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.
Josh is going to be speaking about his new book, None of US Were Like This before American Soldiers and Torture,
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.
And we're really excited to hear some of the some of the work from that in that book.
Josh has been working as a as a reporter for many years now.
His work has appeared in a number of very, very August journals, such as The Washington Post,
Newsweek, The Nation, Turkey's Gay Chronicle, Atlanta Journal, many, many places.
So that better day. Josh, what about you to speak 35, 40 minutes and then ask the questions.
Right. And thank you. All right.
Thank you so much for inviting me here. It's a real pleasure.
When we tend to think about us torture during the war on terror, we tend to think about it in terms of historical events.
That is, you know, Guantanamo stories, harsh interrogation program or two of three.
Abu Ghraib was publicly revealed in 2000 form and the CIA basically shut down its system
of or program for secret interrogation and renditions and black sites in oh six.
But the legacy of torture is still moving on in many unrecognised ways, and it continues to dominate the public discourse.
And it re-emerges, for example, after the assassination of Osama bin Laden and after the 10th anniversary of September 11th,
we were once again revisiting that towards your work. Is it necessary?
Is it effective in basically it's the former Bush administration officials, notably Dick Cheney, that are leading the charge.
They're basically advancing sort of a four point argument about torture.
And they say that it was legal. The techniques that were used, including waterboarding, was used on our troops during training,
and therefore it's considered legally permissible to use them on detainees.
They say that it was limited. Waterboarding was only is three times that is on three detainees and they say
that it produced an abundant amount of intelligence and left no lasting damage.
And this argument has been advanced here in the UK.
Just last month, in fact, my representative of New York State, Peter King, appeared before the Home Affairs Committee just last month.
And Peter King represents or is the chairman of the homeland, the Homeland Security Committee.
And he spoke before a roots of violent radicalisation inquiry and he repeated the very same points.
That is, torture is legal.
The torture that we used was legal, limited, produced lots of intelligence that thwarted imminent terrorist attacks and had no lasting damage.
Now the Cheney camp really wants to keep us focussed on waterboarding and the CIA program of torture.
And this is by design, because really it was a comparatively small program.
We're talking about a program that held about 100 detainees.
And Cheney might be right in that waterboarding was only employed three times by CIA personnel.
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.
And the most publicly recognised incident of detainee abuse was obviously Abu Ghraib, which they want to frame as an aberration.
Just a few bad apples bent, according to the accounts by soldiers, as well as the detainees themselves,
along with what's contained in publicly accessible military documents.
We know that detainee abuse and torture was actually fairly widespread during the early part of the war on terror.
That's important and worth emphasising.
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.
Now, in addition to that,
Human Rights Watch has found that there are 184 detainee deaths that occurred in US custody in four detention and interrogation operations.
So in a way, we've obviously been duped.
We've been lured into myopically focusing on the CIA program and waterboarding.
But obviously that misses the larger picture here.
We fail to grasp the true breadth and scope of detainee abuse as well as its causes and costs.
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?
Am not going to cover the CIA's program because frankly, as I said, it was a limited program,
but it operated differently than the military's response to detainee abuse and torture.
That is, it was much more directly authorised by the administration in the case.
The cases of detainee abuse and torture that occurred within the military were far more varied and complicated.
So when I'm talking about US military forces,
I'm referring to soldiers who were trained for conventional warfare, trained interrogators and senior officials.
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.
One really needs to understand the particular wartime situations and the underlying
beliefs that led US forces to believe that abuse and torture was necessary,
effective and permissible. Okay.
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.
I'm going to first talk about the interrogators both in Guantanamo and in the
mobile interrogation teams they basically face for common situational problems,
background collection, expectations and pressure.
Now, insofar as background is concerned on both the interrogators, on the mobile interrogation teams in forward operating bases,
as well as the interrogators who worked in Guantanamo very early on, often lacked basic knowledge about who they were fighting.
That is, they didn't have a sense who their enemy was. They didn't have a sense of the breakdown of insurgent groups.
They didn't understand the political landscape. Very few of them, very few of the interrogators even knew who the Baath Party was.
They didn't understand the ethnic and tribal divisions in terms of collection and forward operating bases.
Forward operating bases where small stations or bases, often in remote parts of Iraq and Afghanistan that were sort of the first repository for.
So troops went out. They had to make assessments, broad collections.
They did sweeps, area sweeps.
They didn't need night rate, night raids. And they often collected detainees on very flimsy evidence, including things like cell phones.
