Le Show; 2009-06-28

From deep inside your radio. Ladies and gentlemen, you've got to feel sorry for Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett. You're the wrong, short parts of the, what is it, the Isiselese triangle, you're the wrong two sides because in the great triangle of celebrity passages, Michael Jackson has taken the long angle. There has been so much said about Michael Jackson and in the past few days, so much oxygen has been expelled in the service of reporting on the King of Pop, which, by the way, was a title that he contractually granted to himself. He contractually insisted on being called the King of Pop, and so now, post-mortem, his contractual wish is being obeyed.

And all I have to say on the subject is that as you look at the visage of Michael Jackson through the years, celebrities in modern America are a metaphor for the modern human condition in which much like the state of the species in which our wants have increasingly been liberated from any restraints by economic or technological limitations. And so we can go anywhere and do anything and live anywhere. The modern mega celebrity acts as a, as a kind of a metaphor for that because he or she can exercise his or her wants totally free of any economic or technological, technological

constraints. The upshot is that Michael Jackson did to his face, what humans are doing to the Earth. Hello, welcome to the show. I dare not discuss it, I have been to 40, I've only got myself to reply back to the Nothing is real unless you feel it

To watch a film you must have real it The way to keep this is to seal it But it's on what's broken the seal And it's all getting real I know a place where I was king For both from 12 to 10 But we can't make a sound The lynching mob is coming round Never say it never Land again Never say it never Land again Lovely your thoughts, Michael Lovely your thoughts, Michael No place, wait dreams were stored

I'm taking side the din Trying to heal the whole thing hurts But it caused me my network Never say it never Land again Never say it never Land again Never say it never Land again Never say it never Land again From just off Hyde Park in London, England I'm Harry Sherrow welcoming you This edition of the show And now ladies and gentlemen The Apologies of the Week This is so sorry Last week we had David Letterman delivering what I thought was the longest apology in history of the broadcast That record lasted for a day

A two days actually Until the appearance by South Carolina governor Mark Sandford answering the question Where the heck were you sir? I'm a bottom line kind of guy I'll lay it out It's gonna hurt And we'll let the chips fall within May In so doing Let me first of all apologize to my wife Jenny And our four boys, a great boys, Marshall, Landon, Bolton, and Blake for letting them down One of the primary roles well before being a governor is being a father to those four boys Who are absolute jewels and blessings That I've let down in a profound way And I apologize to them And I don't like apologizing in this realm But given the immediacy of y'all wanting to visit and my proximity to them This is the first step in what will be a very long process on that front

I would secondly say To Jenny Anybody who has observed her over the last 20 years of my life Knows how closely she has stood by my side In campaign after campaign after campaign And literally being my campaign manager And in the raising of those four boys And in a whole host of other things throughout the lives that we built together I would also apologize to my staff Because as much as I did talk about going to the Appalachian Trail That was one of the original scenarios that I'd known at the Mary Neal That didn't want to where I ended up And so I let them down by creating a fiction with regard to where I was going Which means that I had then in turn given as much as they relied on that information Let down people that I represent across this state And so I want to apologize to my staff And I want to apologize to anybody who lives in South Carolina for the way that I let them down on that front

I want to apologize to good friends Tom Davis came over the house, he drove up from Buford And he has been an incredibly dear friend for a very long time In my first race for governor he moved up And he lived in the basement of our house for six months And we called it Jurassic Park Because it was a kid's dinosaur sheets And all kinds of different folks were living there in the campaign And so I, in a very profound way, have let down the Tom Davis' of the world I've let down a lot of people, that's the bottom line And I let them down, and in every instance I would ask their forgiveness Forgiveness is not an immediate process It is in fact a process that takes time and I'll be in that process for quite some weeks and months And I suspect years ahead

But I'm here because if you were to look at God's laws They're in every instance designed to protect people from themselves I think that that is the bottom line of God's law That is not a moral rigid list of do's and don'ts just for the heck of do's and don'ts It is indeed to protect us from ourselves And the biggest self of self is indeed self That sin is in fact grounded in this notion of what is it that I want As opposed to somebody else And in this regard, let me throw one more apology out there And that is to people of faith across South Carolina for that matter across the nation Because I think that one of the big disappointments when Believe it or not, I've been a person of faith all my life If somebody falls within the fellowship of believers or the walk of faith I think it makes that much harder for believers to say Where was that person come from or folks that weren't believers to say Where indeed was that person coming from?

