All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And now to some interviews.
First up is Scott Horton, the other Scott Horton, heroic international human rights lawyer and contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.
His blog at their website is called No Comment.
He lectures at Columbia Law School and used to be the chair of the New York Bar Association's committees on human rights and on international law, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you.
Good.
Happy to have you here.
Who's Jose Rodriguez?
And what's he the poster boy for?
Well, he was a career CIA agent.
And by the time he left, he had risen to be the head of the clandestine service.
That is about the number three person at the CIA.
And he's a poster boy for torture.
He's been all over the airwaves the last few days.
In fact, he was the lead item on Sunday's 60 Minutes, where he was interviewed for 36 of those 60 Minutes by Leslie Stahl.
And he was pushing a book and telling us all that torture works, it's wonderful, and that it's a shame that Barack Obama has put it to a stop.
A terrible shame, I guess.
Well, so he's also the guy who was in charge of, or as far as I can tell, Phillison, of destroying the tapes of obstructing justice and destroying the videotapes that the CIA made of their torture, I guess, at the black sites.
That's right.
I remember that when that news first broke, we were told that a tape of some of these interrogation sessions might have been destroyed.
And then we were told maybe it might be a couple of tapes.
And then we discovered it was 92 tapes that were destroyed.
And Jose Rodriguez openly cops to having ordered their destruction.
In fact, he described that in some detail on Sunday evening.
And he says he did this in order to protect CIA personnel from Al Qaeda.
But I'd say it's pretty clear that that's not the reason why he did it.
I mean, no one ever expected the identities of the CIA personnel who were involved to be disclosed or to come out.
It's pretty clear he did it to protect himself from prosecution and also some other senior people in the administration who were responsible for introducing these torture policies.
Does that usually happen where people go on TV and say, yeah, I'm guilty of committing a crime.
What are you going to do about it?
And nobody does anything about it?
Or is it just torture?
It seems to be just torture.
I think he saw that, you know, NSA spying.
George Bush said that about NSA spying, too.
That too.
But Dick Cheney, you know, I mean, he did it.
He bragged about it.
Nothing happened to him.
So I think Jose Rodriguez felt pretty comfortable.
Of course, we know his case was up.
A special prosecutor was appointed to look at it.
And the prosecutor decided not to go with the case.
But if you look at the standard criteria the prosecutors are supposed to apply, this is a case that clearly should have been prosecuted.
And in fact, when a person commits a crime and not only shows no remorse for the crime, but actually runs around bragging about it, these are the sorts of cases that you have to prosecute.
So I think it looks increasingly odd that he wasn't prosecuted.
That's a decision that badly needs to be revisited.
Well, you know, I always learned when I was a kid, especially with Richard Nixon as the poster boy for this, that it's the cover up that gets you because all these obstruction of justice charges and things like that, boy, courts hate it when you obstruct justice and they will get you for that.
So it really doesn't matter who you kill, who you torture, whatever the initial crime is, they'll get you on messing around with the system.
And that's what they really hate.
And that's right.
Yeah, in this case, no, it's not.
It's also the easy thing to prove.
I mean, especially when he's coming on TV saying, yeah, I did it.
So no, not difficult to prove.
Whereas, you know, other underlying crimes might be a lot more difficult.
Right.
And the thing is, it wasn't really true in the very real sense, but officially it was true that there was an ongoing, like preliminary possible criminal investigation into the torture of people who tortured beyond what the memo said you could torture.
And I guess into some obstruction.
And then he was continuing to obstruct during all three of those ongoing cases, right?
Is that clear?
That's correct.
In fact, we have a whole series of different things.
So first of all, we know that right at the beginning when the torture techniques were being used, that there were a significant number of people inside the CIA who said, this is wrong.
This is criminal conduct.
You can't do this.
And they went to the inspector general's office at the CIA and filed complaints and protests.
And that launched the CIA's internal IG investigation of torture.
And Jose Rodriguez knew not only that this was going on, but that the inspector general had concluded that what was being done was criminal and that he was going to wind up recommending that it be turned over to the justice department for a criminal investigation.
So that's one point.
Second point is that there's all this civil litigation and criminal cases going on where involving people who are held at Guantanamo and the black sites where we know that there have been requests made for the government to turn over transcripts, tapes, and other things.
And in many of these cases, even court orders entered requiring these materials to be turned over.
So he destroyed these materials in the face of a pending criminal investigation and other litigation in which this was being sought as evidence.
And if you look back, just think back on the case of Arthur Anderson, you know, from 2002, 2003.
The accounting firm.
The accounting firm.
Remember, they've been involved in Enron and some Arthur Anderson partners in their office in Houston had shredded some key documents which would have incriminated their client, Enron.
And as a result of that, you know, there were indictments, there were criminal prosecutions, and Arthur Anderson, a 100-year-old accounting firm with 85,000 employees around the world, was put out of business by the justice department.
So, you know, the position that the U.S. government and the justice department in particular has taken on destruction of evidence is way harsh.
And Jose Rodriguez knew that.
