Our guests are the author, a leading human rights lawyer and National Security scholar, litigate in one many highprofile cases including several of the landmark guantanamo cases and several others. Hes been working for the military Commission Defense organization. Michel paradis lectured at columbia law school, fellow at the center on National Security and hes a fordham law grad. Carol rosenberg will be talking to him about his book. She is an reporter for than york times working in collaboration with the polish privileges in. Shes been reporting in the u. S. , in the u. S. And at Guantanamo Bay since the day it opened on january 11, 2002. She started with the miami herald where before that she really reporting from middle east. She moved to the new york times. She has won many awards including the robert f. Kennedy journalism award, the aba silver gavel award and part of the miami herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news and 2001. Let me tell you the format. Michel and carol will talk and then i will come back on and i will post some questions. If you have any questions dont please feel free to put them in chat or if you prefer the q a, and i will get to as many as i can. So without further ado, michel, tyrrell, take it away. Thank you very much. Thank you. I think im going to talk about the book real quickly. So the story you tell start this way. America gets a very cruel sucker punch at pearl harbor on december 7, 1941. So pearl harbor attacks both galvanized and demoralize americans. They were angry, probably scared, and they wanted revenge. Four months later this scrappy bunch of pilots at the center of this story, the doolittle raiders, fly deep into japanese territory, dropped bombs on an ostensibly military target, and, or strategic targets, and most of them make it all the way to china, our ally, and then fdr is allowed to trumpet this victory. Close . Thats exactly right. Thats the doolittle raids in a nutshell. The story i have been covering in what seems like forever cocoas like this. In 2001, 19 hijackers in in a y cruel sucker punch attack the world trade center, the pentagon and crash a plane into a pennsylvania field, telling civilian targets. Four months later i watched a military cargo plane landed at guantanamo and dislodge 20 men in orange jumpsuits. And when the photos emerged it seems to reassure, meant to reassure americans that we got them. Thats the setup. In both cases there would be trials, trials of war crimes, questions about military tribunal justice and due process and the reliability of evidence leading to torture. My first question is, how in heavens name did you discover this story and what compelled you to tell it . So taking the second part first, i think what compelled me to tell it is exactly what you just said. And why, how i found the story was i was working in the department of defense in military commissions Defense Organization in 2007, and this is one mike mukasey just been nominated to be attorney general and the debate over the water getting torture was rekindled. We had heard a rumor about a case in which the United States have prosecuted to japanese for waterboarding, and that seemed relevant to the questions we were then confronting in 2007 and so we sent a marine captain to the archives to dig up the record which i dont think had been seen probably in 60 years at that point. A story about torture, it was a story about justice, it was a story about revenge, and i felt, you know, sitting there in 2007 i was reading this episode from 1945, i think, 46 where the United States prosecuting the japanese for doing all the things we were doing in the war on terrorism. And i, you know, i dont mean to be kind of naive about it, but it kind of hit me in the chest. I just had this sense of looking, you know, through 60 years of time and all of a sudden just seeing right where i was sitting at that very moment. I didnt write it right away, it was just this thing in the back of my mind that kind of gave context to all the work i ended up going on the guantanamo cases for a number of years after that. And then i decided, you know, in 2014 to try and make a book about it, and thats, thats how we got the book we have today. So for the people who are watching, ive been talking to miching now for year since 2007. His clients have included omar cat tar andal us inly. One is gone, one is convicted and is trying to overturn that conviction, and one is a pretrial proceeding which is a capital offense. And when i was talking to him about other things guantanamorelated, he was actually talking about this really weird, obscure episode, like world war ii japanese our raids far away air raids fair way. And i thought it was peculiar, and then i got the book this summer and i read it, and i got it. The way i read it, its divided into sort of three portions. The attack, the bombing run the first over sovereign japanese territory, pearl harbor, the First Response is pearl harbor. They did or did not strike civilians. Most made it across japan to allies, but the japanese captured some. Part two is this is the way i read it, military agents of the pilots including the waterboarding, the trial and the summary execution of some. I hope im not doing too much spoiler. No, no, this is all like in the first three chapter, so you cant spoil that. [laughter] the japanese said [inaudible] and then part three when we have maybe what you call victors justice, the americans recovered the surviving doolittle p. O. W. S who were held in dreadful detention conditions. Well worth reading in the book. He takes you there. And the United States puts the people who prosecuted the pilots on trial as war criminals. Okay. And the reason were having this conversation now is i remember calling michel over the summer and saying what struck me about the book is its written in the language of the military commission to describe what happened 80 years ago . Yeah, 75, 80 years ago now. 75, 80 years ago. So lets talk about that language. Okay. You call people highvalue detainees in this book. Who are they . So i think they called them the highest value detainees, specifically. That was a deliberate language choice, im not being cloy, and those were the doolittle raiders. You