Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. So I went to Guantanamo twice in 2015 while I was writing my history of concentration camps. I wanted to see how this mass detention of suspects without trial that had been going on for over a decade at that point was like or unlike the other places I was visiting and writing about. One of the things your book spells out is different governments, even democratic ones, have used camps as tools of detention in various contexts throughout history. Tell me about that. So when people think of concentration camps, they tend to think of Auschwitz and the death camps, because looking back from today, it looms so much larger than everything else that's happened in history, as it should. We should remember it first. But I really wanted to look into how we got to that point. And I interviewed a number of people who had official roles there at various points in Gitmo's history. The chief prosecutor for the 911 case, the defendant's attorneys, and those who had been interrogators or guards. A new UN investigation finds conditions inside the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are cruel, inhuman, and degrading. More than 20 years after the US started sending detainees in the so called War on Terror to what's called camp justice, roughly 780 detainees have been held at the detention center since it opened in early 2002. And one person I talked to was Mark Fallon, who was the director of the Criminal Investigative Task Force at the Guantanamo detention camp for two and a half years. He's a career and CIS agent who said something back then that stuck with me. And as the chief of counterintelligence for Europe, Africa and the Middle east at the time, he'd been part of the early interrogation program at Gitmo. And he protested the US Turn to torture in the interrogations they were doing there at the beginning. And he later condemned it in public as well, writing a book, Unjustifiable Means, about it. And it was not only the home of the Guantanamo prison, but a CIA black site, part of this gulag archipelago of dark prisons and torture chambers. Fallon told me after 911 and the turn toward black sites and torture around the world, that he thought the US had become a rogue state. We lost our way, and decisions were based on fear, ignorance, and arrogance. And because we had brought these secret illegal detention sites into being around the world, America had not only become a rogue state, but we had pulled other states into that orbit. And he thought that the US would remain a rogue state and be in danger of doing even worse things. Honestly, until there was some kind of accountability for that torture program. The continued operation of Guantanamo, where 39 prisoners remain, some of them in indefinite detention without trial, remains a symbol of U.S. torture, injustice and oppression. Hearing the U.S. referred to as a robe state by a career law enforcement agent really made an impression on me. And when Trump came to power, I thought about the ways that Trump is capitalizing on abuses that were authorized by prior presidents. And I was also thinking of him wishing for generals who are more loyal to him than to the state. Hitler's generals, as he called them. According to the magazine, Trump, at one point or another said, and I quote, I need the kind of generals that Hitler had, people who were totally loyal to him that follow orders. Trump seems to want to take things even further than the human rights violations that were instigated after 9 11. He aspires to be a rogue president in a rogue state, ready to smash things at home and around the world. I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. And he's talked repeatedly about being a dictator on day one, about bombing Mexico. In fact, the Trump GOP bomb Mexico plan is so bad, even Trump's own former national security adviser, one of the architects of the Iraq war, John Bolton, has criticized him for invading Mexico. Drug cartels are waging war in America, and it's now time for America to wage war on the cartels about weakening and really destabilizing NATO. I think NATO may be obsolete, and NATO was set up a long time ago, many, many years ago, when things were different. Things are different now. He seems to be planning to force Ukraine into concessions in the war that will be really advantageous to Russia. I want to ask you a very simple question tonight. Do you want Ukraine to win this war? I want the war to stop. And so today I want to address what Trump is up to at home and abroad, why the US Is especially vulnerable to what he's doing and what we can do to slow this movement deeper into rogue state territory. A lot of current issues began or were made phenomenally worse by the global war on terror. In the wake of 9 11, the US attacked Afghanistan, where the ruling party, the Taliban, had been sheltering Osama bin Laden. We unleashed operations around the world. Mass arrests, black site and torture followed. And everything became possible in the name of fighting terrorism. This surrender to using the terrorist methods in the attempt to fight terrorism is one of the classic models for how a country devolves into running things like concentration camps. And Mark Fallon had told me that in the early days of interrogations at Gitmo, he started to notice other interrogation teams had been in the same space at work with the detainees. And he saw signs of interrogation tactics that were really disturbing, like duct tape and cinder blocks, things he would never use. And he pushed back and started raising questions about detainee treatment. And he also refused to take part in any of these new tactics. And in time, as a result of all this, he would be frozen out, as were others who, you know, pushed back or brought up concerns. But the program continued without him, continued without them, and torture was adopted as approved interrogation tactic regularly. CIA officers said this actually isn't working. And that, by the way, is what the Senate investigators found, too. They looked at 20 examples. When the CIA said the torture led to actionable intelligence, they found in each one of the examples there were huge flaws in the report. The US government ended up paying two psychologists more than $81 million to develop an illegal torture program. And in the wake of 9 11, right after it happened, the world had had this really tremendous sympathy for the US As a human, as a Muslim, and as an Iranian, I stand before you to once again express my deepest sympathy with the families of the victims and with all the great American people. It's one of those moments in our history when it's kind of sad to picture the way that it could have gone instead. But the US didn't go down that path. And instead, we kind of embraced this agenda of revenge and maximalist punishment. