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 didnt engage in this kind of closed session secret evidence presented in secret. They happened in public, they were keen to keep the press involved because the press coverage was seen as important in terms of facts that were being disclosed for reality but the transparency measure to show that it was aboveboard and transparency to use the fraud word for you was an important value in the military trials in world war ii. Host it had the advantage of the war bei over . This is one of the things we are up against in guantanamo, thargument that the war is ongoing and therefore it is a level of secrecy. It struck me that the american tribunal idone afterwords. There were transcripts apparently. Were there tapes . There were. One of my Great Research failures, i tried so hardrd to find this because the trial was broadcast on radio every day life and supposedly tapes existed at some point but after looking through every potential archive they dont exist anymore. Host i imagine america listened and because the doolittle raiders were heroes. Guest absolutely. It has faded in America Today amid dday another major events of far more lasting significance militarily but for americans at the time the doolittle raiders were unquestionablyhe most celebrated important heroic the years you could name, there were two raiders, it only lasts four years. Hollywood was able to generate two blockbuster films including one that imagined the fates of the lost doolittle raiders, purple heart. And this is in front of mind . This is an interesting historical point. The doolittle raiders, and they execute three of them unbeknownst to anyone else at the time. The japanese publicly annoued they punished them, and and it was assumed they were all killed and this set off a wave of public anger and bloodlust like you haventeen since pearl harbor since 1943 and members of congress actively calling for the United States to take japanese prisoners, and in revenge for what happened to the doolittle raiders, and and he agreed to apply to the geneva convention, as barbaric late as the japanese, and and to hold them personally responsible, iis the first time you had a head of state seriously promising the public but more criminality will be punished, and satiating the desire for revenge, we will hold those people who were responsible responsible. That ends up becoming the soviets and the british, and and it is a firm part of allied policy. The doolittle raiders case, the public desire for revenge and justice for them was at least one of the major drivers of that. Host when the war is over and americans decide to put the people who did this injustice justice on trial. One of the prosecutors decides he needs to find the mastermind. Th is not the language of this. Guest not really. The language of the y was they needed to find those who participated. The problem the prosecutors faced is as you might expect from the description of the case so far is out of peopl whether or not it is those who tortured the doolittle raiders up to emperor hero vito, and so en the prosecutor, much of the book is about historian trying to figure this out, the main question he finds, the main question is who is that . I need to have a person who is the focal point and just why that mattered, why he was driven that way is part because of hollywood. I mentioned the one movie that was made, purple heart, comes out in 1944 and has a mastermind, an evil villain, even has the thin evil mustache. So who is that . We want hollywood have an expectation that theres a person, one person whos clearly most responsible and ultimately it falls to the lawyers to live up in a way to hollywoods expectations for the expectation hollywood has set in the plics mind for how this should go and i think that is true today we have a very simplistic view of a lot of these things particularly relating to the desire to have the villain and make surehe villain is the one who gets hung in the end. Host it is true that one of your clients is accused of being the mastermind. Host the mastermind of the bombing of the uss cole, so were have a dozen other people. That was a parallel i could see playing out in the development of theoolittle raider case, that you want to tell everyone this is the guy. You want to tell the victim this is the guy, tell the public this is the guy. We got h. That often leads, as the book unfold, an interesting parallelism or problem the prosecution conferences in their rush to find the guy, spoiler may be, they miss the guy and the guy ends up appearing at the trial in ways that shocked and appalled everyone. They are intense, satisfying public expectation for the guy that they are misl. Host through the Looking Glass world of the story coming in the first trial, the trial, is Jimmy Doolittle the mastermind . Guest i guess so he would be consered the mastermind certainly, his name comes up in the japanese judgment. Host the one they blame, who came up with the plan, but he doesnt he escaped, he is a bomber but makes it to the other end and becomes an american hero. One of the debate after the file, the japanese trial concluded august of 1942, they get death sentences. And so the question do we carry out these sentences . There is a mastermind instinct in how emperor hero vito