Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM.
And our next guest on the show today is Glenn Greenwald, of course he keeps the excellent blog at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act?
A Tragic Legacy and Great American Hypocrites and is a leading critic of the media and the government civil rights violations and foreign policies as well in this country.
A leading light, always the top of my police state section here in my open tabs, the great Glenn Greenwald.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
Great to be back as always, Scott.
Good to have you here.
Now let's talk about the rule of four here, I guess is where we start.
The Supreme Court, you've got to have four of them agree to take a case and earlier this week the court refused to take a very important case, an appeal of a torture lawsuit by a man named Mar Arar.
Can you please tell us the story?
Sure, he was and is a citizen who holds dual citizenship in Canada and Syria.
He lives in Canada.
He is a Canadian citizen and in 2002 he was returning from vacation when he had a stopover at JFK Airport on the way back to Canada.
Due to some confusion about his name and some poor information, he was on a list that the Americans had received from the Canadians about people who were suspected of having some involvement in terrorism.
The United States abducted him, literally, at JFK Airport, held him incommunicado for more than two weeks where he had no charges, wasn't allowed any access to the outside world, no lawyer, nothing.
He was then told that he was going to be rendered to Syria.
He vehemently protested and said, I didn't do anything wrong, but if you think I did, send me to Canada.
That's where I live.
I'm a Canadian citizen of Canada.
I haven't lived in Syria forever and if you send me there, they're going to torture me.
And his pleas were ignored.
He was sent to Syria.
He spent the next ten months there in the most horrific conditions imaginable where he was severely beaten and tortured.
And at the end of the ten months, the Syrians told the Americans, we don't think he has anything at all to say.
We don't think he actually has any involvement.
We tortured him.
We did everything we know how to do to destroy a human being and we got nothing.
And afterwards, the Americans and the Canadians both came to the conclusion privately that they just simply had the wrong person, that this was a completely innocent individual who had done nothing wrong.
And the Canadian government investigated and released a public report detailing exactly what happened and all of the ways that both the Canadian and the U.S. government completely screwed up in this case.
And the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized, called a press conference and publicly apologized to him and said that they would pay him the equivalent of around $9 million.
I mean, his life was destroyed.
Imagine being, just being removed from your life and into Syria and tortured for ten months for having done nothing wrong.
The U.S., by contrast, refused to even acknowledge that this case existed.
And when he sued an American court to obtain some degree of compensation for what our government did to him, the Bush administration intervened in the case and said that what was done to him was a state secret.
Even when we abduct and render people for torture who are completely innocent, that is a state secret and that courts, therefore, cannot adjudicate in any way this case because to do so would be to reveal sensitive state secrets and jeopardize American national security.
And both the district court and then in November, last November, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals basically accepted that argument.
The Court of Appeals said a little bit differently that it's the executive's prerogative to make decisions about who should be detained in absence of explicit congressional authorization.
The courts have no right to review that or to decide that a person who's a foreign or national can be compensated in any way.
And they dismissed his case as well.
And then the Supreme Court this week refused to hear it on appeal, which means that the decision stands and Mr. Arar is now banned permanently from receiving any compensation or having a court in America adjudicate what was done to him.
And of course, it was the Obama administration that embraced the Bush administration's arguments and urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal.
So if you contrast what the Canadian government did in terms of investigating, publicly disclosing what happened, apologizing and compensating him to what the United States did, which is stonewalling and keeping everything as much of a secret as possible and evading accountability over the course of two successive administrations, I think it reveals a lot about what the United States has become.
I'm talking with Glenn Greenwald.
The article in question at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald is entitled The U.S. defends the right to abduct innocent people with impunity.
And because this wasn't a big Supreme Court decision, it was their refusal to make one.
That was the headline.
It might have got buried in whatever else you guys were reading.
I want to make sure that you caught all that.
And I need to ask you to clarify something for me here.
I'm looking at James Bovard on the antiwar dotcom blog right now, Glenn.
And he says here that the Justice Department, the Obama Justice Department, told the court that permitting discovery in Arar's case could result in unfairly exposing or scrutinizing, quote, the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded that petitioner could be removed to Syria.
So what does that mean in English?
Exactly.
