Transcripts For CSPAN2 Michel Paradis Last Mission To Tokyo 20240711

Pentagons military Commission Defense organization. The show lectures at clumpy law school and a fellow here in the center of National Security and i must mention is a fordham law grad. Karen rosenberg will talk about his book, his awardwinning Senior Reporter for the New York Times working in collaboration with a pulitzer center. [inaudible] she started with the miami herald or before that she recorded from the middle east and moved recently to the New York Times. She has won many awards including the Robert F Kennedy journalism award, and was part of the miami herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize of breaking news in 2001. So, when we tell you the format. Michelle and carol we will talk and then i will come back on and i will pose questions that have come from the audience and if you have any questions at all please feel free to put them in the chat or if you prefer q a then i will get to as many as i can do. Without further ado michelle, carol, take it away. Thank you so much. Thank you. I think i will talk about the book real quickly. The story you tell starts this way. America gets this very cool upper punch of pearl harbor on december 7, 1941. The pearl harbor attacks galvanize and demoralize americans they were angry probably scared and wanted revenge. Four months later this scrappy bunch of pilots are the center of the story, the doolittle raiders, drive deep into territory drop bombs on extensive military targets and or strategic targets and most of them make it all the way to china our ally and then fdr is allowed to trump his victory. Thats exactly right. That is the doolittle raid in a nutshell. The story of an covering and what seems like forever goes like this. In 200119 hijackers in a very cruel sucker punch attack the world trade center, pentagon and crash a plane into pennsylvania field killing civilian targets. Four months later i watch a military cargo plane landed at guantanamo and dislodge 20 men in orange jumpsuits and when the photos emerge it seems to reassure, meant to reassure americans that we got them and that was the set up. In both cases there would be trials and trials about war crimes and questions about military tribunal justice and due process and reliability of evidence leading to torture. My first question is, how in heavens names did you discover the story and what compelled you to tell it . So, the second part first and what will help me tell it is what you just said. And why and how is because i was working in the department of defense in the military commission in 2007 and this was when Michael Mccabe had just been nominated to the attorney general and the debate over is waterboarding torture was rekindled. We had heard a rumor of a case in which the United States had prosecuted the japanese for waterboarding and that seemed obvious lee relevant to the questions we confronted in 2007 and we sent the young marine captain to dig out the record which i dont think had been seen in 60 years at that point. She came back on one rainy day i wanted to crack it open and read it and it was the story you just subscribed, the doolittle raid which is the most celebrated operation of world war ii and the people who live through world war ii and the story about torture and justice and revenge and i felt sitting there in 2007 i was reading this episode from 1945 in 1946 where the United States is prosecuting the japanese for doing all the things we were doing in the war on terrorism and you mean, i dont mean to be naive but it hit me in the chest that i had this sense of looking through 60 years of time and all of a sudden right where i was sitting in that moment and it came to me but it was the same in the back my mind they gave me context during those quintana no cases after that and then i decided in 2014 to try and make a book about it and that is how we got the book today. So, for the people watching ive been talking to michelle now for years about one, no. In 2007, i dont doubt. When i would talk to him about other things related he would talk about a really weird obscured episode like world war ii Japanese Airways far away and i thought it was kind of peculiar and then i read it and i got it and is divided into three portions and it is pearl harbor and they did not strike civilians, most made it across japan to china are allied but the japanese captured some, part two is brutal interrogation of the captured pilots including the trial in the summary execution of some, i hope im not saying too much. This is all in the first three chapters. They said, the japanese said they were working in part three after the u. S. Wins the war we have what victors justice, the americans recover their surviving pows who were held in conditions, it takes you there in the United States puts the people who prosecuted the pilo pilots. The reason we are having this conversation now, i remember calling up michelle and saying what struck me about the book is written in the language of the military commission to describe what happened 80 years ago. 75 80 years, lets talk about that language. You call people highvalue detainees in this book, who are they . I think i called them the highest value of detainees, that was a deliberate language choice, im not being coy and those were the doolittle raiders, you describe the doolittle raid accurately in the terms, the american perception which was a lot like the opening, i never made that connection until you just did, your four months go by in america shows that it can fight back. To make america feel better right . That was by design, they had virtually no strategic significance, they ended up having far more significant for the japanese and is precisely because one of the things i tried to do in this book for reasons we can get into but i became fascinated by the perspective of the japanese and as much, you can look at the doolittle