Showing posts with label Torture Report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Torture Report. Show all posts

Saturday, June 06, 2015

Isis, Israel, Torture, Pittsburgh


THE ABSURD TIMES



The World of Late, or the Late World
by
Zarathustra





Illustration: sent by one of you.  Well-known journalist banned in Pittsburgh.
            There hasn't been much reason or interest enough to put out another of these for some time.  Once you know the pattern, why need more examples?  I am more and more convinced by what Thoreau meant by that so many years ago.



            I suppose what has most intrigued me is recent stupidity.  A few days ago, and African-American [already suspicious, no?] Moslem [well, that clinches it] was killed outside a CVS by the FBI.  Surprisingly, the video seemed to support the FBI's version of the incident.  There was discussions about beheading the woman who goes around trying to irritate Moslems by blocking building of Mosques and staging contests to draw Mohammed.  I understand that no one know what he looked like anyway, so a caricature is a rather foolish idea.  So is paying attention to this moron, but religion has its own logic.  Maybe logic isn't the right word.



            One of the proofs that they were planning a beheading (and we are opposed to beheadings, btw) is that someone said "I'm thinking with my head on my chest."  I was reminded of Gertrude Stein's remark to Hemingway "Earnest, you are always wearing a wig on your chest."  Code is cryptic, I guess.



            In a recent issue, we talking about a Ukrainian/Russian pianist who was uninvited by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra after some trollish moron complained about her anti-fascist remarks about current Kiev.  It was a bit of a revelation here that she was one of the premier classical pianists of the day as we were aware only of the Ukrainian remarks.



            Now, Chris Hedges has been uninvited from a panel at the University of Pittsburgh for likening ISIS to Israel.  It seem much like that same thing.  To those overseas who hear about our first amendment and freedom of speech, it is important to realize that only government agencies, or officially nominal government agencies, are bound by that.  Since huge amounts of money run this country, and government is only an organ of capitalism, the first amendment really isn't that much of a force.  The University would loose a lot of money if it allowed such unpopular truths be told. 

           

            Below is something quite unrelated on its surface.  Medical Doctors took part in the torture during Bush whose brother is running for President.  We were told the AMA was against this sort of thing, but money is money.



            We wonder if the International court could make war crimes stick and some country could arrest Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, et. al if they were in their country?


THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2015

"These are War Crimes": Shocking Details Emerge of U.S. Resident Majid Khan’s Torture by CIA

