01/06/10 – Matthew Harwood – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
First guest today on the show is Matthew Harwood.
He is a writer in Washington, D.C.
His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, the Huffington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and elsewhere.
He's currently working on a book about evangelical Christian rhetoric and aggressive U.S. foreign policy.
Welcome to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Is it Matthew or Matt is the best way to say it?
You can say Matt.
Matt's better.
Matt's better.
Okay.
I thought that's what you said when you answered the phone, but I want to be sure there.
All right.
So a great article here in the Guardian.co.uk.
It's called A New Year's Resolution for Guantanamo.
Here's a New Year's Resolution for the White House.
Uphold the rule of law by prosecuting or releasing the Gitmo detainees.
So I guess let's go through here, as you well do in the article, and talk about what's good about what Obama's done since taking power to try to undo the revolution, the war against the very theory of having a rule of law at all that was waged by the previous administration here.
Matt?
Well, I think first you've got to start out with Obama's decision to once again make torture illegal.
That's a kind of weird way of putting it.
It was always illegal, but at least he's trying to get back to the pre-9-11 regime.
Also, the second thing which was good was basically saying that we're going to try KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his four co-conspirators as ordinary criminals in federal court based off of our own rule of law.
I mean, it's as simple as that, based off the Constitution.
Another thing would be, it seems, that is good is trying to close Guantanamo and then relocating the remaining detainees into Thompson.
And then also the last one, which seems amazing to me, is also, and you'll see in the GOP, very hysterical, is to try the underwear bomber in normal civilian court.
I mean, these are the good things that it appears Obama has done so far.
Well, in fact, let's focus on that latest one right there.
I don't know if you saw this nightmare on Fox News the other night, but Scott Rasmussen did a poll of likely voters.
I guess that's the thing.
He only does likely voters, not just everybody.
And he found that 71 percent of the American people were for turning the suspected, the accused, underbomber over to the military.
And 58 percent want him tortured.
And, in fact, in the torture question, he was called the suspected Detroit bomber.
They used the word suspected in the question.
And 58 percent of the people said strap him upside down to the waterboard.
Like this is the dark ages.
This is what fear does to a population.
I mean, I think that's really the only response.
You know what it really gets me to?
And here's the thing.
It was that 71 percent number rang a bell in my head.
And you know what it was?
What was it?
It was an article from a few weeks back by the great Mark Ames from the Exiled Online.
Well aware of him.
And he wrote this thing in Alternet about the Fort Hood shooter and how it was much more a case of going postal than going jihadi on us.
But one of the things that he talked about in there was a recent poll that said that nobody trusts the government.
28 percent of something of the people trust the government of America to do the right thing.
But 71 percent trust the Pentagon.
They trust the military to do the right thing.
So, you know, thank goodness that that the the stature of Congress, the courts, the presidency have been so diminished in the minds of the American people.
But there's one government agency left standing that the American people have confidence in, because, of course, you know, we're raised to believe this.
Right.
That the military.
Well, first of all, the government are the best and brightest of us.
And especially that the military are the best and brightest of them.
There's nobody who's more capable than the generals.
They're the guys who know how to get things done.
They say it out loud and people obey and things happen.
And and this is who in government the American people have any faith in at this point.
Which is I think that means that we're simply a matter of perhaps a very short matter of distance in time away from a full fledged fascist dictatorship under General Petraeus or whoever it is here.
I mean, the way you describe it, it sounds like it would be a military junta.
But, you know, I mean, you really hope at the end of the day that these are people.
It's the way the question is raised and it's the heat of the moment when they see these type of things.
I mean, and also, I guess it's an argument why we're a liberal democracy with the rule of law and a bill of rights.
Because at any, you know, at the drop of the hat, the populace can change and want to revoke it.
And it's a very good thing that it's very hard to do that.
Right.
Well, and this is the problem, too, with government education.
I'm going to go ahead and get my my poke in, Adam, while I can.
The American population, the 300 something million of us, I would guess that it's, you know, well under 10 percent, probably under five.
