Showing posts with label Cheney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cheney. Show all posts

Saturday, August 21, 2021

Absurd: Afghanistan

 

 THE ABSURD TIMES

  

 

Bin Laden was moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan a year or so after the U.S. demanded his return. Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney & Co. knew this and approved it after refusing to accept his surrendering by the Taliban. There is also a Senate report on this, easily available.

 

 

Afghanistan

By

Honest Charlie

 

There is seriously way too much untangling to do to understand this situation. Certainly, we never had to be there is the first place and only created problems for everybody involved. In addition, Bin Laden considered Saddam Hussein as an "infidel," and was hardly a "friend".  All of this was fabricated and dutifully reported to us by our media or, rather, our media fed the opposite to us. The U.S. public swallowed it whole.

 

In addition, it seems that ISIS is now threatening the Talaban (which never had any ambitions beyond its own borders), never. Now Americans are being warned about dangers involved in getting to the Kabul Airport because of ISIS.

 

It is likely that most of this is being orchestrated in order to retard Biden's effort to pass social welfare programs here.  Here is a transcript of and interview with Spencer Ackerman:

 

As thousands of Afghans try to flee Afghanistan after the Talaban seized control, we look at the roots of the longest U.S. war in history and spend the hour with Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman. "This is not the alternative to fighting in Afghanistan; this is the result of fighting in Afghanistan," says Ackerman, whose new book, "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump," is based in part on his reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.


Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.orgThe War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

The United Nations is urging countries to keep their borders open with Afghanistan as thousands of Afghans try to flee by land or air, after the Taliban seized control of the country Sunday ahead of the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Earlier this week, President Biden defended his decision to pull troops out as part of a deal the Trump administration made with the Taliban.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war, when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I'm clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to look at the roots of what's become America's longest war. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan October 7, 2001, less than a month after the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within days of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, but the Bush administration rejected any negotiations with the Taliban. This is Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, responding to a question in October 2001.

REPORTER: Would you go so far as to say that no matter what the Taliban might say at this point, it may not make any difference? Are you ignoring whatever they may say?

PRESS SECRETARY ARI FLEISCHER: The president could not have made it any clearer two weeks ago when he said that there will be no discussions and no negotiations. So, what they say is not as important as what they do. And it's time for them to act. It's been time for them to act.

AMY GOODMAN: In December of 2001, just a month or two later, the Taliban offered to surrender control of Kandahar, if its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, would be allowed to, quote, "live in dignity" in opposition custody. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected the offer.

DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: If you're asking would an arrangement with Omar where he could, quote, "live in dignity" in the Kandahar area or some place in Afghanistan be consistent with what I have said, the answer is, no, it would not be consistent with what I have said.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Donald Rumsfeld speaking December 6, 2001. The U.S. War in Afghanistan would continue for almost 20 more years, through to now. According to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. has spent over $2.2 trillion in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By one count, at least 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians have died in the fighting. Afghanistan is now facing a massive humanitarian crisis, and the Taliban is back in power. While Mullah Mohammed Omar died in 2013, his brother-in-law, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now appears set to become Afghanistan's next president.

Well, today we're spending the hour with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Spencer Ackerman, author of the new book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. The book is based in part on his reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

Spencer, it's great to have you back. Congratulations on your book. So, we're talking to you in the midst of this chaos in Kabul right now as thousands of Afghans, Americans and other nationals are attempting to flee Afghanistan. The Taliban have taken over. But we chose to begin back 20 years ago — I'm not going to say "at the beginning," because it goes far back from there. But talk about this moment as the U.S. began bombing and occupying Afghanistan, when the Taliban basically said they would surrender and also give Osama bin Laden over. The U.S. rejected. President Bush rejected both.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: This was a central aspect of the war on terror at its inception and a foreshadowing of what its implications would be. Once we accept the frame that Bush offered — war on terror — we were then locked into a struggle not just against al-Qaeda, the entity culpable for the 9/11 attacks, but a much broader struggle against an enemy that a president could redefine at will and leave in the popular imagination with something along the lines of a civilizational challenge to America for the future, one in which America itself was in the balance.

Now, let's look, in particular, at that moment in Kandahar. The United States's Northern Alliance allies had routed the Taliban from Kabul. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan had fallen, after about five, six years in power, and they recognized, after a last stand they tried to put on in Kandahar didn't go the way they expected, that the end was near for them. And then they offered to Hamid Karzai, the U.S.'s appointed leader for a post-Taliban Afghanistan, that as long as Mullah Omar could live in some kind of house arrest, basically not be killed, not be put up on trial, they were prepared to entertain negotiations for what their role might be in a post-Taliban Afghanistan — basically, a political settlement at that point.

Karzai, for all his flaws that the United States would both contribute to and then criticize him for over the coming years, nevertheless knew Afghan history and recognized that unless there was some kind of political future for the Taliban, the Taliban would opt for a violent future. And they had a proven capacity not just to wage an insurgency, but to triumph in one. And Karzai took the deal.

It was the Bush administration, the United States, that said such a deal was unacceptable — not to the Afghans, but unacceptable to the United States, that now took it on itself, as it has so often throughout its history in so many parts of the world, to tell Afghans the way their country was about to be. And everything that happened since, the 20 years of war since, has contributed on, if not quite a straight line, a kind of nausea-inducing glide path to the abject horror we're seeing at the Kabul airport with people desperate to flee, desperate to — so desperate as to grab onto C-17 cargo planes and fall to their deaths. This is not the alternative to fighting in Afghanistan; this is the result of fighting in Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could take it back even farther, to the U.S.-backed mujahideen, to the U.S.-backed Osama bin Laden, and talk about what happened when the U.S. decided to fund the mujahideen in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and then the mujahideen turning their — setting, literally, their gun sights, their U.S. weapons, on the United States, and how the Taliban came out of that?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yeah, it's important, because, like, an objection to this is always going to be that we, you know, portrayed, like, the 1980s Afghan mujahideen as the Taliban. They weren't the Taliban. They were the precursors of the Taliban.

What happened in the 1980s is the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the United States saw an opportunity. It saw an opportunity to inflict upon the Soviet Union, its great geopolitical adversary, a defeat as humiliating and as psychologically devastating as the one the United States suffered in Vietnam for its own imperial hubris. Over the course of the next 10 years, the United States, the Pakistani ISI and the Saudi intelligence services funded and equipped Islamic extremists, rebels who would come in from Pakistan — among them, a figure who would become intimately familiar as a Taliban ally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a particularly brutal person. And over the course of the 1980s, they inflicted tremendous damage on the Soviets, made the occupation, which was a brutal occupation by the Soviet Union, ever more violent and ever more protracted, to the point where the Soviets withdrew and, a couple years later, the regime the Soviets installed collapsed, much as like we're seeing the one that the United States installed collapsed.

The ensuing chaos and civil war was devastating for Afghanistan. Out of the ashes emerged the Taliban, an extreme group, a group that, you know, used mechanisms of extreme suffering and repression on the long-suffering Afghan people. And something that the United States never recognized throughout this entire period was that it had destabilized Afghanistan, not simply as a pawn of — not simply as a consequence of fighting the Soviet Union, but that was what the cost of fighting the Soviet Union was, that an entire country, millions of people, suffered tremendously, that they were treated as tools by the United States, that their aspirations, their desires for freedom, their desires for security ultimately didn't matter to the United States, much as they didn't matter to the Soviet Union. And in the chaos that resulted, the Taliban took power. They sheltered Osama bin Laden.

