All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our guest today is the great Glenn Greenwald.
He's the star blogger at Salon.com, at Salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
He's a former constitutional lawyer, litigator, I guess he's still a lawyer, but used to actually litigate constitutional law cases.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrites.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
Great to be back, Scott.
Hey, it's good to have you here, and man, I was really proud of you on watching you on Bill Moyers the other night.
You did just great.
Thanks.
It was actually interesting because I've done a little bit of TV here and there and never find it entirely satisfying because the format typically is such that you have 20 to 30 seconds to answer questions, and if you're doing something other than trying to explain things without resort to kind of conventional talking point, it's very difficult to explain a thing in 20 seconds.
And so the format there was a lot more open-ended and I thought more conducive to a lot more subject discussion if TV were like that.
I think more often things would be a lot better, but there you go.
You're kind of a role model to me because I was sitting there watching it and thinking, you know, if that was me up there, I wouldn't be nearly as good.
I would probably start cussing and, you know, who knows what.
That's the hardest part is to exercise rhetorical restraint when talking about these things.
There you go.
Well, and see, this goes right to the heart of a couple of different things I want to bring up here and let you address at the first of this interview.
One thing is you mentioned in the context of your interview on Moyers and on the Rachel Maddow show, Noam Chomsky's propaganda model, and this is something that, eh, it's sort of like taking a class in social sciences where anything that they tell you, you kind of realize you already knew that, but they sort of got it all straightened out for you in a way that you hadn't really thought of before.
That's what Chomsky did for me with the propaganda model, and you explained it well on your show.
How does that work for people, the way they manipulate the debate on TV?
Yeah, you know, when I first heard Chomsky's explanation about what he calls the demand for concision on television, I kind of reacted the same way, which was that it's sort of an obvious point, but one that I hadn't really thought of myself before, and so in that regard, it was new and insightful when you think about it, that it is obvious, even though it's sort of a novel insight.
You know, essentially what his point was is that virtually every television show is structured in roughly the same format, which is anyone who wants to go on and talk about political issues has between 15 seconds to, say, 45 seconds in which to express a thought, and by the time your 30 or 45 seconds elapses, the host starts getting very fidgety.
You're going to get interrupted.
If you take more time than that in order to explain yourself, you're essentially going to be deemed somebody not suitable for television, and you'll unlikely be invited back, and his point about that is that if you're someone who basically wants to go on television and say things that most people already agree with, that are just kind of common assumptions within our political discourse, you know, Iran is an evil country, or Saddam Hussein was an evil man and we did a good thing by deposing him, or any of the other kind of just common morality plays that substitute for conventional wisdom in our political discourse, it's very easy to say these things in a very short period of time.
You don't need any evidence for them.
You don't need to articulate the premises which underlie them.
It's just assumed that you can just leap to the conclusion in that whatever you say is true because you're just mouthing common wisdom, and on the other hand, you want to actually go and challenge conventional wisdom and say things that people aren't accustomed to hearing, you know, and I'd say the leading example of that are things that critique the United States and what we do in the world, not from the perspective of, you know, people who just assume that America is good no matter what we do, but the way that the other people in the world see it.
You actually need to do work in order to get people to be receptive to that.
You need to use historical analogies or offer lots of evidence or go to the underlying premises and point out the deficiencies in them, and there's just no time ever that you're given on television in order to do that, and so the format of television really is designed to ensure that conventional orthodoxy, the pieties that, you know, are widespread are just continuously reaffirmed, and people who want to challenge those orthodoxies, let alone the challenges themselves, are simply excluded by virtue of the formatting of television.
So if we were to try to apply this on this show, where I have this flaw where I try my best in a way to actually shut up and let you people talk, but if we were to actually try to do the propaganda model on this show, it would be something like, so, Glenn, where exactly should Bush and Cheney be imprisoned for the rest of their lives?