Who could even give you a basic description of what the Fifth and Sixth Amendment say.
And so if you don't know what the bill of rights is, then you don't know when it's gone.
So if the pollster says, should we get rid of the bill of rights forever?
You know, you probably wouldn't answer yes to that.
But if they say, how about prison first and then maybe a trial if we feel like it?
And the answer is yes, because they don't even know that what they're saying is, never mind the theory that rule number five always wins.
That's it.
You get a fair trial, then prison.
That's the way it is in America.
There are no exceptions.
Well, you know, you know, people would use their own self-interest.
I mean, I mean, it just seems like a truism that you would want to process before you got locked up.
Yeah, you would think, you know, here we are.
All right.
So let's talk about this.
You mentioned there that, you know, they announced that they're going to try some of these 9-11 co-conspirators in New York City.
And and, yeah, you you say that's really not even really a partial victory.
It's if anything, maybe it's a PR victory for the administration.
But as far as being a real victory for the rule of law, that doesn't count.
Why is that?
Well, it seems like they're cherry picking trial venues.
It looks like when when when it's a slam dunk, people are going to get civilian trials.
And then when it's not, when their evidence has been compromised, you know, we would assume primarily by torture.
They're going to go into a military commission system.
That's going to it's not going to have the same due process protections to civilian system.
And that should be a big problem.
That should be a big worry for people.
Indeed.
Well, I'm sure you saw this article from yesterday.
This is the anti-war dot com version here.
U.S. court war powers Trump rights of non-citizen detainees.
Bush appointees argue president has even more power than the government claimed in a ruling.
Bush is widely expected to set up a new battle in the Supreme Court.
A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the president has virtually unlimited power to detain non-citizen suspects.
Power even beyond what the government argued it possessed in the case.
And then here's the punch line, everybody.
The ruling came during the appeal of Galeb Nasser al-Bihani, a Guantanamo detainee since 2002.
He was a cook for a pro-Taliban faction fighting against the Northern Alliance.
Well, I mean, if you go to the Washington Independence, get my scorecard, which I really hope everyone will.
I mean, you really see, especially of the 32, was it 32?
Now, 41, I believe, habeas corpus hearing results or petitions.
You know, 32 basically said you need to release these guys.
And when you when you go to the evidence for these guys, I mean, a lot of them were captured in Pakistan.
Or or by warlords and then given to the United States military for a bounty.
I mean, how you there's no it's really hard to see how that is an evidence that is being completely compromised.
It just it just doesn't make any sense.
I mean, you basically have thrown away someone's life for five thousand dollars.
I mean, these guys are trying to they're they're prosecuting.
If you call it that, quote unquote, prosecuting the cook, the chauffeur.
Well, I mean, this is insanity.
The worst of the worst.
But obviously, that's not the case.
Yeah.
You know, the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer, anti-torture hero, has explained on this show before that after World War Two, America arrested Hitler's driver and then they let him go.
He was just the freaking driver.
And so it's not like there's no precedent for this.
Right.
We did not convict the, you know, Tojo's cook for keeping Tojo fed.
That's not a war crime.
I mean, what kind of insane, bizarre world is this?
Seriously.
The chauffeur and the cook.
This is who we're prosecuting when these bogus kangaroo courts.
Well, I mean, if I if I remember correctly, there's another guy who basically squealed and gave tons of intelligence, Al-Qaeda, and they still won't release him.
And the judge basically said, you can release this guy because we know he's not going to rejoin the ranks because he's going to have a death sentence for him if he goes anywhere near Al-Qaeda or any associated jihadist movements.
And they still won't let him go.
Still won't let him go.
Well, in fact, I mean, you talk about the well, in fact, let's give a little bit of background on this.
Right.
It's the it's the Bometting decision of the Supreme Court that said that it basically struck down part of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which said that if you're an American, you get a writ of habeas corpus.
One, if they if they arrest you as an enemy combatant, arrest you if they kidnap you and call you an enemy combatant.