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. We did the very thing that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were hoping that we might do, the very thing that would help their cause the most. In the end, it was not just the symbolic power of taking down the World Trade Center. He was. It was also the beginning of a process, of a cascade of events that would ultimately lead the United States on its own, through its own decisions to do a series of things that would, in the end, weaken the United States rather than strengthen it. That was bin Laden's idea. So after 9 11, these US rogue actions quickly multiplied. And in addition to embracing kidnapping and torture, America launched a preemptive war that destabilized a region, you know, in Iraq and led to a death toll that's really likely in the hundreds of thousands, including thousands of U.S. citizens. So after George W. Bush's second term, Obama pulled torture out of the government's approved sort of kit of tactics. Even before I came into office, I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9 11, we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened. But he decided not to punish or prosecute the people that had authorized it or the people that had committed it. And Mark Fallon described the transfer of power by saying, basically, Bush sanctioned torture. Obama gave it sanctuary. And Obama did direct steps be taken to close gtmo, though he didn't burn a lot of political capital. He was busy with the ACA and some other things. And Congress, to be fair, was aggressively uninterested in helping him to close Gitmo. It was too useful to them as a PR thing. And it was interesting because after Obama put out this directive that it be closed, I was at Guantanamo nearly a decade ago, interviewing the rear admiral that was then in charge of detention. And I asked, given his directive, given Obama's instructions, how quickly the facility might be closed to comply with those instructions. And the admiral was so caught off guard that he actually burst into laughter before he could stop himself. And so it was understood on the ground that it wasn't going to be closing anytime soon. And, you know, those precedents being in place give us a history today, and this history makes us more vulnerable. The abuse that was focused on Muslim detainees in that period left a lot of room for future presidential candidates to embrace torture. In 2016, Trump included waterboarding as one of the top five priorities for the incoming administration. His rivals in the primary said they would be happy to do a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. Rather than emptying Gitmo, Some of the people that were running against Trump said they would be putting people into Guantanamo, not emptying it out. Even retired General Wesley Clark said in 2015 that there should be internment camps for disloyal, radicalized Muslims. We didn't say that was freedom of speech. We put him in a camp. They were prisoners of war. So if these people are radicalized and they don't support the United States and they're disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. That's their right. It's our right and our obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict. And this is the language of a rogue state. Biden coming in curbed many of the worst excesses of the Trump administration on the international stage. But on things like the border, he didn't make as many changes as I think people hoped he would. And by continuing to supply vast quantities of arms for the Israeli response to the horrific October 7th terror attack, supplying them long after it was known that tens of thousands of women and children had been killed in Gaza are continuing to be killed. Biden is not helping the nation retreat from this rogue state status that we entered through the global war on terror. US Senator George Helmi was on the floor of the Senate talking about this very issue just in recent days. Do these actions intent on limiting aid into Gaza and West bank, taken under the pretense of security operations, comply with international humanitarian laws and norms? Are these the actions we should expect from one of our closest democratic allies in the world? But I think those who say that Trump is no different or worse than Harris or Biden are mistaken. Many of the worst US Presidents could be threatened and pressured to accommodate norms on a number of fronts. Even the Bush administration tried to give a veneer of legality to what it was doing out of fear of exactly this kind of pressure. John Yoo in the Office of Legal Counsel gave legal advice that justified torture. Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion? Because the lawyer said it was legal, said it did not fall within the anti torture act. I'm not a lawyer and. But you gotta trust the judgment of people around you. And I do. You say it's legal. And the lawyers told me, yeah, they did not want the US to lose its allies. They didn't want the country to be seen as a rogue state. But Trump, on the other hand, takes offense at the very notion of constraint he publicly chased under any limitation, no matter how extreme, international or domestic. He's literally talking about this stuff is military, you know, against Democrats. I mean, he's literally talking. No, he's not. No, no, he's not, Jake. And despite the vast powers that US Presidents have, he's expressed a desire to do, like, much more radical things. No, he's not. Shoot protesters in the legs. No, he's talking about using the National Guard and the military to keep the peace in our streets. Jail his political rivals. What President Trump is talking about is that they have been attacking and maligning him from the day he came down that golden escalator and weaponized libel laws against journalists. That's not. And recent reports suggest he wants to push heavily to keep the US Senate from exercising its constitutionally assigned role in deciding whether or not to approve his appointees to major cabinet positions, including the Secretary of Defense. So conservative legal commentator Ed Whalen warned that he's hearing that this could happen. Trump would adjourn both houses of Congress under Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution, and then recess appointment his Cabinet as a predicate for Trump's exercise of adjournment power. One House of Congress would seek, the other House's consent to adjourn be denied. Speaker of the House would need to be complicit. Bottom line is there's a way, if Speaker Johnson wanted to do this with Donald Trump, that they might be able to do it now. Whether Johnson would go along, we don't know. Could that have been a condition for Trump supporting Johnson for the leadership role? Everybody knows that's true. And to be clear, Trump's actions during his first administration already had rogue aspects to them going against international law. The Trump administration is already considering locations to expand detention centers that would hold migrants before they are deported. The plan would also include restarting the policy of detaining families. Like we saw during Trump's first term, his obscene border policy, with a deliberate punitive spectacle of family separations didn't comply with international law and instead clearly aimed to defy it. Biden's Reunification of Families task Force found 3,913 children were separated from their parents at the U. S. Mexico border from July 2017 to the end of Trump's presidency. However, that number is far lower than the 5,500 children identified by the American Civil Liberties Union. Unlike Bush or Nixon, Trump doesn't try to hide what he wants to do. But in his first administration, Trump was hemmed in some by those around him, which kept our sort of semi quasi, hemi demi functioning rule of law going. I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I've learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it. It was the point of his actions on January 6, 2021 that identified him clearly as a rogue actor, one bent on usurping the party, upending any accountability or rule of law in the country whatsoever. And that's the path he's clearly been on since. And I think he wanted to be on it earlier, but the people around him boxed him in. And I think he's just not boxed in nearly as much at this point. We think about authoritarianism as imposing controls on people and silencing people, and it certainly does that. But it also is designed, from fascism forward, to make people become their worst selves, to give them Permission to be as violent and unrestrained as possible. He was later impeached twice. But like George W. Bush, after the excesses of 911 and invading Iraq, he was reelected. Voters continued to fail to extract the country from disgrace. Just as, you know, Project 2025 wants to deregulate environmental protections and food safety things following what happened during the Trump presidency, there's also a deregulation of inhibitions, of morals. This time out, Trump's nominations seem to include a wholesale contempt for the rule of law and for institutions. Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense, who is sporting what appear to be white supremacist tattoos and has what's generally described as an extremist background. What would it mean for the military, and in particular for women in the military, to have someone accused of sexual assault as defense secretary? A known extremist, RFK Jr. At Health and Human Services, which is seems incredibly unsafe. I want to talk about this sexual assault allegation against RFK Jr which he did not deny when asked about it today. And Matt Gaetz at the Department of Justice, who appears to have resigned from Congress just in time to avoid exposure to the report that his peers compiled about his sexual activities potentially with underage women. The evidence in that report is not survivable by any presidential nominee for office at any point in the history of this country. This is not a great selection. And Trump has suggested in the past that his supporters may not even have to vote again. It'll be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore. My beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed. So good. So he admires and allies himself with rogue states. His supporters and allies include Vladimir Putin, former President of Brazil, Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orban of Hungary. In a second Trump administration, there will be much less pressure coming from these members of the new cabinet to contain Trump's rogue tendencies. The people he's bringing in have embraced his agenda. And it's worth keeping in mind that the domestic sphere shapes the international sphere and vice versa. So war creates veterans, deportations involve other countries, pandemics don't recognize borders. If a country acts as a rogue state abroad, it tends toward similar harms against its own people, and I don't think we as journalists are necessarily prepared to cover that. One concern in holding a second Trump administration accountable going forward is his tendency to target journalists. Trump has already filed a litany of lawsuits against everyone from CBS to the New York Times and Penguin, Random House. And these are just the recent ones. Typically, those suits don't make it very far. But as he works to degrade our court system, he may get more lucky. And the suits can nonetheless play a pretty intimidating role. Comcast announced its intention to spin off its cable networks into a new publicly traded company comprised