good evening everybody thank you for having me i have a very long story to tell but i'm going to tell it in a very short way i was a cia officer for nearly fifteen years and in the immediate aftermath of the september eleventh attacks i found myself as the chief of cia counterterrorism operations in pakistan it was in that capacity that i led a series of raids in march of two thousand and two that resulted in the capture of i was a beta and several dozen other al qaeda fighters we believed at the time that i was a bit it was the number three in al qaeda that turned out to be incorrect he was not the number three in al qaeda but the cia was hungry for a scalp i was a beta was the first one who stumbled onto our radar and so we threw millions of dollars of of resources to look for him we found him in an al qaeda safe house in about pakistan on the night of his capture he was shot three times by a pakistani policeman with an a k forty seven in the thigh the growing in the stomach wounds that would have killed just about anybody else but he was young and strong and in great shape and and he pulled out of it he was in a coma for the first twenty four hours that we had him and my orders were to sit at his bedside and not to leave i was afraid i would fall asleep so i tore up a sheet and i tied him to the bed the next day he woke up he realized immediately that the americans had him and he panicked but as he calmed down i tried to engage him in conversation and we talked about a lot of different things he was very emotional he cried a lot he said he would never know the touch of a woman he would never know the joy of fatherhood he recited poetry to me that he had that he had written he didn't know we had confiscated his diary we had the poetry we compared islam and christianity i found him actually to be quite intelligent quite talkative and i said to him listen i'm going to give you a bit of advice i am the nicest guy that you're going to meet in this experience my colleagues are not as nice as i am i said i have no idea what the plans are for you but if i can give you one bit of advice it's that you have to cooperate and he said you seem like a nice man but you're the enemy and i'll never cooperate the next day the cia sent in a private jet to pick him up on that jet was a contractor named james mitchell it's the second it was the second time i had i had seen james mitchell i vaguely knew that he was a contractor i vaguely knew that he had something to do with counterterrorism but i had no idea what it was specifically that he was interested in and i had no idea why he was on that flight this was supposed to be one of the most highly classified operations that the cia was conducting and here's a contractor on the flight and i remember being puzzled by that  i asked me to hold his hand while we carried him out to to the plane three f b i agents and i carried him out on a gurney maneuvered him onto the plane laid him across the luggage rack in the back tied the luggage rack down and i wish him the best of luck and i shook his hand and i never saw him again in about six weeks later i returned to cia headquarters and it was in the cafeteria and a senior officer in the cia's counterterrorism center approached me and said hey i'm glad i ran into you do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques i had never heard that term before this was may of two thousand and two and i said what's that mean and very excitedly he said we're going to start getting rough with these guys i said what's that supposed to mean and he delineated to me these ten techniques that the cia intended to begin using and i was a beta and i said that sounds like a torture program well it's not torture he said the president approved it let me think about it but they said i have a moral problem with this i went upstairs to the cia's seventh floor the executive floor there was a very senior very senior cia officer there for whom i had worked in the middle east about a decade earlier and i knocked on his door and i said i need some advice i said in the counterterrorism center they just asked me if i wanted to be certified in these and hands to interrogation techniques what do you think it is i said this sounds crazy to me and he said and he later denied that this conversation ever took place but he said to me first of all let's call  this is a torture program they can use whatever euphemism they want down there but this is a turret torture program and secondly torture is a slippery slope and you know how some of these guys are somebody is going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner and when that happens there's going to be a congressional investigation and then there's going to be a justice department investigation and somebody is going to go to prison do you want to go to prison i said no i don't want to go to prison as it turned out i was the only one who went to prison but i said no i don't want to go to prison i went back downstairs and i said i think this is illegal it's immoral it's unethical and i don't want any part of it i'm sad to say that of the fourteen people that they asked i was the only one who said no i'm still disappointed in some of those fourteen i considered them to be friends and i thought that i knew them better than i did within a couple of weeks the cia begin torturing was a beta you've heard about most of the techniques it's started with an open handed smack in the stomach and makes a loud cracking sound it frightens people they did things like grab him by the lapels and they were supposed to put a towel around his neck and slam him up against a plywood wall because plywood has a little bit of give and the towel was supposed to protect is his neck and the back of his skull but they forgot the towel and the wall was actually concrete it got much worse very quickly