raid as our celebration of her opportunity to show were in the war to win it, the japanese, it was 9 11, the first time in the recorded history that japan is ever successfully attacked from abroad at least on the mainland, it is immediately a moment of fear, uncertainty, terror, the basic assumption of japanese life offended all at once. For mobility. Its a profound sense of for mobility but its outrage, we can talk 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 for the oil tankers they focus on the civilians in the context of the doolittle raid, to them it was a great atrocity, they would utterly called an act of terrorism. So when they capture them, they had their own almost four months later there seems to be a symmetry to all of this because when they captured them and they tortured them and theres a debate about what to do with them it exposes all of the challenges that we face in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 and that continues to this day over to what extent do we act on revenge, do we act on the ability to show our power over prisoners versus our ideals and one thing that surprised me, this is probably because there was not japan before working on this book, japan conceived as itself as a progressive liberal society, the first country to sign the convention of 1929 so they had prohibited torture at the end of the 19th century and they almost prohibited the Death Penalty as a massive liberal revolution in their own thinking so when the doolittle raid happened, they revert to the same forms of brutality for almost the same reasons in the same excuses that we did throwing out values that they claimed ahead just as dear as we did in that to me was incredibly compelling parallel between the two and i think its just as important to understand the doolittle raid of japan in 9 11 and understanding how and why they did what they did. In the detainees because they are the first . Theyre not the first prisoners of the japanese by any stretch of the imagination, japan has been raging war for five months. But they are the first marquis prisoners, the first people that the japanese themselves, the japanese population cares about who these people are, they are not just a combatant in the philippines or in singapore, these are the people who perpetrated the attack against us that has created a turning point in our own sense of national identity, vulnerability so they became to the very tippy highest levels of the japanese government, the doolittle raiders were a political issue and thats because they had such highvalue to japan. On page 22 you call the interrogation enhanced and at lunchtime, a can you describe happened to the doolittle raiders . I do describe it and these are somewhat coy words, this is not about a book on the war on terrorism, i dont draw these parallels out directly, youre the first person to unpack all of them im sure. But i did choose language in certain parts of the book precisely to cause the reader to reflect upon the parallels that i was seen as i wrote it so the torture enhanced interrogation that the japanese objected the doolittle raiders to waterboarding but also sleep deprivation, what we would call stress positions today protracted solitary confinement and other forms of really incredible brutality that looked incredibly familiar to what the United States was responsible for doing in the immediate aftermath of september 11 and i think one of the things that was poignant to me, when i first read this in 2007, i grew up in a very traditional pennsylvania overview of American American history, my grandmother never drove a japanese car so to see the United States behaving as the Imperial Japanese was such a jarring moment in thinking about what the country, what road the country had gone down and when you get down to the precise methods of torture for an reflected back in modernday it was really just stunning, it was really stunning. I dont think its overt, i am not suggesting this is overt but it is the language of today and thats how we talk about it so when i read it and people who force on this issue read it i think thats how they see it, other people i imagine read and dont recognize the language. I think that is probably true, most of my readers who have written to me really do see it as a traditional world war ii story legal thriller, that was my intent i did not i wanted to russia with the ambiguity that i have wrestled with in my career dealing with these issues in a way that was honest, there are two kinds of history that are very popular and get very wide audience, one is the fairytale history which were all quite familiar with lookout of michael bay movie and you will see a fairytale history but theres also history of everything in the United States does is expose printer history that exposes the worst about the United States or any country that is being written about. And i find both of those naive and i think its naive in our own times to look at these issues with the blackandwhite understanding, i think people good people do bad things and they do it for good or understandable reasons but i think that people do good things for bad and understandable reasons and this book in a way was an opportunity with me too wrestle with that, with the distance of not having to think about the contemporary issues that were dealing with but thinking about it as history. You do work at wonton among on cases involving torture and so without risking anybody security clearance, some of it sounds like its ripped from the pages of the Senate Report of the rdi book . It is not ripped from that, one thing i will highlight for readers, this book has about 1700 footnotes, a little more than that so this is a history. Again the language. Again of course because these are, for example choose a point of the language choice that i made quite consciously and i did this across the book and not just questions of torture, use modern language