tv Documentary RT January 20, 2022 6:30am-7:01am EST
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[000:00:00;00] in kind of people held before animals are not there because they stole the car. they are not common criminals in their enemy combatants and terrorists who were be detained for acts of war against our country. and that is why different rules have to apply and why do the continuity is extraordinary. if you look at a sketch of the cubicle and of the student volunteer at mcgill university, and then if you look far forward to 2002, when the 1st al qaeda suspects are being confined at camp x, right? at guantanamo bay, there and goggles gloves and here monster that look. i god, just like that 1957 sketch
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in after 911. all of us working at p h r. i realized that there would very likely be a huge problem of interrogation. gone wild, meaning torture, cruel in human and degrading teet treatment through use of extreme isolation was one of a range of techniques that were employed by officials interrogators and so forth. literally starting all the way back in 2002 for many, many days. and that is just unbelievably destructive. i was the 1st to really learn
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to go down there in the commission process in a 4 to 6 month period. you see a market deterioration in many respects. well, if you're a year or 2 at solitary confinement, you're going to ask the defendant for the 1st time in 2 years to to, to interact with other human beings beyond his lawyer. and his jailers is going to be the jury. that's going to decide his life. he's going to be put on the stand. and that's where he's going to speak for the 1st time to the world for 2 years. if to be shut off from the world, it's impossible who who
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9 years an active duty and then i'm still in the reserves in 2011. the department of defense assigned me to a system. the team representing analogy mohammed, the, the, the defendant, in our case, what i can say is that u. s. government has acknowledged that for the period between 20032006, mister muhammad was held at, had certain undisclosed foreign locations, black size, otherwise known as license, right? it was what a boarded over $183.00 times. that's correct. i can say that there is a memos between the department of justice. i various organs of the us government from cuba, department to fans, the central intelligence agency, as to what types of enhance interrogation techniques would be authorized for
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certain types of detainees to live. again concerning panama, they moved to having psychologists do interviews with patients, discover individual flaws, individual sources of trauma and security. and then they, they also discovered because they were germany with arabs and muslims. a muslim males are uniquely upset by nudity, and also by female physical contact. and fear of dogs. race has always played a role in american tortures. the american torture techniques are part of old military punishments, punishments that were used on slaves. and in, you might find that strange, but there was one area where slaves were never whipped, but you use clean techniques on them. so they didn't leave marks. and that was,
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if you're going to sell a slave, because a slave that had wit marks, means that they were not going to obey. and so a clean slave was paso got a higher price in the cotton industry in the southern delta states of the united states depended completely on torture. over the course of, for decades. human beings by using their bodies as a technological form is a technological machine. were able to multiply by 8 times the amount of cotton an individual person could pick in a single day. so the use of torture is absolutely tied at the very beginning
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ah, in these kinds of cases many people in the system or the people who are imposing these conditions. believe that ordinary punishment is too good for these people. and a lot of it is about the other dis of them religiously, ethnically, nationally, culturally, it's easier than it would be to someone from your own community to to that. so in guantanamo being secretary defense rumsfeld appointed a commander jeffrey miller,
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whose job was to extract information. and jeffrey miller made up a cd or staff did. and i included a rack and are under the oh, with the permission of the commander their general sanchez. e. then come friend training sessions for the interrogators and the staff at abu ghraib prison, or he transmitted the guantanamo techniques to the abil gradstaff. basically, the restraints were removed and they were told to get results. the thing that became so clear is that what united states was doing was not a secret. it was hidden in plain sight. it wasn't really until the photographs from abu ghraib were released, which were just, you know, the tip of the iceberg of what was actually happening. that people in this country
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began actually talking about it what we didn't know was exactly what to do. and if i had to work on it all over the recommend exactly the right. so in course of actions that we did exactly with verizon them all, not all of them i can differently whether one is $1600.00 of them. we've only seen up in about 20 maybe 30 is 1600 and they are the worst ones are. are the ones we i'm
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seeing on one so yes they were violating. i know it's our regulations and what they were doing, but the that they were operating within a system in which they were condition they were structured in order to violate those laws. when you arrived at the wave where you aware of what had happened, there are almost immediately after we arrived,
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i will drive we were briefed that there was misconduct, but we weren't given details. and the interrogators that i knew who had been there during that time didn't they didn't talk about it. so we, we didn't know i learned everything through the news. we understood the geneva conventions to mean that absolutely. you know, you, you, you couldn't, you, you couldn't harm anybody in your care that your primary responsibility was their well being rather than putting them in distress. but then we were confused, and then of course we got these memos from the justice department and from the pentagon. authorizing the use of much more harsh techniques. we started adopting those techniques. when i was station in mosul. among them were stress position, sleep deprivation. i inducing hypothermia to say any,
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any way we can put them in distress using dogs. this is, this is a foot cell called slippery slope so that they take the gloves off policy allowed american interrogators from going from a certain list of techniques that were let's say aloud. and even those were already torture to doing extreme things, rape and sodomy in, you know, at the most extreme forms of physical and psychological brutality.
