All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the other Scott Horton.
He's the heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer and contributing editor to Harper's magazine, the oldest continuously published magazine in America.
The address for his blog, no comment.
There is harpers.org/no comment.
Uh, as I said, he's a contributing editor there and, uh, is 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 is the co-founder of the American university in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Uh, he was counseled to Andre Sakharov and Elena Bonner and was, I think, head of the Sakharov foundation or member of the board and yeah, on and on like that harpers.org/no comment.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you?
Hey, great to be with you.
You appreciate joining us.
Uh, so the wiki leaks, uh, seems like some information's come out.
That's a right up your alley and the subject of, uh, well, I guess, uh, in a nutshell, Dick Cheney and David Addington's successful war against the theory that executive power can possibly be bound by the rule of law in this country, or I guess anywhere else.
Well, that's, that's right.
Uh, and, uh, I, I, and back in the, in the 2008, 2009, I wrote a series of pieces, uh, looking at the criminal investigations that were going on in Europe and really focused a lot on what was happening in the national security court in Spain, uh, where, uh, one, uh, Spanish prisoner who had been held in, uh, Guantanamo, uh, was found by the Spanish Supreme court to have been tortured and the Supreme court then referred this back to the national security court for an investigation.
They started into it.
Um, and, uh, they, uh, and the judges and prosecutors there, I reported at one point, I had decided to issue an indictment against the six lawyers from the Bush administration led by Alberto Gonzalez, including, uh, David Addington, John, UJ, Bybee, uh, Doug Fife and, uh, and, and, and Jim Haynes.
Exactly.
Six people.
In fact, I refer to them as the Gonzalez six.
Um, and I had a pretty extensive reporting done in, in, uh, and in Madrid about this.
And then I discovered, I kept hearing from everywhere that there was very, very strong diplomatic pressure being brought to bear on this, but I could never get any details about it.
Um, and, uh, in fact, when the WikiLeaks cables came out and there was a large trove of cables coming out of the embassy in Madrid, we find out that it seems like the only function of that embassy over a period of a couple of years was efforts to obstruct, subvert, and stop this criminal investigation into Alberto Gonzalez and the, and the Gonzalez six.
Wait, wait, wait.
Did I get that right?
That there, there was no other substance to American diplomacy with Spain other than pressure to stop these legal processes.
I'd say this was clearly item number one on the embassy's agenda with enormous resources being brought to bear, including every distinguished American that comes to Madrid, gets corralled into this effort and meetings coached by the embassy to say that this is going to severely damage a diplomatic relations.
They're asked to intervene with judges, with prosecutors, with political figures to get them to suppress this criminal investigation.
Uh, William Graham Sumner, eat your heart out, man.
It's pretty, it's absolutely amazing.
Cause remember, this is a state department that runs around the world saying how important an independent judiciary is to democracy and how we impose the idea of impunity and so on.
That's what's up for public consumption behind the scenes.
Uh, there's absolutely no respect for the independent, for the judges.
And I'm sorry, I think we may have talked about this before, but it was years ago and it's really interesting.
There's this, this brings up this anecdote in my mind from the movie Amistad, where the Spanish ambassador to America is saying, well, why don't you just tell this judge to rule the way you want?
And the American, I forget if it's the president, uh, or I think it is the president, John Quincy, John Quincy Adams.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Explained.
I'm sorry.
You know, we have this independent judiciary here and really all we can do is try to appoint a new guy, but even then he's not that beholden to us.
And that's why we have a rule of law.
I'm sorry, Spanish empire.
We can't, we can't control this judge.
That's right.
And in Spain, because of this long tradition of abuse of the criminal justice system, uh, by the state and by the church, uh, the, uh, the one of the, one of the pillars on which the modern Spanish state is founded is absolute rigorous independence of the prosecutors and the investigating magistrates.
Uh, they're not subject to political direction or anything else.
Um, in fact, of all countries in the world, I mean, Spain and Italy are the two that have this most aggressive tradition of independent, of independent judiciary and independent prosecutorial force, much more independent than the Americans are, for instance.
And so the embassy really had its work cut out for it.
And what we discover in these cables is that they were effectively manipulating the cases.
They were talking, uh, with the government about how to get cases pulled and reassigned to the judges.
They wanted taken away from judges.
They didn't like, uh, they were giving direct instructions to the Spanish prosecutors about what to do.
Uh, even dictating specific motions they were supposed to make, and they were actually having effect in blocking the investigation.