describe the doolittle raid, i think accurately, in the terms of the american inception which was, in some ways, a lot likely it. I never made that connection, that you have this four months go by, and make america feel better, right . Yeah. And that was by design, right . The doolittle raids had virtually e no strategic significance. It ended up having far more strategic significance for the japanese, and its precisely because one of the things i tried to do in this book for reasons we can get into, but i just kind of became fascinated by was the perspective of the japanese on the do little raiders doolittle raiders. And, you know, as much as i think you can sort of look at the do little raid as our strike back, our celebration of our opportunity to show were in this war to win it. The doolittle raid was 9 11 for the japanese. Its the first time in its recorded history that japan is ever successfully attacked from abroad, at least on its mainland. It is, you know, immediately this moment of fear, of uncertainty, of terror. The basic assumptions of japanese life gets, you know, upended all at once. Humility. Thats right. Its a profound sense of vulnerability and also outrage are. We can talk sort of about how the japanese characterize the attack, but they called it a terror raid. And what they focused on was not the bombing of the mitsubishi plant or the oil tankers. They focused on the civilians killed in the context of the doolittle raid. To them,es it was this great atrocity. They called it an act of terrorism. And so for them when they captured the doolittle raiders, they had, essentially, their own guantanamo almost four months later. There seems to be a symmetry to all of this. Because when they capture the doolittle raiders and they to torture them, and theres this debate about, essentially, what to do with them, it exposes all of the challenges that we faced in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 and that really continues to this day over, you know, to what extent do we act on revenge, do we act on the ability to show our power over our prisoners versus our ideals. And i think one of the things that surprised me and its probably because i was not a japan historian before working on this book is japan conceived of itself as an incredibly progressive, liberal society. They were the first country to sign the geneva conventions of 1929. And and so they had prohibited torture at the end of the 19th century, and can they almost prohibited the death messaging few as part of this penalty as part of this massive way of thinking. So when this happened, they kind of reaccelerate to the same forms of brutality for almost exactly the same reasons, with the same excuses that we did, throwing out values that they claim to hold just as dear as we did. And that, to me, was just an incredibly compelling parallel between the two. And i think its just as important to understand the do little raid as japans 9 11 in understanding how and why they did what they did. And theyre highvalue detainees because theyre the first. Yeah. The they werent the first prisoners of the japanese by any stretch of the imagination. Japan had been waging war for five months, but they are the first people that the japanese population u. S. Cares about who these itself cares about who these people are. Theyre not just combatants in the philippines or in singapore. These are the people who perpetrated the attack against us that, you know, that sort of created this real turning point in our own sense of, you know, national identity, our own sense of vulnerability. And so they became really, you know, the very, very highest levels of the japanese government, the doolittle raiders were a political issue. And thats because they had such high value to japan. On page 22 you call the japanese interrogations enhanced. But can you describe what happened to the doolittleing raiders . Yeah. I do describe it and, again, these are somewhat coy word choices. This is not a book about the war on terrorism, i dont draw these parallels out directly. Youre really the first person to really unpack all of them, im sure. But i did choose language in certain parts of the book quite precisely to cause the reader to reflect upon the parallels that i was seeing as i wrote it. And so the torture enhanced interrogation that the japanese subjected the doolittle raiders to was waterboarding, as you mentioned, but also sleep deprivation, what we would call stress positions today, protracted solitary confinement and then other forms of, you know, really incredible brutality that look incredibly familiar to what the United States was responsible for doing in the immediate aftermath of september 11th. And i think one of the things that was poignant to me about that is what i talked about when i first read this in 2007, is, you know, again, i kind of grew up in a very sort of it was very traditional, appalachian pennsylvania view of america and american history. My grandfather never drove a japanese car x. So to see the United States behaving as the Imperial Japanese was just such a jarring moment in thinking about what the country, what road the country had gone down. And when you get down even to, again, the precise methods of torture being rereflected back in modern day, it was really just stunning. It was really stunning to me. I mean, i dont think its to vrt. Im not suggesting that this is, you know, an overt reasons to guantanamo, buts it is this language of today x thats how we talk about it. Yep. And so when i read it, when people read it, i think they see it. Other people, i imagine, read it and dont even recognize the language. Yeah, i think thats probably true. Most of my readers who have written to me anyway really do see it as sort of a traditional world war ii story legal thriller. And that was my intent too. I didnt want to, you know, i didnt want to make it a polemic, and its not. I wanted to actually try and wrestle with the am by guy fews that i have wrestled with in my career in a way that was, you know, kind of honest. You know, i find, you know, there are two kinds of histories that are very popular and get wide audiences. One is the sort of fair true e tale history which were all quite familiar with. You