to reframe the beijing because i find readers are going to get confused if i use this other language. But one place where i had to think about a little more carefully with the use of the great water board which was not the current phrase used in the 1940s the phrased used was water torture, trip torture, you name it, a couple of expressions but water boarding does not come back into american until september 11. So choosing to use the word waterboarding to water cured, but it is the same thing and we should not get lost in her own youth is and is him or of the past to draw extinctions where they do not exist. So i did do that deliberately and i did that because i think doing it, i did not want to mislead the reader, i want to make what is being talked about as clear as possible and i think when history tends to use the language of the. It is lost on the reader for the same reason i will point this out, the 1940s especially the. Im writing about had casual racism and so the word jack comes out of everybodys mouth without even thinking about it, the newspaper headlines, you name it, high and low and i made the conscious choice to restrain my use of quotations in which that was included because to a modern reader its extremely jarring you make judgments about people using it that are misleading. There is an uncomfortable use of it in the book. There are a few, those were deliberate choices as well, i did choose lingered very carefully because i wanted to convey the reality and i wanted people to enjoy what they were reading but in certain language choices for tickly things as you said there are one or two uses of the word jobs in the book but those are very specific choices because i thought at those moments using that word was necessary to convey things like the alienation, the dissent of alienist and the racial dynamic that were at play in front of mind but using the word job every instance, i think it wouldve an builder to those moments and also been distracting because it means Something Different today. Who were the war criminals in this book . Thats a great question, who are the war criminals. There are two war crime trials in this book, one is the work crimes trial that the japanese conduct which is by any measure, the whole thing last about an hour, is passed over the law and use evidence of torture, everybody get the Death Penalty as expected, the japanese accuse them of being war criminals and convicted them and executed them as such in the second part of the story is the United States final the japanese who conducted that and accusing them of the criminals for conducting an unfair trial so you end up having a 1946 a trial of a trial so who are the war criminals, i dont know im hesitant to answer that question because i want that question to hangover the book as people read it because it is one of the efforts i tried to do hopefully successfully is to not presented as a fairytale and obvious morality but to really give you the perspective of all the various people involved so you could wrestle with these questions in the same way that i have over the past 15 years doing these, these are hard questions and anyone who says they are not hard questions im not saying torture is our question but when it comes to the responsibility, victim status to be able to claim that you are victim, shes incredibly fraud questions and are difficult and they should be because they are real questions, theyre not fairytale. What are legitimate maybe legal targets in 1941 in 1942 . Along order to be candid was in flux at the time so its not like you had, there were efforts to create treaties about Aerial Combat in 1920 but they never got off the ground, no pun intended but there was a sense, the United Kingdom had taken aggressive you of the population and the more people you kill the better, the germans took that view as well and the japanese took that view certainly. The United States had resisted this quite aggressively so there was a very deliberate policy that was ingrained in the u. S. Army air force officers from the 1930s and 40s the only military targets, targets that are industrial or directly military in nature are legitimate that the deliberate targeting with illegitimate, Collateral Damage can be accepted but we dont delivery try to kill as many people as possible, we are trying to break what the war planners the strategic planners, the industrials, the memes by which the enemy wages were, that changes over the course of the work, never explicitly which is his own interesting story but certainly by 1945 with Curtis Campaign against the prior bombing and then the two atomic bombings at a minimum tolerance for civilian casualties goes extremely high and the pretext of targeting military targets become more and more pretextual, even in the bombing of nagasaki, you can read the debates about targeting a military school in hiroshima, i think theres about quality of course but it certainly 1941 in 1942 the United States took the targeting of military targets by civilian targets very seriously at least on paper, before i go on too long of a rant i will say the one piece of evidence that i directly have in the dual raids is doolittle made the target selections and they were all industrial targets and the pilots got together to draw cards to see who got to bomb the imperial palace in doolittle called a stop treaties were not bombing a is on military target and moreover we dont want to give the japanese cause to accuse us of wrongdoing or to give them an opportunity to rally around the leader. Doesnt Jimmy Doolittle if i remember from your book correctly recognize that in england people are rallying around royalty and that hes very strategic in that regard and hes like we dont you explain it. Thats exactly right, one of the major express rationales is the battle of britain had been effective as demoralizing the British Population until the germans hit Buckingham Palace and then that