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The Current Transcript for August 10, 2021

Host: Bobyn Bresnahan

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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Stark warning on climate change must prompt action, not despair, say scientists

Guests: Katharine Hayhoe, Simon Lewis

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You've been telling us for over three decades of the dangers of allowing the government to warn the world nation that didn't you and as a result, climate change is a problem that is here now. Nobody's safe and it's getting worse faster.

LAURA LYNCH: The climate crisis is suddenly in sharper focus. A new U.N. report paints a picture of a world in serious trouble and puts the blame at the feet of our species to scientists. Explain why it's too late to avoid climate change, but also everything we still have to fight for. And later.

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Is now after midnight on August nine. And that means that I and anyone else, if you're vaccinated, can finally go Canada! Yeah!

LL: He might have been the most excited man on Twitter on Monday, but there are so many others. Canada opened its borders to fully vaccinated Americans this week. There is joy, there are reunions and there are some nervous epidemiologists. We'll talk about all three of those things in about 30 minutes. And we'll also be bringing you Episode five of the Almost Too Wild to Believe CBC podcast, Brainwashed, the story of the CIA's mind control experiments. Host Michelle Shephard picks up the story post 9/11 in a courtroom in Guantanamo Bay. But we begin this morning with the climate crisis laid bare. I'm Laura Lynch in for Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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LL: Code red, a wake up call, a stark reminder that time is running out. A new report on climate change is being called All of those things. The sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the most comprehensive look at the state of our planet since 2013. What it says isn't good. It was written by hundreds of the world's leading scientists and signed off on by 195 national governments, including Canada. The report was released on Monday against the backdrop of a summer of record breaking heat waves, catastrophic flash flooding and unprecedented wildfires. It places the blame squarely, unequivocally on humanity and the emission of greenhouse gases. But it's also clear there's still time to rise to the occasion and keep our planet liveable. I'm joined by Simon Lewis, a professor of Global Change Science at University College London, and Katharine Hayhoe. She's an atmospheric scientist, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University and the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. Good morning to both of you.

SIMON LEWIS: Good morning.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Morning.

LL: Morning, Simon Lewis, I'll start with you. What was your reaction when you read the report?

SIMON LEWIS: For those of us who've been watching the signs carefully, there aren't any big surprises, but what we see in the report is everything with more clarity because we have eight years more data of increasing carbon emissions, eight years, more data of climate impacts. So scientists can now really join all the dots from fossil fuel emissions to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to warmer temperatures and then these climate impacts that we've been seeing in the news.

LL: Katharine Hayhoe, what was your reaction?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: I was not surprised either because we have known that climate was changing and humans are responsible for decades. The news was not new. What was new was the clarity and the urgency. There is no equivocation, no uncertainty to hide behind. It's real. It's us. And the time to act is now.

LL: We've heard that before, though. Katharine Hayhoe, what makes this different from previous times, previous reports?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Well, we have heard that before, and so this report presents the updated data, as Simon said, we have eight more years of data showing that not only that temperatures are rising, ice is melting and sea levels are increasing, but also we now have information on how much more likely climate change has made. Specific events like the Western heat wave was at least 150 times more likely because of climate change. We know that with Hurricane Harvey that hit the southern US three years ago, we know that three quarters of the economic damages due to Hurricane Harvey were because it was supersized by human induced climate change. We can put numbers on these events. We can show the human fingerprint in almost every part of the world. But at this point, scientists sort of feel like they're tapping the mike, asking if it's on and if anyone's listening.

LL: OK, let me use this word Anthropocene. Simon Lewis, you study it. Can you talk to us about what that is and what this report tells you about it?

SIMON LEWIS: Well, the idea of the Anthropocene is that humans have become a force of nature, that what we do matters on a planetary scale. So the new IPCC report really emphasises that we are changing the Earth's climate and the earth ecosystems. And there's some really shocking statistics in there. We've raised atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. To levels that are higher than at rates about two up to two million years ago and the temperatures now, the annual average temperature of the globe is at its highest level for 125,000 years. So what we're doing is changing Earth on a geological time scale to put that into context. No, there were no anatomically modern humans, no humans that looked like you and I two million years ago and 125,000 years ago when temperatures were this high, we were hanging out with the Neanderthals. We're really making dramatic changes to the climate. And we need to get carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions down to zero to stabilise the climate. And we can only do that by ending fossil fuel use and really moving our societies and our lives to be powered by renewable, renewable energy.

LL: And we know that the U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said that this sounds the death knell for fossil fuels. And Catherine, I wanted to ask you in that context, when you see a Canadian government investing in a pipeline that will expand the capacity to send to send fossil fuels through pipelines for export and the government defending it by saying that will be used to pay for the transition. How do you see that in the context of this report?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: It illustrates the tension that we have in modern society and that every aspect of our lives was built on fossil fuels. We are not talking about a small change. We're not talking about replacing the chemicals that we use in spray cans, as we did when the ozone hole was was discovered by scientists. We're talking about altering the entire basis of our economy, but we have to do it because what's at stake is that the planet will survive. It will still be orbiting the sun long after we're gone. The question is what will happen to our civilisation? And today we stand at a crossroads. And the report is very clear. The choice is up to us. We don't need more science telling us it's real and it's us. What we need to understand is it's affecting us here and now today in ways that we can quantify and even put dollar signs on and the choice of our future is up to us. Now is the time to make that choice.

LL: And what is the choice when it comes to things like that pipeline?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: The choice is, are we going to increase the infrastructure that continues to provide fossil fuels in the future? So we are not only saying that we are still using them today, but if we build that more infrastructure, the guarantee that will be continued to use in the future, that means that we're guaranteeing more carbon emissions in the future.

LL: Simon Lewis, there have been six IPCC reports and countless other studies that have painted this picture for us over decades. Does science make a difference when it comes to moving policy? And does it sometimes feel like scientists like you are just screaming into the void?

SIMON LEWIS: Science is a it's a necessity, but it's not sufficient, there needs to be political action and I'm not a political scientist, but as I see it, is that. People in the government respond to pressure and there's pressure from the fossil fuel industry to keep extracted, and that has to be a larger pressure from people to say, no, we want something a different way. The clamour has to come from millions of people saying this is not acceptable. We need to move. And I think that people are seeing this. What you see, the heat wave in Canada, the floods in Germany, the fires in Greece, that we're kind of realising now that all of our cities and towns that we live in, they were built over centuries and decades to withstand a given climate. And that given climate is now the past. We're into a new phase. So we're going to have to have some adaptation, some changes to the way we live to keep living in these places. But we're also going to have to drive down emissions right down to zero as fast as possible because there are limits to that adaptation. There are limits to how things can change in a given city or town. And I think that's becoming clear to more and more people.

LL: Now, climate activist, Greta Thunberg, responded to the report. I just want you to listen to what she said.

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It doesn't say you have to do this and then you have to do this. It doesn't provide us with such solutions or tell us that you need to do this. And that's up for us. We are the ones who need to take the decisions and we are the ones who need to be brave and ask them the difficult questions to ourselves, like what do we value and are we ready to take action to to ensure future and present living conditions? So I hope that this can be a wake up call and that's it really gives perspective and that it once again can be a reminder that the crisis is not going away now.

