Wilkerson, Lawrence - Interview master file / Witness to Guantanamo / Duke Digital Repository

Interviewer

I'll begin by introducing the project

0:05

and then, okay, okay, good morning.

0:07

-

Morning.

0:11

Interviewer

We are very grateful to you

0:12

for participating in the Witness to Guantanamo Project.

0:13

We invite you to speak of your experiences and involvement

0:18

with people who were associated with Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

0:21

We are hoping to provide you an opportunity

0:26

to tell your story in your own words.

0:28

We are creating an archive of stories,

0:32

so that people in America and around the world

0:34

will have a better understanding of what you

0:37

and others have experienced and observed.

0:39

Future generations wants to know

0:44

what happened in Guantanamo,

0:45

and by telling this story,

0:47

you're contributing to history,

0:49

and we appreciate your willingness to speak with us.

0:51

And if anytime during the interview

0:55

you'd like take your break, please let us know,

0:57

we'll be glad to take a break.

0:58

And if anytime you'd like to stop the interview

1:00

for some other reason, please let us know as well.

1:04

-

Surely.

1:06

-

And I'd like to begin

with some basic background

1:08

as to who you are, your name and hometown,

1:10

and birth date and age,

1:15

maybe you can start with that.

1:17

-

Lawrence Wilkerson, I was born in Gaffney, South Carolina,

1:19

I'm 66 years old, much to my chagrin.

1:23

(both laughing)

1:26

Interviewer

And what are your birth dates

1:27

so people can date this video.

1:29

-

January 28, 1945.

1:31

Interviewer

And your marital status?

1:35

-

Married for almost 45 years.

1:38

Interviewer

Children?

1:40

-

Two, four grandchildren.

1:41

-

Congratulations.

1:43

-

Thanks.

Interviewer

And your education?

1:45

-

Couple of master's degrees,

1:48

one in national security affairs,

1:49

and one in international relations.

1:51

Interviewer

And your current place of residence?

1:53

Interviewer

Falls Church, Virginia.

1:56

Interviewer

And current occupation?

1:57

-

I teach here at the George Washington University

1:59

in the honors program,

2:01

and I also teach at the College of William and Mary

2:03

in two departments, the Government Department,

2:05

and then the Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy.

2:08

Interviewer

I guess we'd like to begin

2:12

with just some background in how you joined the military,

2:13

and perhaps just brings up

2:18

to 2001, just some history.

2:22

-

I was a military brat to a certain extent.

2:26

My father was in the military for some time

2:28

before he went to work for Sears and Roebuck,

2:30

and then actually Allstate insurance company

2:32

which was owned by Sears at the time.

2:37

And we actually moved more with him at Allstate

2:39

than we did with him in the military.

2:41

He was a World War II vet,

2:43

flew B-17s over Europe.

2:45

And in 1966,

2:48

I was a rising senior at Bucknell University

2:50

in Central Pennsylvania.

2:54

And one of my fraternity brothers,

2:57

a dear friend was killed in Vietnam

3:00

after only about a month in the country.

3:02

And I began to think about my own responsibility,

3:05

my family's history,

3:10

my father participated in World War II as I said.

3:11

My wife at the time,

3:14

his father was a World War II veteran also,

3:16

an enlisted man in Patton's third army in Europe.

3:18

So I walked out of Bucknell

3:20

and enlisted in the army,

3:22

signed up to be an airborne ranger. (laughs)

3:26

And unfortunately, my education, or fortunately,

3:29

I guess you'd say my education

3:32

caught up with me every step of the way.

3:33

And I kept being recruited

3:35

for more and more responsibility if you will,

3:38

finally was grabbed up on a machine gun range one day

3:41

in a cold winter day,

3:46

and told by my platoon Sergeant

3:48

that I was a breaded corporal at the time,

3:49

get my ass down to Fort Benning, Georgia,

3:52

and go to officer candidate school (chuckles).

3:55

And I did.

3:57

And so, I joined to go to Vietnam in '66.

3:58

I made it to Vietnam finally in March of '69 (chuckles),

4:01

as a first Lieutenant.

4:05

Interviewer

And can you tell us

4:08

a little bit about that experience,

4:09

just growing up?

4:10

-

Yeah, I served in Vietnam that year, came home

4:12

in '70 and fully expected to go right back to Vietnam.

4:18

But again, my credentials caught up with me.

4:23

So I wound up being selected for a couple of positions

4:28

that were more or less key to army aviation at that time.

4:31

And so I didn't get immediate orders,

4:37

plus I was sent off to school,

4:40

an armor officer school

4:42

which is kind of a kudo,

4:45

because if you're an infantryman

4:46

you're sent off to an armor officer school,

4:48

they expect you to do great things. (laughs)

4:50

And so I went to that school

4:53

and the Vietnam war started winding down.

4:55

And so I didn't make it back for a second tour,

4:58

probably wouldn't have survived it.

5:00

So that's really serendipity and luck on my part.

5:01

You know as an infantryman,

5:05

you don't survive too many exposures like that.

5:07

And then I decided to make a career out of the army,

5:11

and some, well, total 31 years,

5:16

1997, I finally retired.

5:19

My last assignment was as special assistant

5:22

to General Powell when he was chairman

5:25

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

5:27

And I joined him about six months prior to

5:28

that when he was appointed to a four-star

5:31

and to command of the US Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia,

5:34

the largest army command in the United States.

5:37

And so in January of '89, I started a relationship

5:40

which would significantly change my life.

5:44

Close association with General Powell,

5:48

to include working for him as a private consultant

5:51

after I retired and he'd retired,

5:54

and then being asked by him to go to the state department

5:56

in December of 2000 to join his transition team,

6:00

and then subsequently being asked to stay on.

6:03

Initially, as a member

6:06

of the policy planning staff under Richard Haas,

6:07

and then later as chief of staff of that department.

6:10

Interviewer

Were you looking forward

6:14

to being an active political life?

6:16

It seemed like it...

6:18

Did you have the background for that or?

6:19

-

I think every soldier or military officer

6:22

who reaches the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and beyond,

6:25

is ready for that because,

6:28

most of being a soldier Marine or an airman or a sailor,

6:31

at lieutenant colonel 0-5 and beyond,

6:36

involves diplomacy, involves politics.

6:39

The key diplomats for the United States

6:45

in the world today are not Mufti wearing civilians.

6:47

The key diplomats in each region of the world

6:52

are four-star generals and admirals,

6:55

the proconsul so that we dispatch

6:57

to the various military commands around the world,

6:59

far more powerful than anybody from the state department.

7:02

So it is incumbent upon any officer who wants to go on

7:04

in responsibility to become politically

7:08

and diplomatically savvy.

7:11

So yes, I felt fairly well equipped.

7:12

Interviewer

And from the beginning, did you...

7:15

Before 9/11, did you see

7:18

where the government was heading?

7:22

Did it change dramatically

7:24

in terms of the way you saw the government heading at 9/11?

7:25

-

9/11 was a watershed moment, no question about it.

7:30

But I don't think it would have been nearly

7:33

the watershed moment in the direction that it was, had not,

7:35

let's say, I don't think

7:40

it would have been the same situation

7:42

had Al Gore been President of United States.

7:43

George W. Bush and the group of people he brought

7:47

in around him, the so-called dream team,

7:51

plus a lot of people outside the government

7:54

who were semi-official or just private citizens

7:57

who were able to influence the government,

8:01

from Bill Crystal to Richard Pearl.

8:03

Crystal being completely outside the government,

8:06

Pearl being semi-government

8:08

because he at that time was head of the defense policy board

8:10

which is the secretary of defense's sought of think tank

8:13

with civilians in it.

8:16

That meant a very in my view a very dramatic departure

8:20

from what had been consistent American foreign policy

8:25

more or less for about 60 years.

8:28

9/11 was the accelerant, the catalyst, if you will,

8:31

the excuse that gave the George W. Bush administration

8:34

more maneuver space, more political space,

8:40

and they capitalized on it majorly

8:44

and took American foreign policy in a direction

8:47

I don't think it had been since World War II.

8:49

Interviewer

You had said once

8:54

that you thought Donald Rumsfeld

8:56

was on his way out until 9/11?

8:57

-

I think that's a fair...

9:00

We had a sought of informal pool going

9:01

like you do for the March madness, you know,

9:04

who would be the first one to leave?

9:08

Incidentally, the first one to leave O'Neil

9:09

was not even on the list. (laughs)

9:11

No one thought about the secretary or the treasury

9:14

except as a pretty competent individual.

9:16

Donald Rumsfeld had so isolated himself

9:19

from his main power communities,

9:22

the Congress, they despised him,

9:25

the armed services committees despised him,

9:27

the leadership at least.

9:30

He had alienated himself from the uniform military

9:32

which after all was a couple of million of his subordinates.

9:35

And thirdly, he had proven

9:40

incapable of making the trains run on time.

9:43

That is to say the defense department was a mess.

9:46

So everyone was, you know, he was at the top of the list,

9:49

your odds there were about even if you bet on him.

9:53

Everyone thought he'd be gone.

9:58

Interviewer

Why, was he so incompetent?

10:00

I'm told he's a smart man.

10:02

-

Lots of people have said to me

10:06

that Donald Rumsfeld was a smart man

10:08

just as lots of people said to me,

10:10

Douglas Feith was a smart man.

10:11

Smart perhaps, but in the bigger scope,

10:13

unwise, both of them

10:18

and I'd even say Douglas Feith

10:20

on her secretary defense work policy

10:22

never, never showed me even smartness.

10:23

One of the dumbest man I ever met in my life.

10:27

Rumsfeld very smart, but not wise.

10:30

And Rumsfeld had come in

10:33

I think with the idea that, hey, I've been secretary

10:35

of defense before I know what this job takes,

10:37

go back and look at the time he was secretary of defense,

10:40

it really was pretty codified, pretty formalized.

10:42

And he wasn't secretary of defense very long.

10:45

And so he came in

10:48

and he said, "I need to do some things."

10:49

And he went about them

10:50

much of the way a hard core CEO would go about them.

10:52

I think of someone like Jack Welch,

10:59

for example at General Electric.

11:01

Only though I wouldn't give Rumsfeld

11:03

that higher kudo in terms of executive skills,

11:05

but he came in and he said, "Hey, look, Goldwater Nichols

11:08

has made the penultimate amendment

11:11

to the 1947 National Security Act,

11:13

has made the chairman too powerful

11:15

and made the joint staff too powerful.

11:17

He was right.

11:19

But instead of dealing with that,

11:20

the way I would suggest Secretary Gates

11:22

is dealing with it now,

11:24

re-establishing the Sec Def carefully

11:25

as the most powerful individual in the department,

11:28

I'll fire you if you don't believe that and so forth.

11:30

Rumsfeld just said, I think to the military, screw you.

11:33

He cut the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff

11:38

out of most communications.

11:40

He communicated directly with the commanders in the field

11:42

which is allowable by the law

11:44

but not a very smart thing to do.

11:46

Dick Myer, for example,

11:50

Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff

11:51

couldn't find anything to do.

11:52

Most innocuous, unimpactful chairman

11:53

we've probably ever had, and that's saying something.

11:57

So Rumsfeld said,

12:02

I'm gonna reassert civilian authority over the military

12:04

and I'm gonna do it in a draconian

12:07

and even an ignorant way

12:08

because what he did actually was,

12:10

go into promotion lists for example,

12:12

and make sure that people

12:15

who were promoted to flag rank

12:16

were sycophants and yes men

12:19

and people who would not brook any opposition

12:21

to what he wanted to do and so forth.

12:24

The second thing he did was stiff the Congress as I said,

12:26

Congress would send over requests,

12:29

you'd get thousands of requests from Congress,

12:31

Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense.

12:33

You have a whole staff that handles those requests

12:35

and you're reasonable about it.

12:37

If a request comes over you try to answer it,

12:40

you try to answer it as best you can,

12:42

and you try to do it on a timely basis.

12:44

Hey, he just stiffed 'em.

12:46

He just told 'em essentially,

12:48

you're not a separate and equal branch of Congress,

12:50

you're a bunch of pussies.

12:52

And so he stiffed them day in and day out.

12:54

And he also tried and here again, I think he was right.

12:56

He tried to at least for DOD,

13:02

but he wanted that to spin off

13:04

and do it for the entire civil service.

13:06

He tried to revolutionize his civil service

13:09

which he saw as being defunct.

13:11

There is some reason for him

13:14

to see the civil service as being defunct,

13:16

particularly that portion GS9 and below,

13:20

and particularly that portion above 10, say to 15 or so

13:24

that is involved in what I would call

13:29

the institutional memory creation

13:32

and sustainment and resiliency of the government

13:35

through our idiotic crazy two, four,

13:38

and six year transitions.

13:42

Our founders did not bequeath us

13:45

with a system that's very good for the 21st century.

13:47

That's another matter.

13:50

But in all of that,

13:52

there was reason.

13:55

And there was some brilliance in the sense

13:56

that you perceived it,

13:58

and wanted to do something about it

13:59

even some moral courage.

14:01

But the ways he tried to do something about it

14:02

were so alienating, so off-putting, so disturbing,

14:05

that by August we were saying, he'll be gone,

14:09

he'll be gone.

14:12

Interviewer

Was this arrogance supported by anyone

14:13

in the administration?

