Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1205; California Nurses Association; Philippe J. Sands

This week on Bill Moyer's Journal, following the global trail of torture. This is not only a story of crime, it is also a story of cover-up. The administration has talked to about a few bad eggs. I don't think the bad eggs are the bottom of my huge bad eggs are at the top. And California nurses fighting for better health care. What the nurses are saying is there shouldn't be a double standard. There should be an excellence in care that applies to all people. Stay tuned. Funding for Bill Moyer's Journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Paulie Gut Charitable Fund,

Park Foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Marilyn and Bob Clements and the Clements Foundation, Bernard and Audrey Rappaport and the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Petser Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Orphala Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement plan products and services to employers and individuals since 1945. Mutual of America, your retirement company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyers. Welcome to the Journal. The rhetoric of politics grew so intense over recent weeks, so intense, personal and parochial, that some very big national issues dropped from sight. Issues the next president won't be able to avoid. So tonight we'll look at two of them.

Later in the broadcast, we'll hear the case for universal health care, made by nurses who have some ideas for fixing our broken system. But first, our subject is how to fight the war on terror without undermining our values. In this new book, Torture Team, the International Lawyer Philippe Sands, describes what happened when the White House abandoned the policy of Abraham Lincoln, who in the middle of the Civil War told his generals that military necessity does not admit of cruelty nor of torture to extort confessions. After 9-11, Wright's Philippe Sands, our highest government official sanctioned a culture of cruelty that put our troops, our Constitution, and our own standing in the world at risk. This week, members of the House Judiciary Committee began hearings trying to find out how the president came to approve enhanced interrogation methods. That's the official code for the use of cruelty in the pursuit of confession. The administration has been fighting to stop a public accounting of the internal decisions behind that policy. The officials who took part in those discussions fear they could one day face prosecution

if their actions turn out to have been illegal. Those key officials talked to Philippe Sands for his book. And this week, he was asked to testify at those hearings in Congress. This hearing of the subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties will come to order. Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, chided critics of tough interrogation, even for high-profile terrorists such as 9-11 Mastermind, Holled Shake, Muhammad, also known as KSM. Some, of course, have suggested that relationship building interrogation techniques are preferable, and even more reliable in the long run than stress methods. They raised the question, though, what about the hard cases? And I can tell by your, by your grand, you acknowledge the somewhat absurd thought that you could move people who have masterminded the death of more than 3,000 Americans by Oprah Winfrey methods.

I did smile, because, frankly, the image that weeks and weeks of rapport building with KSM is somehow going to produce results is counterintuitive. But the reality is we don't know. And I spoke in my investigation to a lot of interrogators, military FBI, who basically said, coercion doesn't work. You get information that they want to give you that they think is going to stop the pain from happening. Aleep Sand has known in top legal circles for his work on torture cases, fallen by such infamous dictators as Chili Spinochet and Liberia's Charles Taylor. He's a counselor to the Queen of England and director of the Center on International Courts and Tribunals in London, where he closely studied the British fight against terrorists of the RRA. And the thinking in the British military and the thinking across the board politically, it's really not a left-right issue. It's a broad consensus in the United Kingdom is that coercion doesn't work. The view is taken in the United Kingdom that it extended the conflict with the RRA,

probably by between 15 and 20 years. Aleep Sand's testify this week just as his new book, Torture Team, is being published. And he's with me now. Welcome. Terrific to be with you. Let me go right to a story that happened after your testimony. It's the story of the suicide bomber in Baghdad, who drove his bombing vehicle into an Iraqi police station. It turns out that he had been held in Guatanamo for over three years. Pentagon records say that he had told people he wanted to kill as many Americans as he possibly can. And a lot of people, you go to the blogs this morning, a lot of people are thinking, why give someone like that the benefit of the doubt? Well, firstly, we give people the benefit of the doubt because that's the nature of our system. We are a country, you know, the Kingdom of the United States, who believe fundamentally in democratic values, we don't assume guilt, we assume innocence. There are people at Guantanamo who pose a threat undoubtedly, but there are also great many more people who don't pose a threat.

And in those circumstances, I think using this as an example to somehow come down on the merits of the Guantanamo system is not a sensible thing to do. I think Guantanamo has been a problem. As Abu Ghraib has been a problem because it has undermined America's claim to moral authority in facing up to the very real challenge of terrorism. Locking them up and throwing away the key is only going to exacerbate the problem. And it's a problem that we faced in Britain, for example, in relation to the IRA back in the 1970s and the 1980s. That's not the way to go. You told the committee this week that the British experience in fighting the terrorists of the IRA actually extended the conflict 15 to 20 years? What's the evidence for that? The story is a simple one. Back in 1971-72, the British moved as the United States has done now to aggressive techniques of interrogation. They used pretty much the same techniques. Hooding, standing, humiliation, degradation, five techniques they were called. What kind of techniques? They were known as the five techniques.