LL: Berg woke up a long time ago. So, Simon Lewis, do you think that this report will serve as a wake up call to others?

SIMON LEWIS: I hope so, and I think it joins the impacts of devastating climate change that we're seeing on our TV screens this summer, and as we move to a time of going to the UN climate talks, which are hosted in Glasgow by the UK government. The pressure is on. The pressure is on government leaders and business leaders to move things and move the dial fast on emissions because another eight years and another report, we will have lost the window to keep 1.5 degrees C warming. As possible, and we really need to get those emissions bent down, get that curve bent down to be able to stabilise the climate because we need to get emissions right down to zero to stabilise the climate system.

LL: So what would you see as a good outcome from the summit?

SIMON LEWIS: A good outcome from the summit would be the G20 nations. Which are around 80 percent of all global emissions, having concrete and detailed plans about how they will get emissions down this decade, not taking it down the line to 2050 or later.

LL: Katharine Hayhoe, what do you think are the biggest barriers to making that outcome a reality?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: We often think that government, a prime minister, a CEO, a celebrity, will save us. But the reality is it's up to us. The world has changed before. It has changed in very significant ways. Our society has changed radically from societies that were built on slavery and not allowing women to vote on a lack of access to political systems and to resources. And the reason why we've changed in the past is when ordinary people decided the world can and must be different and use their voices to advocate for change. So, yes, our governments need to act. Yes, our corporations need to act. Every single one of us, no matter who we are, no matter where we work, where we go to school, where we live, we all have a responsibility to use our voices, to call for and to advocate for the change we need. Because, again, it's not about saving the planet. It's about saving us.

LL: Well, then what can Canada bring to Glasgow, your Canadian? And what would you like to see from this government?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Absolutely, each country needs to step up and Canada. People often say, well, we're just such a small country population wise, we're just a tiny part of the problem. Why do you matter? Well, on the list of top 10 cumulative carbon emissions emitters, the people who produce the most heat trapping gases since the dawn of the industrial era, we are number nine. We have to put some of the highest per capita emissions in the world so we can make a difference, both materially in terms of our reduction. And of course, we do have a price on carbon. Our price on carbon is increasing. That is going to help to bring our production down. But we need to do everything we can to meet those targets and to also lead by example to show others that it can. And it is possible.

LL: Now, there is a lot at stake in Glasgow and we're certainly feeling the heat in Canada this summer. I'm in Toronto right now, but I live in Vancouver and I live through that extreme heat wave, the wildfires that are burning. Now, if you remember, last month, the village of Lytton in B.C. set three temperature records in a row, topped out at over 49 degrees Celsius before it just was burned down by fire. The Current spoke with one of the people who had to leave Lytton.

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People in Canada and B.C. feel like they are living in a temperate climate and it has been a temperate climate. This is the warning. We're the canary in the coal mine. Climate change is happening now. It's happening fast. And things are it's just that that's the lesson from this. Everything seems the same and seems fine until it changes in an instant and everything's gone.

LL: And that was Gordon Murray of Lytton, B.C. He lost everything in that fire. So what does that what does what happened in Lytton tell you about climate change?

SIMON LEWIS: It tells me that it will not be this smooth process that we sometimes expect it to be. I mean, those records and little were shattered and they shocked everyone. But future shocks are coming our way. Maybe not for that town, but maybe somewhere else, because as we add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, traps, more heat is more energy, and there will be greater heat waves that are more extreme going forward and extreme rainfall events. And these are coming down the pipeline unless we get emissions down and down fast.

LL: There's a little bit more tape I want to play. Katharine Hayhoe. Recently on The Current, we spoke with Eleni Myrevili. I hope I'm saying that correctly. The newly named chief heat officer in Athens, Greece. She told us what it was like living in a city that was approaching 50 degrees and being threatened by wildfires.

SOUNDCLIP

I went outside and met a friend in a cafe. We decided to go like after 8:00 in the afternoon, hoping that the temperatures would have would be a little bit less pressing and was still extremely hot. But as we sat there at the cafe and chatted, there was ash that was falling on us and the skies were had these grey and red clouds. It feels really apocalyptic. It feels horrible. And last night at some point, both my husband and we woke up in the middle of the night because we couldn't breathe from the smoke. I actually had to wear a mask to to go back to sleep because I felt that I my my lungs were burning.

LL: The fires have gotten worse since then. Thousands of people have evacuated the islands in the face of hundreds of fires in Greece. Turkey is going through the same. Eleni also said she was afraid that cities like Athens will become unliveable in the future. Catherine, what goes through your mind when you watch what's happening in Greece?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Soru. When you see people being affected in post-traumatic ways, whether it's in British Columbia, whether it's in Greece, whether it's the massive flooding they experienced in Germany at the same time. Climate change with climate change, we have three choices we can reduce our emissions as much as possible as soon as possible. We can prepare to adapt to the impacts that we can no longer avoid because some of them are already here today or we can suffer. And the faster we cut our carbon, the less adaptation is required and the less suffering it will be.

LL: Do you think adaptation is realistic in places like Athens, when when we hear people saying it could become unliveable, is there a way to still live there?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: We can adapt our cities and there are limits. So, again, that's why we must mitigate some adaptation is possible. And with cities, for example, reducing the urban heat island effect can bring temperatures down. Also looking at clearing, clearing areas to create wild firebreaks, looking at where we build and where we develop, there are smart things that we can do to make our cities cooler, to make them more flood resistant, to secure our water supplies. But we will not be able to do sufficient adaptation. There's no way that we can do so if we continue our dependence on fossil fuels. We must figure out new clean ways to get energy, many of which are already in our backyards today. We must accelerate that transition because the faster we do so, the less suffering there will be.

LL: I just want to talk for a second about the notion of despair. You read a report like this as an everyday person and you think, oh, my goodness, there's nothing more I can do about this, that this is the end. I'm just not I'm not going to be able to do anything. Simon Lewis, what do you say to people who might react to this in that fashion?

SIMON LEWIS: Don't don't despair, get angry and get active. Every extra additional bit of warming matters. So what we do matters, so we do need to call for change and act for change and it is possible to get emissions down. In the U.K., we had an early campaigns against coal fired power stations and we've reduced our emissions by 44 percent since 1990. Almost exclusively due to moving away from coal, and our electricity is now largely produced by renewables, so it is possible to shift the dial, but it requires public pressure. So I would ask people who are concerned to get active.

LL: Katharine Hayhoe, you've addressed this already to a degree, but I want to push you a little bit more on this. Where do you take dispair? What do you do with it?

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Absolutely, well, I mean, yesterday I woke up to a text from a friend saying, I'm sitting in the dark just overcome with despair, reading this report, what do I do? What do I say? And that is a response when we actually recognise how serious this is, what's at stake, how imminent and how real it is. That fear can wake us up. It serves a purpose. It shows us we have a problem, but fear can paralyse us if we don't know what to do about it. What are we supposed to do? Our natural human defence is just to pull the blanket back up over our heads. We have to recognise that each one of us can truly make a difference. You don't have to be a politician or a CEO or the leader of an organisation to make a difference. Every single one of us can by using our voices. And I encourage people to find an organisation of like minded people there. I'm part of an organisation called Science Moms. I'm also part of a lot of faith based organisations. There's organisations that support the just transition for conservation of nature. There's all kinds of organisations, even for winter athletes, where people are getting together and they're saying because of who I am, I care about climate action and we are going to raise our voices to affect change in our communities and our province and our country and the world. So take action, use your voice, get together with like minded people, because as got Greta Thunberg says, don't look for hope, act. And when you act, hope is everywhere.