But they weren't the same thing as al-Qaeda. And the United States, after 9/11, decided that there was no relevant distinction between al-Qaeda, between the Taliban and between what it called "terrorist groups of global reach," which ultimately washes out to saying that while the respectable version of the Bush administration's policies were already an extremely expansive conception of who could be targeted, moving from terror groups like al-Qaeda to, ultimately, entire regimes — the deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, spoke in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 about "ending states" — but in the broader political, journalistic and then popular conception, the enemy could be all of Islam, or it could be something just short of all of Islam. And from there, it was an extremely short, rather immediate, transition to fearing American Muslims, fearing your neighbors, thinking your neighbors posed a threat to you — not that this apparatus of war and repression posed a threat to you.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Spencer, one of the things that hasn't gotten reported very much is that as the Taliban seized control in these last weeks of Afghanistan, a key person that they executed — he was imprisoned, and they executed him — was Abu Omar Khorasani, the former head of the Islamic State in South Asia. The significance of this?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yeah, this is an extreme complication that has come up in the last couple years of particularly U.S.-Taliban negotiations, by which I mostly mean back-channel negotiations. I shouldn't say "back-channel." To be a little bit more specific, they weren't authorized before they were authorized. It was somewhat of a freelance effort by a retired U.S. Army colonel named Chris Kolenda and a retired U.S. ambassador to Pakistan named Robin Raphel.

What they discovered in their talks with Taliban figures in Doha was that the Taliban were rather concerned about the rising presence of a so-called Islamic State branch in Afghanistan, what called itself, or the U.S. also called it, ISIS Khorasan, or IS Khorasan. Essentially, the Taliban feared a kind of next generation of extremist entity insurgency using Islamic justification inside Afghanistan — and with somewhat, I think it's fair to say, good reason, given the way that ISIS fought and displaced al-Qaeda, the organization and entity that it emerged out of, as well. And so, you even saw, over the last couple years, there was an excellent reporting that Wesley — oh man — that Wesley Morgan has done, where the Taliban has even been the beneficiary of U.S. airstrikes on ISIS Khorasan, to the point where it seemed like — you know, they never got as far as some kind of modus vivendi where they said, "You know what? We, in fact, have an enemy in common." But it was a dynamic that both the Taliban and the U.S. side, particularly the more pragmatic elements of the U.S. military, were attentive to, that the Taliban viewed ISIS not as the next so-called al-Qaeda entity to sponsor and permit a staging ground to attack either the United States or its allies or its interests, or so on and so forth, but, in fact, an enemy to be confronted, an enemy to be dominated, an enemy to be defeated. And when we hear all of the kind of loose talk about the necessity of returning to war in Afghanistan so it doesn't become a staging ground for further attacks on the United States, it's not quite sunk in yet, or it's not quite penetrated, it's not quite been grappled with, that the Taliban are showing like very early signs of seeing ISIS as a threat.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, they killed him. They executed him, took him out of a prison in Kabul on that final day, Sunday, as they took control of the country. Spencer Ackerman, talk about the role the U.S. war and occupation, the brutality of the U.S. airstrikes, the torture at Bagram, the night raids played in gaining new recruits for the Taliban.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: The United States tends not to attribute its brutality to any of the circumstances that it comes to bemoan when they manifest in the world. And Afghanistan is certainly a tragic example of that. The fact that, after 9/11, the United States, in its political and journalistic and intellectual elites, generally speaking, refused to accept that there was a direct and tragic and awful historic consequence of its destabilization of Afghanistan in the 1980s, to the degree that Taliban facilitation of Osama bin Laden in the country helped the execution of the 9/11 plot — which, it's important to note, did not involve Afghans and was not staged from Afghanistan, nor was it even planned in Afghanistan; it was far more planned in Germany. Nevertheless, that was an early foreboding of what we would see over the next 20 years, not just in Afghanistan, but throughout the war on terror: a disconnection, an unwillingness to face that America's violent and imperial actions breed their own next generation of enemies. That was on display once the United States went back into Afghanistan.

And throughout the Afghanistan War, even during periods where counterinsurgency campaigns, at least on paper, paid lip service to the idea that protecting Afghan lives and property and so forth was going to ultimately be decisive in the war, it never acted that way. It never acted as if what the point of the war was was the protection of Afghan lives. It more often acted in such a way that it did not draw distinctions between Afghan lives and Afghan enemies. And amongst the major reasons for this is not necessarily like a specific decision to target Afghan civilians, but an inability to understand the country, understand its dynamics and understand the rather complicated relationships, in many ways, between people who fight for the Taliban and the Taliban itself, or people who aid the Taliban under threat to their own life or threat to their family, or simply seek to endure the war, as so many people throughout so many wars simply aspire to, simply by not taking action that harmed the Taliban, because they understood the consequences that could — that they could experience. Over time, all of these things strengthened the Taliban, made the Taliban seem like, once again, a viable alternative to the United States.

And then, on a different level, the United States's contribution — and not just the United States alone's contribution — to the misery in Afghanistan came through the corruption that it always blamed on the Afghans but was a significant driver of itself, so-called development experts. Development aid and development money poured into Afghanistan far beyond a consideration of what a devastated Afghan economy could in fact absorb. And some of this money was very deliberately flooded in from the CIA to pay off warlords to ensure that they would ultimately be responsive to American interests, which would often be violent interests, which would often be things like, as the Joint Special Operations Command would perform throughout the Afghanistan War, Army Special Forces, in particular, throughout the Afghanistan War, raids on people's houses suspected of being, aiding or facilitating the Taliban — and again, the Taliban, not even al-Qaeda, not the thing that attacked the United States, certainly not the core of al-Qaeda that plotted, planned and executed 9/11. The United States was now in extended war with a one-time harborer, ally of al-Qaeda rather than the thing itself, responsible for all of Afghanistan, but never acting responsibly toward the Afghan people.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to January 2015. This is the Obama years. Two hostages — one American, one Italian man — were accidentally killed by a U.S. drone strike along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Here's then-President Obama later apologizing for the killings.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This morning, I want to express our grief and condolences to the families of two hostages: one American, Dr. Warren Weinstein, and an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto, who were tragically killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation. … Since 9/11, our counterterrorism efforts have prevented terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives, both here in America and around the world. And that determination to protect innocent life only makes the loss of these two men especially painful for all of us.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there you have President Obama apologizing. Spencer, you have spent a good amount of time in Afghanistan. You were embedded there, and then you also reported independently there. Can you talk about the significance of this moment?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: This was a profound moment. This is the only time that the United States, particularly the president of the United States, has not only acknowledged drone strikes that killed civilians, but apologized for it. And the reason why it's such a significant moment in its singularity is — both in the book and for an earlier series that I did for The Guardian in 2016, I interviewed people, Pakistanis and Yemenis principally, who were survivors of drone strikes or whose relatives were killed in drone strikes. And one of the stories I tell in Reign of Terror is from a young Pakistani man named Faheem Qureshi.

Faheem Qureshi was 13 years old when Obama launched his first drone strike. And it blew up Faheem's compound, where he lived with his family. And they were gathering for a celebration of one of his relatives who had just returned from a successful business trip to the United Arab Emirates. Forty days later, Faheem woke from his coma. He had burns over most of his body. He was missing an eye. And he had learned that most of his family's breadwinners had been killed in the strike, so that when he left the hospital, his responsibilities would immediately be providing for his family, however it was that his mangled body would perform.

And I talked to him about the difficulties he experienced throughout the, you know, next, at that point, about seven years. And among the things he discussed was that he had tried, through Pakistani authorities and through the U.S. Embassy, to get some kind of acknowledgment that what had happened to him had in fact happened, and that it didn't just happen as an act of God, it happened as an act by the United States of America. And none of that ever came. What did come was a supply of blood money, essentially, a payoff essentially to say, like, "OK, this is what will count for restitution, and your account is settled, and you're not going to get any public acknowledgment, let alone an apology."

