Moyers & Company; 120; Reckoning with Torture

This week a mortgage and company Doug Lyman and I'm asking you to help me direct the movie reckoning with torture the documents you begin to recover are just glimpses of humanity because you hear the voices of detainees we've never heard them and we're asking people to stage their own readings extraordinary rendition has a human face and it is mine yet we will change your life. Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The Colberg Foundation independent production fund with support from the Partridge Foundation a John and Pauli Guth charitable fund the Clemens Foundation Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues the Herbalpert Foundation supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society the Bernard and Audrey Rapaport Foundation the John D. and

Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world more information at macfound dot org and gummerwitz the Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation the HKH Foundation Barbara G. Flashman and by our sole corporate sponsor Mutual of America designing customized individual and group retirement products that's why we're your retirement company. Welcome facing the truth is hard to do especially the truth about ourselves not surprising Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9.11 our government began to torture people and did so in defiance of domestic and international law it's no secret such cruelty occurred it's just the truth we'd rather not think about but memorial day is a good time to make the effort because if we really want to honor

the Americans in uniform who died fighting for their country we'll redouble our efforts to make sure we're worthy of their sacrifice we'll renew our commitment to the rule of law for the rule of law is essential to any civilization worth dying for. So in this broadcast we'll reckon with torture the torture done in our name allegedly for our safety because most of us haven't come to terms with what that meant or means today. We hope to engage you here at online in thinking and talking about this most uncomfortable subject. Our effort was inspired by collaboration between the American Civil Liberties Union and the International Literary and Human Rights Group PIN. They teamed up to comb through 150,000 declassified documents as well as large collections of articles and transcripts to produce the torture report. The documents say about America's post 9-11 torture program written by PIN's Larry Seams.

I am reading an excerpt but that's not all. Penn and the ACLU have staged readings of excerpts from the documents and from first-person testimony at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and Lincoln Center here in New York. Those readings had been videotaped and are being made into a documentary by movie director Doug Lyman. He wants you to participate too and we'll tell you more about the project and how you can get involved later in the broadcast. But first let's meet Doug Lyman whose feature film credits include The Born Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Fair Game and The Lead Rider of the Torture Report Larry Seams who directs the freedom to write and international programs at PIN American Center. Welcome to both of you. What's the brief history of this project? What's the beginning of it?

How did it come about? Well the beginning is in the Freedom of Information Action and Lawsuit that the ACLU filed for the release of documents that detailed the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody since 9-11. We have this incredible trove of documents and I think you know the ACLU was looking for ways of putting the public in contact with these documents. And as a writers organization as you say that does international human rights work and like all international human rights organizations we found our international efforts complicated by the fact that the U.S. was compromising its commitments to standards that we've been asking governments around the world to adhere to because we had immediately after 9-11 a number of regimes launched crackdowns on the usual suspects in their countries and when they were questioned by that they just pointed to the United States and said look what the United States is doing, you know indefinite detention, the Patriot Act and you know increased surveillance powers, if the United States can do it they certainly can't criticize us and this happened in a number of countries.

So we knew we had to look to ourselves in order to speak to the world. So we began to work with the ACLU, pended to put together these public readings from these documents. You can't believe some of these documents that they've uncovered in a way it's a tribute to this country that the freedom of information actually works that you don't actually need WikiLeaks, like there is an actual legal way that documents that are quite damaging to the people who committed these acts of atrocity. That's something that the book really chronicles is that this was not a case where everybody agreed with these programs on the country. With the torch it. Right. You mean people inside government, there were dissidents. In the military and in all of the intelligence agencies and in fact the reason we have these documents is because there were dissenters. So many people said this is wrong, this is stupid, this violates our principles. And effective. There's a document show that that torture didn't work? Yes.

Because there's an internal argument all the time about whether it's working or not working. This is all quite well documented. As a storyteller what was the story you found there? Well, first of all, we're in a sort of state in this country where everything is so polarized and it's right wing or left wing, Republican or Democrat and it's almost hard to sort of get to the truth of matters because suddenly just who's telling you the information makes the information itself suspect. Something that's so extraordinary about this project is that the documents aren't editorialized. They are, these are the documents exactly how they were received from the U.S. government. I mean things are redacted but they're in no way editorialized and we're just, we're reading the documents raw. How did you react personally when you began to look at the documents? What was going on inside of your own head? On one hand, they are riveting these documents and you almost can't believe, I mean you read John Hughes memo talking about, you know, just clinically discussing in a legal memo, you

know, torture and what you can and can't do to a prisoner and just coldly sort of describing how you waterboard somebody and it's extraordinary that the Justice Department could participate, that lawyers could participate in sort of putting torture into some kind of legal framework that was, that is incredibly thuggish behavior and one of my favorite documents is a transcript of George Tandet's interview in 60 minutes, which isn't a D-class of a document at all. That's been portrayed is, we sat around the campfire and said, oh boy now we go get to torture people. We don't torture people. Let me say that again to you, we don't torture people, okay, come on George. We don't torture people. College Shake, Muhammad, we don't torture waterboarding, we do not, I don't talk about techniques and we don't torture people. Now listen to me.