LL: All right. That is a good place to leave it at. I thank you both for your time. Thank you. Simon Lewis is a professor of Global Change Science at University College London. Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and a professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. The CBC News is next. After that, the US Canada border is busy again after more than a year of relative calm. In six minutes, the pros and cons of another relaxed covid restriction. I'm Laura Lynch. This is The Current.

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Opening of U.S. border may be delayed for Canadians, says expert

Guests: Brittney Everett, Steven Young, Kathryn Bryk Friedman

LL: Hello, I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current. Still to come, Episode five of the hit CBC podcast Brainwashed. Host Michel Shepherd's investigation into the CIA's murky past with mind control experiments. We'll take you to a courtroom in Guantanamo Bay. But first, Canada, the Americans are coming. As of yesterday, Canada has reopened its border to fully vaccinated Americans for fun, for business, for family reunions. Finally, for nonessential reasons, U.S. citizens can come north. And for so many living in border cities, it's been more than a year of painful waiting. That's been the case for Brittney Everett and her parents. She crossed the border with her three kids into Windsor, Ontario, yesterday morning from Ohio, all to see her parents who hadn't seen their grandchildren for over a year.

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BRITTNEY EVERETT: Which street are we on the street?

CHILD: Nonny.

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Nonny street. I didn't go until I got to the border and then... Kiss kiss kiss. Another one. Another one.

LL: That is the joyful sound of Brittaey Everett and her three kids, Shane, Seth and Simon, seeing their grandparents for the first time in over a year. Britney is on the line from her parents house in Chatham, Ontario. Good morning.

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Good morning.

LL: Well, that was a lovely sound of joy and happiness. How did it feel pulling up to your parents house and getting that long awaited hug yesterday?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Oh, it was wonderful. We didn't know who was going to get the hugs first, and I won. I think it was easier for me to get out of my car seat and my kids couldn't find their shoes. And so anyways, my mom just held on to me for a really long time and it was, you know, one of those tight hugs that you're just never sure you're ever going to see somebody ever again. So it was wonderful.

LL: And for your grandparents, seeing the kids?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Oh, man. It was just, it's just been absolutely wonderful. There's just been there's been sweet moments where, like, one of my kids will be like, Nonny, where's my shoes? And it's just those simple things that we haven't been able to have in the last year, you know, probably last year and a half, really were- just she can be they can be part of everyday life.

LL: You had quite a journey to get to get to Chatham. You cross the Detroit-Windsor border first thing yesterday morning. What was that like?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: I did it was there was a lot of people in line which we expected. There were two border crossing guys that were just like wandering around. You know, they move the cones and stuff to keep the lines and the best places. And these two border crossing guys had the biggest smiles on their faces. I think they were just really excited because they knew that the people who were crossing first thing yesterday morning were the people who have been waiting for a year and a half. Right. And they just had the biggest smiles on their faces. It was so sweet.

LL: How long did you have to wait?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Yeah, it was wonderful, we waited about an hour and a half at the border yesterday morning, which wasn't terrible, I was prepared for for many hours in my mind.

LL: Well, if you were prepared for that long, what about the kids? How did they do with that?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: I had I let them get unbuckled because we're just sitting at the border. Right. So I let them get unbuckled and they had pillows and blankets. And I have I have a one of those fancy cars with the DVD player in it, which helps entertain them really well. But it was really cute because when we finally did get up to the border crossing, the guard, my two year old was sitting there going, Mom, go, Mom, go. I'm like, Baby, I can't go until the border crossing guy told me that I can. And and the guy was like, I've got young kids, too. And they do the exact same thing. I completely understand. So everybody was in really good spirits that we like, interacted with, and I think everybody was excited for us to be able to reunite.

LL: Now, you are a Canadian citizen, so you've always been able to enter the country. But but can you walk us through how the recent changes to the rules have made that process easier for you and your family?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Yes, so for the last year, I've technically been able to enter the country, you have to quarantine for two weeks or you had to quarantine for two weeks. And the same thing with my kids as they would have had to quarantine for two weeks. So as of last night, that was dropped and so we could come without quarantine. And we did come last July in quarantine for two weeks. So we're one of the lucky ones who have seen them within the last year and a half. But a year is far too long, especially because I have a two year old that's half of his life.

LL: So you have managed to see each other. How how often compared to what you did before the pandemic?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Well, we've only seen them once since the pandemic started and we used to see them every three weeks. So my parents used to drive to Ohio because it's easier for them to drive than for me to put all three of my kids in a car and drive for five hour drive. So, yeah, they used to come down every three weeks. Yes. So it's been a dramatic change for us.

LL: Oh, I know. You can now cross to see your parents. The board is still close to Canadians like your parents are hoping to come the other way into the U.S. I'm wondering, how anxious are you to have your parents come to see you?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Oh, I cannot wait, because seeing my kids in their element, in their, you know, their comfort zone and stuff is is totally different. And we've got all these hopes and dreams of things that we want to be able to do at my house, you know, like with them, just like simple things, like going to the zoo and stuff like that. And and we've got you know, we've got we've got quite a list at this point. Like we literally have a paper and pen list of all the things that we're going to do when they're allowed to come back to our house.

LL: How long are you going to be visiting with them?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: I'm here for a week. I would stay longer, but my child starts school next week, so they start school really early. And, you know, in the States.

LL: Well, then in that respect, what do you hope will change in the coming weeks as discussion about the border?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Yeah, I'm so hopeful that the border is going to open. You know, it'll be the same to the fully vaccinated people. But I really hope that that happens on the 21st when the border is set to, you know, the border restrictions are set to expire on the 21st of every month.

LL: Do you understand why that hasn't been reciprocated yet?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: I don't really understand, because everything that they have said all along is that they were going to do everything unilaterally. Both countries would open at the same time and then they didn't. So it's quite shocking, especially because the U.S. side is so much more open than the Canadians.

LL: All right. We'll leave it. There was just tell me one thing. What's on what's on the agenda today for grandparents and kids?

BRITTNEY EVERETT: It's supposed to rain a lot today. So we've got some indoor activity plans. We've got we've got a tie dye activity that we're going to do together when I don't know I don't know what we have a whole list of things, but nothing is scheduled day to day. So we'll see what the weather, the weather holds out. And my parents living next to a wonderful splash pad. So we will be in the splash paddock. It's not raining.

LL: Excellent. We'll have a great visit. Brittney, thank you.

BRITTNEY EVERETT: Thank you. It has been wonderful.

LL: Brittany Everett is a Canadian living in Ohio with her husband and three kids. She crossed the border yesterday morning to see her parents after more than a year apart. Stephen Young is a Canadian who was regularly crossing the border into the U.S. for work and fun pre pandemic. Now he has to watch a one way flow of people while staying put himself. Americans can drive north, but Canadians still can't head south, at least for now. Steven Young grew up on the border. And Port Colburn, Ontario, hello.