So one more apology in there But so the bottom line is this I've been unfaithful from my life And all I can say is that I apologize I think that's a record that's going to stand longer than two days Apropos from Fox News Quote, we just want to make a correction to something we put up on the screen During our coverage of Governor Sanford's press conference yesterday We briefly identified Governor Sanford as a Democrat He is, of course, a Republican And we apologize for getting it wrong Unquote, that's right, Fox News can't tell A Democrat from a Republican Dateline, General Louisiana, the case of six Black youths charged in a racially charged The attack was officially put to rest this week as five of the youth Identified as the Jane of six pleaded no contest simple battery and apologized to the victim And his family The six all students at the local high school were charged with beating fellow student Justin Barker December 2006 the attack was precipitated

They said because Barker, who was white, shouted racial slurs against them They are all black In an apology read by the students attorneys, they said They did not hear Barker use any racial slurs It's a natural mistake Dateline Washington, D.C., this apropos of radio station W.A.M.U The karma train pulls into the station again W.A.M.U carried this broadcast for nine weeks in total Canceling it on September 10th, 2001 W.A.M.U has apologized to listeners for technical difficulties that resulted in the F bomb airing on the station They heard apologies at least twice for the incident which was explained By spokeswoman Kay Summers as quote, human error that resulted in an off-air conversation Being picked up by a live mic while Bob Edwards weekend was on air Matt Bush was the local host host who gave the apology The matter has been dealt with internally through discussions with those involved Not our finest hour to be sure, but mistakes happen

Dateline Los Angeles, Perez Hilton, a gay gossip blogger named after someone Is saying he's sorry for using a gay slur or the openly gay gossip blogger apologize for unleashing the word The other F word During a nightclub altercation with black eyed piece frontman Will I am? The resultant in the band's tour manager being charged with assault for allegedly punching Hilton I am so I am sorry, said Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavendera And I mean it, no one is forcing me to write this, I'm not feeling pressured to say this, I'm speaking out Because I realized that the last two days have been more hurtful to me than many others Then the repeated blows I suffered to my head in Toronto this past weekend Hilton originally said he called Will I am? The gay slur at a Toronto nightclub after the musician told the gossip blogger not to write about his band He's tour manager Alfred Molina was arrested after he allegedly punched Hilton following the argument Yes, I know, oh um

Clive Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine has apologized for copying parts of his forthcoming book From Wikipedia without attribution the passages were discovered by a reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly review Who was reading an advance galley of the book which is being published next month This is just some copied word for word Mr. Anderson said in a telephone interview, it's really simple, maya culpa A British furniture retailer is apologized for adding Iran hashtags to a Twitter ads If you're searching Twitter for the latest news out of Iran you really don't expect to find ads for a furniture store among them They've been there for British retailer Habitat which has used the keywords aka hash tags, Iran and Musavi to push its products Habitat has apologized and removed them Stating the postings were not authorized but not saying it was responsible for them Senator John Ensign caught in the middle of his own sex scandal Apologized to a senate Republican colleagues doing a closed door luncheon several senators said

On Tuesday he made brief remarks apologized for the impact his actions had on his colleagues and his family took no questions And was greeted by a round of applause Afterward he avoided reporters using a side door No comment, several senators said he was greeted warmly and said there was no need for him further to dive into his extra marital affair if he chose not to He expressed deep regret and it was sincere said Senator Mel Martinez of Florida I think it was sincere people deserve an opportunity to say I'm sorry and move on Senator GOP leaders duck questions about a potential ethics committee probe events and saying it was up to him to address that issue They're so forgiving Sam's club has put an end to the recent pharmacy campaign and apologized for confusing pills with candy Thank you Sam's club after a person received a giant pill bottle filled with sweets

Wrote to complain they sent a response in which they said it was an isolated incident and won't be repeated elsewhere We've also shared with all of our pharmacy departments that this is an unacceptable process practice and should not be repeated In Sam's club we always have the health and welfare of our customers and members in mind with everything we do And we deeply regret that this incident occurred Not bad, not a bad week for the apologies of the week a copyrighted feature of this broadcast He made the room a playground with big ties and aquabats He wants a second childhood and wants wrong with that and they went on a big shopping spree Little boys out from the night till the free and as long as they're happy

