05/18/10 – Debra Sweet – The Scott Horton Show

It's the Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
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That was my favorite one from Mobb Deep there.
All right, and our final guest on the show today, last and certainly not least, Debra Sweet from the World Can't Wait.
That's WorldCan'tWait.net and boy, you got that right.
Welcome back to the show, Debra.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Good to be here.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Good work.
Wow, you've really achieved something incredibly important here.
You know, I don't know how big a headline this got.
I know the AP covered it a little bit, but this is so important.
Crimes are crimes, no matter who does them.
What happened here?
What is this?
Well, it's kind of a simple message in a certain way, but I guess controversial and shocking for some.
We, World Can't Wait, published a full page ad in the New York Review of Books, and we plan to publish it elsewhere nationally that makes the simple statement that crimes under Bush are crimes under Obama and must be resisted by anyone who claims a shred of conscience.
It's kind of a challenge.
End the complicity of silence and sign this statement.
And we got folks to sign it, and we're getting more people to sign it, and that's all indicative of how much we need a big section of people in this country who take a stand to say that the crimes against humanity being carried out in our name by our government, no matter who the president is, have to be resisted publicly, strongly, and by putting our names on an ad saying we don't go along with this, we're appealing to others to take that stand.
And the ad goes on to enumerate some very specific things that the Obama administration has done.
For instance, it starts out this way.
It is now common knowledge that Barack Obama has openly ordered the assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.
Awlaki is suspected of participating in plots by Al-Qaeda.
He denies these charges, no matter, without trial or other judicial proceeding, the administration has simply put him on the to-be-killed list.
And then the statement goes on to talk about the collateral murder video that was put out by WikiLeaks in April, and it talks about the massacre in Gardez, Afghanistan, that in fact was a killing of civilians by U.S. Special Forces, and mentions some other things that we say bring us to this conclusion.
In some respects, this is worse than Bush.
First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of, quote, terrorism, merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly.
Second, Obama says that the government can detain you indefinitely, even if you have been exonerated in a trial, and he has publicly floated the idea of preventive detention.
Third, the Obama administration, in expanding the use of unmanned drone attacks, argues that the U.S. has the authority under international law to use extrajudicial killing in sovereign countries with which it is not at war.
Such measures by Bush were widely considered by liberals and progressives to be outrageous, and were roundly and correctly protested.
But these acts, which may have been construed, wishfully or not, as anomalies under the Bush regime, have now been consecrated into standard operating procedure by Obama, who claims, as Bush did, executive privilege and state secrecy in defending the crime of aggressive war.
So we're putting it out there, Scott.
Yeah.
Well, it's a great thing, and, you know, there have been a few who refuse to buy into, on the anti-war left, percentage-wise, anyway, I guess it's a lot of individuals, who've refused all along to buy into all the hype surrounding Barack Obama's candidacy and his presidency, and more and more people are turning away from it.
I don't know if you saw the boondocks a couple of weeks ago.
It's a black president, Huey, something, whatever his last name is, anyway, it was really great, and it was about how everybody's over it already, nobody loves him anymore, and they realize he is just like George W. Bush, and, you know, think about it, what if in 2001, all the right-wingers who had opposed Bill Clinton's carnivore and echelon and know-your-customer regulations and all the domestic spying that came from the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, what if they had come out with a statement like this against Bush's abuses in 2001, 2002?
That's the standard that you're setting here, sticking to your principles, no matter which so-called political hero is in power, and it's good leadership, it's important leadership.
Why don't you go through the list here and tell us about who you've gotten to sign on to this letter?
And that's what's important here, it's not just the world can't wait anymore, you're getting the mainstream, famous, public, progressive left to sign on to this.
Well, you know, you make a good point, and in fact, I wouldn't even claim that we've gotten all the people that really should sign on to this by any means.
We did get people who have been persistently critical of Obama and the Democrats from the beginning.
That would be Cindy Sheehan, Chris Hedges, Ray McGovern, people who have been active over the last six, seven, eight years against this global war on terror, Mathis Cherou, the Iraq war resister, some well-known leftists.
Mike Gravel signed it, who was a U.S. Senator back in the day.
He's the one who helped Dan Ellsberg get his Pentagon Papers onto the floor of Congress.
Anne Wright, both of the daughters of Bill Kunstler, Sarah and Emily, who have just made this amazing movie about Bill Kunstler, who was probably the most radical and out-there political lawyer of my generation.
But there are other people who signed this ad, and I think this is an indication of the phenomenon you're talking about with boondocks.
There are people who heartily supported and hoped in Obama who are waking up and having the principle to say, you know, this is not what I signed up for.