Cell phones were often used to detonate IEDs, improvised explosive devices, for if you had photographs of Saddam Hussein.
Those were often used to collect detainees and evidence.
If you carried a can of benzene, that was considered a legitimate sign that you could have been linked to a terrorist
or a terrorist organisation or an insurgent group as far as Guantanamo was concerned.
There was, by the military's own accounting, many detainees that were picked up in Afghanistan because of bounties.
So you had a situation in both the forward operating bases, as well as in Guantanamo,
where you had untrained interrogators or interrogators who may have been trained but
didn't have a sense of the background of the population that they were dealing with,
suddenly flooded with all these detainees, trying to do a kind of massive triage.
And in addition to that, they were forced to their efforts to basically find confessions within a very short amount of time.
So there was an expectation that not you're not just getting intelligence,
but you're getting confessions and confessions within the mobile interrogation units could and should have been collected within 30 minutes.
Right now, as far as the Guantanamo folks are concerned, they may not have had the same sort of expectation of time,
but they were still under the expectation that they should be gaining quick, actionable intelligence that would be able to thwart attacks.
So in the mobile interrogation units, of course, they're in the sort of first lines of defence.
They're. There are currents in attack. They're trying to sort of desperately collect intelligence for the Guantanamo folks.
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.
And this was something that senior members of the Pentagon kept repeating to them.
So and in fact, even believed Donald Rumsfeld not just not just repeated it rhetorically to defend the existence of Guantanamo,
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.
So instead of actually considering the systemic and operational problems they were trying to they they drew on an alternate
explanation of why they believe the amount of intelligence was limited and the pace of collecting it was lacking.
And in short, many interrogators and senior officials believe that the explanation was simply that the detainees were schooled in advanced resistance.
So where where does this idea of advanced resistance coming from actually comes from here comes from Manchester in May of 2000,
the British authorities, they found they did a raid on a kind of suspects house.
And there they found an 18 chapter manual, which was dubbed the Manchester Manual.
And in that manual, there are sections that actually instruct al Qaeda members how to resist interrogation.
So what does this consist of? In short, lying, withholding information and saying you were tortured.
That is essentially the full some of what the Manchester manual counter resistance advanced resistance techniques consist of.
Unfortunately, it actually did inform the first Pentagon memo that authorised harsh interrogation.
In fact, Donald Rumsfeld's December 2nd, 2002 memo is titled Advanced Counter Resistance Techniques.
Okay. So the problem is that this is symptomatic of where ideas of torture or the efficacy of torture come from.
They are rooted in ideas of folklore like advanced resistance or myths.
Often time, such as 16 hours of sleep deprivation and you can get someone to crack or pseudoscience,
often heard both psychologists and psychiatrists at Guantanamo and elsewhere thinking and even within the CIA program,
frankly, that you could calibrate pain to get truthful information.
And finally, fiction. It may be it may seem surprising, but then I can talk about this at greater length.
But movies and books have routinely buttressed the idea that pain and duress can be applied to produce quick, actionable intelligence.
Now, the story with soldiers, that is, conventional soldiers who are involved in detainee abuse is a little bit more complicated.
So in Iraq, for example, in 2003, the complexion of the war changed fairly rapidly, of course.
You had soldiers that were entering Iraq with the expectation that they were there to fight Saddam's armies,
look for weapons of mass destruction, find links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.
Obviously, that one person had been moved fairly quickly and suddenly soldiers were embroiled in a
guerrilla conflict and fighting these insurgent groups for which they had no knowledge.
And in many cases, again, the sort of first line of attack was based in or centred around these forward operating bases,
these remote forward operating bases across the country, both in both Iraq and Afghanistan,
and ensured you had soldiers who were tasked to work on tanks.
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.
And that's what they did. They had no training and then entered houses, detained Iraqis and Afghans.
The same arresting soldiers would then guard over them in these forward operating bases or being instructed to help with interrogations.
And that's when things got very messy.
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.
And this is according to the military's own records, in fact, records by military investigators,
the Criminal Investigative Division for Command and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
So it was in the context of these soldiers in guarding over and helping with interrogations that things got missing.
Soldiers were involved in such things as stress positions.
Probably the most common form of abuse, sleep deprivation, forced exercises, mock executions.
And there were some incidents of water torture.
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
interviewed that were that belonged to this sort of third category of ordinary soldiers getting involved in abuse and torture.
None of them ever referenced a Pentagon memo or directive.