14:16

-

I don't think anyone else gave a damn.

14:19

This is what I teach.

14:25

It's like that with presidents

14:26

who don't have a lot of experience with,

14:28

or who really in their soul of soul,

14:30

or either envious off,

14:33

or despise the military establishment.

14:35

And so in this case, I think it was a case

14:39

of perhaps in his deep psychological being,

14:42

George W. Bush knew he was a Vietnam draft avoidee.

14:46

He knew he didn't have any bonafide days with the military

14:50

other than his bravado.

14:54

And he knew that that was enough with the military,

14:57

as long as you didn't do anything

15:00

that made them think otherwise.

15:03

And so he kind of gave it to Rumsfeld.

15:05

Not only that, I think the division of labor

15:07

for the first term in the White House

15:10

is very well chronicled,

15:12

but not to enough detail.

15:13

Someone needs to do this to the granular detail

15:15

by Bart Gellman in his book, "Angler".

15:18

There was a division of labor, it was,

15:21

President, I have compassionate conservatism,

15:24

the pillar of which will become my increase in funding

15:30

to the global HIV/AIDS fight.

15:33

I have no child left behind,

15:37

and thus education policy.

15:39

I have a few other things,

15:42

that I have staff here in the White House

15:44

that will help me with,

15:46

including Carl in my winning a second term

15:47

unlike my dad did,

15:50

and Dick Cheney has everything else.

15:52

Dick Cheney had the entire national security portfolio,

15:54

for reasons befuddling me, even to this day

15:58

I think he had the foreign policy regime

16:03

underneath that national security umbrella.

16:08

And he also had Bart goes into this

16:10

to some extent in "Angler."

16:13

He also had a lot of domestic policy including tax policy.

16:15

And if Bush wanted two out of three tax cuts,

16:18

Cheney wanted all three.

16:24

And Cheney would run over to the Congress

16:25

and actually lobby the Congress.

16:27

And the vice president lobbying the Congress is a first,

16:30

and historians haven't gotten into this big yet either.

16:33

And he would get all three.

16:36

And then Bush faced with either veto,

16:38

or sign getting two out of three with sign.

16:40

I mean it was incredible.

16:44

I'm reminded of when

16:46

LBJ as vice president for John Kennedy,

16:50

his first time as I recall over to the Senate.

16:54

And he's trying to do

16:58

what Cheney will do successfully later.

17:02

He's trying to actually influence votes in the Senate.

17:05

I mean, this is where he came from,

17:09

this is where he knows, you know.

17:10

And he is escorted outside

17:12

the first office that he goes to caucus with,

17:15

I think at that time it was his party.

17:19

And he's told

17:22

in no uncertain terms by senior member of the Senate,

17:24

that he ought to know better.

17:28

That he should go read the constitution

17:30

and don't let his presence darken the Congress again,

17:32

unless it's to break a tie vote

17:37

or to lead the Senate in his capacity.

17:39

And LBJ to his credit,

17:43

I don't think did that again.

17:45

He did not try to do it.

17:48

Well, Cheney does it,

17:49

and the Republican Party allows him to do it.

17:50

And what I would call the pusillanimous leadership

17:52

in the Democratic Party allows him to do it,

17:55

I mean the famous apotheosis of this

17:57

is of course when he turns

18:01

and says to one particular Democrat, fuck you,

18:03

and it's audible when people hear it.

18:07

But well, that was Cheney's disparagement

18:10

of the branch he had come from,

18:13

the separate and equal branch of the government,

18:14

which he is always thought was inferior

18:17

to the executive branch.

18:19

And for the country to function properly,

18:20

should remain inferior to the executive branch.

18:22

In other words, Dick Cheney don't even know

18:25

what the constitution says.

18:26

So this is a rare thing in the first term

18:29

to have the most powerful vice president

18:34

on American history, suddenly loom on the scene,

18:37

loom on the scene in a job that John Garner

18:41

said quite appropriately, it was not worth warm spit.

18:44

Now, of course, as an academic,

18:47

I know that this had been changing since Fritz Mondale,

18:49

Mondale was given real responsibility by President Carter,

18:52

and every vice president that comes along

18:57

culminating in Al Gore with Bill Clinton

19:00

is given increasing responsibility

19:02

because governing is becoming more and more complex

19:04

and more and more difficult.

19:07

And why waste someone when you've got someone?

19:08

But Cheney takes it to another realm altogether,

19:10

and will be unique in the history

19:14

of the American vice presidency,

19:17

as far as I'm concerned.

19:19

Interviewer

You think Cheney knew when he came in that-

19:20

-

He knew he was gonna be vice president, he picked himself.

19:22

He picked himself.

19:25

When he left the defense department,

19:26

not saying a word to Colin Powell

19:28

with him he'd worked for three plus years.

19:30

Powell covers this in his book, "My American Journey,"

19:32

he went up to say goodbye to the secretary of defense

19:35

after George Bush had lost and Clinton had won,

19:37

and he was gone.

19:39

He hadn't said a word, he hadn't said a word.

19:41

Well, he went right out with Jim Baker and others

19:43

and went across the country

19:45

seeing what his chances would be to run for president

19:47

and his chances were zilch.

19:49

And so I think at that moment,

19:50

he decided he'd have to find another way.

19:54

And along comes this governor from Texas

19:56

who's never done anything in his life.

19:58

And also governor in a governor's position

20:02

is probably one of the most feckless in the United States,

20:06

legislature in Texas runs Texas.

20:09

And, he says, "Whoa, got it."

20:12

And he works his way into being...

20:17

I don't think when he was picked

20:19

to be the head of the vice president search committee,

20:20

that Dick Cheney had a clue

20:22

or had a thought in his mind

20:24

about anyone else becoming vice president, but himself.

20:25

And by that means he became president.

20:29

Interviewer

And why was it that everyone else

20:33

was intimidated by him?

20:35

I mean, the way you're describing it,

20:37

people were intimidated by Rumsfeld

20:38

and people intimidated by Cheney.

20:39

How did that happen?

20:42

-

I don't think people would have been intimidated so much

20:43

by either had they not been in pair.

20:47

And I have to add to that ingredient,

20:49

a person who was national security advisor

20:52

who was far out of her element, Dr. Condoleezza Rice.

20:54

She had essentially two choices

20:58

when she confronted the tandem of Chaney Rumsfeld.

21:01

And I should say the tandem supported more often

21:05

than not by the president.

21:08

She had two choices.

21:09

She could try to discipline

21:10

the statutory decision making process.

21:12

She could try to be a Brent Scowcroft,

21:14

her mentor if you will.

21:17

She could try to be a Henry Kissinger,

21:19

and capture the process

21:22

and become president herself.

21:24

Or she could...

21:26

I mean that would be

21:28

a situation that had occurred before.

21:31

Or she could have her eye on the prize,

21:34

and I think that her prize

21:36

was always the secretary Powel's position.

21:37

And the only way she could get there

21:41

with some degree of surety

21:43

would be to get closer and closer,

21:44

more intimate with the president,

21:47

that was her route.

21:50

And so you didn't do that,

21:52

you didn't build your intimacy with the president

21:53

if you discipline the decision-making system,

21:55

because that would put you constantly

21:57

against the vice president and the Secretary of Defense,

22:00

and probably against the President ultimately.

22:04

And it would also make you appear to be

22:07

because the person most often opposed to that triumvirate,

22:10

or that tandem was the Secretary of State.

22:14

It would make you appear

22:17

to be in the Secretary of State's ballpark.

22:18

Now, let's just examine that for a moment.

22:20

Two blacks in the same boat all the time

22:22

against the president.

22:25

The Secretary of State is the biggest political threat

22:28

to the president.

22:32

And the president never forgot that.

22:33

And Karl Rove, didn't hesitate

22:35

to whisper it in his ear from time to time.

22:37

Watch the video of Powell accepting,

22:40

Bush's nomination of him

22:45

to be secretary of state.

22:47

Bush's in the background,

22:50

and you can see a little fuzziness

22:51

as you often do when the camera's focused on the principal,

22:54

but looking at someone behind him.

22:57

The look on Bush's face is precious and indicative.

23:00

Powell gives a tour d'horizon of American foreign policy.

23:03

Bush had given an introduction

23:07

that was his usual stumbling bumbling self.

23:09

And Powell gets up there

23:13

and I'm saying to myself when I'm watching it,

23:14

wrong boss, wrong, you shouldn't have done that.

23:17

You've already got the president thinking

23:20

about how he's gonna be outshone by you,

23:23

time and time again.

23:26

And so, Dr. Rice made in her mind I'm sure,

23:28

a reasonable decision.

23:32

I'm usually gonna just gonna side with the President,

23:34

I'm usually gonna be with Rumsfeld and Cheney

23:37

even though I might not feel that's the best place to be.

23:39

So three people now,

23:41

three people who are as powerful as can be

23:44

in this decision-making process

23:48

are almost always in accord

23:49

or their descent is limited,

23:52

and they come to accord.

23:55

So this is the way the first term runs.

23:56

Interviewer

Well, was Bush intimidated by Cheney

24:00

and Rumsfeld as well in the way you're describing it?

24:02

-

I don't think he was close enough to them

24:04

to be intimidated.

24:06

And I don't think he was perceptive enough,

24:07

until '05, '06,

24:09

and then, '06, of course, he finally fires Rumsfeld

24:12

to understand what was going on.

24:16

He was more Reaganesque without Reagan's executive ability,

24:18

in terms of I don't do the details

24:25

you guys do the details.

24:27

And by the way, I don't like you guys

24:28

fighting in front of me.

24:29

If you go off and fight in the trenches, that's fine,

24:30

but don't fight around me.

24:32

People think, well, how can that happen?

24:35

People don't understand the White House.

24:37

They don't understand the presidency.

24:39

The man, the woman eventually is captured.

24:40

They're totally and utterly captured.

24:43

And if they do not bring the talent and the knowledge

24:46

and the political acumen of a Franklin Roosevelt,

24:50

or I would submit a George Herbert Walker Bush

24:54

eight years as vice president,

24:57

Director of the CIA, ambassador to the China,

24:58

they don't bring that kind of depth to the office,

25:01

they're totally captured.

25:04

And usually for an entire first term,

25:06

if not both terms.

25:09

President Obama is same way right now,

25:11

he's captured, he's captured.

25:13

This man could no more consider an outside thought

25:15

that might be Midas touch.

25:18

It might be golden,

25:21

but he could no more consider it,

25:22

than the head of an organization like Proctor and Gamble

25:23

who can only talk about toothpaste.

25:27

I mean, it's incredible how much they're captured,

25:30

and people just don't understand that.

25:33

They don't understand it.

25:34

They think they remain

25:35

the person they saw in the campaign.

25:37

They think they remain human,

25:39

they think they remain capable of making decisions

25:41

that are independent of others around them.

25:45

It's an impossibility.

25:47

You are in a position where you must listen to the Pentagon,

25:48

you must listen to the military,

25:51

you must listen to corporate America,

25:54

you must listen to the banks,

25:56

you must listen to Wall Street.

25:58

You can't escape it.

25:59

And so if you make a decision that's good, it's serendipity.

26:01

Interviewer

Why must you listen? You're the president?

26:05

-

What choice do you have?

26:07

What choice do you have

26:10

when general Petraeus looks at you

26:11

and says, the man from the field

26:13

dripping with Afghan and Taliban blood says to you,

26:15

"Mr. President, I need 30,000 more troops,

26:19

otherwise, hell will envelop your administration."

26:22

It's not that direct,

26:26

but that's the implication.

26:27

What do you say?

26:29

No general, I'm not gonna give you a single more troop.

26:30

And especially when you campaigned

26:33

on Afghanistan being the right war

26:35

and Iraq being wind down at best, wrong war at worse.

26:38

That's you said when you were a Senator.

26:42

Now you're suddenly gonna say,

26:44

I've looked at this situation really closely

26:46

and, oh, by the way, the way you've looked at it

26:48

is through the lens of your intelligence community.

26:50

The most dysfunctional broken community in America,

26:52

$80 billion, 17 separate entities that couldn't tell you

26:55

who's gonna sneeze tomorrow morning.

27:00

So that's where you're getting your information,

27:02

that's where you're getting your picture.

27:05

You can't get outside that.

27:07

Where are you gonna go?

27:10

Look for your Blackberry and...

27:11

Oh, sorry, I got the microphone.

27:12

Look for your Blackberry,

27:14

and then see if there's some professor out there

27:15

at Harvard or Stanford that's gonna give you the right shot?

27:18

We have created a tremendous problem,

27:24

in not only our electoral process,

27:29

we generally don't put that smarter people

27:31

in the White House, but also in the fact

27:33

that even if we put someone who's smart there

27:36

and I think President Obama is,

27:38

he's captured immediately by the bureaucracy.

27:40

Interviewer

Well, that doesn't give as much hope

27:44

for the future the way you're describing it.

27:46

-

Well, look at whom President Obama brought

27:48

into so-called resurrect our economy,

27:50

the people who had destroyed it

27:53

in the first place, Bob Rubin's disciples.

27:55

Most powerful man and William Jefferson Clinton two terms,

27:58

was Robert Rubin, the most powerful man.

28:02

And he had as much he and Alan Greenspan had

28:06

as much to do with designing the economic catastrophe

28:08

we hit in 2007, 2008, as anyone.