And I kept hearing, when I interviewed people — not just Faheem, but other people whose lives were changed irrevocably by drone strikes — about how Obama had apologized when he had killed white people, and never when he had killed people like them, never when he had killed their loved ones, never when the consequences of his actions had left someone maimed, had left someone in a position where he had to give up his dream of being a chemist and work however he could in the hope that, as he had put it to me, some of his younger cousins and his brothers would be able to live happy and prosperous lives. And I asked him, "What do you think of Barack Obama?" And he said, "If there's a list of tyrants somewhere, Barack Obama's name is on it because of his drone strikes."

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, we're going to break and then come back. Spencer is author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He's a national security reporter who publishes the Forever Wars newsletter on Substack.

When we come back, we're going to look at, well, what he calls the "Reign of Terror." We're going to look also at the rise of right-wing extremism in United States, what all, under Trump and Biden, intelligence agencies call the major domestic terror threat, as Republican congressmembers now say that their deep concern is the threat of foreign terrorists. Stay with us.

As Republicans raise concerns that Biden's withdrawal of U.S. troops will turn Afghanistan "back to a pre-9/11 state — a breeding ground for terrorism," Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman lays out how the U.S. war on terror after the September 2001 attacks actually fueled white, right-wing extremism. Ackerman says U.S. elites consciously chose to ignore "the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history." His new book is "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump."


Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.orgThe War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We're spending the hour with Spencer Ackerman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

Spencer, you begin your book, with the prologue, with Timothy McVeigh visiting the far-right paramilitary compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma, before what you call, the prologue's chapter heading, "the worst terrorist attack in American history." Talk about the connection you see between the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and the so-called war on terror.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: I thought it was extremely important to see the war on terror in its fullness, in its totality, and only then can we understand its implications. And I think the only way to really do that is to look at who were the exceptions to the war on terror, who the war on terror didn't target, despite fundamentally similar actions. And there we can understand not just what the war on terror is, but its relationship to American history, which shapes it so deeply.

And so, I also wanted to kind of start with a journalistic cliché, where the reporter kind of zoologically takes a reader through this unfamiliar and scary world of violence committed by fanatical people who are training with heavy weapons and talk about committing mass atrocity for a sick and supposedly divinely inspired religion. But I wanted those people to be white. I wanted the reader to see how similar these actions were, how similar some of the motivations were, how similar some of the justifications were. But we never treated them like that.

The whole purpose of the phrase "war on terror" was a kind of social compromise amongst respectable elites in order to not say the thing that they were in fact building, which was an expansive war only against some people's kinds of terror, only against nonwhite people's kinds of terror, only against foreigners' kinds of terror, and not against the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history, one that seeks to draw its own heritage out of the general American national heritage, people who call themselves not dissenters, not rebels, but patriots, people who are restoring something about America that they believe a corrupt elite, that is now responsive to nonwhite power at the expense of the extant racial caste, that has been deeply woven inside not just the American political structure, but the American economy, that drives American politics — how that ultimately never gets treated.

This is exactly what Timothy McVeigh was about. This is what Timothy McVeigh had as his motivations for murdering 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, including 19 children. And we looked away from it. We looked away from how deep the rootedness of white supremacist violence was in this country. We listened to what I believe are principled civil libertarian objections against an expensive category of criminalized association. Treating people who might have believed as McVeigh did, odious as I believe that is, but ultimately not committing acts of violence — treating them as, essentially, indistinct from McVeigh was absolutely intolerable, as it always should have been, to the American political elites, but that intolerability did not extend to Muslims.

And there it was easy, after 9/11, to construct an apparatus fueled by things like the PATRIOT Act, that expanded enormous categories of criminal association, known as material support for terrorism, authorized widespread surveillance, that certainly would not be focused simply even on American Muslims, as disgusting as it was that it was focused on them primarily. But, ultimately, all of these things that both parties, that the leaders of the security services and intellectuals created, maintained and justified, so readily, against the threat of a foreign menace, seen as civilizational, seen as an acceptable substitute for a geopolitical enemy that had served as a rallying purpose throughout the 20th century — the war on terror is kind of a zombie anti-communism in a lot of its political cast and association. And never would any of this be visited upon white people. From the start, the war on terror showed you exactly who it was going to leave out from its carceral, from its surveillance and from its violent gaze.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to Donald Trump this week, considering a 2024 challenge to President Biden, said in a statement Biden "surrendered" to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee demanded a plan from Biden to stop Afghanistan from becoming a, quote, "safe haven" for terror groups after the Taliban takeover. This is Republican Congressman Michael McCaul on CNN.

REPMICHAEL McCAUL: We are going to go back, Jake, to a pre-9/11 state, a breeding ground for terrorism. And, you know, I hate to say this — I hope we don't have to go back there — but it will be a threat to the homeland in a matter of time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have the Republicans now talking about a foreign terrorist threat. The Republicans, who have been denying the insurrection of January 6, calling it, you know, no worse than a group of tourists coming to Washington, D.C., and not wanting to investigate that, even though, under Bush, under Trump, the intelligence agencies have said the number one domestic terror threat is right-wing white supremacists.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: We see who the war on terror, then as now, is a mechanism for having terrorism excused, not terrorism dealt with: when that terrorism is white, when it is politically powerful. When, for reasons that they themselves probably ought better to explain, politicians sympathize with it, seek to draw strength from it, that's a real serious red flag for American democracy. We don't have to treat it as if it is a new red flag for American democracy. This is always how American democracy has been eroded. This is always alongside the ways in which capital has been extremely willing to ally with white supremacy. This is what the creation of Jim Crow was. This is how the maintenance of segregation in the North of the country, which we don't often talk about as much in its different permutations — I'm a New Yorker. This city is segregated even still. You see that definitely with the way the school system is constructed.

Ultimately, we are seeing, throughout this past week, the ease with which the Republican Party, supposedly now in the Trump era feeling antipathy to the war on terror, readily snapped to war on terror politics when it comes to the demonization of refugees, the idea that America has a responsibility to take in the refugees that it itself creates, out of this psychotic, racist fear of white replacement, that demographics are ultimately driving the erosion of, you know, in its respectable settings, white political power, not just on the fringes, but at the centers of American governance.

And that is a politics of the war on terror that has been here from the start. Trump makes it vastly less subtle, to the extent that it was subtle, than it was before. And his hold on the party is not an accident. His hold here has everything to do with the way that he was able to recognize the ways in which the war on terror is an excellent sorting mechanism for figuring out who is a real American and who is a conditional American. And then, as we saw him using the tools of the war on terror on the streets of cities like Portland and Washington, D.C., and New York and in the skies over as many as 15 cities last summer, he's willing to use it on Americans that he calls terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, you write repeatedly about Adham Hassoun. Tell us his story.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Amy, I just want to thank you so much for asking about Adham. I knew you would. You have truly been one of the journalistic heroes of this era.

And Adham Hassoun is a symbol of the ways that the war on terror criminalized people. Adham Hassoun is a Palestinian-born man who survived — he grew up in the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s and immigrated to Florida in the 1990s. And as a refugee himself and an active participant in his community in Miami, in South Florida, in the Islamic community there, he wrote a lot of checks to refugee charities, people that he had thought were helping refugees and helping war victims in places like Bosnia, where the wars became genocidal in the Balkans against Balkan Muslims.