Shocking new details have emerged about how the CIA tortured a former resident of Baltimore, Maryland, who has been in U.S. detention since 2003, first at a CIA black site, then at Guantánamo. Majid Khan is the only known legal resident of the United States to be held at Guantánamo. Over the years, Khan has detailed U.S. torture practices to his attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights, but until recently much of the information remained classified. According to the declassified notes, Khan was waterboarded on two separate occasions, he was hung on a wooden beam for days on end, he spent much of 2003 in total darkness, and he experienced repeated beatings and threats to beat him with tools, including a hammer. Khan also faced rectal feeding, which his lawyers described as a form of rape. Part of Khan’s torture was outlined in last year’s Senate torture report, but the declassified information provides new details on the abuse. We are joined by Majid Khan’s lawyer, J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Shocking new details have emerged about how the CIAtortured a former resident of Baltimore, Maryland, who has been in U.S. detention since 2003, first at a CIA black site, then at Guantánamo. Majid Khan is the only known legal resident of the United States to be held at Guantánamo. Over the years, Khan has detailed U.S. torture practices to his attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights, but until recently much of the information remained classified. According to the declassified notes, Khan was waterboarded on two separate occasions, he was hung on a wooden beam for days on end, he spent much of 2003 in total darkness, and he experienced repeated beatings and threats to beat him with tools, including a hammer. Majid Khan also faced rectal feeding, which his lawyers described as a form of rape. Part of Khan’s torture was outlined in last year’s Senate torture report, but the declassified information provides new details on the abuse.
AMY GOODMAN: Majid Khan is a 35-year-old Pakistani citizen who graduated from Owings Mills High School in Baltimore. He was captured in Pakistan in 2003, then reportedly held at an unidentified CIA black site from 2003 to 2006. In the newly released documents about his interrogations at the CIA black site, Khan says agents told him, quote, "Son, we are going to take care of you. ... We are going to send you to a place you cannot imagine." He later confessed to delivering $50,000 to al-Qaeda operatives in Indonesia and to plotting with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to serve as a sleeper agent for al-Qaeda in the United States.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In 2012, Khan pleaded guilty to conspiracy, material support, murder and spying charges in exchange for serving as a government witness.
Well, for more, we’re joined by Majid Khan’s lawyer, Wells Dixon. He’s a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Wells Dixon. Could you talk about how you came to represent Majid Khan?
J. WELLS DIXON: Sure. So, in March of 2003, Majid Khan disappeared. His family had no idea where he was, and he wasn’t heard from until he appeared in Guantánamo in September of 2006. But shortly before he arrived in Guantánamo, during the course of a criminal case that was being tried here in New York, his name came up. And the government introduced at that trial a stipulation, a written document that acknowledged that they had him in custody. And the document purported to describe things that he would say about what was going on in the trial. So that was the first time that his family knew that he was in U.S. custody. And after that, we were in contact with his family, and they asked us to file a case to challenge the legality of his detention.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And it was in 2012 that Khan signed a plea agreement? Could you explain what it means to sign a plea agreement and what the impact of that has been on his case?
J. WELLS DIXON: Sure. So, for many years, we represented—that we were representing Majid, he was challenging the legality of his detention. But in early 2012, he was charged by a military commission with various offenses. And he ultimately signed an agreement in which he agreed to plead guilty and to cooperate with the government. He became a cooperating witness for the government. And he did that for—really, for one central reason, and that is that he was sorry for the things that he had done, and he really wanted to make up for the things that he had done. And this was a way for him to accept responsibility, to really move forward with his life and to hopefully have some chance at a life after Guantánamo. You know, he didn’t want hisCIA torture and his time at Guantánamo to be the last chapter written in his life.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, and can you talk about this—the information now that’s been declassified, what Majid Khan alleges was done to him by CIAinterrogators? I mean, some of this material is quite stunning.
J. WELLS DIXON: Well, it’s horrifying. As you mentioned earlier, he was waterboarded twice in 2003. He was subjected to sexual abuse. He was subjected to extreme sensory deprivation. And he suffered tremendously as a result of this. I mean, it’s absolutely horrifying what was done to him.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to turn to a comment by former U.S. Justice Department attorney John Yoo, who played a key role in drafting the Bush administration torture memos. In December, he appeared on CNN after the release of the Senate committee report on the CIA’s use of torture. He was asked about the allegations of torture, which include—about Majid Khan, such as forced rectal feeding. This was Yoo’s response.
