School, i thought with us security and he is a fordham law great. Carol rosenberg will be talking to him about his book, she is an awardwinning Senior Reporter for the New York Times working in collaboration with the pulitzer center. She has 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 were before that she was reporting from at least and moved recently to the New York Times. She has won many awards including the robert f. Kennedy journalism award, the aba silver gavel award and she was 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 that have come from the audience. Give any questions please feel free to put them in the chat or if you prefer the q a, and i will get as many as i can. Without further ado, michel, carol, take it away. Thank you very much. Thank you. I think im good to talk about the book real quickly. So the story you tell starts this way. Then america gets this very cruel sector punch at pearl harbor on december 7, 1941. Soearl harbor attacks both galvanize and demoralize americans. They were angry, probly scared, and they wanted revenge. Four months later this scrappy bunch of pilots at the center of the story, the doolittle raiders, fly deep into japanese territory, drop bombs on ostensibly military targets, or strategic tarts, and most of them make it all the way to china, our ally, and then fdr is allowed to trumpet this victory. Close . As exactly right. Thats the doolittle raid in the nutshell. So the story ive been covering in what seems like to get foreverhosts like this. In 2001, 19 hijackers in a very cruel sector punch attack the world trade center, the pentagon, and crash a plane into a pennsylvania field killing civilian targets. Four months later i watch a militaryargo plane land at guantanamo and dislodge 20 men in orange jumpsuits,nd when the photos emerge, it seems to reassure, its meant to reassure americans thate got them. Thats the setup. In both cases there would be trials, trials about war crimes, questions about military tribunal justice and due process, and the reliability of evidence leading to torture. So my first question is, how in heavens name did you discover this story . So taking the second part first, i think what compelled me to tell is exactly what you just said. How i found the story was, i was working in the department of defense in the military coission Defense Organization in 2007, and this is when mike mukasey had just been nominated to be the attorney general and the debate over is watboarding torture had been rekindled. We heard a rumor about a case in which we the United States had prosecuted the japanese for waterboarding and that seemed obviously relevant to the qutions we were then confronted in 2007. We sent a young marine captain out of National Archives to dig up the record, which i dont think had been seen probably in 60 years. She came back on one rainy day i finally cracked it open and read it and is the story you just described, the story of the doolittle raid, which is probably the mt celebrated operation of world war ii at least for the people who lived through world war ii. It was a story abo torture compassed about justice, revenge. I felt sittinghere in 2007 i was reading this episode from 1945, and i think 46, where the United States is prosecuting the japanese for doing all the things we were doing in the war on terrorism. I dont mean to be kind of naive or pollyannaish about it but it kind of hit me in the chest. I just had the sense of looking through 60 60 years of time anl of a sudden right where im sitting at that moment. I didnt write it right away. This thingn the back of my mind kind of give context of the work i ended up doing on the guantanamo cases a number of years after that. And then i decided in 2014 to try and make a book about it, and thats have howhey got thek we have to take. So for the people watching ive been talking to michel now for years about guantanamo. Since 2007, i dont doubt. Since 2007. They included omar, ali, and [inaudible] one is gone, when is convicted and he is trying to overturn that conviction, and one is in a pretrial proceeding which is a capital offense. And when i would talk to him amongst other things guantanamo related, he would talk about this really obscure episode, like world war ii, japanese air raids, far away. I tught it was kind of peculiar and then against the book this summer and i read it and i got it. The way i read this books its the fight into three. The attack, the doolittle raiders went on a bombing run, the first overt sovereign japanese territory since pearl harbor, the First Response over thei territories since pearl harbor, they did or did not strike civilians. Most made it across japan to china, telecom but the japanese captured some of them. Part two is, this is what i read, interrogations of the captured pilots including their waterboarding, their trial and the summary execution of some. I hope im not doing too much of a spoiler. This is all like in the first three chapters so you cant spoil any of that. The japanese said the doolittle raiders where wor part three after the u. S. Wins the war, we have maybe what you call victors justice, the americans may cover the surviving doolittle pows who held in dreadful dention conditions. Well worth reading the book. It takes you there. The United States puts the peop who prosecute the pilots on trial as war criminals. And the reason for having this conversation that is i remember calling michel over the summer and saying what struck me about the book is its written in the length of the military coission come to describe what happened 80 years ago . Seventyfive, 80 years a. Seventyfive, 80 years ago. Lets lets talk about that language. You call people highvalue detainees in this book. Who are they . I think i called up in the highest value detainee specifically but that was a deliberate language of choice. Im not being coy. Those were the doolittle raiders. You describe