They went off to court action. They were ruled to be illegal in 1978 by the European Court on Human Rights. But there was a bigger problem even beyond their illegality, in my view. And that was this. That what the use of those techniques did was to really enrage parts of the Catholic community who felt that IRA detainees alleged to be terrorists were being abused. And it turned people who were perhaps unhappy with the situation into being deeply and violently unhappy with the situation. And if you speak to British politicians who were involved in that period and the British military, what they'll tell you is that there is a feeling that the use of those types of techniques extended the conflict. Did you learn that people will say anything to start the torture? Well, actually, I think it's self-evident that that is what happens. If you speak to interrogators, they will tell you that aggressive techniques of interrogation don't work. They don't produce meaningful information. And just the other day, I was listening to a very interesting tape of John McCain. And he explained how he, in the end, had signed a confession, owning up to crimes against children and women in North Vietnam

basically because he had reached a point. He thought he wouldn't be broken. He had reached a point where he simply couldn't bear it anymore. And he wanted the pain to stop. And the only thing he could do was to tell them what they wanted to know. And that's what interrogators will tell you. Abuse produces information that is the information, the detainee thinks you want to know, and nothing more than that. It's not reliable. Going back to the hearings, one member of the committee, representative Trent Franks of Arizona, a Republican said, and I quote, the results of a total of three minutes of severe interrogations of three of the worst terrorists were of immeasurable benefit to the American people. A full 25 percent of the human intelligence we've received on Al Qaeda came from just three minutes worth of rarely used interrogation tactics. Well, I remember that very well, and I appreciated very much everything that the representative Franks have to say. But I've described that to my friends in London as the sort of Monty Python moment in the hearing because he alleged that there had been three individuals water-borted.

They had been water-borted for no more than one minute each, and they had spilled the beans. And I was sitting there watching him and thinking, well, that's new information. I've never heard that before. Where on earth does that come from? Counter-intuitively, I can't imagine how a water-boarding of one minute is suddenly going to produce useful information. We don't even know if it is useful, but also imagine the scene. You've got guys there with stopwatches. Oh, yeah, we're going to water-border him for one minute, and then we will stop, and in that one minute everything will come up. I don't know where he got all of that. From I thought he sounded that it was just made up on the spot. We don't have any objective evidence that any of these interrogation techniques have produced any useful information. And KSM, you've referred to, has owned up to virtually everything under the sun that has happened that is bad for the United States in the last five years. And I find that counter-intuitive to common sense. I would say I don't have actual information on KSM.

I do have actual information on detainee 063. I spent time, as I described in the book, with the head of Muhammad Al-Katan's exploitation team. And the bottom line of it was, contrary to what the administration said, they got nothing out of them. There's another witness who appeared this week when you did. David Ripkin, a lawyer, lots of government experience, lots of experience in the law. And he directly challenged you in his testimony. I think that it is a moral cop-out to argue that coercive techniques do not work, because if they don't work, there will be nothing to debate. Coercive techniques do work. There's plenty of evidence to that effect. Look, Bill, I spent 20 years doing courtroom work as a litigating lawyer. I like to see evidence on things. I like arguments to be based on evidence. David Ripkin is unable to provide any evidence. I have homeed in on the interrogation of one man, detainee 063. The administration has publicly declared they got a mass of information out of him, that related to all sorts of extraordinarily important things to protect the Americans. I then spoke to the people who are involved in his actual interrogation and the head of his exploitation team.

That's not what they told me. If the evidence I had been given had been different, then I would reach possibly a different conclusion. Not as to that legality or the utility of torture, but what do we do in the face of evidence that it works? But there isn't evidence that it works. The British experience is that it doesn't work. The Spanish experience is that it doesn't work. The Egyptian experience is that it doesn't work in the sense of producing meaningful information that is going to protect a country sure it produces information. But as John McCain said in his interview in 1997, it produces the wrong information because someone who's subject to that sort of pain and suffering is going to do anything they can to stop it from happening. And they will tell the person who is abusing them what the person wants to hear and nothing more and nothing less. I think you spent a long time, you made a lot of trips and talked a lot of people to do this book. What was driving you? Why did you, you've got enough to do? Why did you want to do this particular book? I did it totally off my own back. I was fascinated by a simple question.

How could lawyers at the upper echelons of the administration trained at Harvard Law School and other distinguished institutions have approved torture? In what circumstances could that happen? I didn't understand how it happened and it combined with a real sense of injustice that the truth of the story had not come out. Because what the administration said, and I was really catalyzed by a press conference I read in June 2004 as the administration struggled to contain the disaster of Abu Ghraib, the administration spun a story, you're a press man, you know how governments work, I know how governments work, and the story was this. The desire for aggressive interrogation came from the bottom up. People on the front line, people at Guantanamo, elsewhere, told us they needed to move to new techniques. Who were we at the top to say no? And in that context we approved certain techniques. That's the official story. That's the official story, that it came from the bottom up, and they were doing nothing more than what normal, prudent, sensible government would do. Now you've offended your sensibility? Well, it didn't offend... I mean, it may have been true. I hope I went into my inquiries with an open mind, but it struck me as counterintuitive, because I know the American military.

