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Transcript #124 Just A Bunch Of Right-Wingers Sitting Around
Talking... About How Best To Torture People! If This Was A Movie Script, No One Would
Believe It Partially
hyperlinked to sources. For all sources,
see the data
resources page. Greetings, you're listening to podcast
number 124 of Blast The Right. I'm your
host, Jack Clark. Great to have you on
board. Today you're going to hear an
unbelievable, yet-every-fact-is-true scenario.
It's about how it came to pass that meetings were held in the White
House discussing how best to torture prisoners. Also, be sure to stay around for my
closing comments. You'll learn about
Blast The Right transcripts, as well as about some listeners going the activist
route. And there's also a new tune to
close the show with. Let's get right into it. My sources are: ABC News, the
Associated Press, the Wayback Machine internet archives
website, humanrightsfirst.org, thinkprogress.org, Youtube
for some audio, the Washington Post, aclu.org, and England's Sunday Times. Every week it seems, there's a new
revelation, even more hard to believe than the last one, about the Bush
administration's lust for war and torture. I don't know about you, but after a
point, do you start to just file them away mentally, saying to yourself, I'll
think about that later? It takes on the air of unreality: each
individual revelation by itself, of course, but exponentially more so,
cumulatively. It's almost too much to accept as
reality, as something that you have to deal with. If I had a 2 hour show, I could easily
fill it up with this subject. Heck
forget about 2 hours. I could do a 24-hour
marathon. Since neither you nor I have the time
for that, I've picked some highlights here.
Often the bizarre, unfortunately, the bizarrely evil, doings of the
right-wing over the past decade or so. Every fact you're about to hear is
true. If it was presented as a movie script,
no one would believe it. In fact, let's imagine I'm pitching such
a script to a producer. How might the script open? How about this scene: You see a meeting room, and from
what's visible through the window, it could be within the White House. You can't make out who's talking, but it
sounds like they're discussing what?! Whether they can combine water-boarding
with stress positions for a prisoner named Muhammad? Who are these people? Low level operatives sneaking in a meeting
at, could it really be, the White House?
About an illegal subject? But before you can find out more, you
leave that scene and enter a long series of flashbacks, which show how this
maybe-in-the-White House cabal came to meet. You first see a bunch of right-wingers
of the neocon variety openly plotting for US world
domination. In 1997, neocons like Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and others sign the founding charter
for an organization called the Project for a
New American Century, PNAC for short. As you hear them talk, come to think
of it, Cheney and Rumsfeld bring to mind two of the people at that White House
meeting the movie opened with. Anyway, PNAC officials proudly release
a document in the year 2000 entitled "Rebuilding
America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century." This PNAC report asserts that
"retaining forward-based forces in the region" -- the mideast Gulf region --
is "an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the
longstanding American interests" there.
It ominously adds that the "unresolved conflict with Iraq provides
the immediate justification." This neocon
roadmap gloriously sums itself up when it declares: At present the United States
faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and
extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. In other words, the US must continue
to dominate the world, and establishing military bases in Iraqi is one of the
means. The scene closes with this, the most
infamous line in the report: [T]he process of transformation…is
likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor. A new Pearl Harbor will enable PNAC to
implement its agenda more quickly. You can imagine that by now, the
producer hearing this movie pitch is starting to wonder about all this. But continuing on with the script: Flash forward to November and
December, year 2000. George W. the brother of PNAC founding member Jeb Bush,
is installed as President by Republican justices on the US Supreme Court. PNAC founder Dick Cheney is
Vice-President. PNAC signatory Donald Rumsfeld
is Defense Secretary. PNAC signatory Paul
Wolfowitz is deputy secretary of defense.
Other PNAC figures infest the entire national security apparatus. Now you listen as Paul O'Neill, Bush's
Treasury Secretary, tells the co-author of a book he's
writing, that from their very first days in office, long before 9/11, the
Bushians start discussing the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and dividing up
the oil. From their very first days in office,
these right-wing, neocon Bushians actively plotted
their Iraq invasion. Then BOOM! You see the Twin Towers fall. The neocons get their new Pearl
Harbor, the September 11 attacks. The War on Terror is declared. A week later, PNAC writes a letter to Bush,
saying that regardless of Saddam Hussein's relationship or not to the attacks
or to Al Qaeda, he must be ousted. Flash forward again, to March
2003. The Iraq invasion begins. Now if you were pitching all this so
far as a movie script, who would believe it?