28:12

And so what does Obama do?

28:15

He brings their disciples,

28:18

their acolytes in.

28:19

One of them still there.

28:21

Interviewer

He brought some of the same men as well but,

28:24

so you've seen Bush is essentially the same kinda person

28:28

he was also captured,

28:31

and it was his choice to teach.

28:32

-

Yeah, even more so

28:34

because this man was steeped in nothing.

28:35

This man had no...

28:39

If he had anything, it was his adamancy.

28:42

It was his hardheadedness,

28:44

his recalcitrance, his stubbornness.

28:46

And sometimes that produced decent decisions,

28:49

other times it produced catastrophes.

28:52

Interviewer

Did he choose Powell?

28:56

Was that his choice?

28:58

-

I'm not sure.

29:00

I think probably Papa Bush, 41,

29:01

George Herbert Walker Bush had a lot to do with that.

29:04

I'm not sure that Cheney didn't have something

29:09

to do with that, after all, Cheney and Powell

29:11

had worked fairly closely together.

29:12

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense.

29:14

I'm not sure that the combination of Papa Bush

29:18

and Cheney and Powell popularity with the American people,

29:22

his Powell ratings were right there

29:25

with mother Teresa in the high '70s.

29:27

I'm not sure that all of that didn't contribute

29:31

to his selection of Powell,

29:34

plus the fact that Cheney...

29:35

I can't imagine that Cheney didn't confide in Bush,

29:37

that the weakest department in the government

29:41

and therefore the easiest to manipulate

29:43

was the State Department.

29:46

The State Department is virtually powerless

29:47

when it comes to a confrontation

29:50

with the Defense Department.

29:52

You're talking about roughly $1.3 trillion a year,

29:54

against roughly $40 billion a year.

29:59

Rumsfeld used to say he lost more money in a year

30:03

than the State Department got, he was right.

30:05

Interviewer

Well, so then take us post 9/11,

30:10

I mean go right into it, how the torture policy evolved?

30:15

How did all that happen?

30:18

Who is in charge there given the way you described it

30:19

up till now, who's making policy in the administration,

30:23

and where's this coming from?

30:25

-

One of the things I think historians are gonna ponder

30:30

and that I ponder is I do my research

30:32

and try to teach my youngsters,

30:35

is just how big a catalyst, intensive catalyst was 9/11.

30:37

And you do hypotheticals, you say,

30:44

would the Bush administration,

30:47

would Cheney, would the neoconservatives

30:50

who influenced the policy in the strategy,

30:52

would they have been as successful had 9/11 not occurred?

30:56

My preliminary answer to that question,

31:00

is both a person who is intimate with some of the process

31:03

and also done a lot of research and teaches it,

31:06

and each seminar is different.

31:10

I learned more, I learned from my students,

31:11

I learned from further research and from other people.

31:13

9/11 was an incredible catalyst.

31:17

It probably...

31:20

I would right now

31:22

I would say with a footnote

31:23

saying more to come.

31:25

9/11 made it possible for Cheney and Rumsfeld

31:27

and neoconservatives, to do what they wanted to do

31:31

in a far more profound

31:35

and a much swifter way,

31:37

than they would have been able to do, otherwise.

31:39

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

31:41

They're doing the same thing right now.

31:42

The very same thing.

31:45

Same strategy with regard to Iran.

31:46

We right now are in 1997, 1998 timeframe

31:49

vis-a-vis Iraq,

31:54

but vis-a-vis Iran.

31:56

They are plotting,

31:58

they're plotting, they're crafting.

31:59

Interviewer

Who's they?

32:02

-

The new conservatives who are interested in war with Iran,

32:04

Richard Pearl, Michael Ledeen,

32:06

you could rattle off a few more names,

32:09

not sure I'd put Paul Wolfowitz in there anymore.

32:11

I wouldn't put Francis Fukuyama in there anymore,

32:14

but the people who want war with Iran

32:17

are working on the road to war with Iran.

32:20

The latest move reminiscent over my Jollibee

32:24

and the Iraqi National Congress,

32:27

is this desire which has attracted

32:30

some really strange bedfellows,

32:32

like Mitchell Reese, former Director of Policy Planning

32:35

at the State Department, General Anthony Zinni,

32:37

General James Jones, Obama's last national security advisor,

32:39

to delist the MEK,

32:43

the terror bloody minded terrorist organization of Iranians

32:46

that we put on the terrorist list,

32:50

and now we're trying to delist them.

32:52

They will become our provocateurs,

32:54

our cutting edge in trying to regime change in Iran.

32:56

So I see they're moving again to do that.

33:01

This group is probably incapable

33:04

of influencing George W. Bush,

33:08

even though they've got Rumsfeld

33:12

and they've got Chaney

33:14

whom I wouldn't call a neo-conservative,

33:15

I'd call an ultra hyper nationalist in the administration,

33:17

and Condi sought of compliant with them.

33:21

I don't think they'd been able to do it

33:25

without the catastrophe of 9/11.

33:26

9/11 just opened the doors.

33:29

Opened the flood gates

33:31

so you could do pretty much what you wanted to.

33:32

And we got section five of the national security strategy,

33:34

which essentially said,

33:36

we reserve the right to attack anybody.

33:38

It looks like they might 10 years from now

33:42

be getting ready to attack us,

33:44

especially if they have access

33:46

to what we think they will have access to,

33:47

weapons of mass destruction.

33:49

So this is my preliminary

33:51

estimate that 9/11 happened

33:56

in a way that enabled a lot of this.

33:59

And then it enabled Carl Rove for example,

34:01

a master gables like creature

34:04

to essentially exploit the politics of fear,

34:08

much of the way Joe McCarthy and Jenner

34:13

and others of his ilk did during the cold war,

34:16

early years of the cold war

34:20

to the extent that they could scare the American people

34:21

and get things done.

34:24

The real reason George W. Bush won, in 2004,

34:26

a second term unlike his father,

34:33

was one, the incompetence of John Kerry.

34:36

And I think basically,

34:38

the pusillanimous nature of the Democratic Party

34:40

on the one hand and on the other hand,

34:44

and more importantly,

34:46

I think, was still that fear was still very much there.

34:47

And George W. Bush was seen by enough of the electorate

34:50

to be better able to handle that fear than John Kerry.

34:54

So it did a lot.

34:58

It got him in second term,

35:00

it got the neo-cons what they wanted.

35:02

It got war in Iraq, and-

35:04

Interviewer

Well, how did life unfold

35:06

right after the 9/11?

35:09

I assume that Secretary Powell was right there.

35:10

-

Yes, it's unfolding,

35:13

this is another place where my students get...

35:15

They get a real insight

35:19

into the Shakespearean nature of our government.

35:21

Why anyone would be surprised at that?

35:26

I don't know, we're all humans.

35:28

Power is power after all.

35:30

Powell almost instantly, which he was wanting to do

35:33

on major policy issues has a strategy for the president.

35:37

And the strategy is expressed best by a huge matrix,

35:42

that we drew up in policy planning at state.

35:46

And that matrix has on the left side,

35:48

if I recall where the countries

35:51

and across the top

35:52

was the things we would need from the countries,

35:53

as we not only responded to the 9/11 attacks,

35:55

principally with military force in Afghanistan

35:59

as that sort of spear point,

36:02

but also use this opportunity of global solidarity,

36:04

after all, a million people marched into Iran.

36:09

Cuba, Fidel Castro sends his condolences,

36:13

and so forth and so on.

36:16

NATO invoked article five

36:18

for the first time in its history

36:20

and attack on one is an attack on all,

36:21

and offered all manner of support.

36:23

Powell said, and we said it state,

36:25

what a wonderful opportunity

36:28

for America to push this moment,

36:30

into more than just a kinetic response to the attack.

36:33

And so on the left side were the countries,

36:38

I don't remember it was probably 100 or more countries.

36:40

Across the top was everything from as you might expect,

36:43

military forces in Afghanistan,

36:48

all the way over to basing rights, political support,

36:51

overflight rights, you name, it was all there.

36:55

And what that represented was this hugely,

36:57

potentially successful strategy

37:02

of using this moment of solidarity

37:04

to submit cooperation, coherence,

37:08

concerts of power for freedom and democracy,

37:11

all across the globe.

37:14

And to do it in a way that sought of gave some coherence

37:16

which herefore had not been found,

37:19

in the post cold war world.

37:22

Call it assertive multilateralism

37:24

like Madeline Albright did.

37:27

Call it engagement like Clinton liked to call it,

37:28

that's pretty much what it was.

37:30

And it was very consistent

37:32

and very continuous with American foreign policy

37:34

since World War II.

37:37

Bush liked it, Bush bought it.

37:40

How did it go awry?

37:44

It went awry because the neo-cons,

37:45

Rumsfeld Cheney at the lead,

37:47

David Addington is one of the brain forces for it

37:49

began to apply their philosophy,

37:52

to that grand strategy

37:55

and I'll give you some examples.

37:56

Nowhere in that strategy

37:59

did we talk about deploying

38:01

America's unconventional military forces,

38:02

like Delta Force, Navy Seals,

38:06

Seal Team Six, for example

38:10

and others across the globe

38:11

to capture and or kill Al Qaeda wherever they found them.

38:14

Or when incidentally Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines,

38:18

Jamala Mia in Southeast Asia in general,

38:21

Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir whatever.

38:24

Wherever you find these dudes,

38:27

fix and kill or capture them.

38:29

So this is what Rumsfeld starts right off the bat.

38:31

Partly because the CIA beat him to Afghanistan,

38:35

beat him badly to Afghanistan.

38:38

This is another thing that motivates Rumsfeld's desire

38:40

to transform the military and do devote its time and money

38:43

more to precision guided munitions,

38:47

to the Air Force and so forth

38:49

rather than the land forces, 'cause they're so cumbersome

38:51

they can't even get to Afghanistan on time.

38:53

And the CIA really is the US Force

38:55

that does Afghanistan

38:58

along with a few special forces people and airplanes.

39:00

So you're creating all this bureaucratic tension,

39:03

this bureaucratic, shall we say, 800 pound gorillas,

39:06

800 pound egos that are colliding with each other.

39:11

At the same time, you're creating this what I think

39:14

was a pretty good grand strategy

39:17

for how to deal with this.

39:18

And you've got people beginning to contaminate

39:20

that strategy right off the bat,

39:22

lead in that being Rumsfeld.

39:23

He's also I think,

39:27

and this is very bureaucratically the case

39:29

since about the end of the Eisenhower administration.

39:32

Bay of pigs certainly forward,

39:37

bay of pigs CIA just collapses.

39:39

It's a disaster.

39:42

Allen Dulles gets fired by President Kennedy,

39:43

so do the people who are responsible for the bay of pigs.

39:47

But it's a disaster for the Pentagon too,

39:49

because the Pentagon essentially is sitting there

39:51

sought of licking its chops saying,

39:55

when the CIA falls on its face in this invasion,

39:57

and we know they will,

40:00

those Cuban paramilitary forces are not gonna win.

40:01

We'll be called upon,

40:05

and we'll invade Cuba and Castro will be gone,

40:06

and we'll own Cuba again.

40:08

This is the way the Pentagon is looking at it.

40:10

So it's a disaster for both

40:11

because Kennedy stands not only fires dollars,

40:13

but stands up to the Pentagon and says,

40:16

no, you're not gonna provide air support,

40:17

you're not gonna invade Cuba.

40:19

So from that moment on,

40:21

they began to build a bureaucratic tension

40:24

between the agency and the Pentagon, and so bad,

40:26

that by the time we get to the first Gulf war,

40:29

Norman Schwarzkopf in the Gulf,

40:32

the military commander in the first Gulf war

40:34

is telling Powell, the Chairman

40:36

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

40:37

we should just establish the CIA, we should get rid of it.

40:38

I mean, his language is a lot stronger than that.

40:40

Because it's a lousy,

40:44

it's not giving me anything that's useful,

40:45

no intelligence that's useful and so forth.

40:47

So this is a historical building antagonism

40:49

between the agency and the them.

40:53

Rumsfeld knows that he's got this antagonism,

40:54

and he's got it himself.

40:58

So he says, "How do I do this?

40:59

I do this myself, I don't use the CIA."

41:01

So he's out not only trying to capture and kill,

41:03

he's gonna interrogate them

41:08

because, what good is it to capture an Al Qaeda guy

41:09

unless you can interrogate him?

41:12

So there already is building this desire

41:14

to do it all on her own in the Pentagon

41:17

to include interrogation, to include detainment,

41:19

to include the prison facilities and so forth and so on,

41:22

necessarily to do this.

41:25

But it collides with the President, the NSC,

41:26

and the bureaucracy.

41:29

And so the CIA has to come into it,

41:31

the CIA has to be a part of it

41:33

and Rumsfeld can't keep the CIA out completely.

41:35

So you get at the same time,

41:38

that Powell presents this rather workable, I thought,

41:40

and rather sane grand strategy

41:44

on how to exploit the moment for the world's solidarity,

41:46

you get all these bureaucrats

41:50

who are leaping into this to try

41:51

and do what they need to do.

41:54

When did he wanna go after Abu Sayyaf,

41:55

a bunch of thugs in the Philippines, for example?

41:58

They're thugs who capture people

42:01

and hold them for ransom,

42:02

and occasionally cut one of 'ems head off

42:04

so that everybody else later on will understand

42:05

they mean business.