Should it be at a former Soviet gulag in Romania, perhaps the salt pit tortured dungeon outside of Kandahar, or maybe one of those underground dungeons in Thailand, or perhaps Gitmo.
Maybe they should get orange jumpsuits and go to Gitmo.
That's the debate for this quarter hour on the show, folks.
Where should Bush and Cheney be imprisoned for life?
And then you get to answer, well, I think Thailand would be the best place, or Romania, because there you have the whole former Nazi and former Soviet base irony going on there, and that's even better.
And then we go to commercial.
Yeah, and I mean, that's part of the reason why, you know, I think that's exactly right.
It's part of the reason why you don't ever hear any real discussion about things like holding our political leaders accountable.
I mean, if the issue of prosecutions for what clearly are the crimes committed by our government ever come up on mainstream television, it's almost universally dismissed away as something that would be too partisan and would divide the country and distract from the important work that Barack Obama has to do in turning the economy around and fixing the two wars that we're fighting.
I mean, that's literally all you need to say, and everyone will immediately nod in agreement that, you know, prosecuting Bush and Cheney as war criminals is something that only the most radical and fringe crazies would ever intercane doing.
And if you want to actually explain why it's far more dangerous not to do it than to do it, you know, you need to talk about things like the rule of law and what happens to societies that cease to live under the rule of law and hold their political elites accountable under the law equally, and how we, in other cases, when it's come to other governments, insisted that people be held before war crime tribunals, lest the entire concept of the law of war disintegrates.
And it's a much more complex endeavor to explain why it's far more damaging to allow our leaders to rule with impunity than it is to hold them accountable, but you can never do that on standard television shows.
Well, and it's funny, the contrast really is stark, too.
I just watched the Rachel Maddow show clip this morning, and she clearly likes you and reads your blog and wanted to let you say what it is that you wanted to say.
But the show's just not set up that way.
You had to wrap it up as fast as you could.
I can see you kind of, oh, no, I better figure out a way to say this in only two more sentences.
Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, that's about as you know, the Rachel Maddow show is about as good as it gets.
I mean, she, you know, as you say, she does think about these issues.
I've been I've done her radio show many times and they're not dissimilar to the kind of conversation that we're having now.
She's extremely smart.
She is not really bought down in mainstream conventional wisdom, but she's, you know, obviously constrained by the format that that show that is imposed on her, really, by that show and the belief that you need to have a format like that in order to attract the kind of ratings that MSNBC wants to attract.
And so, you know, as good as that gets in terms of and that is as good as it gets in terms of mainstream television, I did find just my own personal reaction was that it was a fairly confining discussion year on there to talk about things like Guantanamo and the challenges required in order to close Guantanamo and the fear mongering campaign being unleashed in order to impede the closing of Guantanamo and the idea of national security courts and and empowering the president to have the preventive detention, which are, you know, some of the measures that are now being advocated.
And to go on and even to explain what those ideas are, let alone to dissect them and analyze them requires a lot more than 30 seconds.
And as soon as you speak for 15 or 20 seconds, you feel that your time is close to running out.
And so you try and cram in information as quickly as possible.
But but you don't feel like you can really kind of engage in the analysis of that topic warrants.
Well, and I want to give you plenty of time to get into all that scaremongering and the fear campaign about what to do with the Guantanamo prisoners, detainees.
I'm not sure if there's a legal term for them at all.
I'd hate to use a legal term if they don't really have legal standing.
But anyway, the people being held there, I'd like to get to that.
But I want to stay on this propaganda model for a minute here, because, you know, oftentimes when you talk about, you know, everybody has to agree on the unsaid premise and and that kind of thing and be so concise, usually what you also have there is the right and the left.
And like, for example, I forget if we discuss this or not, but I know I read it on your blog where somebody asked a Washington Post reporter, how come you won't call out John McCain when he keeps blatantly lying and saying that Russia invaded Georgia for no reason whatsoever?
And she said, well, that would be Obama's job to call him out on that.