you've all heard of waterboarding i won't waste our time on waterboarding but there were techniques that i thought were worse than waterboarding far worse in some cases one was sleep deprivation former secretary of defense don rumsfeld famously said that he didn't believe see sleep deprivation was torture because he would work twenty four sometimes thirty six hours and he had to stand up desk in his office and if he could do it then these al qaeda terrorists could do it and that's not torture but we're not talking about twenty four hours or thirty six hours we know from the american psychological association in the american psychiatric association that people begin to lose their minds around day seven without sleep they begin to die day nine but the cia was authorized to keep people awake for twelve days twelve days that's where your change to an eyeball to the ceiling so that you can't get comfortable you can't sit you can't lay you have to stand these industrial strength lights are on you twenty four hours a day and hard rock is blasted into your cell it's impossible to sleep of course you're going to lose your mind there are prisoners at guantanamo now who are unable to participate in their own defenses because they've lost their minds to sleep deprivation one that was in my view even worse was called the cold cell the prisoner was changed into that to that i built in the ceiling again stripped naked the cell was chilled to fifty degrees fahrenheit and every hour a cia officer would enter the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on him we killed people using that technique but no one was ever brought to justice i ask you what information is gathered when you kill someone i mentioned earlier to rob here that i actually can understand the position of some cia officers if they're told don't worry about this the justice department said it was legal and the president signed off on it if they're true believers and they think that what they're doing is legal ok i understand not prosecuting them but what about cia officers who killed people in custody there was no presidential order or justice department memo that said you can murder somebody well you're questioning him the problem is one that's very very basic it's that there is literally no ethics training at the cia now a cia psychiatry just once told me i mentioned this earlier that the cia actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths sociopaths have no conscience and with no conscience you can easily pass a polygraph exam people who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience but they're comfortable working in moral and legal gray areas the problem is if you have no conscience you're going to pass head polygraph and you're going to slip through the cracks well psychopaths also have no conscience and can slip through the cracks and any graduate level business school will tell you that people who rise up to the top of large organizations tend to be psychopaths as well if this psychopath has a top secret sensitive compartmented information security clearance and finds himself as the director of the cia's counterterrorism center you can put two and two together i'd like to ask a question actually just to sort of give you a real life example of how things work at the cia and i honestly would like to see a show of hands so let's say you are all cia case officers and you have recruited a member of a terrorist group a bona fide terrorist group al qaeda isis it can be whatever you want to be and you're going to meet this person in a hotel let's say it's in cairo or amman or someplace and this guy has given you gold since you recruited him and his information you've been able to use to actually disrupt terrorist attacks against american citizens so you meet with him one night in this hotel and he says to you listen i've given you everything that you've asked me for everything i've told you is true now you're going to do something for me and i'm not going to give you any more information until you go out there and you get me a prostitute how many of you would get in the prostitute yeah you would it's your job i mean your job is to deal with people like this so sure you get in the prostitute what if he asks you for a child prostitute absolutely not under any circumstances but the problem is there are no rules right there is no training to tell you what to do in a situation like this there's nobody at any level that's going to say listen that this is just wrong this is morally wrong because your job is to get the information and if your job as a case officer is to break the laws of the country that you're assigned to but you're going to break this law not that law so when you enter into the cia you have to have your own set of moral values you have to have your own personal ethical structure if you don't what's to stop you from becoming a monster and that's what happened after nine eleven now i'm supposed to talk about what dissenters do internally in a situation like this i went to prison because i blew the whistle on the cia's torture program i had no one to tell but the press i couldn't go through the chain of command because my chain of command created the torture program i couldn't go to the general counsel because the general counsel was complicit in the creation of the torture program i couldn't go to the congressional oversight committees because they had secretly authorized the torture program so you have a choice you can either keep your mouth shut which ninety nine point nine percent of people do or you can go to the press and my wife and i my wife was a senior cia officer who was fired from the c the day of my arrest only because she was married to me we had a conversation and i said what do i do and she said you have to do what you think is right and so i called brian ross at a b