I've got a lot of friends in the American military, and they are deeply committed to the rules of the Geneva Convention and other international rules. And don't go about the abandonment of President Lincoln's disposition. So what I decided to do was I took the famous memorandum by Donald Romsfeld, signed in December 2002, who writes on the bottom why standing limited to four hours, I stand for eight hours a day, and I cracked back the entire decision-making process, identified the 10 or 12 people I needed to meet, and one by one cracked them down, went and found them, spoke to them, and I'm truly grateful to them. But once I'd had my first conversation, which I think was with Diane Beaver, who was the lawyer down at Guantanamo, I was then able to get right up to the very top, and one by one I followed from Diane Beaver, the lawyer at Guantanamo, her boss Mike Dunlavy, who was the head of interrogations, through General Hill, who was the head of Southern Command in Miami, up through General Myers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, up to Doug V, the head of policy at the Pentagon, and then right up to the main man in my book, Jim Haynes. Jim Haynes was Mr. Romsfeld's lawyer, and Jim Haynes wrote the very famous, the infamous, iconic, wise standing limited to four hours memo, and he went to Harvard Law School, and I just couldn't understand how someone so well-trained could authorize abusive interrogation like that.

And did he talk to you? He did talk to me, I had two meetings with him. The fact of the meeting was on the record, the contents of those meetings were off the record, but as I say in the book, concluding chapter includes taking to account everything you said to me. I think you agree they're fascinating characters, and you'll see that on some of them I developed a real empathy, actually, in ways that surprised me. So take Diane Beaver, I had written a previous book where I treated her legal advice. She had been the person down at the bottom who'd signed off on aggressive interrogation. I didn't like her legal advice at all, I thought it was really bad advice, and wrong advice, and I was rather uncomplementary perhaps even rude about it in my last book. And then I met her, and she explained to me the circumstances in which she found herself. I don't think it justifies what happened, but she described to me the pressure she felt herself under, the anniversary of 9-11 coming up. This man, Detonio 63, Alcatani, present and court, tremendous pressure coming from the upper echelons of the administration.

She described to me a visit that the administration has never talked about in which the three most important lawyers in the administration, Mr. Gonzalez, who was the president's lawyer, Mr. Addington, who was the vice president's lawyer, and Mr. Haynes, who was Secretary Rumsfeld's lawyer, came down to Guantanamo. At the end of September, talk to them about interrogations and other issues, watch them interrogation, and left with the message, do whatever needs to be done. Put yourself in Diane Beaver's situation. You're getting a signal from the main man at the top of the administration, do whatever needs to be done. That takes the lid off and opens the door. Was there a single architect of the decision that person who said take the gloves off? There was one lawyer in particular, who everyone kept referring to as being, if you like, the brains, I slow to use that word for such an awful series of events. The driving force behind it. That was David Addington. I know Diane Beaver and Mike Dunlavy, who was her bossly and had an interrogation at Guantanamo, talking that when they came down, it was obvious that Addington was the main person.

He was the leader of the team. He was, I think, very anxious around him with his big booming voice, his big beard. Nothing is known about him in detail. He's never previously, I gather, appeared before Congress, and he's now just been subpoenaed. I think he may well have been the driving force, but he wasn't speaking off his own back. I mean, he was speaking for the vice president, and I think that the finger of responsibility in the end will most likely go to the vice president, but Mr. Rumsfeld was deeply involved. And of course, the president has indicated just within the past month that he signed off on everything. You subtitle the book, Rumsfeld's Mimo and the betrayal of American values. Tell me briefly about that Mimo and why it betrayed American values. The Mimo appears to be the very first time that the upper echelons of the military or the administration have abandoned President Lincoln's famous disposition of 1863. The US military doesn't do cruelty.

And that's the basis, isn't it, for the military handbook that soldiers used to try to stay within the rules of the game? Yup, it's called the US Army Field Manual, and it's the Bible for the military, and the military, of course, has fallen into error and have been previous examples of abuse, but never before. There were prison camps in the Civil War that were abominable. Absolutely. No one is saying it hasn't happened before, but apparently what hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty. And the Geneva Convention to Preset aside, as Doug Feith told me precisely in order to clear the slate and allow aggressive interrogation. And Rumsfeld's Mimo was the catalyst for this? Well, the timing was that the Geneva Convention to Preset aside in February 2002 by decision of the president at the instance of Doug Feith and a small group, including some lawyers. And the memo by Donald Rumsfeld then came in December 2002 after they had identified Muhammad Al-Katani. But it was permitted to occupy the space that had been created by clearing away the brushwork of the Geneva Conventions. And by removing Geneva, that memo became possible.

Why does it abandon American values? It abandons American values because this military in this country has a very fine tradition as we've been discussing of not doing cruelty. It's a proud tradition and it's a tradition born on issues of principle but also pragmatism. No country is more exposed internationally than the United States. I've listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there's nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can't the Iranian president do that? Or the British Prime Minister do that? Or the Egyptian president do that? It's open the door in that way to all sorts of abuses and you expose the American military to real dangers, which is why the backlash began with the US military. And you say from there, it slipped into a culture of cruelty. It slipped into a culture of cruelty. It was put very pithily for me by a clinical psychologist, Mike Gellis, who was with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, spending time down at Guantanamo, who described to me how once you open the door to a little bit of cruelty, people will believe that more cruelty is a good thing.