I'm real fine baby, I'm so lonely in any just a checkbook and a few famous friends One another country, a children I've taken by force, someone let them laugh and make them feel safe of course I watch the parents crying please, just return them unharmed, my go to Vegas and no one's alarmed And I can't hardly speak what I know, it's alright when it's wrapped up in boats Any parents say good times, one rule for men, a son don't need any just a checkbook and a few famous friends Yes, yes, yes Another winter Vegas, no one's alarmed, we love to watch the circus but sometimes the clowns alarm me

And I can't hardly speak what I know, it's alright when it's wrapped up in boats, any parents say good times One rule for men, a son don't need any just a checkbook and a few famous friends Yes, one rule for men, a son don't need any just a checkbook and a few famous friends Yes, one rule for men, a son don't need any just a checkbook and a few famous friends

Yes, one rule for men, a son don't need any just a checkbook and a few famous friends This is a show and this portion of the broadcast is being recorded in the middle of June so because what we're going to be talking about for the next little while has more information has been coming out So this is the state of information as of the middle of June and I've been trying to get this person to be a guest on this broadcast since I read her essential book last autumn And finally she has agreed to be with me this morning, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, author of The Dark Side

Thank you so much, I'm really glad to be with you And I guess we should start for people who are not versed in all of this by explaining what the title means The Dark Side is a phrase from a former vice president Cheney and it is the place that he said we needed to go after 9-11 On the first Sunday after 9-11 he went on meet the press and said that in order to win the war on terror we were going to have to fight it sort of on the dark side Using all the means that are at our disposal and working in the shadows Those were actually real quotes from Cheney and I don't think any of us knew exactly what it meant when he said it but he was indicating we were going someplace different in this country Do you think he knew what he meant when he said it? I do think he knew what he meant I think Cheney had sort of been some ways inhabited the dark side before the rest of the country

He had learned a lot about what the CIA does and much more about how sort of the least moral enemies of the world had conducted espionage and warfare He knew a fair amount about things like fighting in the shadows, basically, special ops and he even knew something about torture From his tenure as Secretary of Defense? Well, in fact it came from the years when he was on the hill, he was a congressman and he sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and while he was up there a CIA agent Buckley was captured and tortured in Lebanon and I think the Cheney learned some of the details of what they did to Buckley It was horrifying and I think at that point he sort of formed a picture of how the real world works

And the book, which I read during the election campaign, it was an interesting experience because reading that book during the campaign was an experience of They're talking about a very different government than is depicted in the book. Basically you do the history of the programs of rendition and interrogation and how they evolved And not just what was done in our name to those who came under our control and captivity but what was done to what we think of as the structure of government There was a phrase that I'd never run into before I read the dark side which seemed very crucial to an understanding of how this all came about And it was the phrase, whether somebody was read into the program, can you explain that? Read into is there's a lot of lingo that goes along with intelligence work. Read into means the people who are allowed to know what's going on are read into a program and everybody else is out in the dark

It was a tiny, tiny group of people that were read into the program initially about what America was going to be doing to captives in the war on terror and it was a tiny group of people really, almost like a high school clique that made all the decisions that were crucial inside the White House in the days right after 9-11 And those decisions which were made in secrecy by a tiny unelected group of people except for Cheney who of course was elected, those decisions became sort of they set the path that we took out in the years after that We've become familiar in the years since with some of those names of those people, J.B.I.B. John U, most notably Stephen, Fredbury, yes. Who else was involved in this? Well, one of the key players was actually David Attington, he was the former chief counsel to Vice President Cheney and then later became his chief of staff when Scooter Libby left and Attington is a fascinating, formable character, really bright, very, very aggressive, very secretive and kind of took no prisoners and he was an extremist in terms of his own ideology.

Probably about as far right as anybody has been in a very powerful position in the U.S. government. So he became a key player and he had very eccentric views of the law. His view basically was that the executive branch and the president in particular, if he was fighting in the name of America to defend the country, he could supersede mere laws. So laws such as the convention against torture that were supposed to stop anybody in America, including the president from torturing people, fell by the wayside because in his interpretation, if the president was acting in defense of America, he had the right to go above those laws. Does that mean that that interpretation, which of course was reflected in the famous torture memos, came from Attington and was transmitted in some way to you and by me and the other people who actually assigned the memos?