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ah, join me every thursday on the alex salmon. sure. i'll be speaking to guess when the world of politics, small business, i'm show business. i'll see you then i think we'll put it up when you get a quote man. he liberties keith is going to push and push it if i had a few, but i just on my buddy sound like a few minutes, but that was 3 to what i still love with it at the but i talked with them in your school. if you believe about what will give you hope, all right, from what you what we did,
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ah, you can just torture somebody on a whim without knowing how to do it. and the reality of course, is that torture like any physical skill right? requires training requires practice. it requires an institutional setting, a built environment, really, you need to have this institutionalized bass, physical space in which you can perform torture. we want, you know, we, we want to be successful. i was against the war, i'm a liberal, i didn't vote for george bush. but i wanted to do my job well, you know, i felt like, you know, if i can be successful and get intelligence from these people, then we could in the or quickly that would be better for, for iraq, better for,
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for us to people who are for the reason days has been a focus, a few who have betrayed our values. and so in the reputation of our country and with 6 or 7 investigations underway and a military justice system that has values. we know that those in law whoever they are, will be brought to justice in . i was angry at our leadership because i knew that they were prosecuting interrogators and guards and leadership wasn't being held accountable. i i, i was disappointed myself and our behavior were there was terrible. so i was, i was, i was very angry when they have a great trial happened. i i, i got a call from the lawyer for chip frederick,
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and he asked me to act as part of the defense team. i said, well, the person that you should really talk to is, is embargo. he ran this, experimenting the 19 seventies and the situations at abu ghraib as far as i can tell, are those conditions that are also reproduced in zimbabwe experiments. chip, frederick, he's the man here. oh, he was the one who had the idea of putting electrodes on the hood. his lawyer said, the problem now is the military want to use him in a show trial in baghdad. in abu ghraib, not only not a single senior officer went to trial. not a single seni office. they got a recall letter of reprimand. in fact, in some cases they even got promoted. that the, the offices. so it's,
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it's the people at the top always take care of the people at the top. mm. for those individuals who were directed by the us government to, to engage in any technique that i believe would price level torture or crore in human or degrading treatment. i think they lose a little bit of themselves every time they have to commit in human act. and dom i power is out to them as well. i frankly in i don't think i noticed that until i got back and then you know, i tremendous guilt and i think a lot of us go up signs that were later diagnosed as p p s. d, but i don't know. i think that they have another name for now and i think it was,
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it's called like moral moral failure. so to assistance is feeling that people come back with after being in war. if they feel like they think they've done things better outside of their moral compass, ah, we're still evaluating how we're gonna approach the whole issue of interrogations, the tensions, and so forth. and i don't believe that anybody has babylon. on the other hand, i also have a belief that we need to look forward as lowe's, as possible looking backwards ah, will look forward backward. well, forward is going to be like backward. if you don't do something about what happened in the past,
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nobody has been held accountable for the torture that happened in the past. and for this, among other people, i fault. president obama, essentially he gave everybody, dick cheney donald rumsfeld. he gave them all a free pass george w bush. they're all going to be rehabilitated. they're all going to be treated as great statesman. one day. i mean, they gave president obama a nobel prize for not being george w bush. the question, of course, the world that dancing around or avoiding as does it work as torture work doesn't, or people that have information that are part of an underground apparatus, a terrorist organization, revolutionary organization accomplished organization, whatever organized form of collective alan chip i, b, they won't break now and the people that you pick up that are innocence.
