Thom Hartmann: ABC News is reporting a profanity-laced screaming match at the White House, between CIA Director Leon Panetta, and “a senior Administration official”, a “senior White House staff member”. Actually calling him a staff member, I wondering if that might be Rahm Emmanuel, particularly since it was profanity-laced. Apparently Panetta was "upset over plans by Attorney-General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation of allegations that CIA officers broke the law," quoting from ABC News, “in carrying out certain interrogation techniques that President Obama has termed “torture” ". That the end of that. Today, those documents are supposed to come out. As best we can tell, they have not yet been released.
Marjorie Cohn is with us, and her website, of course, marjoriecohn.com. She’s President of the National Lawyers Guild, Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, the author of several of my favorite books, including "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent", and a new book coming out. “The United States of Torture: America's Past and Present Policy of Interrogation and Abuse". Marjorie, welcome to the show.
Marjorie Cohn: My pleasure, Thom.
Thom Hartmann: When’s your new book out, by the way?
Marjorie Cohn: It’s coming out next year. NYU Press is publishing it, and it’s an anthology.
Thom Hartmann: Great.
Marjorie Cohn: Ant it will have essays by a political scientist, a historian, a philosopher, a psychologist, a sociologist, a theologian, lawyers. All different aspects of torture, both inside and outside the United States.
Thom Hartmann: Well, the minute it comes out, please let us know, because I’d like to get you back on to highlight that, and maybe make it my BuzzFlash book of the month.
There’s layers within layers here. This is an onion, in so many ways. First of all, we’ve got the President talking about how he only wants to investigate, and Holder for that matter, Attorney-General Eric Holder, talking about only investigating CIA officers and possibly contractors. I never got it straight on whether they were going after contractors or not, who operated outside of the four corners of John Yoo’s memos. Then we’ve got the larger issue of John Yoo’s memos themselves being outrageous, in my opinion criminal, and whether the Holder Justice Department or the Obama administration, or both, are going to do anything about this. Give us the overview and drill down a little bit into those two, if you would, please, Marjorie Cohn.
Marjorie Cohn: Well, ok. There are several reports that should be coming out. Today there is supposed to be the release of the 2004 report of the CIA’s Inspector General. The Inspector General is kind of a watchdog within each government agency. This report is five years old, and there has been resistance to releasing it, and the only reason they’re releasing it is because of the Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. By the way, you mentioned Panetta, and Panetta has been resisting releasing these reports. So that’s one report that going to be released.
A second report that’s supposed to be released today, is the report of Obama’s Task Force on interrogations. I know we’re going to talk about these new terrorist interrogation teams.
Thom Hartmann: Right.
Marjorie Cohn: A third report that’s supposed to be released and we don’t know when it was supposed to be released, about a year ago, is the Office of Professional Responsibility report that evidentially excoriates the legal mercenaries John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, and Michael Mukasey, who was Bush’s third Attorney General, rejected that report and evidently the people who are the subjects of that report were allowed to give input into it and they’re still sitting on that. So we’re talking about three different reports here.
Thom Hartmann: Right. And the CIA report you noted, was actually a commission by the CIA.
Marjorie Cohn: Right. The Inspector-General within the CIA, and each government agency has an Inspector-General. They’re supposed to be independent, and in many cases they do come up with reports that are very critical of the agencies in which they function.
Thom Hartmann: Right. So now, on top of all of this, we’ve got all this stuff happening. And, you know, there’s some butt-covering going back to the Bush administration. There’s concerns within the agency of some people being prosecuted. There’s very, very large issues with regard to Whitewater, er, Watergate rather, excuse me, Blackwater.
Marjorie Cohn: A lot of 'waters' here.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah, it's free association day here on the Thom Hartmann program. And with regard to Blackwater, now known as Xe, and in the midst of all this, the Obama administration has announced, if I have this straight, that they are going to actually have professional interrogation teams henceforth interrogating terror suspects. I thought we already had those, and they were called the FBI. And they were doing a pretty good job of it actually.