If you're an American citizen, you get one chance at a federal judge.
And what the Supreme Court said was, no, everybody gets one chance at a federal judge, because Article One, Section nine provides for the repeal of habeas corpus only in cases where invasion or rebellion may require it.
So these guys have had a chance.
Then many of them have had a chance.
I guess you had 41 have had a chance to go before a judge in a black robe instead of a military officer.
And you say in 31 now or was it 32 out of 41, 32 out of 41.
The judge has said, nope, this does not even satisfy the extremely low threshold of the preponderance of the evidence.
And these men are to be set free.
But now has anybody been set free based on one of these habeas rulings or they're still holding all these guys anyway?
Well, there's nine, nine of the 32 have yet to be released.
Okay, so most of them have been released on the judge's order.
Yes.
And I mean, of the nine, you have the Uyghurs and you also have a lot of now because of the underpants bomber guys from Yemen.
And it's because supposedly now Yemen is a failed state that we can't release them because we can't trust the Yemeni government to keep them away from the, you know, I guess Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula.
Yeah.
Well, and when everybody's a double and a triple agent, who knows who you can trust?
You know, it's kind of funny.
Justin Raimondo pointed out in a recent article about, you know, if you follow the different aliases of the Guantanamo guys who supposedly were released and then helped put the under bomber on the plane, at least would bring up the suspicions.
Nothing really conclusive, I don't think, but at least brings up the suspicion that this guy is actually still working for the CIA.
I guess Philip Giraldi had a different interpretation of it yesterday, but I mean, here's a guy who was in the hands of the United States two different times and Al-Qaeda keeps taking him back.
I certainly raise the question.
I mean, I, you know, I don't want to say anything because I don't have all the information.
Well, I don't either, but that's why I'm the host of the show.
I can just bring up speculations and then you do whatever you want with them.
Okay, so let's talk about, anyway, I think it's worth pointing out that this whole under bomber thing is still a mystery and it's not solved yet.
I mean, they can talk like everybody knows everything about it already, but I don't think that that's necessarily the case so far.
Well, you know, we're going to have the opportunity to see when he actually goes before a civilian court, which is going to be a nice change.
Right.
Well, and that's the whole thing, right?
In fact, I was raised to believe that, you know, conspiracy theories about JFK aside, the problem, the real problem was that Oswald was killed the next day and never got a trial.
So there never was, the government never had the ability to try to prove their case, you know?
Well, you know, too, and I think there's something really important to go back on with the underwear bomber is that, you know, from everything that I've read, he's cooperating with authority and they're getting intelligence out of it.
I mean, that is in itself evidence for why due process is the best way to handle these guys.
So, I mean, you know, especially when you're, you know, a lot of people, especially in the GOP, I mean, I saw something on Larry King where, you know, the woman, the Republican strategist was saying, you know, ship them off to Gitmo and enhanced interrogations.
So basically torturing them.
Right, and then she still called it due process too, which was fun.
Yeah, which, well, it's hilarious.
But, I mean, it just shows that it's, you know, you want to go back to the civilian interrogations.
The FBI has always done very well, or maybe I shouldn't say always done very well, but at least within the rule of law.
And you're not going to hurt anyone.
You're not going to touch them.
You're going to use kind of a good cop, bad cop.
Those type of procedures tend to work better than torturing someone, especially when you don't know whether or not what they said is correct, because they just don't want to be tortured.
Right, I mean, and this is not just a theoretical exercise.
We've lived through a decade of this madness, and there are plenty of books that have been written about it.
Anybody could go to the library and check out The Dark Side by Jane Mayer.
It is absolutely, abundantly proven fact, clear beyond any dispute, that the FBI was doing great until the CIA came in and started torturing people.
And that's just true.
That's the history of the world that already happened.
We already know.
Well, you know, the military interrogator too, the Matthew Alexander guy.
Right.
Supposedly, you know, it took only six hours to interrogate a guy where he gave up the location for Zarqawi.
