1 00:00:01,260 --> 00:00:08,580 So with all of those preliminaries out of the way, it's a real pleasure to introduce to you Josh Phillips, who is joining us from New York. 2 00:00:09,750 --> 00:00:16,050 Josh is going to be speaking about his new book, None of US Were Like This before American Soldiers and Torture, 3 00:00:16,920 --> 00:00:22,140 which has been around wooden houses, you know, for the last year. So it's been up a year with a very, very well-received book. 4 00:00:22,150 --> 00:00:27,390 And we're really excited to hear some of the some of the work from that in that book. 5 00:00:27,450 --> 00:00:31,590 Josh has been working as a as a reporter for many years now. 6 00:00:31,950 --> 00:00:37,979 His work has appeared in a number of very, very August journals, such as The Washington Post, 7 00:00:37,980 --> 00:00:43,559 Newsweek, The Nation, Turkey's Gay Chronicle, Atlanta Journal, many, many places. 8 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:49,030 So that better day. Josh, what about you to speak 35, 40 minutes and then ask the questions. 9 00:00:49,050 --> 00:00:52,900 Right. And thank you. All right. 10 00:00:57,570 --> 00:01:00,360 Thank you so much for inviting me here. It's a real pleasure. 11 00:01:00,870 --> 00:01:09,120 When we tend to think about us torture during the war on terror, we tend to think about it in terms of historical events. 12 00:01:09,120 --> 00:01:14,130 That is, you know, Guantanamo stories, harsh interrogation program or two of three. 13 00:01:14,760 --> 00:01:22,829 Abu Ghraib was publicly revealed in 2000 form and the CIA basically shut down its system 14 00:01:22,830 --> 00:01:30,180 of or program for secret interrogation and renditions and black sites in oh six. 15 00:01:31,140 --> 00:01:41,280 But the legacy of torture is still moving on in many unrecognised ways, and it continues to dominate the public discourse. 16 00:01:41,280 --> 00:01:50,820 And it re-emerges, for example, after the assassination of Osama bin Laden and after the 10th anniversary of September 11th, 17 00:01:51,210 --> 00:01:55,200 we were once again revisiting that towards your work. Is it necessary? 18 00:01:55,200 --> 00:02:04,290 Is it effective in basically it's the former Bush administration officials, notably Dick Cheney, that are leading the charge. 19 00:02:05,610 --> 00:02:10,829 They're basically advancing sort of a four point argument about torture. 20 00:02:10,830 --> 00:02:19,290 And they say that it was legal. The techniques that were used, including waterboarding, was used on our troops during training, 21 00:02:19,410 --> 00:02:24,090 and therefore it's considered legally permissible to use them on detainees. 22 00:02:25,200 --> 00:02:34,169 They say that it was limited. Waterboarding was only is three times that is on three detainees and they say 23 00:02:34,170 --> 00:02:39,510 that it produced an abundant amount of intelligence and left no lasting damage. 24 00:02:40,560 --> 00:02:46,650 And this argument has been advanced here in the UK. 25 00:02:46,650 --> 00:02:58,110 Just last month, in fact, my representative of New York State, Peter King, appeared before the Home Affairs Committee just last month. 26 00:02:58,770 --> 00:03:05,100 And Peter King represents or is the chairman of the homeland, the Homeland Security Committee. 27 00:03:05,850 --> 00:03:13,139 And he spoke before a roots of violent radicalisation inquiry and he repeated the very same points. 28 00:03:13,140 --> 00:03:14,610 That is, torture is legal. 29 00:03:14,610 --> 00:03:24,150 The torture that we used was legal, limited, produced lots of intelligence that thwarted imminent terrorist attacks and had no lasting damage. 30 00:03:26,210 --> 00:03:34,630 Now the Cheney camp really wants to keep us focussed on waterboarding and the CIA program of torture. 31 00:03:35,030 --> 00:03:41,360 And this is by design, because really it was a comparatively small program. 32 00:03:42,230 --> 00:03:48,200 We're talking about a program that held about 100 detainees. 33 00:03:49,160 --> 00:03:56,090 And Cheney might be right in that waterboarding was only employed three times by CIA personnel. 34 00:03:57,470 --> 00:04:10,730 But the part that's left out of this is that, by contrast, the military held tens of thousands of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. 