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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Our first guest on the show today is the great Glenn Greenwald.
Three G words in a row and I didn't stumble.
How do you like that?
Alright.
Glenn is the author of three very important books, the most recent of which is Great American Hypocrites, and I'm under the impression there's a new one coming out here pretty soon.
And he keeps the great blog at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
He used to argue constitutional law in court in New York too, so he knows this business.
Welcome to the show, Glenn.
How you doing, man?
Great to be back, Scott.
Thanks.
I'm really happy to have you here.
Now, what is this update three?
Frank Gaffney owns the thing that's doing the whole mosque push here?
What?
Well, there was a mosque, an anti-mosque rally in Lower Manhattan on Sunday, which was really quite ugly, not just in terms of a few isolated incidents, but just in terms of the general tenor of the rally.
It was just extremely anti-Islamic.
It was basically a march against Islam, not against any specific mosque at any specific site.
And one of the facts that hadn't been known that was uncovered was that the group that was essentially the sponsor of this rally had a website that was registered by the group controlled by Frank Gaffney, who's probably the single most unhinged and deranged neoconservative extremist of the country, which is obviously saying a lot.
I mean, the history of his lies and radicalism could fill the rest of your show for the week.
And so it's not a surprise that the rally turned into what it turned into, given who was behind it.
Amazing.
And you know what?
I think I'm forced to agree with you.
And that means that, I mean, on that same scale of comparison, you have to include Michael Ledeen.
And that guy actually believes the nonsense, he says.
According to my friend Larissa Alexandrovna, she's met him and talked with him in person.
And she says, no, he's not a liar.
He really is, you know, that crazy.
And for Gaffney to be worse than Ledeen, yeah.
But this is the guy who says that Iran is going to take the nukes they don't have and they're going to shoot them into space and destroy all electricity in America like that old Fox show, Dark Angel, and that 70 to 90 percent of us will all starve to death and it'll be the end of the world.
Right.
I actually had a little dispute with Frank Gaffney a couple of years ago because it was, I forget exactly what the details were, but I think it was in 2007 he wrote a column for the Washington Times in which he quoted a completely fictitious quote from Abraham Lincoln, essentially advocating that politicians who oppose American wars ought to be hanged.
And he called for the hanging of, I think it was either Carl Levin or Dick Durbin, who had come out and spoken out against the Iraq War at the time based on this completely fictitious Abraham Lincoln quote that he then used to justify the hanging of current American politicians due to their position on the Iraq War.
That's just one of countless examples like that establishing the craziness of Frank Gaffney.
Well, you know, Ron Paul and his statement, which I saw that you noted on your blog, and this is also something that M.J.
Rosenberg wrote about over at TPM Cafe, at least in terms of he was talking specifically about Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League and why they were getting in on this.
I guess now it looks like you've got neocons at the very root of this thing.
But both of these men said this is about foreign policy.
This is about the war.
And what M.J.
Rosenberg was picking on, the Israeli lobby part of it, Ron Paul was more general about just the war party in general in the United States, that they want Americans to hate and fear Muslims, and they want Americans to falsely believe that, one, all Muslims attacked us somehow or are responsible somehow, and, two, that Islam was the motivation for the attacks in the first place, which, of course, is not true.
But if we can believe those false motives, then we feel like our back is against the wall and we're acting on the defensive as we invade the entire planet.
And that's what they want.
They see the opinion polls.
People are getting sick of war.
It's interesting.
I wrote a piece yesterday basically making the argument that I was growing increasingly irritated by those who were saying, oh, this whole Moss debate is just a distraction, it's just an August story about nothing designed to kind of distract us from what really matters.
And I think that argument is being made most frequently by Democratic and liberal pundits who fear that this story is politically harmful for the Democrats and therefore want to belittle its importance and dismiss it from our public discourse.
And in part I understand that impulse because if you look at it in a certain way, the question of where this particular mosque is located isn't a particularly important question in the scheme of all the other issues that deserve political attention.
But in a more substantive way, I think actually this issue is an extremely important one because of the reasons to which you just alluded, which is that the kind of enemies that are manufactured are extremely important to virtually all of our policies.
And the ginning up of animosity and hatred towards Muslims has really been at the core of pretty much everything we've done in the world for the last ten years.
