Title: Why Torture is Both Immoral AND Ineffective / John Kiriakou
Show: Revolutionary Change
Date: 2020-11-24
URL: https://youtu.be/sIpcxZJ1R4k
Duration: 11:00

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[00:01] [Music] so have things changed from one administration to the next regarding our torture policies and regarding what we are doing um if you could talk about that like what you saw as a transition between maybe different administrations to where we are now that's a tough question um and it's because there are so many ethical gray areas involved in it it was during the bush administration of course

[00:32] that we had a formal torture program and that we had a formal system of secret prisons this archipelago of secret prisons spread all around the world um that was supposedly shut down um after my revelations john mccain at least said on the floor of the senate that because i had gone public the the cia ended the program and shut down the prisons between 2005 and finally 2007 when i went public

[01:02] uh the the deal that was eventually worked out between uh congress and the obama administration was then to have even civilian agencies like the cia like homeland security follow the army field manual so if it says in the army field manual you can't torture you can't waterboard then you can't torture and you can't waterboard the problem is that's an executive branch document it's not necessarily a legal document

[01:34] and so all anybody would have to do if they want to reinstitute a torture program is to just change the army field manual that's all you have to do you don't need congressional approval for that you don't even need a presidential finding for that you just do it so this ban that we have on torture now is tenuous with that said we're still seeing reports not a lot but enough to be worrisome that cia officers

[02:06] homeland security officers military uh personnel are torturing prisoners we we get these reports mostly from afghanistan sometimes from syria somalia elsewhere uh and they're not being punished for it why not where are the congressional oversight committees why isn't the intelligence committee looking into this or the armed services committee or the homeland security committee if we have these laws on the books banning torture then let's ban torture by god right american people

[02:37] guess at it and let's let's talk about another thing which is which is you know also very important to this is that it doesn't work so so that's that's the thing that that that that amazes me is that it's not even effective so if this were an effective method and it saved lives and it it's still like but it doesn't even work no the the cia has an army of psychiatrists and psychologists on staff not just contractors although

[03:08] there are contractors as well but there's an army within a group called the office of medical services oms at the at the cia and and like dr mengele these guys and and women were going out to secret sites to ensure that the prisoners didn't crack that the torture stopped just at the point where they were going to crack so that they could rest a little bit and then be tortured more later right well you can't do things like that the hippocratic oath begins

[03:38] first do no harm we know that we know from declassified uh cables and from the senate torture report that there were physicians and psychologists and psychiatrists who were objecting to the torture and then some of them electing to return to headquarters but nobody went public nobody said anything finally what they did say to the senate uh intelligence committee was that the torture just simply didn't work a victim of torture will tell you

[04:09] literally anything that they think you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing them you know our own prisoners during the vietnam war have talked about this that they were being tortured and when asked to give names for example they would they would name the starting lineup for the green bay packers or they would make up the names of ships and make up locations for these ships in the south china sea just anything to get their torturers to stop well that's what happened with us and

[04:42] that's not even going into the fact that so many cia officers went over and above what they were authorized to do by the justice department causing permanent damage to prisoners i mean like brain damage to the point where these prisoners are unable to participate in their own defenses and let's be clear that a lot of these people might not have even been guilty of what they were charged with doing well that's the dirty little secret of this whole program is most of them actually were not guilty of anything you see we had this program in afghanistan in the immediate aftermath

[05:13] of the 9 11 attacks that we would pay a bounty for any al qaeda person uh who a local villager could turn over to us well the thing is is if i don't like you or maybe if i borrowed money from you and i don't want to pay it back i just go to the americans and i say hey there's a there's an arab over there you might want to take him and then i get my 500 and you get sent to guantanamo and it's three or four years before they figure out that you're actually not an al-qaeda figure

[05:44] you're just some guy who owed who was owed money by this other villager who turned you in yeah i think people don't realize that and i've been saying this for a year and specifically about gitmo and the amount of people that are still rotting away there that have never been formally charged never given translators never given a defense and very likely are people that were just disliked for whatever reason you know abu zubaydah i think is probably the best example of this he's been incarcerated since march of

[06:16] 2002 so 18 and a half years now we're coming up on 19 years he's never been charged with a crime ever with any crime and when we were going after him we thought not only is this guy the number three in al qaeda but he is so incredibly dangerous that just to save the nation we have to grab him well as it turned out that wasn't the case at all joe hickman and i joe hickman was a was an army whistleblower from guantanamo joe hickman and i wrote a book about abu zubaydah called the

[06:48] convenient terrorist and it turns out that what the truth was was that there were two first cousins both named abu zubaydah and if you put in one file what both cousins were doing they looked like a terrorist superman excuse me a terrorist superman well they were both moderately bad guys but not 19 years in prison bad guys right now one of them escaped he was actually in the united

[07:19] states he was in montana and um when he realized we were looking for either him or his cousin he didn't know we didn't know he fled to jordan we never we never heard from him again but abu zubaydah in pakistan had opened an al-qaeda safe house called the house of martyrs in peshawar and he had opened and managed both of al qaeda's training camps in southern afghanistan and kandahar province he was a logistics guy if you needed a fake passport to get home if you needed

[07:49] money or a ticket uh he'd be the guy to get you out if you wanted to come and fight the americans he would be the guy to send you to the house of martyrs and then vet you but he never joined al qaeda he was never a member he never pledged loyalty or fealty to osama bin laden and after 19 years in prison and three of those years of being mercilessly tortured he still hasn't been charged with a crime my position is

[08:21] whether we like his politics or not he is entitled to the same constitutional protections that the rest of us are and if you're not going to put him in front of a jury of his peers and charge him with a crime then you need to release him yeah i've been saying that since 9 11 and we started rounding everybody up and and i had heard stories of people stuck in um incarcerated and they weren't even given translators so then you know i can't even imagine how horrifying that is especially if it is someone that really has nothing to do

[08:52] with anything and they just get swept up in this so then why if we know that torture doesn't work right why why is it being done why are people like gina haspel still able to just sort of be out there and doing what they're doing you know because it makes us feel better uh it makes us feel like first that we're getting something done and second it gives us a sense a sense of of vengeance where we've we've avenged those 3 000

[09:23] deaths we haven't it it uh it's a burden on us a torture program it cheapens us and it uh it makes us less of a of a people of a nation i believe uh but then you know i'll tell you a funny little anecdote i was friendly with a cia psychiatrist uh we're still friends and he told me once that the cia actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies

[09:54] not sociopaths sociopaths are impossible to control right because they don't have a conscience they blow right through the polygraph exam because they don't feel guilt about anything the problem is that because they don't feel guilt because they blow through a polygraph exam it's almost impossible to prevent them from making their way through the process and so the cia is full of sociopaths i would venture to say and i'm not a

[10:24] psychologist but i'm not a psychologist but i'm not an idiot either i would venture to say that there are a good number of psychopaths at the agency as well and we know from psychological studies on u.s business leaders uh most prominently in the book the psych the the sociopath next door that people who are sociopaths are comfortable climbing to the top on the backs of the people around them

[10:56] and so just like in a fortune 500 corporation the sociopaths and psychopaths at the cia claw their way to the top and so they're the ones who come up with the idea of a secret prison system and a torture program and waterboarding and sleep deprivation and cold cells where people freeze to death and you know they're the ones that implement these programs