35 00:04:11,870 --> 00:04:22,189 And the most publicly recognised incident of detainee abuse was obviously Abu Ghraib, which they want to frame as an aberration. 36 00:04:22,190 --> 00:04:29,810 Just a few bad apples bent, according to the accounts by soldiers, as well as the detainees themselves, 37 00:04:30,350 --> 00:04:35,720 along with what's contained in publicly accessible military documents. 38 00:04:36,470 --> 00:04:42,100 We know that detainee abuse and torture was actually fairly widespread during the early part of the war on terror. 39 00:04:42,180 --> 00:04:44,390 That's important and worth emphasising. 40 00:04:45,470 --> 00:04:58,680 And in fact, in 2006, the Department of Defence even even found that there were that they had done 842 criminal investigations and inquiries came. 41 00:05:01,110 --> 00:05:03,599 Now, in addition to that, 42 00:05:03,600 --> 00:05:14,070 Human Rights Watch has found that there are 184 detainee deaths that occurred in US custody in four detention and interrogation operations. 43 00:05:14,580 --> 00:05:18,450 So in a way, we've obviously been duped. 44 00:05:18,450 --> 00:05:24,570 We've been lured into myopically focusing on the CIA program and waterboarding. 45 00:05:25,680 --> 00:05:29,880 But obviously that misses the larger picture here. 46 00:05:31,290 --> 00:05:38,760 We fail to grasp the true breadth and scope of detainee abuse as well as its causes and costs. 47 00:05:39,750 --> 00:05:52,010 So. The question is and the questions that that sort of guided me in when I was doing this book was How did U.S. forces turn to torture? 48 00:05:53,700 --> 00:05:58,730 Am not going to cover the CIA's program because frankly, as I said, it was a limited program, 49 00:05:59,600 --> 00:06:05,509 but it operated differently than the military's response to detainee abuse and torture. 50 00:06:05,510 --> 00:06:13,850 That is, it was much more directly authorised by the administration in the case. 51 00:06:14,120 --> 00:06:20,000 The cases of detainee abuse and torture that occurred within the military were far more varied and complicated. 52 00:06:20,600 --> 00:06:24,799 So when I'm talking about US military forces, 53 00:06:24,800 --> 00:06:34,730 I'm referring to soldiers who were trained for conventional warfare, trained interrogators and senior officials. 54 00:06:34,820 --> 00:06:46,310 Now, both the civilian officials in the Pentagon as well as the the military officer, and there isn't really a one size fits all explanation. 55 00:06:47,210 --> 00:06:53,720 One really needs to understand the particular wartime situations and the underlying 56 00:06:53,720 --> 00:07:00,800 beliefs that led US forces to believe that abuse and torture was necessary, 57 00:07:01,370 --> 00:07:03,920 effective and permissible. Okay. 58 00:07:04,640 --> 00:07:12,830 So I mean, they discussed this in very broad strokes because as I said, there are a lot of disparate cases, but there are a lot of overlaps as well. 59 00:07:14,630 --> 00:07:19,370 I'm going to first talk about the interrogators both in Guantanamo and in the 60 00:07:19,370 --> 00:07:27,470 mobile interrogation teams they basically face for common situational problems, 61 00:07:28,190 --> 00:07:31,910 background collection, expectations and pressure. 62 00:07:32,120 --> 00:07:43,370 Now, insofar as background is concerned on both the interrogators, on the mobile interrogation teams in forward operating bases, 63 00:07:43,730 --> 00:07:53,490 as well as the interrogators who worked in Guantanamo very early on, often lacked basic knowledge about who they were fighting. 64 00:07:53,510 --> 00:08:00,590 That is, they didn't have a sense who their enemy was. They didn't have a sense of the breakdown of insurgent groups. 65 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:08,060 They didn't understand the political landscape. Very few of them, very few of the interrogators even knew who the Baath Party was. 66 00:08:09,110 --> 00:08:17,540 They didn't understand the ethnic and tribal divisions in terms of collection and forward operating bases. 67 00:08:17,540 --> 00:08:28,370 Forward operating bases where small stations or bases, often in remote parts of Iraq and Afghanistan that were sort of the first repository for. 68 00:08:28,910 --> 00:08:35,870 So troops went out. They had to make assessments, broad collections. 