And, ultimately, among the people that he met and tried to help was a convert named José Padilla. José Padilla would, after 9/11, become famous as someone John Ashcroft accused of trying to set off a radiological weapon inside the United States. And very shortly after that happened — Padilla was at first placed in military custody, an American citizen; that was allowed at the time — the feds came for Adham. And even though Adham had committed no violence, Adham had done nothing criminal, the feds and immigration authorities locked him up, and they leaned on him to try and inform on his community, to try and be an informant. And he refused to do that. He considered it an affront to his dignity. He considered it unjust.

And as a result, he spent a tremendous amount of time — he spent years in jails in Florida, while, ultimately, the FBI and the local prosecutor — who eventually would be the Trump Cabinet member Alex Acosta — came up with pretexts to prosecute him. He was originally charged as a co-defendant with José Padilla, who is now placed in federal custody. And even though there was no way that the government could connect him to any act of violence, thanks to the PATRIOT Act and thanks to, frankly, the atmosphere politically in the years after 9/11, that he could be charged with things that simply were not acts of violence or acts of active contribution to specific people committing specific acts of violence that the government could name, and he was convicted. And as he was sentenced, the judge reduced his sentence — the feds were seeking life for Adham — because the judge recognized that the government couldn't point to any act that he — you know, act of violence that he was responsible for. That was in 2007. He served until 2017 in federal prison, a variety of federal prisons.

And then, in 2017, when he had finished his sentence, he had figured that he would be deported, that ultimately he would go back to probably Lebanon. He was kind of done, as you can imagine, with the United States at that point. But he didn't. What happened instead was that he was sent into ICE detention in western New York, outside of Buffalo, at a place called Batavia. And after the PATRIOT Act became law in 2001, there was great civil libertarian fear over one of its provisions, Section 412. Section 412 said that any nondeportable noncitizen, which is to say a stateless person who doesn't have a country that will take that person in, who is deemed a threat to national security by the authorities — ultimately, in this case, the determination is made by the secretary of homeland security — could be imprisoned indefinitely. That never happened throughout the whole war on terror, until it was time to keep Adham Hassoun locked up.

Ultimately, in early 2020, around like late February, early March, Adham gets sick, to the point where he — we don't know for sure, but he thought that he got COVID. By April of that year, Batavia was the ICE detention facility with the highest COVID outbreak inside. So, here was a figure who the United States criminalized, robbed of his freedom, and then ultimately endangered his life by the incompetence and indifference that it showed in allowing COVID to run wild in facilities filled with people that the United States functionally treated as nonpeople.

And it took a very valiant effort by local attorneys and by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge his detention. Ultimately, instead of outright losing the case, as a judge indicated after she ruled Adham had to go free, because the FBI admitted —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, Spencer.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: — that it relied on a — sorry. Adham was ultimately successful, once the government dropped its case in order to preserve its power to do this. And he lives in freedom, I'm happy to say, right now in Rwanda.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds. What has surprised you most about what is happening today?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Very little at this point, I'm sorry to say, surprises me. But the general indifference by the American political and intellectual elites to the relationship between the war on terror and the erosion of democracy is also a very deep thread and very historically rooted, not just in the war on terror, but before, and certainly seeing that those connections have to be made in order to have any form of real democracy in this country and safety and dignity for so many people.

AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter. His new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much.

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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Nuremberg on the Potomac


THE ABSURD TIMES



Illustration: George II called himself "The Decider" which makes him responsible.

Nuremberg on the Potomac

            So many other titles come to mind.  Rico and the CIA.  The decider and his men.  Merry Christmas.  "Heckova job, Brownie."  All that needs to done is add the cowardliness of Obama so far (and Pelosi who said "Impeachment is off the table").  In addition, some senator, if he is worthy of the name as they teach it in elementary schools, needs to read the entire Senate Torture Report into the Congressional Record.  It might help if also there was a mention of the CIA hacking into the Senate Committee's computers.

            It is almost impossible to know where to begin, but it is such an appropriate topic for the Christmas season that it is impossible to resist.  While our mass media is busy talking about North Korea and a third-rate semi-comedy (that is one which is not very good or funny), it is a good time to look at these interviews and see what actually happened during the Bush years (wand what did not happen during the Obama years (such as in investigation).  It would actually be a great idea to have an international tribunal exactly like that of Nuremberg, to issue subpoenas for everyone mentioned in the interviews below, and arrest them as soon as they leave U.S. territory.  There is so much focus on Russia and Putin these days, but Bush, Rumsfield, and the rest of the Bush administration make Putin look like some revered saint.

            Most of this has already been exposed here, but perhaps a summary is in order.  At least some of the points that we know. 

            First of all, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein never got along.  Bin Laden made him one of the lowest of the low (in his estimation) and we know how much better Iraq is without Saddam and how much safer it is without Bin Laden.

            Second, with the fall of the entire Soviet Union, the United States carried out an unchecked assault on South America.  Panama is discussed in connection with Norriega, but we also "took out" Torillos (Omar, however the last name is spelled). 

            Actually, there is little point in listing all this stuff.  Much of it is covered in the interviews below.  One of the interesting side comments was a CIA official calling himself the Al Capone of the Western Hemisphere.  RICO is mentioned several times in connection with government officials.  Experimentation on prisoners, Nazi style comes up as well.  Psychologists play a big role in this, but some Doctors (physicians) and Psychiatrists are also used. 

            In fact, things are so bad, that one simply throws ones hands up.  It is no longer an exaggeration to say that all of the activities prosecuted against the Nazi's and the Japanese (remember we held a trial there too) we also committed by our government, only in the name of safety and freedom, not ethnic purity.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2014

Ex-Bush Official: U.S. Tortured Prisoners to Produce False Intel that Built Case for Iraq War