created a opportunity for people to rally around the flag into say if the king can take it so can we. So Jimmy Doolittle explicitly said the emperor is complete the offlimits we do not want to give the japanese any opportunity to rally around anybody we have to make this an operation, that was expressive of u. S. Policy in 1942. Can i switch, were these trials open . Smack the japanese trial was not. Was anybody there for the hourlong trial . Japanese soldiers were allowed to come, it was quite a show at least for the people in shanghai with the trial itself was held in secret and the fact that so many people were allowed to attend this is not in the book but i became a point of contention in the army sends word that they must be held in secret and is acquire you letting some of these people watch these if its mostly a secret trial, the american trial was in the open and that was a big point of pride but also appoint a policy that the United States were crime trials that took place in europe did not engage in a closed session that were gonna have the secret evidence proven as a secret, they had them in public, they were very keen to keep the press there and involved because the press coverage was important in terms of relating the facts that were being disclosed about axis criminality but also the transparency majors so yeah transparency to use, for you im sure was a really important value in the military trials that happened after world war ii. It did have the advantage of the war being over. This is one of the things of what tom and no the argue that the work is ongoing and therefore there needs to be a certain level of secrecy, it struck me that the american tribunal is done after words and whether there was transcript clearly, were there tapes . There were and in my Great Research i tried so hard to find these because the doolittle trial was broadcast on radio everyday life for at least an delay and supposedly tapes existed at some point but after looking through every potential archive, they just do not exist anymore, they are reserved. I imagine america listened in because the doolittles were he heroes. The doolittle raid faded in american memory around dday in the atomic bombings in the major events that obviously have far more lasting significance militarily and the Second World War for americans of the time the doolittle raiders were the most celebrated important heroic figures that you could name, there were two movies made about the dual raid during the war and the war only last four years so hollywood was able to generate two blockbuster films including one that imagines the state of the lost doolittle raiders, the purple heart while the war is ongoing, this is right at the front and in fact this is kind of in in interesting historical point release for lawyers, the doolittle raiders, 1942 as i mentioned the japanese prosecute them in the execute three of them unbeknownst to anybody at the time they actually grabbed a clemency but the japanese publicly announced that they had punished the doolittle raiders this is all in the japanese newspapers and made into some broadcast inside the United States and when the fate of the doolittle raiders were revealed it was assumed they were all killed in this set off a wave of public anger and blood loss like you have not seen since pearl harbor, this is 1943 and your members of congress actively calling for the United States to not take japanese prisoners, just to execute all the japanese and they come into contact with in revenge for what happens to the doolittle raiders and roosevelt to his credit in the War Department got in front of this very quickly and said no, we agreed to comply with the convention this is part of the values that we are fighting for as a country, we cannot be seen as behaving barbaric late as the japanese and as a way of placating or drawing a line that ends up being historically important roosevelt says we are going to find those japanese who participated in this and hold them personally responsible so it is the first real time that you have head of state promising the public that were criminality will be punished and it becomes a way of the publics desire for revenge, the desire that were only going to hold those people who actually were responsible responsible. That ends up becoming over the resistance of the soviets and the british, that becomes allies of policies over the course of the war, by the end of the war trials in the largescale or the individual trials like the one i read about here are now a firm part of american and allied policy generally but by no means a conclusion at the beginning the work, the do letters case in their fate in dealing with the public desire for revenge and justice for them was at least one of the major drivers in a matter of public opinion. When the war is over and the americans decide youre gonna put the people all call injustice and justice on trial, what did the prosecutors decide he need to find the mastermind . I assume thats not the language of the day. Not really, the language of the day, they need to define those who participated in the problem the prosecutors faced is as you might expect from our description of the case so far, that is thousands of people potentially whether or not its the goons who tortured all the way to the personal involvement, when this prosecutor who much of the book is about, trying to figure all this out, the main question he finds the main problem he confronts is who is that i need to have a person who is the focal point and why that modern white was driven that way, in part because of hollywood and i mentioned the movie that was made the purple heart which comes out in 1944 and has a mastermind and the evil villain and has an evil mustache, there is a desire, who is that, hollywood has already set an expectation that there is is one person who is the most probable and ultimately falls to the lawyers to live up in a way that