People like Cornel West, who went out on the campaign trail for Obama, always critically, but he said it was a very good thing that Obama had won.
Bill Ayers, who was a supporter of Obama and was really kicked to the side publicly by Obama, and is still continuing to be threatened by the Tea Partiers in the right wing.
Bill Ayers was a weatherman back in the day, in 69 and 70, and he's stayed firmly with his principles of being against these imperialist wars, but he did speak very much in favor of Obama becoming the President, and he's signed onto this, as well as other, Mark Ruffalo, the actor, James Cromwell, the actor, Donald Fried, the playwright, a bunch of lawyers, and a few religious people.
Certainly not enough.
Certainly not the core of people who supported Obama as an alternative to Bush.
You know, I've been on your show before, and we talked about what World Can't Wait was trying to do during the Bush administration.
We were calling on and persistently working for a movement independent of the political parties, particularly independent of the Democrats, that would force Bush and Cheney in particular from office in disgrace.
In fact, Bush and Cheney did leave office, but they left on the election of what I think was an alternative put out there explicitly to answer all the anti-war sentiment in the world and in this country, and that was the Obama candidacy.
Well, and the exit polls showed it was, the wars were one of the most important issues for Obama voters.
Yeah, and you know, you talked about this, we knew this at the time.
We were following what Obama said around Afghanistan, and he clearly said, this is a good war.
This is the one we're going to increasingly fund.
Iraq was a mistake.
He never said it was unjust, illegal, illegitimate, immoral.
He said it was a mistake.
And he's pursued this Afghanistan war with a vengeance.
25,000 more troops going this summer in June, and another bigger offensive being planned, which I understand now is probably being put off to the fall.
It was supposed to start in June in Kandahar.
Well, they can't even hold Marjah.
Even the New York Times admits that the bogus Marjah offensive that was built up and supposedly was this giant city of 80,000 that, funny, nobody had ever heard of it.
It turns out, yeah, it wasn't, and they can't even hold this tiny little town.
And now you may have seen, I don't know if you have seen, it's the top headline on antiwar.com today, five US troops among 18 killed in Afghan attack.
And according to a tweet put out by Greg Mitchell from editor and publisher, this makes 1,000.
It took five years, he said, for 500 Americans to die in Afghanistan, and it's taken two years for another 500 to die.
And I wondered when I saw this today whether the suicide bomber in this attack in, I think it was in Kabul this morning, I wonder whether it was the same guy I saw on Democracy Now yesterday in a report that Rick Rowley made about American soldiers killing a family of people who were supporters of the government, and one of them at least was a former government employee or maybe even currently works for Karzai in some capacity.
And the man said, according to the translator on Democracy Now, the Rick Rowley report there yesterday, he said, quote, When I saw my daughter, that is her dead body, when I saw my daughter, all I could think about was putting on a suicide jacket.
And I wonder if, you know, I guess at least, you know, liberals tend to be literate, unlike conservatives.
They tend to, you know, at least entertain the idea in their own minds that they're open to evidence and arguments and changing their mind about important things.
You think maybe they could understand that, you know, they could come around to the idea that Obama's policy is like George Bush's policy, simply making matters worse?
Well, maybe.
But here's the problem.
When you have a candidate and a leader like Obama, specifically Obama himself, arguing and leading this, justifying it, it does change people's minds, Scott.
That's a big problem for us.
People who should know better, who were critical of this under Bush, are going along with it.
They're buying the refashioned so-called global war on terror by another name.
But the people are, the civilians are still being killed.
This example is just the same as what they did in Gardez that we refer to in our statement.
They killed civilians, including a police officer and a district attorney.
And the U.S. special forces and the U.S. propaganda machine immediately said, oh, they're insurgents.
They're insurgents, and they have the nerve to say that the three women killed inside this building were the victims of a bride burning, that they were killed by their own relatives.
None of that turned out to be true.
And you can't have an illegitimate occupation like the U.S. is carrying out, along with its NATO allies, by the way, Britain, France and so forth.
You can't have this without these kind of atrocities.
This is an alien force coming into Afghanistan that has no basis to understand, care about or in any sense of the word, help the people of Afghanistan, especially the women.
You know, volumes have been written about how the U.S. military treats its own women.
How are they going to bring liberation to the women in Afghanistan?
They're not.
And that's not why they're there.
Right.
The fact that that's even still a talking point is simply amazing.
I mean, which warlords are the feminists in Afghanistan?
Well, they're known rapists in Karzai's government.
You know, this is all to tighten up U.S. imperial control over the Middle East, and Afghanistan has been a lot tougher than they expected.
Obama is going to, you know, we're up here in New York City, not far from West Point.
Obama is going to go give the commencement address Saturday to the new army, the graduating army officers in West Point.