the dlittle raid i think accurately in the terms of the american perception, which wasnt so much result like as you said helping i never made that connection to you just did. You have these four muscovite d american shows it can fight back but that the sort of speed is both episode seem to make america feel better, right . That was by design. The doolittle raid had virtually no strategic significance. It was not intended to happen. If you are more strategic difference for the japanese precisely because one of the things i cant do in this book for reasons we can get into butt i just kind of became fascinated by, was the perspective of the japase on the doolittle raiders. As much as i think you can look at the doolittle raid as our strike back him our celebration opportunity to show were in this war to win it. The doolittle raid was 9 11. It was the firstime in its recorded history that japans ever successfully attack from abroad at least on the mainld. It is immediately thi moment of fear, of uncertainty, of terror, these bic assumption of japanese life upended all at once. This profound sense of vulnerability and alsoutrage. We can talk about how the japanese characterize the attack, but they called it at terror raid. What they focused on was not the bombing of the mitsubishi plant or the oil tankers. They focus on the civilians killedn the context of the doolittle raid. Two then it was this great atrocity. They called it guerrilla style eric. David recalled it an act o terrorism. For them when they captud the doolittle raiders, that essentially their own guantanamo almost four months later. There seems to be a symmetry to all of this. Because when they captured the doolittle raiders and tortured them and theres this debate about a sense of what to do with them, it exposes all of the challenges that we face in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 and really continue to this day over to what extent do we act on revenge . To act on the ability to show ou power over our prisoners, versus our ideals . On of the things that surprised me and this probably because i s not a japan historian before working on this book, in japan and seed itself as a progressive liberal society. Theyere the first country to sign the geneva conventions of 1929 and so they had prohibited torture at the end of the 19th century and theyll most prohibited the Death Penalty as part of this massive liberal revolution in their own thinking. So when the doolittle raid happens they kind of just revert to the same forms of brutality for almost exactly the same reasons and the same excuses that we did throwing at values they claim to just as dear as we did hear and that to me wishes incredibly compelling parallel between the two. I think its just as important to understand the doolittle raiders in japan to 9 11 and understanding how and why with the did. They are highvalue detainees because they are the first. They are not the first rishioners by the japanese by any stretch of the japanese. Japan has been waging this war at this point by mth but there the first marquis parishioners, the first people the japanese themselves, japanese population itself cares about who these people are. They are not just some combatants in the philippines or singapore. These are the people who perpetrated the attack against us that sort of created this real turning point in our own sense of National Identity or or own sense o vulnerability. They became really to the very, very highest levels of the japanese government, the doolittle raiders were a political issue. Thats because its such highvalue to japan. On page 22 you call these interrogations enhanced and then can you describe what happened to the doolittle raiders . Yeah. I do describe it. These are somewhat coy word choices. This is not a book about the war on terrorism over, dont call this pills out correctly. You were the first person to 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 i wrote it. The torture enhanced interrogation that the japanese subject of the doolittle raiders to was waterboarding as you mentioned. But also sleep deprivation of what we call stress positions today, protected soldier confinement and of the forms of really incredible brutality that looked incredibly familiar to what the United States was responsible for doing in the immediate aftermath of septembe. One of the things that was poignant to me about that is what i talk about when i first read this in 2007 is, again i grew up in a very sort of come very traditional appellation pennsylvania view of america and american history. My grandfather never drove a japanese car. So to see the United States behaving as the Imperial Japanese was such a jarring moment, been thinking about what the country come , wrote the coy had gone down. When you get that even to the precise methods of torture being reflected back in modern day, it was really just stunning. It was really stunning to me. I dont think it over. Im not suggesting this is an overt referen to guantanamo i did is the language of today and thats how we talk about it. When i read it and people have worked on this issue read it, i think they see. Of the people i imagine read it and dont even recognize the language. And i want to wrestle with the ambiguities that i have wrestled with in my career dealing with these issues in a way that was obvious. I find there are two kinds of history that are popular and get wide audiences was what is the fairytale history whicwe are all familiar with, the michael bay movie, but also the polar medical history, everything the United States does is shift. This expose kind of history that is attempting to expose the worst about the United States or any other country being written about. I find both of those naive. It is naive in our own time as well to look at tse issues with this hearted blackandwhite understanding. Good people do bad things and they do it for good or at least understandable