STEVEN YOUNG: Hi, how are you?

LL: Fine, thanks. Tell me, before covid, how often were you crossing the border?

STEVEN YOUNG: So my job with our small company, I'm the sales manager, sales rep. So I called. Generally speaking, I'm in the building business. Building supply business is still a very lack of a better term in your face business. You need to be in the stores every now and then, you know, six week cycle, have a visit, build a relationship, check on product problems, delivery problems, that kind of stuff, and move on to the next door. So I would work normally two days a week in the near border states of New York and Pennsylvania and then two days a week in Ontario, calling on my customers, Ontario and I, one day a week in the office. So.

LL: So what's the border closure meant for business for you?

STEVEN YOUNG: We have lost some in New York and Pennsylvania because the domestic competition is still able to go in their store. The U.S. domestic competition is still be able to go in their store. And I'm not. So we've seen about a 15 percent sale through all this. And, you know, I'm kind of blessed because I have some very good relationships. These people- I've been doing this for 25 years. These is some of these guys that run these stores in New York State. They are I consider them friends of mine. And they've been very understanding and they've helped where they can. But I have lost a few along the way to you know, people change, attitudes change. And and, you know, it is unfortunate. But that's just, I guess, the world we live in right now.

LL: So, yeah. And many of your friends actually live and work, work in the United States. Tell me how it has affected them.

STEVEN YOUNG: Well, you know, that was the other thing I was going to talk to you about. I have because I grew up in border community. I have lifelong friends that are there, what I call generational cottages. Their grandparents came over from Buffalo and built cottages on the north, the north Lake Erie shore, actually their great grandparents back in the 20s. And it went to their grandparents and went to their parents and now it's their places and they haven't been able to be here for the last, you know, 16, 18 months. So I've been charged with five of these properties just cutting the grass. I've cleaned out fridges, I've cleaned out freezers. I've, you know. I'm the most attacker I have I have most straps that everywhere.

LL: You are a good friend.

STEVEN YOUNG: Yeah. And these are dear friends of ours sort of thing. We, you know, we would for us, it's 30 kilometres to the border from our from our home. So, you know, we cross this bridge all across this bridge all the time. I'll go and meet you for dinner. It's like, great, you know? So for us, it's it's still nothing's changed for us. And even for the Americans that are coming over now. Like, I have a couple of my guys that are coming over this week, but it doesn't really work for them because they still have to test before they come. That test is only good for that trip. These are for the lack of a better term commuter cottagers, OK, when they come to their cottage here in and along the north shore of Lake Erie from anywhere from forty three up through Port Colborne in the main fleet, they commute back every day to go to work. That's just how it's always been for them. OK, it'll be no different than somebody having a cottage, say, in Barry or or just a bit north of Barry Bracebridge. And they drive into Toronto every day to go to work because people do that.

LL: But let's talk about the reason why they haven't been able to come, the covid-19 cases are surging in part of the U.S. Are you concerned?

STEVEN YOUNG: The part of the U.S. they're surging, aren't where those people are from. It's in Arkansas and Texas and and places like that, they're not coming up here. Those people are not coming up here. I'm talking about people right from the west western New York and northern Pennsylvania area. That's got to have places here.

LL: So you have no worries about your part of the world?

STEVEN YOUNG: Nope, zero. Absolutely zero.

LL: But you can understand why there would be the reluctance to let Americans in and why it has to be announced.

STEVEN YOUNG: Not necessarily. I mean, to be quite honest with you, when when we were surging in the GTA and we still are in the Brampton area and stuff like that, I have more concern in the Niagara region because they come down here every weekend. I mean, you know, the KBW is packed every weekend with people come out of the GTA down here. I don't know who was vaccinated and who is not, I don't know who, you know what I mean.

LL: But I'm wondering what you're hoping to hear in the coming weeks about the going the other way, Canadians being able to cross back into the United States.

STEVEN YOUNG: I'm hoping they open it up as soon as possible.

LL: And what's the first thing you're going to do if and when it gets it's opened up?

STEVEN YOUNG: Go see my customers first and then we're going to go over for a motorcycle ride with a bunch of friends as soon as we possibly can.

LL: All right. Steven Young, thank you so much for your time.

STEVEN YOUNG: Thank you. Bye bye.

LL: Steven Young lives in Port Colborne, Ontario, just 30 kilometres from the U.S. border. He frequently crossed the border for work prepend. Demick, August 21st, is the tentative date for the U.S. to open its border to Canadians. But with surging Delta variant cases in many states and no clear border protocol in place yet, that milestone isn't a sure thing. Kathryn Bryk Friedman is a Canada U.S. specialist at the University of Buffalo and a member of the Woodrow Wilson Centre's Canada Institute. Good morning.

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Good morning, Laura.

LL: So we've been hearing from folks who before the pandemic made the trip across the border frequently you're in Buffalo yourself. Can you tell us about the nature of border communities and the importance for residents of being able to move back and forth freely?

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Well, I think Steven and your other guest really hit the nail on the head, these are commuter communities where people have been used to crossing the border with these. Obviously, that changed after 9/11, but still people were able to cross pretty freely and pretty regularly. It really has taken a toll on families and small businesses and cross-border communities all along the northern border, and that translates into economic loss for these cross-border communities.

LL: I'm just thinking now of Point Roberts out in British Columbia, which, well, the United States, but it's separated from the United States by the border because of the geography and it's suffered greatly. How much is that a factor in other parts along the border? How many communities like that are really suffering?

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, when you think about the folks who would come down, for example, from Ontario to western New York to shop, to visit the Allbright Knox, to visit Niagara Falls, New York, to go to a Buffalo Bills game or Buffalo Sabres game. That translates into millions of dollars of economic activity. In addition, you have to think about the tax revenue that's derived from that spending power. And so, you know, Buffalo, Niagara and Detroit, Windsor and you know, Bellingham, Washington, as well as other cross-border communities on the U.S. side of the border, really have seen a significant economic impact due to the nonessential travel restrictions that were put in place.

LL: And we saw some long line-ups at the border yesterday. What's your sense of how Americans are reacting to the news they can now enter into Canada if they're fully vaccinated?

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, on the one hand, I think that family members are elated that they can now enter Canada and not have to go through the 14 day quarantine. I mean, that was extraordinarily prohibitive for a lot of people who, you know, have family on the Canadian side of the border. So so I do think that folks are really joyful and elated. And, you know, however, the fact that the United States still has the border, not a central border restrictions in place is really frustrating to folks in cross border communities all along the northern parallel, the northern border, the 14th parallel. There, you know, our congressional representatives from those communities who have been trying to put pressure on the Biden administration to lift the restrictions. But to date, they haven't been successful.