It's justified everything from torture and renditions and Guantanamo and the deprivation of due process to bombings and invasions of occupations, which is there are these horrible, scary, bad Muslims out in the world that we need to go and do anything that we want to.
And ginning up that kind of fear and animosity among the population is critically important.
And I think there's two aspects of it reflected in the statement by Ron Paul and by M.J.
Rosenberg.
One is the statement by Ron Paul identifies the fact that the military industrial complex has always needed an enemy to scare the American people in order to induce support for general policies of war and militarism and what Andrew Bacevich calls the state of perpetual warfare.
You need a very menacing and scary enemy in order to justify and sustain support for those policies.
And I think Ron Paul is right that ginning up this kind of fear and hatred of Muslims and hatred is critical to that.
But the other aspect of it, which M.J.
Rosenberg points out, is that there's been a very lengthy effort, probably decades old, on the part of Israel and its supporters in the United States to universalize the conflict that Israel has with its neighbors so that the Western world generally and the United States in particular takes on Israel's battles as its own.
And so obviously the neighbors of Israel, with whom Israel has the greatest amount of conflict, are Arabs and Muslims.
And so convincing Americans that Arabs and Muslims are also their enemy is extremely important to the supporters of Israel to get the United States to continue to make Israel's enemies our own.
And I think that's a major part of what's taking place as well.
Well, and it must be so frustrating for you.
I know I see you write this on your blog over and over again about how the vast majority of American Jews are liberals and embrace above all things the American, you know, the core Jeffersonian principle of freedom of religion.
I mean, I learned about freedom of religion and that's what makes America great and screw the Soviet Union.
We're Americans and we're free.
And freedom of religion was the defining height of that.
That's contrary to the entire history of the world, that there's freedom of religion the way it is in America.
And of all the myths, as my friend Anthony Gregory was pointing out, all the myths of American exceptionalism, this one is actually pretty true.
I mean, we do have Branch Davidian massacres and things like this from time to time.
But for the most part, there's freedom of religion here in just an unprecedented fashion compared to world history.
And here we're willing to throw it away, and we have the Israel lobby leading this push to attack our last real value we have left here after throwing out the rest of the Bill of Rights.
Glenn, man, it's sad to me.
Well, you know, one of the reasons why the position of the anti-defamation league coming out and arguing that this community center should move, one of the reasons why that resonated so much and was so shocking and disappointing to so many people is because the history of Jews in the United States really has been, and not just in the United States but around the world, but I'd say especially in the United States, has been this realization that defending pluralism and the rights of minorities to pursue their own vision of happiness freely is not just the right thing to do abstractly and in principle, although it is, but it's also something that's in the self-interest of Jews because Jews are so typically small minorities in the country in which they live, and it's therefore in the interest of small minorities to establish the principle that everybody has equal access and equal rights as everybody else does, as the majority does, including very small minorities that the majority may not understand or even like.
And as you suggest, American Jews to this day largely reject the neoconservative view on pretty much everything, as polls repeatedly and definitively show, and yet the Israeli lobby, as it's called, gets so much attention and purports to speak on behalf of Jews generally, even though they represent a small minority.
All right, we'll be right back with Glenn Greenwald after this, y'all.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Sorry to the Chaos Radio audience for all that dead air.
I really should have a board op.
Less responsibilities while I'm trying to do this thing live, but hey, it is what it is.
All right, hey, we're talking with Glenn Greenwald.
He writes the great blog at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
It's a great blog.
It's a great blog at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
It'll forge you on there.
That's the old address, but it still works.
And he's the author of Great American Hypocrites and How Would a Patriot Act?
And I always forget the name of the other one when I'm trying to remember off the top of my head.
Now, Glenn, let's talk about something here that is, I think, at the root of this issue about the mosque.
And it's something, you know, in your argument with Cliff May, if you can call it an argument, on TV yesterday.
You and the host of the show both attack the idea that somehow Islam attacked us, that Al-Qaeda, rather than being some individuals, is all Muslims or something like that.
But what I think is the core of this issue is what was the real motivation for the attack in the first place?
