 Hello, my name is Rebecca Gordon. I teach ethics at the University of San Francisco. And a big part of my life is the opportunity to talk with young people about the most important values in their lives as they're trying to figure out what those things are. And in the rest of my work, I've written a couple of books recently, one called Mainstreaming Torture and the other called American Nuremberg. And this latest book is about the whole question of holding US government officials responsible for the crimes that have been committed in the war on terror. And so when I was first approached about writing this book, I wasn't really happy with the title because my dad was raised in Orthodox Jew. He lived in the United States through the period of World War II. He was in the US Army and I think he would have had a hard time with the idea of comparing horrible as it's been the crimes of the war on terror with the scope of death and destruction of World War II which killed somewhere between 65 and 85 million people around the world, 20 million of them at least in Asia which we don't hear about at all. And the vast, vast majority of them were civilians. But the more I studied about the Nuremberg tribunals and reread my history, the more I realized how important it was, what was done at Nuremberg. Because for the first time, we had nations of the world coming together and saying international law is real law. And when you break it, there are real consequences. And this is a principle that I think is even more important today when I live in the country that has the largest economy, the largest military, the greatest power the world has ever seen. And yet we are stomping all over the world like an angry two-year-old waving missiles. And this is really dangerous. We need the rule of law and the belief in the law as the only thing just about that can restrain us. So when I looked at what the people who set up the Nuremberg tribunals thought about, one thing really became clear to me. There were four powers. So it was the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, or Great Britain, as it was called then, and the United States. Two of those, Great Britain and the United States, and its ironic considering future, the history that was to come, absolutely insisted that of the three categories of crimes that were gonna be tried for, the first and most important one was this crime they called a crime against peace or making an aggressive war. And this is exactly what the Code Pin Tribunal, what the People's Tribunal is all about. And what they said was, look, all of the other crimes of the Nazi regime, including the extermination of my people, the Jews, but also of Roma people, disabled people, LGBT people, all of those exterminations arose after and almost as a consequence of the original crime, which was the belief that Germany had the right to invade other countries. We forget because we associate the Holocaust with Germany, but the people who died, the vast majority of them, were actually in other countries, Poland, for example, which had been invaded by Germany. The Holocaust couldn't have happened without that first crime in the same way, in the very same way. It became clear to me as I thought back on the history of this so-called war on terror that it was the desire to have an excuse to invade Iraq that led to the other crimes. So for example, the torture, the torture at Guantanamo, the torture and the CIA in Afghanistan and in the other CIA dark sites, the very first people who were tortured were tortured because either Dick Cheney in the CIA or Donald Rumsfeld in the Defense Department wanted somebody somewhere to be tortured into saying there was a connection between 9-11 and Saddam Hussein. And so for example, Abu Zubeda, who is a man who is still in jail in Guantanamo and who the CIA has said should remain without any significant contact with any other human being for the rest of his life was the first person to be waterboarded by the CIA. And what they wanted him to say was that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The reality was there was no such connection. They believed he was the number two or number three man in al-Qaeda, they were wrong and they knew they were wrong as early as 2006 but they kept on repeating this lie. And if you look at Dick Cheney's or George W. Bush's memoirs, the lie is still in there, that he said there was this connection and it's not true. And actually the federal government very quietly withdrew that accusation years later in the case of Abu Zedah, Zubeda and you can look that up. But similarly at Guantanamo, they were trying to get the same thing. They were trying to get people they were detaining there that they'd picked up in Afghanistan to say that there was this connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which didn't exist. And so Donald Rumsfeld was really frustrated and he wrote to them and said, look, can't you do better? And they wrote back and said, well, here's a list of a bunch of things that we wanna try on these people. And some of them literally, they had thought up because they sat around watching old episodes of the TV show 24. I mean, it really is life imitating art in the most disgusting of ways. So Donald Rumsfeld wrote this famous memo that anybody can see on the internet. It's available now in which he's allowed them to do this list of different techniques, including forcing people to go without sleep for 48 hours at a time. And we now understand that this is a very powerful form of psychological torture that very quickly makes people psychotic in the same way, putting people in boxes and holding them without human contact. Human beings are, we are social animals. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher says this. It's the fundamental, our fundamental nature. When we're deprived of contact with other human beings, as happened in Guantanamo and happens in our US prisons on a daily basis, we very quickly start to see things that aren't there, hear things that aren't there, and become crazy. And there are people in this country who have spent three or four decades without physical or face-to-face contact with other human beings. Similarly, we were doing this in Guantanamo in addition to a series of other more painful kinds of torture, including what are called stress positions. And stress positions sound like, oh, well, you just have to stand in a certain position for a while. But what's so brilliant if you want to torture someone about stress positions is that they can cause more pain than anything you can do to someone with an electrical current, but they don't leave a mark. And this is what Donald Rumsfeld approved. So the purpose of it was to get people to say, yes, Saddam Hussein was behind September 11th, which of