Right. They had this little group, this clique that they called themselves the war council. It was a half dozen lawyers basically who met together in secret and Attington was pretty much the protean force in the group. And so when we talk about the torture memo or the bibi torture memo, which we know to have been mostly written by John Yu, in fact a lot of the language was also dictated by David Attington from what we've been told. Now I should just interrupt to say that what I'm asking you and what you're saying is based not on your, you're here not because of your opinions, but because of your reporting. So this is all based on the reporting you did in the dark side in sense, is that correct? Definitely. Now I mean I did hundreds and hundreds of interviews with people in and around the White House. And I think one of the things that made that possible was there was not a united front inside the Bush White House. I mean later Vice President Cheney has gone on the errands and kind of tried to make it sound as if only whistle liberal Democrats are the people who might have qualms about turning America into a country that could embrace torture.

But that is actually a really misleading interpretation. And in truth what I found as a reporter working for the New Yorker was there were many, many people inside the government, even some lawyers inside the Bush White House and Justice Department who just thought this was completely wrong for America. So they pushed back from the inside. And so there were many people to be interviewed about the subject who kind of described what was going on in these meetings. So eventually I was able to sort of piece together this puzzle, this tremendous sort of jigsaw puzzle and put it together in the book. The picture I got from your book and from Bart Gelman's book about Cheney's Vice Presidency of Addington is a tall man who likes to yell in the faces of his adversaries. Yeah, I think he's not afraid to yell. He is tall and he has a sort of salt and pepper beard. He looks like sort of a stout sea captain, though I may maybe some people would say he's not really stopped.

But he's a big fellow, very intimidating to people. And I interviewed a number of people who were shouted down in meetings with him who said that you just couldn't imagine what the atmosphere was like. He seemed to have intimidated an awful lot of people into going along with him. Well, that gets to a question that I've played with comedically on this broadcast, but I've always been curious about the real answer, which is what was the mechanism of Dick Cheney kind of getting so many people out of his way over the years? Well, Cheney's a formidable political player. He is, he's very smart. He knows what he wants to do. He has, he and Addington both had supreme self confidence and assurance that they were right at a time when many people really were not sure what the right thing to do was. We were so shaken after 9-11. And in some ways, Cheney and Addington's, I think, self confidence, let them lead the way. They had been privately practicing for a catastrophic moment in America for many years.

So they were in some ways ready for this. Hold on, they'd been privately practicing what do you mean? Well, they had been going through what were called continuity of government exercises. When Cheney was Secretary of Defense, and Addington was working as his, his counsel and deputy there at the, at the Defense Department, they would do these exercises where they would prepare in case, for instance, America was attacked with a nuclear bomb. By, at that point, the, you know, we were still in the Cold War and they were worried about, about the Soviet Union. They would practice where they would take off 10 days and create a sort of command center in a bunker and try to set up an alternative power center, just in case, for instance, the, the president had been, as they say, these sort of decapitated. So they had been through these exercises again and again. They'd studied what the, what, you know, would be required in terms of the Constitution and how to keep the government running smoothly in catastrophic circumstances.

So when there was a real catastrophe, which was the tax of 9-11, they, they had a better sense than most people about how to carry on and what to do. Well, aside from the specifics, the, the sort of the psychological profile you're, you're drawing there makes, makes it sound a lot like Hollywood, you know, self-confidence rules the day, you know, somebody comes into things. I'm, I'm kick ass, a singer actor and it just convinces everybody, yeah, you must be. Well, I mean, and the other thing that they describe in these meetings, which, that some of the people I've interviewed have described inside the Bush White House was that, that it was very macho. The idea was if, you know, we can be tougher than the next guy and we're going to, you know, we're going to kick some butt over there in the Arab world. And anybody who sort of said, you know, excuse me, but is that legal? Look, you know, it was just embarrassed to sort of pipe in on with, with, you know, little problems like that.

So the Constitution was feminized. That's a great way to put it. Well, there was a, there was a comment that Dick Cheney made toward the end, referring to Nancy Pelosi, and he referred to his big stick, and I thought that was a sort of a glimpse into what you're talking about. Let's talk about Abu Zabada for a minute, who was sort of the poster boy for both sides in this discussion to Bush administration early on, brandished him as the number, the first in a series of what I noticed was apparently an unending series of the number three in Al Qaeda. We kept capturing the number three guy, but never got number two or number one, and I thought that was always the worst job to have in the world was the number three guy in Al Qaeda. But he was supposed to be the number three guy in Al Qaeda. He was the first person water boarded. He was a water boarded what 183 times because it was so effective. And he turns out not to have been anything that that he was purported to have been.

