All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm happy to welcome the other Scott Horton back to the show.
He is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.
He's a lecturer at Columbia University, former chair of the New York Bar Association's Committees on Human Rights and International Law, co-founder of the American University in Bishkek.
And of course, for the past many years, has been a fierce opponent of America's torture regime.
Welcome back to the show.
Scott, how are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
Lots of great stuff to talk about.
George W. Bush had to cancel a trip to Switzerland.
What for?
Well, if you listen to his spokesperson, it was because he was afraid that there was going to be a violent demonstration.
They don't have free speech zones over there that they can corral everybody in a little pen and keep them out of sight of his limousine?
Well, of course, the police in Geneva have a great track record dealing with potentially violent demonstrations.
In fact, there haven't been any there in quite some time.
Of course, we discover this morning that no, that's really not the reason that he canceled his trip.
The reason he canceled his trip is that two victims of torture in US detention have prepared a criminal complaint which was filed with the prosecutor in Geneva together with a request to arrest President Bush.
And I think at that point, we don't know what the prosecutor was going to do.
But at that point, it appears that President Bush decided he would rather not make the trip out there.
OK, now just to nail this down, we know this is why he canceled just because of the timing?
Or someone near him confirmed this?
Or what do you know?
No, we're speculating, of course.
But of course, you're right.
I mean, it's obvious this is the thing.
I think this is pretty clearly the major reason for his decision.
And they decided to put a different face on it.
But the problem is that he did not make arrangements to get diplomatic immunity when he was traveling.
A president traveling abroad as a private citizen doesn't have such protection.
And what I'm hearing now is that the State Department had told him, of course, they'd be happy to arrange this for him.
But it takes a little bit of time to do.
It involves an exchange of notes and things like that.
There really wasn't the time to take care of it before his appearance on the 12th of February.
My god.
Well, just to step back for a second, we're talking about the former president of the United States can't travel to Europe, to Switzerland, for fear of arrest and prosecution on torture, war crimes charges.
Others, Scott Horton?
Well, remember, back when his memoirs came out in November, the new conservative prime minister in Britain, David Cameron, responded to his claims there that torture had been used to protect Britain by saying that that was horse manure, it was absolutely untrue, and that the British government in no way endorses torture.
And then the Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wrote an article in which he says, well, if Mr. Bush is thinking of promoting his book in Europe anywhere, he better pack heavy, because he may never return to Texas again.
And he goes on to explain that we Europeans, all of us, have a different view of what constitutes torture from Mr. Bush's.
And if he comes over here, he's likely to be arrested and prosecuted.
Now, a lot of people thought that that was just rhetorical.
But I think what we see coming out of Switzerland is, no, not at all.
That, in fact, there is a very serious intention to go after Bush.
Right, and there's a risk that a judge or a prosecutor who has their own ambition, would like to make their own bones make in that case, might just get their hands on it.
They might not be able to stop it, right?
Well, exactly right.
It's like Ronnie Earl versus Tom DeLay, local Austin district attorney.
What are you going to do?
He's got a grand jury.
Look at Augusto Pinochet.
He went on a trip, a private trip, to London to meet with Margaret Thatcher and wound up being arrested and spent the next four years litigating about it.
So it's exactly that same situation.
I mean, it starts with the fact that former presidents have immunity.
Former presidents do not.
And Bush has made statements in the past, including in his memoirs, in which basically allow someone to make out a complaint against him for torture.
He's acknowledged that he made the decision.
And he says, doggedly, he thinks he was right.
He did the right thing.
But he acknowledges having done it.
So, you know, that obviously helps anyone who wants to go after him.
So what's with the legalities of the State Department could arrange for him immunity.
It would just be embarrassing and it would take a little while.
They could do that for you or me if we tortured somebody?
They could do it for anybody, in fact.
And in fact, you know, Henry Kissinger has this problem already, because remember, he was involved in Operation Phoenix and a bunch of other things down in Latin America.