Now listen to me. Why don't you listen to me? What struck you about it? He clearly has to say we don't torture people. Like he's just, he's been told or he knows, like he must just repeat that sentence over and over again, but he's being confronted with overwhelming evidence and at the same time he's sort of saying some people need to be tortured, but he can't really say that until seeing somebody sort of squirm in this position where they know they can't support, they morally can't support what it is they're saying and what they did and they just have to sort of keep talking and filling the space until the interview ends. So just as like a student of drama, I find that one of the most extraordinary performances I've ever seen. But as you suggest the story has been out, we all knew finally that torture had happened and felt badly about it many people. Yeah, but you knew it as like maybe there were a few bad apples out there. Right?

I mean that really was how the story was positioned and these people here did this horrible thing and these people here did this horrible thing and what these documents reveal is that it comes straight back to the highest levels of government. But why bring it out? Now it is in the past, America is going through hard times, people out there have lost their jobs, lost their pensions, lost their homes, politics as you say, means spirited. Why take all this dirty linen and dump it in the middle of the room right now? Torture is something that happens by human beings, two human beings, and there are lives that have been harmed by this. And the convention against torture and domestic laws against torture make it clear. When torture happens, people must be prosecuted, victims must be compensated. No ambiguity in that. The Geneva code. That's the convention against torture and cruel and human-integrating punishment or treatment. In the United States is a long time signature. It's been codified into U.S. law. Under U.S. law, the question of what's cruel and human-integrating treatment is determined by the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and human punishment.

The courts interpret that as behavior that shocks the conscience. There's much, much that shocks the conscience in this book. But the one thing is you look at documents which seem coldly bureaucratic and you start to read it and you realize that they're very, very human. They have human voices in them. They capture, I mean, if you think that the purpose of torture is to dehumanize people. The documents, you begin to recover just glimpses of humanity because you hear the voices of detainees. We've never heard them. The whole system has been structured, so you never hear them tell their stories. You made over the last years we've heard about them, but we've never heard of them. You never hear. You're one of the stage readings or do perform one of them yourself and it's because some of these documents are detainees describing the experience of being tortured. Let me play one of the readings that took place during the Sundance Festival. This is the infamous torture memo from the Justice Department 2002 and the first hand accounts

of the interrogations of Abu Zabata. Who is he? Abu Zabata was, according to the Bush administration, when he was first detained, the number three man in Al Qaeda, this is what their definition of him was. He was detained. He was shot actually during a raid in Pakistan, treated by the US, and then flown to a secret CIA prison in Thailand, where the CIA sent a team of contractors who were the ones who would end up sort of driving this torture program to do this experiment, to really try these new enhanced interrogation techniques. Things that had really been derived from techniques that the communist Chinese and the Soviets used in the middle of the 20th century, sent them there interrogated him that the memos are August 1st, 2002, green lighting, saying that these techniques are not torture, and green lighting their use on Abu Zabata.

So throughout August of 2002, he's brutally tortured, including he was water-bored at 83 times, kept nude, subjected to temperature extremes, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, slaps, walling, slamming him against the wall. And this reading I think that you're going to show is it juxtaposes the John Yu memo describing the treatment with one of the only documents that we have in which Abu Zabata speaks. And John Yu was? Justice Department Attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel. He is the architect of a number of the legal manipulations that declared these things legal. And this is Abu Zabata speaking to the Red Cross in 2006, four years after he'd been disappeared, literally disappeared into secret prisons. He'd been held in Thailand and then in Poland. He's finally brought to Guantanamo with 13 other high value detainees in October or in September of 2006.

He finally gets to see the Red Cross. He tells his story of what happens. And the amazing thing is his account of what happens to him just by recollection to the international committee on the Red Cross matches exactly the instructions that are laid out in the you memo. So let's play that for you. Hi, I'm George Saunders. I'm going to be reading an excerpt from a legal memo written by John Yu and signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bibi. I am Saunders Yisnetto, so I will be reading an excerpt of Abu Zabata's first-hand account of his interrogation in a secret CIA prison. About two and a half or three months after I arrived in this place, the interrogation began again, but with more intensity than before, then the real torture started. In this phase, you would like to employ ten techniques that you believe will dislocate his expectations regarding the treatment he believes he will receive and encourage him to disclose the crucial information mentioned above. These ten techniques are attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, insult slap,

cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and the water board. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck. They then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury. During these torture sessions, many guards were present, plus two interrogators who did the actual beating, still asking questions. Finally, you would like to use a technique called the water board. You have early informed us that this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control, even though he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning.