JOHN YOO: I agree with you. If these things happened as they’re described in the report, as you describe them, those were not authorized by the Justice Department. They were not supposed to be done, and those people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was John Yoo speaking on CNN. Could you comment on what he said?
J. WELLS DIXON: Yeah, so there you have it. I mean, in the Senate report, there was a disclosure, the fact that Majid had been raped. And you have there the legal architect of the CIA torture program, the lawyer who literally wrote the memos that allowed the torture to occur, saying that’s not something that he authorized and that that’s something that would violate the anti-torture statute.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what about the fact that he—you said earlier that he regretted, he wanted to compensate for what he had done. How do we take his claims of admission, given the fact that they claim—for whatever it is that he’s admitted to, they all came after he was subjected to this torture, is that correct?
J. WELLS DIXON: Yes, he agreed to plead guilty and to cooperate after being tortured. And what’s important to understand about that is that he agreed to plead guilty despite what had happened to him, not because of what had happened to him. You know, as you might imagine, the decision to trust the government, to take a leap of faith, to use the words that he used at his guilty plea, was very difficult, given the fact the he had been waterboarded and raped and subjected to all of these other horrors. But he really, truly believes that that was—that that’s something that’s necessary for him to do to put his prior life behind him and to move on with his life.
AMY GOODMAN: Wells Dixon, can you talk about how you, as an attorney representing him, knowing what has happened to him over the years, how you work these deals with the government about what you can and cannot reveal or say?
J. WELLS DIXON: Right, well, the Center for Constitutional Rights has long been on record opposing Guantánamo, opposing the CIA torture program and raising serious objections to the military commissions system. Having said that, our first interest always is the best interest of our clients. And so I, as counsel for Majid Khan, have to do what’s in his best legal interest, and ultimately what he directs me to do. And he made a decision that he wanted to plead guilty and cooperate, that he really wanted to try to atone for what he had done. And this is the way that he can do that. He is committed to fulfilling—to his obligation to cooperate in the commissions system. But, you know, if the government were to decide, for example, that it wanted to transfer his cooperation here to a criminal court in the United States, he would certainly be receptive to that. And, you know, I, as his counsel, think that there are policy reasons why that might be a good thing to do, notwithstanding the flaws, you know, even in our criminal justice system. But it’s up to the government. It’s really up to the government whether that happens.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to read from a Reuters report about the newly released details of Majid Khan’s treatment in a CIA black site: quote, "In a July 2003 session, Khan said, CIA guards hooded and hung him from a metal pole for several days and repeatedly poured ice water on his mouth, nose and genitals. At one point, he said, they forced him to sit naked on a wooden box during a 15-minute videotaped interrogation. After that, Khan said, he was shackled to a wall, which prevented him from sleeping.
"When a doctor arrived to check his condition, [Majid] Khan begged for help, he said. Instead, Khan said, the doctor instructed the guards to again hang him from the metal bar. After hanging from the pole for 24 hours, Khan was forced to write a 'confession' while being videotaped naked."
That’s an excerpt from a report by Reuters. Can you comment on this, overall, Wells, but also talk about the role of doctors, the role of psychologists, or what you heard about what happened in this CIA black site?
J. WELLS DIXON: Well, one of the things that we got declassified was Majid’s commentary on what had happened to him, how it felt and what he was experiencing as these things occurred. And one of the things that he has said is that doctors were among the worst torturers that he had. And I think, you know, you’ve given that one example as a perfect illustration, where you have a medical professional who is not only monitoring him, but monitoring him for the purpose of deciding when he can go back and be tortured even more. It’s horrifying. It’s a betrayal of the medical profession. And it’s unlawful. I mean, I think that’s the bottom line here, is that what happened to Majid Khan was unlawful. If you accept the notion that the United States is at war, which is of course debatable, if you accept that notion, these are very clear war crimes. Torture, rape, these are war crimes, and they need to be prosecuted. There needs to be a new DOJ investigation into this.
AMY GOODMAN: How did he know the person was a doctor?
J. WELLS DIXON: I don’t know the answer to that question.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And he’s the only—Majid Khan is the only high-value detainee who has legal representation, is that right, in Guantánamo?
J. WELLS DIXON: No, actually, there are several who have legal representation. There are some, like Abu Zubaydah, for example, who has counsel. And then there are a number of men who have been charged by military commission—the alleged 9/11 plotters; the alleged Cole bomber, Nashiri. So there are several counsel who are representing these men.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what is it that you are calling for? What should be done now in his case?