c news and i told him everything so the boom was lowered i went to prison for two years but you know what it was worth it one of the things that is a deep regret of mine is the senate torture report the senate report was published at least the executive the heavily redacted executive summary of the senate torture report was published about six weeks before i came home from prison and i happened to call my wife that day and  i said how are you doing and she said i am doing great it's been a great day and i said yeah why and she said because the senate torture report was released today and it proved that everything you said was true i had no idea the senate torture report had been released but i finally got a copy of it in prison still and it was clear that there were people inside the cia who were involved in this program some of them in the secret site who were objecting internally but the regret that i mentioned a minute ago was that absolutely none of them said anything none of them in the end it was worth it the price was high not just because i lost my freedom but the government took my pension on top of it after twenty years of government service but i can sleep at night i'm going to close with one short anecdote jose rodriguez is one of the true bad guys in this whole story he was not just the director of the cia's counterterrorism center he went on to become the deputy director of the of the cia for operations and was really the godfather of this program from the very beginning three days before i went to prison he tweeted at me and he said don't drop the soap asshole can you imagine  i gave myself an hour to calm down because my normal reaction you don't even want to know my normal reaction so i called him down and i tweeted back and i said jose i'm on the right side of history and you are not and i left it at that and you know as time passes i think the country has come to the realization that that we are all on the right side of history here we're the ones who are right and  wrong and we have the wherewithal to keep talking about this i mentioned earlier tonight that the reason why so many former cia senior officers directors and deputy directors continue this montra that torture worked which is a red herring anyway whether it works or not is irrelevant whether it's right or wrong is the relevant issue but they're montra is that torture worked and it's because that is their legacy when they die and their obituaries are written those obituaries are going to say that they were instrumental in the creation and implementation of a torture program in violation of u s and international law the torture program and so they have committed themselves to repeating this lie over and over and over again with the hope that if they keep repeating it enough americans will believe it our job is to make sure that americans don't believe it because we're right and they're wrong thank you very much thank you well it's an honor to be here i'm very grateful for the organizers and it's also an honor to follow john kiriakou that was a great talk you know one of the things i would just start off with and the fact that we're in this room there's a number of organisations here that are devoted they were established to fight torture the fact that there is an anti torture community in america is both wonderful and terrible you know it's a terrible thing that we are here and the only but i would say was i was doing torture back before it was cool again who was doing torture in the ninety's so in the sense that we have to be here it's good that so many people have come together to really address this thing i want to start you know because so much of our thinking about torture is very much centered on the post nine eleven era and the debates that have gone on but i just want to just as a starting point just really talk of for a moment about what is the importance of torture in a much broader much deeper historical  the relationship between torture and the law you know torture was you know in much of western you know europe was legal and necessary in the law it was only at a particular moment kind of one of those enlightenment moments when torture the law the law of torture was changed in order to prevent what had previously been deemed legal and necessary and three elements of that pro the cleansing of the law of the right to torture are absolutely elemental to three things that are crucial to public you know modern civilizations one is simply the rule of law itself you know the rule of law as we understand it is literally built the cornerstone of the rule of law is the cleansing of the law of the right to perpetrate violence against people in custody the second important element of this history of torture is that once it was written out of the law by limiting the what states or governments can do to people when they're at their most vulnerable imposing legal limits on states was a major phenomenon in modern legal liberalism and the third element is by preventing torture by by saying that it's not ok to purposely harm people in custody it was literally one of the first steps to turn people into humans to turn people into humans who have inviolable rights and i've always you know sort of said back when i was doing torture before all the rest of you people were doing torture was or thinking about it was that it's really is the most important and the most universal human right that we have all human rights are important but what is so significant about the right not to be tortured is that it is an absolute right it applies to all people everywhere under all circumstances you don't have to be a good person to have the right not to be tortured just have to be a person and so that significance of the right not to be tortured in its relationship to the rule of law its relationship to the limits on the