69 00:08:35,870 --> 00:08:39,169 They did sweeps, area sweeps. 70 00:08:39,170 --> 00:08:47,180 They didn't need night rate, night raids. And they often collected detainees on very flimsy evidence, including things like cell phones. 71 00:08:47,450 --> 00:08:55,310 Cell phones were often used to detonate IEDs, improvised explosive devices, for if you had photographs of Saddam Hussein. 72 00:08:55,340 --> 00:08:58,850 Those were often used to collect detainees and evidence. 73 00:08:59,690 --> 00:09:08,300 If you carried a can of benzene, that was considered a legitimate sign that you could have been linked to a terrorist 74 00:09:08,450 --> 00:09:13,310 or a terrorist organisation or an insurgent group as far as Guantanamo was concerned. 75 00:09:14,450 --> 00:09:23,480 There was, by the military's own accounting, many detainees that were picked up in Afghanistan because of bounties. 76 00:09:24,080 --> 00:09:32,150 So you had a situation in both the forward operating bases, as well as in Guantanamo, 77 00:09:32,330 --> 00:09:37,729 where you had untrained interrogators or interrogators who may have been trained but 78 00:09:37,730 --> 00:09:40,760 didn't have a sense of the background of the population that they were dealing with, 79 00:09:41,840 --> 00:09:47,720 suddenly flooded with all these detainees, trying to do a kind of massive triage. 80 00:09:48,380 --> 00:09:58,960 And in addition to that, they were forced to their efforts to basically find confessions within a very short amount of time. 81 00:09:58,970 --> 00:10:03,050 So there was an expectation that not you're not just getting intelligence, 82 00:10:03,410 --> 00:10:11,750 but you're getting confessions and confessions within the mobile interrogation units could and should have been collected within 30 minutes. 83 00:10:13,250 --> 00:10:22,220 Right now, as far as the Guantanamo folks are concerned, they may not have had the same sort of expectation of time, 84 00:10:22,940 --> 00:10:33,350 but they were still under the expectation that they should be gaining quick, actionable intelligence that would be able to thwart attacks. 85 00:10:35,900 --> 00:10:41,570 So in the mobile interrogation units, of course, they're in the sort of first lines of defence. 86 00:10:42,360 --> 00:10:51,440 They're. There are currents in attack. They're trying to sort of desperately collect intelligence for the Guantanamo folks. 87 00:10:52,160 --> 00:11:02,390 They obviously didn't face the same sort of imminent attacks, but they were led to believe that they had the worst of the worst. 88 00:11:03,110 --> 00:11:08,210 And this was something that senior members of the Pentagon kept repeating to them. 89 00:11:08,750 --> 00:11:19,819 So and in fact, even believed Donald Rumsfeld not just not just repeated it rhetorically to defend the existence of Guantanamo, 90 00:11:19,820 --> 00:11:29,180 but for a an early period of time, he and other senior members of the Pentagon genuinely believed that they had the worst of the worst. 91 00:11:29,930 --> 00:11:46,219 So instead of actually considering the systemic and operational problems they were trying to they they drew on an alternate 92 00:11:46,220 --> 00:11:54,830 explanation of why they believe the amount of intelligence was limited and the pace of collecting it was lacking. 93 00:11:55,550 --> 00:12:07,610 And in short, many interrogators and senior officials believe that the explanation was simply that the detainees were schooled in advanced resistance. 94 00:12:08,600 --> 00:12:24,200 So where where does this idea of advanced resistance coming from actually comes from here comes from Manchester in May of 2000, 95 00:12:24,950 --> 00:12:30,439 the British authorities, they found they did a raid on a kind of suspects house. 96 00:12:30,440 --> 00:12:36,050 And there they found an 18 chapter manual, which was dubbed the Manchester Manual. 97 00:12:37,400 --> 00:12:46,230 And in that manual, there are sections that actually instruct al Qaeda members how to resist interrogation. 98 00:12:46,250 --> 00:12:55,910 So what does this consist of? In short, lying, withholding information and saying you were tortured. 99 00:12:56,690 --> 00:13:06,650 That is essentially the full some of what the Manchester manual counter resistance advanced resistance techniques consist of. 100 00:13:08,120 --> 00:13:15,740 Unfortunately, it actually did inform the first Pentagon memo that authorised harsh interrogation. 