And I say if you go back all the way to Ramzi Yusef from the first World Trade Center bombing and Abdul Abdel Rahman, Sheikh Rahman, and all the thousand years of revenge story, as told by Peter Lance, of the 1990s Al-Qaeda leading up to the September 11th attack, plus a million more footnotes than that, show that the reason for the attack, the reason that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to be at war with us, and the reason that Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib and the guys that actually did the attack wanted to be at war with us was because of American foreign policy in the Middle East.
It was not about an interpretation of Islam at all, really.
Well, this is probably the single most suppressed truth in American political discourse, I'd say.
That is the role that the United States played in inspiring Islamic terrorism and in generating anti-American hatred in that part of the world.
I mean, of course, after 9-11, the American people wanted an explanation, naturally, about why would these people hate us so much that they would risk their own lives or sacrifice their own lives and slaughter so many of us, which was a natural question.
And, of course, the answer that was given to them was so completely absurd because it was detached entirely from reality because the reality was suppressed.
And the answer was, well, they hate us for our freedoms.
And, of course, that would immediately prompt the question, well, there are all sorts of free countries around the world who aren't being attacked by Al-Qaeda.
Why aren't they attacking Sweden?
And why aren't they attacking France?
And why aren't they attacking any countries in South America and a whole host of other countries if that's really all it's about?
And, of course, the reality is that we've been interfering in that part of the world and in bringing all sorts of death and destruction to that part of the world for many, many decades.
I mean, anyone who knows about history would never, with a straight face, deny that.
And I think what's really interesting is, yesterday or the day before, a bunch of neoconservatives who are trying to demonize the imam who is at the center of this Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, Imam Rauf, said that they had explosive video of a speech of his in which it proves what a horrible, subversive, American-hating radical he is.
And the argument that he essentially made that they clung to is that American foreign policy had a role to play in why the 9-11 attacks happened, and America was an accomplice, in essence, to what it is that occurred.
And people from Ron Paul to David Petraeus and many, many people in between have said that things that we do in the world cause terrorism to escalate and for us to increase the risk to ourselves.
And Osama bin Laden has three grievances that he said were the principal grievances that caused the 9-11 attacks to occur.
The bases on Saudi soil, our support for Israel, and our general propping up of dictators in the Middle East.
And so the idea that nobody can ever talk about what the United States has done that contributed to the sentiments that gave rise to 9-11 is what then leads to these absolute fictions.
Well, it's just about them hating our freedoms or it's because Islam needs people to engage in violence.
And these are obvious fictions, but they're designed propagandistically to suppress the truth.
Well, you know, it's interesting because in this case, I mean, basically they gave Ron Paul an opportunity here to bring it back up.
I mean, this is a terrible thing that's happened.
It's not like a...
Well, it's a silver lining, I guess, is the thing.
Now is our opportunity to say, no, see, you guys have it all wrong all the way back to your very first premise.
The enemy's not radical Islam.
This is...
Michael Scheuer, the head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, said it's a global Islamist insurgency.
Well, you can have an insurgency without an over-dominant power to insurge against.
Which is first, the cart or the horse?
The American empire was already there.
You know, you talk about the bases in Saudi Arabia.
They were bombing Iraq every other day for 10 years straight.
They enforced a blockade that starved a million people to death from those bases in Saudi Arabia.
Well, this is, you know, I mean, what I've written about before is the unbelievable disparity in perception between the Muslim world and the American population.
And there's so many...
And people assume that this disparity exists.
People over here in the United States assume that that disparity exists because they are propagandized and the truth for them is distorted.
But if you look, for example, at one of the things that was most significant in the Muslim world, it was when Madeleine Albright was asked about the sanctions regime that killed a million people, 500,000 children, and she very cavalierly replied, well, I think it was worth it.
I mean, this was an enormous scandal.
This was something that really shaped perceptions in the Muslim world of the United States.
The fact that we would not only invoke and institute a policy that killed half a million Muslim children, but then so cavalierly dismiss concerns about it.
Or in the last decade, the Al Jazeera cameraman, Samiel Haj, who was detained in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Guantanamo without charges for seven years, a journalist, who was basically interrogated not about Al Qaeda but about Al Jazeera, was a major, major cause celebre in the Muslim world.
Obviously, Al Jazeera talked about it quite a bit.