In fact, there, there are some new documents that were just released from the defense department that it give some more details about statements he's made when he was down in Guantanamo. He turns out to have been in a big fight with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda because he had arguments with them about their program. Well, that's a relationship. That's a relationship. Not a very sturdy one if you want to try to make him the number three guy though. So the evidence against him looks a little shaky in terms of making him a top Al Qaeda guy. But at the time you're right, he was portrayed by the CIA and by President Bush who spoke out about him publicly as a tremendous Al Qaeda figure. Well, I think the question for a lot of people as the facts of his story have come out, the question has centered around that number. 183? Yeah, 183 episodes of water boarding, which of course was way more than both that and the frequency and the amount of water way exceeded what was even in the Justice Department memos about what was legal and non-torturous.

Why was it necessary to do that to administer that treatment to him 183 times? I mean, we have been, reporters have been studiously kept apart from the people who actually did the water boarding and unable to interview also James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen who are two psychologists, former military psychologists, who were contractors to the CIA, who helped design this program. And the CIA never lets anyone get near them recently fired by Leon. The CIA renewed their contract in February of 2009 after Obama was elected and took office. The CIA was still in business with these people, which is quite amazing to me. The amazing thing to me was according to everything I've read, you could double check me on this. Neither of them had ever conducted an interrogation.

That's absolutely right. One of their defenders said to me, though, you don't need to know how to build a plane in order to fly one. I'm not sure how that exactly plays out. At any rate, they had never interrogated anyone. They'd also actually never even witnessed a real interrogation. They had witnessed play-acting interrogations in which American soldiers acted as the bad guys and interrogated other American soldiers who were being trained. That is the extent of their experience. And what they did was they sold this program to the CIA and to the White House saying, it's safe. It's never hurt anybody. We just do it in training. It really works well. And we'd love to do it ourselves. And what they felt to say was that they were going to do something that was way, way more brutal than what took place in American training. In American training, they had only been able to use the water board on people for 20 seconds, twice, maximum. That was it. What they did to I was a beta was they water-bored it in 183 times in one week, in a five-day period.

So what they were doing for no resemblance to what we do in our training and what we do in our training is a ridiculous argument to make anyway. That's the so-called seer training that was borrowing what the Chinese communists were known to have used during the 50s to elicit false confessions. It's a program that's based on what we learned about how American soldiers were made to give false confessions during the Korean War. And it's also based on research that the CIA did into show trials that Stalin ran, where again they got false confessions out of people by completely breaking them down psychically. Those were the techniques that the U.S. government had studied in our enemies and after 9-11, the experts in those techniques turned around and decided that they should become our own program. And you're still not allowed to interview Mitchell and Jeppes and even though they're Jensen, even though they're no longer working for the CIA.

They claim that they would love to talk, but the CIA has borrowed them from talking by making them sign some kind of non-disclosure statement. So, you know, one of these days, they will be hauled up, I think, in front of some kind of committee on Capitol Hill. And we will maybe be able to learn a little bit more. Let me bounce something off you that I think has been reported elsewhere that one of the reasons for the persistence of these techniques in the cases of Abu Zabata and others was two strands that I noticed. One that it was Larry Wilkerson who wrote that it was a really of minor interest to these people, whether the detainees were innocent or guilty because anything they had to say fit into the mosaic of intelligence. And therefore, it was useful whether they really knew anything or not aside from where the post offices were located or where the local liquor store was.

And the other was a report that, and I don't remember where this came from, that the real object of much of this interrogation was the insistence from the Cheney level or somewhere near it to find a provable link between Al Qaeda and 9-11. Again, I think that was from Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell. And the other shred of evidence for that was a statement from one of the officials down in Guantanamo, a man named Bernie, who, that's his last name, that was his first name, who said that he felt he was one of, he was involved in the interrogation program. I think he was also a psychologist who said that he felt pressured to try to make the detainees confess to a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein before the war when they were looking for to be able to build the case in order to sell the war. He felt he was under pressure to make detainees say that.