42:07

Well, we've been kicked out of the Philippines.

42:09

We DOD, been kicked out of the Philippines.

42:11

We've been kicked out of the largest ship affair facility,

42:13

the cheapest ship affair facility.

42:17

Being kicked out of Clark Air Base,

42:19

the place where we could drop our bombs

42:21

without any worry about the environment or anything else.

42:23

The place where we could train in the Pacific.

42:25

We wanted to get back.

42:28

Oh, here's the way to get back.

42:29

We'll send special forces units into the Philippines

42:31

to look for Abu Sayyaf.

42:33

We'll tack on the Muslim National Liberation front too,

42:35

the MNLF, and we'll be back in the Philippines.

42:39

So there are all manner of ulterior motives

42:43

that are operating in this process,

42:46

of executing this strategy.

42:48

And no one to guide it from the top.

42:50

No one to put their hand on it

42:53

and say, wait a minute,

42:56

that's not what I wanted to do.

42:58

Instead, you have a president

43:01

who's aloof from all of this,

43:03

a vice president who's aiding and abetting it

43:04

particularly with regard to the defense department,

43:07

the place he understands best,

43:09

after all, we elected a defense contractor

43:11

to be vice president in the United States,

43:13

as well as the former secretary of defense.

43:15

We also elected the guy who wrote the dissenting opinion,

43:17

to the congressional report about Iran Contra.

43:20

He felt the president had done right,

43:23

the Congress had done wrong

43:24

and he was a member of the Congress.

43:26

So we made him vice president.

43:28

So he's aiding and abetting this process as he can,

43:29

and eventually will become a direct correspondent

43:32

with some of the military forces in the field,

43:37

even going around the sector of defense.

43:40

Some of these forces will report directly

43:42

to the office of the vice president.

43:44

Stanley McChrystal at JSOC

43:46

the Joint Special Operations Command

43:48

is reporting directly to the vice president.

43:49

Whether or not the vice president brief the sec Def on that,

43:52

I don't know, I suspect he probably did.

43:55

But you've got in one case I've discovered,

43:57

when McChrystal is testifying to the Senate

44:01

on his apparent complicity in trying to cover up the death

44:05

of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan,

44:09

you've got the vice president's office

44:11

and perhaps the vice president himself,

44:13

though I've not found the smoking gun there,

44:15

telling McChrystal what to say,

44:18

helping him with his testimony.

44:20

So this becomes a very incestuous,

44:22

and very insidious relationship

44:25

that is playing with this bigger grand strategy

44:27

for its own bureaucratic or power purposes.

44:31

And it goes on and on and on,

44:33

with no one to stop it

44:35

because the president is not paying any attention,

44:36

I'm not sure if he had been paying close attention,

44:39

he'd understood what was going on.

44:41

Interviewer

So the way you're describing it,

44:44

everyone seemed to think Cheney was the one

44:45

who designed the policy

44:48

that led to perhaps the torture.

44:51

But the way you're describing it,

44:53

Rumsfeld was a megalomaniac who wanted control

44:54

and he might've come up with this interrogation policy.

44:57

-

Here again, I don't know whether it's chicken and the egg,

45:01

I don't know which came first.

45:04

I've changed my mind several times

45:06

as I've done further research

45:08

is that I've talked to principals

45:09

and sub principals in this matter,

45:11

both at the agency, the White House,

45:13

I shouldn't say both, all over the government.

45:16

I thought originally,

45:20

that it probably started with a select group

45:22

what we would call a presidential finding.

45:27

Although I can't find the finding,

45:29

nor can I find anyone

45:31

who will tell me about the finding,

45:32

that's not that unusual

45:34

because generally if you're smart,

45:35

a finding is going to be known

45:38

only by those people who need to execute.

45:40

So it'd be the president,

45:42

the Director of the CIA,

45:43

and maybe a few people at the agency.

45:44

But Tenet doesn't talk about it.

45:46

They're highly classified,

45:49

they're very narrow, very stovepipe,

45:51

and maybe 25 years from now

45:53

we'll find out if there was one.

45:55

But that's what I thought at first

45:56

the president must assign the finding,

45:58

and said to Tenet in a very rational way,

46:00

probably about safe by the vice president,

46:03

I want you to form a unit

46:08

that will take care of HVDs,

46:11

High Value Detainees,

46:14

like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for example,

46:15

like Shaykh al-Libi

46:17

I want very competent,

46:19

very talented professionals in that unit.

46:21

And I will tell you,

46:25

what you can do and when you can do it.

46:27

Oh, let me consult with office of legal counsel

46:29

and the justice department,

46:32

and I'll find out exactly what I can tell them.

46:34

That makes sense to me,

46:38

and I think that did happen

46:40

in something like the way I've just described.

46:41

But I'm not sure

46:44

whether that led Rumsfeld into thinking

46:45

about, oh, I can take advice from that too,

46:48

and I'll inform what I wanna do,

46:51

which I think preceded this

46:54

with that once it's done.

46:57

Or whether Rumsfeld actually started the whole thing

46:59

through Cheney, and got the president

47:03

to thinking about the finding or whatever,

47:05

I'm not sure we'll ever be able to get that sequence down,

47:07

because they're just probably aren't gonna be the records

47:11

we need or the truth telling

47:13

from some of these principles that we need,

47:15

in order to craft that story correctly.

47:17

But I do think it happened,

47:20

in the way I've described.

47:22

I'm just not sure which led what.

47:24

Here's something that I've discovered only recently,

47:27

that would lead me to believe,

47:30

that perhaps Cheney was more instrumental even in this

47:33

and might've been the ultimate instigator of it all,

47:37

than some other possibility.

47:41

I've now discovered,

47:44

that we were probably torturing people

47:46

as early as the late spring of 2002.

47:50

I've also discovered,

47:54

that we were doing it as much for the reasons articulated,

47:56

i.e, we got to stop another attack,

48:01

we've gotta make sure there's not another attack like 9/11.

48:03

We were doing it for as much or more,

48:07

to find evidence of Saddam Hussein's

48:09

complicity with Al Qaeda,

48:12

and thus be able to justify

48:14

with more smoking guns,

48:16

that the American people would appreciate

48:18

and respond to the war that was coming with Iraq.

48:19

If that's the case,

48:23

then I see the vice president in that all.

48:25

I see David Addington and the vice president in that all.

48:27

So then the question becomes,

48:31

did the vice president very,

48:33

and he is one hell of a bureaucratic entrepreneur.

48:35

He is probably the best bureaucratic operator

48:38

in this administration, and that's saying something

48:41

because I know Powell is good.

48:44

He is saying to all points of power

48:47

who can help him in this,

48:50

we'll get you a legal position,

48:52

we gotta do this, we gotta operate on the dark side,

48:54

everybody's got carte blanche

48:58

who's got a dog in this fight.

49:00

I think that's probably gonna prove

49:02

to be what really happened.

49:04

And then everybody sought of moved out

49:06

under that general mantra.

49:07

Now, did someone have thoughts

49:08

about this beforehand, that were similar?

49:10

Probably, Rumsfeld, probably.

49:12

But Cheney, gives it coherence

49:14

and gives it its momentum.

49:16

And its ultimate blessing,

49:17

after all he's the vice president.

49:19

Interviewer

Well, where was this charge

49:21

in the spring of '02, where was it going on?

49:22

-

Probably at Guantanamo.

49:24

Probably at Guantanamo.

49:26

It may have gone on in Cairo in Egypt,

49:27

it may have gone on in Syria,

49:29

it may have gone on at a couple of other places

49:31

where we dispatched people, we rendered people,

49:33

and we knew they were gonna be tortured

49:35

and whatever the results of that torture were,

49:36

that was relative to what we wanted

49:39

would come back to this fabricated or otherwise.

49:41

But I think it was either in a foreign country,

49:46

or it was at Guantanamo that early.

49:49

Interviewer

And would you have known about that?

49:51

-

Now, let me hasten to say,

49:54

that my research for Powell,

49:56

once Abu Ghraib in the photos

49:58

come out from Abu Ghraib

50:01

and it's general knowledge,

50:02

my research for Powell subsequent

50:04

to that in the spring of 2004, indicated to me that

50:06

perhaps not necessarily

50:13

as a effect of what I'm talking about at higher levels,

50:17

but I think it eventually became an effect of it.

50:21

There are things going on in Afghanistan,

50:25

that are certainly torture.

50:28

There are things going on like homicide.

50:31

December, 2002, if my head's still right about the dates.

50:35

So was this bad training?

50:41

Was this an effect of Cheney's having said,

50:45

and everybody having heard and known about this

50:49

we're gonna operate on the dark side,

50:50

gloves are coming off?

50:53

Was it a result of 9/11?

50:54

Was it a result of national guardsmen

50:58

and reservice being in positions

51:00

they should never have been in

51:01

without the proper training and education and so forth?

51:02

I think it's probably a combination

51:05

of a lot of those things, if not all of them,

51:07

that cause this rather heinous treatment of detainees

51:10

to begin as early as December, 2002

51:14

and perhaps even earlier.

51:17

Particularly in Afghanistan, of course.

51:20

Interviewer

Did Powell know what was going on?

51:22

I mean, was he kept out of the loop?

51:23

-

Largely, I think so.

51:26

If I didn't think that

51:29

and I've actually told him this.

51:31

I think I would have a very different appreciation of him.

51:34

Did he know about the high-value detainee program?

51:37

Probably.

51:40

Did he know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

51:42

once the FBI had finished with him

51:45

was turned over to the CIA?

51:46

Did he know that others that were considered to be HVDs

51:48

which now in retrospect

51:52

don't look like they were HVDs at all,

51:54

but at the time were thought to be?

51:56

Did he know that there was a select program going

51:59

on and approved by the president,

52:03

and furiously being legalized in OLC?

52:04

Probably. Probably.

52:08

But did that involve any more than a half dozen people?

52:10

Probably not.

52:13

It probably wasn't, maybe a half dozen or less.

52:15

But did he know about this wider arena

52:18

where things were going on

52:21

from Afghanistan to Iraq, to Guantanamo,

52:22

to indeed and other places in the world?

52:25

Other places in the world.

52:29

We had to whisk a man out of South America,

52:30

who was a part of this Rumsfeld effort to go everywhere

52:34

and find everyone who had murdered a taxi cab driver.

52:37

I think the circumstances

52:41

where he was a little bit inebriated,

52:43

he had his personal weapon with him.

52:45

He got angry with the taxi cab driver

52:46

'cause the taxi cab driver wanted more money or something,

52:48

and he shot him and killed him.

52:50

And we had the whisk him out

52:51

of this South American country and get him away.

52:53

This was something else Rumsfeld was doing.

52:55

He was deploying these people

52:57

without telling the state department.

52:58

So we would have an ambassador call us

53:00

for example and say, who are these white men

53:01

who are six foot four 19 inch biceps

53:03

walking around my city?

53:05

That's a rhetorical question, I know who they are.

53:07

Why the hell are they here?

53:09

And why haven't I been told?

53:10

And then we would go through Condi

53:12

and then we would go to Don,

53:14

and it'd be this heel dragging and procrastination.

53:15

And finally, they admit, oh yeah, we've got a team

53:18

in that city or that country.

53:21

It's kinda like Raymond Davis in Pakistan at this moment.

53:22

It's still going on in other words.

53:27

Interviewer

Also it sounds to me

53:28

like there were these few people there

53:29

and Powell is being kept out of the loop

53:31

and they were running the show,

53:33

and they were willing to torture.

53:34

And Powell saw that won't go into apply,

53:36

he must have seen it coming here.

53:39

I mean, he's a very smart man. He must have seen that this-

53:41

-

But the deliberations were

53:44

of all the decision-making I've looked at closely

53:47

in the first Bush administration,

53:51

the deliberations over this were quite normal.

53:53

You even had Dr. Rice from time to time,

53:58

largely I think because of John Bellenger, her counsel,

54:01

who I've worked fairly closely with

54:06

as we prepare both Condi and Powell

54:09

for the 9/11 commission testimony in '04.

54:11

And I got to know fairly well

54:13

had some real reservations

54:16

about some of the things that were going on

54:17

and let those reservations be known to Dr. Rice.

54:19

So you actually had Dr. Rice from time and time,

54:22

so to speak on Powell side

54:24

on Will Taff, Powell's lawyer's side

54:26

with regard to these deliberations.

54:28

So I think it was a real shock.

54:30

No decisions had been made,

54:33

that is to say everyone knew

54:35

where everyone stood I think,

54:36

but no decisions have been made.

54:38

And then suddenly on 7th February, 2002,

54:40

as I recall here comes this memo.

54:43

And it says for the Taliban and Al Qaeda,

54:45

oh, we're not gonna follow Geneva.

54:47

It does say subject to military necessity,

54:50

we're gonna treat them

54:54

within the spirit of Geneva and so forth.

54:55

And I think a lot of people thought that was-

54:57

Interviewer

So Powell was blindsided by that.

54:59

-

Yes, just like he was blindsided

55:01

about the demobilization of the Iraqi army.

55:03

President had said,

55:05

"No, we're gonna keep intact battalion and below,"

55:06

he'd approved that, then all of a sudden we did mobilize

55:09

the whole Iraqi army.

55:11

Shock.