He's been the subject for many years of a pending criminal investigation, actually three of them, one in Chile, one in Argentina, one in Spain, in which he's been linked to some nasty things that happened down there.
And as a result of that, Kissinger can't go traveling anywhere without the State Department getting involved in clearing the way for him in advance.
And they do it if he asks them.
He says he wants to go to, say, the Munich NATO conference to give a speech there.
The State Department will go ahead and clear it with the German government so he can appear and won't face arrest or anything like that when he shows up there.
They could do exactly the same thing for Bush and they could do it for anyone.
Amazing.
I thought you would have had to be a diplomat in the other country to have diplomatic immunity, but I guess not.
Well, but, you know, but who is a diplomat?
I mean, anyone can be can be accredited or can be given immunity or can be given assurances that there'll be no action taken as a diplomatic courtesy.
In fact, that happens fairly frequently.
You know, we have, for instance, people come to testify in legal proceedings and they may face an arrest warrant.
And war criminals come to the United Nations in New York all the time.
And there is immunity for them to come and do that.
So it's a standard procedure.
But, you know, it takes a little bit of time and effort.
And Bush had not anticipated this and hadn't gone through the steps to to get his immunity, which he's going to have to do, I think, in future trips.
Well, that's kind of puzzling, though, too, because it seems like he wouldn't know.
Right.
I mean, there's been talk of at least his lawyers and other people being indicted or being held to account if they go to Europe for years now.
Well, in fact, you know, no small part due to you.
Yeah, there's not that much talk about it in the United States.
There's an awful lot of talk about it in Europe and overseas.
And I think, you know, most American media have just dismissed it.
You know, this is nonsense, crazy stuff.
But in fact, it really is going on.
And I think it's testimony to the fact that, you know, in the law, as it's applied in most nations around the world, there just really isn't any debate about what the Bush administration did.
You know, it was torture and it is subject to prosecution.
And this is an area where we have universal jurisdiction standards applied by most countries, which means that any country could indict and prosecute him and would be in a position to do that.
And private citizens can bring criminal complaints and request action on them.
Right.
Well, this is just great.
The president of the United States apparently is in the same boat that you describe for Hosni Mubarak in your piece, Give Me Shelter over at foreign policy dot com.
Why isn't he just leaving?
Because you say maybe it's because the life of an exiled dictator isn't what it used to be.
That's exactly right.
He's got the same problem as George Bush, George Bush's former torture puppet, co-conspirator and torture.
In fact, we just spoke with Robert Baer about the conspiracy to have the CIA deliver people to Egypt to be tortured to tell lies about Saddam Hussein, which was a huge operation, of course.
Now, George Bush has the big advantage in that he's an American and America is, you know, shielding and protecting him.
Hosni Mubarak, you know, I think it looks pretty clearly you listen to those people out on Tahrir Square, you know, they're saying leave.
I mean, they wanted to leave the country.
There's a lot of pressure for him to get out.
And one of the big dilemmas is where is he going to go?
You know, there's not a lot of options for him in terms of asylum.
And the big problem is, is exactly the same issue that we see with Bush.
The Europeans are they're now a block of 25 countries that operate together.
And that is in the past, you know, deposed dictators went to Europe, they went to some posh watering hole and hang out.
Now the Europeans aggressively prosecute dictators over their crimes and human rights violations.
Amazing.
May you live in interesting times and all that.
All right, everybody hold tight.
It's the other Scott Horton contributing editor at Harper's magazine.
The blog is no comment.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And this morning, George W. Bush and Hosni Mubarak both have a problem.
They can't go to Europe because they conspired to torture people together.
And they could get in legal trouble.
And I'm sorry for just saying how amazing it is to me over and over again, Scott, but somehow I can't.
Oh, I'm on the other line is the other Scott Horton from Columbia Law School and Harper's dot org.