So of course this is called an, uh, caused, uh, absolute, uh, outrage in Spain, uh, where this has been the lead item in the newspapers for four consecutive days now, uh, with the...
I was just about to ask that.
What is the backlash from this?
Yeah, well, I think there are demands for the resignation of Spain's attorney general who, uh, seemed to, who was accused of having prostituted his office to serve the Americans this way.
Uh, and there's widespread and across the political spectrum, widespread, uh, concern about the independence of their criminal justice process.
People in Spain just cannot understand how a foreign power is being allowed to manipulate what goes on in their criminal justice process.
Well, this is separate, right?
From the, the question of universal jurisdiction and trying Americans for other war crimes, say committed against Iraqis or something like that.
This is a specific case that you're talking about of, or a specific couple of cases about actual Spaniards who supposedly are under the protection of the government of Spain.
That's right.
Well, there are three separate cases, so we should take them one at a time.
Okay.
The first case had to do with a guy named Jose Cusco, who was a cameraman for, uh, Telecinco, uh, the Spanish television network.
Uh, and he was killed by a tank fire, uh, at the beginning of the Iraq war.
He had been in the Royers offices in the Palestine hotel in Baghdad when they were shelled and he was killed.
Um, so the first proceeding was an inquest into his death in which subpoenas had been issued to a bunch of American servicemen to testify about this.
And the U S was trying to get the whole proceeding just shut down.
In this case, I think there's no question, but that, uh, no one is accusing the Americans of having intentionally murdered him, but there is a question of whether the U S operations were run consistently with the laws of war.
That's the way it's been framed there.
The U S wanted that shut down completely.
And remember, of course, in the invasion of Iraq, uh, the U S and Spain were allies, Spanish troops, uh, entered Iraq alongside of the Americans, uh, and were operating in Baghdad alongside the American forces.
Um, you know, Spain and Portugal were two, uh, two of the, of the European nations that most aggressively supported, uh, the U S action.
Yeah.
Their governments did anyway.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, and that's another one of these cables, right?
Is that they were, uh, uh, when the new government in Spain came into power and was denouncing the war, the Americans were putting pressure on them to button their lip about that.
Absolutely.
That's they're all over the place.
Now, one other thing that's absolutely fascinating here has to do with, uh, this case of, uh, of Khalid al-Masri, this German green grocer, who by mistake was snatched by the CIA, tortured and whisked off, uh, to the salt pit, um, and, uh, and, uh, Afghanistan where he was tortured.
That's a real place.
That's a real torture prison.
The salt pit in Afghanistan.
And people died there.
Quite a few of them.
And certainly at least two, we have very well documented.
Um, and, uh, he, um, we now know that, uh, the CIA rendition operation run out of Spain.
So there was collaboration between the prosecutors who were investigating this in Germany and in Spain.
And the U S was absolutely freaked out about this.
We see cables saying how dangerous this is for the United States, for the German prosecutors to be talking to the Spanish and Italian prosecutors.
We don't want them to compare notes or share information that will make it.
It says, quote, much more difficult for the U S to manage on a bilateral basis.
So they, the U S really is planning to use political pressure to shut down all these things.
And in fact, they're right about this.
Cause they tried to squelch the thing in Germany, but it just pops right back up again at Spain.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
It's the other Scott Horton from Harper's dot org.
And I got the blog wrong.
It's Harper's.org/subjects/no comment.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton on the line is the other Scott Horton.
He writes the blog, no comment at Harper's.org/subjects/no comment.
And we're talking about the European torture cases, particularly in Spain.
But where we left off, we're talking about a Mossery, this green grocer who was abducted and Scott, was he tortured this guy?
Yes.
He says he was physically assaulted and beaten repeatedly, both when he was first seized in Macedonia and then later in Baghdad and still later in Afghanistan, he also says he was shot up with psychotropic drugs and put on a special starvation diet, uh, accusations that the U S uh, refuted and which the German prosecutors said they were able to completely validate, uh, taking hair samples and skin samples from him.
They analyzed them and they said, yes, he was shot up repeatedly with psychotropic drugs.
They could even estimate the dates when they were administered.
And they also say it was put on a starvation regimen diet, which was very strange.
It seems to have been some, some sort of experimentation project that the CIA was running on his prisoners.
So he was clearly tortured and abused over a long period of time, five months roughly.
Um, and we should note that, um, of course, immediately when he was apprehended, he said, Hey, I'm not that guy, that Al Qaeda guy, Khalid al-Masri with an A.
Uh, I'm, you know, I'm this German grocer.
Uh, and as he said, my passport's valid.