know, look at a michael bay movie, and youre going to see a fairy tale history. But theres also this policemen call history where polemical history where everything the United States does is shiing t, and its just sort of an expose kind of history thats tempting to expose the worst about, you know, the United States or any other country thats being written about. And i just find both of those kind of naive. And i think its naive in our own time as well to look at these issues with this hardedged, black and white with understanding. I think, you know, good people dod bad things, and they do it for good or at least understandable reasons. And the same but i think bad people do good things for understandable reasons. This book was, in a way, an opportunity for me to kind of wrestle with a lot of that. We had the distance, at least, of not having to think about the contemporary issues that were dealing with, but the distance of thinking about it as, you know, as list as history. But you do work at guantanamo on cases involving torture. And is so without risking anybodys security or clearance finish. Finish yeah. Some of it sounds like its ripped from the pages of a senate report. Well, t not ripped from the senate. This book, one thing ill highlight for readers, you know, this book, i think, is about 1700 footnotes. A little more than that, actually. So this is all this is a history. And its more like sort of the narrative, again, the language. I think, again, im not going to say of course because these are, you know, so, for example ill choose a language, ill point out a language choice that i made quite consciously. And i did this across the book and not just about questions of torture. I used modern language including referring to something as beijing, right . Because i find readers are going to get confused if im using this archaic language. But one place was the grews use of the great waterboard which was not the current phrase in the 1940s. The phrase used was the water cure. There were a couple other, water torture, drip torture, but the wart cure was probably the most common. Waterboarding really doesnt come back to american parlance until [inaudible] and so choosing to use the word waterboarding as opposed to water cure was, again, a conscious choice to saw, look, this is the same thing. And we shouldnt get lost many our own euphemisms or in the euphemisms of the past where they actually dont exist. So, yeah, i did do that deliberately. And i did that, i think, because doing it because i dont think i wanted to mislead the reader, i wanted to make what was being talk about as clear as a possible. And i think often when history tends to use archaic hedge or language of the period, its just lost on the reader. For the same reason, ill point this out, is like the 1940s, especially the period im writing about, had a lot of very casual racism in it. And so, you know, the word jap comes out of everybodys mouth without even thinking about it. Newspaper headlines high and low. And i had, i kind of made the conscious choice to restrain my use of quotations in which that was included because to a modern reader its extremely jarring. You sort of make judgments about people using it that, i think, are misleading and there is an uncomfortable use of it in the book. There is. There are a few, in fact. And those were deliberate choices as well. You know, i use i did choose language very carefully because i wanted to convey the reality of the situation. I wanted to make it a good yarn, too, again, i wanted people to enjoy what they were reading. But in certain language white houses, particularly things, as you said, there are a couple one or two uses of the word jap in the book. Those were very specific choices because i thought at those moments using that word was necessary to convey e things like the alienation, right . The sense of alienness and the sort of racial dynamic that were actually at play and were at front of mind. But putting, you know, using the word jap in every instance in which i could have based on the quotes i was using, it would have dulled you to those moments and also been distracting because it means Something Different today. And so who were the war criminals in this book . Well, thats a great question. Who are the war criminals. There are stories, right . Yeah. So there are two war crimes trials in this book. One is the war crimes trial that the japanese conducted of the doolittle raiders which is but any measure a hoe trial. Its done in you were an hour. Everyone gets the Death Penalty as expected and so, you know, the japanese accused the do little raiders of being war criminals, convicted them and executed them. And the second part of the story is the United States finding the japanese who conducted that trial and accusing them of being war criminals for, essentially, conducting an unfair trial. And so what ends up happening in 1946 is the trial of a trial. So who are the war criminals in this book . You know, i dont know id be reticent to answer that question because once that question i want the question to actually hangover the book as people read it. Its one of the efforts i tried to, hope flu successfully hopefully successfully, to not present it as a fairy tale, but really to give you the perspective of all the various people involved so that you could wrestle with these questions in the same way, frankly, that i have over the past, you know, 15 years doing these guantanamo cases. These are hard questions. And anyone who says theyre not hard questions, im not saying tortures a hard question, im not. But when it comes to things like the responsibility, you know, victim status to be able to claim that you are a victim, these are incredibly broad questions, and theyre difficult. And they should be, because theyre real questions, their not fairy tale questions theyre not fairy tale questions. What are legitimate maybe legal targets in 1941, 42 . So the law, to be candid, was in flux at the time. There were efforts to create treaties about Aerial Combat in the 40s, but they never got off the ground, no pun intended. Sorry are about that. [laughter] the uted kingdom had taken United Kingdom had taken a progressive view of bomb population ares and the more you kill th