Right-wingers bent on world domination take over the US government, and
just happen to receive as a present a domestic Pearl Harbor to give them cover
to rapidly effectuate their schemes? A pretty amazing scenario you've seen
so far, yes? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Up next, the plot thickens even further. BREAK Continuing on with the script: The War on Terror is in full swing. But these US officials of the PNAC
variety, as well as others, don't feel that their questioning of captured
suspected terrorists is going well. They
want new and improved methods. You now see a scene of Nazi
interrogators torturing their prisoners with stress positions, extreme heat
and cold, sleep deprivation. The
torturers smugly tell each other, that their Verschärfte
Verneh-mung" is working well. That phrase in a subtitle is accurately
translated as "enhanced interrogation techniques." The scene with Nazis fades into a
scene of Soviet
interrogators using the same techniques, and adding waterboarding. Then the scene shifts to US officials,
early 2000's, deciding to incorporate these Nazi-Soviet torture techniques into
the American repertoire. As the
American officials discuss waterboarding, scenes of the Inquisition
using waterboarding on its "heretics," its victims, flash before you. So do
newspaper stories of how the US military prosecuted its own soldiers for
waterboarding prisoners during the Spanish-American War and Vietnam, not to mention
Japanese after World War II for waterboarding American prisoners. You see a montage of newspaper stories
since the early 1900's describing this technique as water torture. Yet despite all this, you now see
President Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney
General John Ashcroft sign a presidential
finding, approving waterboarding and these other techniques. OK, the long extended flashback is
over. You're back witnessing that mysterious
meeting. Yes, you can now make out that
it's actually, for real taking place in the
White House Situation Room. You can't believe who's there! Vice President Dick Cheney, National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary
of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John
Ashcroft. Condoleeza Rice is chairing the meeting. Imagine being the proverbial fly on
the wall in that room! An aide explains to another that this
is called the Principals Committee, and that they've held dozens of these
meetings so far. They're discussing which of the
enhanced interrogation techniques can be used on which prisoners. A CIA officer comes in and
demonstrates the techniques for the officials. Then they start discussing. Will so and so be deprived of
sleep? Kept in stressful positions? Waterboarded? The discussions get really
detailed. How many times can each technique
be used on a given prisoner? CIA Director Tenet makes the case that
techniques should be used in combination.
The others agree. Now you see cross-cutting back and
forth, between CIA and military officials torturing prisoners using these
techniques, and, the creation of the legal cover for doing so. Justice Department lawyers talk of
their finishing the so-called Golden Shield, a 2002 legal memo. It narrowed down the definition of torture to
cover only acts causing pain at an intensity similar to that accompanying organ
failure or death. Other scenes show CIA agents in the
field repeatedly cabling headquarters, seeking approval for their specific
plans on how to use the enhanced interrogation techniques on a specific
prisoner. Everyone is trying to cover their
butts. Meanwhile, you see at least 8 people die
from torture in US custody. Scores
of other prisoner deaths are suspicious. As interrogators discover prisoners
have died, we hear in a voiceover some of the right-wingers minimizing the
offensiveness of these torture techniques: Here's Bill
O'Reilly: audio: O'Reilly You have powerful forces in
America who are basically saying they don't care if it saves lives - we would
rather have more Americans die, have more terror attacks on our home soil, than
dunk these people in water. (this is shortened) O'Reilly: [Y]ou have powerful
forces in America... Guest: The Establishment! O'Reilly: The Washington Post, etc....yeah...they're
basically saying "We don't care if it saved lives..." (because you cannot deny what Tenet and Scheur have just said.)