101 00:13:16,130 --> 00:13:25,580 In fact, Donald Rumsfeld's December 2nd, 2002 memo is titled Advanced Counter Resistance Techniques. 102 00:13:26,690 --> 00:13:40,170 Okay. So the problem is that this is symptomatic of where ideas of torture or the efficacy of torture come from. 103 00:13:40,770 --> 00:13:49,020 They are rooted in ideas of folklore like advanced resistance or myths. 104 00:13:49,050 --> 00:13:57,600 Often time, such as 16 hours of sleep deprivation and you can get someone to crack or pseudoscience, 105 00:13:58,500 --> 00:14:08,159 often heard both psychologists and psychiatrists at Guantanamo and elsewhere thinking and even within the CIA program, 106 00:14:08,160 --> 00:14:13,320 frankly, that you could calibrate pain to get truthful information. 107 00:14:14,070 --> 00:14:22,590 And finally, fiction. It may be it may seem surprising, but then I can talk about this at greater length. 108 00:14:23,310 --> 00:14:38,940 But movies and books have routinely buttressed the idea that pain and duress can be applied to produce quick, actionable intelligence. 109 00:14:40,200 --> 00:14:49,740 Now, the story with soldiers, that is, conventional soldiers who are involved in detainee abuse is a little bit more complicated. 110 00:14:50,940 --> 00:14:59,550 So in Iraq, for example, in 2003, the complexion of the war changed fairly rapidly, of course. 111 00:15:00,120 --> 00:15:06,180 You had soldiers that were entering Iraq with the expectation that they were there to fight Saddam's armies, 112 00:15:06,930 --> 00:15:13,650 look for weapons of mass destruction, find links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. 113 00:15:14,100 --> 00:15:20,520 Obviously, that one person had been moved fairly quickly and suddenly soldiers were embroiled in a 114 00:15:20,520 --> 00:15:24,340 guerrilla conflict and fighting these insurgent groups for which they had no knowledge. 115 00:15:25,680 --> 00:15:37,079 And in many cases, again, the sort of first line of attack was based in or centred around these forward operating bases, 116 00:15:37,080 --> 00:15:42,540 these remote forward operating bases across the country, both in both Iraq and Afghanistan, 117 00:15:43,950 --> 00:15:49,649 and ensured you had soldiers who were tasked to work on tanks. 118 00:15:49,650 --> 00:15:57,340 And all of a sudden they're being told that they need to abandon their tanks, get in Humvees, and get involved in sweeps, in nitrates. 119 00:15:58,470 --> 00:16:09,720 And that's what they did. They had no training and then entered houses, detained Iraqis and Afghans. 120 00:16:10,530 --> 00:16:19,769 The same arresting soldiers would then guard over them in these forward operating bases or being instructed to help with interrogations. 121 00:16:19,770 --> 00:16:22,230 And that's when things got very messy. 122 00:16:22,710 --> 00:16:34,290 And it's important to note that many, if not most, of the incidents of detainee abuse and torture actually occurred in these forward operating bases. 123 00:16:37,020 --> 00:16:41,969 And this is according to the military's own records, in fact, records by military investigators, 124 00:16:41,970 --> 00:16:47,430 the Criminal Investigative Division for Command and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. 125 00:16:49,350 --> 00:17:00,810 So it was in the context of these soldiers in guarding over and helping with interrogations that things got missing. 126 00:17:01,980 --> 00:17:06,690 Soldiers were involved in such things as stress positions. 127 00:17:07,410 --> 00:17:17,090 Probably the most common form of abuse, sleep deprivation, forced exercises, mock executions. 128 00:17:17,130 --> 00:17:20,250 And there were some incidents of water torture. 129 00:17:21,960 --> 00:17:29,370 And one of the things that struck me in the course of reporting on the book that was that none of the soldiers that I 130 00:17:29,370 --> 00:17:36,810 interviewed that were that belonged to this sort of third category of ordinary soldiers getting involved in abuse and torture. 131 00:17:37,740 --> 00:17:41,730 None of them ever referenced a Pentagon memo or directive. 132 00:17:43,140 --> 00:17:49,710 And so oftentimes you would hear the most banal sources of inspiration for the actual techniques themselves, 133 00:17:49,860 --> 00:17:53,910 such as what was available, like flex cuffs. 