And once the dogs are unleashed, it's impossible to put them back on. And that's the basis for the belief amongst a lot of people in the military that the interrogation techniques basically slipped from Guantanamo to Iraq and to Abu Ghraib. And that's why the administration has to resist the argument and the claim that this came from the top. The long time it was thought that it went up the chain from Bagram in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib and then to Guantanamo, but you're saying it started in Washington and went down. It started with a few bad eggs. The administration has talked about a few bad eggs. I don't think the bad eggs are at the bottom. I think the bad eggs are at the top. And what they did was open a door, which allowed the migration of abuse, of cruelty, and torture to other parts of the world in ways that I think the United States will be struggling to contain for many years to come. You said that the backlash came from the military. I think it's, I tell a really complex story. It's more sort of like a thriller, actually, because you've got different camps who are struggling Guantanamo.

And I think it'll be wrong in any way to give the sands, but there was unanimity to move towards abuse or that there was even strong support towards moving towards abuse. There was a strong body of belief down at Guantanamo amongst the military community, amongst the military lawyers, with the FBI, with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, that this is a bad thing. Abuse doesn't work. Abuse undermines authority. Abuse undermines morale. We are going to stop it. Initially they weren't successful. But once the abuse began, a backlash followed, and the folks down at Guantanamo identified a man in Washington who was the General Council of the Navy, a man by the name of Alberto Morra, who truly is a heroic individual in my view, who intervened very courageously, no personal advantage, directly with Jim Haynes, and said this must stop. If it doesn't stop, I'm going to reduce this into writing, and I'm going to cause a big fuss. And eventually it did stop, but only after 54 days of abusive interrogation of Muhammad al-Katani, and not before the door had been opened, and the dogs had slipped their leash. This legal affairs correspondent of the National Journal, a very respected fellow named Stuart Taylor, says that we should focus on amending the law to prevent future abusive torture, but not hold those responsible for past and interrogations of questionable legality.

What do you think about that? I mean, some people have said that the committee that you appeared before was on a witch hunt to go after these lawyers and the politicians, and some of the critics on the blogs are saying that you're aiding in and abetting that. I think the crucial issue is you've got to ascertain the facts. I was asked by the committee, what should happen? My answer to that question was, let's sort out the facts. Once we've sorted out the facts, then it will be for others to decide what to do. I'm satisfied here, a crime was committed, but the Geneva conventions were plainly violated in relation to this man, and in our system laws, if a man violates the law and commits a crime, he is punishable. So who violated the law? I think it goes to the top, and I think that the lawyers contributed to the violation of the law, and the lawyers themselves face exposure. But just coming back to this bigger point, I'm not saying, I'm not on a witch hunt, I'm not saying that there should be a campaign of investigation and prosecution and sentencing and conviction and so on and so forth. What I'm saying is, let's start by sorting out the facts. Once the facts have been sorted out, let's see exactly what they say, and it will be for others to decide what needs to be done. But until that's done, you can't close on the past and you can't move forward.

David Rifkin says in the hearing, I think it would be madness to prosecute anybody, given the facts involved, the efforts to go after the lawyers, borders to put it mildly on madness. Those lawyers were not in any chain of command. They had no theoretical or practical ability to direct actions of anyone who engaged in abusive conduct. He's just wrong. The lawyers were deeply involved in the decision making process. The lawyers that I've identified from John Yu, a Department of Justice, preparing a legal memorandum, which abandons American and international definitions of torture, and reintroduces a new definition that has never been passed by any legislature that is totally unacceptable. What was he doing there? What's he really giving legal advice? No, he wasn't. He was rubber stamping a policy decision. This is not careful, independent legal advice. What was Jim Haynes doing when he recommended to Donald Rumsfeld, the authorisation for the approval of 15 techniques of interrogation?

He was saying to the Secretary of Defense, I'm your lawyer, I'm telling you this is fine, you can do it. If he hadn't done that, Mr. Rumsfeld would not have signed to the piece of paper that Jim Haynes wrote. Jim Haynes is directly involved in the decision making process and the lawyers are such play an absolutely key role. Now, at the end of the day, they're not the most important people. The most important people are the people who signatures are actually appended. They are the politicians who actually decided the issue. But in this case, without the lawyers, they would never have had a piece of paper to sign. Do you think that people like David Attingham and John Yu and Jim Haynes and the other lawyers you mentioned who advised and were all on the torture team should ultimately be held responsible in court for what they did in government at this period of time? If they were complicit in the commission of a crime, then they should be investigated. And if the facts show there is a sufficient basis for proceeding to a prosecution, then they should be prosecuted.