Well, it essentially means what the court has accepted, what is the central premise of the American political system, which is that the president has unilateral right to make decisions whenever it comes to foreign policy or terrorism or national security broadly defined.
And that even if what he did is illegal or a war crime, that courts have no right to, quote, unquote, interfere in or second guess what it is that he did because the Constitution bestows to him the power to make those decisions in an unfettered manner.
I mean, it's basically the radical John you George Bush Dick Cheney version of the Constitution of the presidency and the Constitution that court some courts have accepted.
But see, I don't even really understand the language there, the motives and sincerity.
That's not an issue, really, except maybe mitigating circumstances at sentencing or something in a criminal trial.
Right.
So if you're guilty of negligent homicide, you're at least going to be charged with manslaughter or something.
And and whether you were being a nice guy at the time is kind of beside the point.
Right.
Theoretically, you know, under the law, if there was a very good faith basis for having believed that this individual was associated with Al-Qaeda and the government using its full abilities and acting as thoroughly and conscientiously as was possible, simply made a mistake.
There is a question as to whether there'd be legal liability under the state of the law if it was simply a good faith mistake.
But of course, there's ample reason to believe that the government actually had no basis for believing that that this individual was involved in terrorism and that the slightest investigation or inquiry with the Canadians would have revealed that this was the wrong person.
And so what the court is saying is we're not going to inquire into whether or not the executive did the right thing in terms of motives or mindset or to try and second guess what they did.
Now, of course, that's what the role of court is, is to decide when people act recklessly or or or in deliberate violation of rights.
So it's a complete application of the judicial responsibility, but that's what the court says.
We'll be right back with more after this.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest Liberty oriented audio content 24 hours a day at Liberty Radio Network dot com.
All right, so welcome back to show it's antiwar radio on Liberty Radio Network, LRN FM, talking with the great Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional litigator.
Now he litigates on his blog salon dot com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And now.
So let me attempt to set this question up correctly, but briefly here, Glenn.
And so I'll refer to James Bamford's book, The Shadow Factory, where he talks about nineteen ninety eight or something like that.
General Hayden explaining to maybe it was later that explaining to the Congress that as soon as anybody sets foot on American soil, they're a U.S. person and he has to respect their rights.
If they prove they're tied to a foreign terrorist group or to a foreign government, then he can get a FISA warrant.
Other than that, Fourth Amendment applies.
The Bill of Rights applies as long as they're a person, a civilian not connected to a foreign terrorist group or government.
And they're on American soil.
The Bill of Rights doesn't say citizen soil is soil.
A U.S. person is a U.S. person.
So how does that apply to Mara being arrested at the JFK airport in New York on American soil and then being turned over to our enemies, the Syrians, to be tortured?
Right.
Well, first of all, I think that General Hayden may I don't know exactly the testimony was probably talking about the FISA statute that defines a U.S. person as any U.S. citizen or person legally inside the United States, a foreign national legally inside the United States.
Right.
But I guess I thought that was dictated by the courts, that that was the definition of a U.S. person.
Well, in general, so let me just step outside the FISA statute, which is in general, the Constitution applies to two groups of people.
One is U.S. citizens, no matter where you are in the world.
And secondly, are foreign nationals who are on U.S. soil legally.
And with regard to either of those two categories of people, the Constitution does apply.
Now, you know, there's been all kinds of questions about whether or not if somebody is an enemy combatant who, for example, enters the United States even legally on behalf of a terrorist group or a foreign power in order to sabotage the U.S. or engage in violence against the United States, then there's a legal theory that says that they have no rights.
But in general, it is true that anybody legally inside the United States does have the right to a constitution.
Now, whether somebody who is on an international flight and passing through the United States airport, you know, JFK, but who hasn't entered the country formally because they haven't passed through customs, what their status is, to be honest, I don't know.
But I can tell you that it wouldn't really matter because there are lots of cases where people who were inside the United States who were U.S. citizens, never mind U.S. persons, such as Jose Padilla, were argued by the Bush administration to have no constitutional rights because they were enemy combatants.
And the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Padilla case said that even if you're a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, the president can detain you as an enemy combatant and not have to give you due process rights because they can hold you under the laws of war.
I mean, this was the true radicalism of the Bush administration, was to take the law of war and introduce it far away from the battlefield, even onto U.S. soil.