powers of the state is absolutely essential and so violating that right doesn't just  victims you know it literally harms the law it harms civilization it harms the principles of humanity i mean it degrades many of the things that we thought we might be you know sort of especially in this country the champions of and i would also just mention the torture in its context in the law if we now fast forward to the twentieth century and the twenty first century torture is apparent nurse in the law are genocide war crimes and crimes against humanity so when people in this lee you know excuse or justify or embrace or applaud torture its hooves us to remember that they could be literally behooved being genocide war crimes and crimes against humanity because all four of those specific categories are the were called gross violations under international law and they are all absolutely categorically prohibited by the law and so just you know the prohibition of torture is and it's criminality or customary international law so if every human being everywhere on earth has a right not to be tortured legally that means there is absolutely no human being on earth has a right to torture and anyone who is engaged in or abetted torture is and should be made vulnerable to the law the law should be you know we should be on the side of the law that wants to prosecute people and you know been that's an essential element so i just want to note for a moment the you know the thinking about what the law does in this country who are thinking about torture as a crime sometimes i like to cite the work of the late robert cover who was a law professor and philosopher a yale and he was he was the guy who really gave created in a sense in the  eighty s and ninety's and appreciation for the violence of law and he you know he's been credited for ushering in and laying the ground for what's been termed like a jurisprudence of violence and one of his famous quotes was legal interpretation takes place on the field of pain and death he was talking about the violence of the law law enforcement i mean john kiriakou has experienced the violence of the law but when i when we're thinking about these kinds of gross human rights violations i am a strong enthusiastic for the violence of the law when it comes to the prosecution of people who are accused of gross violations of the law of the human rights and international law and in that sense you know as  sometimes standouts the narrative of many of my progressive friends intellectuals and others who are you know devoted to politically politically committed to progressive causes and protecting rights but many progressive fundamentally uncomfortable with violence and even legal violence and they want to see themselves in their cause as rejoinders to violence and that's a good thing but i believe that robert covered was right the law is violent even if that violence and the sceptically termed legitimate force and so i see a progressive cause maybe it's not everybody's cup of tea but everybody you know it is there's a progressive cause in developing a what i call a perpetrator centered perspective like looking for perpetrators and looking to do legal violence to them so not a sort of violence on i mean i'm you know big yes for that kind of thinking in terms of when it comes to prosecuting agents of the state and other officials who engage in torture war crimes crimes against humanity etc now there are a number of ways in which account accountability can be pursued and as the a c l u representative who very eloquently talked about the many doors that have been closed on accountability in this country until the precedential civil case of just sitting michel but if we think more broadly i mean torture is an international crime and among the ways in which people who can be there's no there's no statute of limitations for the crime of torture and so if you think about how do you get these guys you know some of them are still young and some of them are still out there some of them are still teaching law at berkeley you know there are  ways of thinking about this you know so one of the you know i mean obviously the violations of the geneva conventions you know torture is a violation of the geneva conventions therefore it's a war crime now the law itself what happened in the united states after nine eleven was that that with the advisement of right wing lawyers cooperating with political officials who felt wanted to torture they wanted to torture they felt they'd be deluded themselves into thinking th torture was a necessary and legitimate strategy they offered up legal reasonings including for example president bush on february seventh two thousand to one is heavily advised by these lawyers and by dick cheney to declare the geneva conventions to the war on terror and this primary purpose of that declaration was to shield officials from the past but to huge for prosecutions and as we know what happened you know fast forward to  obama never pursued accountability on the grounds that the law in this country had been so tainted by these ridiculous contrary to rationality interpretations but nevertheless they were official interpretations and it makes it very difficult to prosecute people in this country particularly government officials but there is you know one thing we could say is that the universe the doctrine of universal jurisdiction that remains a relevant criminal international law doctrine and it's the one with the in the universal jurisdiction means is that some crimes are so extreme that there perpetrators are enemies of all mankind that's what it and so that in the modern in the contemporary era torturers were criminals genesee dare's and those responsible for crimes against humanity are enemies of all mankind because those crimes are regarded as menacing humanity itself and