I struggled against the straps trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine, since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress. What does that document tell you? Just a recovery from watching the clip again, but, you know, I'm a filmmaker, but my father was a lawyer, my brother's a lawyer. And your father was? It was Arthur Lyman. He was a lawyer in New York City, but he also ran the investigation into the Reagan administration's Iran Contra program, and actually I ended up taking a lot of the details of the investigation and making those the characters and the born identity. And clearly this was a situation where the White House was turning to lawyers and saying, we want to torture these people and we need a lawyer to sort of tell us that it is legal. And the lawyers that I grew up around would not have done that. And yet there were lawyers in this Justice Department who were willing to bend the law, figure

out some tricky business to sort of somehow say that this kind of behavior was in fact legal when it so clearly shocks the conscience and violation of the convention against torture. So just my first reaction is just shock that a lawyer like John U could sort of shirk his responsibilities as a lawyer to remember the Justice Department sworn to uphold the law and write a memo like this. And then when you hear that which was so powerful about these readings is to then not read a transcript of Abu Zubayda, but to actually hear the words spoken out loud. Abu Zubayda who it turns out the government has finally admitted was in fact never even a member of al-Qaeda, let alone its number three deputy, had no knowledge of the 9-11 attacks. But he confesses on the torture. Of course he does. To something he did.

Because everybody does. He does. These techniques that we tried in the secret prisons and in Guantanamo and Iraq were based on the seer training program of the military that's SERE and it stands for Survival Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. And it's a training program that we put soldiers and airmen and naval officers and Marines who are a particular risk jeopardy of being captured. We put them through this program to, you know, to prepare them for what they may experience if they're captured by countries specifically that don't adhere to the jadeva conventions and that torture people. But the scenario that's most often used is the scenario that was used during the Korean war when pilots were captured and it was in order to get them to sign false confessions that they had committed war crimes. This was what the North Koreans did and these were the techniques that they used to break down your will to the point that you will sign a confession.

So Zabeta had fetuses? He confessed to something he didn't do. Interestingly, people who go through this even in a simulated one week program end up signing false confessions. So, you know, let alone the pressure of being, you know, disappeared from the face of the earth in a secret dungeon in Thailand. You have no access to lawyers, nothing. They tell you there's no law anymore. The law has been suspended. You can do it to you, whatever we want, of course you can pass it. But let me ask you both to go back ten years. The United States has just been attacked. Thousands of people have been killed. There are more tax fears. Nobody really knows what has happened. The country has stunned. There's a ticking time bomb we keep being told. We've got to find that ticking time bomb before it goes off. Again, the men charged and women charged with protecting American citizens are stunned. They're uncertain. They don't know where this is coming from. They don't know when it will happen again. And they want to find out. Any sympathy for the desperation that drove the decisions to go after the sources of the

information? We all felt that fear. I think to some extent, the public, we probably communicated to the administration that we would like them to do anything they could do to protect us. That said, I think one of the, again, I think one of the clearest stories that the documents tell is that many, many people who were in positions of high responsibility had felt exactly the same pressure and had exactly the opposite reaction that John U and Dick Cheney and George Bush had. There were a stream of legal memos that were written by the lawyers of every single service. That challenged John U's memo. They fought and fought and fought. They said, look, these techniques, they violate the convention against torture. They violate U.S. law and they violate the uniform code of military justice. These are front-line people. Some of the people are pushing back because they know that torture leads to useless

information. What is useless information? The information that's elicited from somebody who's being tortured is most strategically useless. In fact, we didn't find Bin Laden's location from somebody who was tortured. If you listen to all these voices that are in the documents, all these people who are saying, history is going to judge this. People say this, again and again and again. This is the stuff that congressional investigations are made of. That's a quote that could come out of it. They feared being prosecuted. Absolutely. Because they knew it was wrong. The dissenters warned about prosecution and the administration feared prosecution. The administration feared prosecution. That's why this is a John U memo. There's one of your excerpts that you did at Sundance of a soldier witnessing torture in Afghanistan, I think. This was a woman, an interpreter, and it's an incredible moment of what they used to call an Aristotelian dramatic irony because here she is in Afghanistan. She witnesses this.