And so the government never had to articulate its theory in the RR case as to why it could do what it did, because the court said before that even happened that the case would be dismissed.
But had it proceeded, I'm certain that the government would have said that as someone who they suspected to be an enemy combatant, they have the right to detain them without charges.
And remember, it is true that if somebody is in U.S. soil, the government has the right – before they enter at the airport, the government has the right to deny them entrance into the country for any reason or no reason at all.
I mean, if you show up at JFK airport with a foreign passport, the government has the right to exclude you from entering the country, as does any government.
And I think actually that was what the Bush administration said, is how they categorized it was, we're not rendering you or abducting you, we're simply deporting you from the United States to the country that you came from, which is Syria.
And that's how they justified it, which is why he said, actually, I'm from Canada and you should send me there, and they sent him to Syria instead.
And there's so many questions I have along these lines.
Do you know what happened to him in Syria?
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing.
In the piece that I wrote back in November, and I linked to it in the piece I wrote a couple of days ago, the court detailed at length what happened to him based on the Canadian report and based on what everybody acknowledges occurred, which was he was kept in a tiny cage that was not at times much larger than a coffin.
It was infested with rats, it was unbelievably unsanitary, his diet was so poor that he lost about 45 pounds in the first two months, he was released emaciated.
He was beaten, he had electric prods used on him.
I mean, the most brutal kinds of torture imaginable that we know the Syrians use and that we knew they would use once we sent them there.
That's why we sent them there to be interrogated using torture that even the United States at the time was unwilling to use, or at least use formally.
And so he was basically emotionally and psychologically crippled and physically harmed as well.
He had all kinds of back issues, one of his knees was fractured, I mean, very serious injuries.
Remember, this was a person who was completely innocent.
Right, yeah, reading from that article you referred to from last November, everyone acknowledges, everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with terrorism and was guilty of nothing.
And that article is entitled, A Court Decision That Reflects What Type Of Country The U.S. Is.
Yeah, it sounds like it ought to be a hyperbolic statement there, Glenn, but it's clearly not.
Yeah, unfortunately it's not.
So what would have happened if George Bush had not blinked on the Padilla case and had gone ahead and seen it through to the Supreme Court?
Would they have refused to hear it?
Well, I think what essentially ended up happening was that they were very happy with the victory that they had secured in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, they won that decision 3-0.
And so they were concerned about what the ultimate outcome of the Supreme Court decision would be, in part because Justice Scalia, who in the past had sided with the conservative wing of the court on issues of executive power, meaning he favored executive power, had actually, in one of the cases, involving a U.S. citizen, Hamdi, in 2003, he joined with Justice Stevens, and it went even further than the majority of the court did in protecting the American citizens from the whims of the executive.
What Justice Scalia said, and the great opinion that was joined by Justice Stevens, the court, what happened there was Hamdi was, Yasser Hamdi was an American citizen who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, not in the United States, but in Afghanistan, and the American government brought him to a military brig and held him for two years without any charges as an enemy combatant.
And the Supreme Court said it sort of took the middle position.
It was an opinion written by Justice O'Connor, and the court said, even when it's an American citizen, if someone picked up on a battlefield, you could hold them as an enemy combatant.
You don't have to charge them or convict them with a crime, but you do have to give them some minimal due process.
And Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens dissented and said, no, when it involves an American citizen, you cannot hold them as an enemy combatant.
If they're fighting for a foreign force, if they're engaged in terrorist acts, that's called treason.
And under the Constitution, you have to charge them with a crime, with treason, and convict them in accordance with what the Constitution requires.
So the Bush administration was concerned that given what Justice Scalia did in that case with regard to an American citizen, when it comes to a foreign national, he's willing to endorse anything, but an American citizen, and given the likelihood that Justice Kennedy would have probably joined with the liberals on the court as well, they were concerned that they were going to lose that case.
And so at the last minute, they said, okay, never mind, you don't have to hear this case, because after four years, we'll now give Jose Padilla a real trial.
And of course, Padilla's lawyers told the Supreme Court, you should still take this case, because this issue is going to come up again, and it's vital that you hear it.
And the court took the cowardly way out there, too, and said, well, no, since they're now going to give him a trial, we're going to leave the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling standing, and that's what they did.