And as long as the Democrats aren't challenging the Republicans, it doesn't matter if the reporters themselves know that they're actually lying completely wrong and deliberately wrong.
They will not call them out.
These are the two sides of the debate.
And if you're to the left of Barack Obama, which would be the only explanation for you making an argument that he is not making, then who cares about what you think anyway?
Yeah, I found that really interesting.
That was actually a chat that that was posted by Dana Priest, who, you know, is really one of the best reporters in working in any establishment venue.
She was the one who who uncovered and publicized in the face of threats of prosecution the network of secret black sites that the United States was maintaining throughout Eastern Europe and wrote a really lengthy and detailed exposé on this network of secret prisons.
And she also did the series on the treatment of veterans at the Army at Army Root Hospital, Walter Root Hospital.
So she's really a very knowledgeable reporter who understands the adversarial role that journalists ought to play.
And yet she was asked in this chat why it is that this complete and obvious myth has been permitted to dominate our thinking about Russia and Georgia.
And that is the idea that that war began by an unprovoked attack by the Russians when, of course, it's absolutely clear that that war began when when Georgia started shooting artillery not only into civilian neighborhoods in South Ossetia, but also at Russian peacekeepers and a completely unprovoked and brutal attack that itself was a war crime.
And Russia responded probably excessively, but nonetheless, responded to that provocation.
The complete opposite of what our discourse has assumed.
I mean, she said probably correctly that the reason that that myth has been perpetrated without much challenge, and it's been a little bit more challenged lately, but this is about a month or two ago at the height of the campaign, was because John McCain, you know, was the one who perpetrated this, you know, we're all Georgians now morality tale about, you know, the poor little plucky democracy being attacked by the Russian aggressors.
And Obama, who, you know, originally was accused of being too sympathetic to Russia and too morally compromising in his position, when he initially issued a very mild statement saying I urge restraint on both sides, quickly abandoned that and embraced the McCain view of this war, the deceitful fiction that the war began because of Russian aggression.
And so with both political parties, and the leaders of both political parties, embracing this orthodoxy, there simply was nobody in the mainstream who was deviating from it in any way.
And as you suggested, when both political parties agree to the same premises, any other views, even if what they're agreeing to is completely false gets shut out.
You know, I am often asked when I go around and talk about things like Bush's torture program, or the unlawful, plainly illegal surveillance that he ordered on American citizens, why it is that most Americans don't care as much as they should, or why they didn't protest or backlash.
And what I always say is exactly this, which is, you know, you go and look at what not just Republicans, but Democrats were saying about these, these issues, you'd be very hard pressed to find very many Democrats outside, you know, Russ Feingold here, Dennis Kucinich there, who was dismissed as fringe, who were speaking about these, these issues, and any sort of disagreeable let alone urgent terms.
And so you have Republicans defending it, and many Democrats defending it or sort of, you know, protesting in the mildest and lamest ways, if they protested at all.
And so the debate got defined by the agreement of both parties that this was not very much of a, an urgent matter at all, if it was even anything to object to.
And so naturally, most Americans were never exposed to the idea that this was a radical departure, and were serious crimes, and meant to make sense that there wasn't much backlash.
Right.
And that's exactly it.
And then you heard people like Chuck Schumer going, oh, well, nobody cares about that.
Well, why not?
It's because he hasn't, he and his colleagues haven't made a big deal about it at all.
And of course, as you explained to Bill Moyers, because they were in on it, the leadership of the Democrats.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, you know, I think it took a while for people to realize this.
What originally happened was that these were programs, this whole panoply of radicalism, were programs that were originally designed and conceived of by the Bush administration and implemented by the Bush administration in secret.
And so as it, as these things got slowly disclosed, when they were disclosed, they originally were presented as things that the Bush administration had done.
It was the Bush administration that was defending them, and the Bush administration that implemented them and oversaw them.
And all of that was true.
But what happened as these disclosures became more common is that the Bush administration began defending itself by saying, well, we didn't just do these things on our own.