of some of NBCUniversal's best known brands, like MSNBC. But another big issue in covering Trump is that most big outlets are institutions themselves that historically have taken the lead in covering government for the public. They have their own traditions and stance in relation to political officials, and especially in relation to the president. And even as their own journalists have sometimes broken key stories of wrongdoing and whistleblower, big news organizations themselves don't seem to know how to cover a government that moves outside the rule of law, let alone one that does it as shamelessly as Trump does. We've seen this previously after 9 11, when Judith Miller got the case for war against Iraq drastically wrong. She was exposed to a lot of criticism for this and basically replied to her attackers by saying, my job is to tell the readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal. So we're going to see more appalling reporting like that under Trump, I feel certain. But there will be a more insidious side as well. There's an upcoming Washington Post women's summit that's featuring Laura Trump and Kellyanne Conway, you know, other featured speakers include Nancy Pelosi and Kerry Washington. So it's not just like a conservative women's summit, but this kind of pop marketing of the new administration is going to go a long way toward sort of papering over the extralegal and aggressively undemocratic positions and efforts underway by the Trump administration in its second time out. If the president was not telling these four congresswomen to return to their support supposed countries of origin, to which countries was he referring? What's your ethnicity? Why is that relevant to this? Because I'm asking you a question. My ancestors are from Ireland and Italy. My own ethnicity is not relevant to the question I'm asking. Other coverage is already driving the public to despair. NPR calling RFK a vaccine skeptic and claiming that he wants to tackle chronic disease and to, quote, make America healthy again. I mean, this is all just poppycock and they're reporting it as if it has some basis in reality. Do you have any idea of how many cases of measles were in Samoa between, say, 1986 and 2019? I have no idea. Great. Okay, I've got that. 1986, one case of measles. 937200502006 0, 2009 0. And in 2019 there were 5,707 measles cases. Do you know what happened in 2019? Yeah, I'm aware there was a measles outbreak. His actual track record includes making recommendations, health recommendations in America and Samoa that led to the death of 83 people, many of them children. Kennedy sent the Samoan prime minister a letter, a letter pressing him to investigate whether those children died not of measles, but ridiculously of exposure to the measles vaccine. Albert Borneo at the defector countered that NPR story. I think a lot of people were upset by it with a headline that asked what the fuck is a vaccine Skeptic? And he rightly pointed out that there are not a lot of questions left to ask about the overall effectiveness of vaccines. This is one of the most useful inventions in human history. And there's a great quote from him. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, he said, but rather an ignoramus. A person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter. Given where we are now, I reached out to Mark Fallon again, and when we spoke last week, I asked him what he thinks of our current moment and whether America is still a rogue state. And he noted that the cabinet appointees are in many cases the literal antithesis of the agencies that Trump is inviting them to run. These nominees appear to be those who will destroy or hinder the internal workings of government, he said, which even Al Qaeda failed to do. The problem is, he notes, that after a country surrenders ground on the rule of law, it's hard to find a way back. Once you open that door, it opens the door for other people who will do worse. Mark Fallon himself co wrote a piece for Psychology Today just before the last election, which identifies Trump as a bullshitter too, and warns of the risk of state sponsored bullshit. It talks about moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt's argument about bullshit, that it's worse than lying. The idea is that bullshit is phony. The bullshitter isn't even invested in truth or falsity enough to care which one is real. They just want their bluff to work. This lack of any anchor to any principle whatsoever that we see in Trump is something that Fallon suggested might be a useful sword for Fighting him. Former Vice President and Indiana Governor Mike Pence says he's concerned with Robert F. Kennedy's appointment to run the Department of Health and Human Services. He calls Kennedy, quote, an abrupt departure from the Trump Pence pro life record. He goes on to say that he urges Senate Republicans to reject Kennedy's nomination. This lack of an anchor to any principles Fallon has suggested, might be a useful sword to use to fight Trump. On issues where his supporters have waffled, Trump himself has shifted to accommodate them. His need to be adored is massive. He was for the vaccine, or at least for taking credit for it before he was against it. On abortion, he has helped relentlessly with making abortion illegal, but across his life has spoken out both sides of his mouth in ways that reinforce his lack of any moral opinion about it whatsoever. Faced with massive displeasure from his base as potentially the consequences of some of the things he's talking about doing, deportations, tariffs, he may very well abandon some of his most damaging and unlawful programs. So how can we reckon with this rogue state bullshit that has headed our way? A legacy of decades, maybe even centuries, of American missteps, of which Trump seems to epitomize all the worst aspects. Faced with the introduction of torture interrogations two decades ago, Fallon stood up in that moment and told his subordinates not to take unlawful orders from anyone, even from him. He warned them that they were accountable in the long run for whatever they did. And I asked if it had really