That's still good law.
And again, that Fourth Circuit Court decision said which again?
That even if you are a U.S. citizen, as Jose Padilla was, captured on U.S. soil as he was at Chicago International Airport, the president has the power to declare you an enemy combatant.
So the negative precedent was the one left standing when Bush took the Supreme Court issue up.
And then, of course, the Omari case came, and he was a U.S. person but not a citizen, and they blinked on that one, too, and we've got to go to break.
We'll be back with more Glenn Greenwald after this.
It's Antiwar Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.fm.
And our guest is Glenn Greenwald.
We're talking about the government's war against the rule of law, and the most egregious case this week, last week, immediately, right now, ought to be in the headlines if it ain't anymore, is the arrest, I guess, imprisonment, you can call it something, of Bradley Manning, allegedly the leaker of the collateral murder video put out by WikiLeaks a couple of months ago, the Apache helicopter slaughter, and apparently the leaker of much more.
Three weeks now, he's been held, apparently, without charges, and at the same time there are at least reports, I don't know exactly how confirmed they are, that the DOD is saying, we are hunting for Julian Assange, and he better not come to the United States, but wherever he is, apparently he's not safe from the DOD, this guy.
Dan Ellsberg says, run, kid, run, and this seems very worrisome, and it brings up questions of whether there are laws anymore, or whether we're just going to stop pretending, or what's the damn deal?
Glenn, take it away.
Well, I think the context for this entire story is that WikiLeaks is really one of the few entities that is putting any real fear into the entire military complex and the intelligence community.
In 2008, there was a report prepared by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Division that ironically ended up being leaked to and then published by WikiLeaks, which categorized WikiLeaks as a serious threat to America's national security and talked about ways to basically destroy it, destroy its ability to function.
One of the main reasons why they're so petrified of WikiLeaks, aside from the fact that they've had a history of obtaining and publishing extremely embarrassing documents, exposing the secrets of governments and militaries and corporations from around the world, is because what will happen usually is if somebody...
The way that whistleblowing traditionally worked is that whistleblowers inside the government would go to newspapers and would give newspapers very secret information.
And then the newspapers would go to the government and say, what is it that we can publish?
Can we publish this?
Why shouldn't we publish this?
And they would be very deferential to what the government would do.
So, for example, in the New York Times learned that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on American citizens illegally and without warrants, George Bush called the executive editor and the publisher of the New York Times to the Oval Office and said, don't publish this.
It'll harm national security.
And they sat on it for a year until Bush was safely reelected.
And when Dana Priest exposed the network of CIA black sites in Eastern Europe, the Bush administration said, you cannot identify where they are, even what countries they're located in, because that'll undermine our ability to operate them any longer because these countries will be embarrassed.
So she wrote an article basically exposing the fact that there's a legal network of prisons, secret prisons where prisoners are taken away from any monitoring and was convinced by the government to withhold the information that would basically allow international monitoring organizations to know where they were and to put an end to it.
So she basically enabled these prisons to continue.
And that's the thing is that's why the government at least knows that with these media outlets they can control them and can prevail upon them not to publish things that are truly damaging.
That isn't the case of WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks will publish anything that they think is in the national interest for people to know were in the world's interest.
And they don't care what the government thinks about these things.
They don't care what the government's arguments are for why they shouldn't publish them.
And so the Pentagon and the government have no control over what WikiLeaks is doing.
And so they're petrified of the damage that they can do to their ability to maintain the huge wall of secrecy that surrounds virtually everything that they can do.
And so this latest episode is very suspicious because it really dovetails almost completely with what the military in 2008 said they wanted to do to destroy WikiLeaks.
And remember that was before the Apache helicopter attack video was released by WikiLeaks which caused the Pentagon so much problem.
So imagine how much they want to destroy WikiLeaks now.
But basically they talk about them needing to create a perception that it's not safe to leak to WikiLeaks, that WikiLeaks is a dangerous organization and if you associate with it you're taking huge risks as a way of deterring future leakers from being willing to leak to WikiLeaks and think that they can do safely.
And now suddenly out of the blue a 22-year-old private supposedly has access to enormous amounts of classified information, not just the Apache video in Iraq but another one in Afghanistan that shows an airstrike that slaughtered civilians plus 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables that are highly sensitive supposedly.