hirohito, the supporting personnel, we are going to execute the pilot of the two planes, the two crews, asked the pilot and the gunner because one of the main allegations against the doolittle raiders was the day strafed civilians was that was one of the galvanizing aspect of the doolittle raid in the japanese popular imagination, the evidence of children being gunned down in school, fishermen being guns down on beaches, hospitals being strafed. Going after the gunners was seen as going afr those who participated most comfortably. Host all of this establishing ane or 2 hour trial. Which is not a trial by any standard. Guest absolutely not and it is a show trial. One of the aspects of the trial is they dont how this unfolds is they have these eight guys in secret prins, theyve gotten any intelligence they are going to get out of them, strategic intelligence what americans military capabilities are but there is a real fht over what to do and on the one side you have people like togo who is a trational japanese liberal, we signed the geneva convention, agreed to comply with it, we have to treat them as prisoners of war, as important for the japanese as it is for the americans because there are japanese around the world, the americans are interning tens of thousands of japanese in the United States, we dt want to create a pretext for reprisals, we need standard we are willing to ve by. There are different hardliners but the one i focus on in the book is the chief of staff of the army who calls to execute summarily is publicly and spectacularly as possible as a show of strength for the japanese population but also as a deterrent to americans, dont try to bomb japan again. This becomes one of the most violent debate in the japanese cabinet since the start of the war d war minister tojo who i always thought of as kind of somewhat a politician whose main job is to keep these irreconcilable factions from killing each other in the cabinet, he goes to thwar ministry and says weve got to kill these guys. Is there a way we can do that legally under International Law and the lawyers come back and say no, you cant. International law forbids killing prisoners so tojo goes back to the war ministry, no, you dont understand, we have to kill these people. If we dont find a way of killing these guys they will do it anyway and claim it was an accident but no one is going to buy that and it will be a huge diplomatic and political problem so what the lawyers do, they put pen to paper and say if we try them as war criminals in military commissions under International Law we c sentence them to death but that is a problem because there is no law that authorized it so they passed an ex post facto la that makes it a crime to attack janese civilians. It is called the enemy airman law of 1942, extremely broad rules of evidence, it was designed to convict these eight men quickly and summarily as possible. They issued this in august and all the 2 little raters are convicted in october three are executed and sentenced to life imprisonment under special treatment. One of those who condemned these trials is they created a law after the attack to the circumstances. Host when we prosecuted the japanese lawyers, our main target for prosecution in 1946, it was t lawyers. The uted states punishes the lawyers for conducting an fair trial, what i call the papeork for murder and the key elements that make up the charge, its use of evidence, the fact that is in ex post facto law, an acof terrorism, the unitedtates calls it an act of terrorism and the law only applies in nonjapanese citizens, violates e golden rule, and what they are prosecuted for. Host if you follow guantanamo, you feel it is very famili. One of the things michelle did in his defense, forget m if im wrong, established am i right, the crime of Material Support for terror is ex post facto and t tryable. Exactly right, terrorism violates the ex post facto clause, solicitation of fraud, violates the ex st facto clause and a constraint on the military cmission, a contested position. Host no defense attorn has gotten any ground onhe notion you cant create aourt for a foreign population. Guest it was an equal protection argument. Host the airman trial guest the violation of the golden rule. In a number of case not on the merits interestingly enough, courts never wants to answer this. They have avoided it, they bend over backwardso avoid having to decide this issue. Procedural reasons why does not appropriately presented. They know it is wrong but it is a allenging, politically, such a politically dangerous thing to do, to essentially Khalid Sheikh mohammed are being prosecuted for the september 11th, violates the prciple of american justice. Is is perfectly legal, they just avoided it li the plague against hope that the issue will one day go away. That remains to be seen. Host this for rum, somebody, t prosecutor, mk burns, you have a few ings to say, but at th stage, the prosecution of the guantanamo casenot speaking publicly but in the court room, this awkward position to present the prosecution case. The last thing, one thing mielle does, he not only articulates his argument, but if you ask him to, and why you can have a case like that . Whats the answer . Guest the government avoided answing this squarely too. Came down to two ideas. Pret thin