Today as the guest will tell you. The guests are the author, michelle, a leading human rights lawyer, security scholar whose litigated and one many highprofile cases including several of the landmark cases and several others. Working for the pentagon military Commission Defense organization. Michelle lectures at columbia law firm and is a fellow on National Security and board of law graduate. Carol rosenberg will be talking about the book awardwinning Senior Reporter for the New York Times working in collaboration with the center. Rosenberg has been reporting in the u. S. And at Guantanamo Bay since the day it opened on january 11th, 2002. She started with the miami herald where before that she reported from the middle east and moved recently to the New York Times. She has won many awards including the Robert F Kennedy journalism award, the silver gavel award and was part of the miami herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news in 2001. So, let me tell you the format. They will talk and then i will come back on and i will pose questions from the audience. If you have any questions please feel free to put them in the chat or the q and a and i will get to as many as i can. Without further ado, take it away. Thank you very much. Im going to talk about the book quickly. The story you tell starts this way. America gets a cruel sucker punch december 7th, 1941. The pearl harbor attacks galvanize and demoralize americans. They were angry, probably scared and wanted revenge. Four months later, a scrappy bunch of pilots at the center of the story, the doolittle raiders fight deep into the japanese territory, drop bombs on military target or strategic targets and most of them make it all the way to china, our ally and then fdr [inaudible] thats exactly right in a nutshell. The story that ive been covering from forever ago seems like this. In 2001, 19 hijackers in a very cruel sucker punch attack the world trade center, pentagon and crash a plane into a pennsylvania field killing civilian targets. Four months later, i watched a military cargo plane landed at guantanamo and dislodged 20 men in orange jumpsuits and when the photos emerge, it seems to reassure americans that we got them. In both cases there would be trials, questions about the military tribunal justice and the reliability of evidence leading through torture so my first question how in heavens name did you discover the story . Taking the second part first its exactly what you just said. How i found the story was i was working in the department of defense in 2007 and this is when Michael Lucas he had been nominated to be the attorney general and we had heard a rumor about a case in which the United States prosecuted the japanese for waterboarding and that seemed relevant to the questions we were then confronting in 2007 so we sent a marine captain to the archives to dig out the record which i dont think had been seen in probably 60 years at that point and she came back and on a rainy day i read it and its the story that you just described of the doolittle raid which was probably the most celebrated operation of world war ii. It was a story about torture, justice, revenge and i was reading this episode from 1945, 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 naive about it, but it kind of hit me in the chest i had a sense of looking through and all the sudden seeing where i was at that moment. I didnt write it right away it was just a thing in the back of my mind that gave context to the work i ended up doing a number of years after that and then i decided in 2014 to try to make a book about it and thats how we got the book we have today. For the people watching, ive been talking for michelle for years about guantanamo. Since 2007. Theyve included omar [inaudible] one is gone, one is convicted trying to overturn the conviction and one is in a pretrial proceeding in a capital offense. When i would talk about other things guantanamo related he would talk about this really obscure episode like world war ii japanese far away and i thought that was kind of peculiar. Its divided into three portions. The attack, the doolittle raid, the sovereign japanese territory over pearl harbor, the First Response over the territories. They did or did not. Most made it across japan but the japanese captured them. The interrogations of the captured pilots including the waterboarding, the trial and the summary of some. This is all in the first three chapters. They said the doolittle raiders were working and then part number three after the u. S. Wins the war, we have maybe what you would call victory justice. The americans recover the sort of surviving p. O. W. S that were held in the book and the United States puts the people that prosecute the trial. The reason we are having this conversation now i remember calling over the summer and saying what struck me about the book is that its written in the language of the military commission. To describe what happened 80 years ago. 75, 80 years ago. So, lets talk about that language. You call people highvalue detainees in the book. Who are they . I think i call them the highest value detainees specifically but that was deliberate. I am not being coy. Those were the doolittle raiders. You describe them i think accurately in the american perception. I never made that connection until you just did that as the four months goes by america shows it can fight back. It doesnt make america feel better, right. It had virtually no strategic significance. It ended up having far more for the japanese and its precisely because one of the things i try to do in this book for reasons we can get into but i just kind of became fascinated the perspective and as much as you can look at it and see the celebration to show we are in the war to win it. It was 9 11. Its the first time in its history japan ever successfully attacked from abroad. Immediately it is a moment of fear, uncertainty, basic assumptions of japanese life upended all at once. Its a profound vulnerability and outrage. We can talk about how the japanese characterize the attack but they