55:14

Interviewer

Well, what does Powell

55:16

do in a situation like that if he sees himself blindsided?

55:18

-

As I said, I think Will Taff would be a better person

55:21

to ask this question, because Will was far more

55:25

in the middle involved in it than I,

55:27

my involvement was mostly Powell back briefing me

55:29

when he came back from meetings.

55:32

Will was with him most of the time,

55:34

plus one at the meetings.

55:36

I think Will would say,

55:39

we thought that 7th February memo,

55:41

despite it's being a surprise to us, a shock,

55:45

I'm told David Addington wrote it

55:48

and gave it to the vice president,

55:49

vice president put in front of the president,

55:50

that's how they made a decision.

55:52

Gave enough leeway,

55:55

and expressed enough respect for Geneva

55:58

and respect meaning that somewhere

56:01

you gotta consider common article three,

56:03

all human beings are human beings

56:06

and deserve some kind of treatment

56:09

that is other than torture

56:10

or cruel and unusual punishment.

56:11

That was a little bit with, you could do that.

56:15

You could go ahead and do that,

56:17

especially if you had reasonable combat

56:20

status review tribunal's on the ground,

56:23

in Afghanistan and then later in Iraq.

56:26

And by the way, Iraq was never outside Geneva.

56:28

Iraq was completely within Geneva.

56:31

So that's what we'd done in the first Iraq war.

56:33

We'd had these kind of vetting processes

56:36

on the battlefield that said, you're a civilian,

56:39

you're a civilian with an arm.

56:41

And so we got to go further with you.

56:42

You're a civilian who's killed some people maybe.

56:44

You're a uniform wearing,

56:47

patch bearing, state sponsored prisoner of war,

56:49

and do that sort of thing on the battlefield

56:52

and then the treatment would follow.

56:54

And then none of that would be a violation

56:56

of common article three,

56:59

no matter how unlawful the combatant

57:00

you were not going to torture them.

57:02

You're not gonna abuse them.

57:04

I think that's what everybody thought.

57:06

When Powell came through my door,

57:08

we had adjoining doors.

57:10

Our officers were right beside each other.

57:11

When he came through my door,

57:13

I think it was early April of 2004, and said to me,

57:16

it might've been late March, and he said to me,

57:20

"They're gonna be some photographs coming out.

57:22

Secretary Rumsfeld has just told me about them.

57:26

They're gonna be some photographs coming out,

57:28

they're really gonna be bad."

57:30

I don't know how we got here,

57:32

I need to know how we got here.

57:34

I've charged Will Taff

57:37

with the duty of determining legally how we got here.

57:39

I want you to find out chronologically, event by event,

57:44

fact by fact how we got here.

57:48

You and Will work together.

57:50

And there's an admiral

57:52

being appointed by Secretary Rumsfeld

57:54

to do the same thing at the Defense Department.

57:56

I want you to work with him.

57:58

Will and I got in touch with him,

58:00

shared initially all the paperwork we had,

58:02

everything we had never heard from him again.

58:05

Never heard from him again and he rendered his-

58:06

Interviewer

When was that?

58:09

-

This was the...

58:09

Geez, it just escaped me.

58:12

He turns out a formal report,

58:15

begins with a P but I can't think of the name right now,

58:18

I can get it for you.

58:21

And I read that report later, and I read all through

58:23

clear evidence that is General Taguba will say later,

58:29

there is a policy

58:34

and the policy is influencing actions in the field.

58:36

Taguba is really straightforward about that.

58:40

This report shows all through its breadth

58:43

and length that there is a policy,

58:46

and it's influencing actions in the field

58:49

and then concludes at the end,

58:50

that no policy influenced any action.

58:52

It was just bad apples.

58:55

So we didn't pay a whole lot of attention to that report.

58:57

Interviewer

So I wanna go to David Addington

58:59

in a minute, but I just wanna repeat

59:01

what I think I'm hearing from you is that your office

59:04

or the secretary of state's office,

59:07

was not aware of any torture going on

59:09

while all this was happening

59:12

beginning in the spring of 2002,

59:15

essentially was kept removed from all of it

59:17

and that Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney and Addington,

59:19

were essentially running the country in this direction

59:22

and no one was aware of it, no one knew.

59:25

I mean, John knew, but he-

59:27

-

Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment,

59:29

that's my understanding of it.

59:31

Now, as I said, I do believe Powell knew

59:33

about this HVD unit at the CIA,

59:35

knew about Bush's various precise directions

59:38

to George Tenet and so forth.

59:41

ABC investigation team has provided me

59:45

with a copy of a couple of transcripts,

59:48

of principals meetings or formal NSC meetings,

59:50

it's not clear.

59:53

Sometimes the principals meeting

59:55

the president will drop in on,

59:56

just to make his impact known.

59:58

Principal's meeting is where the national security advisor

1:00:00

chairs all the ministers.

1:00:02

Secretary of state, secretary of defense,

1:00:04

secretary of treasury if necessary,

1:00:05

attorney general and so forth.

1:00:07

NSC formal meeting, is all those people

1:00:09

with the president of the United States presiding.

1:00:12

So these look more like principal's meetings

1:00:14

where the president dropping in,

1:00:17

or maybe functional meetings

1:00:18

with the president present,

1:00:20

not formally within the system.

1:00:22

But they provided me with transcripts

1:00:25

where Powell says things,

1:00:27

Condi says things to the president, Tenet say things,

1:00:29

and it looks like they all knew about the highly

1:00:32

classified CIA run HVD program.

1:00:38

Interviewer

These extraordinary rendition.

1:00:42

Oh, okay, can my wife ask you a question?

1:00:45

-

Sure.

1:00:48

Woman

Our interviews with detainees

1:00:50

have indicated that in Bogglement Kandahar,

1:00:53

even before the memo was written,

1:00:56

they were being tortured in those prisons.

1:00:59

What were the folks in your office thinking was going

1:01:03

on in those prisons and the selling of the detainees?

1:01:08

Were they even thinking about that?

1:01:12

I mean the detainees were sold to the US

1:01:14

and then they were taken to these prisons

1:01:17

and they were tortured.

1:01:20

What was Colin Powell's position on that?

1:01:22

That was happening even before February of 2002.

1:01:25

Interviewer

As you answer, keep looking here.

1:01:29

-

Yeah, you know I can't directly answer that question

1:01:31

except to say that in 2000,

1:01:35

well, when I first started my work for Powell in 2004,

1:01:38

I came across immediately

1:01:43

the work that had been done at the New York Times,

1:01:45

and they were kind enough to let me access that work.

1:01:48

And I came across to the murder of Delaware for example,

1:01:52

and several other homicides

1:01:55

that had even at that time been classified

1:01:57

either by the coroner

1:01:59

or by the reporting physician as homicides.

1:02:00

So that's the first indication

1:02:04

that I as the chief of staff at the State Department,

1:02:06

had that we were abusing people

1:02:09

that early December, 2002 in Afghanistan.

1:02:10

As I did my research further and further,

1:02:14

I began to associate things that I had heard

1:02:17

in the secretary's morning meetings,

1:02:20

with his 50 or so office heads

1:02:23

and under secretaries, assistant secretaries

1:02:26

and so forth, with what I was finding out.

1:02:28

Things like Jack Straw, foreign minister for the UK

1:02:30

trying to get his citizens back from Guantanamo,

1:02:34

the Uighurs at Guantanamo, for example.

1:02:38

Other foreign ministers trying to get their citizens back

1:02:40

including Alex Downer from Australia.

1:02:43

And I began to understand

1:02:46

more about what was going on at Guantanamo in particular,

1:02:48

but more about what was going on

1:02:52

in both Afghanistan and Iraq too.

1:02:54

And Jeff Miller and all the other things

1:02:56

that had transpired.

1:02:58

But it wasn't until that time,

1:03:00

that I began to gain some insights

1:03:02

into what had seemed like to the question,

1:03:04

really perfunctory types of actions

1:03:08

that we were having to do before that.

1:03:10

The most alarming, I guess, of which in diplomatic terms

1:03:13

was our detention at Guantanamo and elsewhere,

1:03:19

of people who were third country nationals.

1:03:23

They were British citizens,

1:03:27

they were Chinese citizens,

1:03:28

they were Australian citizens.

1:03:29

And those foreign ministers didn't understand

1:03:31

why we wouldn't turn those people over to them.

1:03:34

Now, in the case of China,

1:03:37

I understood with the Uighurs

1:03:38

because they probably get their heads cut off

1:03:39

when he went back.

1:03:41

So I understood why we were procrastinating there.

1:03:42

With England, I couldn't understand.

1:03:44

With Australia, I couldn't understand,

1:03:47

why are we holding these people?

1:03:49

So these kinds of questions, yes,

1:03:50

were being raised in my mind

1:03:53

as they were in Pierre Prospers' mind,

1:03:54

Ambassador Pierre Prosper

1:03:56

for war crimes at large and so forth.

1:03:58

Powell's mind, Richard Armitage,

1:04:00

the deputy secretary's mind, and so forth,

1:04:02

we couldn't figure this out.

1:04:03

So in that sense,

1:04:06

yes, there was some foretelling if you will,

1:04:08

of problems, but they were problems

1:04:11

that while in explicable,

1:04:14

they didn't involve torturing people.

1:04:16

They didn't involve murdering people,

1:04:18

they didn't involve abusing people.

1:04:20

Interviewer

Well, it sounds like Powell

1:04:21

was not aware of what Jamie was doing in Afghanistan

1:04:22

when he was torturing...

1:04:26

The people were tortured in Afghanistan

1:04:27

before they went to Guantanamo.

1:04:29

-

Yeah.

1:04:30

Interviewer

Powell wasn't aware of that.

1:04:31

-

Well, the question becomes as I tried to suggest earlier,

1:04:32

is were these people being treated

1:04:36

the way we say they're being treated?

1:04:39

Because of other factors

1:04:41

than policy at that time?

1:04:43

I can't answer that question.

1:04:48

Interviewer

Do you think Cheney was behind grabbing

1:04:50

the close 800 people who went to Guantanamo?

1:04:52

That's what I've heard that it was Cheney's policy

1:04:55

to just grab anybody by essentially drop these leaflets

1:04:58

and pay the to fill up Guantanamo

1:05:01

and make this look like,

1:05:03

do you think they were using these policies?

1:05:04

-

In the sense that Tenet was authorized,

1:05:07

Tenet being the real, I think power in Afghanistan

1:05:10

at this time, in the sense that the CIA was authorized

1:05:13

to do what it did.

1:05:17

Which was to put leaflets all over the country,

1:05:19

telling people you get a bonus,

1:05:23

you get a bounty if you turn people in and so forth

1:05:25

in the sense that the prisoners who were originally captured

1:05:28

not that I can find,

1:05:31

not a single prisoner was captured by US force.

1:05:34

They were all captured by General Dawson's forces,

1:05:37

and we know about General Dawson.

1:05:40

They were captured by other Northern Alliance commanders.

1:05:42

They were captured by Pakistanis, ISI and others.

1:05:47

They were captured by almost everyone in the region

1:05:51

with a dog in that fight, so to speak, except us.

1:05:55

And we just accepted them.

1:05:59

And we hauled them off to Afghanistan.

1:06:01

I forget the original number,

1:06:03

740 or something like that.

1:06:04

We just hauled off to Afghanistan,

1:06:06

and we had not been present at the capture of,

1:06:08

nor had we interrogated to the extent

1:06:11

that we could say we were a status review tribunal.

1:06:14

And we were, you should go,

1:06:17

you should go back to your homeland.

1:06:18

Or you should go back to your taxi or whatever.

1:06:20

We simply ship them.

1:06:23

And then the image that was created

1:06:24

in order to justify all this,

1:06:27

was that they were people

1:06:30

who would bite through the hydraulic lines on the aircraft

1:06:32

if we didn't have them shackled

1:06:34

and hooded and ear muffed and everything else.

1:06:36

That image I think came right out of David Addington

1:06:39

and the vice president's office

1:06:42

and right out of Rumsfeld and Bill Haynes and Cambodia

1:06:44

and the crew at the Defense Department.

1:06:48

Working together, just as they had worked together,

1:06:50

to essentially lie about WMD in Iraq.

1:06:53

They worked together to make sure that the American people

1:06:56

thought these were the most heinous sons of bitches

1:06:59

on the face of the earth,

1:07:01

and therefore, fully justified in keeping them

1:07:03

in the kind of conditions

1:07:05

they were gonna keep them in at Guantanamo.

1:07:06

But to go back to the question about Afghanistan and Iraq,

1:07:08

it's hard for me to say that some of that early stuff

1:07:13

didn't occur more based on bad training,

1:07:17

reaction to 9/11, and wrong people to have there

1:07:22

and so forth and so on

1:07:26

as it did from policy emanating from Washington.

1:07:27

Interviewer

So the policy might've come a little later

1:07:30

because I think everyone was so angry at that time.

1:07:31

They might have you saying,

1:07:34

it could have been some quote rogue soldiers.

1:07:34

-

Yeah, there could have been.

1:07:38

There always some bad apples.

1:07:39

I mean there were bad apples in Vietnam.

1:07:41

Look at My Lai look at some of the other things.