134 00:17:54,300 --> 00:18:00,000 Right. Just simply using the plastic cuffs that they had to torture people. 135 00:18:00,560 --> 00:18:06,270 And imitation, many of them drew on what the special forces had been doing. 136 00:18:07,140 --> 00:18:16,320 And there was a whole regiment of abuse that Special Forces was that were involved in, which included a technique that was dubbed the disco. 137 00:18:16,740 --> 00:18:27,870 It was a combination of flashing lights, sleep deprivation, loud noise, etc., barking dogs, remembering what had been done to them during the. 138 00:18:27,950 --> 00:18:38,270 Training or when they were being hazed. Common source of inspiration, what they heard about what their officers boasted they did in Vietnam. 139 00:18:39,830 --> 00:18:46,370 I found that to be particularly the case with the water torture that was reproduced and then what they could get away with. 140 00:18:46,370 --> 00:18:48,559 And this is kind of important and I'll get to this later. 141 00:18:48,560 --> 00:18:55,910 But the common characteristics of the torture that I just mentioned, the torture techniques, was that it didn't leave marks. 142 00:18:58,370 --> 00:19:12,280 So the reasons why the troops, the soldiers were involved in abuse and torture by their own account was for a number of different reasons. 143 00:19:12,290 --> 00:19:18,620 You know, first and foremost, I would say they were using these techniques to discipline their detainees, 144 00:19:19,760 --> 00:19:23,300 and that was considered totally legitimate by their commanders. 145 00:19:24,710 --> 00:19:30,440 Oftentimes, however, especially during the early part of the Iraq war, 146 00:19:31,130 --> 00:19:37,850 many of the soldiers candidly admitted that abuse was simply an outlet for rage and frustration. 147 00:19:38,990 --> 00:19:47,180 Some simply said that it was boredom. And of course, they were also using these techniques during interrogation. 148 00:19:48,260 --> 00:19:58,700 But you cannot simply explain that the abuse and torture occurred because an officer issued a command. 149 00:19:59,210 --> 00:20:07,580 It's a very incomplete understanding of how abuse and torture took root overlooking abuse that is, 150 00:20:07,580 --> 00:20:14,030 officers or senior officials looking the other way enabled it, failing to investigate abuse, 151 00:20:14,030 --> 00:20:15,259 which was a very serious, 152 00:20:15,260 --> 00:20:26,419 widespread problem that for the first time I think military investigators are starting to talk about today and ignoring whistleblowers, 153 00:20:26,420 --> 00:20:34,430 which was a very grave problem for a period of time. Whistleblowers were ignored, harassed and even threatened. 154 00:20:34,460 --> 00:20:38,330 I mean, take the case of the Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Joseph Darby. 155 00:20:39,920 --> 00:20:49,880 He was trying to being as discreet as possible about revealing the Abu Ghraib abuse. 156 00:20:50,660 --> 00:20:56,719 He sort of surreptitiously snuck a copy of the photographs under the military 157 00:20:56,720 --> 00:21:02,030 investigators dorm and hope that the investigation would proceed without any harm to him. 158 00:21:03,660 --> 00:21:14,540 He is congratulated on live TV by Donald Rumsfeld in front of a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, and his house was instantly vandalised. 159 00:21:15,320 --> 00:21:19,490 He slept with a pistol under his ben or under his pillow, rather. 160 00:21:20,570 --> 00:21:26,510 And he basically received the military equivalent of witness protection. 161 00:21:27,650 --> 00:21:40,690 So. The problems with reporting abuse were an enormous source of distress for certain soldiers who earnestly wanted to halt it, 162 00:21:40,690 --> 00:21:43,750 including those that had been involved in it. 163 00:21:46,360 --> 00:21:51,790 And their involvement in the soldiers involvement in detainee abuse and torture 164 00:21:53,080 --> 00:22:00,459 represents one of the unrecognised costs of this whole by-product of official policy, 165 00:22:00,460 --> 00:22:12,130 you could say. It's not new, but it is an unrecognised and largely misunderstood or unknown problem. 