We actually briefed the congressional leadership, including Democrats in Congress, and told them what we were doing, and they didn't object at all.
And it turned out that by and large, that was mostly accurate, that even now, the Democrats who they say were included in these briefings, they're not obscure backbenchers.
I mean, there are people like Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman, the leading Democrats in the House at the time on the Intelligence Committee, and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Bob Graham, who preceded him, were brought into these meetings.
They were, in 2002, brought to the CIA, and the CIA walked them through what they call the Enhanced Interrogation Program, which, of course, is the torture program, and told them that they were waterboarding and invoking all of the standard interrogation techniques that have long been regarded as torture in the entire civilized world.
And none of the Democrats objected.
Certainly none of them did so publicly or took any steps to impede the program.
And in fact, in most cases, they actively encouraged that the program continue.
The same is true for warrantless eavesdropping and rendition.
And so, it's simply not very difficult to understand why the Democrats were so mealy-mouthed and reluctant to condemn these programs, when they were condemning them at all.
It's because they were just as implicated, or almost just as implicated in their implementation as the Bush administration itself was.
Yeah, the Gang of Eight.
Not obscure backbenchers by any means.
The leadership and the leadership of the intelligence committees, even when the Democrats were in the minority there still.
Right.
Incredible.
Okay, now, and speaking of radicalism, Glenn, this is something that, well, I think I've deliberately not asked you about this, because it's kind of nice not knowing.
But I think in this context, it's important to go ahead and ask.
My impression is, and perhaps it's simply your measured tone of voice, is that you're really not a radical or even a leftist, really, at all.
Best I can tell, and you don't usually address welfare issues and these kinds of things in your writings, but best I can tell, you're a fairly moderate Democrat who just happens to be a real stickler for the Bill of Rights.
Well, I think these labels have become, as you know, I think these labels have become almost useless, because...
Well, the point is, there's certainly a difference between a moderate and a radical.
I mean, I sit up here and breathe fire all day, and you're just not a fire breather.
That's not really your modus operandi at all.
I guess even what is moderate and what is radical is shifted also.
I mean, it used to be the case that people who believe in things like search warrants and habeas corpus and due process, it used to be that those people were called Americans.
Those were pretty much common beliefs, regardless of where you fell on the political spectrum.
And now, there are actually people, I'd say a majority of people who define our political debates, who consider a belief in things like search warrants, before you can use drop and habeas corpus and due process, before you can put people into cages for life, to be the hallmark of a radical or a leftist or whatever the term is.
So I do try and confine my advocacy to what I always thought were very solid and uncontroversial principles, because one of the points that I typically try to make is how radically we've departed from all the things that we've said we believe in in the past.
And I try and avoid sort of gratuitously inflammatory partisan or ideological disputes, because those aren't even necessary to get to how sort of far astray we've gone in terms of the things we always claim to believe in.
Right.
Well, but see, the problem is this.
On TV, they want to go, well, you know, the left says this, and the left says that, and you know how these left bloggers are.
And basically they're referring to you, and they're trying to say that you're somehow to the left of the Democratic Party, when, as you're saying, you could be anywhere on any political spectrum and be hardcore about the Bill of Rights.
You don't have, you could be, well, ask a right winger about the Second Amendment, for example, he'll tell you.
Yeah, I mean, or you can just go back and look at, you know, even what people were saying in the 1990s who were considered conservatives at the time, ironically, including people who ended up part of the Bush administration and implemented some of these draconian policies.
I mean, John Ashcroft was one of the most vehement opponents of Clintonite programs to do things like ban encryption technology from preventing the government from accessing people's computer communications, or requiring that they keep it accessible, internet communications accessible to the government.
And even the FISA court was considered in a lot of conservative circles in the 1990s to be a grave infringement of liberties for reasons that we've discussed in the past.
And so, you know, these principles are not controversial.
Even, you know, of course, foreign policy principles as well.