reads. It is not just my editorial. Detainee dont enjoy any due process for the technical constitutional matter. Anssue like that is in the dc circuit right now and the premisis guantanamo detainees outside the United States are essentially not people for t purposes of the constition. And use the same argument. Then they say even if these are people, theourts had to be for to the legislative branch for national security, they trd to defend both segregation on t merits, an to me, to justify in 2020 discrimination, and segregated justic something out of jim crow, the slavery period so to try and argue, to coletely justifiable and the right thing to do, a hard task even fo people like rk martins or prosecutors. Ht there are 15 questions. Host i will start with Nancy Hollander who thinks you answered one of her estions but i want you to answer it more directly. Did you considemaking it more explicit about guantanamo . And did they bomb the school, and that guest a more satisfying part, and how it operates, not doing defense work, they were in a tougher question. The lead defense counsel was not a lawyer, he was a decorated pilot at that and was 100 ideologically and personal sympathies with do little raters and as i explained in the book takes the case mainly because he is love with the russn concierge at his hotel in shanghai, nes a reason to stay in shanghai and this was the only ticket in town. He takes the case for theorst reasons d it will be an open and shut case, a well uniformed plan to make it look as fair as possible but what he does, and onof the remarkable parts of this book, he cat live with himself wearing that, grabbing the case and h enemies who would have happily killed him, could have been one of the doolittle raiders, it is my duty commy job in this situation is to simply represent them and give them the trial would want if i was captured and put in japane hands. He does that at the cost of his military a pilot ter this trial and ultimately does go to law school many years later. As i said, would look to thi trial, the american trial of the doolittle trial in 1946 as the first fair trial of the poworld war ii period. There were only three specifics prior to this, one was a case that was not the greatest moment under the thumb of general macarthur, and a mass trial conducted in shanghai for the doolittle raiders invoing lynching but with the defense lawyers came into it and we will do our bs. As a consequence it ended up being a really fair trial slightlyvoiding the question, to avoid spoilers they e of king position that in 1946 were shocking and made them pariahs r even suggesting your conversation, this is a ry interesting story of human people. And we finally get the mention in shanghai. And it is really interesting read. And and guantanamo trial for japanesofficial the first one. The brutal treatment of the figure and the charges for the trial. Iot to interview Jimmy Doolittles copilot, the time was 99. It was really incredible. He was such an incredible american. He stays in china and flying missions or the hump which were resupply a third of our ples went down, i loved about all sorts of interesting things and as an anecdote, in the afterword, in the afterword or authors note, why do you want to write another book about the doittle raid . There are a lot of books out there but hopefully i can tell the story in a new way so he was a supergentleman and that was great. The revenge against the chinese for their cooperation with the do theaid one of the things that happens, 60 of doolittles men make it to safety, o of the planes ends up ditching in the soviet union and causing a diplomatic incident, three are killed jumping out but all the rest, 64 of the doolittle raiders not only survivbut make iout of occupied china with the help of a number of chinese who are sympathetic to thamericans and one of the things i write about in the book is japans sponse to this was mind numbingly stupid for one but brutal. There estimates, 40,000 chinese are killed in i dont know what you call it, a terrorism operation conducted after the doolittle ra whose sole purpose is to destroy ery year field airfield to prevent americans ne landing in china again. Th incded, i remember i didnt eat any of the pele who were involved or had personalelationships but i we a couple hours to the st of shanghai. That was the doottle raiders rallying point and there was a cave they hold up for a couple weeks where chinese enagers now go to make out and hide from their parents but the town itself becse it had been the base, the rallying point becomes a brutal target for the japanese expeditiona army which it bombed merlessly for weeks. When the airfids are destroyed, they impress the chinese and slave labor to manually break up the airfiel fopickaxes and shovels which is a brutal kind of slave labo there is some evidence, compelling evidence that japanese even used chemical weaponon kudu to kill civilians. The doolittle raid provoked thisuthless response against the chinese. The question that was raised, a lot of those did not come t in time for the trial. The amican understanding of atrocities against the chinese even in 4546 were largely reservedor dan king. Those revelations came tough scholarship done in the past 20 years some of which is in my book and tre is another scholar