I mean, there's certainly a story, as I tell it in my book, about a particular detainee who was captured by the U.S. named Ibn Sheikh Al-Libbi, who was- The recently deceased. Recently deceased, but before he died, he went through an incredibly strange experience of being sent over to Egypt where he was tormented in all kinds of physical and psychological ways, locked in little cages and boxes. And also just kind of beaten up, actually. And he kept being asked the same questions about whether or not Al Qaeda, which he was supposed to have been part of, played some role in learning about weapons of mass destruction and bio weapons from Saddam Hussein. They were again trying to make this link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and it was before the war. And if you read what he has said about this, that is Al-Libbi, and there's a Senate report about it that's bipartisan, not just Democrats, but Republicans signed off on it too. He says he had no idea what they were really talking about.

He didn't understand even what bio weapons were. But by the time that they were done with him, he confessed to everything they wanted to hear. And those confessions then worked their way into the speech that Colin Powell gave to the UN right before the war that was one of the most important turning points, I think, in selling the country on the war. And a year later, this same detainee took it all back. They went to him and said, well, where are these weapons of mass destruction? Where are these bio weapons that you talked about? And he said, well, you know, I made it up. I had to say something. They were killing me. And so he recanted. And, you know, so again, that's certainly one specific case we know of where somebody was basically pummeled into making the case that helped sell the war. And that was really the whole point of the coercion and so-called enhanced interrogation program. I think it was only part of it, really. I think that they really felt that they needed to use these techniques in order to get the truth out of evil people and that this is the only way these people would talk.

And there's a certain amount of racism involved in it too. They thought this is a language that Arabs understand. And from interviewing a lot of people, I get the sense that they weren't trying to make them lie. They were trying to make them say what Cheney thought was true. So it's a little bit more complicated than just to just make them lie. It's more like making them confirm his preconceptions. There would be a allegedly committed suicide. Do we know any more about that than we did a month ago when it first was made known? No, I haven't seen anything more. I mean, it was in weird circumstances. He was in prison in Libya. And it's not the easiest thing to commit suicide in a jail cell. He did. And it was right after human rights activists finally had located him and wanted to talk to him. So, you know, it all looked sort of suspicious, but it seems no one's gotten to the bottom of it. Well, everything looks suspicious on the dark side. We've been talking about the past. Let's quickly move to the present because you're most recent report in the New Yorker deals with the current state of our intelligence activities, including an interview with Leon Panetta.

To what extent are we still operating on the dark side from your reporting? Well, I think it's a mixed picture. I mean, I think there have been tremendous improvements made to put, give you the bright side first, which is that President Obama has summarily banned torture. No American prisoner, he says, will be treated in humanely. And he's done that through an executive order. We're back in compliance with international law on that. And he's also closed all the secret black prison sites. So really, the worst, the worst abuse is always take place in secret places where the Red Cross is not allowed to meet with prisoners. And now the Red Cross can meet with anybody the U.S. holds. And there are no secret prison sites. So those those steps are tremendous progress as far as I'm concerned. And beyond that, there are some worries still, which are that the the rendition program is still with us apparently. Panetta thinks that there's a way that we can use the CIA to capture people abroad and take terror suspects and return them to various other countries where they can be interrogated in rules that are probably a lot harsher than our own.

But he thinks that there are ways that you can keep that keep those people from being tortured. That's something we've heard in the past. It didn't work in the past. He he seemed to think there would be ways you could monitor this. I don't know. We'll see. He according to your reporting, thanks to State Department can make sure that they they don't torture people in Morocco and Egypt. Well, the State Department is required to play that role according to laws that we have. The U.S. is not allowed to transport anybody to a country where there's a greater than not chance they'll be tortured. So I mean, it's already there's a law against sending people off to be tortured. It's just that it's it's hard to monitor. Yes. And the hard the hard guys are famously skeptical of the State Department efforts to do anything more than than wave wave a pinky at people. There were a lot of winks and nods in the past. Basically, the U.S. would feed questions to the tough interrogators in places like Egypt. And they'd give them questions in the morning and get answers in the evening and not ask too many questions about how they got those answers.

So they're going to have to monitor it a lot more closely if they want to avoid abuse. Panetta says they're going to monitor it more closely. I guess we will monitor the monitors and see what happens. Also, you are among many other people report as evidence of the change that Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo. But I notice in all of that, there's very little mention of Bagram. Right. Bagram still exists. And as much as a much bigger population than Guantanamo, it's kind of out there in the shadows and the sort of in Chinese dark side still. There's tremendous fights taking place inside the Obama administration as we speak about the subject of preventive detention and whether the U.S. can continue to hold people outside of the regular sort of legal system outside of the American criminal justice system. And that population in Bagram, part of it is in contention when we talk about these fights. So it's unresolved. And I think it's a great question because it's a big problem.

