tv Documentary RT April 25, 2022 5:00am-5:30am EDT
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o join us in the depths will remain in the shallows. situational forces can overwhelm, can dominate even the best of us. ordinary people, put in a bad evil environment, can become transformed. to become part of that negative environment. and it's any of us, or in fact most of us the office of naval intelligence, it was a pretty consistent cut out front for cia. they funded much of this research. and i don't know if there was a yield that they, they produce a yield for this cruel science. i don't, i that's, it's maybe more, i just don't think they do. it might play
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out spectacularly in the military. so the connections would be much further down the road. it would be particularly in the iraq war and in the setting up of get mo and all of that. and by the time you get to 2001, it's already this cultural artifact. and so it is going to be picked up by by anyone for any purpose. mm. mm. in kind of people, hell, be for economy. are not there because they stole the car. they are not common criminals in their enemy, combatants and terrorists who are be detained for acts of war against our country.
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and that is why different rules have to apply to the continuity is extraordinary. if you look at a sketch of the cubicle end of the student volunteer and mcgill university, and then if you look forward to 2002, when the 1st al qaeda suspects are being confined at camp x, right? x one, panama there, and goggles, gloves and here most that look. good god, just like that 1957 sketch. confer with 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,
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meaning torture, cruel. in human integrating te treatment the 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. and i was the 1st to really learn to go down there in the commission process in a 4 to 6 months period. you see a market deterioration at any respects. well, if you're a year or 2 solitary confinement, you're going to ask the defendant for the 1st time in 2 years to, to, to interact with other humid beaks. beyond his lawyer and his jailers. it's going
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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. mm. it's been 9 years and active duty and then i'm still in the reserves in 2011. the department of defense assigned me to a system, a team represented acknowledging mohammed the, the lead defendant in the 911 case. what i can say is that the u. s. government has acknowledged that for the periods between 20032006, mister mohammed was held at has certain undisclosed
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foreign locations, black site, otherwise known as black sense. it was what a boarded over $183.00 times correct. i can say that there is a memos between the department of justice. i various organs of the us government to include the department defense, the central intelligence agency, as to what types of enhance interrogation techniques would be authorized for certain types of detainees to when they began signing different animal, 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 annuity and also by female fiscal contact.
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and then share of don't race has always played a role in american torture. it's 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. they didn't leave marks. and that was, if you're going to sell a slave, because a slave that had with marks means that they were not going to obey. and so a clean slave was up got a higher price. a cotton industry in the southern delta states of the united states depended completely on torture. over the course of,
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for decades human beings by using their bodies as a technological form. as a no logical 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 ah, in these kinds of cases many people in the system and 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,
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culturally, it's easier than it would be to someone from your own community to do that. so in guantanamo being. secretary defense rumsfeld appointed a commander jeffrey miller, whose job was to extract information. and jeffrey miller made up a c. b or staff did. and i included a rack and are under the with the permission of the commander, their general sanchez event can rent training sessions for the interrogators and the staff at abu ghraib prison. or he transmitted the guantanamo techniques to the abil gradstaff. basically,
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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 began actually talking about it what we did, you know, was exactly the way to do. and if i had to work on it all over, yeah, i would recommend exactly the right. same course of actions that we did exactly right.