And it's just so amazing to me, I guess, that there's such an equivalence between the American president and the dictator of Egypt.
But I guess also, it's kind of neato that there's actually a threat that the law could be applied to these guys.
How, you know, unique is that or, you know, this is hardly what I would have expected.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's been a slow and steady trend in world affairs that the US was behind for many, many decades, although the US seems to have gotten out of the business the last couple of years.
But the Europeans and people in Latin America and elsewhere have picked it up with a vengeance.
And in particular, you know, the top of the agenda has been torture.
So they do not care for people who torture and you know, they're absolutely delighted to bring criminal proceedings against them.
And it doesn't faze them for a second, that the people were formerly senior government officials or even former presidents.
But with Hosni Mubarak, I think one of the really interesting things is that, you know, look at the transition we see ahead in Egypt, we see a guy named Omar Suleiman being brought in as his vice president now, as the person who appears to be set up to take the reins of power from him if he withdraws from the scene.
And Omar Suleiman was the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service in Egypt, and Jay Mayer and a number of others have identified him as the person who ran the extraordinary renditions operation for the CIA in Egypt.
In fact, there's some really grim stories, one in quoting a senior CIA operative who says he wanted to get some DNA information from a kinsman of an al Qaeda terrorist who was being suspected and they want to get some blood drawn.
And, and they say that Omar Suleiman responded saying, Oh, we'll just cut off his arm and give it to you.
And they, the CIA said, Oh, heavens, no, that's ridiculous.
But yeah, just give us a finger.
Yeah, exactly.
So you know, being cited as an example of what kind of man this Omar Suleiman is, so clearly, he's been put in this position because he is so tight with the CIA in the United States, also evidently very, very tight with Israel.
But it's hard to see how somebody like that is going to command the respect and following necessary to calm the crowds out on Freedom Square in Cairo seems very unlikely.
Yeah, well, more likely, as we're just talking about with Robert bears that he will be able to command the military to make them leave one way or another.
I think that that is likely.
And of course, you know, pretty much all of the senior officials in the in the Mubarak government have have military credentials in the military background.
And the military is the backbone of Egyptian society in the Egyptian state.
Nobody's questioning that.
But we're also seeing the rousing of the middle class and the intelligentsia, the professionals, and others in Egypt, they're trying to claim a political role that they have not had ever, really.
And you know, if you listen to what the US has been saying over the last 20 years, the US has been their advocate.
But there's been very, very little action by the US to show it intends to make good on that.
Now, in the case of these two people who filed this complaint in Switzerland against George Bush, can you tell us who they are?
Or do you know their stories of what at least supposedly happened to them?
I was looking at the complaint, I don't have at the top of my mind that the names one of them is currently still a prisoner Guantanamo, and the other is someone who was released from Guantanamo.
And they provide there was roughly two and a half thousand pages of information contained in this complaint, which I just started looking at, but they go over in tremendous detail, how these policies of isolation and use of highly coercive interrogation techniques were approved in the Justice Department and approved in the White House and involving Bush ultimately to and they describe how they were subjected to these some of these techniques.
So, you know, it's, it's definitely a firsthand complaint from victims of torture.
But of course, the Bush administration would say that what they were subjected to was just an enhanced interrogation technique, not torture.
Even though already in American law and international law, the very things specifically, the very techniques used have been described as torture in the law and throughout the past leading up to this era.
That's, that's absolutely right.
And I would tell you, I don't think the Swiss court would have any problem saying that what happened to them was torture.
And that might be something of an issue for, you know, for a Bush appointed judge, but I don't think it would be an issue for a judge pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Well, you know, something that we talked about before was the, at least I think it seems it comes across in the media, the impression that, okay, yeah.
So, and this is, you know, even in the, the media surrounding the publication of Bush's memoir there at, okay, authorize some waterboarding.