who worked on it too. Is your book being translated into japanese a published in japan . Guest i hopeo. I dont know to be perfectly candid. A number of japanese people have read it and appreciated it. They said they appreciated it but japanese culture, dont know if they would tell mef they hated or not. I dont i really resist any effort on the american or japanese side, moralelativism or equivalence or caricature or fairytale telling. I try to take the perspective of differenteople involved ev when they are the villains, there is a whole chapter abousomeone who is clost thing to the mastermind in the book and is written from his perspective and he is unquestionably a vlain, he is tried as a war criminal at another war crimes trial. But i tried because i find history that is too simplistic boring, i dont enjoy it. It is not history if you are not trying to help people to explain why people do i it is a wikipedia entry, not a history. Host to what extent did cold war politicsperpetrators of war crimes against prisoners of war. Guest that was a huge inflnce. In march or april of 1942 o 1946. A lot of those decisions co later, german and japanese scientists, two issues i address was emperor hero vito. Hero heat oh was involved for ything. That the complex decision tt was not publicly released in the time period that i write about. The decision was made in january 194546 and indiduals that macarthur picks and chooses as being too important for the same reasons abeing too important for the reconstruction a occupation program. Part of that, ill early 1946, military and strategic, to get japan on its feet, if nothing else is counterweight, soviet have a lot of interest, loterm rivals but the chinese civil war in the baground of the book comes up a couple different times is a major driver opolicy. A long ansr to a short question. I try to get peoples perspective, how people are viewing the chinese vil war, i find it important to think about history as it lives, not we know it to have happened. We know the Peoples Liberation army take ovethe mainland of china, shanghai check no one knows it at the time. In 194546 there is a civil war in china having all sorts of political implications. What pple deal with in time. We try to convey that. Host a really good question. Will we ever have a triaof e trial . What we did in that case, the questioner is saying currently, is there a possibility of that . Guest ost what people are asking. Whatev you want to answer is interesting idea. Guest the closest anything has come, the oba administration, complicated and debatable, do not seek accounbility or transparency, the abuses of the war terror. John durham famously workingn the russia investigation from that policy. And the american citizen, inlved in terrorism, in 25 years, it is subject to all sorts of abus as well and brought a lawsuit against john you 5 or 10 years ago. The courts ultitely dismissed the suit. Because of the doctrine peop are familiawith paula find immunity, what they did was wrong. They hent been successful so far but will hold up over time, and the criminal court brings charges agnst americans. Host you are saying the format by penalties . Guest the criminal court investigating afghanistan, could they char, in the torture memos, iis precedent. Would it be a good idea . That is why it is history. Host the book is not as nerdy as its cover. Guest nowhere ar as nerdy as i am. Host give it a shot. Give us a part of htory we dont know about. You cld start your own bl week by week. How this relates to the book. It is a good read. What is wrong witheing nerdy by the way . It is a page turner. Host it is written as a lel thriller. Funny the you say it is a lel thriller, and read back someing you said. There is fairytale history and political history,nd enjoyable history. Guest hopefully this is enjoyable nuance. Host thiss a wonderful conversation, there was a torture museum in tokyo. Hands water board, there were things referred to. And you dont have to go. A couple things i have to say that is how you get the information you get, the inside of wt is going on. Thank you so much for this, come bacanytime. I wanto advertise for Upcoming Events with john brennan and samantha power, on tuesday called undaunted and it is aemoir. Therere many many comments, to bring you back. Thank you so much. Reporter booktv on cspan2, every weekend. Saturday at 9 00 pm eaern, form president barack obama reflects o his life and political career on a promised land. Sunday at 9 00 pm easternn afterwords, open markets Institute DirectorSally Hubbard and her book monopolies suck, 7 ways big corporations ruin your life a how to take back control, shes interviewed by bloomberg ns reported david mclaughlin. At 10 00 for appellate judge in George Mason University law professor Douglas Ginsburg and his book voices of our republic examines the constitution through the eyes of judges, legal scholars and historians. Watch booktv on cspan2 this weekend and be sure to watch in depth live sunday december 6th at noon eastern with our guest, author and chair of africanamerican studies at Princeton University eddie junior. Host my name is maggie clark, codirector of absentee health and director of the Innovator Group at the aspen institute. Thank you for joining us today for what would be a fascinating