"We don't care. We would
rather have Americans die, more terror attacks on our home soil, than dunk
these people in the water!" Not to mention the author of one of
the torture memos going even further beyond the pale: audio: Yoo Questioner: If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there's no law that can stop that. No treaty. And also no law by Congress. That's what you wrote in the August, 2002 memo. Yoo: I think that depends on why the President feels that he needs to do that. Sickening, huh? Ah, but nothing ever goes smoothly,
even for evildoers like the neocons. Trouble develops. The Golden Shield memo is leaked to
the press. It's withdrawn by a newly
installed Justice Department official. The Attorney General, Ashcroft, who
thinks what they're doing is legal, still is aware of the unseemliness of it
all. He argues that senior
administration officials shouldn't be involved in the details of harsh
interrogations. He says: Why are we talking about
this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly. A bit of an understatement. But National Security Advisor Rice
doesn't care. It's full speed
ahead. When CIA officials later come to
the Principals Committee asking for the okay to continue the torture
techniques, Rice brushes aside concerns, and tells the CIA, "This is your
baby. Go do it." Go do it, indeed. But more trouble is brewing for the
torture program. Not from human rights
advocates outside the government. But
from other law enforcement officials within the government. Stay tuned. BREAK OK, we cut to FBI headquarters. Some agents are informally meeting. They are reviewing a file labeled "war crimes." Are they collecting evidence against
some foreign dictator? No, they're discussing interrogations
they've witnessed, conducted by the US military and the CIA against War on
Terror prisoners. Subfiles
are labeled Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq. As they continue speaking in a
voice-over, we see some of the incidents they're discussing: A female interrogator bends back a
prisoner's thumbs, then squeezes his genitals.
He grimaces in pain. Another interrogator cuffs two
prisoners and forces water down their throats. As you witness these scenes, you hear
a US Senator denouncing such practices.
This is Hillary Clinton, not one of the more dovish Democratic
Senators. You may be no big fan of her,
nor of her husband. I'm not. But her
words here are powerful nevertheless: audio: Clinton When General Washington led
his soldiers across the Delaware River and on to victory in the Battle of
Trenton, he captured nearly 1000 foreign mercenaries, and he faced a crucial
choice. How would General Washington
treat these prisoners? The British had already
committed atrocities against Americans, including torture. As David Hackett Fisher described in his
Pulitzer-prize-winning book, Washington's
Crossing, thousands of American prisoners of war were treated with extreme
cruelty by their British captors. There are accounts of
injured soldiers who surrendered being murdered instead of quartered. Countless Americans dying in prison hulks in
New York Harbor. Starvation and other
acts of inhumanity perpetrated against Americans confined to churches in New
York City… General Washington announced
a decision unique in human history, sending the following order for handling
prisoners: Treat them with humanity
and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of
the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren. George Washington
understood that how you treat enemy combatants can reverberate around the
world. At this point, the agents stop
discussing what they've witnessed, and turn to efforts to stop these practices. One of them complains that it's like trench
warfare, battling these other US government organizations. You see the agents present their case
to a senior FBI official, the head of counterterrorism efforts. He agrees that the enhanced
interrogation techniques are less effective than the FBI's well-developed
non-coercive measures. He laments that
such coercive techniques will taint any future prosecutions. And he deplores the fact that use of such
methods helps Al Qaeda in spreading negative views of the US. But we shift to various shots of more
senior FBI officials, as well as to higher-ups in the Justice Department, the
Defense Department, and the National Security Council. Each in turn looks at the FBI agents'
complaints, and shakes his head in disagreement, and closes the file. Nothing is done about the agents'
complaints. We cut to the office of an FBI senior
official. The superimposed screen title
says 2003. The official orders the
agents' "war crimes file" closed.
He says the FBI will simply have no more involvement with the CIA interrogations. Beyond that, the FBI will take no action
about what its agents have seen. How does this script close, how does
this story end? Up next! BREAK The final act you see of our script
unfolds in present day 2008 America, with ABC
News revealing the existence of the White House torture meetings. Asked about these secret sessions, the
president, George W. Bush, makes light of their disclosure. He says I'm aware our national
security team met on this issue. And I
approved. I don't know what's new about
that; I'm not so sure what's so startling about that. ABC News dryly reports exactly why
it's so startling: [B]efore
Wednesday's report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior
advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down to the
number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda
prisoner -- had never been disclosed. (abc) Reaction to this stunning disclosure
is not exactly overwhelming. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts does
blast the
news. "Who would have
thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top
officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to
approve torture?" Kennedy said in a statement. "Long after President
Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price for his
administration's renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental human
rights." (ap confirming abc
story) The American Civil Liberties Union is
also appalled
at the high-level torture mongering. Its executive director says "We have always known
that the CIA's use of torture was approved from the very top levels of the U.S.