mattered that he pushed back, given that he himself was soon pushed out, that given that torture continued, millions of dollars were spent creating an official program and that this program did tremendous harm. But he said yes, that it had mattered that he'd stood up, that there were places in which torture was not used in interrogation because he and others like him stood up. There were teams that might have turned to it that did not. He couldn't turn the whole tide, but he could divert some of it. Just as important, he suggested, was this public stance against torture that he and others took, exposing the unlawful actions that they had seen. Public exposure is accountability, and it puts a marker down. It can play a role in changing public opinion. It can play a role in establishing accurate history, and it can play a role in future prosecutions. Most of us will never be in a position to try to stop a secret torture program, but there will be a lot of us who will be able to take important stands. One example that comes to mind happened in Oklahoma recently. The state school superintendent, Ryan Walters, worked hard earlier this year to develop a call for textbooks for Schools that really seem to be very focused on getting Trump Bibles into the school. And he made a video about his new Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism. I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team. He tried to make it required viewing for students in every school and even instructed local superintendents to forward it to parents and superintendents in seven school districts. Some of the bigger ones have refused and the state attorney general's office has said that there is no law that can force them to follow Walter's order. Well, it's not a torture program. It's a kind of underhanded activity and furthers propaganda and abuses, the separation of church and state. And these things are still important to stop. And there's going to be a lot of these small battles where it's a little bit easier to defy power and those small standoffs can help keep existing laws intact and head off worse actions right out of the gate. If people are stymied when they try small things, then it's a little bit more difficult for them to step up to the next level. And in the next four years, many of us may come face to face with situations where we can draw a line by pushing back against unlawful orders, unethical actions, or at least refuse to participate in them. So other actions you can take preemptively include pressuring your elected representatives on the state and national level. You can find out their stances on issues that matter to you. You can praise them for good stances, pressure them for their cowardly ones, and encourage others to as well. And another way we can all help deal with the journalism crisis is to support small and mid size independent outlets that won't have the institutional blinders that can make reporting from the large outlets so frustrating they're less likely to those smaller outlets are less likely to present as one big institution interpreting another big, and they take themselves a little less seriously and I think have an easier time calling bullshit. At least that seems to be how it's been going so far. Podcasts like this one can help keep you informed, but it's critical to support reported news where people are on the beat and following events day to day and investigating abuses especially. You don't have to subject yourself to horror stories every minute of every day or faint every time Trump makes a threat. But you do want to have actual factual news sources at your disposal doing reporting and telling you what's happening in the world. I think often about the grandmothers from Argentina, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, and how under dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, they protested in the square in front of the presidential offices, demanding answers about their disappeared. During this time, government death squads hunted down anyone suspected of political dissidents. Up to 30,000 people disappeared. Even under dictatorship, the junta could not shoot those grandmothers. I met with some of them when I went, and 40 years later they found more than 100 of those missing children. But they kept an accountability present and visible on a national level this whole time. And it was decades after dictatorships ended when I went to Argentina and Chile in 2016, and at that time there were trials underway then in Buenos Aires, and they were continuing to bring members of the military to account. And last year in Chile, the Supreme Court validated judgments against the architects of the Condor program, which was central to torture and disappearances. And it was an operation the US Assisted in, just as it had supported those dictatorships being there today, it's clear that it hasn't been an easy road back for Argentina or for Chile. There are still deep problems in each place, but accountability is possible. Standing up for what's right and refusing to participate in what isn't, and presenting true history is the only way that we can really put these ghosts to bed. And one other item to note. As we see in our own pasts, it's important to say that rule of law is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Rule of law allowed slavery, it allowed Jim Crow, it allowed indigenous dispossession and women to be denied the vote. Many horrible things have been legal, but when the rule of law is on the side of justice, there's room to insist on it whenever Trump takes rogue actions, domestically or internationally, or both. I said last week about the mass deportation plan that they don't necessarily plan on running a legal program at all, but that shouldn't stop us from using existing laws as a stick to hit them with. It's a weapon against Trump's wish for unchecked power and for those who want to support him in doing that. If we can't stop everything, we can at least stem the tide and build a future where we start reeling the country back from being a rogue state. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.