Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  What’s your evidence for saying that the British experience in fighting the terrorists of the IRA actually extended the conflict fifteen to twenty years?

  The story’s a simple one. Back in ’71, ’72, the British moved as the United States has done, to aggressive techniques of interrogation. They used pretty much the same techniques: hooding, standing, humiliation, degradation. They were ruled to be illegal in 1978 by the European Court on Human Rights. But there was a bigger problem, even beyond their illegality, in my view. And that was this: what the use of those techniques did was to really enrage part of the Catholic community, who felt that IRA detainees alleged to be terrorists were being abused. It turned people who were perhaps unhappy with the situation into being deeply and violently unhappy with the situation. And if you speak to British politicians who were involved in that period, and the British military, what they’ll tell you is that there is a feeling that the use of those types of techniques extended the conflict.

  Did you learn that people will say anything to stop the torture?

  I think it’s self-evident that that is what happened. If you speak to interrogators, they will tell you that aggressive techniques of interrogation don’t work. They don’t produce meaningful information. Just the other day, I was listening to a very interesting tape of John McCain. He explained how, when he was a POW in Vietnam, in the end he had signed a confession owning up to crimes against children and women in North Vietnam. This was basically because he had reached a point at which he simply couldn’t bear it anymore, and he wanted the pain to stop. And the only thing he could do was to tell them what he thought they wanted to know. That’s what interrogators will tell you: abuse produces information that the detainee thinks you want to know, and nothing more than that. It’s not reliable.

  In my book Torture Team I have homed in on the interrogation of one man, Detainee 063 [Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged “twentieth hijacker” of 9/11]. The administration has publicly declared they got a mass of information out of him that related to all sorts of extraordinarily important things to protect the Americans. I spoke to the people who were involved in his actual interrogation and the head of his exploitation team. That’s not what they told me. If the evidence I had been given had been different, then I would possibly have reached a different conclusion. Not as to the legality or the utility of torture, but what do we do in the face of evidence that it works? But there isn’t evidence that it works. The British experience is that it doesn’t work. The Spanish experience is that it doesn’t work. The Egyptian experience is that it doesn’t work, in the sense of producing meaningful information that is going to protect a country. Sure, it produces information. But as John McCain said in his interview in 1997, it produces the wrong information. Because someone who’s subject to that sort of pain and suffering is going to do anything they can to stop it from happening. And they will tell the person who is abusing them what the person wants to hear, and nothing more and nothing less.

  You spent a long time and made a lot of trips and talked to a lot of people to do this book. What was driving you?

  I was fascinated by a simple question. How could lawyers at the upper echelons of the administration, trained at Harvard Law School and other distinguished institutions, have approved torture? In what circumstances could that happen? And it combined with a real sense of injustice that the truth of the story had not come out. I was really catalyzed by a press conference I read about in June 2004, as the administration struggled to contain the disaster of Abu Ghraib. The administration spun a story, and the story was this: The desire for aggressive interrogation came from the bottom up. People on the front line, people at Guantánamo and elsewhere, told us they needed to move to new techniques. Who are we at the top to say no? It struck me as counterintuitive, because I know the American military. I’ve got friends in the American military, and they are deeply committed to the rules of the Geneva Conventions and other international rules, and don’t go about the abandonment of President Lincoln’s disposition that in no circumstances is cruelty to be used.

  So what I decided to do was I took the famous memorandum signed by Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002, where he writes on the bottom, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” and I tracked back the entire decision-making process, identified the ten or twelve people I needed to meet. And one by one, tracked them down, went and found them, spoke to them, and I’m truly grateful to them. Once I’d had my first conversation, with Diane Beaver, who was the lawyer down at Guantánamo, I was then able to get right up to the very top. And one by one, I followed from Diane Beaver’s boss, Mike Dunleavy, who’s the head of interrogations, through General Hill, who is the head of Southern Command in Miami, up through General Myers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, up to Doug Feith, the head of policy at the Pentagon, and then right up to the main man in my book, Jim Haynes. Jim Haynes was Mr. Rumsfeld’s lawyer, and wrote the infamous, iconic “Why is standing limited to four hours” memo. And he went to Harvard Law School. I just couldn’t understand how someone so well trained could authorize abusive interrogation like that.

  I had two meetings with him. The fact of the meetings was on the record, the content of those meetings was off the record. But the concluding chapter of the book takes into account everything he said to me. I think you’ll agree that they’re fascinating characters and you’ll see that with some of them I developed a real empathy, actually, in ways that surprised me.