The fights that are going on are about the state's secret claiming the state's secrets provision in any of these cases that may come, habeas corpus cases or others that may come to the notice of a judge. As we come close to the end here, you report about pressure on Obama, President Obama from people in the CIA, including now, Leon Panetta, who represents them as the head of the agency. This persistent refrain that we hear from the Obama administration that we're looking forward, we're not interested in looking in the past as against sort of what the international law says, which is anybody who has been guilty of torture. The government is responsible for bringing them to justice. This is attention that continues to what extent is Obama being briefed by intelligence people who have dirty hands? Well, I think to a considerable extent, I hate to say it. The problem is that, surprisingly, the people who set up supervised, implemented the torture techniques that the US used in the war on terror during the Bush years, many of them are still in the CIA.

Some of them run the CIA and some of them also are at least one of them, somebody who has sort of a mixed record on torture is right at Obama's ear in the White House. Unsurprisingly, these people who have sort of checkered pasts are fairly vocal and saying, you know, you really don't need to look back. We don't want to get snagged in the past. Let's just move forward. So there's a certain amount of self-interest in that argument and I just don't know how much Obama and some of the new people understand that they're still being advised by the people who were part of this. Who's the person who has right at his ear that you just mentioned? We should have a name.

There's a band named John Brennan, who is on the National Security Council, and he, you know, in the past, he was the chief of staff to the former CIA Director George Tennant, and it was Tennant who set up the program that included torture. And he's had a number of top positions in the CIA during the period when the abuse was at its worst. And he has said he was an opponent internally of waterboarding, but there are other things that he's spoken even to me about where he basically defended enhanced interrogation techniques. In other words, he took a position that was opposite of the position that Obama has taken, yet he's in there advising Obama on some of these same subjects. So it's complicated. Yeah. I think any of us who've lived through the last couple, three decades have been sort of whipsawed perhaps in our perception of the CIA from time to time. When Valerie Plain was outed, she seemed like a good guy. She was working in the non-proliferation section.

The administration saw fit to out her for apparently political reasons. Yet the movie, the Hollywood version of the CIA is implacably sinister. And certainly we saw that when the Bush administration tried to lay blame for the intelligence, quote, failures that led to the Iraq war. At the feet of the CIA, the CIA started furiously leaking back in a fairly serious self-protective mode. So there appeared to be more than one thread of what's going on at the CIA. Listen, there are a lot of terrific people inside the CIA and very, very, you know, public-spirited people and people who are willing to risk their lives to help the US. You just can't paint the whole thing with a big broad brush, but at the same time, right after 9-11, the CIA was led by George Tennant who is criticized by many other people at the CIA for basically rolling over and doing whatever the Bush-Chainy White House wanted the CIA to do.

And during that period, they took the CIA into a very legally dubious territory where the US started torturing people. And it was a damn big program that required many, many people to be participants in it. And by not looking back, many of those people are still there and still playing prominent roles. And, you know, you can't really say that the whole CIA is tainted by that, but there are a number of people who were tainted by that. And, you know, so this effort just to move forward without looking back is creating all kinds of problems. Is the dark side out in paperback? It is. And it has a new afterward that is actually brighter, which is about the Obama period. And I have to say I am optimistic about Obama and what they're doing. I think, and I'm actually optimistic about Panetta. He's spoken out eloquently against torture. You know, the values are in a different place now. And I also think there's much more reverence for the law.

So I think that, you know, it's just that it's a daily struggle to write this ship. He has already, though, had to recant the essence of the quote that he gave to you about what he surmised Dick Cheney's mode of political operation at this point being to be, right? Well, I think they've, what they've done is sort of tried to explain that it was an off the cuff comment. And he didn't actually say that he thought Cheney wanted America to be attacked. He said it's almost as if he wants America to be attacked. Anyway, he obviously was saying that the kind of politics that political games that Cheney's been playing in his view were dangerous. And so that's what he was trying to get across. They walked back the cat, though. Well, they can't walk it too far because I have a tape. I understand, but it's like if you say he's he's almost acting like as if he were a homosexual. I think everybody knows what you're saying. Well, I, you know, I leave it with them. They are the masters of politics. I'm just taking notes.