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yes. you tell them to pieces, you'll destroy them, you'll ruin them. i think that a few of the people that passed passed through my hands as an interrogator did have intelligence. but most the vast majority of the people that i dealt with work just being picked up because they were males of military age and they were just get swept up and he's res, i don't think torture is always being used as a method to gain information or or confessions, it's often just been used are out of out of anger and fear ah
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right after september 11th attack, september 11th, 2001. a very well known harvard law professor islander schwartz came up with the ticking bomb theory. and he said, so what happens, for example, if a terrorist, as a ticking time bomb a small nuclear bomb in time square and the bon sticking. and we only have so much time, we must torture. and then, you know, the show 24 of course started every segment with that giant clock ticking away. and it kind of gave visual reality a visual imprint that resonated with this discussion of ticking time bomb. in addition to the way that it framed our reception of torture on a popular level, just among the civilians in guantanamo itself, they were getting pressure from the department of defense and they have these
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meetings. and in the meetings they screened the 2nd season of $24.00 and use that as a jumping off place to decide what tortures what methods they were going to propose to donald rumsfeld that they would use against the people they were holding in. guantanamo, i think, was very influential on the people that i worked with. i i know that some of the techniques that people wanted to use they had, should they had seen on television programs. for instance, i mentioned to you our leaders wanted us to mock and mock executions and also using electricity. and these were things that they had seen on television this . i mean, no, no one trained us on that. that wasn't, that was simply from colored here in the united states. we have this picture of torture as something that is done by the lonely person, the lonely sarah,
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the man who does it more in sorrow than in anger because he is absolutely forced to because so many lives depend on it, is willing to take the moral stain and the moral pain on him. and in order to save all these people, there was always this anxiety in american politics. which is that democracy kind of makes, makes us weaker and less capable of taking the real things that real men should be able to do. there's a very gendered, masculine este sort of notion behind this real men, torture and and, and democracy makes us sissies to, in the middle east. we have people shopping, the heads of christians. we have things that we have never seen before. i would bring back water boarding and i'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than water boarding. we're
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hey, it's your and your terrors been could be a free trial. detention it fcc 2 sounds for 2 years. they're going anywhere. would you say that the manhattan m c. c? is while he done in plain sight, a black sight, an american song? yes, but i would say it's a black side that the sense of the black sites that people are being taken out and tortured, but they're being tortured in the way that our daily lives are being managed or not managed. they're not living in a day or a life. they are a, a neglected product in a warehouse where there's no maintenance, you know, i mean, even as like the most, the most sol, negating place i've ever bid. one of the things that we need to consider now and has become a quite an issue,
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is how many of these soldiers who used to participate in these kinds of american techniques are now policeman and immigration officers who managed mexicans and hispanics and other sorts of things in integrations, today, there's already beginning to be evidence that these old techniques, including freezing rooms, sleep deprivation, all these things are now being used on, on, on immigrants and children. so this is one of the terrible things about techniques is that they circulate between war and home and whatever you do and war comes home ah. ready ah . ready if we keep torture clean. ready then we can feel that the thing that's
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being done to protect us isn't really so bad. we have become used to the idea that it is a legitimate moral stance that we do anything we need to in order to feel safe to feel secure. i mean a bizarre way, it's as if the government is trying to make a deal with us. you let us do whatever we want over here on the dark side. and in return i promise you will never die. it's like this fake promise of immortality. but of course, what time on the history of the american empire, a certain 50 years from now, historians might have to say, as french historians have said about french algeria, that something was lost in the russian brace of torture. the moral authority that made america world leader sacrificed for this the shamira of effective interrogation. and, ah,
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ah. you know, other shows are happy to report pleasant sounding lies. our politicians are constantly telling us pleasant lies. i'm a show. we dare to delve into unpleasant truth. what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have. it's crazy even foundation, let it be an arms race move is often very dramatic development only personally and getting to resist. i don't see how that strategy will be successful, very difficult, time time to sit down and talk. yes, me ideally, look, we're screen you. will you at least the typical there's only 9,
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but already 8 university students that away m slash. you're welcome. if as a point, let's see, i believe you got the was restored a so the loss of a human come come, no recalls and he will show control such programs. now, bush like nebraska of course with level you're special, but i was the yeah. my i just have a 4th grade and i was thinking what the plan was to get up to him was in your mind it was something to do with soon lose with his teacher was reason this one is a good
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a, a breaking news here. now it rushes cope with vaccines. but nick, they demonstrate strong protection against the recently emerged omicron strain according to studying and also produces more anti bodies than the pfizer job also to come criminal negligence. that's how russia is for a ministry. is describing the work of some western journalists seeking to mislead the public into believing russia wants to invade ukraine, despite continuous denials, from officials in moscow, egg, i'm all sides. according for the escalation, some native member states is sending me styles and other weapons to ukraine. in says the arms though only for defensive purposes and posed no threat to russia plus,
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