government, yet the latest revelations about knowledge from the president himself
and authorization from his top advisers only confirms our worst fears The ACLU demands an independent
prosecutor be appointed to investigate possible violations of the War Crimes
Act and the federal Anti-torture Act. Why an independent prosecutor? You see
another ACLU official explain that No one in the executive
branch of government can be trusted to fairly investigate or prosecute any
crimes since the head of every relevant department, along with the president
and vice president, either knew or participated in the planning and approval of
illegal acts, Congress cannot look the
other way; it must demand an independent investigation and independent
prosecutor." But the rest of the nation seems to
yawn. And suddenly you shift scenes to find
a final unpleasant plot twist. Sort of a Carrie, hand-coming-out-of-the-ground
scenario. You first see on screen one of those countdown
clocks showing the days-hours-minutes and -seconds left in the Bush
administration. You think, at least,
thank goodness, Bush and all of them will soon be gone. But then you swoop in to the campaign headquarters
of the Republican candidate for President, John McCain As you see McCain speaking to some of
his top aides and advisors, titles on screen identify them as former
PNAC big shots. McCain's formal chief foreign policy
advisor: a former Project Director at PNAC.
Informal campaign advisor Bill Kristol: a PNAC co-founder Informal campaign advisor John Bolton:
a PNAC signatory And others. Then you see and hear, in his own
words, that McCain seems to have signed onto the PNAC agenda lock, stock and
barrel. Permanent military bases in Iraq, a
prime PNAC goal? McCain's on board: audio: McCain Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years — (cut off by McCain) McCAIN: Make it a hundred. Q: Is that … (cut off) McCAIN: We’ve been in South Korea … we’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans … Q: [tries to say something] McCAIN: As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me, I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Queada is training and equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day. Even more frightening -- you don't
even need any scary movie music for this -- is that McCain doesn't plan to stop
with Iraq, as he nonchalantly guarantees that even more
bloodshed will follow: audio: McCain There’s going to be other
wars. I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never
surrender, but there will be other wars. In a sign that may be ominous, or just
a coincidence, the last scene written so far in the script, shows that the PNAC
website -- yes, all this time PNAC and all its documents, letters and other
info, has been available on a very public website -- the PNAC website is
suddenly taken down. But you then see a skilled computer user
show that through internet archive
sites, the PNAC website can still be pulled up. They can't cover their tracks that
easily. Well, that's as far as I've gotten in
the script. Quite a sweep of history. From the Inquisition several centuries
ago, to the 21st century White House. Of course, as I told you at the outset
here today, this wasn't a fictional script, not a word of it. Everything I said happened, really did
happen. Right-wingers have openly plotted to
dominate the world, and have publicly embraced torture as one of their tools to
do so. It may be unbelievable. No doubt, if it had been pitched as a novel
or film script 10 years ago, you would have been tossed out on your ear. But it all really has happened, a 1984
dystopia. Brought to you courtesy of Right-Wing
Productions. Directed by Dick
Cheney. Junior played by George W. Bush. It was only in the last few weeks that
the existence of the White House torture meetings, and the FBI agents' war
crimes file, came to light. That's what
led me to envision all this as a movie script too far-fetched to be believed. By the way, for much more detail about
PNAC, check out podcast 58. About the Nazi and Soviet pedigrees of the
Bush administration's beloved enhanced interrogation techniques, podcasts 98 and
109. To close, what should you look for in
the near future? For one thing, Rep. John Conyers,
Democrat of Michigan and head of the House Judiciary Committee, will hold
hearings in a few weeks focusing on the FBI report which revealed the "war
crimes file" kept by the unhappy agents. On a broader scale, here's what an
ACLU official said: Congress is duty-bound by
the Constitution not only to hold the president, vice president, and all civil
officers to account, but it must also send a message to future presidents that
it will use its constitutional powers to prevent illegal, and immoral conduct. This applies to all the right-wing,
PNAC atrocities you've heard me cover here today. All these evildoers need to be held
accountable for all their misdeeds. No one knows right now what the ending
of the script will be. I guess that's up to me and you. First order of business in my book: stopping
the PNAC neocons dead in their tracks, by making darn sure McCain and his PNAC
cohorts don’t take power in January, 2009.
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