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Since the release of Senate findings earlier this month, the assumption that the CIA’s torture program’s sole motive was post-9/11 self-defense has gone virtually unchallenged. There has been almost no recognition that the George W. Bush administration also tortured prisoners for a very different goal: to extract information that could tie al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein and justify the invasion of Iraq. While the Senate report and other critics say torture produced false information, that could have been one of the program’s goals. We are joined by retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. Wilkerson helped prepare Powell’s infamous February 2003 speech to the United Nations wrongly accusing Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction. The claim was partially based on statements extracted from a prisoner tortured by Egypt on the CIA’s behalf, who later recanted his claim. Wilkerson says that beginning in the spring of 2002 — one year before the Iraq War and just months after the 9/11 attacks, the torture program’s interrogations "were as much aimed at contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad and corroboration thereof as they were trying to ferret out whether there was another attack coming like 9/11. That was stunning to me to find that was probably 50 percent of the impetus."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: Since the release of Senate findings this month, senior officials from the George W. Bush administration have defended their global torture program. Speaking to Meet the Press last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that with no major terror attack since 9/11, he wouldn’t hesitate to use torture again.
DICK CHENEY: With respect to trying to define that as torture, I come back to the proposition torture was what the al-Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation. ... It worked. It worked now. For 13 years we’ve avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States. We did capture bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys of al-Qaeda who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I’d do it again in a minute.
AARON MATÉ: The Obama administration and top Democrats have contested Cheney’s claim the torture program was effective, as well as legal. But what has gone unchallenged is the assumption the torture program’s sole motive was post-9/11 self-defense. There has been almost no recognition the Bush administration also tortured prisoners for a very different goal: extract information that could tie al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein and justify the invasion of Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Instead, from President Obama on down, it’s been taken at face value that protecting the nation was the Bush administration’s sole motive. Speaking to the network Univision, President Obama was asked if President Bush had betrayed the country’s values. This was his response.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As I’ve said before, after 9/11, I don’t think that you can know what it feels like to know that America has gone through the worst attack on the continental United States in its history and you’re uncertain as to what’s coming next. So, there were a lot of people who did a lot of things right and worked very hard to keep us safe. But I think that any fair-minded person looking at this would say that some terrible mistakes were made.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama’s comments were echoed by CIA Director John Brennan. In his first response to the Senate report, Brennan said those behind the torture program faced agonizing choices in their effort to protect the country after 9/11.
JOHN BRENNAN: The previous administration faced agonizing choices about how to pursue al-Qaeda and prevent additional terrorist attacks against our country, while facing fears of further attacks and carrying out the responsibility to prevent more catastrophic loss of life. There were no easy answers. And whatever your views are on EITs, our nation, and in particular this agency, did a lot of things right during this difficult time to keep this country strong and secure.
AARON MATÉ: Though the White House has not questioned the Bush administration’s motives, there is no doubt torture played a major role in the push for invading Iraq. And while the Senate report and other critics say torture produced false information, that could have been one of the program’s goals. In 2009, McClatchyreported, "The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and ... Saddam Hussein’s regime." A "former senior U.S. intelligence official" said, quote, "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder."
AMY GOODMAN: The Iraq-torture connection gets only bare mention in the Senate intelligence report, but it’s still significant. In a footnote, the report cites the case of Ibn Shaykh al-Libi. After U.S. forces sent him for torture in Egypt, Libi made up the false claim that Iraq provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda. Secretary of State Colin Powell then used Libi’s statements in that famous February 5th, 2003, speech at the United Nations falsely alleging Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Senate report says, quote, "Libi [later] recanted the claim ... claiming that he had been tortured ... and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear."
Well, we’re joined now by a guest with unique insight into the Libi case and other Bush-era uses of torture to justify the Iraq War: retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. Colonel Wilkerson helped prepare that speech that General Powell gave at the U.N., only to later renounce it. He’s now a professor of government and public policy at William & Mary.
Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the Libi case and how seminal it was.
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Amy, it’s probably the most seminal moment in my memory of those five days and nights out at Langley at the CIA headquarters with George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin. Powell had rarely, in the some eight years or so I had worked for him to that point, grown so angry with me that he, in this case, physically grabbed me and took me to the spaces that were empty in the room adjacent to the DCI conference room, sat me down in a chair and essentially lectured me on how he was dissatisfied with and very unhappy with the portions in his presentation that dealt with terrorism, particularly the connections with Baghdad and al-Qaeda. And I quickly apprised him of the fact that I was just as uneasy as he was. He calmed down a bit, and he said, "Well, let’s throw it out." We did. We threw it out.
Within about 30 to 45 minutes, we were back in the DCI conference room to resume that night’s rehearsal, and George Tenet himself laid a bombshell on the table. He essentially said—and these are almost direct quotes: "We have learned from the interrogation of a high-level al-Qaeda operative that not only were there substantial contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad, that those contacts included Baghdad Mukhabarat, secret police, Saddam’s special people, training al-Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons." That’s almost a direct quote, Amy. At that point, Powell turned to me and said, "Put it back in."
And from that point on, though I did take some of the stuff out as late as 2:00 a.m. in the morning in the Waldorf-Astoria prior to the morning of the presentation, and had Phil Mudd, George Tenet’s counterterrorism czar, standing behind me in the Waldorf, trying to prevent me from taking things out, until I finally told him I would physically remove him from the room if he didn’t leave of his own will, people were trying to get that portion back into the presentation. But the damage was done. The secretary, as you know, presented the information as if there were substantial contacts.
AARON MATÉ: Colonel, in your judgment, how big of a motive was the Iraq War in the torture program, in the torture of prisoners to get information that could tie al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: One of the things that I have to say rather stunned me was when Powell, in April, right after the Abu Ghraib incident was made public or incidents were made public, asked me to look into it and to get a tick-tock for him, to get a chronology—essentially, to tell him how we got to that point. And I began my investigation. I learned that there was, as early as April-May 2002, efforts to use enhanced interrogation techniques, also to build a legal regime under which they could be conducted, and that those efforts were as much aimed at al-Qaeda and contacts between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, and corroboration thereof, as they were trying to ferret out whether or not there was another attack coming, like 9/11. That was stunning to me to find out that that was part—I’d say probably 50 percent of the impetus that I discovered in both the classified and unclassified material I looked into.
AMY GOODMAN: In June, we spoke to Richard Clarke, the nation’s former top counterterrorism official. Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism during Bush’s first year in office. He resigned in 2003 following the Iraq invasion. Clarke said that after 9/11, right after, in the days after, President Bush had wanted him to place the blame on Iraq.
RICHARD CLARKE: I resigned, quit the government altogether, testified before congressional committees and before the 9/11 Commission, wrote a book revealing what the Bush administration had and had not done to stop 9/11 and what they did after the fact, how the president wanted me, after the fact, to blame Iraq for the 9/11 attack.


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TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2014

Weaponizing Health Workers: How Medical Professionals Were a Top Instrument in U.S. Torture Program

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Physicians for Human Rights is calling for a federal commission to investigate, document and hold accountable all health professionals who took part in CIA torture. Last week, the group released a report titled "Doing Harm: Health Professionals’ Central Role in the CIA Torture Program." The report finds medical personnel connected to the torture program may have committed war crimes by conducting human experimentation on prisoners in violation of the Nuremberg Code that grew out of the trial of Nazi officials and doctors after World War II. We speak with Nathaniel Raymond, a research ethics adviser for Physicians for Human Rights, who co-wrote the new report. "We now see clear evidence of the essential, integral role that health professionals played as the legal heat shield for the Bush administration — their get-out-of-jail-free card," Raymond says.
"There has often been this narrative that Mitchell and Jessen were the lone gunmen of torture, that they were doing this out of their garage," Raymond explains. "They were operating inside a superstructure of medicalized torture. It was not just them alone. It includes physicians’ assistants, doctors and it may include other professionals. What they were doing was everything from 'care' to actual monitoring, calibration and design of the tactics."
Image Credit: physiciansforhumanrights.org