what that means is that if a person is not prosecuted in his or her own jurisdiction he or she can be prosecuted anywhere in the world and so the cases that have been pursued although so far unsuccessfully for the most part in in european courts but because there is no there is no statute of limitations it's still possible to get these people you know and i mean i would say that one of the things we can learn from the example of latin america where you know during the dirty wars you know horrific crimes were perpetrated and then there was for the most part impunity immunity and impunity for about twenty years to things that mattered then and now was that the fact that there were i mean really human rights activism began as we now think of it in latin america in south africa in the occupied palestinian territories in the places where governments were perpetrating some of the worst violence and those human rights activists who took you know took positions in the seventy's and one nine hundred seventy s against human rights violations and made the use of international law they were the ones who were the first people who brought international law down to the streets and out into the sort of public domain didn't really have much of an effect in latin america but time passes and as we know you know over time it was the fact that human rights activists had taken note and documented and protested back in the seventy's and eight and the passage of time and the possibility of then in the ninety's in two thousand is going after those aging military dictators and torturers from latin america so even if people are feeling depressed about what has happened or the possibilities of justice now you know just remember that that is the work that people are doing now that organizations this will be important in the future i think so i would just sort of conclude there's a couple of things about the issue of domestic  accountability i mean not prosecuting torturers makes a mockery three of the law itself and that's something that you know as we have our part is in debates and as seventy two percent of republicans when polled are now support torture and whatever the kinds of debates they've become so void of both the deeper significance historically and legally and they're really just a partisan issue i mean it's so it's really sort of minimize these issues these points but it's important for you know people like us and people who we come in contact with to really keep on pressing the point of accountability and as john kiriakou had mentioned them in the senate select committee on intelligence which is inaccessible to us you know but for the heavily redacted executive summary it contains our nation's history you know it contains our nation's history the fact that some people in congress would have wanted to destroy every copy is disgusting you're destroying our history it's a disgusting chapter of our history but it's our history but then  a saved our history elby it in the most namby pamby way possible he put it preserved one copy of this document of our grotesque history of torture in his presidential archives but he said nobody can access it for the longest amount of time you know available by law but the point is that we have to keep on understand even from the information that we have what this country did and that accountability is important and you know something to continue being activists about i mean the little we know i mean we know a lot from the executive summary but one of the things we know you know is that aside from just torture i mean torture is almost as i suggested it's become so commonplace in american you know vernacular but it was also involved human experimentation so it's important to invoke that term by the cia into cage in human experimentation if that gives brings to mind nazis that's exactly the point by the shielding you know cia officials from the the the rules and norms of law that were established because of the nazis are back you know in a place where this is something our history resembles a nazi history you know and it disregards the safety mechanisms that were instituted after the holocaust about not being able to experiment on human beings and so you know information you know becomes absolutely crucial i want to you know sort of commend you know in terms of bringing to the public the attention of these issues obviously john  obviously chelsea manning and other people who have helped the public see what the government does not want us to see which is you know information about crimes this is information about crimes and trial take place i was bummed i had a ticket for spoken and everything i would just mention that that was a precedent and now there's a second case that is at least going to be moving forward hasn't been dismissed it c l should mari versus catchy case this case has be litigated by the center for constitutional rights for nine years it's basically you know in america you can't have criminal cases what's the government on your side so it's a civil case involving survivors from abu ghraib prison suing the contractors again it's also contractors not officials but the contractors from the firm see a c c i so this is another case that perhaps it's just to reiterate it remains important for us to care for us to listen to people who have information to tell us and you know have some faith that the changing political environment will come at some point and so i would just say the history of this era that we're living in it's defined both by torture and by transnational efforts to torture efforts to stop and punishment and so even failed efforts to pursue accountability and now they leave a noble record of efforts to enforce the law and validate the norms and rules that were so flagrantly violated and these initiatives i believe will be important in the