course he wasn't. It's really interesting about who the September 11th pilots and hijackers were. Because every few years I ask my students who are 18 and 19 year olds, right? Who were the pilots? What country did they come from? So back in 2006, 2007, when I was first teaching at USF, I had a lot of students who had family who were fighting in Iraq. Some of them even had fathers who had been called up again for that war. And when I asked the students who was responsible for 9-11, they were sure that those hijackers were from Iraq, that they were all Iraqis. A few years later, when George W. Bush was trying to gin up a new war against Iran this time, I asked the same question and my students were sure they were from Iran. So those hijackers have become sort of this empty slate that any government can write any enemy on and just point the American people in that direction. So coming back to the war in Iraq, what I concluded, and this is in American Nuremberg, but it's just dead obvious, was that the Bush and Cheney administration came into office with a plan to invade Iraq. And the plan was actually written out in 1998 by an organization called The Project for a New American Century. And you can read, and it's very interesting because it starts with taking Saddam Hussein out in Iraq and then goes on to do what? Destabilize Syria. What has happened? And look at the millions of people who are suffering between Iraq and Syria. Iraq still has over a million internal refugees, people who have been displaced. And right now, as I'm speaking to you, the final attacks on Mosul are going on. Who knows how many people are gonna die in the process of liberating that area? And I put liberating in quotes, not that I would ever wanna live under the rule of the Islamic State in any way, but Iraq is a problem that the US has one answer for and that answer is bombs and more bombs, destruction and death. If you wanna count the number of people who've died in the Iraq war, it's hard to do. And there are many different counts that go anywhere from 200,000 to over a million. And it depends on how you count and who's doing the counting. But the reality is that none of those deaths needed to occur, not one of those deaths. And they are all on our heads here in this country. Similarly, Iraq was a developed country. It was a country with industry. It was a country with universities, with publishing houses, with an entire intellectual social life. We have taken that industrialized developed country and done what they used to say they wanted to do to Vietnam, bombed it back to the Stone Age, with absolutely no legitimate right to do that. You know, they claimed that the reason was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Well, there's a whole set of international law that applies to the question of when a country is allowed to use military force against another country. And essentially, when you've been attacked in order to defend yourself, which had not happened to the United States, we had not been attacked in spite of the implications that the Bush administration gave in public. We had not been attacked by Saddam Hussein. There was no danger of an imminent attack. There was no evidence. In fact, the evidence was that Saddam Hussein was doing his very best to comply with the requirements of the United Nations and the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, whose job was to oversee whether or not, you know, there were weapons of mass destruction. And in fact, as we now know, there were not. And as we now know, Saddam Hussein was actually trying to comply. And then in the Security Council, and this is all sounds like inside baseball stuff, but it's really important, the United Nations is the closest thing that we have to an organization that has authority over the behavior of individual countries. In the Security Council, which is the highest body in the UN, the United States and England, using almost exactly the same words, promised the Security Council that before the US and the United Kingdom would invade Iraq, that they would come back to the Security Council and ask for a new resolution, giving permission for that invasion. When the time came, it became clear that both Russia and France would veto anything in the Security Council that would okay the invasion of Iraq. And so what did President Bush do? He went to those gigantic countries, Portugal and Spain, and got them to sign on to a coalition of the willing. And based on their backing, and of course, Tony Blair in and the British government, he decided that he had enough and that he didn't need to pay any attention to the United Nations. The consequences of this in terms of deaths and destructions of the lives and the futures of millions of people, really we haven't even begun to look at those consequences. But just as importantly, nobody has borne accountability. Nobody has been held accountable for this terrible crime, which led to all these other terrible crimes, crimes that are continuing to be committed today, and crimes that the Republican candidates spent an entire election season promising to commit more of. So our new president-elect promised to bring back waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse. But we had other people, we had kindly Ben Carson, the pediatric neurosurgeon, saying he would be okay with the deaths of thousands of children if that's what it took to protect the United States from terrorism. Over the last 15 years, the people in this country have been taught that we should be terribly afraid, that we are always at all times in mortal danger, that only our government can save us. And if you want any proof of how great the danger is, look at the terrible things we've had to do. We are a good country. We would only do those terrible things if you were in that terrible danger. Basically, we've been made into a nation of cowards, a nation of people who are willing to accept any crime committed in our name, if it makes us feel that we are personally safe. It's as if the government were promising us immortality. And we know that's a false bargain, because I'm sorry, but we're all going to die. It's not something the government can promise. And so then the question is, as we live, what kind of people do we want to be? What kind of country do we want to be? Do we want to be a nation that's committed to law? Or do we want to be a nation that thinks it can do whatever it wants because we have the biggest and baddest toys? I myself want to live in a world of law, a nation of law. Laws are the way that human beings agree to live together, to cooperate with each other. Laws are what make it possible for us to have human society. When the biggest country in the world, the most powerful country in the world, breaks the law, we're all in danger.