  Take Diane Beaver. She had been the person down at the bottom who’d signed off on aggressive interrogation. I didn’t like her legal advice at all. I thought it was really bad and wrong. And I was rather uncomplimentary, perhaps even rude about it, in my last book Lawless World, in 2005. Then I met her. And she explained to me the circumstances in which she found herself. I don’t think it justifies what happened. But she described to me the pressure she felt herself under, with the anniversary of 9/11 coming up: this man, Detainee 063, al-Qahtani, present and caught. Tremendous pressure coming from the upper echelons of the administration. She described to me a visit that the administration has never talked about in which the three most important lawyers in the administration—Mr. Gonzales, the president’s lawyer; Mr. Addington, the vice president’s lawyer; and Mr. Haynes, Secretary Rumsfeld’s lawyer—came down to Guantánamo at the end of September, talked to them about interrogations and other issues, watched an interrogation, and left with the message, do whatever needs to be done. Now, put yourself in Diane Beaver’s situation. You’re getting a signal from the main men at the top of the administration: do whatever needs to be done. That takes the lid off and opens the door.

  Was there a single architect of the decision, the person who said, “Take the gloves off”?

  There was one lawyer in particular who everyone kept referring to as being, if you like, the brains. I’m slow to use that word for such an awful series of events. But the driving force behind it was said to be David Addington. Diane Beaver and Mike Dunleavy, who was her boss, the head of interrogation at Guantánamo, told me that when they came down, it was obvious that Addington was the main person. He was the leader of the team. I think they were very anxious around him, with his big booming voice, his big beard. I think that the finger of responsibility in the end will most likely go to the vice president. But Mr. Rumsfeld was deeply involved. And, of course, the president has indicated that he signed off on everything.6

  You subtitle the book Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Tell me briefly about that memo and why it betrayed American values.

  The memo appears to be the very first time that the upper echelons of the military or the administration abandoned President Lincoln’s famous disposition of 1863: the U.S. military doesn’t do cruelty.

  And that’s the basis, isn’t it, for the military handbook that soldiers use to follow, to try to stay within the rules of the game?

  It’s the U.S. Army field manual, and it’s the bible for the military. And
the military, of course, has on occasion fallen into error, and there have been previous examples of abuse.

  There were prison camps in the Civil War that were abominable.

  Absolutely. No one is saying it hasn’t happened before. But apparently what hasn’t happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty. And the Geneva Conventions were set aside, as Doug Feith told me, precisely in order to clear the slate and allow aggressive interrogation.

  And Rumsfeld’s memo was the catalyst for this?

  Well, the timing was that the Geneva Conventions were set aside in February 2002 by decision of the president, at the insistence of Doug Feith and a small group, including some lawyers. And the memo by Donald Rumsfeld then came in December 2002, after they had identified Mohammed al-Qahtani. By removing Geneva, that memo became possible.

  Why does it abandon American values? It abandons American values, because the military in this country has a very fine tradition, as we’ve been discussing, of not doing cruelty. It’s a proud tradition, borne on issues of principle, but also of pragmatism. No country is more exposed internationally than the United States. I’ve listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there’s nothing in our Constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that? You open the door in that way to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers, which is why the backlash began with the U.S. military.

  And you say, from there, it slipped into a culture of cruelty?

  It slipped into a culture of cruelty. It was put very pithily for me by a clinical psychologist, Mike Gelles, who is with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, spending time down at Guantánamo, who described to me how once you open the door to a little bit of cruelty, people will believe that more cruelty is a good thing. And once the dogs are unleashed, it’s impossible to put them back on. And that’s the basis for the belief amongst a lot of people in the military that the interrogation techniques basically slipped from Guantánamo to Iraq and to Abu Ghraib. That’s why the administration had to resist the argument and the claim that this came from the top.

  For a long time, the story was that it went up the chain from Bagram in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib and then to Guantánamo. But you’re saying it started in Washington and went down?

  It started with a few bad eggs. I don’t think the bad eggs are at the bottom, I think the bad eggs are at the top, and what they did was open a door which allowed the migration of abuse, of cruelty and torture, to other parts of the world in ways that I think the United States will be struggling to contain for many years to come.

  And the backlash came from the military?

  I think it’s a really complex story. It’s more like a thriller, actually. You’ve got different camps who are struggling down at Guantánamo. And I think it would be wrong in any way to give the sense that there was unanimity to move toward abuse or that there was even strong support toward moving toward abuse. There was a strong body of belief down at Guantánamo amongst the military community, amongst the military lawyers, with the FBI, with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, that this is a bad thing. Abuse doesn’t work, abuse undermines authority, abuse undermines morale. We are going to stop it. Initially, they weren’t successful. But once the abuse began, a backlash followed. And the folks down at Guantánamo identified a man in Washington who was the general counsel of the navy, a man by the name of Alberto Mora, who truly is a heroic individual, in my view, who intervened very courageously, directly with Jim Haynes, and said, “This must stop. If it doesn’t stop, I’m going to reduce this into writing, and I’m going to cause a big fuss.” And eventually, it did stop. But only after fifty-four days of abusive interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, and not before the door had been opened, and the dogs had slipped their leash. The Geneva Conventions were plainly violated in relation to this man. And in our system, if a man violates the law and commits a crime, he is punishable.