Everything's in order.
Uh, the CIA, after investigating this, took them roughly three months to conclude that of course, everything he said was absolutely correct.
He was not indeed not the Al Qaeda guy and the CIA pushes back.
They don't want to let him go because now he knows too much.
So you've got a completely innocent German citizen who's been tortured and abused and because he'd been tortured and abused, they wanted to continue holding him.
Uh, and in this point, uh, Condoleezza Rice actually comes out as a heroine.
She steps in and says, no, you got to let him go.
So she forces his relief.
But, uh, Condoleezza Rice figures in this story again, repeatedly, because it appears that the authorization for these extraordinary rendition, that was rooted through the national security council and appears to Condoleezza Rice and her lawyer, a man named John Bellinger, um, were responsible for okaying the snatches.
And that includes, uh, Khalid al-Masri.
And so guess what?
2005, uh, Condoleezza Rice emerges as secretary of state and she brings John Bellinger with her as the head of the legal office at the state department.
And they turn up the, the, the, the volume trying to shut down all of these criminal investigation, uh, into the renditions programs.
And we see this in a cable coming out of the German embassy where they're trying to shut down the criminal investigation into al-Masri.
A criminal investigation that ultimately would have come back to a focus on Condoleezza Rice and John Bellinger as the people who approved the program.
And they issue their report about all the activities they're taking directly to Condoleezza Rice.
So no question, but that she's using the massive apparatus of the state department to protect herself.
Yeah.
Well, and there's that ABC report about the choreographed, their words, uh, torture of Katani down at Guantanamo Bay, where she chaired the national security council, but then included all of the big names in the Bush cabinet, everybody but Bush, uh, was there as they all worked together.
And she was the chair of that meeting too, right?
Yeah, exactly.
This was all kind of her baby.
She was involved in approving the, uh, torture techniques that were used, authorizing their specific use on individual people, and also specifically authorizing who would get snatched.
Uh, so they're frankly few people in the administration who are more likely candidates, uh, to be prosecuted in these European criminal investigations than Condoleezza Rice.
Well, so then, uh, we got to get to what the Obama administration's been up to here, uh, with these stories, but, and I guess maybe that's part of the same question about, uh, the third case is more of a general, the Americans won't prosecute their own violations of Geneva in, I don't know what, if it's not Al-Masri or Cuso, what's that, what's the root of that case?
Let me tell you, there's some other things in here that I think are very, very interesting.
One is in these negotiations or in these discussions that the embassy in Madrid has going on with the Spanish prosecutors, the Spanish prosecutors are telling the embassy, well, you know, if you launched a criminal investigation into some of this, we would have a pretext for shutting down the investigation.
And it's right after that time, right about the time that this discussion occurs, that then Michael Mukasey, uh, authorized the appointment of, uh, of John Durham, uh, to begin his, uh, the first investigation of the Rodriguez matter.
Uh, and then later we see, um, uh, attorney general Holder extending that investigation.
So all of this really creates a question about what the justice department was doing with these investigations.
It creates the impression that they're sham investigations that were never perceived that never proceeded in good faith to actually investigate, but were used to try as a justification for trying to shut down the real criminal investigations that were going on in Europe.
Yeah, here.
I thought they were at least paying us the respect of pretending to have a rule of law at all, but no, it's not about that.
It's about the Spanish court and stopping them now, but so, um, I'm sorry.
I get, I get lost in some of this story.
There's three different cases you said, and I thought my understanding was that the Mossery case and the, the, uh, cameraman case were separate from the larger question of whether to indict all of these guys.
That's the third case, right?
As far as the tortured lawyers and the Geneva conventions in general.
Exactly.
So the third case really has to do with the torture case.
And the third case comes out of a Spaniard who was imprisoned in Guantanamo, uh, and who claimed he was, had been tortured there.
And the Supreme court of Spain, after reviewing his case concluded, uh, that his claims were correct and the Supreme court directed that there'd be a criminal investigation into this.
So all three of these then are based on a Spaniard at their core and then they expand out.
That's right.
Okay.
I guess I thought that there was one investigation that was based more just on the idea of, uh, well, nobody's prosecuting it and we have universal jurisdiction to prosecute, but I guess you have to have at least, uh, one person from your state in order to get away with doing that.
Is that right?
The Spanish Cortez, I mean, Spain used to have a completely open ended universal jurisdiction statute, but the Spanish Cortez, their parliament, uh, concluded that that was too easily abused and politicized.
So they put in a restriction and the universal jurisdiction statute that says, no, you have to have a clear connection to Spain.