These are things, I bet you, the sanctions regime and Madeleine Albright's comment about it, how many people it killed, the imprisonment of Al Haj, that only a tiny sliver of the American population are even aware of.
And yet the entire Muslim world has been thinking about it and talking about it constantly.
And so this disparity is one that accounts for how different the perceptions are, and it all stems from the fact that the greatest taboo in American political culture is to suggest that America bears any blame or responsibility for the fact that people around the world hate us and want to do violence for us.
That's the prohibited question is, what are we doing that causes this animosity to exist?
Yeah, and you know, the way I like to put it too is, well, as bluntly as possible, if that's how it's going to be, then I like to come at it from the other angle, which is, here's the facts.
And the way I like to put it is, just because America's an evil empire doesn't mean that bin Laden is Luke Skywalker.
He's just as evil as the Republicans and the Democrats.
He is a murderer of civilians, and he's not taking his side to simply actually read the Declaration of War and see what it's about, right?
You know?
The way I always talk about it is that there's a very simple difference, and that is, there's a difference between causation and justification.
So you can observe that one of the things that causes Islamic terrorism, or terrorism by people acting in the name of Islam, are things that the United States does.
To talk about that causal relationship is not in any way to suggest that deliberately targeting civilians for slaughter is a moral or justifiable thing to do.
It's very consistent to say, number one, terrorism aimed at civilians, the intentional killing of civilians is morally wrong in all cases, and yet, two, American foreign policy in the Muslim world contributes to and exacerbates the problem of terrorism.
It's just causation simply is.
It's not a question of morality or justifiability, and that's a distinction that I think has to be insisted upon in order to have this conversation in a rational way.
So my question is the power of the American Department of Justice to indict actors in foreign states for breaking American laws.
You brought this up in a recent blog entry there in the case of WikiLeaks and just completely destroying the argument of this Heritage Foundation neocon, but it reminded me of the indictment of Manuel Noriega, who not only was a foreigner on foreign soil, but was a sovereign on foreign soil, and also the FBI's telling the Washington Post that the reason that they, or at least the government telling the Washington Post the reason that they were invading Somalia with the help of the Ethiopian Army in 2006 was because there were three men, suspects, wanted for questioning by the FBI in the case of the two embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and the two Africa embassy bombings of 1998.
I don't think that a Spanish court can indict me for breaking a Spanish law in my country, can they?
How does this work?
Well, it's really interesting because there's actually a dispute among international law theorists and the like about the ability of countries to indict other people for things that were done outside of the soil of the indicted country, and what's interesting is that it's usually people on the left who maintain that under the concept of universal jurisdiction, countries can indict criminals from other states for acts that had nothing to do with them, and in fact lots of Western European countries like Belgium and Spain have sought under this theory to indict foreign war criminals.
Belgium has indicted Israelis who have been accused of war criminals against the Palestinians and the Lebanese, people who have nothing to do with their country for acts committed far away from the borders of their country, and of course Spain famously has threatened to indict.
Pardon me Glenn, I'm sorry we're just so short on time, but even that, that's like war crimes, that's people at highest levels and stuff, but we're talking about lower level crimes, right?
Penal code statutes and things.
Well that's what I mean, if there are international treaties that justify prosecution in the Geneva Conventions for example, say that every nation shall be required to try to bring to justice war criminals no matter where they are found, that's one thing, but to assert the worldwide right to indict people under your domestic laws, like you would have to do to say that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks committed a crime is really such a far transgression of what a sovereign state ought to be able to do that I don't even see the theory that justifies it.
Cool, and so that would apply to even the FBI going after Al Qaeda, that should be gee, I hate to say, that's more what, intelligence agencies' jobs, or the FBI should just be working through Interpol with other cops?
There are conventions of governing international terrorism that allow countries to bring to justice using the criminal justice system countries, international terrorists especially when directed at U.S. soil which is what embassies are, so I don't know exactly what treaty that is, but I think that's a more justifiable case than say, prosecuting foreigners for leaking classified information.
Right, yeah.
Alright, well listen, I'm sorry I can't ask you about everything you write on your blog, but I read every entry all day long and I hit refresh to make sure, in case there's a new one, I suggest everyone do it's salon.com slash opinion slash greenwald, and I really appreciate your time on the show today, Glenn.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