future perhaps even more than in the present because they stand as a record of resistance to dehumanization and as any good student of  lord knows law and that action knows the impact of legal initiatives can never be judged by the immediate outcome of cases so thank you all for your work so thanks everybody for being here we are national coalition that formed about eleven years ago to bring the moral voice more explicitly into the work against torture and not th moral voice isn't there with all the great organizations like a c l u human rights watch etc many of the sponsors that are here at this event not that it isn't there but this brings the religious community into the fight in a way that wasn't happening before we were formed and so that's where the national religious campaign against torture came on the scene and we have about three hundred twenty organizations across the country  many local congregations many orders of sisters and catholic brothers very interface synagogues local synagogues local associations and we have the washington state religious campaign against torture and i want to give them a huge applause for bringing this to the forefront at an incredibly critical time when this trial was hit and hit in this state so you i mean just one of many and i'm i'm here to talk about the role of the faith community in the grassroots organizing and organizing of the resistance that's happening across the country kind of over this time but also i want to say a little bit about what we're doing in washington d c right now in the trump administration to put up the resistance of the faith community a c l u all of us working together on that so if you're interested in that i hope you are not the only to put up with me for about another thirteen minutes so but you know i'm going to expand the definition a little bit because we also work on the torture of solitary confinement in u s prisons which affects about eighty to one hundred thousand people at any given moment and the same thing that happens to the minds of folks that are in situations of torture that john described is happening every day in our state federal prisons and jails and i'm also going to talk about the bigotry against muslims which is part of what makes we believe in this at least the post nine eleven era makes the possibility for how many of your colleagues to say sign me because there is bigotry against the muslim world in the muslim community and muslim individuals so those are the three key areas that we work on and they're very related but you know just like the washington state religious campaign just jumped into the middle of making sure that everybody in washington state and then the new york times was making sure everybody across the country knew how important this trial was is spokane as a kind of a hearing on showing what really happens in torture wee it's happening all over and over around the country three years ago when a state of alabama had a anti foreign law bill which was a ballot amendment on the anti shari'a basically it was an anti muslim ballot amendment one of our campaign coalitions there brought the christian coalition in to take it on as a state issue a very conservative organization as you know took that issue on that ballot initiative on and said no this is wrong we can't continue to target the muslim community in this way when the prisoners when thirty thousand prisoners started by prisoners in pelican bay and other sought harry confinement union units in the state of california went on a hunger strike thirty thousand prisoners coordinated a hunger strike on the conditions of torture that are happening in solitary confinement in the state of california american friends service committee a lot of the faith groups a lot of us we all jumped in and of course the center for constitutional rights had a classic an amazing when raising the human rights issues and helping to close down a significant part of the pelican bay like one of the world one of the worst torture chambers we have in this country is solitary confinement so the folks have been there when mike home district he was a former member of congress the nuns took television cameras in and we delivered three thousand names of people in kansas who said torture is immoral there's no place for torture in this country event so over and over and over again every year on january eleventh this will be the sixteenth year now to close guantanamo it's an international solidarity action to call for the closure  kuantan of all we always have a huge group in front of the white house and i'm hoping that you'll have one here this year because the faith community and the organizers and god bless everybody who is here we are standing up against torture and making business visible as an issue that is a moral issue and one that has no place in the society so i mean i could i could go on and on even even on when richard burr the head of the senate intelligence committee when he first came in when the when the when the republicans gain control of all the committees we delivered a petition of four or five thousand names to him saying we don't want you to bury that torture report because that's what he was threatening to do just take it and get rid of any race it so grassroots activism whether it's in north carolina seattle which is all across the country we're standing up and doing something about this and i don't know about you but that gives me a tremendous amount of hope and i guess i will say one more thing about the moral voice against torture because it's important in our coalitions we play as a faith community a very important role because we don't care for the arguments about whether it works or whether it doesn't work that makes no difference to us this really is one of those moral absolutes that the entire faith community agrees on that