Bush did this for years in a row.
We were always there protesting.
Obama was not there for the 2009 graduation, but he's going this year.
Yeah, we'll see if he wears an army jacket and a pseudo uniform like Bush used to do.
Boy, he loved that commander in chief role.
That's true.
But even if he doesn't, you know, even if he looks as fairly hip self, what is he going to be telling these officers?
He's literally sending them right to Afghanistan, some of them, to participate in this offensive.
We know from the news you're talking about, it's not going very well.
Well, heck, the General McChrystal just said the other day, well, it's a draw, you know, which means we're losing, which means we're going to start all over again with a whole new policy.
They don't have any idea what they're doing over there other than killing people and staying.
But they are warning that civilian and military casualties are going to go up sharply when this offensive starts.
Well, you know, Aaron Watata said, I will not lead men into battle to commit war crimes.
I will not do it.
Put me in prison.
I will not.
Well, he tried to stay out of prison, but he said I would rather go to prison.
And it wasn't just I don't want to commit war crimes.
It was, look, I'm an officer.
I'm responsible for the men under me.
How can I give them illegal orders to invade and murder people in their own country?
I will not do it.
And this is what Barack Obama is asking of these young officers graduating from West Point to bring young men into battle and order them to commit atrocities.
You're right.
And we're going to be out at the gate with, you know, hundreds of people, not thousands and not tens of thousands, but hundreds, I'm sure, who are going to be giving a counter message to this.
This is a moral injustice, an illegitimate occupation.
It has to stop.
And we are going to be reading the names of the civilians in Afghanistan killed and also the U.S. military killed.
We want there to be an accounting.
Oh, well, speaking of accounting, speaking of accounting, everybody, I'm talking with Deborah Sweet from World Can't Wait dot net.
Listen to this.
When there is a civilian casualty.
That is not just a political problem for me.
I am ultimately accountable.
Just as General McChrystal is accountable for somebody who's not on the battlefield who got killed.
And that is something that I have to carry with me and that anybody who's involved in a military operation has to carry with them.
And so we do not take that lightly.
We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties, not because it's a problem for President Karzai.
We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don't want civilians killed.
Well, what about a problem for humanity?
Yeah, well, you know, that's a problem because I don't want them killed.
That's all.
Yeah, well, that, you know, then he's accountable.
Let's explore this accountability of the president.
In what way can a president be held accountable for killing people?
Deborah?
Well, there's no structure at this point because we know that particularly under the Bush regime, presidents and with the help of the executive orders and all the whole machine that created this basically are not accountable.
It's whatever the president says.
Wars are carried out now under the order of the president and not just acting as an individual.
But this is the only way that they can do these types of wars, which have literally no justification in human history other than to exert power and to hold on to the most essential part of the planet.
If you are an empire that wants to gobble up the world's resources, control them and keep anyone else from controlling them.
This is what people are being killed for and dying for.
That's not the open justification, but that is the reality.
And this is why people coming out now and calling a crime a crime and a criminal act, a criminal act is extremely important.
And we are not cowed by the fact that these right wing lunatics are criticizing Obama on the basis of, you know, he's not a legitimate president because he's black.
Well, he doesn't kill people enough.
He doesn't torture them enough, even though, of course, he is continuing to torture them, as was published in The Atlantic last week.
Yeah, well, this is you know, you could we picked out a few incidences in the statement we published.
You could pick out many more.
We were trying to get in somewhat of a poetic way, a challenge put before people.
And this ad is designed with a mugshot of both George Bush and Barack Obama.
It's not subtle at all.
It's putting it right in your face.
But we want people to think about what are you accepting being done in your name by the country you live in, whether you're a citizen or not, you know, whether you are a resistor to the war, whether you participated in the war, whether you voted for this or you have no interest in voting for any of it.
We all still have a responsibility.
We're living here.
We're citizens of the planet.
And I hope we think about humanity before we think about being an American, because this is the responsibility we all have as people.
And this is what we're trying to project with ads and protests this Saturday.
If people want to learn more about the protest, they can come to WorldCan'tWait.net and meet us in Highland Falls, New York, at 10 a.m.this Saturday, May 22nd, to protest the direct orders that Obama and the indoctrination that Obama is going to be giving these new army officers.
Indeed, everybody, again, that's WorldCan'tWait.net for all that information.
The ad in the what you call it again is called Crimes or Crimes No Matter Who Does Them.
Thank you very much for your time, Deborah.
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's Deborah Sweet.
WorldCan'tWait.net.
Yep, turns out Barack Obama is a serial killer, too.
It's time for the antiwar left to get it back in gear.
Follow her.
WorldCan'tWait.net.
See you tomorrow.