Some obscure Special Forces team comes in, beats up and tortures the prisoner that they're interrogating, ruins the interrogation for her. What she has, she has her training as a military training in Geneva conventions and she just says, look, I know this is a violation of Geneva conventions and I know how important it is to uphold these things. At the very moment that this is happening, the Bush administration is putting the final touches on the memos that suspend Geneva protections for detainees, for al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees. Two weeks later, Bush signs the order that will withhold Geneva protections. That juxtaposition, it's like one of the things about just lining up the dates of the documents. This happened here and this happened here. I knew those two things happened, but you put them together side by side and you just see the gulf between the people on the ground and people on the White House. Yeah, and this is us, this woman is us. She was sent out to do this job, trained in a way to do this job, and the rugs being pulled out from underneath her even as she's behaving exactly as we would hope.

So this is the reading. Hi, I'm Lily Taylor. I'm going to read from the sworn statement of an interpreter at the Kandahar detention facility in Afghanistan. The handwritten document is dated February 13th, 2002. I am writing this in response to events that I witnessed while performing my duties as an interrogator with the Task Force 202JIF. Specialist Blank and I were conducting interrogation of military prisoner number XXX on three January 2002. Blank and I took a break to regroup and check our notes. While we were out of the booth, several special forces members entered. Blank and I finished the break and went back. When we entered the booth, we found the special forces members all crouched around the prisoner. The prisoner was extremely upset. He said that they had hit him, told him that he was going to die, blew smoke in his face and it shocked him with some kind of device. He used the term electricity.

I immediately notified our non-commissioned officer in charge. I was very upset that such a thing could happen. I take my job in responsibilities as an interrogator and as a human being very seriously. I understand the importance of the Geneva Convention and what it represents. If I don't honor it, what right do I have to expect any other military to do so? The book and the website are filled with documents after documents of people who in that same situation, feeling that same pressure to do something, felt that this was wrong and that this shouldn't happen and wrote a memo to her superior saying that this was wrong. You've got a segment called the Repentant Prosecutor. Set that up for me before we play it for the audience. This is drawn from an affidavit by Lieutenant Colonel Daryl Van DeVelte, who is a prosecutor at the Military Commissions in Guantanamo and he was assigned to prosecute a Guantanamo detainee, a young man named Mohammad Jawad. Like all of the Guantanamo prosecutors, he was operating in the dark.

He had no idea how a person who was supposed to prosecute had been interrogated or treated. He was going about building his case against him. At one point, one of the hearings of Mohammad Jawad starts telling the story about how he had been subjected to this program, which came to be known as the Frequent Flyer Program of being moved from cell to cell just to keep him from sleeping. And Van DeVelte thought this was alone. I thought he was just making this up and complaining about mis-treatment. So he proceeded. But as he went on, he came to discover that in fact, Mohammad Jawad had been abused. So this is his affidavit that he filed actually in Mohammad Jawad's habeas corpus petition. So set this up for me. This is Colonel Morris Davis, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions in Guantanamo. In the summer of 2007, a few months before I resigned as Chief Prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Lieutenant Colonel Darrell Van DeVelte joined my staff. And I signed into the case of Mohammad Jawad.

In 2008, Lieutenant Colonel Van DeVelte, filling an ethical conflict, removed himself from the case and provided a sworn statement to the ACLU as part of Mr. Jawad's habeas corpus petition. This is a portion of Lieutenant Colonel Van DeVelte's sworn statement. I Darrell Van DeVelte declares follows, I am a Lieutenant Colonel in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. I was the lead prosecutor assigned to the Military Commissions case against Mr. Jawad until my resignation in September 2008. Initially, the case appeared to be a simple street crime as I had prosecuted by the dozens in my civilian life. But eventually, I began to harbor serious doubts about the strength of the evidence. I learned that the written statement characterized as Jawad's personal confession could not possibly have been written by him because Jawad was functionally illiterate and could not read or write, and the statement was not even in his native language. I also found evidence that Mr. Jawad had been badly mistreated by US authorities, both in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo.

Mr. Jawad's prison records referred to a suicide attempt. A suicide which he sought to accomplish by banging his head repeatedly against one of his cell walls. The records reflected 112 unexplained moves from cell to cell over a two-week period, an average of eight moves per day for 14 days. Mr. Jawad had been subjected to a sleep deprivation program known as the Frequent Flyer program. I lack the words to express the heart sickness I experienced when I came to understand the pointless purely gratuitous mistreatment of Mr. Jawad by my fellow soldiers. It is my opinion based on my extensive knowledge of the case that there is no credible evidence or legal basis to justify Mr. Jawad's detention in US custody or his prosecution by military commission. Holding Mr. Jawad for six years with no resolution of his case and with no terminus in sight is something beyond a travesty. Six years it's long enough for a boy of 16 to serve in virtual solitary confinement in a distant land for reasons he may never fully understand. Mr. Jawad should be released to resume his life in a civil society for his sake and for

our own sense of justice and perhaps to restore a measure of our basic humanity. What a turn of a bit. Amazing. Amazing. But not unprecedented. The accounts are full of stories like this. And the thing that compelled me through this work for 18 months was the incredible heroism and the incredible acts of conscience of individuals who were put in these situations. These are very, very human stories. These are individual stories. Individuals grappling with their own consciences. Another Guantanamo prosecutor named Stuart Couch who was a marine pilot, one of his best friends was one of the pilots who flew into the trade center and was killed. He re-opted, went back to the military to prosecute cases, went to Guantanamo and was assigned to prosecute the case of a guy named Muhammad al-Ultzlahi who was supposed to have recruited some of those hijackers on those planes.