Lawyers are gatekeepers to legality and constitutionality. If the lawyers become complicit in a common plan to get around the law to allow abuse, then yes, they should be liable. There are people who say, I don't want to hear about this. A lot of Americans say, I don't want to hear about this. It's like being diagnosed with cancer, you don't really want to hear the terrible news. You know, this is something that was done in a particular period of intense fear and uncertainty. We had been attacked 3,000 people killed right here in New York. And I just want the government to take care of it. I don't want to hear about the cruelty, the torture, the enhanced interrogation techniques. Do you understand why they would say that? I do understand that. And here's what I'd say. I would want the government to take care of it in a way that is going to protect me over the long term. And if I understand that using abuse produces pictures of the kind that have appeared at Abu Ghraib and of the kind that have appeared at Guantanamo, and are going to make it more difficult for me to protect the American public, I want to know about that. And if it is indeed the case that those pictures are going to make it more difficult to protect the American public, I want to sort it out that we remove that obstacle to protecting the American public, and we ensure that it doesn't happen again in the future and as necessary.

Make sure that those who are in putting in place policies that allow that to happen face appropriate responsibility. You know, Bill, what has really agitated me the most about this? At the end of the day, I've been reflecting on it this week, in particular, just being before the committee. Some very pertinent questions from both sides of the House, Democrat and Republican. It's not just a crime was committed. It's that there's been a failure to take responsibility. There's been a cover-up from the top in terms of pointing the finger to people who should not take blame for what has happened. But soldiers down the line. Soldiers on the front line who are doing their best in difficult circumstances to protect the United States should not be blamed for what was decided at the top. But there's an even bigger issue at a very personal level. It's not about legality, about criminality. It's about taking individual responsibility. As people like Doug Fife and Jim Haynes had said to me, look, Philippe, September did not come. The anniversary was coming. We were getting information that there were going to be more attacks. We had people that we were told had information that we do something about.

And we therefore felt in those circumstances it was right to use all means appropriate and necessary to get the information. But with the benefit of hindsight we realised we fell into error. We made a mistake. We accept responsibility for that. We will learn from those mistakes. We'll make damn sure it doesn't happen again. I didn't get that at all. There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility. You read these chapters. When you read my account with Doug Fife and others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Fife's book on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it's as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it's about individual responsibility and there's been an abject failure on that account.

Do you think torture is still going on? I don't think torture is still going on at Guantanamo. And I have to say my own view is that there has not been systematic torture at Guantanamo. I think it was isolated to two or three cases. I think the Guantanamo facility violates international law in many other ways and is wrong in many other ways. But I don't think that there was systematic torture at Guantanamo. I think there was probably far more systematic torture in Afghanistan, a background and in Kandahar, but not in the military. And I think the military has now stopped. But it's important not to forget that although the military now following in particular the intervention of the United States Supreme Court in 2006, very important judgment. In the case of Hamdan versus Rumsfeld, which said common article three of the Geneva conventions can be invoked by all detainees at Guantanamo. So in the military side, it has stopped. But there remains the other side, the dark side as Vice President Dick Cheney called it, the CIA. And just in the past few weeks, the president of the United States has vetoed legislation which would allow the CIA, which would prohibit the CIA from using the very techniques of interrogation that are the subject of this book.

As necessary in the future, I think that has disturbed a lot of people. But truth has consequences. And in the hearing the other day, Representative King of Iowa said to you, you're hurting the war, Ontario. You and all the critics, all the journalists, all the people who are trying to stir up this debate and expose what happened in the inner working of the administration. Following and self-guilded as a nation and bringing hearings before this Congress and pumping this into the media constantly, when we've identified that these are narrow, very narrow, exceptional circumstances, and our analogy on it isn't complete, that it extends the outrage. And this panel, in this testimony, and those things that supplemented across this media also extend the outrage and may well be extending this global war against these people whom we won't call, terrorists will call them Islamic jihadists. He's saying too much truth about what really went on can be explosive in our ability to deal with the threat we face.

I think he's a historical and he's revealing a historical. He has no sense of history. He's revealing his lack of understanding in other contexts where similar analogous situations have arisen. I can come back to my own experience in Britain, either the kid growing up in London when the streets of London were being bombed. For a period in the 1970s, the view was, let's hit him hard, let's hit him very hard. And it soon became clear that that is not a technique that worked. The technique ultimately that worked and Prime Minister's over time, John Major, Tony Blair, have put in train a different approach. And the different approach is, you understand what's at the root cause of the conflict. You talk to these people sometimes secretly. You try to reconcile that errors have been made and that is a crucial part of bringing closure to a painful past. It happened in South Africa, it happened in Chile, it's happened in many other countries around the world. And if nothing else, an inquiry such as the House Judiciary Committee is doing, is playing into the establishment of the facts, which is a first prerequisite to moving on. So I directly contradict the views of the representative, it's exactly the opposite, until you begin to come to terms with the past.

And accept if errors were made, that they were made, and who has responsibility for them, not necessarily in a prosecutorial way, but in some appropriate way, then you're able to move on. But without that, you can't move on. I read some comments just this week by noted Arab Scholar, who said that if you walk the streets of Cairo today, stop at the book stalls, stop at the bookstores, you see looking out at you everywhere, photographs of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that this torture, these enhanced interrogation techniques. This cruelty has seized the imagination of the Arab world. And that long after all of us are gone, including the torture team, the next generation of Arabs will be living with those images. What's your own sense of that? Well, that...