I mean, that is proof enough that this is the way to do it, and we don't need to destroy our values to win this fight against Al-Qaeda.
Now, you know, I didn't even realize until I read your article at The Guardian that there was a Military Commissions Act of 2009.
How the hell did I miss that?
You know, I kind of missed it as well, to be quite honest with you.
I'm trying to keep up on it and read the legal analysis coming out of it.
And, you know, there's a woman from Human Dry Watch, I think it's Joanne Mariner, I believe her name is.
And she said it's better, but it's still not the best.
I mean, you know, we're still talking that most of these guys should go to civilian trials.
And, you know, we can also argue about whether or not New York was a proper venue with it, and it's probably not.
But that still doesn't mean that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and all the rest of the Gitmo detainees should get civilian trials.
They should be prosecuted or they should be released.
Yeah.
Well, and again, like you said, they're only prosecuting the ones that they have, you know, that they believe that they can.
Which, you know, that's supposed to be the rule, right?
You're not supposed to, the prosecutor's not supposed to indict somebody that he doesn't really believe that he can convict them at trial.
But they're not letting the rest go.
They're just, their plan is they've announced already, well, we're going to go ahead and give military trials to the innocent.
That way we can convict them.
Well, that's the part, too.
And, you know, what I consider a slate of hand is that, you know, by giving some of them civilian trials and then saying, you know, we're prosecuting these because there's enough evidence to do so, it looks like we're giving everyone due process.
But, you know, the other side of that is when there isn't enough evidence to convict someone, the prosecutor lets the person go.
Well, yeah, you'd think so.
In fact, it's funny because that Larry King you're talking about with that Republican strategist, there was a great little clip in there where Ron Paul says, well, you know, there's this thing.
It's kind of muddled the way he says it.
He's like kind of confused.
He says, well, you know, it used to be that we would convict some, we'd give them a trial first before we put somebody in prison.
You know, like he's talking about the olden days that none of us remember.
But that used to be the way it worked in America, you know?
Well, you know, I mean, I think there was something to be said.
If you're in a military conflict, you know, the fog of war, you're going to detain people.
But a lot of people forget that these guys have been detained now.
I mean, some have been going, I think, eight or nine years.
I mean, just think of the nightmare of that.
If you're an innocent man and you haven't had recourse to challenge your detention, I mean, that's a nightmare.
And then you have to— It's torture itself to leave someone hopeless of ever having a chance to argue their own case.
I just have to ask you, and a lot of things are coming out now because of the connection with the Christmas bombing.
But if guys are being released from Gitmo and they are turning to terrorism, there still has to be the question asked, were they terrorists before or were they turned into terrorists because of Gitmo?
That is going to create rage in any reasonable person.
Any reasonable person listening to this could think that if a foreign company, I mean a foreign company, a foreign country scooped them up and detained them for eight or nine years of their life and they're an innocent man, that is going to create some real anger in that person and his family.
Well, yeah, and there's just no doubt about that at all.
And, in fact, it's going to create a lot of anger among, you know, perhaps millions of perfect strangers.
I mean, Matthew Alexander, you mentioned him.
That's the pseudonym of the former interrogator there in Iraq, the guy who played good cop in order to get the information of where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was.
He said that virtually, it was virtually unanimous, like every single person that he interrogated who was a member of the resistance in Iraq said that they had joined the resistance because of the pictures of Abu Ghraib and of Guantanamo Bay.
So, I mean, the whole chicken-egg thing here is pretty clear.
Well, and also you don't see the media do a real good job of disentangling something like core al-Qaeda from the people that picked up guns and entered the fight because of our policy, because we basically fed into al-Qaeda's narrative.
It's mind-boggling how much that we have fed into their narrative.
I mean, it basically, you know, Osama bin Laden saying, we are going to get you to attack countries and start to bleed your treasury dry.
We're going to try to bankrupt you.
It looks like they're doing a good job of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Something else that needs to be brought up here is that, and again I'm going off information provided to me from the other Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine, and that is that who really is one of the nation's highest experts on international law, the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions and all these things.