And that means, you know, the two or three of the very worst people were waterboarded a few times each or something, but the real scandal, if I understand it right, was the Gitmo wising of Iraq and Afghanistan completely where, or I guess it was the Afghanistan standing of Cuba or whatever there was Guantanamo.
But then all throughout Iraq, there's, I know you're familiar with Tony Lugaranis who told PBS frontline, man, we tortured people in their homes.
We tortured people everywhere.
We froze them.
We beat them.
We burn them with cigarettes.
We put, you know, kept them awake for weeks.
We did this to tens of thousands of people.
We tortured them on the side of the road.
We tortured them in front of their moms.
So the idea that, oh, just a few of the worst of the worst, there was some technicality in the law that said that Bush couldn't do that to him, but, but vengeance is mine.
And so who cares that that's all moot.
I mean, it was really, I don't know how many tens of thousands of people basically who were treated abusively outside of any kind of the rule of law, the laws of war or anything else in the Afghan and Iraq wars, right?
Yeah.
Let's go back and look at the numbers for a second.
Cause I think this, this is, I mean, one of the big arguments that's made in defense of president Bush and his team is that you only have three people who were ever waterboarded, that's it.
It's tiny.
It's nothing.
You can't compare this with Paul Potter, Stalin or Mao or something like that.
It's just a tiny group of really evil people who deserved it anyway.
Um, so let's step back and, and analyze that.
Is that right?
The administration does have stated repeatedly that there are only three people who are waterboarded.
You know, that may or may not be right.
It might actually be a few more than three people, but it's a very small number of people.
But then we have the number of people to whom these enhanced interrogation techniques were applied.
Uh, and on a formal level, we know that that's several hundred at a minimum, uh, maybe more than several hundred, uh, and then we have people who were held in detention and, uh, Iraq and Afghanistan who were subjected to cruel treatment.
Uh, they were, they were, many of them were subjected to freeze.
Many of them were subjected to, um, uh, harsh interrogation techniques.
Uh, there were a large number of reported instances of physical beatings.
So the number of people who were held in detention, uh, during the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan comes to roughly 150,000.
Um, and if we assume that 10% of them were subjected to some sort of, uh, harsh procedure or harsh treatment, and that is by the way, pretty much with most experts who are looking at it think is correct, I mean, it seems to have been a very large percentage of those held in the early years up to about 2006, uh, who were treated abusively, we're talking about a very large number of people.
And then we have people who weren't even held in detention, but were subject to, uh, public humiliation.
Had the, you know, as you described here, uh, Tony Luganis talking about, you know, night raids, having the door of their house beaten, uh, down, um, males being forced to lie on the floor as someone puts his foot on the back, which is an effort to humiliate, uh, things done to humiliate people because of their religion.
We're talking about tens of thousands of people who've been subjected to this treatment.
Well, and the army admitted to the red cross that 90 plus percent of the people held in Iraqi jails by the American forces and the pseudo Iraqi, you know, collaborators, uh, were innocent.
And the red cross turned around and said, Hey, guess what the army just told us that the army didn't even really suspect them of anything.
They were just fighting age males or whatever.
Yeah.
The U S or sometimes the entire family, because they had to just take them all.
And the U S said it had no process before in place for sorting through and releasing them.
So we got through several years of the conflict before that finally got straightened out, right?
Cause the soldiers doing the arresting and whatever happens to them, isn't their problem and the people doing the receiving of them once they're arrested, just assume that they're all guilty as hell.
So torture them all the same.
And here we're talking about 2003 to roughly the middle of 2005 that we had a big problem with that.
But the, but the bottom line is we're talking about tens of thousands of people who were subjected to, uh, procedures that could be called torture in some form or another.
So it is a very large number of people.
I think it would be great if Bush would be tried in America and American courts for his war crimes.
But I guess that'll be the day.
Maybe the Swiss will get him.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Scott.
Great to be with you.
Have a good day.
That's the other Scott Horton, everybody harpers.org.
