02/24/11 – Jeremy Sapienza – The Scott Horton Show

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Hi, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Jeremy Sapienza.
He's senior editor at antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Jeremy.
How's it going?
Hey, Scott.
Pretty good.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I'm happy to have you here.
As hopefully everybody knows, it's fundraising time again at antiwar.com.
So we're doing a thing this week where we talk to at least one of our staff members.
Of course, we're always talking with our regular writers here on the show, but it's kind of nice to get the staff on to talk a little bit about antiwar.com itself, which to me is an important topic of study in its own right.
So I appreciate you joining us today.
And now tell me, Jeremy, you've been with antiwar.com since for how long?
Since 2002.
Wow.
So like nine years.
Well, I thought it was even before that, like during the days of Kosovo and stuff, no?
Oh, no, no, no.
Just in the run up to the Iraq war is when you...
Yeah, after 9-11.
Well, I wouldn't say no, it was February 2002.
So it was at the time they were talking about Iraq and threatening.
And I said to Eric at the time, like, oh, it's just stupid.
It's not going to happen.
What are we worrying about this for?
It's just too dumb.
It'll be a total disaster.
You know, they proved us wrong.
Yeah.
Lesson was learned.
Dumb never stopped Washington, D.C.
It's certainly not these days.
Being true year after year, it's pretty amazing.
All right.
Well, so tell me if you want to start back then or, you know, just current version, whatever.
Tell us about what you do for Antiwar.com that makes you the senior editor there.
Sure.
Well, when I started, it was a lot less.
Well, I had a lot less responsibility, obviously.
And I was being trained.
I was basically the I guess I was the only besides Eric and Justin.
I think I was the only full time employee at that point.
The organization hadn't really grown very much at the beginning, even though 9-11, I guess, provided a lot of impetus for growth and for people to fund us.
So Eric needed help because of the crush of work.
So they hired me and I was basically just Eric's assistant.
I was supposed to pick up the slack for him when he needed help.
Like, for example, the job that Jason mostly does now is you talk to him this week, right?
Yeah.
Well, we talk to Jason every week, but yeah, we did talk with him yesterday on the show.
So, you know, about the job that he does going around the Internet and looking for links, hundreds of them a day.
I was doing that job.
And then Eric was building the page for seven days, you know, well, six days a week for me, seven days a week for him.
And then eventually we could add more staff.
And my duties changed and I learned more and I was able to myself build a page at the end of the night, building a page involved.
After the end of the day, we've got hundreds of links, news links in the database, and we've been putting it in all day.
And some of it is actually by the end of the day already outdated.
So we have to figure out where all this news is going to go on the page.
What's going to be top news is going to go into a little frontline section.
And then how is it going to be categorized at the bottom?
So I began doing that a few days a week and then doing editing three days a week.
So I do I build the page two days a week and then three days a week, I actually just edit the viewpoints.
And that's the job that you share with Matt Barganier, who we talked to.
And that's the part of the job that I share with Matt.
Half my job I share with Eric.
I basically and I used to actually do the links as well.
So my job used to be a floater so I could do all the job.
And I would go around giving people days off.
Yeah, but man, I need to I need to set you up a little radio station over there in Brooklyn, right?
Yeah, let you be the backup antiwar radio host when I need a day off.
How about that?
All right.
So tell us about being an editor for antiwar.com is something I brought up with Matt.
And I think it's, you know, worthy of note, especially like if I go into the database and I see the comments on the proposed viewpoints, you and Matt are extremely critical.
You you pick from a very broad section of points of view, but you only take the very highest quality and the slightest infraction can result in a viewpoint being tossed into the memory hole.
You really like this subject.
Yeah, we I gotta tell you, I laugh out loud when I go through the unapproved viewpoint section and I see you and Matt's comments on and they're just great.
Yeah, they're obviously they're not for public consumption, but they're Oh, no, I never tell.
Yeah, they're just the first thing that pops into our mind when we're reading them as our first impression of them.
Yeah.
So we have a few things that and there's, there's probably a bit of a difference.
We haven't really talked about it, actually, between the criteria that Matt used and the criteria that I use.
I mean, we have a basic idea of what is supposed to go on the page antiwar.com.
But other than that, we'll read stuff.
And if it's just really terrible economics, we kill.
Or if it's just if it's too pragmatic, you know what I mean?
Where they think it's pragmatic.
But, you know, for example, saying, well, of course, America has to intervene in these cases.
We kill that too, because we don't think it takes a pragmatic tone.
But it's not pragmatic, really.
It's not really something that should be done in any case, no matter what.
Right.
That's like Glenn Greenwald always does a serious person with capital letters for S&P.
You have to be wrong about everything as a basis and then go from there.
Yeah.
All serious people know that, of course, the U.S. needs to be able to intervene wherever it wants in certain cases.
Right.
Just not this one.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah.
It's Jeremy Sapienza.
He's senior editor at antiwar.com.
And we're going to come back, talk a little bit more about that and about the news.
The world turned upside down, the Middle East anyway.
All right.
Hang tight.
Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Jeremy Sapienza, senior editor at antiwar.com.
And by the way, it's fun drive week again, fun drive weeks again at antiwar.com.
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All right, so now Jeremy, back to the question at hand, which was about original submissions to antiwar.com.
I know you get a lot of them.
How does somebody get past the Jeremy Sapienza wall of denial?
Just be good.
I know it sounds really simplistic, but if I only have so much time in the day, I can't spend an hour fixing grammatical errors, or punctuation, or things like this.
So even if you have the greatest idea, if you can't write, it's just not going to happen.