I'm very sad to say, it's my own observation. I do travel a lot. I travel in South America, I travel in Asia, I travel in the Arab world, I do a lot of work for governments around the world. And it's sad but true that the image of the United States today is that it's a country that has given us Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Now, that is not the America that I know. I've spent a lot of time here. I married to an American. My kids were born in the United States. I know what the true America is. And for me, this is a distressing story, because it has allowed those who want to undermine the United States, a very easy target for doing it. It's even worse than that, Bill. I mean, I've been in situations, you know, in a globalized world with the internet, the legal advices that have been written by people like John Yu at the Department of Justice, and the memos written by Jim Haynes that have been put in front of the desk of Donald Roosevelt have gone all over the world. They've been studied all over the world. Other governments are able to rely upon them and just say, equally look. This is what the United States does. If the US does it, we can do it. It's undermined the United States's ability to tackle corruption, abuse, human rights violations in other countries in a massive way, and it will take 15 or 20 years to repair the damage. And that's why irrespective of the complexion of whichever next president happens to hold that high office.

And I think irrespective of whether it's Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama or anyone else, there will be a recognition of a need to move on and moving on means recognizing that errors were made. So the next president has to wrestle with this and so do we. I think we're all going to be wrestling with this, and I think we have a responsibility to wrestle with it in a constructive way. Precisely because I think we do face real global challenges and the threat of terror is real. And the importance of putting the spotlight on the past is to make us learn for the future and to make sure it doesn't happen again. Well, in that respect, torture team, your book is a very important beginning because you did do your homework. You went out and talked to all of these people who were on the torture team. Well, that's very kind of you to say it will be for others to judge, but I learnt an important lesson, which is that you can't always deal with materials as they appear in newspapers or in documents.

You need to take the trouble to go and spend many, many hours with people, talk to them, get to know them, understand what motivated them, understand that these are not bad people. These are not people who wanted to do bad things. These were people who found themselves in a very difficult situation under intense pressure from the top. I think once you've spoken to people, you begin to get a clearer picture. And I hope I have accurately conveyed the conversations in a fair and balanced way. There are people I liked, there are people I didn't like, there are people whose views I shared, there are people whose views I didn't share, but I thought it was terribly important to lay out in the book, the range of views that were expressed. And often not even to comment on them, but to let people's views inform the reader and the reader can then form a view as to whether they agree or disagree. But I have put the other side of the argument against my own argument and there will be many, I'm sure who'll disagree with me, and that's fine because that's what our societies are about debating these important issues. I know what I think though, what happened was wrong and it needs to be sorted out.

And it's only the beginning, there will be more hearings in June before the same committee with David Attington saying he will be there and many of the others, John, you and Haynes and others saying they will come voluntarily and testify. Yes, what has happened is that this is part one, as it's described in the Judiciary Committee's guidance note. I was told it's probably the first time that a hearing has been held on a book that hasn't even been published, which I gained some pleasure on. The next hearing is slated in for the 26th of June. I think John U is going to appear at that hearing. He has agreed, as I understand it, to come voluntarily and Mr. Attington, they're hoping will appear on the same day. But they've also issued letters to Mr. Fyth and Mr. Ashcroft and in fact all of the people that I write about and thus far they've all agreed to appear voluntarily. So I think it's the beginning of a lengthy story that will allow the American people to form a view on what happened and form a view then on the vital next question, the consequence question, what should happen next? And I hope you'll come back and talk about these unfolding events.

I would be delighted to come back and I'm delighted that you've taken on what I think is a very important issue in which has, I should say, great amount of attention from around the world. I shouldn't imagine for a moment that the interest in this is limited to within the borders of the United States. As you've already explained, people around the world are looking at this. And I think people around the world have a passionate hope that the United States and not anyone else puts the House in order here and allows the U.S. to sort itself out. The book is Torture Team. Your author is Philippe Sans. Thank you very much for being with me. Thank you very much Bill. We turn out to health care. You don't need me to tell you again that 47 million Americans are uninsured.

And it's not news to you that medical costs are increasing faster than the rate of inflation or that more Americans than ever. Are afraid a single major illness would bankrupt them. It's a little wonder that when the Gallup poll asks people on the eve of this election year to name the most important thing that could be done to cope with health care, 63 percent mentioned universal coverage, more than any other fix. Critics were quick to cry, socialism, socialism. And even before Senator Hillary Clinton unveiled her health care plans, they attacked it too as socialized medicine. It took them a clatchy news service, which some of us consider the finest news organization still on its feet, to reach back into history for some context on this debate. The clatchy's Kevin G. Hall reminded us that Senator Clinton's socialistic plan bears a striking resemblance to changes proposed in 1974 by President Richard Nixon, who was, some will remember, a Republican. Here's what Nixon said in his final state of the Union address.