166 00:22:14,170 --> 00:22:28,360 But it's unprecedented in US history. In 1983, the Congress commissioned probably the largest study on veterans full stop. 167 00:22:28,900 --> 00:22:33,250 It was particularly focussed on Vietnam veterans and post-traumatic stress. 168 00:22:33,790 --> 00:22:42,880 It was called the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Studying. It took four years to research and included interviews with 3000 detainees. 169 00:22:43,360 --> 00:22:51,790 And in short, they found that the highest correlative with PTSD was not combat, actually. 170 00:22:52,450 --> 00:23:04,990 But it was the soldier's exposure to or involvement in abusive violence, which includes but is not exclusive to prisoner abuse. 171 00:23:05,980 --> 00:23:11,410 So we are, alas, revisiting this stuff all over again. 172 00:23:12,310 --> 00:23:22,660 And in the course of the work that I did reporting on the book, I met many soldiers who were similarly being very distressed by their involvement. 173 00:23:22,660 --> 00:23:30,310 As I said, not just with difficulties reporting it, but just being involved in detainee abuse and torture in one form or the other. 174 00:23:31,390 --> 00:23:39,520 There were soldiers who had very serious anxiety and depression, violent outbursts, 175 00:23:40,180 --> 00:23:45,730 often getting into fights, substance abuse and even attempted suicide. 176 00:23:46,960 --> 00:23:52,510 In fact, one of the main soldiers that I profiled in the book took his life, 177 00:23:53,110 --> 00:24:04,360 and he referenced his experience with detainee abuse and torture as being the primary source of his traumatic wartime experience. 178 00:24:06,190 --> 00:24:12,069 And unfortunately, one of the soldiers who first approached me about his difficulty trying to report abuse, 179 00:24:12,070 --> 00:24:20,350 who was himself a combat medic, first monitoring detainees, then getting directly involved in abuse, 180 00:24:22,720 --> 00:24:29,170 grew disenchanted with it, tried to halt it, was rebuffed by his commanders, returned home, 181 00:24:29,770 --> 00:24:38,270 tried to protest it in the anti-war movement, contacted me trying to get traction on holding his commanders accountable. 182 00:24:39,880 --> 00:24:43,480 Struggled for three and a half years since his return home. 183 00:24:43,480 --> 00:24:54,700 And then he, too, took his life. And I'm continuously, unfortunately, seeing many other similar episodes of this. 184 00:24:57,070 --> 00:25:08,560 So apart from the effects of of detainee abuse and torture on the detainees, of course, the soldiers there is the the impact on detainees. 185 00:25:09,580 --> 00:25:21,160 And as I said, the sort of the key hallmark of the techniques, as I said, was that they didn't leave marks. 186 00:25:21,730 --> 00:25:28,120 It's not that democracies don't torture. It's that they often torture in more stealthy ways. 187 00:25:28,840 --> 00:25:40,460 They're responding to the scrutiny of human rights organisations, church organisations, health officials, those who are involved in torture treatment. 188 00:25:42,250 --> 00:25:53,170 And the practical effect of it is that in the case of the detainees who were sexually humiliated, many of them, 189 00:25:53,170 --> 00:26:02,890 according to clinicians and researchers that I met who were treating detainees, especially in Iraq, would say that these people don't get treatment. 190 00:26:03,790 --> 00:26:09,880 You know, they're too gripped by humiliation to seek out help. 191 00:26:11,770 --> 00:26:20,110 The other problem with being tortured with stealthy techniques is that you have nothing to show, right? 192 00:26:20,590 --> 00:26:25,720 You cannot go to a military investigator and prove that you were tortured. 193 00:26:26,680 --> 00:26:35,380 And this inflicts its own kind of pain, of course. It's sort of it's denial heaped on to pain and suffering already. 194 00:26:37,300 --> 00:26:48,430 And then there's the problem with deaths. As I said, there are at least 184 detainee deaths, 195 00:26:48,610 --> 00:26:55,840 deaths of detainees that died in military custody during just regular detention and in some cases, interrogation. 196 00:26:57,190 --> 00:27:00,430 And no one has served more than five months of jail time. 197 00:27:03,710 --> 00:27:11,870 So apart from that, there's the impact on counterinsurgency itself or counterterrorism generally. 