torture is immoral in any situation don't catch me up in the debate about whether it works or not don't catch me up in the debate that our president tries to put out there about what you should do to punish people who do bad things forget about trying to get intelligence from them that there's no place for this in our society torture is absolutely wrong and there's no place for it in any society so that's where we come across on the on the moral issues and it's very important that there's groups in the mix that can say that because not every group can say  that we work with in coalition so that's where we stand and so here we have a president who was quoted in  as he campaigned in saying that even if torture doesn't work they deserve it anyway for what they're doing so now we're in washington d c and we're working against that  kind of a backdrop in january twenty seventh when the administration either floated a trial balloon or a leak or something a plan which really specifically call would have called  for reopening the cia black sites prisons again and questioning kind of what we had accomplished by getting the whole mccain finds stein bill passed which codified obama's executive order which which kept the cia out of the torture business it was going to look at that it was kind of leaked out there and there was a huge response that came back it wasn't as big as i would have liked to but importantly mccain wasn't just causing trouble now with the health care crisis he started causing trouble right there he said he didn't quite say over my you know whatever i don't know exactly how he said it but it was basically like as long as i'm standing here there's no way we're going to go back and undo the legislation that codified as this torture so that that started to happen you know the pushback we've pushed back the national religious campaign against torture in a lot of groups pushed back on all of the trump cabinet nomination over the course of two days the republican senators were getting phone calls saying don't let them go away from torture ask them about torture and let them know that torture is wrong and so each one of them actually was asked about torture and each one of them did have to say yes i realize that it is the law of the land after mccain feinstein that that we can't do torture and i even heard mike pompei o the now head of the cia who's really pretty big fan of torture come out and say that if trump told him to go torture somebody no he would he would have you know he couldn't do that because it's not legal so we've made some good progress but we're really kind of hanging on to the edge of the cliff with our fingers too there's a there's another case we're working on now steven bradbury which was a lawyer i mean these folks would tell you all kinds of things about steven bradbury but he was basically one of the lawyers who wrote the torture memo wrote the torture memos that basically helped permit the kind of torture that john was talking about he is now up for a general counsel position him reminding the u s senate this is somebody who authored torture memos who let torture happened and he shouldn't get any position in government so the idea it's a weird form of accountability i wish we really could do some legal accountability  believe like lisa said that day will come but while we're out there we're continuing to remind people of how wrong what these individuals did he's here he's going for department of transportation that i don't think they try to torture people i mean the knows maybe they'll start but i don't think they will but is following him his records following and we're not going to let people get away with what they do if they do if there is no legal accountability there's going to be community accountability and so that's those those are the kind of things that i think we're really doing i would say our end game with trop and ministration there's two ways that this can go one level what we're doing right now all this organizing and i could name a lot more and a lot of different places  states all this organizing at one level is to keep us together raising the issues in case the unthinkable could happen that could be another war another major nine eleven style terrorist attack here in our country whatever it might be that might flare this back up we're keeping ourselves ready for that point and what i hope is going to happen is that if we can get through this trumpet ministration without a significant effort successful effort on their part at least as far as what we know happens you don't always know what everything that happens when you come to groups like the cia but if there's no kind of public backtracking on torture and trump is the president if we can hold the line for three years we really do believe that we have kind of made it through a period where no one will be able to again make a credible case that the united states should return to a policy of torturing people so those are kind of like the two scenarios and realities that we're that we're trying to hang on to in our work and much of our work is is aimed at the united states senate and for example in the bradbury case senator schumer and the democrats kept bradbury i mean you would think they would say oh come on you know look forget about it we've got more important things to think about they kept bradbury from getting put in basically a bunch of nominations that that had just been held up that was supposed to happen right before they went on break their summer break it didn't happen this is commerce committee they're talking about torture in the commerce committee they stopped that and bradbury still doesn't have his position so there's we're also that's my point of working with the senate we're also trying to really continue to support and bring this voice to the senators because