LL: Now, not everyone in Canada is convinced that this is the right approach to reopen the border to Americans. I want to play you a clip from Professor Kelly Lee at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She's a member of an International Pandemic and Borders Research Group. And it looks at how travel measures affect countries covid-19 outcomes. Just listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

Ideally, you want a preventive strategy. We've learnt with variants that you don't wait and see what happens and then let variants take hold and spread in the country because it is very hard to put the genie back in the bottle, you know, before we even increase further to other foreign nationals, that the scale means that, you know, the amount of volume that's going to come in means that we have to have in place at the border capacity to handle increased volume of travellers. So that's worrying. We're dispensing with testing because it's inconvenient. It's going to slow people down. The government's policies on Monday are actually running against science. They're running against even the expert [unintelligible] panel that advised a certain amount of testing, certainly allow fully vaccinated American travellers to come in, but test them properly. And we just have a chance each time to do better. And so I think we're doing is moving away from that where even, you know, making the borders even less likely to prevent virus importation.

LL: I'm wondering what you make of Professor Lee's concerns.

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, I would defer to the science and I think that having the right kind of testing at the border would make sense. I think, though, there was so much pressure on the Trudeau government to lift the restrictions, they are, you know, trying to balance the science with the very real politics of opening the border and allowing folks to come in if they are vaccinated and if they have, you know, a test, the PCR test within 72 hours. I you know, I think there was a balancing act that the Trudeau government undertook and and, you know, the results and we have the resulting policy.

LL: Speaking of the Trudeau government, there's a lot of buzz that the federal election could be called here very soon. And some commentators are saying that rushing to reopen the border to Americans was a political decision by the Trudeau government. What do you think?

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: I think there's some truth to that. I mean, look, all our politicians respond to their domestic constituencies, and I think that the Trudeau government was not going to do anything to jeopardise the way that it was perceived as handling the pandemic. I think those same optics are taking place in the United States. The Bidon administration doesn't want to do anything that would look as if, you know, they are, you know, acting in a sort of free wheeling capacity and, you know, in a way that would open them up to criticism about the way that they're handling the pandemic. So I do think that there is some truth to those to that perspective.

LL: But some people might be confused why it is as big a deal for President Biden given the high vaccination rates in Canada. Why would he be so reluctant to open the border to Canadians?

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, for those of us who are observers of the Canada U.S. relationship or for, you know, those of us who live and work on the border, which, by the way, is about 80 percent of the Canadian population, it does seem a little odd that the Biden administration is not listing the nonessential border restrictions. But if you take a step back and look at the fact that the United States has two borders, right. Obviously the northern border with Canada and the southern border with Mexico, and you consider the fact that the nonessential border restrictions were put in place simultaneously at both borders in March of 2020. From a policy perspective, having some sort of coordinated approach to lift those restrictions does have- you know, there is a rationale there. And I think that, you know, there are some folks in some quarters of the administration who would like to see restrictions lifted simultaneously at both borders. So I think I think that perspective, along with the fact that the Delta variant is strengthening in the United States, has given the Biden administration pause.

LL: And I think one of the other things we're hearing about the delay in a decision is a simple matter of bureaucracy. There are a lot of agencies involved in the issues surrounding the borders.

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Well, there are a lot of agencies involved. You know, historically, there have been a lot of agencies involved. And now, in addition to the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security, you also have the CDC. You have an agency that has to incorporate public health protocols into that, you know, security trade mix that has historically, at least since 9/11, defined border relationships or border relationship between Canada and the United States. So there is, you know, as my colleague Laura Troutman out at the Border Policy Institute in west Western Washington University has said there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen and there's another cook that's been added to the mix.

LL: So just just very briefly, do you think the time line to open the border on August 21st to Canadians going to the U.S. is realistic?

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: I would not be surprised if the Delta variant continues to spread in the United States, if we do not have that under control, or if the perception is that we don't have that under control, unfortunately, I would not be surprised if the United States extended the nonessential travel restrictions another month. I think until there is a bi lateral plan in place that we will continue to see Canada and the U.S. move at a different pace and really take into account their domestic constituency when thinking about the border.

LL: Thank you so much for your time this morning.

KATHRYN BRYK FRIEDMAN: Oh, thank you, Laura.

LL: Kathryn Bryk Friedman is a U.S. Canada specialist with the Woodrow Wilson Centre's Canada Institute and we reached her in Buffalo. Now, whether you're patiently waiting to cross or feeling deceived by border rules, hopefully you can find a little joy and peace with the queen of soul. This morning, here's Aretha Franklin with her rendition of Border Song.

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[Song]

LL: That is Aretha Franklin with her version of Border Song, originally recorded by Elton John. Well, coming up after your regional update, we continue to bring you brainwashed, the CBC podcast that puts the CIA sketchy past under a microscope. Episode five coming your way in 90 seconds. I'm Laura Lynch. You're listening to The Current.

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Episode 5 of CBC podcast Brainwashed

LL: 'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current. This week, we're continuing the original CBC podcast, Brainwashed with Michelle Shephard and previous episodes, we heard that patients at Montreal's Allan Memorial Hospital unwittingly endured life altering mind control experiments and that those experiments were part of the CIA's covert project into brainwashing, even though it became clear the torturous experiments didn't work the techniques and evolved and Americans continued to use them in the era that followed the September 11th, 2001, attacks.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: On an island, with nowhere to go, playing all the iguana hits, it’s AFN Radio GTMO.

Stephen Xenakis: The five defendants all sit on the lefthand side. And they’re in these rows respective tables with their attorneys, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the first row... Michelle Shephard: It’s January 2020, on the US Naval Station Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in a makeshift courtroom, where the five alleged conspirators of the 9/11 attacks are on trial. Sound clip: [Stephen Xenakis] And this was a particularly tense week because Mitchell was going to testify about his activity. And it was going to bring out very vividly what, in fact, had occurred when these defendants were in the black sites.

Carol Rosenberg: It’s sort of interesting because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed didn’t react. We all went there, held our breath wanting to see what would happen.

James Connell: Dr. Mitchell seemed to focus on expressions on the defendants’ faces and whether someone was looking at him funny. You know, it was clear that they had a very odd connection.

Carol Rosenberg: This was the first time that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was sitting there in the company of the man who waterboarded him. And it was Dr. Mitchell, the interrogator, who is forced to answer the questions. It wasn’t violent, it wasn’t physical, it wasn’t threatening. But as much as Mitchell tried to be in control, it was the defense lawyers who asked the questions and he had to answer them. And it was a real kind of surreal tablesturn moment.

Michelle Shephard: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are the two psychologists who were paid more than $80 million by the CIA to come up with an interrogation program for high profile, waronterror captives. This was the first time Mitchell and Jesson were forced to testify about the methods they devised, the enhanced interrogation techniques, the EITs, waterboarding, keeping people awake for days on end, shackling, confinement boxes, extreme temperatures, sounds and pain. They were experiments, really, on how to make people do what you want them to do, make them talk. You could almost think of it as a form of mind control. But most just call it for what it is, torture. I’m Michelle Shephard, and this is Brainwashed, Episode Five: We Tortured Some Folks.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama: Good afternoon, everybody. Happy Friday. I thought I’d take some questions, but first, let me say a few words about the economy.

Michelle Shephard: That’s Obama, former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2014, standing before the White House Press Corp.

Barack Obama: So with that, I’ll take a couple questions.