I mean, the idea that we shouldn't be invading and occupying other countries and rebuilding them in our own image was much more of a principle of the right than the left in the past.
And so, you know, that's why I say I think it's very difficult to start trying to throw these labels around.
But I think what matters is that there were these core set of political principles that had fairly common agreement.
And that has been largely thrown away in place of true radicalism that kind of predominates now.
Right.
And that's, yeah, all the radicalism now, it's like Garrett Garrett said, well, I don't know how much you'll agree with this reference, but Garrett Garrett talking about the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration was, all the revolutionaries are on the inside and all the protectors are out here on the outside watching helplessly.
Yeah, I think that's largely true.
I mean, I think the ironically enough, the establishment itself has become a truly radical political faction, which is kind of counterintuitive.
But I think that's exactly true.
Yeah.
Well, because the premise of having a constitution and especially of having that Bill of Rights, that whole, well, we'll ratify this constitution, but only if James Madison swears before God that he's going to add 10 declaratory and restrictive clauses to this thing.
The whole premise.
I mean, this is, again, one of those things that everyone in America, no matter where on the political spectrum you fall on, you know, pretty much ought to agree that if the constitution creates this government, then the law is the law and the Bill of Rights is the Bill of Rights.
You can't go around putting Glenn Greenwald on trial without access to a lawyer and without habeas corpus and the right to face his accusers and see all the evidence against him and all these things.
It says it right there in black and white.
That's not radical at all to say that the law is the law in America, is it?
Well, it has become that, you know, it's interesting when I talk about kind of the evisceration of the rule of law.
I don't only mean the fact that we don't put our political leaders on trial or investigate and prosecute them when they commit crimes.
I mean, I do mean that that is part of it.
But it's something much broader, which is the whole idea of what the constitution says and what it provides and the constraints that it imposes, that that should be acknowledged and adhered to is really something that our political class really doesn't believe in any longer.
I mean, you go and watch any of these television news programs or read most of our newspapers and mainstream outlets, and there's virtually never any mention when these debates are taking place in terms of what the president can or can't do or what Congress can and can't do of what the founding, governing, still supreme document says about these things, even though it supposedly is the centerpiece of how our government functions.
Instead, it's a very sort of pragmatic calculus.
It's based on what seems to be right or wrong or justifiable or not at the time.
The idea that we ought to be guided by or adhere to constitutional constraints is virtually a non-existent concept.
And that really is a byproduct of the fact the rule of law is not something recognized by the political class.
They really do believe that they can exercise power at will and without restraint.
Well, you know, to watch Bush and Cheney and, well, as we know, as the Senate Committee report explained last week, the Principals Committee and all their lawyers, I would almost go ahead and acquiesce.
I mean, not like I have a choice anyway, but I would almost think it was okay if all these people were allowed to go free, as long as they admitted that there was no law.
There wasn't a law that created the Congress or the presidency or that binds me.
And then we can all just be free.
And I'd be willing to let Bush and Cheney go if we could just all be free.
Yeah, I mean, there is a, you know, part of it is a desire just to have some honest acknowledgement of what our country has become.
And, I mean, one of the things that I almost appreciate about Dick Cheney as he does these interviews, as opposed to, you know, most of these Bush officials, is that he's not really even much bothered by the idea that what he authorized is probably illegal.
You know, he's very brazen about proudly embracing what it is that he did and, well, I'll pay a little bit of lip service to the fact that, you know, he doesn't think it's wrong or the Constitution calls for a strong executive.
He clearly is not particularly interested in the pretense that they were concerned in any way about what the law allowed or what the Constitution allowed.
And there's a little bit of a refreshing honesty to that, that he really just makes it as brazen as it ought to be expressed, which is, yeah, they authorized these tactics.
Yeah, they authorized things like waterboarding and rendition and entered Iraq based on completely false pretenses and would have done it anyway, even if they had known it was known that they were false.
But he believed they were justifiable and that's all that matters.
And it is good to see it put in terms that are that stark.
Right.