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so and yes they were violating. i know it's our regulations in what they were doing, but 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 that i would grab we, 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
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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 stationed in mosul. among them were stress, position, sleep deprivation of inducing hypothermia. just a, any way we can put them in distress using dogs. this is, this is a slow so 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. and, you know,
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the most extreme forms of physical and psychological brutality, with whom is the aggression today, i'm authorizing the additional strong sanctions. today. russia is the country with the most sanctions imposed against it. and number those constantly growing. i figure which of the following was to call soon as we speak. i'm assuming you mostly mind the sheila were banding all in ports of russian oil and gas. new g i g 's
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with the letter from, you know, we're pretty good regarding joe biden, imposing these sanctions on russia. you know, has destroyed the american economy. so there's your boomerang self. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have. it's crazy, even foundation, let it be an arms race is on often very dramatic development. only personally, i'm going to resist. i don't see how that strategy will be successful, very critical. i'm time to sit down and talk with
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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 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 and we could in the or quickly and that would be better for, for iraq, better for, for us my, the people who are in recent days has been a focus, a few who have betrayed our values. and so the reputation of our country
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and with 6 or 7 investigations underway and a military justice system that has values. we know that those involve whoever they are will be brought to justice. 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 was disappointed in myself in our behavior where there was terrible. so i was very angry when you have a great trial happened and i, i got a call from the lawyer for chip, frederick. any 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 experiment in the 19 seventy's and the situations at abu
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ghraib as far as i can tell, are those conditions that are also reproduced in zimbabwe experiments. chip, frederick, he's the man here. 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 feeney office. they got a recall letter of reprimand. in fact, in some cases, they even got promoted at the offices. so it's, 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,
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to engage in any technique that i believe would price level torture, crore and human or degrading treatment. i think they lose a little bit of themselves every time they have to come in and human act. and my power is out to them as well, frankly in i don't think i noticed that until i got back and then you know, tremendous guilt. and i think a lot of us develop 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, it's called like moral moral failure. sorts of assistance is feeling that people come back with after being in war if they feel like they think they've done things
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better outside of their moral compass. ah, we're still evaluating how we're gonna approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. and i don't believe that anybody has bubble on. on the other hand, i also have a belief that we need to look forward as lowe's, as possible, looking backwards. ah, look backward, well, forward is going to be like backward. if you don't do something about what happened in the past, 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
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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 tap, dancing around or avoiding as does it work as torture work doesn't work. people that have information that are part of an underground apparatus, a terrorist organization at revolution or organization accomplished organization, whatever organized form of collective balance, it might be, they won't break down. and the people that you pick up that are innocence. yes. you tell them to pieces, you'll destroy them, you will ruin them. i think that a few of the people that passed passed through my hands as an interrogator did have
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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 these raves, 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 it out of anger and fear. ah right after september 11th attack, september 11th, 2001. a very well known hover law professor islander schwartz came up with the
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checking bond theory and he said, so what happens for example, if a terse, 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 or started every segment. well, that giant clock ticking away. and it kind of gave visual reality 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 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
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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 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 color this. i mean, no, no one trained us on that. that wasn't, that was simply from color. here in the united states, we have this picture of torture as something that is done by the lonely person, the lonely sarah, 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,
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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 as sort of notion behind this real men, torture and, and, and democracy makes us sissies too. in the middle east, we have people shopping the heads off 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, who had a, if you're in your terrors, be would be a free trial. detention in m. c. c. 2 and south for 2 years. they're going anywhere
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. 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 to black, say that the sense of the black sites that people are be taken out and tortured, but they're being tortured in the way that their 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 like the most, it's the most sol negating place i've ever bid. one of the things that we need to consider now and has become quite an issue is how many of these soldiers who used to participate in these kinds of american techniques are now policeman and immigration officers who manage mexicans and hispanics and other sorts of things in
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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 in war comes home move. ready ready ah, if we keep torture clean, then we can feel that the thing that's 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
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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 thank 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 set about france, algeria, that something was lost in the russian branch of torture, of moral authority that made america war later sacrificed for this the shamira of effective interrogation and ah, [000:00:00;00]
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ah ah oh is your media a reflection of reality in the world transformed what will make you feel safe? isolation for community. are you going the right way or are you being led somewhere? direct what is true, what is faith in the world corrupted. you need to descend a join us in the depths or remain in the
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shallows. ah, pohden is the aggressor poon chose this war. today i'm authorizing the additional strong sanctions. i think it shows that i was in the school showing that i speak on the billing if any more streamlined the branding all in ports of russian oil and gas turbine and imposing these sanctions. i brush you as destroyed the american. in fact, mister barish boomerang, by way of suffering the i was really hitting people in the pocketbook, boise was almost there. i see you using your, your router visit or not you. this is going to impose severe cost on the russian
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