hollywoods expectation that hollywood has set in the public mind for how they should go and i think that is true today we have a very simplistic view of a lot of these things related to goal ability and the desire to have the billing and make sure the villain is the one who gets hung in the end. It is true that one of your clients is accused of being the mastermind. That is right, al has been variously accused of being the mastermind of bombing but about a half a dozen other people were too, that the parallel i could see playing out in the development of this case in the doolittle reader case is you want to be able to tell everyone, this is the guy, you want to tell the victim, this is the guy, you want to tell the public this is the guy, we got him and that often, as the book unfolds there is an interesting parallelism or problem the prosecution confronts, in the rush to find the guy without doing a spoiler, they missed the guy and the guy ends up appearing at the trial in ways that shock and appall everyone, they are so intent on satisfying the public expectation with the guy that they are misled. In the world of the Looking Glass in the story, the first trial, is Jimmy Doolittle the mastermind . I think he would be the mastermind his name comes up in the japanese judgment. Hes the one that they blame, the one that came up with a pl plan. So they dont have him and the people of the japanese, one of the big debates after the trial that concludes the japanese trial in august 1942, they get death sentences against all the doolittle raiders, excuse me. And the question is, do we carry out these sentences and there is a mastermind thinking and how face with the baby, they say we will split the sentences of the supporting personnel and we will execute to cruise the execute the pilot and then the gunner because one of the main allegations against the doolittle raiders was that they have essentially straight civilians and that is galvanizing aspects of the deliberate and the japanese imagination was evidence of children being gunned down in schools, fishermen being gunned down on beaches and hospitals, going after the gunners was seen as going after the participants. All of this supposedly is establishing a one 2 our trial. That is right, the japanese. By any standard that we would consider a trial. Absolutely not, one of the aspects of the trial they actually do not have, how this unfolds is they have eight guys in the secret prisons inside of tokyo, theyve gotten any intelligence of the going to get out of it at least practical or strategical on how the dual rates took off and what americans and military capabilities but there is a real fight over what to do with her, on the one side you foreign minister who is a traditional japanese liberal he says we sign the convention, we did not ratify but we agreed to comply in this work we have to treat them prisoners as were in its as important for the japanese as it is for the americans because the japanese all around the world, the americans are turning tens of thousands of japanese inside the United States, you dont want to create a pretext for which is that the students were willing to live by, then young hardliners who have consolidated a lot of different hardliners but the one focused on in the book is the chief of staff of the army who calls for the adu the reader to be executed as publicly and spectacular as possible as a show of strength to the japanese population and to the americans they said dont try to bomb japan again. This becomes one of the most violent debates in the japanese cabinet since the start of the war and then Prime Minister and war minister who have always thought as A John Weiner figure, he is somewhat politician whose main job is trying to keep all the irreconcilable actions from killing each other in the cabinet, he goes to the war minister and says weve got to kill these guys, is there way we can do that legally under the national law and the lawyers come back and say no, you cannot, the law forbids killing prisoners so he goes back to the war ministry and say no, you dont understand we have to kill these people, we dont find a way of killing these guys then theyre going to do anyway and theyre gonna claim it was an accident but nobody will buy that and itll be a huge diplomatic and political problem so what the lawyers do they put into vapor and say if we try them as were criminals and military commissions under International Law we can sentence them to death but thats a problem because they dont have a law that authorizes this so they pass a law that makes it a crime to attack japanese civilians and its called the enemy of airmans law of 1942 and it has extremely broad rules of evidence, it is clearly design to convict these eight men as quickly as possible and thats what he does, thats exactly what they do, the issue this law in 1942 and within a few weeks all the doolittle raiders are convicted in octobee rest are sentenced to life imprisonment under special treatment. One of the things that condemned these trials is that they created a law after the attack to the circumstances. When we prosecuted the japanese lawyers, as we referred to before, our main target for prosecution in 1946 was not the emperor, it was the lawyers, they punish them for an unfair trial, what i call in the book the paperwork for murder. In the key elements that make up that charge are the use of evidence by torture the fact that it was in fact a law, they called the law itself but an act of terrorism, the United States calls it an act of terrorism the fact that the law only applies to nonjapanese citizens, it violates the golden rule and thats what ultimately the japanese are prosecuted for, the perversion of justice. All of this why you follow guantanamo and you read that book, you feel is very familiar, one of the things that michelle did in his defense, correct me if im wrong, they established, and my right the crime of Material