Crooks and Liars

October 24, 2005
Transcript by Reg NYC
Thanks to Blah3 for a little help.

John Amato: This is John Amato from Crooks and Liars, and I'm joined once again by very special guest. Please welcome Mr. General Wesley Clark.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: John, I'm Happy to be with you. I hope your listeners can hear us over the noise of the Chilis 2 by gate 42 bravo in L.A...

John Amato: ...Faced many battles before and you're facing another battle. How has it been for you to be on Fox News as their analyst?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I've enjoyed it. Actually, they've treated me very well. They, you know, listen to what I say. They ask me to be on a lot, and you know, I hope I'll be able to do a lot with Fox, because they've got an important audience, and I enjoy having the opportunity to present my views even if some of the listeners are, maybe they're sort of predisposed to worry about whether they should agree with me or not, but my feedback is that it makes a difference.

John Amato: And also they're just very important topics and obviously to biggest topic is torture and the torture problem. And I'd just seen Janis Karpinski really lay out a problem really quickly on The Daily Show, where she talked about these military leaders come in, these interrogators that change to whole dynamic of interrogations of what went on at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. How does that make you feel, you know, as far as the torture goes, the way the changes and the way we departed from the Geneva Conventions?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, it's a little hard to hear in here, John. But Let me just say about this issue of mistreatment of prisoners: It's simply un-American. I know it's gone on in the past on occasion, and whenever it has it's been punished. The leadership in our Armed Forces and our country has never supported torture as a matter of policy. It often doesn't work. I was at a fundraiser in New York the other night where a man who was a World War II interrogator came up after I had spoken. And then he said, "You know, you're exactly right. We never tortured the German prisoners that we caught. We never roughed them up. We gave them cigarettes and coffee, and they sang like canaries, because, you know, we made them feel safe and welcome. We treated them with respect." And I think that as a matter of our nation's values, we just shouldn't be a nation that abuses people who are in our custody. We should be bigger than that and stronger than that, and I think as a matter of policy, practical policy, I think the evidence shows that torture usually doesn't work, and certainly in terms of winning the war on terror where ultimately we've got to persuade people that they want to support us that torture is a counterproductive- or abuse, I'm using the word torture loosely- abuse of prisoners is counterproductive. It certainly doesn't help the men and women in uniform, and they shouldn't be doing it, and neither should the CIA.

John Amato: By speaking out on this issue, and you do it so eloquently, we are protecting our troops from further harm, and we need to take that moral high ground. And I just, you know, want to thank you for always constantly battling, because the talking point is that, you know, torture gets results, and as you just said, it doesn't get results.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: The American power in the world will not have been based on the barrel of a gun. It’s been based on our economic strength, but also on our values. And the fact that people in large parts of the world believe that from the American people and the American government they would be treated fairly and generously. When we’ve done that we’ve won friends all over the world. When we’ve behaved like other powers and been small-minded and nasty and mean-spirited and run things on an eye-for-an-eye, tit-for-tat basis, we’ve lost friends, lost influence and generally lost our policies.

John Amato: I agree. And how does it make you feel just recently that the Vice-President is openly arguing that restraints on the treatment of captives need to be relaxed? I mean, you know, what do you say to that?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I’m very disappointed that the Vice President's doing that, because I just- you know, I know that it’s easy for an armchair quarterback to think if you just put somebody’s arm behind his back the guy'll squeal. But the truth is that- and John McCain I think is living proof of this- that people don’t squeal when you torture them. They may scream, and they may talk, but they’re not giving you the information, in most cases, that you want, and if they are, there are other ways to get it.

John Amato: Alright, you know I agree, and we've heard it again from McCain, and from many others who have come out and said that they were tortured for five years, and they never gave any information. So, it is an important issue, and you are a leader in that front. And, you know, there are a lot of problems obviously with recruiting and in the Army at this point where we missed our recruiting goals. What would you be able to do? I mean, how could we fix this problem?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think that this is one of those issues that- it goes right to the top of the government. When you have the Vice President advocating the exemption for torture, it’s pretty clear where the guidance came from to abuse and rough up prisoners, and even though this is not the character of the United States Army, the leaders that I know or the men and women I know who serve in the army, they’re nevertheless subject to his control and direction. This has got to be stopped at the political level, at the legal level. It’s not a problem inside the armed forces, and that’s been the failure of the investigation so far. Sure I mean, they’re investigating saying, "How come these people at Abu Ghraib went too far? They should never have gone that far," but the whole idea of not respecting the Geneva convention, the whole idea of pressuring and abusing and humiliating these prisoners did not originate with sergeants and privates in Abu Ghraib.

John Amato:...With the Alberto Gonzales memo, and then listening to Donald Rumsfeld talk about it, you could see that it wasn't a bottom-up but a top-down mentality. And I think, again, we need to have that moral high ground, because the extreme fundamentalists that want to paint the US and Americans as evil. When we're accused of torture, it gives the, you know, that talking point credence, and as a military man, it must just really upset you.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: John, you're right. We need the moral high ground, and our troops need the moral high ground, because we’ve always believed- the Army I served in- we always believed that we were better. We weren’t like other armies. We didn’t abuse people. We didn’t torture them. We didn’t kill them. And to strip that (inaudible) values away from our troops is to strike at the very heart of the patriotism, the morale, the spirit, that animates a force of free men fighting for democracy- and women- free men and women fighting for democracy.