1:07:42

And yet, it's the same time that I say that,

1:07:43

I have to say that constant overlooking

1:07:46

by both field commanders,

1:07:49

from lieutenants to generals,

1:07:51

and constant overlooking by the White House

1:07:54

and others who knew better,

1:07:56

contributed to the war crimes in Vietnam.

1:08:00

So if you've created this environment

1:08:03

of the gloves are coming off,

1:08:06

we're gonna operate on the dark side.

1:08:08

If you said that from the highest policy levels

1:08:10

in the country, it's difficult for me to go down

1:08:13

and blame a private who takes his gloves off.

1:08:15

Interviewer

Did David Addington you think

1:08:19

helped create the policy along with Cheney, right?

1:08:23

'Cause he apparently knew international law

1:08:25

and it was smart.

1:08:28

-

I think David Addington is the Ayman al-Zawahiri

1:08:29

Ayman is the brain trust for Bin Laden.

1:08:35

I think David Addington is the brain trust

1:08:38

for Dick Cheney and has been for years.

1:08:40

We used to call David in the Pentagon

1:08:43

when he was working for secretary

1:08:45

of defense Cheney, Weird David.

1:08:47

Interviewer

Do you think he's the one who came up

1:08:49

with the term enemy combatant?

1:08:51

-

I think he probably crafted

1:08:53

most of what John Yoo and Jay Bybee

1:08:55

and others in the OLC

1:08:58

are given credit for and passed it to them.

1:09:00

Interviewer

And in terms of...

1:09:03

Just from what you said before,

1:09:06

in terms of the actual thinking we need to torture.

1:09:08

It sounded like you said that came from Rumsfeld,

1:09:11

but maybe it came from Huntsville and Cheney together.

1:09:14

Addington, who said, look, we're gonna break the ranks

1:09:17

and be something we were never

1:09:20

before in the history of the US,

1:09:22

we are going to mistreat people

1:09:24

like we've never done before, who?

1:09:25

-

Dick Cheney and David Addington.

1:09:27

That said, I think Rumsfeld approached it

1:09:29

and here's one reason why I said

1:09:33

before I don't think he's a very wise man, maybe smart,

1:09:34

but he's not very wise.

1:09:37

I think Rumsfeld approached it from the point of view

1:09:39

of even before the OLC opinions were rendered,

1:09:42

before the Bybee memo as it were,

1:09:46

I need to figure out what I can do

1:09:49

and I need to figure it out within the law.

1:09:52

And so you get this exchange going

1:09:56

on between Southern command

1:09:57

and its legal staff if you will,

1:09:59

Diane Beaver, I think was her name

1:10:01

being sought of principal,

1:10:03

who should never been a principal.

1:10:04

She didn't know what she was talking about.

1:10:05

And the Pentagon in this case is Cambone

1:10:09

and his boys and Rumsfeld and his boys

1:10:12

and OSD general counsel, Bill Haynes, Jim Haynes,

1:10:15

and William J. Haynes, I think his name is.

1:10:18

And, so what you get here

1:10:21

is Rumsfeld actually trying to stay

1:10:23

within legal confines,

1:10:25

and people giving him really bad advice,

1:10:27

tremendously bad advice.

1:10:30

Both from the field and his own counsel,

1:10:32

Cambone and others in the Pentagon.

1:10:34

So that you get a reaction to that bad advice

1:10:37

from the service Jags, from the chairman even apparently,

1:10:40

if we're to believe that pusillanimous son of a gun,

1:10:44

and others who see in this

1:10:47

at least the fabric of abuse,

1:10:51

if not the clear evidence thereof.

1:10:54

And you get it coming to a head when Alberta Mora

1:10:57

from the Navy comes in and tells Bill Haynes,

1:10:59

essentially, if I remember correctly

1:11:02

and this is paraphrasing,

1:11:05

but I might expose you if you don't change this

1:11:08

'cause I can't live with this.

1:11:11

And you get Haynes saying back to Mora,

1:11:13

okay, things will be done,

1:11:15

nd then Rumsfeld reacts and Rumsfeld pulls the initial memo,

1:11:16

and then things seem like they've changed

1:11:20

but they pretty much go on the way

1:11:22

they had been going on before.

1:11:23

I don't think Rumsfeld for example, thought,

1:11:25

okay, in this memo, I've signed the famous one,

1:11:29

or infamous one, now where he puts I stand,

1:11:32

why can't they stand?

1:11:33

I think it was A through double D, which is what?

1:11:36

30 techniques or something like that.

1:11:40

I don't think he put them together.

1:11:43

I don't think he understood

1:11:45

that if you do six or seven of these,

1:11:46

over a sustained period of time

1:11:49

to a single individual, that's torture.

1:11:51

I mean it is torture.

1:11:54

If you keep someone at hypothermic temperatures,

1:11:56

blasted with loud music in the dark shackled to the floor,

1:11:58

unable to move in a hood

1:12:01

or over 52 days or whatever, that's torture.

1:12:04

I really don't think Rumsfeld ever thought about it.

1:12:08

Interviewer

Cheney will think that,

1:12:11

but not Rumsfeld.

1:12:12

Cheney had to think of a way to describe it.

1:12:13

-

I'm not sure that Cheney would have cared.

1:12:15

Cheney's philosophy was if I saved one American life

1:12:18

and kill 700 innocent people,

1:12:22

then 700 innocent people have to die.

1:12:24

Oh, and I think you have to bring this in,

1:12:26

because this is what I teach.

1:12:29

Cheney is also thinking, my God,

1:12:32

3000 Americans died on my watch,

1:12:37

this can't happen again,

1:12:43

I will be drummed out of this office.

1:12:44

I will be sent to hell.

1:12:47

I will be nothing in history if this happens again,

1:12:49

therefore, I will prevent it.

1:12:53

I think there was a lot of personal

1:12:57

with Dick Cheney's decisions.

1:12:59

I also think Dick Cheney is a coward.

1:13:01

Five draft deferments during the Vietnam war,

1:13:04

I watched the man closely.

1:13:09

I think Dick Cheney's a coward.

1:13:11

I've said he was a coward on national television.

1:13:12

Cowards react differently.

1:13:16

I'm not sure I wouldn't characterize

1:13:18

George W. Bush the same way.

1:13:21

Bravado.

1:13:23

Walk upright.

1:13:25

Look brave, but they're not really brave.

1:13:27

Interviewer

You think Bush knew

1:13:30

about the torture right away when it started?

1:13:31

-

I think he knew about the select group

1:13:33

that he'd commissioned.

1:13:36

I think they talked periodically to see

1:13:38

that they didn't go beyond some point where maybe Addington

1:13:40

and other lawyers, Gonzalez plays in this too, would say,

1:13:45

now you've gone too far, now you're vulnerable.

1:13:48

Even though you have Addington saying,

1:13:51

you're never vulnerable.

1:13:53

Addington's position was, you're never vulnerable,

1:13:54

you're the commander in chief,

1:13:56

you can do anything.

1:13:57

Treaties don't mean a thing

1:13:59

when you're exercising your power as commander in chief.

1:14:03

Interviewer

I mean you make this so megalomaniac

1:14:09

in terms of just a few people running the show

1:14:11

and Dick Maya's didn't stand up to Rumsfeld,

1:14:13

Peter Pace stand up to Rumsfeld,

1:14:16

seems like General Powell didn't stand up either

1:14:18

to the other administration people.

1:14:21

Seems like people in the military

1:14:23

who were most effective,

1:14:24

I will tell you that once we did a seminar

1:14:26

and on torture and some military people

1:14:28

came up to me and said,

1:14:30

they were appalled at the way

1:14:32

the military has been portrayed as being involved in this,

1:14:33

that's not who the military is.

1:14:37

But it sounds to me like the way you're describing it,

1:14:39

the military didn't stand up to the administrators and say,

1:14:40

no, we're not going to be seen like this,

1:14:43

we're not gonna be.

1:14:45

-

I think some of the most encouraging moments

1:14:48

that I had in my

1:14:50

look into this for Powell,

1:14:53

was that a lot of junior officers in particular

1:14:55

did step away from it.

1:14:58

Now you can say, why didn't they report it?

1:14:59

Why didn't they sing out?

1:15:02

Why didn't they go public?

1:15:04

A few of them did, and you saw what happened to them.

1:15:05

So that's the reason they didn't.

1:15:07

You have to know the military to understand the environment.

1:15:09

But there were a number of lieutenants and captains

1:15:13

who said, not for me, I'm out of here, I'm not doing this.

1:15:16

Most of the time what you find

1:15:20

is they're combat arms officers.

1:15:22

They're officers who have what I call courage,

1:15:23

physical and moral.

1:15:27

They're not your rear echelon officers.

1:15:28

Most of the time I found the officers

1:15:32

who were complicit in this, not only complicit,

1:15:33

but in some cases were eager to do the things,

1:15:37

they are non-combat arms officers, more like Dick Cheney,

1:15:40

more like George W. Bush.

1:15:43

So there's a certain amount of encouragement one gains

1:15:47

from looking at this opposition.

1:15:50

As I said, there aren't too many of them

1:15:53

that go public with it.

1:15:54

And I as a former soldier understand

1:15:55

why you have wives, you have families,

1:15:57

you have a career and so forth and so on.

1:16:00

Few people are willing,

1:16:02

although they'll sit there and tell you they are.

1:16:03

And when it really comes down to the point,

1:16:05

few people are really willing to risk all of that

1:16:07

by going public, by being a whistleblower, if you will.

1:16:10

So that's one side.

1:16:15

The other side is this is always happened,

1:16:17

in every conflict America has ever waged.

1:16:21

In the Philippines, we shot Moros

1:16:25

in a hole in the ground with machine guns

1:16:27

who had nothing more than bolos and loincloths on.

1:16:29

And at Mila, we massacred an entire village.

1:16:32

In the battle of the bolos in World War II,

1:16:36

we used machine gun Germans

1:16:40

because we didn't have time to take them prisoner.

1:16:42

And they machine gunned us,

1:16:43

because they didn't have time to take us prisoners.

1:16:45

This always goes on.

1:16:47

What happens in the aggregate

1:16:49

is you hope your officers and your NCOs,

1:16:52

ultimately shy away from this sort of thing.

1:16:57

For practical reasons, they might go to jail,

1:17:00

they might be court-martialed.

1:17:03

And for human dignity reasons, if you will,

1:17:05

this is not the kinds of things you do.

1:17:08

Look at the Russians and the German

1:17:11

on the Eastern front in World War II,

1:17:13

and you'll see the depths to which humanity can descend.

1:17:14

And those depths are accessible during war time, big time.

1:17:18

So it always happens.

1:17:22

The last thing you want to do

1:17:24

to your junior officers in your NCOs in the field,

1:17:26

is exacerbate their problem

1:17:30

by giving it a formal blessing from the top.

1:17:31

And that I think is the greatest crime that Donald Rumsfeld

1:17:36

and Dick Cheney and their minions performed,

1:17:39

during the first Bush administration.

1:17:42

They actually gave in both word and deed eventually,

1:17:44

blessing to this on the ground.

1:17:49

Therefore, empowering the masochistic tendencies

1:17:51

that all soldiers and Marines have anyway,

1:17:54

and blessing those who participated

1:17:57

and cursing those who stood up against it,

1:18:01

and giving them a no reason

1:18:04

to come out and blow the whistle.

1:18:06

Rick Sanchez, the Commander in Iraq

1:18:08

has been somewhat explicit about some of these things.

1:18:09

I think he feels very remorseful

1:18:14

about his having past some of this stuff

1:18:16

right on down to the field,

1:18:18

the three or four checklists

1:18:20

that went up on the wall Abu Ghraib for example,

1:18:21

in the course of 30 days, confusing everyone,

1:18:24

and when you confuse soldiers who were ill trained

1:18:26

and under stress, anyway,

1:18:29

then they're going to do what they need to do

1:18:31

to get what they think is the job done.

1:18:33

So there are so many guilty people in this process.

1:18:35

So many guilty parties, if you will.

1:18:38

I'm a guilty party, because I didn't get involved in it

1:18:41

and think about it and look at it ahead of time

1:18:44

and resign and leave and go out and blow my horn.

1:18:46

Instead, I didn't even find out it was going on until 2004

1:18:51

and then had great angst about going out

1:18:55

and talking about it.

1:18:57

And didn't until about October, 2005,

1:18:59

I spent a whole year thinking

1:19:01

about whether I was gonna go out

1:19:04

and try to tell the American people what their government

1:19:05

had done in their name.

1:19:07

And imagine how dissuaded I became

1:19:09

even from that, when I found out that about 50%

1:19:11

of the American people thought Jack Bauer was right.

1:19:14

At any given time, I could find half of my audiences

1:19:18

who thought Jack Bauer was the ultimate example.

1:19:21

That "24" was the ultimate TV show and instruction,

1:19:24

and whether one should torture or not.

1:19:28

If Americans are gonna die,

1:19:30

go beat the hell out of that guy or that girl.

1:19:31

Interviewer

Did you ever to Guantanamo Bay?

1:19:34

-

No, I never did, I've been to Cuba several times,

1:19:36

but I've never been out there.

1:19:38

Interviewer

And do you think

1:19:41

that Decane seems to me just a Patsy too

1:19:44

in this whole process,

1:19:48

I don't know anything about him

1:19:49

other than he doesn't seem all that smart or wise, for sure.