Michelle Shephard: Just days after President Obama came to power, he quickly dismantled some of the post9/11 measures brought in by his predecessor, George W. Bush. He shut down the network of secret CIA prisons, known as black sites, and abolished the use of the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, the EIT program that Jessen and Mitchell developed. But by 2014, his presidential honeymoon was over. Guantanamo was still open, despite his pledge to shut it down, and he was facing questions about the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s actions. An investigation into exactly what happened to those CIA captives.

Barack Obama: The RDI report has been transmitted, the declassified version that will be released at the pleasure of the Senate committee...

Michelle Shephard: The RDI report. The CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program.

President Barack Obama: 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. Michelle Shephard: We tortured some folks.

Barack Obama: It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.

Michelle Shephard: Obama’s narrative was widely accepted. This was an aberration, something so extreme, due to extreme times. That’s how these incredibly violent, new, interrogation methods, the EITs were invented. When we started this podcast, I knew about post9/11 policies. I’d reported on them for years, been to Guantanamo a couple dozen times. And while I knew the vague outlines of MKUltra, and the CIA’s involvement in foreign conflicts, I had no idea of the direct correlation to modernday torture. That what took place at the Black Sites and Guantanamo after the September 11, 2001 attacks, it could be traced back more than half a century earlier, to the start of the Cold War, to MKUltra, and to the Allan in Montreal. This wasn’t new. Sound Clip: [James Connell] My name is James Connell. And I am learned counsel for the defense team of Ammar alBaluchi as part of the Military Commissions Defense Organization working in the United States Military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Michelle Shephard: He’s an experienced death penalty lawyer. Which is required in capital cases.

James Connell: I have a little disclaimer that I have to give at the beginning, and I know that it never gets picked up verbatim, but that’s fine, but the disclaimer is that although I am paid by the United States Department of Defense, I’m not speaking on behalf of the Department of Defense, and that nothing I’m about to say in this interview is based on classified information.

Michelle Shephard: James Connell has top secret security clearance, which means he knows more than he can say. As a Guantanamo defense attorney, he’s fighting to keep his client from being sentenced to death. Not many people would have sympathy for his client or the four other men accused of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. But this trial is actually less about them. Because for Connell to most effectively defend Al Baluchi, he actually has to prosecute the actions of the state. In other words, prove that the CIA tortured his client while in custody. And to prove that, he’s had to go back in time.

James Connell: Before I started the case, I had no idea of how much the United States had grappled with the issue of how to make people do what someone wanted them to do. The amount of money and effort that went in to what the CIA called brainwashing is astonishing. That story really begins with the Korean War, because in the Korean War the North Koreans and Chinese backers used techniques not all that sophisticated to get US service members to say a lot of things that they wanted them to say. And that was around the same time that director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, in 1953 popularized the word brainwashing in the United States. He gave a speech at Princeton in which he described a process by which the Chinese could brainwash people.

Allen Dulles: They took our boys and brainwashed them and had them film there so that they would give out the most extraordinary lies. I have no doubt myself. I mean, we’ve never had any guinea pigs. We can’t try this thing out. We’ve just deductive reasoning. They have had in their slave camps, in their prison camps, they have had an indefinite number of people on whom they can try out all these techniques. And they are so many years ahead of us in all that, I mean, there’s no comparison. Michelle Shephard: As the CIA’s director was publicly discussing communist brainwashing, lamenting the fact that the US didn’t have human guinea pigs, the CIA was secretly launching MKUltra, a program that essentially would give them human guinea pigs: Prisoners, clients of sex workers, even their own agency staff, and of course, the psychiatric patients at The Allan. The CIA never did learn how to brainwash people. And here’s the thing, neither did the communist governments. When scientists actually studied the American POWs returning from the Korean War, they discovered a far more simple explanation for all the strange behavior. The men had been tortured. So the US Air Force created a program to better prepare their forces should they become prisoners of war. It was called SERE.

James Connell: That story really begins with the creation of the SERE program.

Michelle Shephard: That stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

James Connell: The program of how to resist interrogation... Michelle Shephard: The first SERE students were American pilots. After the Vietnam War, soldiers and sailors also underwent the training. Today, every branch of the military has its own program and most of the curriculum remains classified. The idea behind SERE is that you expose your troops to horrible treatment in a controlled environment so that if they are captured and tortured, they’ll be better equipped to endure the abuse. But while the military was developing their internal SERE program to build defenses against interrogations and torture, the CIA was creating its own manual for how to conduct interrogations using torture. Remember Sydney Gottlieb, the guy who ran MKUltra?

Stephen Kinzer: Gottlieb’s research produced some written observations, some reports that were kept within the CIA about how do you destroy a person? How do you interrogate a person? How can you make a prisoner dependent on the interrogator?

Michelle Shephard: This is Stephen Kinzer, who wrote the book on Gottleib calling him the “Poisoner in Chief.”

Stephen Kinzer: He had so much experience with the hundreds of expendables that he experimented to death. So he wrote up some guidelines for how to do this.

Michelle Shephard: These secret CIA guidelines would evolve into other manuals that would be circulated within the agency and beyond. These manuals were used throughout Latin America in the 70’s and 80’s.

Nestor Fantini: When they arrested me and they took me to the departmento informacion, I was there, tortured basically during the first three days. They will use they traditional electric shock. They will put it in different parts of my body.

Marthat Moore: Maria says, her torturers were university educated and their methods more sophisticated. They not only used electrical shocks, but also simulated the voices of her family on tape. Sound clip: [Maria] They were working with electricity. And they play with my body and my mind.

Marthat Moore: They were doctors, some of them psychiatrists, who not only used electricity, but also tried to brainwash her. Their knowledge of the body and the mind made them both effective and cruel torturers.

Michelle Shephard: The CIA’s involvement in this torture was finally revealed by a “Baltimore Sun” investigation. The newspaper found that the CIA had been training Honduran military forces accused of kidnapping, torture and murder. For three years “The Baltimore Sun” fought to have the CIA’s training manuals declassified under a freedom of information request. Only after the paper threatened to sue the agency, did the CIA turn over the redacted documents, in 1997. Two manuals were released, a 1983 handbook given the beautifully bureaucratic title “The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual.” And another written in the early 1960s just as MKUltra was winding down. Sou

Nestor Fantini: The socalled “Kubark Assassination Manual,” Kubark being the CIA’s cryptonym for itself... Michelle Shephard: The official name for the manual was “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation.” Over 128 pages, the manual details suggested interrogation methods. The principal techniques include: Deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, pain, hypnosis and narcosis. It includes references to, quote, “a number of experiments at McGill University” with long sections devoted to sensory deprivation. The core of the manual directly relies on Dr. Ewen Cameron’s work at McGill and his theory that to make a mind more malleable you need to break it down to an infantile state. The prisoners must essentially be depatterend so they would look to their interrogator as a father figure.

Stephen Kinzer: Those torture techniques that we taught to secret police forces in Latin America had their roots back in the Gotlieb era. Michelle Shephard: Now, the pattern was clear. The MKUltra experiments evolved into interrogation techniques in Kubark, which then were updated and used in the “Human Resource Exploitation Manual.” Call it brainwashing or mind control, if you want, but achieving psychological dependence, essentially through torture, is the consistent directive.