I read his blog all the time.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, he's got 75 initials of credentials after his name.
It's ridiculous.
But he says, listen, the military already has a system of battlefield hearing processes to figure out who they want to keep and who is actually innocent and worth setting free.
Because, you know, just from the point of view of, you know, your average faceless officer, he doesn't have any interest in kidnapping a bunch of innocent people.
You know, they already had a system set up for, on the battlefield, how do we decide who's dangerous, who's not, among who we captured.
And what Don Rumsfeld and David Addington and Dick Cheney did was they threw all of that out.
And they just offered bounties and said, you know, kidnap some people and sell them to us and you'll get paid.
That was it.
I mean, you really hope that it wasn't as crass as that, don't you?
Well, yeah, I like to hope a lot of things.
But, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it was.
Buy up some, let's buy up a bunch of goat herders so that we can stalk Guantanamo Bay so we can pretend that there's an al-Qaeda enemy out there that the Air Force didn't already bomb off the face of the earth in the first two weeks.
Well, yeah, I mean, the same thing, you know, talking about the narrative, is, you know, probably a lot of counterterrorism analysts have said this, and it seems to be true, is that you had the core al-Qaeda, and because of how much importance we put on them, it's metastasized into an ideological movement.
I mean, it's grown to something that we can't handle where, you know, whatever your feeling is on the Hassan of the Fort Hood shootings is that people now can just, you know, go on the Internet, radicalize, pick up guns, and do what they will.
But also to make the one-to-one correlation that these guys are the same as core al-Qaeda seems a little bit ridiculous.
Yeah, well, and you know, this is the part that really bothers me, too, is that here now, Matt, it's 2010.
We've been going through this for years, and there have been people who have been getting it right for years.
And, you know, I think Michael Sawyer is a pretty controversial character, and we'll be talking about some controversial things later on the show today, but he came out in 2005, resigned from the CIA over the 9-11 Commission and its refusal to tell the truth to the American people about what the hell is going on here, and he wrote a book called Imperial Hubris, and, you know, the sub-headline might as well be why we started it and why we have to stop intervening in the Middle East by the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit.
It's not like this is a secret, you know what I mean?
Justin Romano in his article today is quoting Osama bin Laden from his speech of 2004, where he says, all I have to do is take a piece of cloth and write al-Qaeda on it and send two mujahideen to the furthest point east, and you'll chase them with all your generals and all your billions of dollars, and no one will benefit but me and maybe a few of your politically connected corporations.
But meanwhile, everyone else loses, he said.
And it's as simple as that.
It's obvious.
The whole point of terrorism is a weak actor trying to get a reaction out of his strong opponent, his strong enemy.
You don't have to have a Ph.
D. in anything to look at what's going on here, look at what the purpose of September 11th was in the first place, to bait us into invading and occupying the Middle East forever, or until we're completely bankrupt and gone.
Right, and, you know, we follow the hook, line, and sinker.
Hook, line, and sinker.
So what does that make us, fish?
Patches, maybe.
Or Americans?
Well, I mean, that's the thing, too, right?
There are a lot of people who did understand, and yet they wanted to take advantage.
Right?
Like, say, for example, Dick Cheney.
You know?
I mean, you know, when we talk about this, again, I want to operate off of the assumption that at least Dick Cheney thinks he's doing the right thing.
We know he's not.
That's odd, but okay.
You're a journalist, you've got to be fair, that's fine.
You know, you try to be as much as possible.
Sure, and, you know, I'm sure there's probably part of that.
In fact, I read something that said that, you know, people really underestimate just how frightened Dick Cheney was.
That, you know, a lot of people saw September 11th on TV and were scared to death.
Dick Cheney got grabbed by the Secret Service and taken down to the bunker, like in a movie.
And he never got over it.
He went to hide in cowardly terror under Mount Weather for, like, six months before he ever came out and saw the sun again.
Well, I mean, it's interesting to see, I mean, what you said there, and I hate to bring it up again, but, you know, the Larry King interview with Ron Paul and the Republican strategist, she was literally advocating for hysteria.