He not only has access to this but he leaked it all to WikiLeaks and then supposedly he arbitrarily contacted a stranger, a computer hacker named Adrian Lamo over the internet and confessed to Adrian Lamo all the things that he had done.
Lamo then went to the government, turned over the chat logs, asked him more questions of the direction of federal agents and then they detained Bradley Manning and are now saying there's a worldwide manhunt for Julian Assange.
So there's a lot of question marks, a lot of very strange developments embedded within this story but I think the key is that there is a war going on on the part of the Obama administration against whistleblowers generally and WikiLeaks specifically and anything that happens like this should be seen as part of that broader context.
That's very interesting.
I can't wait to read the upcoming article about this, Glenn, but it sounds like you're making the case that this whole thing is a CIA plot or very well could be.
We haven't heard Manning's side of the story whatsoever and there are some things that sound kind of implausible there, that 22-year-old kid has access to everything that Hillary Clinton breathes, to her closest smitherses and so forth.
You're right.
He is a 22-year-old private in Iraq who has access to the entire cache of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and not only does he have the know-how to figure out how to access them and leak them, but then one day he just decides to arbitrarily contact somebody who he had never known before, who's a total stranger and who's a convicted hacker and confess within a matter of minutes over an international unsecured chat line to everything that he has done, to crimes that could basically send him away to prison forever.
Now it's possible that it happened and if it did happen, I think that the point is that Bradley Manning is a national hero.
He's basically the Daniel Ellsberg of our day and Adrian Lamo and whoever else is responsible for turning into a government informant committed a pretty despicable act, but I think the bigger point here is that there are real question marks as to what happened and we shouldn't assume we know what happened until there's a lot more facts.
Yeah, well as far as the kid, at least there's one push specifically in the Washington Post, if you type in Bradley Manning and despondent, you'll get thousands and thousands of returns.
I think last I checked, at least hundreds and hundreds and certainly the Washington Post has characterized this kid in every way they can as some illegitimate being.
Well it was interesting, I did an interview this morning on Democracy Now!
with Daniel Ellsberg and he talked about the fact that it's such amazing deja vu, what's happening with Bradley Manning and what happened with Ellsberg and of course Richard Nixon ordered a break-in of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in order to get information incriminating about his mental health because they had been depicting Ellsberg as this extremely disgruntled, mentally unstable individual beset with all sorts of psychological problems, almost verbatim what they're saying about Manning.
What's interesting is they released some very selected chats that Manning had with this computer hacker when he supposedly confessed and if you read these chats and believe that they're authentic one of the things that immediately jumps out at you is how noble and pure of a whistleblower Manning is.
He talks about the fact that when he was in Iraq he was working on a case where he was told to he was working on the detention of these Iraqi quote-unquote insurgents who were engaged in insurgent activity distributing insurgent flyers and when he had them translated it turned out that these flyers were nothing more than very, very mild and scholarly critiques of the Maliki government and when he went to a supervisor to say that's all these flyers were, that these people were distributing he was told that that was none of his business and he should find more people involved in the distribution of these flyers and in 2018 he said he started realizing that there was something very wrong with this war that he believed in and the more that he looked at things like the Apache helicopter video and saw those civilians getting slaughtered and the more he read through these diplomatic cables and saw the crimes that were being committed in the name of the U.S. government and hidden from public view the more he realized that he had an opportunity to do something extremely consequential and beneficial which was to inform the public about what our government is really doing so that meaningful debate and discussion could take place and if that's really what motivated him and if that's really what he did then he really is a national hero who, you know, everybody who cares about these issues ought to start thinking about ways to help and support him.
All right, now taking the basic narrative at face value for the sake of this argument anyway if the whole thing is a CIA plot to discredit WikiLeaks then I guess this argument is kind of moot but all things being equal here, now we're out of time I don't know if you can come up with a ten second answer It's a good cliffhanger.
Is Bradley Manning a CIA operative engaged in destroying WikiLeaks or is he a national hero and whistleblower?
And I guess it remains to be seen.
All right, this has been great.
Glenn Greenwald.
Salon.com.
Less opinions, less Greenwald.
Thanks, Glenn.
Bye-bye, Chuck.
See y'all tomorrow.