I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses. Nixon's plans before by the White House crimes known as Watergate, which forces resignation. 34 years later, we're no closer to health care for everyone, despite the number of Americans who need it. But now, some very determined people are taking up the fight for universal health care. They're nurses, who day in and day out, and through the nights, encounter the human consequences of a broken system. Here's our report by producer Peter Maryach and correspondent Rick Carr. Let's consider a hypothetical cardiac patient, male, 67 years old, high stress job, and a history of serious heart problems. And let's say hypothetically that he'll be changing jobs soon.

Intensive care unit, Nurse Jerry Jenkins, says a patient like this might have a tough time getting new health insurance. He's had four major heart attacks. He's had quadruple bypass. He's got an implantable defibrillator in his chest. He has atrial fibrillation. He gets cardioverted when his heart rhythm goes out of whack. He would be uninsurable for having a pre-existing condition. That is, he'd be uninsurable if he were an average American. But this case actually isn't hypothetical. The patient is Richard Bruce Dick Cheney, the vice president, and because he's a government employee, he can't be denied health insurance, no matter how serious his heart condition is. Last year, Cheney was rushed to the hospital with an irregular heartbeat, at least his fifth trip to the hospital since being in office, and the incident made national news. This just in, we're told, Vice President Dick Cheney has been taught to be on Monday. It also caught the attention of a union called the California Nurses Association, or CNA, whose members see a sharp contrast between what they call the Cadillac Health Care,

the vice president gets as a government official, and what's available to most Americans. Dick Cheney can have the choice of doctors. He can go to any hospital. He can have excellent standard of care, and he's alive today because of it. Well, there's a lot of people who aren't. Rosanne DeMoro is executive director of the CNA. Under her leadership, the union launched an ad campaign that's designed to shock. It claims that if Cheney were just a regular American, he'd probably be dead by now. The ad is run in newspapers across the country, and on the internet, and it calls for radical change in the country's health care system, so that everyone can have access to the kind of care that saved the vice president's life. What the nurses are saying is there shouldn't be a double standard. There should be an excellence in care that applies to all people. We as the public pay for Dick Cheney's care. Why is the government not providing the same type of care to all Americans? The vice president isn't the only government employee who gets what the nurses call Cadillac Health Care.

It's all government employees, members of Congress, workers at the Justice Department and Interior and the EPA, a total of more than 2 million people on the federal payroll. Like Vice President Cheney, they get to choose from a wide selection of health plans, and you, the taxpayers, pay about 70% of their monthly premiums. Everyone within a plan, no matter how sick they are, is charged the same rate. There's no waiting period before coverage kicks in, and perhaps most importantly, no one can be denied coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition. Rose Andromoro says, compare that to the approximately 47 million Americans, that's one in six of us who are uninsured, or the 90 million with insurance, who say they've had trouble getting the health care that they need. The California Nurses Association is one of the few union success stories these days. It's been growing, it now represents some 80,000 members in all 50 states, not just California.

Like other unions, it fights for better wages and benefits and working conditions, but its members don't think the union's mission stops there. They believe it's their duty to fight for better health care for all Americans, which means that along the way they've picked fights with some huge corporations and powerful politicians, like they did with their ad about Vice President Cheney. His office slammed the Cheney Care ad with a no-comment comment, saying something this outrageous does not warrant a response. But Rose Andromoro says the ad represents exactly the kind of political advocacy that a nurses union should be doing. Every registered nurse in this country advocates for her patient at the bedside. She's there, she's the last line of defense for the patients. She fights for the patients against hospital corporations, often putting her own job in jeopardy. And you can't fight for your patient without changing the social structure in which that care is delivered. So registered nurses organized by us have become pretty dramatic force in this country to change the health care system.

Andromoro says that CNA members see every day on the job how the current system works, and they've decided that it's badly broken. If you look at health care in America, there is no health care system. There's a health care industry that's major objective is profit making, which means not providing the patient all of the care that they need discharging patients early. Patients without insurance being treated differently than wealthy people, frankly. And that is the health care system in America. Those who can afford it, get to live, and those who can't suffer needlessly. It's a strong indictment, but it's backed up by the numbers. The US has more preventable deaths than any other industrialized nation. And in fact, more than 20,000 Americans die needlessly every year according to a recent report because they don't have health insurance. But the CNA's chainy care campaign isn't just about the uninsured. The union says that even those of us who do have insurance face potentially fatal problems with the system.

That's because insurance companies, driven by profits, are the ones deciding which medical treatments are paid for and which aren't. For example, the CNA took up the cause of 17-year-old Natalie Sarkeesian. She suffered from leukemia and chemotherapy had destroyed her liver. Intensive care unit Nurse Jerry Jenkins, who's also one of four co-presidents of the CNA, says Sarkeesian's doctors thought that she needed a liver transplant. Her doctor's felt she had a 65% chance of survival at six months. And who's better to make that decision, a pediatric transplant specialist, or an insurance company who's not actively involved in the case and knows the nuances of her care? We think it's much better to let the actual healthcare provider who has all that knowledge make the decision. The insurance company's signal said no, that it wouldn't approve paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars that a liver transplant could have cost. So the CNA set up protests to call attention to Natalie Sarkeesian's plight and even marched right into sigma's lobby.