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: Calls are increasing for the prosecution of Bush administration officials tied to the CIA torture program. On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch called on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to probe the crimes detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. Also on Monday, The New York Times editorial board called for a full and independent criminal investigation. Meanwhile, the group Physicians for Human Rights is calling for a federal commission to investigate, document and hold accountable all health professionals who took part in CIA torture.
AMY GOODMAN: Last week, the Physicians for Human Rights released a reporttitled "Doing Harm: Health Professionals’ Central Role in the CIA Torture Program." The report finds medical personnel connected to the torture program may have committed war crimes by conducting human experimentation on prisoners in violation of the Nuremberg Code that grew out of the trial of Nazi officials and doctors after World War II.
Joining us now is Nathaniel Raymond. He’s a research ethics adviser for Physicians for Human Rights. He co-wrote the new report. He’s also a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health.
It’s nice to have you back, Nathaniel. So, start off by talking about the human experimentation. What came out of the CIA documents?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Well, I would say that there were two incidents in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary that have been largely overlooked by the press. One is the Office of Medical Services raising concerns to the inspector general in 2005 at CIA that they were being asked to potentially commit human experimentation through the required monitoring role to study the efficacy and the quote-unquote "safety" of the tactics. Additionally, the report shows two senior former CIA agents were asked to do an independent review of the CIAinterrogation program and declined to assess the efficacy because they said it would, quote, "violate federal policy" on human subjects research.
What we see clearly in this report is that the Office of Medical Services’ role evolved from the time of the Yoo-Bybee memo in 2002 and 2003 into something very different by the Bradbury memo in 2005. They were actively engaged in collecting data, in assessing the potential impact, the harm, of these tactics. That role can constitute research and can constitute a violation of international war crimes prohibitions on human subjects experimentation, because what they were doing was unrelated to the medical care of detainees, and it had no clinical precedent, and it involved the analysis of identifiable data from detainees who were being tortured.
AARON MATÉ: So what does this evolution indicate to you?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: It indicates this: that the U.S. government swallowed the spider to catch the fly of torture. And they swallowed the spider of weaponizing health professionals to engage in a role that has been widely documented and prohibited by the Nuremberg Code and also by U.S. domestic war crimes law as constituting potentially a crime against humanity. Now, I want to be clear here: There’s no hierarchy of harm between torture and alleged human subject experimentation. Both are illegal, and both can constitute war crimes. But the fact here is that we now see clear evidence of the essential, integral role that health professionals played as the legal heat shield for the Bush administration—their get-out-of-jail-free card.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about the different professions.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve talked to you a lot over the years about psychologists, and we’ve done several big segments in the last few weeks. We know about the psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell—
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —and their role in the torture. But talk beyond these two men, as the attempt is made for them to be isolated, the role of the American Psychological Association, the largest association of psychologists in the world, but then beyond that—psychiatrists, doctors, nurses.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I think there has often been this narrative that Mitchell and Jessen were sort of the lone gunmen of torture, that they, you know, were doing this out of their garage. They were operating inside a superstructure of medicalized torture. And what that means is it wasn’t just them alone. It was the Office of Medical Services at CIA, part of the Office of Technical Services that allegedly employed Mitchell and Jessen, and that includes—just looking at the executive summary of the Senate report, it includes physicians’ assistants, it includes doctors, and it may include other professionals within OMS. And what they were doing was everything from, quote, "patient care" to actual monitoring, calibration and design of the tactics with Mitchell and Jessen.
AMY GOODMAN: But explain. It has traditionally been said—
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —that the American Psychological Association, despite a lot of resistance from a lot of psychologists within who were trying to change the rules—
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Mm-hmm, absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: —was resisting for years any kind moratorium or ban on psychologists’ involvement in these so-called enhanced interrogations, but that theAMA and the little APA—
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —the American Psychiatric Association, did pass bans, moratoriums.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: In 2006, the AMA and the little APA, American Psychiatric, passed clear bans on participation. And those bans on participation are now being echoed by The New York Times. The American Psychological Association is, of the big three, the only association that still permits involvement in interrogations.
Where we have to go in the next step is to a ban encoded in U.S. law. It’s time for it no longer to be about the associations, but to be about U.S. code. Health professionals have no role in interrogations. There’s the line from the famous Diane Beaver email out of Guantánamo: "If a detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong." If you have a health professional in an interrogation, I would invert that and say, "Then you’re doing it wrong." Right now is the time for leadership for the associations to step up and go, in the case of the AMA and American Psychiatric, one step further and say this needs to be encoded in U.S. federal statute.
AARON MATÉ: You spoke to a contractor who was involved in these CIAinterrogations.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes.
AARON MATÉ: Who was he, and what did he tell you?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: In 2006, I received a phone call from Scott Gerwehr, who identified himself as a CIA contractor, who said that he was at Guantánamo in the summer of 2006, and he was installing cameras as part of detecting deception during interrogations at a CIA facility at Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Gerwehr then proceeded to go into detail about the Office of Medical Services evaluation he said was in a CIA inspector general report. I didn’t speak to Mr. Gerwehr other than one or two times after that, and I found out in 2009 he had passed away in a traffic accident.
Once I learned that he had died, I went and contacted at Physicians for Human Rights, through that organization, the Department of Justice, and I met with Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham, and I told him that he needed to look at Mr. Gerwehr and any potential evidence he had left behind. Subsequently, the Department of Justice obtained emails, after that meeting, from Mr. Gerwehr’s files. And in those emails, which are referenced in James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price, we see a stunning tick-tock of the American Psychological Association’s direct communication with the CIA and White House officials related to its own ethics policy.
Right now, David Hoffman of the law firm Sidley & Howe in Chicago is conducting an independent probe of the APA, and I’m cooperating with him. And I also analyzed Mr. Gerwehr’s emails at the request of the public corruption unit of the FBI in 2012, and I analyzed in the context of a RICO violation, potentially, by the American Psychological Association related to this apparent collusion with the CIA and the White House.
AARON MATÉ: Are there grounds for charges, do you think?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: In the memo I wrote for the FBI, I presented information that I felt had probative value, meaning that there was grounds for an official investigation by the Bureau. The issue that we encountered then is that the information I had, which was not only Scott Gerwehr’s emails but other additional evidence in my possession, was outside the statute of limitations of U.S. RICO code, 18 U.S.C. The hope here is that with David Hoffman’s investigation, new evidence can be unearthed. And the hope is that if it falls within the statute of limitations, he’ll refer it to the Department of Justice.
AMY GOODMAN: And you think it suggests that?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I think it definitely suggests that. I think—
AMY GOODMAN: That what?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I think it suggests—let me make a clear, declarative statement: I think the information I reviewed for the FBI in 2012 suggests that theAPA potentially was engaged in racketeering related to its relationship with CIA and White House officials in the construction of the 2005 PENS, President’s Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain that. "PENS" stands for?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: PENS is the President’s Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, which basically encoded in APA policy the observation, the monitoring, the direct involvement role for psychologists in national security interrogations, that we now know at that time involved torture. What we see from Jim Risen’s reporting based on the emails I also reviewed is clear concealed contacts between officials who were directly in the policy chain of command and the operational chain of command at CIA related to this program—were helping, in one case, to literally write the PENS report. It wasn’t just that they were passing Post-it notes. They were literally writing the text of the document.
AMY GOODMAN: We had Jean Maria Arrigo on Democracy Now! years ago.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Who’s a real hero.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. She was in the PENS panel, to her own shock. She’s an oral historian of military psychologists, and she’s sitting there in this meeting, and she starts to take notes. Psychologists are known for taking notes. And she’s told to put her notes away. And before she knew it, she’s handed the final report that she is supposed to sign.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: And if you’re trying to cover something up, don’t give Jean Maria Arrigo a notebook. The fact of the matter is that there’s one conclusion that you can draw, is that unlike the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, which had public processes on this issue, processes that I was involved with that were public meetings in Chicago in 2006, not only did the APA do it behind closed doors, they did it with direct contact and follow-up, it appears, based on Jim Risen’s reporting, with the very officials who were in the operational and the policy chain of command. And the question is: Why? Why did it have to go that way? And I hope that Mr. Hoffman, in his investigation, can help answer that question.
AARON MATÉ: On top of the policy part, helping draft guidelines that would enable torture, can you talk about how a health professional would actually physically abet the interrogation of a prisoner?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: It depends on the profession. In the case of physicians, what we see in the now well-known, heinous example of, quote-unquote, "rectal feeding" is that the physicians themselves, in addition to the well-known psychologists Mitchell and Jessen who were mentioned before by Amy, appear to have been involved in the designing of tactics that were intentionally inflicting harm. In the case of psychologists, there appears to be additional psychologists, beyond Mitchell and Jessen, who would be called operational psychologists. There were support psychologists who were conducting evaluations and serving in OMS. And there’s the mention of a physician’s assistant who appears to have been involved in relaying information back to headquarters at Langley about whether a detainee was ready, after an injury, to be tortured again. So we see this clear role across the health professions of taking their responsibility to do no harm into a mission to do harm to detainees with their health professional skills.
AMY GOODMAN: Nathaniel Raymond, you say the human rights community has done a disservice to itself on this issue. How?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I think that in many ways we have buried the lede, in the sense that we’ve seen often—the health professional issue, as it relates to the interrogation scandal, is seen as this boutique sort of side narrative. And I think—and kudos to you, Amy, you’ve kept this issue front and center for many years. Now it’s time to really see it as the central story. If you didn’t have the health professionals, you wouldn’t have had the Office of Legal Counsel memos. It was the spark plug in that engine.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Because the OLC memos were based on a good-faith interpretation of U.S. anti-torture law, saying that if we, the United States, did not cause a certain level of severe, long-lasting pain, physical and mental pain and suffering, then we had not violated torture. Well, how are you going to assess that in a good-faith defense? You need to have health professionals involved to say that this limbo stick of harm was not crossed. Well, the fact is, that’s inherently an experimental role. There’s no clinical precedent. Doctors are not trained in assessing the prospective harm of a torture technique. So, the fact of the matter is, if you did not have the psychologists, the doctors in the room, OLC, as we see in the Bradbury memorandum, wouldn’t have had the data to say we hadn’t crossed the threshold of harm. In other words, the health professionals were the get-out-of-jail-free card, the legal indemnification for the White House.
AARON MATÉ: Your report calls for a federal commission.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes.
AARON MATÉ: What should such a commission look at, and why is that important?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Well, I think, to date, we have had two critical and courageous congressional investigations, in terms of Senate Armed Services Committee and then, later, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary. But right now we’ve been working in compartments. And the issue of health professional involvement is an interdisciplinary, cross-committee problem. It goes from judiciary to health and human services on to intelligence and armed services. There needs to be a holistic approach.
This is a five-alarm fire in American medical ethics, up there with Tuskegee. This is not just about what was done before. It appears that there were changes to both the interpretation of the Code of Federal Regulations related to human subjects research—the Wolfowitz memorandum—and changes to U.S. interpretation of the Geneva Conventions related to biomedical experimentation during the Bush administration. We need to go back, find out what was done and literally fix our code.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the psychologist, James Mitchell, who helped design the CIA interrogation program, recently interviewed on Fox News’s Megyn Kelly about his involvement in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was reportedly subjected to waterboarding at a secret CIA black site in Thailand.
MEGYN KELLY: And there was medical personnel in the room.
JAMES MITCHELL: There was always medical personnel. There were medical personnel there. There were psychologists that were independent of the interrogation there. There were language experts, although he spoke English pretty well. There were language experts. There were subject matter experts. And there were the—there were the people who had the command and control.
AMY GOODMAN: All the people in the room, Nathaniel Raymond.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes. I think that, you know, James Mitchell said it better than I can say it. This was a multiple-department chain of command-authorized operation. And we have a responsibility, underneath the precedents of Nuremberg, under the precedents of the Tokyo trials, to hold the chain of command accountable. To date, we have basically violated the bedrock principle of command accountability, which is the basis of international and domestic war crimes law. It’s been about two contract psychologists. Who brought them in? Who was their commander? Who gave them the order? We still don’t know that. And thank you, Senator Feinstein and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but we need to understand the chain of command, about who gave the order to weaponize health professionals to inflict harm and to study it.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Senator Udall—what Senator Mike Gravel is calling for—should have the whole report put into the record? It doesn’t just have to be Udall, the outgoing senator from Colorado; it could be any senator. But are you calling for this? Do you think some of that information will be in those thousands of pages that are still secret?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Based on people that I have talked to over the 13 years I’ve been working on detainee abuse, there is a lot that appears to have happened that we don’t know. You know, the president has said we should look forward and not backwards. Well, we shouldn’t look forward in blindness. Until we have the full accounting, that only a federal commission can provide, including the release of the full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, we don’t actually know fully what we’re talking about.
AMY GOODMAN: Should President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet—do you think these men should be charged with crimes against humanity?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I believe that the challenge of now, the challenge of the past decade, is to resuscitate our institutions for them to be able to do the accountability functions required by the law. Until we restore the rule of law by holding those who gave the order accountable—not the people, the burger flippers at the bottom, not middle management, but the chain of command from the top—we have not done what the law requires.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Nathaniel Raymond, research ethics adviser for Physicians for Human Rights, researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. This is Democracy Now! We will link to his report, "Doing Harm: Health Professionals’ Central Role in the CIA Torture Program," at democracynow.org. And when we come back, we’ll be joined by Colonel Wilkerson to talk about who should be held accountable. Stay with us.


