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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.-->