J. WELLS DIXON: Well, we’re calling for greater transparency and accountability for what happened in the torture program. You know, every time there is a public disclosure about what has happened, we see more and more evidence of the savagery that occurred and sort of the treachery that’s occurred at the CIA. And it just gets worse. You know, once we get to—we think we’ve gotten to the bottom of it, there is a new and horrifying revelation. So there needs to be more accountability. We need to see the entire Senate report. And there need to be Justice Department prosecutions, as I said. That’s the only way to get to the bottom of what really happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about the release of the Senate intelligence report, I wanted to ask you about an interesting interaction I had with the former CIA director, Porter Goss. It was in March. I was participating at Hofstra University in Long Island in a review of the George W. Bush presidency. It was called "The Bush Doctrine and Combating Terrorism." This is a clip of my exchange with the former CIA director, Porter Goss, about the bipartisan Senate committee report on the CIA’s use of torture.
PORTER GOSS: In the interests of fairness, would respond a little bit on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study on rendition, detention and interrogation—was a partisan political study. It was not two-sided. And there are further facts that need to come out from those who are able to, I think, correct some of the misstatements in the Senate study. That has not happened yet. I hope it will happen, because I do believe the American public needs to know the truth of all of this. The Senate study is not the full truth.
AMY GOODMAN: Was there any truth in it?
MODERATOR: Could you say again?
PORTER GOSS: What?
AMY GOODMAN: Was there any truth in it?
PORTER GOSS: Of course there was some truth in it. It was a cherry-picked, selective presentation of information to support a narrative that was made before this report actually even was started. The announced purpose of the report, of the study, if I’m correcting Chairman Feinstein—if I’m quoting Chairman Feinstein properly, was to make sure this never happens again. I’m not sure what the "this" was, or neither are a lot of people. But apparently, as you go through the report, as you go through this study, there are a series of observations that involved information that the decision makers could have provided to the people doing the report and would have given a fairer and more complete understanding of what happened and why. If you want to know why something happened, it’s a good idea to go back to the people who made the decision and ask them. They calculatedly and determinedly avoided going back to anybody that they thought might spoil their narrative. So, consequently, yes, there is some information that is cherry-picked, some out of context and some actually factually correct, as far as I know. I have not read a word of the report. I have not read a word of any of this stuff, because, to me, it is purely partisan political. And a politicization of intelligence in this country is going to hurt only one person, and that’s every citizen in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to quote Senator McCain, who—
PORTER GOSS: I love Senator McCain, and I would certainly agree with you that Senator McCain is the icon of prisoner of war conduct. He has suffered greatly for our country and made great sacrifices and deserves to be listened to. But he does not have all of the information either.
AMY GOODMAN: He said, "It is a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose—to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies—but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world."
PORTER GOSS: He is welcome to his opinion. I doubt he’s read the report. And in any event, he has certainly not asked the people who were involved in this activity what they think, because they have all indicated that he has not asked them. So, even he is dealing with less than a full deck.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Porter Goss, the former director of the CIA. Wells Dixon, you’re a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. His response?
J. WELLS DIXON: Well, I also have a lot of questions I’d like to ask people who were involved in the torture program. One of those questions is: Why was Majid Khan raped? Now, in response to the Senate report, the CIA offers no justification. And we heard earlier that the legal architect of the torture program said that wasn’t authorized. So, why did it happen? I do want to know the answer to that.
But, look, the notion that the report was incomplete or that it’s a partisan hack job, that it wasn’t well done, those are—those are talking points. And the only people who are making those talking points are people who are actually implicated by the report.
One of the really important aspects of the information that we got declassified concerning Majid Khan is that it corroborates a lot of what’s in the report. Not only does it discuss his torture that exceeded what’s disclosed in that report, but it also corroborates a lot of things in there—the sexual assault, for example, detainees being subjected to torture methods that are indistinguishable from waterboarding. So, you know, I am all in favor of the public release of the entire report, as well as the CIA’s own Panetta review. I think that’s a starting point for accountability.
AMY GOODMAN: Leon Panetta.
J. WELLS DIXON: Correct, right.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Wells Dixon, senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he represents Guantánamo prisoner Majid Khan. He specializes in challenging unlawful detentions.
This is Democracy Now! 

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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.


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