reasons and bad people do good things for bad and understandable reasons. This book was in a way an opportunity for me to wrestle with a lot of that, with the distance at least of not having to think about the contemporary issues buthinking about it as history. You do work at guantanamo on cases involving torture. Without risking anybodys security clearance, some of it soun ripped from the pagesf senate report. One thing i will highlight your readers, 1700 footnotes, a little more th that. This is a history. The narrative, the length. I am not going say of course because these, i will choose i will point up a language choice that i made quite consciously. I did this across the book, not just about torture but modern language, referring to something as beijing or peking. Readers will get confused if i use archaic language but one place i d to think about that more carefully was the use of the phrase waterboarding which is not the current phrase used in the 1940s it was the water cure. There were a couple other, water torture, you name it, a couplexpressions, water care, waterboarding doesnt come back into american pilots until the war period. Choosing to use the word waterboarding as opposed to the archaic water cure was a conscious choice, this is the same thing andhouldnt get lost in the euphemisms of the past to draw distinctions where they dont exist. I did do that deliberately. Because i didnt want to mislead the reader. I wanted to make what was being talked about as clear as possible and when history uses archaic langge of the period it is lost on the reader for the same reason i will point this out, the 1940s had a lot of very casual racism. And so the word chap comes out of everybodys mouth without even thinking about it. Newspaper headlines high and low. I made the conscious choice to restrain my use of quotations in which that was included because to the modern reader it is extmely jarring, you make judgments about people using it that are misleading. There is uncomfortable use of it. And those were deliberate choices as well. I did choose language very carefully because i wanted to convey the reality, to be a good yarn, i wanted people to enjoy what they were reading but certainly which choices, one for two us of the word in the book, those moments using that word was necessary to convey like aliennation and the racial dynamics at play. Using the word gaap in every instance would have told you to those moments has also been distracting, it means Something Different today. Host who are the criminals in this book . Guest that is a great question. Host there are stories. Guest there are two war crimes trials in this book. One is the war crimetrial japanese conducted with the liberated which is by any measure a show trial that lasts an hour. Everne gets a Death Penalty is expected. The japanese convicted them and executed them d then the second part of the story is the United States finding the japanese, accusing them of being war criminals for conducting an unfair trial so you end of having 1946 the trial of the trial. So who are the war criminals in this book . I guess i dont know. Im reticent to answer that question because i want that question to hang over the book as people read it because it, one of the efforts i tried to do, hopefully successfully is to not present it as a fairytale or obvious morality play but give you the perspective of various people involv so you could wrestle with these questions the same way i have, 15 years doing these guantanamo tapes. These are hard questions, not using torture as a hard question, and victim status to claim that you are a victim, and the real question, not a fairytale question. What are the legitimate legal targets in 1941. It was pretty in flux at the ti. Treaties abouterial combat, they never got off the ground. But there was a sense, this is not true in the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom took an aggressive view of bombing civilian populations, the germans basically took that view, and the United States resisted this, the deliberate policy ingrained i Us Army Air Force officers, and and, the deliberate targeting of civilians, and we dont deliberately try to kill as many as possible, and the war planners a Strategic Plan is in time call this the industrial bottleneck. The means by which the enemy wages war, that changes over the course of the war, and and the firebombing, andt a minimum tolerance for civilian casualties goes extremely high, and it is more pretextual, even the bombing of the regime and nagasaki, we read these debates we are targeting, and the United States, took the targeting of military or civilian targets, and the piece that i have for this is doolittle made the target, and they bombed the imperial palace. It is not a military target and moreover we dont want to give the Japanese Cars to accuse us of wronging or give them an opportunity to rally around the leader. Host doesnt Jimmy Doolittle also if i remember your book correctly remember or recognize, rallying around royalty, and was key to very strategic, in that regard, we explain it. And the battle of britain had been effective and demoralizing the British Population until the germans hit buckingham palace, and to rally around the flag, if the king can take it so can we, Jimmy Doolittle expressly said let the emperor, this is completely awesome, we dont want to rally around anybody, this is an aboveboard operation, and can i switch to that. Were these trials open. Was anyone there for that . Japanese soldiers will muddle in. The trial itself was held in secret, and those allowed to intend, this was not in the book, but i became, these trials must be held in secret, why are you letting some people these are supposed to be secret trials was an american trial was held in the open and that was a big point of pride but also a point of policy that the war crimes trials that took place in the pacific and europe di