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TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2014

Bush & Cheney Should Be Charged with War Crimes Says Col. Wilkerson, Former Aide to Colin Powell

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Calls are increasing for the prosecution of George W. Bush administration officials tied to the CIA torture program. On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch called on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor who would investigate the crimes detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the program. On Monday, The New York Times editorial board called for a full and independent criminal investigation. We put the question about prosecution to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Richard Clarke also says he believes President George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
RICHARD CLARKE: I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Richard Clarke, Bush’s former counterterrorism czar, who said Bush came up to him right after the 9/11 attacks to say, "Start linking this to Iraq." Colonel Wilkerson, he’s a Bush administration official. You’re a Bush administration official. Of course, the man you worked for, Colin Powell, was a Bush administration official, secretary of state. Do you think that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, George Tenet, head of the CIA, and others should be held accountable for war crimes, should be actually charged?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I have to say that after all of my investigations, my students looking into the episodes in case studies and so forth, my own personal experience in that administration, I can only give you an answer that is, I think, utopian, I think it’s far too optimistic, it’s Pollyannaish: yes. But I don’t think for a moment that it’s going to happen.
AARON MATÉ: Colonel, the Senate report says that 26 innocent people were caught up in the program, and former Vice President Cheney addressed this. Speaking toMeet the Press, he was asked about the report finding that 26 of the 119 prisoners were innocent. This was his response.
DICK CHENEY: I’m more concerned with bad guys who got out and were released than I am with a few that in fact were innocent.
CHUCK TODD: Twenty-five percent of the detainees, though. Twenty-five percent turned out not to have—turned out to be innocent. They were—
DICK CHENEY: So, where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are you going to know?
CHUCK TODD: Well, I’m asking you.
DICK CHENEY: I’m saying—
CHUCK TODD: Is that too high? Is that—you’re OK with that margin for error?
DICK CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.
AARON MATÉ: That was Chuck Todd questioning former Vice President Dick Cheney. Colonel Wilkerson, can you respond to what Cheney said? And also address the issue of innocence. Do you think that the 26 figure is too low?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Definitely too low, when you consider the entire prison population. As I’ve said many times in the past, I am quite confident that probably a half to two-thirds, possibly even more, of those initially put in Guantánamo, some 700-plus people, were just swept up on the battlefield, through bounty process or whatever, and were basically innocent of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But let’s look at what Dick Cheney said. This is pure Cheney. This is Cheney and Rumsfeld’s tactic. They immediately deflect the question, which is a solid question which they simply can’t answer. They immediately deflect it to the other side of the equation, whether it’s the ticking time bomb argument, which is a fallacious and stupid argument if you really parse it well, or whether it’s, as Cheney did here, that, you know, 75 percent were guilty, and any one of those might have done something, and so I was good in what I did. This is Cheney, amoral, amoral Cheney.
What you must look at, too, and what I wish that interrogator of Cheney had looked at, is, we know—we know positively that a minimum—and I suspect it’s higher—of 39 people died in the interrogation process. Why does no one ever mention that? We know, too, that in some of those cases the military or civilian coroner involved found the cause of that death to be homicide. The most famous case, of course, Alex Gibney in his documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, Dilawar in Afghanistan, is known about, but even that’s been forgotten. We murdered people whom we were interrogating. Isn’t that the ultimate torture? No one ever asks Dick about that.
AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, that number, 39 people killed by torturers, where do you get that number, and where were they killed?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: That number comes from Human Rights First’s initial report on command responsibility in the interrogation program, which I believe came out quite early, 2006-2007. It was 39 people who died in detention. Now, some of them died of natural causes. They had a heart attack or whatever. Of course, the heart attack might have been brought on by the very strenuous process they were going through, including hypothermic rooms and stress and so forth and so on. But nonetheless, several of those were judged homicides. In other words, either the contractor for the CIA, the CIA or the military individual conducting the interrogation was responsible for the death of that person because of what they were doing to them. That’s never talked about anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: Final question. At the time that Colin Powell gave that speech, that infamous speech that he would later call a blot on his career, February 5th, 2003, at the U.N., there were many who were saying, including weapons inspectors in Iraq, that the allegation of weapons of mass destruction was not true. What would have penetrated the bubble for you, Colonel Wilkerson—for example, to peace activists and others—to be able to reach you, to reach Colin Powell? Why could they continue to say this, with lots of evidence behind it, yet you didn’t hear it?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I think there was objection that made its way through to us. After all, we had an intelligence and research group at the State Department, INR, and an assistant secretary, Carl Ford, who objected rather strenuously to one-third of the major elements of Powell’s presentation, the most dangerous element, if you will—the active nuclear program. So, we had opposition.
But, Amy, when you have a secretary of state of the United States sitting down with the representative of the 16 intelligence entities, representing the military, representing NSA, representing DIA, the CIA, of course, and all the other entities that we spend some $80 billion a year to keep up and working, and telling the secretary of state, who is not an intelligence professional, that this is the case and this is the proof, it’s very difficult for the secretary of state to push back and say, "No, I’ve got some element here that tells me you’re not right." Powell did that, on a number of occasions. But in each case, with few exceptions that were important, Tenet and McLaughlin pushed back with the weight of the intelligence community. And people forget, Tenet was pushing back, as he said, quite frequently, with the Germans, the Israelis, the French and, as he would put it, all the other countries in the world who have reasonably good intelligence and intelligence institutions and are corroborating what I’m saying. So, this is a very difficult situation for the secretary of state.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think John Brennan, head of the CIA, should immediately be fired?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I think John Brennan should have been fired a long time ago. Long time ago.
AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, we’re going to have to wrap this break, but we’re going to ask you to stay with us. You served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. But we’re going to go back in time. We’re going to—it is the 25th anniversary of the invasion of Panama. At the time, Colin Powell was the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We’re going to have a discussion about this anniversary. Stay with us.