Well, and this does go back to the media, too, because the people who are interviewing him, whether it's Larry King or this guy from ABC News or whatever, sometimes they'll ask one good question and they'll get some shocking answer.
But then and, you know, I speculate and I try my best to watch gears turning in people's heads and try to figure out what's going on.
And the best I can tell, these reporters know one trillionth what you or I know about the torture program, the wiretapping, et cetera.
And so they're not in any position, Glenn, to ask the real follow up question that you would ask, like when Cheney admitted the other day, yes, he ordered waterboarding.
The obvious follow up question to that is, you know that that's a felony, right?
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, they they don't.
I mean, these issues are are barely discussed in public.
And they're actually surprised that Jonathan Carly even asked about that.
But he asked about it that in the most surface way possible, compare that, for example, to how thorough of of experts these political reporters are in the Rob Bogolyavich scandal.
They know every last detail, every last document, every last fact that they can recite as though they've memorized all of it, which they have because it's a titillating scandal that's easy to digest and fun to talk about.
And, you know, sort of the kind of sleaze and excitement that they wallow in.
And as you say, their knowledge of things like illegal torture and rendition programs or war crimes and the laws of war or surveillance crimes and the like is is one one millionth of what they've learned about that or other similar, you know, similarly petty and sleazy matters, which is a real shame because this Senate report, which you talked about at length on your blog at salon dot com slash opinion slash Greenwald, put out by the Senate Armed Services Committee signed by John McCain from, as you wrote on your blog, the president's party, the president's party's presidential candidate has put his signature on this declassified executive summary of the Senate report, which itself is what it's only what, 20, 30 pages long or something like that big type and basically says that everything in chain of command by Seymour Hirsch back in 2005 is right, that torture team by Philip Sands, that everything he says in there about these war criminals is true, that the dark side by Jane Mayer is is right on the money and that these people are felons.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's absolutely no doubt about it.
And I mean, I do think it's interesting that Dick Cheney feels so comfortable walking around, you know, so brazenly acknowledging what are, by all accounts, crimes, because he knows that we're just not going to do anything about that.
You won't even read this thing and barely discussed it.
And, you know, there was all that outcry over Abu Ghraib and how horrible these low level personnel were who engage in these, you know, sadistic and inhumane acts that brought shame and disgrace on the United States.
And now here we have a Senate report not only signed by their public party's president nominee, but agreed to by several other Republicans on that panel and objected to by nobody.
It was unanimously issued, directly tying the policies of the top level of the Bush administration to what happened in Abu Ghraib and saying that it was not the acts of unauthorized acts of low level military personnel, but was the direct byproduct of the policies that they authorized at the top of the government.
And the media just paid that no attention whatsoever.
And you know, when you talk about the brazenness, I'm kind of curious as to whether they had a principal's meaning about this.
I guess maybe we'll find out in 30 years or something.
But I noticed that Dick Cheney in the interview the other day with was a Jonathan Carly said that he used basically the same line as Condoleezza Rice used back, I guess, in August or September when she said, look, whatever the legalities, we were trying to protect the American people after September 11th, where she's basically openly saying, forget you.
Right.
And that's been the attitude of this government all along.
And it's difficult even to blame them, given that we've allowed them to get away with these crimes with impunities.
You say the media doesn't even hold them accountable.
And therefore, the citizens can't, even if they were inclined to, because there's really no there's no debate over these things.
There's no information that's being distributed.
So I think it just makes sense that that these kinds of kind of impunity is allowed to take place.
All right.
Now, if we can switch gears here for the last few minutes, Glenn, I'd like to ask you about all the controversy.
I mean, geez, here it is.
It's only halfway through December.
I don't think has the Electoral College even voted.
I think I saw one article about in one state.
They vote or something.
Is it all in one day?
Did I miss it?
I don't know.
I'm not about formality.
So anyway, here we are.
Neither of us even know if this guy's actually the president elect yet.