I mean, we do have to have some kind of style standards even.
So even if your message is just wonderful, it's got to be well written because people have to read it.
And also, length.
I think people get a little carried away in a subject that they're very passionate about.
And the thing is that not everybody wants to read 2,000 words on it, or 5,000 words sometimes.
I think that most people want to stay under like a 1,200 word limit.
Justin excluded, of course.
Well, and usually he stays pretty much around there.
Yeah, yeah.
He's not too much over that unless he's really out for somebody.
And then that's what people tune in for.
But in general, if you're talking about Iranian foreign policy or whatever, you got to keep it short.
And I like the part what you said.
I like reiterating it.
The part about don't give us a bunch of, yeah, well, every serious person is for this terrible thing, as though that gives you credibility and standing to then take a good position.
You know, that's backwards thinking, if you ask me.
I'm glad you said so.
It's ceding territory to the interventionists, really, a lot of times.
And a lot of actually good columnists fall into this sometimes.
And I just won't run something that has that so-called practical viewpoint about something that, you know, oh, maybe we should consider some level of sanctions, but things like that.
Yeah.
Well, and that was the major failure of the opposition to the Iraq war back then was accept every premise, but then say, but don't have a war.
Just give the inspectors more time.
Just wait until you can get France and Russia on the Security Council to agree.
Then it will be OK.
Of course, he's Hitler.
Of course, he's got chemical weapons.
But there's got to be a way other than war to get his chemical weapons away from him.
This kind of crap is what led us into that war, that soft kind of accept every fake thing as true as the premise before you kind of mealy mouth oppose it, you know.
Right.
So the interventionists are throwing out all these things that are practically lies.
We just found out the curveball revelation that we knew it.
But most people were really paying attention and wanted to knew it.
It was fake.
But, you know, curveball basically said that all along it was it was a lie to get the U.S. to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam.
Yeah.
Kill however many people needed to be killed.
So they see the argument over to the people who want war already.
So, you know, each little bit is more on their territory.
And you're backing up, backing up and you don't even know.
And then when it comes time for war, you've already conceded that the U.S. or whoever has the right to invade whatever country.
And it's over.
Right.
And I mean, you can check just check those people were the Clinton supporters from just a year or so before.
And the whole George Bush completely had them with the he's in violation of the United Nations Security Council and the principle that something's got to be done about that.
They couldn't argue that they love that.
And we see the same thing now.
They're talking about invading Libya.
But don't worry, we're going to wait and get the baby blue flag wrapped around us first and then we're going to invade them, maybe.
Right.
Well, that's that's that's what's so aggravating about, you know, how how many years later is this now in Iraq?
Eight.
Yeah.
So eight years later, in Iraq, Iraq is still a disaster.
Iraq still doesn't have a decent government.
And they're still talking about the illegal U.S. invasion.
Well, would there be a million more people alive on the planet right now if it were a legal invasion?
If the bombs had the U.N. kiss, would they?
Would people be like more virtuous in their death?
I mean, I just I just really don't understand the idea of continuing to say that the Iraq invasion was illegal when it was really just wrong, whether it was legal or illegal.
Yeah, well, you know, that it doesn't have any bearing, really.
Yeah, of course not.
And once you get caught arguing just a technicality, you lose.
And, you know, here's the thing that's bothering me.
Part of me, I guess, like you were saying about what you told Eric in early 2002, they're not going to do Iraq.
That's so patently on its face, a bad decision.
There's no way they're going to do that.
That's how I'm feeling right now about Libya.
They're not really going to intervene in Libya, are they?
Because, you know, there's Muammar Gaddafi on TV this morning talking about Osama bin Laden now, not not the CIA, but Osama bin Laden is giving LSD to all the kids and he wants to create an Islamo-fascist caliphate, like they say on Fox News and whatever.
And I was thinking there's nothing that could make that even slightly true other than American direct intervention in Libya is the only thing that could actually bolster al-Qaeda's position in that country.
This is hardly an Islamo-fascist revolution from below going on here, but we could make it one by bombing the place.
Sure.
I mean, I again, I really don't want to be wrong, but I don't think I don't think it's going to happen.
I really don't.
I mean, it just doesn't make sense at this point.
Either.
Well, OK, there's one of two things.
Obama's shell shocked himself.
He's terrified to do absolutely anything, which I think is true in a lot of cases, because he is damned if he do if he doesn't, damned if he doesn't.
And all he cares about really are, you know, how he's seen, because he's really an image president more than more than any I can, you know, the few presidents I've known in my life.
So I think he's terrified to do anything.
But on the other hand, he could succumb to that.
He needs to look real tough.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems like in the media it's already, well, what are you going to do?
I heard a State Department briefing or something yesterday.
They played on Al Jazeera where whoever the reporter was, the premise was, what in the hell are you waiting for to do something about what's going on in Libya?
And that's that Clintonian intervention again, where the question of, you know, invading Iraq.
Yeah, sure.
We're all against that because we don't trust these oil Republican types or whatever.
But the idea that America has the right to just intervene in a civil war in a country in North Africa, you know, unbidden by anyone fighting even there, it's just we don't even examine that.
That's just goes without saying that, of course, we have the right and nay the duty to do something about this terrible Qaddafi character that Obama's been supporting up until last week.
It's crazy.
Crazy.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
I talked us all the way up into the break.
Anyway, good interview, though.
And thanks a lot for your time and our work at Antiwar dot com.
We can't do without you.
Oh, thanks.
Thanks very much, everybody.
That's Jeremy Sapienza, a senior editor at Antiwar dot com.
And he writes from time to time to keep an eye out.
Very sharp pen.