Support for terror is ex post facto and not tribal, how did i do question my. Thats exactly right Material Support for terrorism violates the laws that solicitation which is another broad inchoate of it violates the factor calls its a constraint on the military commission, that was a pretty contested position. So far no defense attorney has been able to get any ground on the notion that you cant create accord reform population to the americas. Not yet, that issue is still banging around, the courts is the equal protection argument or an equal justice under law. The credit twosomes of these enemies in trial. It was one of the biggest criticisms the violation of the golden rule and what is interesting to me in observing these and having tried to bring this back to that issue in a number of cases and flailing not on the merits interestingly enough, the courts dont want to mention this merit, they bend over backwards to avoid ever having to decide this issue, they always defer or come up with procedural reasons why the issue is not appropriately presented and i think it is because it is wrong, they know it is wrong but it is such a challenging and politically dangerous thing seem potentially to do to essentially declare that the military commission that they are being prosecuted for september 11 trials violate a fundamental principle of american justice so they have never said it does not apply, theyve never said this is perfectly legal to have the segregated, they just avoided it like the plague hoping somehow against hope that the issue will one day go away and that remains to be seen. The only thing i would regret is that we dont have a forum for example the prosecutor of military commissions to participate in it because he would have a few things to say but at this stage unfortunately the prosecution of the cases is not any way speaking publicly and only speaking in the courtroom, we find ourselves in awkward position of having to present the prosecution phase and this is my last thing, one of the things that he does is he not only articulates his argument but if you ask them to hell explain the prosecution position on why you can have a case that only prosecutes foreigners, what is the answer . The government avoided answering this to and its come down to two ideas in there pretty thin to be candid and thats not just my editorial, i think its accurate, one is they dont enjoy any Due Process Rights of the matter in issue like that is actually in the d. C. Circuit right now and these detainees because outside of the United States and not citizens and their essentially not people for the purpose of the constitution that the same argument i should say that the government used in litigating these cases all these years and the uses same argument on every. That is one, and they say even if these are people and theyre entitled to due process under the constitution, the courts have to defer to the executive and legislative branch the political branches in the determination of what is necessary for National Security but they never tried to defend the segregation of the military commissions on the merits and again, im not in their heads but i would say that retrace the certain discomfort with having to justify in 2020 discrimination that literally separate but equal segregated justice something out of jim crow and the slavery period. To argue that that is not a technical way but justifiable in the right things to do is a hard task for people like mark morgan or the prosecutors of the case. I see there are 15 questions. Im gonna bundle them and see what we can do but i minister with Nancy Hollander who i think you answered one of her questions but i want to answer it more direct which did you consider making it more explicit that this was guantanamo when you were writing it in another question which is more minor did they bomb the school where the boy died. Without getting into too many spoilers one of the more interesting parts of writing this book was seen the defense counsel operate and not just because they have been doing defense counsel work on guantanamo cases but they were in a far tougher position politically, personally that i was in the lead defense counsel was our lawyer, he was a pilot and a decorated pilot at that, he was 100 ideologically aligned in his personal sympathies with the do liberators and he basically is explaining the book takes the case mainly because hes in love with the russian concierge at his hotel in shanghai and he needs a reason to stay in shanghai and hell be shipped home and this was only ticket in town so he takes this case to the absolute worst reasons and i assume thinking that is going to be an open case and he has to stand there as a well uniform plan to make it look as fair as possible. But what he does and what strikes me as one of the remarkable parts of this book is he cannot live with himself doing not indians of grabbing the case and his enemies who wouldve happily killed him if he couldve been one of the do the readers just makes the decision i owing to them, it is my duty my job to represent them and give them the best trial i would want if i was captured and put into japanese hands, he does that at the cost of his military, he sees this as a pilot after the trial and he does go to law school many years later but he just commits to doing his job and i said in a couple that i would look to the child the american trial and at the first fair trial of the post world war ii. There is only three specific prior to this, one was the case which was not the greatest moment for anyone under the sum of General Macarthur and done entirely with expedience in mind, there was a mass trial that was conducted in shanghai right before the trial they do liberators involving lynching but this was the first try with the defense lawyers that came into it that said were going to do her job as a consequence it ended up being a fair trial but that is me