  So who violated the law?

  I think it goes to the top. And I think that the lawyers contributed to the violation of the law and face exposure. But I’m not on a witch hunt. I’m not saying that there should be a campaign of investigation and prosecution and sentencing, and conviction. What I’m saying is let’s start by sorting out the facts. Once the facts have been sorted out, let’s see exactly what they say, and it will be for others to decide what needs to be done. But until that’s done, you can’t close on the past and you can’t move forward.

  But David Rivkin, former White House lawyer, said at the Judiciary Committee hearing, “I think it would be madness to prosecute anybody, given the facts involved.” He said, “The effort to go after the lawyers borders, to put it mildly, on madness. These lawyers were not in any chain of command. They had no theoretical or practical ability to direct actions of anyone who engaged in abusive conduct.”

  He’s just wrong. The lawyers were deeply involved in the decision-making process. John Yoo at the Department of Justice prepared a legal memorandum which abandons American and international definitions of torture and reintroduces a new definition that has never been passed by any legislature, that is totally unacceptable. What was he doing there? Was he really giving legal advice? No, he wasn’t. He was rubber-stamping a policy decision. This is not careful, independent legal advice. What was Jim Haynes doing when he recommended to Donald Rumsfeld the authorization for the approval of fifteen techniques of interrogation? He was saying to the secretary of defense, “I’m your lawyer. I’m telling you this is fine. You can do it.” If he hadn’t done that, Mr. Rumsfeld would not have signed the piece of paper that Jim Haynes wrote. Jim Haynes is directly involved in the decision-making process. And the lawyers, as such, play an absolutely key role. Now, at the end of the day, they’re not the most important people. The most important people are the people whose signatures are actually appended. They are the politicians who actually decided the issue. But in this case, without the lawyers, they would never have had a piece of paper to sign.

  Do you think that people such as David Addington and John Yoo and Jim Haynes, and the other lawyers you’ve mentioned who advised and were on the torture team, should ultimately be held responsible in court for what they did in government at this period of time?

  If they were complicit in the commission of a crime, then they should be investigated, and if the facts show that there is a sufficient basis for proceeding to a prosecution, then they should be prosecuted. Lawyers are gatekeepers to legality and constitutionality. If the lawyers become complicit in a common plan to get around the law, to allow abuse, then yes, they should be liable.

  Many Americans say, “I don’t want to hear about this.” It’s like being diagnosed with cancer. You don’t really want to hear the terrible news. This is something that was done in a particular period of intense fear and uncertainty. We had been attacked, thousands of people killed right here in New York. And I just want the government to take care of it. I don’t want to hear about the cruelty, the torture, the enhanced interrogation techniques. Do you understand why they would say that?

  I do understand that. And here’s what I’d say. I would want the government to take care of it in a way that is going to protect me over the long term. If it is indeed the case that those pictures from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are going to make it more difficult to protect the American public, I want to sort it out, remove that obstacle to protecting the American public, and ensure that it doesn’t happen again in the future. And, as necessary, make sure that those who erred in putting in policies that allow that to happen face appropriate responsibility. You know, Bill, what has really agitated me the most about this is that it’s not just that a crime was committed. It’s that there’s been a failure to take responsibility. There’s been a cover-up from the top in
terms of pointing the finger to people who should not take blame for what has happened.

  Soldiers on the front lines who are doing their best in difficult circumstances to protect the United States should not be blamed for what was decided at the top. But there’s an even bigger issue at a very personal level. It’s not about legality, about criminality. It’s about taking individual responsibility. If people like Doug Feith and Jim Haynes had said to me, “Look, Philippe. September the 11th came. The anniversary was coming. We were getting information that there were going to be more attacks. We had people that we were told had information that we need to do something about. And we therefore felt, in those circumstances, it was right to use all means appropriate and necessary to get the information. But with the benefit of hindsight, we realize we fell into error, we made a mistake. We accept responsibility for that. We will learn from those mistakes. We’ll make damn sure it doesn’t happen again.” I didn’t get that at all. There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility. When you read my account along with Doug Feith’s and others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Doug Feith’s book on how to fight the so-called war on terror, and it’s as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to the interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it’s about individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject failure on that account.