And already, Robert Gates, he's keeping Hillary Clinton for for secretary of state.
Jim Jones, I love that.
Get out the flavor aid for a national security advisor and already issuing nuclear war guarantees to Israel.
He's had Robert Gates tell George Will at The Washington Post that we will be in Iraq for decades and that nothing he has said about getting us out and out of Iraq in 16 months precludes that whatsoever.
I'm feeling discouraged, Glenn.
Yeah, well, you know, I can't say that I am surprised by anything that's happened thus far.
I'm a little bit surprised that there's talk that they actually might retain McConnell and and and Michael Hayden, the CIA director and the director of national intelligence, just because symbolically those are the two who have really overseen the most controversial programs of the Bush administration.
And we'll see whether or not that happens.
But the fact that he's surrounding himself with all kinds of establishment figures, hawks and even Republicans, people who helped to implement the policies of the last eight years, I don't think can or should surprise anybody.
I don't think he ever held himself out as anything other than a sort of centrist establishment who wants to please political power and not do anything to disrupt it.
And that's how he became president.
He got to the Senate and the first person that he sought out as his mentor was Joe Lieberman and campaigned for Joe Lieberman against the anti-war candidate Neville Monahan in Connecticut.
And so I don't think that anyone who's been paying attention to Barack Obama should be surprised by the fact that he's surrounding himself with people like that.
That's how he empowers himself.
I'm willing to wait and see whether or not, as he and his supporters claim, this effort to surround himself with establishment power brokers is an attempt to co-opt them in order to implement the sort of change-sweeping progressive agenda, or whether or not it's truly reflective of the way that he intends to govern.
I mean, I have my suspicions.
I have my beliefs about what I think is likely to happen.
But I'm willing to wait and see what he does before I begin to criticize him, if for no other reason than that I'll make the ultimate criticism more potent, I think.
That if you waited until you were able to see what he actually did before saying, well, this is what he's doing and therefore I'm criticizing him, I just think people will be more open to those criticisms.
Is there a reason for concern?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, that's been true for a long time about what Barack Obama intends to do.
But as you say, he may not even be President-Elect yet formally.
He's certainly not inaugurated yet.
So unless there's some truly surprising appointees that he's considering, like John Brennan, an advocate of rendition and torture and the like, I'm willing to give him a little breathing room before pronouncing that I know what he's going to do.
Well, and that's okay.
And you've done a great job on your blog of raising problems where you see them in some of these appointments.
And by the way, a friend in the chat room says that the Electoral College, in fact, did meet, I guess it was yesterday or today.
Congratulations, President-Elect Barack Obama.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
But, you know, here's the one that's really getting me more than anything else.
And I know that this is something that concerns you.
Mostly your your beat is on domestic spying and the torture and that kind of thing.
But in terms of broader policy, this guy came out just a couple of days after winning the election in November and and has been and has continued to make statements about Iran's pretended development of nuclear weapons that you and I and Mohamed ElBaradei and Thomas Fingar and the National Intelligence Council know they are not developing at all.
And here he's making threats about using nuclear weapons against them.
Right.
Now, I'll just give you in order to play devil's advocate and to tell you why I think it's prudent, at least for me, in my view to wait a little bit.
What the what the argument is on his behalf, which is if you are going to reverse the course that the United States has been pursuing of belligerence towards Iran, and if you really are intent on engaging in meaningful negotiations with them so that we can have a once and for all rapprochement with them and and a full resolution of the kind of tensions that have been, you know, inexorably leading to some kind of conflict, if not all out military confrontation in the future, then one of the smart ways you can do that is by using the language of being a hawk towards Iran, or, you know, making it clear that you are you find their development of nuclear weapons, even if it's a possibility to be intolerable.
So that way, there aren't factions in advance who have already concluded that you're some, you know, soft patsy on Iran, the sort of only Nixon could have gone to train a mentality that enables Obama to say, I showed you how serious I was about Iran, I showed you that I wasn't taking the threat of their proliferation lightly.