198 00:27:13,250 --> 00:27:24,160 Now, one of the things that surprised me was that the military and intelligence officials that I met, especially the season ones, hated torture. 199 00:27:27,810 --> 00:27:33,270 They needed end because of its impact within the interrogation room itself. 200 00:27:34,320 --> 00:27:38,700 That is the effect of pain and duress on memory and recall. 201 00:27:39,960 --> 00:27:45,030 They hated torture because it often burned a system of public cooperation. 202 00:27:45,030 --> 00:27:50,570 And that system of public cooperation is not about making nice in your community. 203 00:27:51,300 --> 00:27:56,040 It's about relying on one of the key backbones of intelligence. 204 00:27:56,730 --> 00:28:01,170 And when you use torture and you burn that system of public cooperation, 205 00:28:01,230 --> 00:28:08,910 then Informant Network, you are losing a trove of valuable intelligence in addition to them. 206 00:28:09,990 --> 00:28:15,990 One of the things that came up in a Senate Armed Services Committee was that within 207 00:28:15,990 --> 00:28:24,990 the US Senate Armed Services Committee meeting in I think 2008 or nine eight, 208 00:28:27,270 --> 00:28:32,579 they found that the number one and number two greatest sources of insurgent 209 00:28:32,580 --> 00:28:40,500 recruitment and therein coalition deaths were the images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. 210 00:28:41,190 --> 00:28:52,980 So collectively, you know, not just a great loss and a deleterious impact on the soldiers and the detainees, 211 00:28:53,430 --> 00:28:56,550 but also on the counter terrorism policy itself. 212 00:28:58,440 --> 00:29:06,149 And as a result of that, many of these seasoned intelligence workers, those that worked in Guantanamo, for example, 213 00:29:06,150 --> 00:29:14,730 who earnestly worked to halt the authorised harsh interrogation that occurred there, you know, two, know three. 214 00:29:15,240 --> 00:29:20,940 Many of them have since left the military, which means we have a gaping hole in institutional memory. 215 00:29:22,470 --> 00:29:34,710 So in the meantime, we still have the Cheneys who are professing that torture produced bountiful intelligence. 216 00:29:36,390 --> 00:29:41,490 None of this has been verified or corroborated at all. 217 00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:48,630 In fact, according to the 911 Commission and even the CIA, Syria's own inspector general, 218 00:29:50,100 --> 00:29:56,790 none of the intelligence produced by coercive interrogation, torture, whatever you want to call it, thwarted any terrorist attacks. 219 00:29:57,450 --> 00:30:00,560 So we're still waiting to see what they're talking about. 220 00:30:00,570 --> 00:30:04,500 It's very possible that they're right. But thus far, no proof. 221 00:30:06,390 --> 00:30:15,690 And of course, those who are advocating for torture are conveniently downplaying or ignoring all of these costs. 222 00:30:17,130 --> 00:30:23,730 In the meantime, we have President Obama who says that he wants to look forward and not backward. 223 00:30:25,050 --> 00:30:31,890 Now, the problem with this is that there has not been any real accountability for torture. 224 00:30:31,950 --> 00:30:38,550 As I said, you know, five no more than five months for 484 deaths. 225 00:30:39,600 --> 00:30:45,720 You had a smattering of soldiers that were held to account for Abu Ghraib, and that's pretty much it. 226 00:30:45,750 --> 00:30:56,760 No senior officials held accountable. So without any real accountability and without reckoning with torture in any way, 227 00:30:57,330 --> 00:31:04,230 these notions of the efficacy of torture continue today, unfortunately. 228 00:31:05,100 --> 00:31:15,749 And in short, Cheney and his cadres, they they fill a void in the torture discourse and the notions of torture, 229 00:31:15,750 --> 00:31:18,480 the torture success stories they live on. 230 00:31:19,170 --> 00:31:33,270 And that is of great chagrin to the the military intelligence officers, interrogators, and and other military officials who are gravely concerned. 231 00:31:34,290 --> 00:31:43,350 They they are more so, I think, in some cases then the human rights community worried about the lack of accountability for torture. 