Stephen Kinzer: And finally, after 9/11, when the United States set up Guantanamo and its other network of secret prisons around the world, what kinds of techniques could be used? What should CIA officers do in those prisons? They again reached back to Gottlieb’s research and the manuals and the techniques that have been used at Guantanamo and at those secret torture bases that the US established around the world are also drawn directly from Gottlieb’s research. So he’s the beginning of all the CIA’s research in how to control prisoners, how to destroy their minds, and how to make people you’re interrogating feel they have no connection with the outside world and therefore, they have to do what you tell them.

Carol Rosenberg: OK. We can do this. Michelle Shephard: It feels weird to get you to formally introduce yourself, but go for it.

Carol Rosenberg: Well, my name is Carol Rosenberg.

Michelle Shephard: Carol Rosenberg is a good friend of mine.

Carol Rosenberg: I’m a reporter with “The New York Times.” And that’s been true for a year now. And before that, I was, for many years, a reporter with “The Miami Herald,” starting in 1990. And I covered Guantanamo Bay, the place, the policy, the prison, and stuff related to detainees and particularly the trials these days that are going on down there.

Michelle Shephard: I met Carol in Guantanamo. And for years we shared a tent with three other female journalists on a strip of asphalt in an area the US military called Camp Justice. I can’t praise Carol’s dogged determination enough. In the press corps, we call her the Dean. And no one knows more about Guantanamo than Carol.

Carol Rosenberg: Where do you want to begin? It really begins in 1990 at Baghdad. But I don’t know that you want to start there.

Michelle Shephard: I do want to start there. Go back there. Yeah. Carol has had a long and illustrious career as a journalist. Carol Rosenberg: So it starts in the Middle East when I was a Middle East correspondent. And in in the early 90s, the US State Department decided to cut off relations with Sudan. And I had a tip that this was coming. They were gonna put them on the sponsors of terror list. And I went over to write about this place where kind of all of the radical leaders and movements had gathered. Hezbollah was there, Hamas was there, I think Carlos the Jackal was there in Khartoum. And there was a guy named Osama bin Laden. And I actually paid no attention to him because I thought he was nobody. And when September 11th happened, I was home on Miami Beach in my house. You want this whole story, Michelle? Michelle Shephard: I do. Keep going.

Carol Rosenberg: I jumped in my car and drove to the Herald. And one of our two managing editors was standing there. And because I was supposed to be this expert on terrorism. She said, well, who did this? And I said, I guess if you believe what we’ve been hearing, Osama bin Laden, alQaida. The planes resumed about five days later. And they sent me off to the Middle East. And then we started hearing that they might want to put this, some kind of prison for some kind of prisoners related to the war in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo.

Michelle Shephard: By now it’s the end of December, 2001. And then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, announced that captives would be going to Guantanamo.

Donald Rumsfeld: I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the leastworst place we could have selected.

Michelle Shephard: And soon after Carol was on a US military plane to Cuba. Carol Rosenberg: Which was January 8th. They’d brought in 19 reporters and there was no flight off. So, we ended up spending one or two nights. Then, we were supposed to leave before. And suddenly the CNN reporter got word that prisoners were on their way to Guantanamo. And this was as much a surprise to people at Guantanamo, I think, as it was to us. And the military tried to rush off the base. I learned a lot about how to dig in and stay from the CNN reporter, who at one point hid in the bathroom, which I would not have done, but about how just because they tell you have to go, you try to negotiate to stay.

Michelle Shephard: The journalists weren’t leaving. Not when a planeload of captives was on the way. Carol Rosenberg: American gunboats were off the coast. Marines were arrayed around the airstrip and the cargo plane from the American air force came in and landed at Gitmo, and one by one, they pulled off 20 men in orange jumpsuits with goggles on their face and blue surgical masks in their mouths and caps on their head and mittens taped to their hands, which were shackled together and shuffled them off that plane in these tight little leg shackles. They were coming from icecold Afghanistan. It was winter there. They’d been in an icecold cargo plane. They hit the heat in Guantanamo and they collapsed, one by one on their knees to the ground as they were being held by the Marines. They got put on a bus, shackled to the floor of a white school bus, were driven onto a ferry, went across the bay, drove down Sherman Avenue, passed the movie theater, the neighborhoods, the McDonald’s, to the other end of Guantanamo Bay and were put into cages that looked like kennels in what was called Camp Xray. And that day, January 11th, 2002, the Guantanamo Detention Center was born. Michelle Shephard: That was what the public was allowed to see that day or rather, what the journalists were allowed to record for the public through their words. No photos or videos were allowed. And they certainly couldn’t witness what went on with the prisoners once they were behind closed doors in Guantanamo...let alone what was happening elsewhere.

Carol Rosenberg: They told us we were getting the worst of the worst. And that became sort of the slogan and the idea that the eventual 779 people who passed through Guantanamo were the worst of the worst. But the truth of the matter is, is for the first five years of Guantanamo from 2002 until September 2006, they weren’t the worst of the worst. They, US military and the US government, and the US intelligence agencies, the FBI and the CIA, created a secret program. The men who they thought were the highvalue captives, that’s what they called them, were taken to a secret set of prisons run by the CIA around the world. Michelle Shephard: So, while reporters were trying to figure the quagmire that was Guantanamo, there were prisoners no one even knew about, these socalled highvalue detainees who had disappeared into the black sites. Carol Rosenberg: What went on in the black sites of the CIA was that experiment on steroids, because nobody knew about it. The US didn’t acknowledge it.

Michelle Shephard: To understand how this happened and what went on in these CIA black sites, we have to go back to...test case number one. This is when the CIA, consulted with psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, and the socalled enhanced interrogation techniques were developed. The CIA wanted answers fast from a detainee known as Abu Zubaydah. And they figured these two psychologists could help. Abu Zubaydah was suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda and having information about impending attacks. He was picked up in Pakistan in 2002, but taken to a CIA secret prison.

Carol Rosenberg: By the time Mitchell and Jessen get called by the CIA, they have this man named Abu Zubaida in Thailand. And the FBI has been interrogating him and trying to use what they say was rapportbuilding coupled with some certainly isolation techniques and other things. And the CIA was impatient and didn’t think that the FBI was working and they decided to, you know, I think the quote is “take the gloves off,” and design a different program that would dismantle these people’s self-esteem in a way, and get them to spill everything they knew. And so these two men get hired, first as consultants charged with coming up with these interrogation techniques. Mitchell says they were in Washington, I believe, and they sat in a room and they typed up a list of them. And they included things like short shackling, sleep deprivation, confining people to a cramped box, waterboarding, dietary manipulation. They came up with a list of these things.

Michelle Shephard: The RDI report, the one Obama was talking about at the press conference, the one that details what happened to Abu Zubaydah and 118 other detainees in CIA custody. It’s more than 6,700 pages long. And only 549 of those pages are public in an executive summary. And even those ones, are censored. Mitchell and Jesson are mentioned in the report under pseudonyms. Quote “Neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of Al Qaeda, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise.” The only experience they could draw upon, was from their involvement with the Air Force SERE program and the CIA”s past experiments. But as noted in the Senate’s report, even the CIA knew coercive interrogations didn’t work. MKUltra was a failure. KUBARK and “The Human Resource Exploitation Manual” just left a litany of abused and broken prisoners. The CIA’s Inspector General even once recommended that an unidentified CIA agent who was involved in interrogations in Latin America in the 1980s be admonished for his interrogation techniques. After September 11, 2001, attacks, that same agent was put in charge of interrogations for post9/11 captives.