And so he was quite excited about the opportunity to get some justice for his friend. When he first went to Guantanamo he just went to observe an interrogation and went into one of the trailers and saw the strobe lights and the metallic amusing at music playing and the detainees shackled to the ground. And he had been through the seer training program and he knew immediately what was going on. So he was a little bit suspicious of how we were getting intelligence. And Stuart Couch describes himself as an evangelical Christian and he wrestled with his conscience. He talked to his minister. He talked to other members of the military about what he was seeing and people were saying you should speak up. And he sat on the fence and he wrestled and then one day he was in church on Sunday for a baptism as he described it and the liturgy included the words about the dignity of every human being and he said that was it. What did you learn about torture in this work that you didn't know? What shocked me about the memos that Larry and the ACLU uncovered was on one hand how

much they contradicted the values that are so important to me as an American that the government could have not only allowed this to happen but actually encouraged this to happen, actually made it legal for this to happen. And at the same time that it again reaffirmed some of my hope and belief in this country because in the face of this and all of this pressure, the book and is filled with what document we have to document to people who knew this was wrong and chose to speak out about it. What techniques of torture were used that would force a confession? We know about waterboarding, but what are the others? When you think about reading a book like this, you think you're going to be subjected to some very horrific grim bloody scenes. In fact, there was not a lot of physical barbarity. It's a kind of a relentless degradation and a relentless assault on the dignity of the person.

They very rarely touch a prisoner. They very rarely do because they want to preserve this sort of mockingly, this false idea that they follow the rules, but we all know this is torture. This is what they said. So it's things like sleep deprivation, one of the most famous and well-documented interrogations which was also the subject of an ongoing trench warfare between the FBI and the criminal investigative task forces in Guantanamo saying stop this and the military on the other hands saying do this is the interrogation of this guy, Muhammad al-Katani, that's carried out over several months, but the most intense period is a 50-day interrogation where they allow this man to sleep for only four hours a day for 50 days. And then during that time, it's sleep deprivation, it's temperature manipulation, and then endless endless humiliations, just mocking him all the time, at one point dressing him in a bra and panties, calling him a homosexual. Another time inflating a latex glove and slapping him on the face with it and putting a making

him wear a sign that says coward and slapping him with a sissy-slap glove, having a female interrogator constantly getting up in his face, constantly touching him, you know, constantly sort of just, you know, things that, you know, people who looked at this would say, well, that constitutes an assault under the universal, under the uniform code of military justice. But it wasn't punching him, it's just invading his face in this constant, ecological warfare, not physical, absolutely. Absolutely. And the purpose as the designers of this program said was to develop a state of learned helplessness. That was the phrase that they used, you want to break down a person, so essentially so they will do what you say there, so that they are compliant. So again, back to the idea that there's a ticking time bomb scenario, the whole purpose of the techniques that we use was not to get an immediate confession, you know. This was to break people down to make them compliant, and ultimately in many cases it was then to put a piece of paper in front of them and say, sign this.

And some of the techniques were more physical than also leave no scars. So, you know, it was a technique that's spread out throughout the book called Walling. Walling? Walling. That literally sounds like it would be, you know, something that, you know, I would put in a film when I was trying to show like a gangster, beating up a rival gang, like I hear this drug gang attacking this drug gang. But again, it's something that's actually detailed in the John U memo as one of the techniques that's okay for the U.S. government to do to detainees called Walling, which involves wrapping something behind their neck so you don't break their neck and then slamming them into the wall. There's documents that describe specifically what kind of wall to build so that you inflict maximum pain, but minimum scarring so that there's no evidence of what you did to the person. Water voting, you know, the most extreme example of it because it leaves no scars whatsoever except psychological ones, but if, I mean, you can try it yourself at home.

You can take, I mean, honestly, live on your back and take a wet wash cloth and put it over your face and just have somebody dump some water over you and now imagine that happening to you when you're strapped down and have no control over it. And these are all techniques designed to physically harm the person but leave no scars. They're trained interrogators who fought against this the whole time, the career interrogators of the FBI. The first thing is, you know, at 9-11, the CIA had no interrogators. This was not their job and that, you know, and one of the first documents in the book is that President Bush signs an order days after the 9-11 attack giving the CIA power to detain and interrogate suspects. They don't have interrogators. They've never done this. The FBI trained interrogators say all along, this doesn't work. The thing that works is rapport building. This is the thing that... Report building. You know, you build rapport.