called it a terror raid and what they focused on wasnt the bombing of the mitsubishi plant with the oil tankers they focused on the civilians in the context of the doolittle raid with a great atrocity. They literally called it an act of terrorism so for them when they captured the doolittle raiders they had their own guantanamo. There seemed to be a symmetry to all of this because they captured and tortured them and theres this debate about what to do with them and it exposes all of the challenges we face in the aftermath of 9 11 and that continue to this day to what extent do we act on revenge and the ability to show our power over prisoners versus our ideals and i think one of the things that surprised me because i wasnt a japan historian working on this book is japan and seeing a progressive liberal society, the first to sign the Geneva Conventions of 29 and so they prohibited torture at the end of the 19th century and almost prevented the Death Penalty is a massive revolution in their own thinking and so when the raid happens they kind of just revert to the same forms of brutality for the same reasons i and same excuses that we did and that to me was being incredibly compelling between the two and i think that its just as important to understand how and why they did what they did. They are not the first by any stretch of the imagination. Japan has been waging wars for five months but they are the first martini prisoners, the first people the japanese themselves care about who these people are. They are not just some combat tends in the philippines or singapore. These are the people that perpetrated the attack against us that created this turning point in our own sense of vulnerability so they became to the highest level they were a political issue and thats because they had such highvalue. Page 22 you call these enhanced. But can you describe what happened . I do describe it and again, these are somewhat coy. This isnt a book about the parallels. I did choose language at certain parts of the book to cause the reader to reflect upon the parallels that i was seeing as i wrote it and so will it was waterboarding as you mentioned, but also sleep deprivation. We would call them stress divisions today, protected solitary confinement and then other forms of incredible brutality that looked familiar to what the United States was responsible for doing in the immediate aftermath and i think one of the things that was poignant to me about that is what i talk about when i first read this in 2007 as again, i kind of grew up in a very sort of traditional age. My grandfather never drove the japanese car and so to see the United States behaving as the Imperial Japanese was such a jarring moment thinking about what road the country had gone down and when you get down to even the precise methods of torture being reflected back it was just stunning to me. I dont think its overt. Im not suggesting that its a reference to guantanamo but it is the language of today and so i think they see it and other people imagine read it and dont even recognize it. Thats probably true they do see it as a traditional world war ii thriller and that was my intent. I wanted to try to wrestle with the ambiguities that i have wrestled with in my career in dealing with these issues in a way that was kind of honest. I find the different histories one we are quite familiar with look at the michael bay movie and you will see theres also this polemical history where everything the United States does its just sort of an expoee of history attempting to sort of expose the worst of any country thats being written about. And i just find both of those kind of naive. I think that its naive in our own time as well to look at these issues with this blackandwhite understanding. People do good things, good people do bad things and they do it for hard to understand reasons. And for just understandable reasons this book was and the opportunity for me to wrestle with a lot of that. We had the distance at least of not having to think about the contemporary issues but thinking of it as history. A. But you do work at guantanamo in cases involving torture and so without risking anybodys security clearance some of it sounds like its from the pages. Its not ripped from the senate. One thing i will highlight theres about 1700 footnotes so this is a history. A. These are i will point out a language i made quite consciously and i did this across the book. I used modern language referring to something as beijing. I find the readers will get confused. One place i had to think about that a little more carefully is the use of the phrase that is in the current phrase used in the 1920s. It was typically there was other torture, you name it but it was probably the most waterboarding doesnt come back until the post september 11th period. So, choosing to use the word waterboarding was a conscious choice to say this is the same thing and we shouldnt get lost in our own euphemisms of the past to try to draw distinctions where they do not actually exist. So i did do that deliberately. I didnt want to mislead the reader. I wanted to make what was being talked about as clear as possible. And i think often when history tends to use this language in the period it gets lost on the reader for the same reason i would point this out like the 1940s especially the period that im writing about and the casual racism it comes out of everybodys mouth without even thinking about it. In the newspaper headlines, high and low. I made the choice to restrain my use of quotations in which that was included because to a modern reader it is jarring you sort of make judgments about people. And there is an uncomfortable use of it in the book. And those are deliberate as well. I did choose language very carefully because i wanted to convey the reality and i wanted people to enjoy what they were reading but in a certain language theres one or two uses of the word in the book but they were very specific choices because i thought in those moments using that word is necessary to convey the alienation and the sort of racial dynamic