avoiding nancys question to avoid the spoilers but they end up taking position that in 1946 it was shocking and made them pariahs for suggesting that the United States mightve been culpable of anything in 1942. Our conversation got nerdy, i want to say this is an interesting story of people in which he tells you and here we are and we finally get a mention of the concierge in shanghai, dont think you will read it on war crime, its a really interesting read and we were talking about this yesterday most people will not see the portion of it because you have to have that time on the trials to understand the coop of the language. Im going to bundle a couple, did you ever interview any of the surviving doolittle raiders or japanese officials first and second did the treatment of the chinese who help the readers to hear and the charges of the 46 trial . Yes i got to interview his copilot at the time he was 99 and way more with it than i am it was really incredible and he only died a year end a half ago and hes such an incredible man and an incredible american after the raid he ends up staying in china in missions which were resupply missions over the himalayan mountains and Something Like a third of airplanes went down so he was an incredible person and i love being able to speak with him about interesting things in antidote i relate in the book and the authors note at one point he asked me why did you want to write another book about the do the raid and i was like there are a lot of books out there but hopefully ill be able to tell the story in a new way, he was a super gentleman and that was great, on the revenge against the chinese for their cooperation with the do the readers one thing that happens they make it immediately to safety one of the planes and updating in the soviet union and causing the diplomatic incident, three or killed in various plane crashes jumping up but all the rest, 64 of the do liberators not only survived but they make it home or make it out of occupy china and with the help of a number of the chinese that are sympathetic to the americans and one thing i read about in the book is japans response to this was my nominally stupid for one but brutal, there are certain estimates, you have to be careful with casualty estimates one way or another but theres estimates as a 40000 chinese are killed essentially by, i dont know what you call it terrorism operation that the Japanese Army conducts in china after the doolittle raid whose sole purpose is to destroy every airfield and china to prevent the americans from landing in china again, that included i remember meeting the people who were involved or had a personal relationship but i went to the city which is a couple hours to the west of shanghai and that was the do liberators rally and theres a cave where they hold out for a couple of weeks where chinese teenagers go to make out and hide from their parents but the town itself because it had been the base, the rallying point for the do liberators becomes a brutal target for the japanese expedition air me and its bombed mercilessly for weeks when airfields are destroyed they impress the chinese into slave labor to manually break up the airfield with pick axes and shovels which is a brutal kind of slave labor, there is some evidence, it is compelling evidence but i researched enough to give you a confident answer that the japanese used chemical weapons on coup shoot to kill civilians but the do the raid promotes an utterly ruthless response against the chinese and it was a question that was not a lot of the revelations did not come out in the trial with the american understanding with 1946 those revelations really came out there a lot of scholarship that was done in the past 20 years and some of which in my book but there is another scholar who worked on some of these problems to. Quick question is your book being translated into japanese and published in japan . I hope so, i dont know actually is a candid answer. The number of japanese people have read it and i think appreciated it, they said they appreciated it but Japanese Culture is very light, i dont know if they would tell me if they hated it or not but i hope it is there, again i really resist any kind of effort on the american or japanese side more relativism or equivalent or character or a very telling, i tried to take the perspective of the different people involved when there is a villain the whole chapter about someone who is to the mastermind in the entire written perspective he ends up getting tried for the worker milk and other war crimes he commits but i do try because i find history that is too simplistic or character boring i dont enjoy but i also think it is not history if youre not trying to help inform people to explain why people are doing this, you dont explain that its a wikipedia entry is not actually history. To what extent did politics of perpetrators of war crime against prisoners of war. That was a huge influence, the book stops basically in march, april of 1942 march apri. So a lot of those decisions and upcoming leader particularly for example german and japanese scientist who end up getting left off the hook for two issues that i address one that he famously actively absolves for anything and that was incredibly controversial decision at the time and it was not publicly released in the time. I write about but i do write about it because its in the water at the time when the decision is made in january of 1945 or 1946 and then theres individuals who he picks and chooses as being too important lower people but for the same reasons as being too important to reconstruction and Occupation Program this is still early 1946 imparted out of understanding the strategic interest to get japan on its feet as quickly as possible if nothing else as a counterweight to the soviets have a lot of interest in our longterm rival but also the chinese civil war which is in the background of this book