You just... Trust me. Yeah, trust me. I can help you. I'm one of you. I'm really on your side. I'll help you out of this. And there's a very famous confrontation that happens over the interrogation of Abu Zabeda, which involves this very skillful FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan, who confronts this guy, James Mitchell, who is one of the architects, the CIA contractors, who devises this alternative enhanced interrogation technique regime. And Ali Soufan is, you know, he's nursing Abu Zabeda, who's been shot. He's feeding him ice for his fever, but also developing rapport with him and getting information. That information is going back to Washington. Everybody's like, this is wonderful. And then the CIA finds out that it's not their guys who are getting this information with the FBI. So they said, no, we want our guys to do this. We want to get the credit for this. Ali Soufan ends up having a shouting match with James Mitchell saying, you know, James Mitchell shows up with one of these confinement boxes. And Ali Soufan says, I swear to God, I'll have you arrested. What you're talking about doing here is illegal.

Not only that, every time the CIA guys go in and start working on Abu Zabeda, he shuts up. Every time they pull out the information stops, and for about two weeks, there's this back and forth, and they'll send back in the FBI team, and they'll take them a little longer now to get back the rapport, but then Abu Zabeda will relax and start talking some more. And then they'll say, no, no, no, we want our guys. We want to do this our way, and they send them back in. So there's no secret to interrogation, law enforcement. You think, you know, are these detainees any more diabolical than some of our domestic criminals that we have to interrogate? Serial killers, you know, hardened gangsters, you know, ruthless mobsters, I mean, no. And we know how to interrogate them and get information. We have the impression, I think we've been given the impression that there was some kind of real method to this, and they were, you know, I mean, in fact, and they thought there was.

It was kind of a pseudo-science. When we were interrogating Abu Zabeda in Thailand, James Mitchell was sending cables back and forth every day to the White House, and each one of those cables would ask permission to do one of these things. It was just this whole mother-may-eye process, you know? Going right to the White House? Going back to the White House. Going to the CIA and the CIA would report to the White House on what was going on. I mean, the chain of culpability is very clear that orders were coming from Washington. But so that gives the impression that this is some kind of, you know, extremely scientific effective regime, but it was really just stupidity. At one point in Guantanamo, somebody proposing, proposes taping a detainee's mouth shut for several days on the assumption that when you take the tape off, they'll finally, they'll just blurt out stuff. You say in the book, and there are some sequences in your film that are officials tortured the innocent and the guilty alike, and tortured to get specific information such as Al Qaeda's ties to Saddam Hussein, tortured to hide their mistakes, tortured people to break them,

and then you say they sometimes could spiral to cover up their crimes, and they tortured to cover up a mistake. Give me an example of who they tortured to cover up a mistake. The government knew by August of 2002 that over 80 percent of the people in Guantanamo should not be there had no business being there. The CIA did an internal audit in August of 2002 that leaked out to the press. And yet you're talking at that time of over 700 people. And so one of the preoccupations from a public relations point of view became how are we going to support the story that we've told about these people who, when Guantanamo opened Donald Rumsfeld declared the worst of the worst, General Myers said these are people who will chew through the hydraulic lines of a transport jet in order to bring it down. And it turns out most of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So, you know, the case, in one recent habeas corpus case, the testimony was based on the incriminating evidence was based on testimony given by Ben Yamohamid, who had been brutally tortured in Morocco. And when he was in Morocco, he says that interrogators started to bring him photographs of people and saying these are the people that you were going to testify against. Doctors moved to a place that the CIA secret prison called the Dark Prisoner in Afghanistan and they kept rehearsing him on what his testimony was going to be. Doug, there's one document from August 2002 written by John Yu. It's titled, Standards of Conduct for Interrogation and it says they laid out a blueprint for getting around the ban on torture, asserted that abuse becomes torture only if it results in organ failure, death, or years of mental torment. And then only if the torture specifically intends to inflict such extreme, bad damage. What do you make of that?

It's an extraordinary memo because it's got sort of a circular logic to it, that it's really only torture if we say it's torture. And if we say it's not torture, it's not torture. Then if you look at the specifics of what it says is allowed, things like walling, behaviors are so thuggish and so clearly torture. And interestingly, when you talk about the damage of torture, we're not only talking about damage to the people who have been tortured, but you're talking about the damage that we have done to our servicemen and women who we put in a position that required them to violate their training, to violate their consciences. And there's the damage that's happened to the careers of many of the dissenters, people who stood up, felt they had to resign, were blackballed within the services, had to leave the services, and we leave them carrying the burden of conscience. Where are we now? I mean, when Barack Obama came in and took the oath of office, he said no more torture. And he said, but let's don't look backward, let's look forward.