1:19:51

He seems more of the same, sounds like a couple of people

1:19:54

who control and they have,

1:19:57

like you said, sycophants around him

1:19:59

and no one is willing to stand up to him.

1:20:01

And that's what caused these last 10 years.

1:20:03

-

Well, Hayne's particularly blameworthy in my view

1:20:06

because Maura went to him.

1:20:10

And Maura essentially gave him the credibility he needed,

1:20:12

the ammunition he needed

1:20:16

to reverse some of the things they were doing.

1:20:18

And instead of doing that,

1:20:21

he just went into a secret mode as it were,

1:20:23

and things didn't change really that much.

1:20:26

Interviewer

But he had to know

1:20:29

when Maura went to him, I'm sure.

1:20:30

-

He had to, he had to.

1:20:32

I wrote a letter along with several other people

1:20:33

to congressional committees

1:20:35

that would have approved his being a federal judge

1:20:37

and recommended to them that they not approve it.

1:20:39

And thank God they took our advice.

1:20:41

Interviewer

Do you think Congress knew

1:20:43

what was going on to Congress members?

1:20:45

-

That's a huge question.

1:20:47

I don't think Congress knew.

1:20:49

I think there were certain congressmen and women who knew

1:20:52

to the extent that they knew is a huge question right now,

1:20:56

especially those in the intelligence committees.

1:21:00

The idea or the counter-argument

1:21:04

that we weren't told all the details

1:21:07

resonates with me because I know

1:21:13

how the CIA lies to its oversight committees,

1:21:14

that's what they're paid to do.

1:21:18

That's what they are trained and educated to do is lie.

1:21:20

So when the CIA goes and talks to its oversight committee,

1:21:23

it gives its oversight committee

1:21:27

in the Congress house or Senate,

1:21:29

just as much as it needs to get.

1:21:30

And sometimes giving a little bit of information

1:21:32

is more misleading than giving none.

1:21:36

And so when Jane Harman and Rockefeller and others

1:21:39

from the intelligence committee say,

1:21:42

we weren't given the whole picture,

1:21:44

I can believe them, I can believe them.

1:21:47

That said, I still think they probably knew

1:21:49

about the high-value detainee program

1:21:52

in very little detail, they just knew probably

1:21:54

that the president had authorized the CIA

1:21:57

to interrogate and interrogate people

1:22:00

like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and so forth.

1:22:03

Anything beyond that,

1:22:05

I can't believe the CIA would have told them.

1:22:07

Interviewer

And do you think Tenet bought into that,

1:22:10

when Tenet obviously had to be very much involved

1:22:13

in getting the CIA to do all this, right?

1:22:16

So he had to buy into this.

1:22:18

-

Well, buy into it is I think the wrong phrase to use,

1:22:19

George Tenet was a political animal

1:22:24

not an intelligence expert,

1:22:27

not an intelligence professional.

1:22:29

He was a political animal.

1:22:31

And George Tenet by this time had seen

1:22:33

where his bread was buttered and who buttered it.

1:22:35

And George Tenet was going to do

1:22:38

whatever that individual asked him to do

1:22:40

within the law as that individual crafted it for him,

1:22:43

after all the president is not a lawmaker,

1:22:48

but he's the chief executer thereof.

1:22:50

So as long as Tenet could get something from justice

1:22:53

that seemed to give him and his people immunity

1:22:56

or it seemed to give them some cover,

1:22:59

I think George Tenet was gonna do it.

1:23:01

Would he have gone to the point

1:23:03

where he would have put people to death

1:23:05

for the president of United States?

1:23:07

No, I don't think so.

1:23:08

Would he have gone to the point as apparently he did

1:23:10

where he would inflict some pretty bad treatment on people?

1:23:12

Yes, and the president and OLC

1:23:16

and Gonzales to Addington and others,

1:23:18

six people really in this in big time

1:23:20

are Flanagan, Gonzalez,

1:23:23

Haynes, Feith, Addington, maybe Bybee,

1:23:25

maybe one or two others,

1:23:29

but they weren't the ones I would disbar if I had my way,

1:23:31

I could probably name for you pretty easily

1:23:34

'cause they participated in crafting this legal structure

1:23:37

under which they could do these things.

1:23:41

Interviewer

And you left that Ashcroft,

1:23:43

do you think was he outside the loop?

1:23:45

Was he not aware what was going on?

1:23:47

-

The only thing I can find out about John is

1:23:50

that he raised warning flags at various places,

1:23:53

made some comments at various places

1:23:58

that sought of outweigh my desire to include him

1:24:00

and make me think that maybe he might have been

1:24:03

a right-wing voice of sanity from time to time.

1:24:08

I can't find a place where I can say,

1:24:12

aha, he was there, he was doing it,

1:24:15

he was blessing it and so forth and so on,

1:24:18

and so while I might wanna say that I can't find it.

1:24:20

Interviewer

And just going back

1:24:26

to what you said earlier,

1:24:27

in terms of Obama, you feel that he's captured,

1:24:29

you think when he said he's gonna look forward

1:24:33

and not backward, did he have a choice on that?

1:24:35

And should he have looked backward

1:24:37

and prosecuted these six people you just identified?

1:24:39

-

Yes, he had a choice,

1:24:43

but it was a difficult choice,

1:24:44

and this president lacks moral courage.

1:24:46

This president if he has a deficiency

1:24:49

that makes me wonder why I campaigned for him

1:24:52

and voted for him,

1:24:56

it's the fact he lacks moral courage,

1:24:58

and this would have required enormous moral courage.

1:25:01

Interviewer

Why?

1:25:05

-

First of all, it would require probably saying,

1:25:07

I don't care about a second term.

1:25:09

Second, it would have required taking on

1:25:12

that instrument in this country

1:25:15

which is probably most dangerous to its longevity right now,

1:25:18

the extreme right-wing, from Rush Limbaugh

1:25:22

to those who sit in the Congress

1:25:25

as blessed representatives of the American people.

1:25:27

And if you're going to do that,

1:25:31

you're gonna vitiate your political capital, your energy.

1:25:33

And lastly, you are not going to do it

1:25:36

in effect what seems to be the thrust of his domestic

1:25:39

in particular, but also his overall policy,

1:25:44

including foreign policy, and that's compromised.

1:25:47

That's making up with the other side

1:25:50

and effecting some good legislation

1:25:52

and some good policy through that making up.

1:25:57

Interviewer

Do you think Powell has regrets-

1:26:01

-

Look at what my party did to Bill Clinton.

1:26:03

Look at the feckless way my party used

1:26:07

the only instrument the constitution affords

1:26:10

to get rid of a president, article two impeachment.

1:26:14

And my party used that against Bill Clinton

1:26:19

for his dalliance with an intern in the White House,

1:26:22

which JFK, FDR, anybody else would've gotten away with

1:26:26

without anybody ever saying anything.

1:26:30

So the most powerful instrument we have,

1:26:33

like a vote of no confidence in parliamentary democracy.

1:26:36

We have used so fecklessly in our country

1:26:39

with the exception of Richard Nixon

1:26:41

where the impeachment articles were so strong

1:26:43

that he chose to resign

1:26:45

rather than be successfully impeached.

1:26:46

And that's kind of the thing that my party would do again

1:26:49

to a president who tried to achieve accountability

1:26:54

in the way you're suggesting.

1:26:57

Interviewer

Do you think Powell regrets

1:27:00

that he was in that administration?

1:27:02

I know you don't speak for him, but just your thoughts

1:27:05

on whether he gets having watched this whole thing unfolded

1:27:09

is being captured by it too, essentially.

1:27:12

-

I think he has

1:27:17

a very different appreciation

1:27:20

of those four years than I do,

1:27:22

and that's about all I'll say.

1:27:24

Interviewer

Okay, you happen to know

1:27:26

where David Addington is these days?

1:27:28

-

No, I don't, I hope I never run

1:27:30

into the guy again. (laughing)

1:27:32

Interviewer

Is there any you want to say?

1:27:37

Woman

I'm wondering about rendition

1:27:40

and some of the processes that were happening,

1:27:44

and who would have with that have been strictly CIA

1:27:47

or where would the directive have come from

1:27:52

for some of those renditions that were happening?

1:27:55

-

Right, rendition in my time in government

1:27:58

is not something new when we come to George W. Bush.

1:28:02

I don't know if we called it rendition,

1:28:06

that's what we call it in the military.

1:28:08

But my recollection is we began doing this sort of thing

1:28:10

regardless of what we call it

1:28:16

in conjunction with the War on Drugs.

1:28:18

That is to say if we did not have

1:28:21

really slick, fast, implementable, extradition policies

1:28:23

with the country or maybe we didn't want

1:28:29

to go through formal extradition,

1:28:32

we would call up Islamabad for example,

1:28:35

and we would say, we're coming to get that guy,

1:28:37

you okay with it, yeah, we're okay with it.

1:28:39

And usually, it would be intelligence community

1:28:41

to intelligence community,

1:28:43

but political authorities would be blessing it.

1:28:44

We would then fly in, pick the guy up,

1:28:48

take him to a third party, a third country perhaps,

1:28:51

or bring him back to the United States

1:28:54

and put him in jail after a trial, (chuckles).

1:28:56

But that's kind of how,

1:29:00

and maybe once or twice a year it would happen.

1:29:02

So I think that's kind of the background

1:29:06

for what gets expanded majorly

1:29:10

during the first Bush administration.

1:29:13

And I don't know how it happened,

1:29:15

except it had to have a presidential finding I think,

1:29:17

it had to be formally recognized by the president,

1:29:20

it had to be blessed by the president,

1:29:23

and what Tenet did

1:29:25

and Tenet would have been implemented,

1:29:26

what Tenet did in order to implement it,

1:29:29

I think probably at least in its macro detail

1:29:31

had to come back to the president,

1:29:35

now and it's micro, how many planes,

1:29:36

where the planes came from,

1:29:38

what contractors participated and so forth

1:29:40

would have been probably left up to George Tenet.

1:29:43

The countries would have been the president's decision too

1:29:45

I think, it's probably heavily informed

1:29:49

by the vice president,

1:29:52

where are we going to do it in Poland?

1:29:54

Where are we gonna do it

1:29:56

overflying the Scandinavian countries?

1:29:57

Where are we going to do it overflying any of the EU

1:29:59

where there was a lot of court possibilities?

1:30:01

Where are we gonna do it with Egypt?

1:30:07

Where are we gonna pass somebody to Israel,

1:30:10

clearly in violation of the ICAT,

1:30:11

we knew it was in violation

1:30:14

and yet you still have people like Tenet and others

1:30:15

who stand up and say,

1:30:17

we didn't know they were gonna be tortured, bullshit.

1:30:18

All of that, in its high-level detail,

1:30:22

I think would've had to been blessed by the president.

1:30:26

And to a certain extent,

1:30:28

I can't imagine the president

1:30:30

doing it in say Poland,

1:30:31

without letting the secretary of state

1:30:34

knowing that he had asked the Polish government

1:30:36

or the Polish intelligence service blessed by the government

1:30:39

to do this or that

1:30:42

to entertain a secret prisoner or whatever.

1:30:44

But I don't know if we'll ever know the extent

1:30:46

to which others were involved in this

1:30:50

than this highly select group that I say

1:30:53

always surrounds a finding.

1:30:55

It would be imbecilic

1:30:57

to sign a finding like Eisenhower did for example,

1:31:00

for overflight of the Soviet union with U2s,

1:31:03

clearly in violation of international law,

1:31:06

in violation of our agreements

1:31:08

with the Soviets at that time.

1:31:09

But Eisenhower determined it was something he wanted to do

1:31:11

to get a better picture of the Soviet union.

1:31:14

And then when Gary Powers was shot down

1:31:16

and didn't take his cyanide tablet,

1:31:18

Eisenhower been embarrassed in that

1:31:19

and suffered that embarrassment.

1:31:21

But when you do that, you don't tell anybody,

1:31:23

but those who were executing,

1:31:25

you keep it as close as possible,

1:31:26

that allows you possible deniability

1:31:29

if you decide to exercise it Reagan Iran contract,

1:31:30

for example, and it also affords you the ability

1:31:34

if you're like Eisenhower and have a lot of moral courage

1:31:39

and a lot of political capital stand up and say,

1:31:42

damn right, I did it, that's not what he said,

1:31:44

but he didn't try to back off from it or anything.

1:31:47

I think the American people understood

1:31:49

why we wrote we're flying to Soviet union.

1:31:51

This is one that's very different, very different.

1:31:54

And so I would think that historians

1:31:57

are gonna find very few people knew about it.

1:32:00

Interviewer

Did you know General Miller?

1:32:03

-

I didn't, but I discovered a lot about him

1:32:05

as I was doing that little look into things for Powell.

1:32:08

Interviewer

Do you think he created the torture

1:32:11

in Guantanamo and then took it to Iraq as people said?

1:32:13

-

What I think I saw was a clear

1:32:16

beginning operation at Guantanamo, the leadership

1:32:21

of which wearing uniforms said, we're gonna correspond,

1:32:25

I don't care what anybody says,

1:32:29

we're gonna correspond with a rule of law,

1:32:30

the law of land warfare,

1:32:32

the way you treat people, period.

1:32:34

Informed by Geneva, by common article three,

1:32:36

that was not named by Haynes, Rumsfeld, Cambone,

1:32:38

and others to be the thing they wanted.