that is at play. So every instance in which i could have basically protest if i could indulge you to those moments and also have been distracted so its meaning Something Different today. The japanese accuse them of being war criminals and convicted them and then the second part of the story is finding those for conducting an unfair trial so we end up having a 1946 trial. I would be reticent to answer that question because i want it to actually hang over the book as people read it because it is one of the efforts i try to do hopefully successfully is to not present it as a fairytale but at least to give the perspective of the people involved so you can wrestle with these questions in the same way that i have over the past. These are hard questions and anyone who says they are not. Im not saying torture is but when it comes to the responsibility of the victim status to claim you are a victim, they are incredibly fraught questions and difficult and they should be because they are real questions. What are the legitimate legal questions . It was pretty influx at the time so there were efforts to create the treaties about the combat but they never got off the ground, no pun intended. This wasnt true in the united kingdom. They had taken the view and the germans took that as well. The United States resisted this quite aggressively so theres a policy ingrained throughout the 1930s and 40s that only military targets. We are trying to break what the war planners of the time called the industrial bottlenecks. That changes over the course of the war, never explicitly which is its own interesting story but by 1945 with the campaign against japan first, the firebombing and then the two atomic bombings at a minimum the tolerance for civilian casualties goes extremely high and theres the pretext of targeting the military targets become more and more pretextual even in the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki you can read these debates about targeting the military school in hiroshima. Its a certain quality but certainly 1941, 42, the United States took the targeting on paper and in doctrine. The evidence that i have for this is the target selection they were all industrial targets and they got together to draw cards to see who got to bomb the imperial palace and doolittle called a stop to it and said its not a military target and moreover, we dont want to give the japanese a cause to accuse us of wrongdoing or to give them an opportunity to rally around the leader. If i remember from the book correctly, doesnt he also remember or recognize over in england people are rallying around royalty and hes very strategic in that regard. You explain it, sorry. No, no, thats right. One of the major rationales as the battle o battle of britain n pretty effective demoralizing the population until the germans hit Buckingham Palace and that created an opportunity for everyone to rally around the flag so he explicitly said its off limits we do not want to give any opportunity to rally around anyone. We have to make this essentially and aboveboard operation and that was expressive of the policy in 1942. Were these trials open . The japanese trial was not. The japanese soldiers were allowed to kind of model in and it was quite a show for the people in shanghai and the fact so many people were allowed to attend, this isnt in the book but it became a point of contention that the trials must be held in secret like why are you letting so many people and when its supposed to be a secret trial but it was held entirely out in the open and that was a point of pride but also policy that the United States war crimes trials that took place in the pacific and europe didnt engage in this kind of closed session we are going to have all this secret evidence presented. They had them in public and they were keen to keep the press involved because the press coverage was seen as important in relaying the facts and also as a kind of transparency measure. So yes, transparency was and an important value in the military trials that happened after world war ii. It did have the advantage of the war being over so this is one of the things we are up against like guantanamo the argument that the war is ongoing and therefore there needs to be a certain level to crusade. It struck me that the american tribunal has done that afterwards and there were transcripts, clearly. Were there tapes . This is part of my Great Research failures. I try to find these. It was broadcast on radio every day live and supposedly tapes existed at some point but after looking through every potential archive they just dont exist anymore if they were preserved. And they were heroes, right. Absolutely. They are feted in memory today around things like dday and the atomic bombings and these other events that had a far more lasting significance militarily in the Second World War but the doolittle raiders were unquestionably the most celebrated and important figures you could name. There were two movies made about the doolittle raid during the war. It lasted like four years, so hollywood was able to generate two blockbuster films including one that kind of imagined the fate of the lost the doolittle raiders in the movie called the purple heart while the war was ongoing. Barbaric as the japanese and either placating or joining line that is historically important and roosevelt says he will find the japanese who are responsible in holding them personally responsible. Is the first meal time that the head of state seriously promising the public that more criminality will be punished and to satiate the publics desire to that will only hold those people who are responsible accountable. And that ends up becoming the resistance of the soviets and the british but that becomes a wide policy so that by the end of the war were claims tires like nuremberg of the largescale individual trials like what i read about you a firm part of american and allied policy generally. Not that foregone conclusion and to deal with the public desire for revenge and justice that is one of the major drivers of public opinion. Wh