In fact, he was making the decisions to shred these tapes as the Arthur Anderson case was big in the news.
Well, and his excuse that, oh, well, you know, we had to do this because rank-and-file CIA torturers could have been the victim of Al-Qaeda revenge.
I mean, really?
That was the best lie the CIA could come up with for this?
Yeah, I think that's a pretty absurd argument, actually.
I mean, it's absurd two different ways.
One is, you know, when these tapes and photographs are released, and, you know, there have been hundreds and hundreds of them released so far, they're always redacted so that the, you know, the face and other characteristics of the American personnel are obscured so you can't see them and can't identify them.
So the idea that they would be revealed, that wasn't gonna happen.
And then the idea that they would be targets of Al-Qaeda.
Well, you know, that's a little strange.
I mean, first of all, remember Barack Obama's speech from Kabul last night.
He was claiming victory over Al-Qaeda.
And pretty much all the serious analysts, you know, in the intelligence community right now say, this war against Al-Qaeda is basically over right now.
I mean, Al-Qaeda is the faintest wisp of a shadow of what it used to be.
It's a handful of people hiding out in caves and, you know, trying to defend themselves.
You know, the idea of Al-Qaeda as an entity that presents some sort of menacing threat to the United States just ain't there anymore.
And even if Al-Qaeda was going to launch some sort of strike against the United States, the idea that it would do this against second and third tier interrogators for the CIA is pretty ridiculous.
All right.
And now I didn't even know this, but you mentioned in your blog post here at No Comment today that Michael Mukasey, the former attorney general, in his speeches has been himself bringing up the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, and the Spanish Inquisition in order to claim that our water torture is different and what I guess more technical and therefore less immoral than our predecessors here in this process.
That's right.
He's done this.
I've talked to several people who've been in audiences and they've heard him do this and they all come out saying like, what a crazy speech.
So he actually acknowledges that, well, of course the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge used waterboarding, but our waterboarding is humane.
It's technocratic.
Because we simply measure and control the amount of water we use and they didn't do that.
Right.
Yeah, there you go.
Not very convincing.
I don't think anybody...
But imagine if you saw those...
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold it right there.
Hold it right there.
We got to come back after this break.
Harper's.org/subject/No Comment.
The other Scott.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I'm talking with the other Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine, contributing editor there and author of the blog No Comment at their site harpers.org.
And we're talking about the, at least so far, immunity and impunity for confessed and in fact bragging and boasting torturers in the American government.
And when we left off, we're talking about how Michael Mukasey, the former attorney general, and I think a former associate of yours at some New York law firm or another, I forgot the name of it, Patterson, Belknap, Webb, right?
Has been going around saying, yes, it's true that the Nazis, you know, Hitler, Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada, they all used the water torture.
But our water torture is different.
And then were you going to say something about Genghis Khan there at the break?
Using this?
No, I think his argument is that we're more humane when we use waterboarding.
Our waterboarding as a technique is far milder because we carefully measure the amount of water we use, whereas they use large quantities of water.
So he makes his argument.
But I'm told that the, you know, the audiences when he's done this are just incredulous.
I mean, they think it's crazy.
He's trying to justify it this way.
But what's your problem?
If Pol Pot liked a nice glass of orange juice, does that discredit orange juice?
Come on.
Just because Pol Pot likes to do the same sort of thing, that doesn't make it bad.
That's one kind of reasoning.
But of course, this is what Pol Pot did that led him to be viewed as a murderous, genocidal thug, not his love of orange juice.
And I think this links back directly to these tapes, because we know that waterboarding sessions were recorded on these tapes.
And Rodriguez himself has told other people that these were not a pretty sight.
These were very ugly things.
And he was very much afraid about how people would react if they saw what we were doing.
And I think, you know, it would make it difficult for Michael Mukasey to run around on the cocktail circuit and tell these tall tales about our humane version of waterboarding if, in fact, there were tapes out there which people could watch.
Right.
Well, and, you know, this is the kind of thing, too, and we've talked about this so many times over the years, but it can't go without saying because a lot of people really, I think, don't understand this.
The waterboarding was the least of any of this.
They Gitmo-ized and CIA-ized the entire prisoner process in Afghanistan and Iraq for years, and they tortured thousands of people, mostly, probably just with beatings, right?
They did it in their living rooms and on the side of the road and in dog cages, and God knows what they did to all these people, the military, as well as the intelligence agencies.
Yeah, I mean, there were instructions given to take the gloves off, and that was interpreted everywhere that casual violence was just fine, and so we have, you know, we have literally thousands of complaints being lodged involving beatings, so that's the most common form, and we have many, many other forms of ritual humiliation, making people strip naked.
We had light being used and temperature being used, and we have many of these different techniques being used in combination, of course, all with the intention of torturing people, in fact, and of softening them up for interrogations, making them more pliant.
Right.