1:32:42

So in flowed some more people

1:32:44

and things changed when Miller comes in,

1:32:46

it's a guy who hasn't a clue about interrogation,

1:32:48

hasn't a clue about detainee management,

1:32:53

hasn't a clue about running a prison or anything else.

1:32:55

And all of a sudden Miller's in charge

1:32:58

and Miller's a hard charging guy

1:32:59

who's gonna get the mission accomplished

1:33:02

and know by the way, I look a lot like Cheney

1:33:03

and I know what the vice president wants,

1:33:05

I know what the president wants.

1:33:07

I know what those people

1:33:09

who were in the chain of command want,

1:33:10

and I'm gonna give it to him.

1:33:11

And so he begins a very hard core policy

1:33:13

and that policy as far as I can tell runs into

1:33:16

policies coming out of Afghanistan

1:33:21

through the transfer of people,

1:33:24

principally people who deal with detaining management

1:33:25

so forth into Iraq and Miller comes in

1:33:28

and brings the formal policy blessing

1:33:32

to what they are already infecting people with

1:33:34

in places like Abu Ghraib, for example.

1:33:38

Interviewer

So Miller you think

1:33:41

was implementing the torture policy

1:33:42

that Cheney had prescribed taking it to Guantanamo,

1:33:45

then bringing it to Iraq.

1:33:49

-

I think that's a fair assessment though.

1:33:52

I don't think Miller talked to Vice President Cheney

1:33:54

or Addington or anybody else

1:33:57

except maybe when Addington was down there.

1:33:59

Interviewer

Miller had to know what they wanted, right?

1:34:01

-

I don't think anybody in that inner circle

1:34:03

doubted what they wanted by this time.

1:34:06

I'm curious personally,

1:34:10

as to how much Southern command legal staff,

1:34:12

these sorts of things you never can find was prepped.

1:34:20

I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

1:34:24

In 1980, was it '80, 1985 or '86?

1:34:27

I'm executive assistant to the admiral

1:34:34

in charge of policy and plans

1:34:36

that US CINCPAC Civic command in Hawaii,

1:34:39

the phone rings, the admiral's not there.

1:34:42

The phone is the hotline from the White House.

1:34:45

So I go and take it as I normally do and take notes.

1:34:49

It's a guy whom I've never heard of before,

1:34:52

Colin Powell, he's a national security advisor,

1:34:54

not the national security advisor,

1:34:58

he was the military advisor

1:34:59

to Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense at that time.

1:35:00

That opens the door into some conversations

1:35:04

that we're gonna have

1:35:07

about whether or not we take Iraq side

1:35:09

in the first in the Iraq, Iran war, the only one, thank God.

1:35:12

This led to operation Ernest Will

1:35:19

where we we flag Kuwaiti tankers

1:35:21

and escorted them through the Gulf,

1:35:22

and it led to operation preying mantis

1:35:25

where we actually attack the Iranians,

1:35:27

sank one of their major warships,

1:35:28

destroyed their oil platform with its command and control

1:35:30

and heavily damaged and other worship

1:35:33

as it went back to port.

1:35:35

A lot of that was prepped in phone calls.

1:35:39

A lot of that was not recorded

1:35:43

by history in any way, fashion or form,

1:35:45

except as the principles in those phone calls

1:35:48

revealed it later.

1:35:51

And the tendency there, things like that is not to reveal it

1:35:52

to go to your grave with it.

1:35:56

So I don't know how much of DOD prep Southern command

1:35:57

to prep DOD, you know what I mean?

1:36:02

I don't know how much Haynes and Addington,

1:36:04

maybe others call Southern command

1:36:07

and got Southern command to ask the right questions,

1:36:09

or conversely how much Southern command,

1:36:12

Diane Beaver, for example

1:36:15

call the joint staff legal office

1:36:16

or maybe army legal office or whatever,

1:36:20

and said, we're gonna ask these questions,

1:36:22

what should we ask, where should we go?

1:36:25

Because rarely in the military,

1:36:27

do you get someone striking out

1:36:29

on their own into unknown territory.

1:36:30

Interviewer

Well, my understanding of Diane Beaver

1:36:33

was that she was forced into making those decisions.

1:36:35

She wanted assistance from other people and they-

1:36:38

-

That's somewhat my understanding too.

1:36:41

Interviewer

But then she is not really-

1:36:43

No one wants to touch this,

1:36:44

if they're worried about their career or most-

1:36:46

Interviewer

We're set up, would you say

1:36:50

then she was kind of set up

1:36:51

that they kind of made her make decisions

1:36:52

that she knew they wanted, but they wouldn't record them.

1:36:54

-

I think that's a fair assessment.

1:36:58

I had to say, I don't know Diane

1:37:03

and I've never talked to Diane,

1:37:05

but from reading the record,

1:37:07

I think that's a fair assessment.

1:37:09

Interviewer

She won't come out and say that,

1:37:10

and I don't know if that's because she's a true military

1:37:12

loyalist and she just won't speak out like that.

1:37:14

But if that's true or people were forced

1:37:18

into positions that were untenable,

1:37:20

why won't they speak out especially now?

1:37:22

-

Most military officers go to the grave

1:37:24

with what they know.

1:37:27

That was my plan.

1:37:28

My plan was not to speak out.

1:37:31

Interviewer

What changed?

1:37:34

-

Two issues, the war with Iraq

1:37:37

and what was happening in 2004 and 2005.

1:37:40

And I didn't see any prospect of there being a change in it.

1:37:43

Indeed, and '06 and '07,

1:37:47

we had the worst years in Iraq we had,

1:37:49

and then this issue, which I kept learning more and more,

1:37:51

and more about, and which kept looking more and more like

1:37:55

it had been blessed at the highest policy levels

1:37:58

in the land, and,

1:38:00

here's another thing I had to think about,

1:38:05

again, this is my academic field.

1:38:07

So I'm looking at power accumulating in the White House.

1:38:09

I'm looking at the Patriot Act.

1:38:15

I'm looking at unauthorized wiretapping.

1:38:18

I'm looking at probably my own phone

1:38:20

being wiretapped at that time.

1:38:23

I'm looking at how do I know that,

1:38:25

my daughter was a secret service agent for eight years,

1:38:26

and I know some things.

1:38:29

I'm looking at the reality

1:38:33

of any power created in the oval office stays there

1:38:38

regardless of what the next president says or wants to do.

1:38:42

No president will surrender power willingly, period.

1:38:48

So I'm looking at this being perpetuated

1:38:53

and indeed I'm being proven precious in that regard,

1:38:54

today Obama has changed very little,

1:38:58

that's dangerous for this Republic.

1:39:02

It's extremely dangerous

1:39:04

if we want it to remain relatively free

1:39:06

and an equitable distribution of wealth

1:39:09

and power and so forth and so on.

1:39:11

We certainly don't have that today.

1:39:14

We look as much like a tyranny

1:39:16

as we've ever looked in our history.

1:39:18

And it worries me,

1:39:21

and that was enough to persuade me

1:39:22

to begin to speak out.

1:39:26

Woman

If you were in charge,

1:39:29

what would you do with Guantanamo today?

1:39:32

-

As I said, when I was campaigning for President Obama,

1:39:35

close it, shut it down.

1:39:40

I don't care if the...

1:39:42

What is there, 172 left or whatever.

1:39:44

I don't care if they're all terrorists

1:39:46

and they go back to the battlefield.

1:39:48

I am not a coward,

1:39:49

like apparently 50% of America is,

1:39:51

I am not a coward.

1:39:54

I have enough resiliency to understand

1:39:56

that terrorism will always be with us always.

1:39:58

The best you can do is bring it down to a manageable level,

1:40:00

bring them here and let's try them.

1:40:03

And if they're determined to be innocent

1:40:05

for whatever reason, release them,

1:40:07

this is insane that we allow this to go on.

1:40:09

Incidentally, more people die on the highways,

1:40:18

than have died in every nuclear accident

1:40:24

and every terrorist attack combined.

1:40:25

But we don't go, excoriate the automobile or highways,

1:40:27

or this is insanity to me.

1:40:31

This is the kind of insanity

1:40:33

that the politics of fear in particular

1:40:35

and bad leadership lacking courage brings about.

1:40:38

And that leads to tyranny.

1:40:42

Interviewer

What's the most difficult for me

1:40:46

in listening to you or the last two hours,

1:40:50

was that the, not people like you who want to speak out,

1:40:52

because I think that's why we're here today.

1:40:54

If you know why didn't your boss,

1:40:57

why won't your boss speak out before it's too late?

1:41:00

You said he's so trustworthy.

1:41:02

People would listen to him.

1:41:04

People would hear him,

1:41:05

don't people have an obligation

1:41:08

to us as Americans to speak out like you are?

1:41:10

-

But you also have to understand

1:41:13

that he is a part of the warp and woof

1:41:15

of this dramatic increase in presidential power.

1:41:18

He is a product of the administrations he served,

1:41:22

he's a product of his background

1:41:30

and what it took for him to get to the position of power

1:41:33

that he ultimately achieved.

1:41:37

He's a product of believing

1:41:39

that if he won't say it, certainly, I think he believes it

1:41:42

that the founders who made the most sense

1:41:47

were the ones who reveled in the

1:41:51

soundness, robustness, and well-fundedness of the military.

1:41:57

He's a firm believer in the volunteer military

1:42:03

as opposed to the conscript military,

1:42:07

and lots of other things I could say, but I won't bore you

1:42:10

that if you combine you understand

1:42:13

that he has a very different character

1:42:15

and thus belief system

1:42:18

about what's going on in this country, than say, I do.

1:42:20

I've always been

1:42:25

a kind of iconoclast I guess you'd say

1:42:28

when it comes to understanding where we came from

1:42:31

and why we came from there and how we evolved and so forth.

1:42:34

And for example, how dangerous it is

1:42:37

to have an all volunteer military.

1:42:39

I don't care how good it is.

1:42:41

I don't care that it's much better.

1:42:43

I can argue that it isn't then a draft military,

1:42:46

a nation that purports to be what we are,

1:42:49

a democratic federal Republic

1:42:52

that purports to have the founding

1:42:55

and establishment that we had,

1:42:57

that has the power that we have post-World war II

1:43:00

has no business having a mercenary military.

1:43:04

If the citizens do not participate

1:43:09

in the defense of this country,

1:43:11

then the president is free

1:43:14

to do whatever he damn well pleases

1:43:15

and has particularly since the end of the cold war,

1:43:19

we've used the military instrument more

1:43:22

since the end of the cold war

1:43:24

than we did in the entire cold war.

1:43:25

And people say, well, that's 'cause the pressure

1:43:27

of the Soviet union has been relieved.

1:43:29

No, it's because it's the first instrument,

1:43:31

not the last instrument that the president turns to

1:43:34

because he has it.

1:43:37

It's his, belongs to no one else.

1:43:39

And now he's got 100,000 contractors

1:43:42

to add to his in strength.

1:43:44

Interviewer

Do people ever tell you, you said too much.

1:43:49

-

From time to time. (laughs)

1:43:53

Interviewer

Do that disturb you?

1:43:55

-

The thing that makes me most encouraged

1:43:56

is like a little incident that happened last week.

1:43:59

I was at the National Defense University

1:44:03

as an actionable foresight conference,

1:44:05

where we're talking about essentially,

1:44:07

how to give the White House more ability

1:44:09

to plot alternative futures

1:44:13

and then plan for those alternative futures

1:44:15

for lack of a better way

1:44:18

of describing it, strategic insight.

1:44:19

And I'm sitting at my table

1:44:23

and an Air Force officer walks over

1:44:27

and drops a note on my desk and,

1:44:29

well, what's this, I open it up.

1:44:33

And he says, I just wanted to tell you,

1:44:35

I never met him before in my life, nor did he ever met me

1:44:38

as far as I know, he says,

1:44:40

I just wanted to tell you that your outspokenness

1:44:41

over the last five or six years

1:44:44

has been one of the few things that's given me faith

1:44:46

in this country's ability to recover and rewrite itself.

1:44:48

Please keep speaking, that outweighs all the naysayers.

1:44:52

Interviewer

Is there anything else

1:44:59

you wanna say before we close?

1:45:01

-

No, except to give a caveat

1:45:03

that you've listened to me talk.

1:45:04

And like I said, I've never been to Guantanamo,

1:45:07

I never saw anybody interrogated.

1:45:09

And so all of this is from research

1:45:13

and from listening to others who perhaps were more intimate

1:45:15

with the decision process than I, and in many cases,

1:45:19

people who actually did carry out interrogations,

1:45:22

CIA, contractors, military,

1:45:24

who now prove what Nietzsche said.

1:45:27

If you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you

1:45:30

because they are now having grievous problems

1:45:33

getting their lives together

1:45:36

because they did in fact abuse people.

1:45:38

Interviewer

I think this interview is very valuable

1:45:42

and he never went to Guantanamo is amazingly insightful.

1:45:44

I'm really honored to have heard this.

1:45:48

I really appreciate it.

1:45:50

-

Glad I can do something.

1:45:53

-

We're gonna take 20 seconds of room tone,

1:45:56

Johnnie needs that for just...

1:45:59

-

Yeah.

1:46:00

Interviewer

Begin room tone.

1:46:01

End room tone.

1:46:17

Wilkerson, Lawrence - Interview master file

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