and comes back a couple different times is a major driver of policy, ill just say this is a long answer to a short question, i apologize but one thing i do try to get into peoples perspectives and that includes things how people are viewing the chinese civil war, i also find it important to think about history as its lived not as we know it to have happen, now obviously we know the Peoples Liberation Army Takeover the mainland of china and they get pushed into taiwan but no one knows at the time in 1945 1946 there is a civil war in china and thats having all sorts of political indications and strategic implications of people are trying to deal with in real time and no one at the time knows how the story ends so i try to convey some of that in presenting the context in which all of this is happened. That is a really good question, will we ever have a trail of a trial, i guess what we did in that case but i get the questioner is saying currently is there a possibility that we want to try on a trial. Im asking, you can look at any number of cases, whatever you want to answer but its always an interesting idea. It is, the closest that anything has come, there are two things, the Obama Administration for the number of complicated and debatable, i will say that much, policy reasons decided to not seek accountability or that much transparency about the abuses of war on terrorism in john durham who is now famously working on the investigation of the Russian Investigation was put in charge of that policy essentially but there were civil suits including one that was brought by jose padilla and an american citizen who is involved in terrorism and gets prosecuted and sentenced in 25 years but he is subjected to all sorts of abuses as well and brought a lawsuit against john you may be about five or ten years ago in the courts dismiss that suit, not because he didnt do anything wrong but the doctrine that people are more familiar with today than they were then but qualified immunity that you have to to show that what the government did was wrong so they had civil suits that tried to go after the lawyers and they have not been successful so far, will that hold up over time, i dont know that is why is history, we will not know if the criminal court brings charges against americans for complicity as lawyers, we will not know until Something Like that happens. Your saying the format would be a civil suit . They tried that and failed to come into court has been investigating afghanistan including american war crimes, could they charge american lawyers for complicity and things like the torture memos, its not inconceivable, i think it is actually for that, will that happen to be politically feasible or a good idea, i dont know, that is right history. One more time to emphasize the book is not as nerdy as the conversation. Nowhere near as nerdy as i am, dont take it, give it a shot i think youll find an interesting read in a period in history that we dont really know about and people youve never heard of. You can probably start your own blog week by week what is happening in guantanamo and how this relates to the book, it really is a good read and whats wrong with being dirty by the way. [laughter] , it is a page turner. It was written as a legal thriller. A legal thriller, it is funny that you say its written as a legal thriller because i want to read back to something that you said, two kinds of history, fairytale history and the third thing is enjoyable history, like what. And there is boring history, hopefully enjoyable nuance history as well. This was a wonderful conversation i want to say a couple of things, i want to tell you did you know theres a torture museum in tokyo, have you been there . I have and there are many different kinds of torture things that are referred to but it is one of them and i thought you would want to know that and now you dont have to go. It is interesting that its a little footnote. A couple of other things, every time that i watch carol i want her to learn, that is how you get the information that you get, thats how you see the insides of whats going on, it is terrific, thank you so much for this, come back anytime, i want to do an advertisement for Upcoming Event on october 15 with john brennan to talk about his new book which is coming out on tuesday called undaunted. And its a memoir, i think that would be a lot of fun but we cannot thank you enough, i know how appreciative our guest are and they have many, many comments and questions but we will just have to bring you back. Thank you so much, thank you both of you. Thank you. Weeknights this month we feature book tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2. This week marks the 25th anniversary of the monthly Author Program in depth, tonight highlights from past shows including our interviews with david mccullough, shelby foote, toni morrison, tom wolf, grinnell west and many others. That begins at eight eastern, enjoy book tv this weekend every weekend on cspan2. Book tv on cspan2 has top nonfiction books and authors every week and saturday at 1 00 p. M. Eastern from a recent virtual festival of books author sarah marsh, john burton and Wayne Winkler reflect on life in appalachia and david discuss the jim crow era and the south. Then at 7 45 p. M. New yorker staff writer evan discusses his book joe biden, the life, the run and what matters now. On sunday at 1 00 p. M. Eastern from the southern festival of books journalist matthew van meter talks about his book deep Delta Justice about a civil rights case which helped to reaffirm the right to a trial by jury in most terminal cases. In author Stephanie Gordon and chris offer their thoughts on Investigative Journalism and its role in a democracy. Then at 9 00 p. M. Eastern on after words law Professor John fabian talks about his book american contagions, epidemics in the law from smallpox to covid19, he is interviewed by georgetown law professor