Stephen Xenakis: First, I think it’s important that Mitchell and Jessen really were not the wizards that designed and imagined the program. I do think that they were used by the authorities above them in the agency and probably the White House to come up with something like this.

Michelle Shephard: This is retired Army General Stephen Xenakis. He’s a psychiatrist who specializes in PTSD, and has worked extensively both with soldiers and veterans, and the captives at Guantanamo. I’ve known him for years.

Stephen Xenakis: But they came up with these ideas. I think that essentially what they based their understanding was bad science, completely not validated in any way. There’s no reason to think that it would have any positive effect to be useful.

Michelle Shephard: When you say bad science. What do you mean? What was it drawing on? What other experiments do you think that they might have borrowed from?

Stephen Xenakis: Well, there actually had been never any studies to show that good intelligence was retrieved from using these kinds of tactics or techniques. I, in fact, in the “70s interviewed a number of POWs coming out of Vietnam that they didn’t produce good information when they were under high duress when they were tortured. They just said what they needed to say to stop it.

Michelle Shephard: Stephen Xenakis was among the early whistleblowers questioning the abusive interrogations both in his capacity as a Retired General and a doctor. In 2005, he wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post and immediately felt the backlash.

Stephen Xenakis: I felt shunned. And I called a number of my colleagues, two and three stars, and these were former surgeons general of the Army and for the other services. And they told me very pointedly, they said, Steve, I think you’re wrong. I think that we don’t get involved. We don’t make those decisions. And if our, if other senior people tell us that that’s what’s their policies and procedures, we’re going to support and follow it. And my response was, we have our own ethics codes. I mean, we’re expected to be independent professionals. People look to us, particularly as clinicians. You know, when we wear the white coats to abide by those codes.

Michelle Shephard: So, there was basically no science backing the effectiveness of these new techniques, which doctors and psychologists were heavily involved in, and yet precious few in the medical community objected. Why?

Stephen Xenakis: Well, I think fear is at the core. I felt that from the beginning. And I remember telling my family members that we don’t want to get into a climate like we had in the ‘50s. You know, I was in grade school and in junior high school in the ‘50s. I remember all of that activity. And there was a communist behind every bush. And the bomb might come off, and we had to dive under our desks and people were building shelters. What happens is in these circumstances, and I really feel it strongly now, is that fear is exploited. And particularly in this situation where we had not adequately prepared for this kind of terrorist threat. We were still thinking along the kinds of engagements that had a Cold War element to them. I felt that the responsibility of our political leadership was to calm people, not to leverage it.

Michelle Shephard: James Connell, the Guantanamo defense attorney, takes it a step further.

James Connell: Fear drives hate. And one of the things that we saw in the policy process leading up to the decision to use torture was how much people were blinded by fear and hate. In that situation asking the question of, hey, is there any empirical support for this or hey, is this what the SERE techniques were designed for? Or, hey, didn’t we try this once before and it was a failure? Those kinds of reasonable questions come to be perceived as weakness. I think that nobody wanted to ask the question of is it actually going to work to torture people in the sense of generating good information? Because they didn’t want to be seen as weak.

Michelle Shephard: And like Dr. Xenakis, he believes that these policies were not just driven by Mitchell and Jesson or even a small political cabal.

James Connell: Torture is a bureaucracy. It takes not just, you know, a goodlooking actor with a gun and a man tied to a chair. I mean, somebody has to cook the food. Somebody has to take out the trash. Somebody has to check the prisoner to see if he has a temperature. Somebody has to say, yes, he’s not nearly dead yet, you can keep abusing him. In the black sites, there were both doctors and other kinds of health care professionals. One of the points that those who have testified publicly about the program have stressed is the involvement of physicians. The role of physicians varied. There was a role for physicians in actual abusive interrogations where, as in other countries, a physician looked at the person and said, stop or keep going. There was another role, which was more ordinary health care. Once a government adopts the reasoning of there are no limits, then really there are no limits. The professions get swept into the bureaucracy of torture just as much as trades do.

Michelle Shephard: There’s something about the involvement of doctors and psychologists, those in the medical profession who we rely on to keep us well, the whole Hippocratic Oath of “do no harm.” It just seems especially odious, when the military and medicine collide. The Nazi doctors and the need for the Nuremberg Code. Then Dr. Cameron’s experiments on unwitting patients. And no one in the medical profession questioned him at the time. And that led to other eras of torture under the Kubark Manual, or the 1980s in Latin America, to what followed 9/11. And those who objected, like Dr. Xenakis were shunned. Few would decry the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who does not dispute being an Al Qaeda leader, was tortured. But so were many others. And how do you justify sanctioned torture that took place in Gitmo and the Black Sites, in a court of law? James Mitchell was defiant, combative at times when he testified in Guantanamo and Jesson?

Carol Rosenberg: The thing I will never forget, the last day they got Bruce Jessen on the stand. Jessen comes in and sits down and he’s, like, Mr. Rogers, does that work?

Michelle Shephard: It definitely brings up a picture.

Carol Rosenberg: OK. So, you know, this man comes in. He comes off as very pleasant and genial, and he’s like Mr. Rogers. And he’s answering the questions. And he’s I mean, Mitchell is defensive for nine days and angry and hostile. And then in comes Jessen, who’s very mild mannered and in a completely different behavior, and he’s being questioned. And there’s a pause. And he looks over across this huge courtroom to the defendants who are maybe 30, 40, 50 feet away from him, depending on where they are in relationship to the witness stand. And he’s just remarks, “They’ve all grown up. They’ve just grown up. May I know who is who?” I remember, like, the air leaving my chest, like I was suffocating because it was such a strange moment. He somehow was portraying that these men that they were, like, children. They were his charges. They were his children. And now they’re all grown up and dressed like adults. And to me that is the moment that I will never forget.

Michelle Shephard: The 9/11 trial has been called the trial of the century, but it’s looking more like it’ll take a century to try. It has been nearly two decades since the attack, seven years since the men were arraigned. There is no end in sight. The full Senate RDI report remains classified. No one has been charged or successfully sued over abuses that occurred during interrogations. In fact, some have been promoted. Gina Haspel was a senior official overseeing the CIA”s enhanced interrogation program. She came to the secret Black Site in Thailand when just after test case number one, Abu Zubaydah, was tortured until he nearly died. She later helped destroy the almost 100 videotapes of his abuse. Abu Zubaydah never provided any actionable intelligence as a result of his torture. He is now indefinitely detained in Guantanamo. And Gina Haspel? In 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump appointed her as the CIA’s new leader. Without accountability, history does tend to repeat itself. And sometimes justice if it comes at all takes decades.

LL: That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Saturday Night Live star Cecily Strong will be speaking with Saroja Coelho [Sa-ROH-ja KWAY-lo] about her new book, This Will All Be Over Soon. It’s a collection of diary-like dispatches from a year spent grieving the loss of a close cousin and navigating life in a pandemic. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Tuesday 10 August, 2021 Full Transcript

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