Now, it's just, I don't know if this is deliberate anywhere or if it just kind of works out this way, but the water torture really captures everybody's imagination, so that gets all the headlines, but then that's the thing that's reduced to, yeah, but the CIA only did that to a couple of people, and what are you, crying for Ramzi bin al-Shib, right, and that kind of thing, and so the importance of it all is reduced to a couple of instances that we can look away from.
I mean, who cares about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that kind of thing.
That's exactly right, because it was applied to some people who, you know, may or may not have been important figures, and one of the big questions is, did applying this technique and other techniques, did this result in the U.S. getting actionable intelligence?
From a moral perspective, it really wouldn't make any difference in terms of justifying it, but from what we call a utilitarian perspective, that's just another way of evaluating it, and, you know, we've seen very strenuous efforts made by Jose Rodriguez to justify the use of torture on Abu Zubaydah, for instance, with arguments that we got good evidence from using this, and the same thing with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Well, now, on that specific point, do you have any evidence, have you ever seen any evidence that they got good evidence, good intelligence of any kind out of Abu Zubaydah?
No, and in fact, it's pretty clear that Abu Zubaydah was a nobody.
They tried to make him into a mastermind, key figure, 11th, 9-11 hijacker, and so forth, and I'd say, you know, the current thinking is that that was just a mistake.
This guy was, you know, first of all, he's, you know, not in good mental health today, probably in some part as a result of what was done to him, but he was never really a key figure in al-Qaeda, so I think he was put up and painted as a powerful figure in large part because the Bush administration didn't get Osama bin Laden and didn't get Ayman al-Zawahiri or Mullah Omar.
Well, and this gets to the efficacy of the torture.
They needed a bunch of orange alerts and Zubaydah gave them to them, and so if torture is about getting real intelligence, then it's a failure, but if it's about just getting somebody to tell you what you want to hear right now, like, didn't Saddam Hussein ever teach you guys how to make chemical weapons?
Then you get them to say, yeah, then you get to point to that and pretend it's true.
Instead of just making up about a whole cloth, you just torture some guy into saying it.
That's right, and I think, you know, these are key issues that are underlying what's going on with Rodriguez and his book, and of course, we've also got the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which has done a report.
They spent three years preparing it.
It's ready.
I'm told it's ready to be released now.
It's in the process of finalization, and I'm told that it, you know, addresses these questions head on and says, no, that, you know, all the claims are put forward for good, actionable intelligence derived from torture dissolve when you look at them up close.
It just turns out they're not true, that, you know, all the things that they got, in fact, have been gotten through non-torture technique.
Right, up to and including how they got bin Laden, right?
That's right.
Because remember, a year ago, they said, hooray, see, torture works.
Exactly.
And that's just nonsense, just complete nonsense.
But it all goes to show you repeat a lie loudly enough and often enough.
First of all, it will be broadcast in the American media without any challenge, and people will believe it.
Yep.
Yeah, when it comes to Zebate, I mean, think back to in the run up to the Iraq war, how many orange alerts, how many grocery stores and banks and supposed targets we got, you know, just beaten over the head with orange alert after orange alert that they got out of Abu Zubaydah.
And then he's the guy, as Ron Suskind reports, George Tenet finally went to George Bush and told him, you know, it turns out that this guy was really a nobody.
He was in charge of bringing people's wives into visit for the weekend, that kind of thing.
And George Bush said, hey, I already brought this guy up in public.
You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
All of a sudden, George Bush has honor, you see.
And he was worried that George Tenet would make him look bad by letting it be known to the world that actually this guy Zubaydah that George Bush has used to justify the torture, you know, anecdotes about Zubaydah that he's used over and over again.
Turns out actually was good for nothing, except some silly lies for your top of the hour AM news.
That's something that happened many, many times in the course of the Bush years, you know, where false charges were made.
And when it was discovered they were false, there was no turning back from them.
And Jose Rodriguez was also a key figure in that process.
Always vilifying, always building up the significance of the people they had in detention and not reconciling himself ever with the truth.
When it turned out these suspicions weren't right.
Yeah, I kind of got the idea watching that interview that this guy was out of his depth to be the top, you know, director of operations for the CIA.
Don't you have to be some kind of mad genius to do that?
He's seems like more just some cop, some meathead.
I looked at this guy and I kept thinking he's a psycho.
I mean, he just looks totally sociopathic.
And I'm wondering, you know, well, that makes sense.
But in the clandestine service, he should be in the hospital somewhere.
Well, he should be smarter, though.
The psycho part makes sense, but he should be, you know, a mad genius, a Lex Luthor type, not just a mean old cop who will beat you in your cell.
You know, this guy was definitely not a particularly bright fellow.
Amazing head of operations.
Well, I guess which law is that that everybody rises to the level of their best incompetence or whatever?
Well, he was clearly way beyond his level.
I think that's the Peter principle.
So he's well, well beyond his highest level of competence.
No doubt about that.
Amazing.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you as always, Scott.
Hey, great to be with you and good luck with the show.
Thanks, everybody.
That is the great, the other Scott Horton, contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.
That's harpers.org.
And check out his great blog, No Comment, where he writes well about everything.