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TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2014

"The War to Start All Wars": Did U.S. Invasion of Panama 25 Years Ago Set Stage for Future Wars?

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This month marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Panama. On December 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause to execute an arrest warrant against Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, once a close U.S. ally, on charges of drug trafficking. During the attack, the United States unleashed a force of 24,000 troops equipped with highly sophisticated weaponry and aircraft against a country with an army smaller than the New York City Police Department. We discuss the Panama invasion and how it served as a template for future U.S. military interventions with three guests: We are joined by Humberto Brown, a former Panamanian diplomat, and Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University and author of "The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World." His new article for TomDispatch is "The War to Start All Wars: The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama." We also speak with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: This month marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Panama. Early in the morning of December 20th, 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause, sending tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of aircraft into Panama to execute an arrest warrant against its leader, Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking. General Noriega was once a close ally to Washington and on the CIA payroll. But after 1986, his relationship with Washington took a turn for the worse. During the attack, the U.S. unleashed a force of 24,000 troops, equipped with highly sophisticated weaponry and aircraft, against a country with an army smaller than the New York City Police Department.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by three guests: Humberto Brown, former Panamanian diplomat; Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University, his most recent book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World_, his most recent articlepanama/ for TomDispatch, "The War to Start All Wars: The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama"; and still with us in Washington, D.C., retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, special assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was chaired by General Colin Powell at the time of the invasion.
Greg Grandin, let’s start with you. Why is this anniversary—why the 25th anniversary? What do you have to say, going back 25 years ago, is the most important thing to understand about what happened?
GREG GRANDIN: That the invasion of Panama took place a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it really set the terms for future interventions in a number of ways. One, it was unilateral. It was done without the sanction of the United Nations, without the sanction of the Organization of American States, which was a fairly risky thing for the United States. It didn’t occur often, even during the Cold War. Two, it was a violation of national sovereignty, which of course the United States did often during the Cold War, but it was a violation—the terms of the violation changed. It was done in the name of democracy. It was argued—it was overtly argued that national sovereignty was subordinated to democracy, or the United States’ right to adjudicate the quality of democracy. And three, it was a preview to the first Gulf War. It was a massive coordination of awesome force that was done spectacularly for public consumption. It was about putting the Vietnam syndrome to rest.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the effects, Humberto Brown—you were a Panamanian diplomat at the time—the effects of the U.S. invasion. The Pentagon said hundreds of people died; Panamanians said something like 3,000 people died in this attack. How long did it last?
HUMBERTO BROWN: Well, Amy, just in the first hour, we had had 200 and—about close to 400 bombs were dropped after midnight, devastating poor neighborhoods—El Chorrillo, Marañon, Caledonia. So it was devastating, because, one, the majority of the people who suffered consequences of it were poor people in the urban areas. And the elite, who was complicit to this, were—their neighborhoods were protected. They were safe. Some of them was removed from their homes and were placed in the Canal zone. So it was two different approaches. One was intimidation and literally expressing no concern for the poor, in a way. So we think it was very devastating.
And it’s interesting that at 25 years, this is the first time one of the presidents are talking about the need to answer the question about how many people died, how many people disappeared. And on Saturday, the new president, President Varela, said that he wanted to create a special commission to investigate what happened during the invasion, how many people died, because they’re attempting to get a national reconciliation. The debate—there’s always a debate in Panama, if we’d celebrate this as a day of mourning. The president calls it a day of reflection, and there’s a sector that call it a day of liberation. So we still have a conflicting view of the impact of this invasion in Panama.
AARON MATÉ: And, Colonel Wilkerson in Washington, you were an aide to Colin Powell during this time. What’s your understanding of why this attack took place?
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, my understanding was the understanding that the press reported. It was everything from attacks on or threatened attacks on our officers and men and women in the military in Panama to drug trafficking and extensive contacts with drug gangs that had grown much larger than the contacts with the CIA had ever contemplated and so forth.
But I’ve got to say that in what I teach, you could learn a lot about U.S. operations in its own hemisphere. This was an operation, not so unique, as one of the speakers just suggested. Go back and look at Marine General Smedley Butler, in his testimony to the then Armed Forces Committee in the Congress, where he essentially compared himself to Al Capone, and he said, "Al Capone operated on one continent, I operated on two. I was a criminal for American commercial interest." We have invaded someone or interjected our military force into someone’s territory in the Caribbean about 35 times since 1850. This is our hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine is still operational. And we seem to think that we can interfere in anyone’s country at any time. 2002, we tried to foment a coup in Caracas to overthrow Hugo Chávez. This is nothing new. This is the way America operates in its own hemisphere.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds, Greg Grandin, but then we’ll continue this and put it online.
GREG GRANDIN: I agree completely. The Cold War, though, did force the United States to operate under the legitimacy of multilateralism, and that’s what gets swept away with Panama, with the invasion of Panama. And it does set the terms for future invasions. But I agree completely.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, General Noriega was taken prisoner at the time and brought to the United States. And in our post-show interview, we will continue that discussion about why the U.S. changed its view of him, from the U.S.'s man to the U.S.'s prisoner. Greg Grandin and Humberto Brown and Colonel Wilkerson, thanks so much for joining us. Part two online at democracynow.org.


The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.



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