Jane Mayer, I'm so glad you agreed to spend this time with me. I hope you continue to alert us to what's going on on on both the dark and the light side. And thanks so much for being my guest today. So glad to be with you. Thanks. And now, ladies and gentlemen, news from outside the bubble. Happer Poe of Bagram. This from the BBC, former detainees of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have alleged a catalog of abuse at the US military facility after a two month investigation by the BBC. They said X inmates of Bagram listed mistreatment, including beating, sleep deprivation, and being threatened with dogs. Now, weird. That's the same stuff that happened of a grave in Guantanamo. Like minded bad apples, they did things he would not do against animals a little into humans that one former detainee identified as Dr. Condon, whether another described as having a gun put to his head and being threatened with death.

The detainees held in Bagram were between 2002 and 2008. They were all accused of belonging to or helping Al Qaeda or the Taliban. No charges were brought. Some received apologies when released. The Pentagon denies the allegations. Two of those questioned by the BBC reported having been treated well. US military and Kabul could not immediately comment. A British legal rights lobby group reprieves that the allegations confirm its concerns. Bagram is the new Guantanamo Bay, it said. Speaking of which Abdul Rahim Abdul-Razakh El-Janko was tortured by Al Qaeda and imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months because the group's leaders thought he was an American spy. Abandoned by his captors in late 2001, he was picked up by US authorities who shipped him to Guantanamo Bay. On suspicion, he was a member of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

This week, a federal judge ordered his release saying the government's legal rationale for continuing to detain him. Quote defies common sense. The worst of the worst, ladies and gentlemen. Two separate US drone attacks have killed at least 10 people in a Taliban stronghold of region of Pakistan. According to the BBC, in the first raid, at least one missile struck a known stronghold of the Pakistan Taliban chief. Reports say a second attack on the funeral of one of those who died in the first attack killed four more people. And the US commander, in Afghanistan, says we're going to do less of that. Because we want to win hearts and minds. And finally, from the Scotsman, the United States has made a deal allowing it to continue using a central Asian air base that is crucial to the NATO mission in Afghanistan after agreeing to triple the rent it pays. The former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan had ordered the US forces out in February, which some observers said may have been influenced by Russia, strongly opposed to US military presence so close to its borders. Russia also has a base in Kyrgyzstan, and it increased its aid to the country just before the eviction announcement.

Under the new deal, the US will pay $60 million in annual rent up from the current $17.4 million. The base became even more important to the Afghan war after neighboring Uzbekistan evicted US troops from a base there. I guess we didn't pay them enough. Follow the money ladies and gentlemen, news from outside the bubble a copyrighted feature of this broadcast. And in the wake of this week's Big Celebrity News, ladies and gentlemen, the first chapter in what appears to be a continuing saga, at least so your host predicts, called All Will Be Revealed, this from Anderson Cooper on CNN last Thursday evening. I actually met Michael Jackson when I was a little kid. For some odd reason, I went to Studio 54 with Michael Jackson and a bunch of people, and I had no idea who he was, and I saw him dance, and I was like, oh, that guy's a really good dancer.

Why I was at Studio 54 and H. Chen is a whole other story that I don't know. I don't know, child welfare authorities probably want to talk to my mom. Yeah, they might well, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this edition of the show the program returns next week at the same time over the same stations of RNPR Worldwide throughout Europe. The U.S. and 440 cable system in Japan around the world to the facilities of the American forces network up and down the east coast of North America by the shortwave giant WBC, use of planets 7.4 and 5 beggarhertz. Shortwave, think of it on the mighty 104 in Berlin around the world by the Internet, two different locations live and archived. Whenever you want at harryshear.com and KCRW.com, available on your smartphone at stitcher.com, available on the mighty 104 in Berlin, available as a free download at www.autable.com slash the show for members, and available as a free podcast from KCRW.com. And it'd be just like, my mom taking me to Studio 54 when I was 10, if you'd agree to join with me then.

Would you already thank you very much, huh? A tip of the show shoppo to the San Diego Pittsburgh Chicago and Hawaii desks, and if thanks, as always, to Pam Hall's deadly, email address for this podcast and the playlist of music available on this podcast. You can access at the always evolving harryshear.com. The show comes to you from century progress productions that originates through the facilities of KCRW Santa Monica, a community recognized around the world as the home of the homeless, so long from London. Thank you very much.