And now that you believe that you'll know that when I go to Iran and sit down with them and negotiate a piece that I'm not doing it from a position of weakness or indifference.
That's the argument.
And by the way, I have Horry Clinton by my side, as my Secretary of State, who you know, is not soft on Iran, she wants threatened to obliterate them.
She's by my side as I sign this agreement, and therefore you bring those factions along with you instead of having them exist as impediments towards you.
Now, is that really what he's doing?
Or is it really that he intends to follow the same hardline strategies?
And that's why he's embraced that rhetoric?
I don't know the answer.
I have my suspicions.
But again, I'm going to wait and see.
Well, and that's eminently fair of you, Glenn.
And we'll have plenty of time.
Yeah.
If Obama intends to pursue an aggressive course with Iran, one will know that quite quickly.
And we'll have plenty of time to begin objecting.
All right.
Now, here's some clear language from the Obama Biden group that I like.
And I'd like to end this interview on a positive note, if I possibly can, since Bush and Cheney and Addington and the rest of them will all skate for their kidnapping, torture and murder charges.
Joe Biden has said, has basically sworn that he means to give up much of the power that has been amassed in the office of the vice president on the last eight years.
He has repeatedly called Cheney the worst vice president ever and has said, I think it was to the Politico, that he means only to be an advisor.
And that is it.
And that he does not mean to take on a portfolio of foreign policy or torture policy or anything else.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that's encouraging.
I think they mean that.
Now, the reality is that I don't, as far as I'm concerned, what was so dangerous about Dick Cheney, and that's actually an adjective that Joe Biden has used in the past to describe Cheney, wasn't so much that he undertook too active of a role.
I mean, if you have a president who tends to, whose leadership and management style is to delegate, as Bush's was, and you want to use the vice president to implement policy or to oversee the development of certain programs and the like, you know, it's probably an unconstitutionally inappropriate role.
And I'd prefer that the vice president not have any formal authority like that.
But the mere delegation of that kind of responsibility to the vice president isn't what, in my view, made Dick Cheney so dangerous.
It was the policies themselves that were implemented, rather than who was doing the implementing.
In other words, if it wasn't Bush himself, who was actively overseeing these programs, I would still find it just as disturbing.
And so I am glad to see Biden returning the vice presidency to the very sort of humble and, and really kind of amorphous role that it was intended to have, and being advisor and is, is probably the proper role for the vice president.
And I think they are probably serious in some ways about, you know, sort of sandpapering the really hard edges on the government model that that Bush and Cheney have created.
But I just think there's a lot more needed to reverse the extremism of the last eight years than than simply reducing the formal bureaucratic responsibilities of the vice presidency.
Right?
Yeah, that's a very good point.
And although there was a Seymour Hersh article where they all had some reunion party or something and talked about the lessons of Iran Contra, and how he do it all through the vice president's office, the way the law is constructed, there's very little oversight about the vice presidency, that kind of thing.
But that's really detailed.
Yeah, you're right.
And there is that constitutional ambiguity that's real, and that they exploited.
So I do think it's a good thing.
I just think it's, you know, important not to overstate the value there.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, my thing is, I just want Biden to have as little power as possible.
Yeah, that's good.
All right.
Oh, one more one more piece of positive news here.
If I can get you to address real quick, where'd it go?
Well, it was about the Patriot Act, and the court struck down the gag provisions of the Patriot Act.
Can I get you to address that real quick?
I actually haven't read that case yet or read much about it.
I'm aware of it.
So it's probably best that we save that for the next time.
Okay, cool.
Well, I'll make sure to keep an eye on your blog.
Definitely do that, Scott.
All right.
Thanks a lot for your time on the show today, Glenn.
I really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure.
All right, folks, that's Glenn Greenwald from salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
You can just find them in the blog at my blog, the stress blog.com.
And check out his book, Great American hypocrites.
Here's some more agnostic front for you guys, and we'll be back.