And so oftentimes you would hear the most banal sources of inspiration for the actual techniques themselves,
such as what was available, like flex cuffs.
Right. Just simply using the plastic cuffs that they had to torture people.
And imitation, many of them drew on what the special forces had been doing.
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.
It was a combination of flashing lights, sleep deprivation, loud noise, etc., barking dogs, remembering what had been done to them during the.
Training or when they were being hazed. Common source of inspiration, what they heard about what their officers boasted they did in Vietnam.
I found that to be particularly the case with the water torture that was reproduced and then what they could get away with.
And this is kind of important and I'll get to this later.
But the common characteristics of the torture that I just mentioned, the torture techniques, was that it didn't leave marks.
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.
You know, first and foremost, I would say they were using these techniques to discipline their detainees,
and that was considered totally legitimate by their commanders.
Oftentimes, however, especially during the early part of the Iraq war,
many of the soldiers candidly admitted that abuse was simply an outlet for rage and frustration.
Some simply said that it was boredom. And of course, they were also using these techniques during interrogation.
But you cannot simply explain that the abuse and torture occurred because an officer issued a command.
It's a very incomplete understanding of how abuse and torture took root overlooking abuse that is,
officers or senior officials looking the other way enabled it, failing to investigate abuse,
which was a very serious,
widespread problem that for the first time I think military investigators are starting to talk about today and ignoring whistleblowers,
which was a very grave problem for a period of time. Whistleblowers were ignored, harassed and even threatened.
I mean, take the case of the Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Joseph Darby.
He was trying to being as discreet as possible about revealing the Abu Ghraib abuse.
He sort of surreptitiously snuck a copy of the photographs under the military
investigators dorm and hope that the investigation would proceed without any harm to him.
He is congratulated on live TV by Donald Rumsfeld in front of a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, and his house was instantly vandalised.
He slept with a pistol under his ben or under his pillow, rather.
And he basically received the military equivalent of witness protection.
So. The problems with reporting abuse were an enormous source of distress for certain soldiers who earnestly wanted to halt it,
including those that had been involved in it.
And their involvement in the soldiers involvement in detainee abuse and torture
represents one of the unrecognised costs of this whole by-product of official policy,
you could say. It's not new, but it is an unrecognised and largely misunderstood or unknown problem.
But it's unprecedented in US history. In 1983, the Congress commissioned probably the largest study on veterans full stop.
It was particularly focussed on Vietnam veterans and post-traumatic stress.
It was called the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Studying. It took four years to research and included interviews with 3000 detainees.
And in short, they found that the highest correlative with PTSD was not combat, actually.
But it was the soldier's exposure to or involvement in abusive violence, which includes but is not exclusive to prisoner abuse.
So we are, alas, revisiting this stuff all over again.
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.
As I said, not just with difficulties reporting it, but just being involved in detainee abuse and torture in one form or the other.
There were soldiers who had very serious anxiety and depression, violent outbursts,
often getting into fights, substance abuse and even attempted suicide.
In fact, one of the main soldiers that I profiled in the book took his life,
and he referenced his experience with detainee abuse and torture as being the primary source of his traumatic wartime experience.
And unfortunately, one of the soldiers who first approached me about his difficulty trying to report abuse,
who was himself a combat medic, first monitoring detainees, then getting directly involved in abuse,
grew disenchanted with it, tried to halt it, was rebuffed by his commanders, returned home,
tried to protest it in the anti-war movement, contacted me trying to get traction on holding his commanders accountable.
Struggled for three and a half years since his return home.
And then he, too, took his life. And I'm continuously, unfortunately, seeing many other similar episodes of this.
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.
And as I said, the sort of the key hallmark of the techniques, as I said, was that they didn't leave marks.
It's not that democracies don't torture. It's that they often torture in more stealthy ways.
They're responding to the scrutiny of human rights organisations, church organisations, health officials, those who are involved in torture treatment.
And the practical effect of it is that in the case of the detainees who were sexually humiliated, many of them,
according to clinicians and researchers that I met who were treating detainees, especially in Iraq, would say that these people don't get treatment.
You know, they're too gripped by humiliation to seek out help.
The other problem with being tortured with stealthy techniques is that you have nothing to show, right?
You cannot go to a military investigator and prove that you were tortured.
And this inflicts its own kind of pain, of course. It's sort of it's denial heaped on to pain and suffering already.
And then there's the problem with deaths. As I said, there are at least 184 detainee deaths,
deaths of detainees that died in military custody during just regular detention and in some cases, interrogation.
And no one has served more than five months of jail time.