So where are we on the issue of torture now? I really think we're exactly in a limbo. I think unless you look backward, unless you look backward, you can't move forward. That's what the history of recovery from human rights abuses around the world has taught. The world knows that when you have periods of human rights violations, a process has to happen of publicly encountering and reckoning with what happened. It doesn't necessarily involve prosecutions, but it involves truth telling why? Because the victims need to be recognized as human beings, they need to have their experience acknowledged publicly, and that's a crucial, crucial process, and we haven't done that. Is there a turn in the gross national psychology of a people when we give a pass to this sort of thing? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's very, very corrosive. Think about post-war German literature, for example. One of the things that writers have often done in this process is they expand the circle of responsibility.

It's just not us and those Nazis who did this. The question for German society becomes, how did this happen in our society and to what extent were we complicit? I mean, I think that's one of the reasons we need a public accounting. We have essentially communicated to successive administrations now that you do whatever you need to do, and we will give you a pass. But listen to this. According to recent warships in post-ABC news poll, 53% of self-identified liberal Democrats and 67% of moderate or conservative Democrats support keeping Guantanamo Bay open. 77% of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, which we know kill innocent civilians. What does that say about the moral compass both of you have talked about? I think your statistics would be very different if you pulled people who actually went to the reckoning with torture website or read the book. I think you would find probably 95% of conservatives, liberals, anyone would say the torture is wrong and this program was wrong.

What would change the mind? The specifics of it. It's sort of very easy if it sort of takes things are happening in a far away place. People you don't know with weird sounding names. You don't have to pay attention to it, so okay, whatever it's fine, but if you're forced to confront it, or if you stage one of the readings yourself and you hear the words spoken by somebody who was tortured, I don't know any human being anywhere who would say that that was okay. So what are you trying to do with the website? You're asking us as citizens to take our own little camera and take one of these documents. What do you want us to do? We have posted a number of the documents that have been declassified and put them into sort of script form and we're asking people to stage their own readings. These days, it's hard to find a cell phone that doesn't contain the ability to record a video, so just take a few minutes, go to the website, pick a document and somebody reads it and the other person films it and for both people involved, it will change

your life. So I want to play one for you and the artist, but set up what we're about to see. This particular clip is a young New Yorker reading the testimony of Khalid Al-Mazri, who's a German citizen who the United States utterly mistakenly renditioned to the Middle East for torture, deliberately to be tortured, mistaken identity wrong man. The U.S. policy of extraordinary rendition has a human face and it is mine. I was born in Kuwait and raised in Lebanon. In 1985, I fled to Germany in search of a better life. I became a citizen and started my own family. I have five children. On December 31, 2003, I took a bus from Germany to Macedonia. When we arrived, Macedonian agents confiscated my passport and detained me for 23 days. I was not allowed to contact anyone.

I was forced to record a video saying I had been treating well. I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to a building where I was severely beaten. My clothes were sliced from my body with a knife or scissors and my underwear was forcibly removed. I was thrown to the floor, my hands pulled behind me, a boot placed on my back. The following night, my interrogations began. They asked me if I knew why I had been detained. I did not. They told me I was now in a country with no laws and did I understand what that meant. You know, the United States has not officially apologized. To Khalid Omarzari, he had been told that Khandeliza Rizh apologized to the Germans privately but there's never been a public apology to him. And I think for him, I can think of how meaningful it will be for him, at least to see Americans encountering his experience and speaking his experience, internalizing his experience.

That's something huge, I think, for him. It's emotional for me just to start to see Americans of every size and color step forward and participate in this project and, you know, my father, you know, subscribed to Justice Brandeis' mantra that sunlight is the best disinfectant and that seeing just ordinary Americans come forward and speak these words out loud is a step of acknowledging the wrong that happened and it's, and the fact that ordinary Americans are stepping forward to do it. The Obama administration may not be willing to do it, so the American people are stepping forward and doing it. The test of character is how you respond when you realize that you've gone astray. And I do think that this country historically has had an ability to examine, you know, when it's critical and make apologies and make adjustments. The question is what happens if we don't, you know, and I think in this case, to not

examine these things and to not reckon with them is, first of all, to reward bad leadership because I think the real story is there was bad leadership. These guys weren't operating in a vacuum having to make stuff up on their own. They were ignoring good advice that was saying don't do these things, it doesn't work. Now, you know, if that's the record, I think, you know, we have a responsibility for asking our leaders to account for themselves for that kind of behavior. The other thing is I think it's, you know, I think if we don't get this right, if we don't, if we don't reckon with this, we're essentially saying go ahead and lie to us. Go ahead. That's fine. You know, tell us the story that this worked, tell us the story that this was necessary, tell us the story that you were right that we should just trust you. And I am unable to take that kind of position. I just can't accept being lied to like that. Tell us the website again.