And it had to be on Spanish territory or it had to involve Spanish interests or Spanish citizens, uh, in order for the court to exercise jurisdiction.
So they really been reigned way back in.
And each of these cases, either the things occurred on Spanish territory, uh, or they involve Spanish citizens.
And that, that by the way, is exactly the same theory that the American courts proceed in.
Like we will exercise, uh, extraterritorial jurisdiction when the interests of American citizens are involved, just the same as Spain does.
So that's nothing really to, uh, nothing too surprising about this is pretty conventional.
Yeah.
Well, and so, um, it really goes to show about, uh, the Obama administration, how, you know, they really were, they meant what they said about looking forward, not back.
They're willing to bend over backwards to protect Michael Haynes and David Addington.
Well, I think that's right.
I mean, the, the extent of the efforts that were launched that were continued by the Obama administration are just extraordinary here.
I mean, and to this point, what's going on in Spain, they're actually pressing government officials, threatening government officials, threatening, instructing prosecutors.
That's something a diplomat, a diplomat did that in the United States.
They'd be invited to leave the country.
Yeah.
I can imagine if the roles were reversed here.
It's just amazing.
All right.
Y'all, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper's magazine.
And man, this is about the best headline I've seen in a long, long time.
Oh, especially the first part, Dick Cheney faces bribery, scandal charges from the BBC.
It ends in Nigeria, which makes me think that their court won't be able to enforce this somehow.
I don't know.
But, uh, if, if we can roll over the Spanish, like we've been talking about other Scott, I don't think the Nigerians stand much of a chance.
Well, this is a totally different case.
It doesn't involve anything Dick Cheney did when he was vice president of the United States.
And moreover, the U.S. agrees that the, that there is absolute substance to the charges.
In fact, the justice department conducted its own investigation and forced Halliburton to pay several hundred million dollars in fines, 579 million, in fact.
Uh, and, uh, the U.S. acknowledged that they were considering indicting senior, uh, Halliburton executives and didn't, uh, and my colleague, Ken Silverstein, who looked at this extensively and reported about it, uh, said that, uh, in the U.S. probe all along, Dick Cheney was smacking the crosshairs, uh, and it was probably a result of political manipulation that he was in the U.S. that he was not indicted here.
Uh, the bottom line is this.
When he came in in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton, he had no real experience in that industry before.
His main plus was that he was going to get them government contracts.
And the biggest contract, government contract he netted for Halliburton while he was serving there was a $2.2 billion liquefied national, uh, natural gas project in Nigeria.
Uh, and this whole project, which is where the, they acknowledged that they $170 million in bribes, Nigerian officials, no dispute about this admitted by Halliburton, uh, was done, uh, under Dick Cheney and has his fingerprints all over the, every single stage.
In fact, the person who specifically did it, a guy named Jack Stanley, uh, was personally hired and brought in by Cheney was supervised by Cheney.
He's the person who made the payment.
The investigators who looked at it at all concluded there's no way the bribe payments could possibly have been made, uh, without Dick Cheney's, uh, knowledge and consent.
Uh, and, um, access or how does that work?
Can you be more specific there?
Well, uh, they were, they were made by this Stanley guy, but the sums were so large, they would have been reported to him, would have been known by the CEO who was Dick Cheney.
So there's just a 170 million.
You just don't dole out 160 million.
You don't dole out that sort of cash without the CEO knowing about it.
Um, especially when it's an area that the CEO personally is taking responsibility for, which this project, you know, was so, uh, um, you know, the, it was amazing.
In fact, that the settlement was run through, uh, in the Bush administration and cleared in the last days of the Bush justice department without anything involving Cheney, very, very suspicious about how that was done.
A lot of people inside the justice department were clearly unhappy with it.
Um, so the charges that Nigerians are bringing are absolutely meritorious.
No question about it.
I mean, there's no question, but that the bribery occurred and that Dick Cheney has his fingernail fingerprints all over it beginning to end.
Um, and it has nothing to do with politics or any government service by Dick Cheney.
This is Dick Cheney, private citizen as CEO of Halliburton.
So does that mean he doesn't have sovereign immunity?
I, he definitely does not have any kind of immunity.
Yeah, but I mean, come on.
The America's going to extradite the former vice president to Nigeria.
I think it'll be really difficult for the U S to, uh, resist, uh, supporting the Nigerians on this.
When the department of justice did its own investigation and concluded that the, uh, the corruption charges were valid.
Uh, this is going to be very interesting.