Marjorie Cohn: Well, yes. What’s happened, is that, and this was reported today in the “Los Angeles Times”, is that there’s going to be a new, elite unit, and it’s going to be directly overseen by the National Security Council, for high-value detainees. It’s called the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. It will be housed at the FBI, and severe interrogation techniques will be banned. But there’s one thing that’s very worrisome about this, and that is that this task force, which is supposed to release its report today, and this is not the Inspector-General of the CIA, but this is rather the interrogations task force that Obama promised would come up with a report a couple of days after inauguration. And they concluded unanimously that the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation, and no different guidance would be necessary for other agencies.
Thom Hartmann: In other words, we don’t need no stinking Jay Bybee and John Yoo memos.
Marjorie Cohn: Well, yes, except that if you look at the Army Field Manual, particularly Appendix M, it does not eliminate torture. There are in particular two techniques that the Army Field Manual allows and sanctions, which constitute torture, or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment. And that is the use of isolation, and prolonged sleep depravation, and they are illegal under Common Article 3 of Geneva, under the Convention Against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the War Crimes Act.
And let me just briefly talk about them. Isolation, they call it separation, and that includes solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory depravation, sleep depravation, the inducing of fear and helplessness, and sensory overload. And scientists have found that isolation constitutes torture. It can lead to hallucinations, depression, catatonic states. One psychiatrist said that it causes severe psychiatric harm, permanent harm. And then the other...
Thom Hartmann: Jose Padilla, just to that point, Jose Padilla who went through this stuff, has been described by his lawyers now as being a piece of furniture. He basically is just a piece of furniture, he's not a human being any more.
Marjorie Cohn: Exactly. And then sleep depravation, which is also allowed by Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, can cause stress, high blood pressure, it impairs verbal processing, complex problem solving, it’s associated with irritability, depression, and reduced sense of well-being. And, so they’re touting, evidently this report that going to come out today from Obama’s task force on interrogations, is touting the Army Field Manual as the gold standard, and even that, particularly Appendix M, would allow torture and cruel and inhuman treatment.
Thom Hartmann: Is it time to update the Army Field Manual, then?
Marjorie Cohn: It’s time to eliminate Appendix M from the Army Field Manual, while everyone is crying its praises.
Thom Hartmann: Has there been, outside of you, Marjorie Cohn, and your website marjoriecohn.com, has there been, and the National Lawyers Guild that you’re the President of, you know, has there been any serious discussion of this, has this been engaged?
Marjorie Cohn: There has been Jeffrey Kaye, who’s a psychologist, has written articles about this. He wrote one on Alternet in January. The Physicians for Human Rights, the Constitution Project, the ACL’s National Security Project are all deeply troubled by Appendix M, and are opposing it. So this is, no, it's not just something that I thought of.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah. No, I didn’t mean to say…
Marjorie Cohn: Not that I would, not that I wouldn't think that would be enough. But no, I’m not the only one.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah, ok, good. So there’s some movement on this. We have just a minute left. We’re talking with Marjorie Cohn, the President of the National Lawyers Guild, and Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Marjorie, bottom line, end of the day. What should we be doing about what happened during the Bush administration?
Marjorie Cohn: What we should be doing is, that Holder should not be getting an insider in the Department of Justice to investigate. He should appoint a special independent outside prosecutor, to investigate and prosecute all of those people who committed crimes, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and their legal mercenaries, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury, David Addington, William Haynes.
The cases that Holder is talking about investigating are only cases where he finds that, or his inside prosecutor finds that, the interrogators went beyond the illegal advice contained in the torture memos, which implicitly sanctions the torture memos. He is not talking about investigating CIA officers who tortured people in the black sites.
Thom Hartmann: Yep. He needs to go a whole lot further if we’re to end up with any integrity at all in our military and intelligence processes. And if we’re to set a good example for the world.
Marjorie Cohn: Absolutely.
Thom Hartmann: Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild and Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, marjoriecohn.com check it out. Thank you Marjorie.
Marjorie Cohn: Thank you, Thom.
Transcribed by Gerard Aukstiejus.
