Daphne Eviatar, lawyer and journalist for the Washington Independent, discusses the Bush Administration’s semantic games that are redefining torture, how John Yoo’s justification of waterboarding conveniently ignored numerous contradictory court precedents, the familiar refrain of fitting legal opinions around the policy, why the Hamdan ruling doesn’t help detainees outside of Guantanamo and how the growing Bagram prison and other “black” detention facilities remain outside the law and hidden from scrutiny.

MP3 here. (33:03)

Daphne Eviatar is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Legal Affairs, Mother Jones, the Washington Independent and many others. She is a Senior Reporter at The American Lawyer and was an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow in 2005 and a Pew International Journalism fellow in 2002.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, (US Army Ret.), former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, discusses the coalition of Oil and Israeli interests in pushing the invasion of Iraq, all the reasons that everyone should have known that the WMD and terrorism pretexts were just that, the disgrace he felt during Powell’s UN speech and his surprise at the positive coverage, the status of Anar al-Islam in Kurdistan before the war, the after the fact creation of al Qaeda in Iraq by Zarqawi and his allies, how he came to understand how the Cheney-Neocon cabal operated - too late, the continued polarization of American politics, the responsibility of David Addington, Jim Haynes, Doug Feith, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales for the torture policy adopted after 9/11, its consequences, John McCain’s pro-torture Detainee Treatment Act, how the administration killed the Iranian peace offer of 2003 and how the administration let Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan in 2001.

MP3 here. (52:44)

Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret.), was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He is now the Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary.