
I'm looking at this Fraggle 242.
This is the, the torture order there.
Uh, this is so far the big headline from the WikiLeaks.
Yeah.
And that really made an issue out of WikiLeaks itself.
And so I was wondering really what your take on WikiLeaks is.
Um, uh, you know, that fragmentary order clearly violates the law.
And, you know, the order is general pace described it at that press conference.
He described exactly what the law requires, which was written up in field manuals and was military doctrine of the United States for more than a hundred years, um, and he correctly described it.
So this fragmentary order appears to have come from that pushback from, uh, secretary Rumsfeld, uh, and it is squarely contradictory to what the law requires.
So it's astonishing, but I think we can well understand why they kept it secret.
But let's, let's talk about something else here too.
Remember just before the WikiLeaks stuff broke, we got these dramatic statements put out by the Pentagon saying, first of all, there's nothing interesting here.
Just move along.
You already know all this stuff and those statements issued by the Pentagon.
They say down below, Oh, and by the way, we haven't seen the new materials.
So how can they say that if they haven't seen them?
It's completely ridiculous.
And then they make the accusation again, that the disclosure of these documents, parentheses, which we haven't seen, close parentheses, jeopardizes the safety of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Um, and remember with the last set of leaks, they made exactly the same accusation repeatedly.
I think we can count more than 20 times that accusation was stated by public affairs officers and senior officials at the department of defense.
Uh, and, uh, secretary, excuse me, uh, chairman Levin from the Senate armed services committee wrote a letter to Gates saying, this is a very serious accusation.
Could you please tell me the factual basis for this claim?
And Gates sent a letter in response saying, well, having fully reviewed it now, I can tell you that there's no basis for this claim.
And that really didn't in any way, jeopardize American soldiers.
So there you go.
I mean, they rush out aggressively with baseless statements.
And then when press, you know, under oath, giving testimony to a congressional committee, they acknowledge it's not true.
Uh, and I think people really need to focus on the fact.
And I think frankly, it does not serve the United States and the department of defense.
Well, for public affairs, offices are officers to engage in what is effectively a disinformation campaign.
And that's the obvious one too.
I mean, it is really effective in a way when the phrase that you didn't quote exactly is blood on their hands.
WikiLeaks has blood on their hands.
And that was what they said 20 times, which is complete nonsense.
I mean, it really stuck though, in a lot of people's minds.
I've seen people saying these guys are traitors and they ought to be hung and whatever, like they're like Julian Assange is the war criminal here.
No.
And in fact, it's exactly the other way around.
In fact, I think, you know, it's, it's quite well established that it serves the United States to be upfront and transparent about these matters too.
And that's how we describe how that's how we mark ourselves as a democratic society.
We are transparent about these things.
When we make mistakes, we act on them.
If people are not upholding the law, we prosecute the people who are not upholding the law.
That's what the democratic state does.
The shift that occurred under Bush was to keep everything super secret all the time.
And when the laws violated and, uh, and there's serious crimes committed, we take no action following up on it.
We don't prosecute anyone.
Uh, we don't hold them accountable.
Now, one of the really big things that emerges from these documents is detailed documentation of hundreds of incidents in which Iraqi civilians were raped, murdered and killed by American contract security forces.
And you have soldiers on the ground noting this thing.
They're really worried about it saying we should do something about it.
This is undermining morale.
It's just damaging our reputation very seriously.
And the Pentagon, again, is telling them, don't do anything.
Stand by.
So the Pentagon has taken this position that the security contractors just have impunity.
Right.
Well, and that was the game all along was, uh, well talk to the just department.
Well, talk to the Pentagon.
Well, talk to the state department.
Well, talk to the just department.
And, and note that the Blackwater cases, as the New York times observed last week, have fallen apart.
None of these prosecutions is being successful.
Well, that's what I was predicting from the beginning.
And the reason they have fallen apart is lack of will on the part of the justice department to act on or prosecute these cases.
And one of the things we see in the WikiLeaks documents is that the justice department doesn't want to do anything.
That's completely clear.
So it's not a legal technical problem.
It's a failure of will and the real seat of that failure of will was in the Bush era justice department.
They were evidently too busy out engaged in political prosecutions to actually do their job.
Right.
Well, and this is what we've talked about for, geez, I guess going on five years now, maybe six Scott is that, uh, Dick Cheney and David Addington and I guess Scooter Libby and, but the vice president's office specifically had a plan.
Really their goal was in the name of as many things as they could to prove that there is no law that can bind their authority, that they really can do anything that impunity itself was the goal.
And I guess as we're talking about this in 2010, it worked and that was it.
You can only draw so many lines in the sand just to cross them and see if anybody pushes back or not, and then draw another one and cross it and draw another one and cross it.
We're now, I mean, the idea, come on to Eric Holder's going to do anything about what we're learning, you know, over this weekend and over the next couple of weeks, as people go through these documents, it's just not going to happen.
Well, we know it's not a major neoconservative project is that, uh, the government, when it's run or revised by neoconservatives is above the law.
Yep.
Well, there they go.
And I guess, you know, it's been like this for a while in certain ways, but now it seems like, you know, even though they, they pretend to go by the authorization to use military force, really all that doctrine of the plenary power of the imperial president still stands, doesn't it?
Yep.
It does.
All right.
Well, good.
At least, uh, somebody's paying attention and teaching us about it.
I appreciate having you, Scott.
Hey, great to be with you.
Good luck, everybody.
That is the heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer.
The other Scott Horton, his blog is no comment at harpers.org.
And that's the show for today.
Anti-war radio.