It'll be very interesting.
And I'm sure you're going to hear Cheney's people screaming bloody murder and saying, this is all politics.
But the bottom line here is that even the Bush justice department concluded that these charges were absolutely meritorious and they had to stretch mightily in order to avoid bringing charges against Dick Cheney here.
So, um, you know, and, and they, and they rushed to get this out the door and concluded before the keys were handed over to the new administration, which is a clear sign of how politically motivated the whole thing was.
Well now, so there must be really angry people at the justice department, right?
I think there are a lot of people, the justice department laughing up their sleeves right now.
I'm saying that he's getting exactly what he deserved.
Yeah.
Probably the justice department was not bringing those charges.
Yeah.
There's no revisiting the decision to not indict him back then.
No, because they concluded their settlement with the Halliburton.
So I think they can't do anything more.
Uh, but I think, you know, there's nothing blocking the Nigerians from prosecuting.
They have an independent discretion to act.
And so what's the status of our current extradition treaty with them?
Um, you know, we'll, we'll have to see.
I think it is there.
I don't think there is an extradition treaty between the U S and Nigeria.
I think it has to be done on a case by case government, the government basis.
And I'm sure that you're going to hear that Dick Cheney is in failing health and requires constant medical attention.
And therefore it would be, uh, it would be life threatening for him to be forced to go account, uh, answer these charges in a Nigerian court.
I think that's the argument we're likely to hear because I think it'd be very, very difficult for Cheney to respond to this on the merits.
Wow.
I'm really happy to hear that.
You really think he's going to have to respond to it at all?
Like this really is that serious, huh?
It is that serious.
And the charges are going to be brought.
Wow.
Um, well, and you know, you're right when you say the only reason they brought him on in the first place was because competing in the oil services market, you know, requires talent.
That's right.
But I just had people who dismissed this should just ask themselves if this is bogus, why did Halliburton pay 579 million in fines and agree that they had bribed the government of Nigeria to get this contract?
I mean, there's no question as to the merits of the claim.
That's totally valid.
Wow.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
So I guess we could always just threaten to have war in Nigeria and that'll shut them up.
And there's, there's plenty of excuse for it.
You know, with those rebels in the Niger Delta, who don't take too kindly to all their oil being stolen and all their land being polluted.
So they can't fish anymore and they've got nothing to do but fight.
Now the excuse is going to be that oil.
Oh yeah.
Whatever they say, that would be the reason.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm probably reading too much into this, but I saw a recruitment ad on TV for the army and or the military in general.
I think it was advertising all the branches and it showed special forces guys and what looked like a jungle on this barely in the future, you know the near future style assault boat and all the latest equipment and stuff like that, you know, and let's see, it's not the Mekong Delta and there's nothing like that in Afghanistan or Iraq.
I'm looking at here, like what, what near future is this I'm supposed to be looking at where these guys are headed up what looks like a jungle river, you know, port hardcourt.
There you go.
Maybe we'll invade Brazil.
But yeah, I, I talked with that guy, Sebastian Younger about those rebels.
He did a big piece in vanity fair about them in January, 2007 and how they're hardcore too.
And they have these beliefs that if they paint these little white circles on their bodies, that they become invincible.
And so they're really brave and talented fighters and they all have high quality Eastern European machine guns, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I guess, you know, if you needed to pick a fight in Nigeria, there's somebody you could pick a fight with and, and it's shell oil, which is very tied to the U S state.
Is it not that has those interests that are being threatened there?
And apparently that situation continues on another complication.
Yes.
All right.
Well, so tell me, what's the next step from here then?
Scott, I really, the Nigerian court, they're going to indict him and then the American reaction there's it'll, it won't be the U S government's reaction.
Preliminary skirmishing.
This investigation has been going on for a long time.
You know, Ken Silverstein wrote a series of pieces about it.
I've also written about it.
And I think there was one point where it was widely expected that indictments would come down.
And evidently the Nigerians were pushed off making indictments by U S suggestions that no, no, no, don't do this.
We're doing our own investigation.
And after the U S wound up at the investigation without them, now the court now the balls in the Nigerians court and they're acting.
Yeah.
Well, I just think of all the pain that could have been saved if the just department had just indicted him back in the year 2000 or whatever, when they were supposed to, the question is, would, would Bush ever made him vice president that Bush had known what was going on?
Well, a lot of, a lot fewer people would have been tortured to death, I guess.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
I appreciate your time on the show as always, Scott.
Okay.
Take care, everybody.
That's the other Scott Horton from Harper's.