During the protests, the insurer reversed its position and agreed to pay for the liver transplant. But that didn't help Natalie Sarkeesian. She died that night. It was too late. And we think that's just a classic example of what happens. And it happens hundreds of not thousands of times a day all across America with people who think they have insurance. But when the crunch happens, someone denies them what they need. The nurses launched their chainy care campaign in part to uncover more stories like Natalie and Sarkeesian's. The union set up a website that asks Americans to write in with their own healthcare horror stories. It's a war on our soil against the American people what's going on with the insurance industry and the dick chainies and all the politicians who get the healthcare that the public provides. We're saying why are Americans not worthy of the same type of care that you have? When it comes to this kind of high-profile political battle over healthcare policy, the CNA has a pretty good track record.

We take the fight that the nurses had with California's governor. A few years before Arnold Schwarzenegger took office in 2003, the stated past a new law that set strict limits on the number of patients a nurse could take care of at any one time. Schwarzenegger, once he was in office, moved to scale back the nurse to patient ratio. At the time, his approval rating was over 60%. But the CNA decided to take him on anyway. And we just were there. Everywhere he went, we were there. We were like the bad penny. You couldn't get rid of. We were there at every event he went to, every time he showed up in public, every time he went to a fundraiser trying to solicit huge amounts of money from his corporate donors, we were there. When Schwarzenegger addressed a women's conference in Long Beach, local TV news showed members of the CNA marching outside the convention center, while inside some union members unfurled a banner protesting the governor's opposition to nurse to patient ratios. That's when Schwarzenegger lashed out at the nurses.

We know attention to this voices over there, by the way. This is the special interests. If you know what I mean, okay? The special interests just don't like me in Sacramento, because I'm always kicking the butt. That's why they don't like me. He was so cocky and confident, and so above it all, in terms of decorum, that he thought that he could say whatever he wanted. Well, I saw I was outside, and the press, the media came, it was like paparazzi running out of the building. Did you hear what he said? Did you hear what he said? And you knew at that moment it was kind of stunning, actually, that it was a similar turning point in his career in California, perhaps his political ambition. And that just unfurled that, galvanized all of the nurses in California. Within a few months, Schwarzenegger had backed off his bid to rescind the nurse to patient ratios. Meanwhile, his approval rating fell to around 40%. And at that point in time, he said nothing more about registered nurses, and he kept very quiet in California about the California Nurses Association. I think that the nurse's, you know, the shoe is on the other foot, frankly, in terms of who kicked who's butt, and he knew it.

Since then, the CNA has taken the fight to other states, pushing for a similar cap on nurse to patient ratios in half a dozen, most recently in Arizona. It's been organizing across the country, and it hasn't been timid about opposing other unions. In March, for example, when the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, tried to organize more than 8,000 hospital workers in Ohio, the CNA moved in to stop the vote. The Service Employees charge that the CNA's opposition is really union-busting, and even launched a website called ShamanCNA.com. But Demorow says the SEIU is tubeling to compromise with health care conglomerates, and that the CNA would be a better representative for Ohio nurses. The CNA has been critical of the three remaining presidential candidates, too. It's bought TV ads in primary states. The nurses say that none of the remaining candidates are pushing for true reform, because all of them would keep the big insurance companies in the picture.

Instead, the nurses want what they call Medicare for All, a single government-run system that would provide every American with the same coverage that Vice President Cheney has, and get the insurance companies out of the way. I think when you interject into the middle of the delivery of health care, an entity who sold purposes to make a profit, it totally skews the whole intent of what insurance is supposed to be, or what care is supposed to be. The nurses base their argument on a surprising fact. From every dollar that insured Americans spend on health care, insurance companies keep 30 cents, none of which goes to actual health care. Instead, it pays for executive salaries, shareholder dividends, advertising and marketing, and other overhead. And that's before a penny flows to the for-profit hospital conglomerates that look out for their own bottom lines and run most of the country's health care system. When you have 60% of the health care in this country being delivered by for-profit corporate entities, whose major focus is their bottom line, then you would hope there's a nurse there to make sure you're okay and to look out for you and advocate for you when you're at that most vulnerable moment in your life.

Since nurses are an individual community across the country, and since there's such a trusted profession, we think we're structurally situated to actually change this health care system for once and for all. We're not going to stop until that happens. Those California nurses are a combative lot and not just in their fight for universal health care, they're also in that fierce battle with a rival employees union, the SCIU, over organizing new members. The competition has led to some heated competitions and meetings and the courtroom, creating a distraction from the hopes of other labor leaders for United Front and the political campaigns this fall. That's a story for another day, but we posted some information about it on our website at pbs.org.

Next week, we'll look at another battle affecting your health, this one about what's driving the high cost of the daily meds so many of us depend on. With one little pill taken just once a day, people with allergic reactions. The drug industry is driven by marketing and profits, which is fine if you're selling cold cuts or computers or something like that, but it's definitely not all right with medicines. That's the problem with the industry. We hope you'll join us next week. I'm Bill Moyers. Read more about the California Nurses Healthcare Plan. Log on at pbs.org. This episode of Bill Moyers' Journal is available on DVD or VHS for $29.95.

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