Right.
Quote, unquote, hysteria.
Hysteria.
You know, Americans are usually proud that we're the most powerful nation on Earth.
Is that how the most powerful nation on Earth acts?
Yes.
Well, there's a great Ted Rall article that we're running on Antiwar.com today, too, about the decade of cowardice and how the whole home of the brave, land of the free thing is just gone.
We just spent ten years being frightened of everything they tell us to be frightened of, and it's just changed the whole character of the society, you know?
I mean, you know, my favorite, of course, is Harry Brown, but you pick your favorite.
If it's Ralph Nader or whoever.
What if even Al Gore?
I don't know.
What if a real man with a real education and, you know, without ulterior motives had been in charge on September 11th?
He would have said, America, this was really sad, but don't be afraid, okay?
It's going to be okay.
But that's not what Dick Cheney and George Bush did.
They said, be afraid, be very afraid.
You'll die if you don't let us do everything we want.
And we let them do that.
And now, after all this time of that, it's become part of our character.
That's who we are now.
The people who are so afraid of the boogeyman will let our politicians do anything.
It really is scary.
I mean, you know, another thing is, just to bring it up, but, you know, especially with war, it doesn't seem to be understanding that when you wage multiple wars, again, it bankrupts a country, but you can't do other policy things.
You can't do health care correctly.
You can't do infrastructure investment correctly.
These things just can't happen.
You're just bleeding your treasury dry.
Yep.
Well, that's the name of the game.
And, you know, I think it's funny.
That's what Dan Ellsberg was saying on the show the other day, that, I mean, it really does look as though the Republicans are secret agents of Osama bin Laden.
Obviously, he's being facetious there, and he's turning the 9-11 truth conspiracy thing upside down and saying, you know, in fact, who's zooming who here?
Who's accomplishing whose agenda for them?
Is the era of American hegemony being strengthened by all this, or is our demise only being hastened?
It's pretty clear.
Look at the scorecard, man.
Well, I mean, actually, if you want to look at other geopolitical events, you know, that have been reported in the last week or so, is that China is investing in Afghanistan.
I mean, we're spending all our money hunting down al-Qaeda there and trying to prop up, you know, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the Chinese are coming in and they're investing.
I mean, they're trying to get something, reap some real benefit out of it, or we bleed ourselves dry in there.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's just a matter of simple geography, too.
We're from the land between Canada and Mexico over here.
The idea that somehow our country, our society is going to dominate all of Eurasia, from what, here on out or something?
Come on.
Who believes that outside of the project for a new American century?
Well, I mean, there's also, I mean, I think if you get back to the Constitution and, you know, having a Republican form of government, you can't have an empire.
It's just hypocritical.
It just doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
Well, and that is the whole thing.
I was raised to understand that from a very young age by George Lucas, but, you know, everything else I've learned about the history of the world since then bears that out.
You know, you're either going to have, well, I don't know about either or, but you certainly cannot have a free society when you embrace militarism and lawlessness and executive authority and permanent war.
And all those things come with permanent war.
All local issues must be deferred to the national government, and even all the national government's authority must be deferred to the will of the president, as we can see the court ruled yesterday.
I mean, yeah, and what you're talking about is that they're embracing the, you know, the John Yoo version of the presidency.
You know, it's an executive that can wield unlimited powers.
Yeah, that's what they call strict construction.
There's the commander-in-chief clause, and that's it.
That's really strict construction.
There's not a lot of checks and balances in that.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been great, but I've got to move on to Karen Katowski here.
But this is really good stuff.
I recommend everybody read it.
New Year's Resolution for Guantanamo by Matthew Harwood.
Comment is free there at Guardian.co.uk.
And you can find what Matthew writes in the Washington Monthly, the Huffington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and elsewhere.
And maybe sometime I'll have you back to talk about evangelical Christian rhetoric and aggressive U.S. foreign policy.
It sounds interesting.
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks very much.