232 00:31:44,610 --> 00:31:54,569 And their concern is that we might revisit this all over again if we have another terror strike, 233 00:31:54,570 --> 00:32:02,940 heaven forbid, another war or even a president that believes in the efficacy of torture. 234 00:32:03,900 --> 00:32:07,030 So. With that, I'll take questions. 235 00:32:07,540 --> 00:32:16,269 Great. Really fantastic presentation I think would have a huge amount of fans and I'm sure we'll be able to explore in the in the discussion. 236 00:32:16,270 --> 00:32:24,639 So if I could just just kick us off. Sure. Ask you about and about how the people that you were talking to, 237 00:32:24,640 --> 00:32:30,300 particularly the soldiers in these forward operating bases, were thinking about what culture is. 238 00:32:30,310 --> 00:32:37,190 Right. The definition of culture. I mean, were these people saying to themselves, yeah, what I'm doing is clearly torture, but it's okay? 239 00:32:37,210 --> 00:32:41,920 Or were they thinking, well, what I'm doing is, you know, just like hazing, you know, 240 00:32:41,920 --> 00:32:46,460 that we did back home or and this was really, you know, below the threshold of torture. 241 00:32:46,540 --> 00:32:49,750 Know what did they kind of understand where that threshold was? 242 00:32:50,140 --> 00:32:53,770 They started off by saying that, you know, talking about the the change in response. 243 00:32:53,770 --> 00:32:59,679 And you said he was making a number of arguments that it was effective, that you said also making the argument that it was that it was legal. 244 00:32:59,680 --> 00:33:02,829 But I guess is when he says and he's not saying that, you know, torture is legal, 245 00:33:02,830 --> 00:33:06,160 because that would just be manifestly, I'm sure that they say, well, what are we doing? 246 00:33:06,460 --> 00:33:10,780 Presumably saying it's not really torture. It was something with enhanced interrogation. 247 00:33:10,930 --> 00:33:15,310 There's never the use of torture. There's never a discussion that we are involved in torture. 248 00:33:15,580 --> 00:33:21,520 And after that word by the advocates is is absolutely never used, not even by the troops themselves for the for large part. 249 00:33:21,520 --> 00:33:33,549 I mean, I would say that, unfortunately, in the effort to legalise torture or rationalise its use or downplay incidents like Abu Ghraib, 250 00:33:33,550 --> 00:33:39,940 we we have all sort of collectively appropriated the term detainee abuse. 251 00:33:41,170 --> 00:33:44,860 It's a gentler way of grappling with it. 252 00:33:46,270 --> 00:33:48,700 But I would say there are some interrogators, 253 00:33:48,700 --> 00:33:58,479 some troops even who were dispirited by their involvement in it and who candidly referred to it as torture. 254 00:33:58,480 --> 00:34:04,480 But I would say they're the rare exception. And do you think I mean, does that I mean, to justify the arbitrary I mean, 255 00:34:05,140 --> 00:34:10,720 was there an awareness that if what they were doing didn't meet that threshold, that this would be a big problem? 256 00:34:13,350 --> 00:34:17,250 No. And I would say because here's the thing. 257 00:34:19,540 --> 00:34:25,060 On the left there is this understanding that whole torture is linked. 258 00:34:25,240 --> 00:34:29,020 This is by way of explanation on Twitter's link to the torture memos. 259 00:34:29,860 --> 00:34:40,419 The single the the the memo that probably had the greatest impact on the Army and the application 260 00:34:40,420 --> 00:34:48,459 of detainee abuse and torture was really the decision to undo the Geneva Conventions, 261 00:34:48,460 --> 00:34:51,970 Common Article three, protections for detainees. 262 00:34:52,510 --> 00:35:02,860 So that essentially signalled to low ranking troops, interrogators, senior officials, that torture was considered permissible. 263 00:35:03,850 --> 00:35:16,780 So the at that point, that really got the ball rolling and understanding then you know that given that gave troops the. 264 00:35:20,140 --> 00:35:25,690 You know, sort of the big legal parameters that what they can do is permissible. 265 00:35:26,200 --> 00:35:34,480 It gave the interrogators a sense that rough treatment was harsh interrogation whenever they had plenty of latitude to do that. 266 00:35:35,590 --> 00:35:42,330 So I don't think they were concerned about. The question of whether or not something means that the commission of torture.