they do have an important role in whether whether we have this attack or in holding this all up but just let me again say thank you to those of you who are in this room and really remember like when this trial came out here the reason we as a national organization of our national network want make as much noise as we could about it was not because we are a national group that works on torture but because if people ever think that the reason we're not torturing folks is because there's this group of policy wonks in washington d c who don't want to torture people if anybody ever starts thinking that that's it we've lost we'll never be able to get what we want so this grassroots work that you all are doing here continue i hope you have a great event on january eleventh standing up to try to get guantanamo closed that's another big piece of what we need to be addressing and i just want to thank everybody who has come here you're not of this not of what i'm talking about would be possible without you so thank you so maria executions trials last fifteen men whose thousands being killed on a weekly basis and this man is still in power and no previous commander in i would just say thank you for mentioning that syria case and it is our if it wasn't for people have been reading about it include photo evidence of thousands of people literally tortured to death in the pr of the syrian government so i want to thank you also there your i want to thank you also for mentioning greece i am a greek american i'm actually a greek citizen as well and i served in greece with the cia for two years the military dictatorship in greece and the torture that came out of that dictatorship has been so traumatic to greek society that here we are forty four years later and it's as though it happened yesterday to the greek psyche people can't get over it because it was such of violent period in their history so this is something that affects american policy you know we have this short term view that we're going to torture or we're going to support torture and then everything's going to be fine later well it's not fine later these these feelings these feelings of anger and aband disappointment in the united states last for generations we're supposed to be the shining beacon of human rights and civil rights and civil liberties and it's just simply not true i want to add one more thing to in  six we executed japanese soldiers who waterboard american prisoners of war that was an executable it was a death penalty offense to commit waterboarding in one hundred sixty eight in january seventeenth one thousand nine hundred the washington post ran a front page photograph of an american soldier waterboarding a north vietnamese prisoner the day that that photo was published the secretary of defense robert mcnamara ordered an investigation that soldier was arrested he was charged with torture tried and sentenced to twenty years in prison well the law never changed we changed right so i'm asking rhetorical why was it not wrong until two thousand and fifteen shame on us john i would like to ask if it was if it was that torture was actually wrong and sixty eight  seems like mcnamara was part of what we call plausible deniability because there was a whole program as the speaker here mentioned about vietnam was called the phoenix program that involved mass assassinations torture and that that program had emerged out of an earlier program that the cia developed in the mid one nine hundred fifty s later that program was moved to latin america was called project x cia manuals were later found that were given to military and security officials all across latin america we created something called the school of the americas the point is that especially since the cold war but even reaching back to the philippines torture has been an instrument of counterinsurgency warfare and we can trace it all the way through so during the one nine hundred ninety s there was a lot of pushback on that but one nine eleven happened i would point the finger also at congress you know we have these oversight committees the senate select committee on intelligence and the house permanent select committee on intelligence that are supposed to oversee and regularly these these programs i can tell you that cia culture is such that the cia will push and push and push just to see what he can get away with that's the nature of the organization the only thing that stops the cia or that ought to stop the cia is congressional oversight but there hasn't been a real congressional oversight in this country in decades we were talking earlier that we really haven't seen real oversight since the church committee in the mid one nine hundred seventy s and in the house the old despite committee well frank church noticed poker dead and no leader has really stepped up to stand up to the cia in all the intervening years we're talking about what over forty years ago forty two years so maybe i'm just you know talking to the wind but we need to write our elected officials and demand research i became public and even enter became public i have never been a fan of dianne feinstein because she has been nothing more than a cheerleader for the cia from the minute she started serving on that committee nothing more than a cheerleader it was only when she was embarrassed by john brennan and by the hacking the cia hacking into the senate's computers that she even went public in the first place she was also under a great deal of pressure from other members of the of the senate select committee on intelligence to just make this thing go away very quickly john brennan in the cia committed a crime against the senate they committed a crime against the american people by hacking into that computer system and and you know as well as i do that that story just kind of went to way nobody ever