So apart from that, there's the impact on counterinsurgency itself or counterterrorism generally.
Now, one of the things that surprised me was that the military and intelligence officials that I met, especially the season ones, hated torture.
They needed end because of its impact within the interrogation room itself.
That is the effect of pain and duress on memory and recall.
They hated torture because it often burned a system of public cooperation.
And that system of public cooperation is not about making nice in your community.
It's about relying on one of the key backbones of intelligence.
And when you use torture and you burn that system of public cooperation,
then Informant Network, you are losing a trove of valuable intelligence in addition to them.
One of the things that came up in a Senate Armed Services Committee was that within
the US Senate Armed Services Committee meeting in I think 2008 or nine eight,
they found that the number one and number two greatest sources of insurgent
recruitment and therein coalition deaths were the images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
So collectively, you know, not just a great loss and a deleterious impact on the soldiers and the detainees,
but also on the counter terrorism policy itself.
And as a result of that, many of these seasoned intelligence workers, those that worked in Guantanamo, for example,
who earnestly worked to halt the authorised harsh interrogation that occurred there, you know, two, know three.
Many of them have since left the military, which means we have a gaping hole in institutional memory.
So in the meantime, we still have the Cheneys who are professing that torture produced bountiful intelligence.
None of this has been verified or corroborated at all.
In fact, according to the 911 Commission and even the CIA, Syria's own inspector general,
none of the intelligence produced by coercive interrogation, torture, whatever you want to call it, thwarted any terrorist attacks.
So we're still waiting to see what they're talking about.
It's very possible that they're right. But thus far, no proof.
And of course, those who are advocating for torture are conveniently downplaying or ignoring all of these costs.
In the meantime, we have President Obama who says that he wants to look forward and not backward.
Now, the problem with this is that there has not been any real accountability for torture.
As I said, you know, five no more than five months for 484 deaths.
You had a smattering of soldiers that were held to account for Abu Ghraib, and that's pretty much it.
No senior officials held accountable. So without any real accountability and without reckoning with torture in any way,
these notions of the efficacy of torture continue today, unfortunately.
And in short, Cheney and his cadres, they they fill a void in the torture discourse and the notions of torture,
the torture success stories they live on.
And that is of great chagrin to the the military intelligence officers, interrogators, and and other military officials who are gravely concerned.
They they are more so, I think, in some cases then the human rights community worried about the lack of accountability for torture.
And their concern is that we might revisit this all over again if we have another terror strike,
heaven forbid, another war or even a president that believes in the efficacy of torture.
So. With that, I'll take questions.
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.
So if I could just just kick us off. Sure. Ask you about and about how the people that you were talking to,
particularly the soldiers in these forward operating bases, were thinking about what culture is.
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?
Or were they thinking, well, what I'm doing is, you know, just like hazing, you know,
that we did back home or and this was really, you know, below the threshold of torture.
Know what did they kind of understand where that threshold was?
They started off by saying that, you know, talking about the the change in response.
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.
But I guess is when he says and he's not saying that, you know, torture is legal,
because that would just be manifestly, I'm sure that they say, well, what are we doing?
Presumably saying it's not really torture. It was something with enhanced interrogation.
There's never the use of torture. There's never a discussion that we are involved in torture.
And after that word by the advocates is is absolutely never used, not even by the troops themselves for the for large part.
I mean, I would say that, unfortunately, in the effort to legalise torture or rationalise its use or downplay incidents like Abu Ghraib,
we we have all sort of collectively appropriated the term detainee abuse.
It's a gentler way of grappling with it.
But I would say there are some interrogators,
some troops even who were dispirited by their involvement in it and who candidly referred to it as torture.
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,
was there an awareness that if what they were doing didn't meet that threshold, that this would be a big problem?
No. And I would say because here's the thing.
On the left there is this understanding that whole torture is linked.
This is by way of explanation on Twitter's link to the torture memos.
The single the the the memo that probably had the greatest impact on the Army and the application
of detainee abuse and torture was really the decision to undo the Geneva Conventions,
Common Article three, protections for detainees.
So that essentially signalled to low ranking troops, interrogators, senior officials, that torture was considered permissible.
So the at that point, that really got the ball rolling and understanding then you know that given that gave troops the.
You know, sort of the big legal parameters that what they can do is permissible.
It gave the interrogators a sense that rough treatment was harsh interrogation whenever they had plenty of latitude to do that.
So I don't think they were concerned about. The question of whether or not something means that the commission of torture.