Coming with torture.org, it takes you through the process, pick a script, pick a document, and film yourselves reading one of these documents. It is a cleansing act, it is a patriotic act, it is an act that will make this country stronger. It is taking responsibility for something that was done in the name of this country. And saying we acknowledge, we made a mistake, we're acknowledging the mistake, and we're ready to move forward, but you have to acknowledge the mistake first. I think that phrase cleansing act is great. I mean, there really is something transformative about the process of this project, you know, and it is amazing to hear these words that have been suppressed, that we were never supposed to hear spoken out loud, there's something really empowering about that. And I do think the idea, the way this is structured, we've done that. Now it's open to a national performance. It should be part of this performance, everybody should be part of this.

And I think when it's all brought together into one document, I think the experience will be extremely cleansing. Facing the truth is what you're asking us to do. The truth is there, the truth is there, and the question is what you do when it's there. I have looked at the website, I have read the book, they are both remarkable contributions to facing the truth. And I thank you Doug Lyman and Larry Seams for joining us on the broadcast. Thank you. Thank you so much. The date of death June 6, 2003, to see it into a 52-year-old Iraqi male civilian. In Iraqi national died while detained at Abu Ghraib prison, where he was held for interrogations by government agents. This Iraqi died while in U.S. custody, the details surrounding the circumstances at the time of death was classified. So here we are into our 11th year after 9-11, still at war in Afghanistan, still at war with terrorists, still at war with our collective conscience as we grapple with how to protect

our country from attack without violating the basic values of civilization. The rule of law, striving to achieve our aims without corrupting them and restraint in the use of power over others, especially when exercised in secret. Meanwhile, the news keeps coming. Five of the Guentanamo prisoners were recently arraigned before military commission for their role in the attacks. One of them is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who says he was the mastermind behind 9-11. He was what aborted by interrogators 183 times. Pentagon officials predict it will be at least another year before the five go on trial. Then there's Muhammad al-Qatani, the so-called 20th hijacker who didn't make it onto the planes. Lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights have filed suit in New York Federal Court to make public what they described as extremely disturbing videotapes of his interrogations. He remains an indefinite detention as does Abu Zabada.

Just this week, a federal appeals court refused to release information on the interrogation methods the CIA used on Abu Zabada and other terrorist suspects. As for John Yu, the architect of the August 2002 memo that authorized waterboarding, he's teaching law at the University of California Berkeley and no doubt breathing easier after a recent appeals court rejected a lawsuit from American citizen Jose Padilla, who's currently serving time for allegedly aiding terrorists. He accused John Yu of giving the go ahead for torture. Two final thoughts. At our website, billmoyers.com, we'll link you to an excerpt from the documentary we produced a decade ago on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where whites and blacks were striving to confront the cruelty inflicted on human beings during a part time. It's 12 minutes to 7. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission resumes public hearings. They tortured him and cut off his hands, they shot him and blew him up.

You were lying on the floor and the police was really firing at us. The act of opening the magazine was the detonating device for a bomb. This is of him and brains all of it was scattered around. I stepped over the bodies, reached my wife, so that she had been shot. We found, at very, very many of those who came, found the telling, just the telling in a way, a very cathartic, a very healing thing, because most of those who came are people who, for almost all of their lives, had been treated as nonentities. Being the film again calls me to wonder once more, as I have often, what might have resulted if after our own brutal civil war, we had created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission aimed at healing the deep wounds of slavery and slaughter. We'll never know.

And perhaps you caught something said the other day by the President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseau. She was held in prison and tortured repeatedly by the military dictators who ruled her country in the 70s and 80s. The state of Rio de Janeiro has announced it will officially apologize to her. Earlier, when she swore in members of a commission investigating the dictatorship, President Rousseff said, we are not moved by revenge, hate, or desire to rewrite history. The need to know the full truth is what moves us. That's it for this week. See you next time. Don't wait a week to get more moyers. Visit billmoyers.com for exclusive blogs, essays, and video features.

This episode of Moyers and Company is available on DVD for 1995. To order, call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The Colberg Foundation, independent production fund, with support from the Partridge Foundation, a John and PolyGuth Charitable Fund, the Clements Foundation, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Herb Alpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society, the Bernard and Audrey Rapaport Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.

More information at Macfound.org and Gunowitz. The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, the HKH Foundation, Barbara G. Flaishman, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company.