03/23/11 – Mike Malloy – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Mike Malloy.
He's a radio host from Atlanta, Georgia.
It used to be on Air America, my favorite show on Air America back in the days.
And, uh, he's now self syndicated.
He used to write for CNN and was the editor of Creative Loafing there in Atlanta.
You can read him at the Huffington Post and check out his website.
Mike Malloy dot com.
Welcome to the show, Mike.
How's things?
Hey, Scott, going fine.
Well, that's good.
I'm happy to have you here.
Uh, thanks for joining us today.
Uh, tell us, uh, you were involved in the, uh, the big protest against the treatment of Bradley Manning over the weekend, correct?
Yeah, there were two events.
The first one was last Saturday in, uh, in front of the white house, which was, uh, generally anti-war, but also had to do with the imprisonment and torture of Bradley Manning.
And, uh, about 120 of us were arrested at that protest.
And then the next day we went to Quantico, Virginia, where the, uh, Marine brig is located, where Bradley Manning is being held and tortured by the Obama administration.
And, uh, the demonstration there, uh, was, uh, resulted in about 30, 32 arrests and, uh, both events were as far as I'm concerned, fairly well attended given the fact that, uh, uh, the involvement of the American people in their own democratic process, let's get to the point where it's ridiculous.
Um, we're about to lose it.
The whole country is going fascist.
And unless people understand how necessary it is to, uh, uh, to involve now and get involved in civil disobedience, we're going to lose the whole damn thing.
Yeah.
Well, I did see a video of it on your website.
It did look like quite a few people came out and I guess it was including Colleen Rowley and Daniel Ellsberg.
And I guess I was going to say it was nice of them to let y'all go, uh, after the first arrested to get to the second protest in time.
Well, they, they held us for about, uh, we were picked up, I guess, around one o'clock, one 32 o'clock afternoon in front of the white house and, uh, taken to the, uh, I think it was the Metro DC detention center Southwest of the city and the, uh, the process of booking us and fingerprints and photographs and all this other stuff that you have to go through when you're exercising your first amendment.
Right.
Um, uh, ended, I was out of there by about five 36 o'clock and, uh, uh, it was picked up by a couple of friends and, uh, back to DC and then the next morning, everybody headed back to, uh, this time to Quantico.
Now, was there anything specific, uh, that caused y'all to be arrested or just showing up?
Were you crossing the line?
They warned you not to cross that kind of thing.
Um, it, it, it, it's mostly the latter, I, uh, I guess, uh, uh, the constitution guarantees a right, a P a peaceful assembly, which is what both events actually were.
There were peaceful assemblies of people, protesting policies, um, of the U S government.
But here's the catch when, uh, a local jurisdiction, a local police force, um, in front of the white house, it was a park police and a SWAT team at Quantico.
It was a Virginia state police and, um, uh, um, the, uh, the, the county police, when, when, when the police move in on a demonstration and tell you to move, if you do not move, then, um, you're violating a lawful order.
There is a requirement for most demonstrations.
You have to get a permit, which to me is extremely galling, uh, to get a permit to exercise the right of, uh, free speech is a totalitarian by definition.
It just is so.
Um, but once the permit expires, if you have a permit for a demonstration from noon to three at three Oh one, the police can tell you to move on.
You've had your demonstration.
You've exercised your first amendment, right?
If you do not move on, you will be in violation of the law.
What's the law?
The law is obeying a lawful order, uh, by the police or criminal trespass.
This is what we were charged with, uh, on public property, criminal trespass, the public property being the sidewalk and, and, uh, the area in front of the white house, uh, doesn't belong to anybody.
It belongs to the people and to assemble there and to, uh, to protest and hold our signs and sing our songs and to be told, um, if you don't move on, you're going to go to jail is when you get right down to it is an absolute outrage.
Yeah.
Well, Hey, at this point, you're probably lucky you didn't get rounded up and locked in a free speech pin.
Well, I mean, they really had those, right?
Like, uh, not too many years ago, a couple of years ago, uh, 2008, they had at some of the political conventions, literally all the way chained in, in fences with, uh, you know, a fence roof too.
Right.
And, and the sad part of that is, uh, there was a time when this, this entire country was a free speech zone, uh, but it has been so changed and so altered and so destroyed by corporatism, capitalism, fascism, whatever you want to call it, it's been so destroyed that anybody who lives in the United States of America now who believes they live in a democratic society is either a fool or completely unaware of what has happened in the past 30, 35 years.
You know, I think about April 20th, 1971.
Uh, 40 years ago, uh, there was a demonstration in Washington, DC to stop the war in Vietnam.
And that, uh, those demonstrations were led by some of the same people who were involved in these demonstrations as fast weekend.
The, uh, the, the truth is, so they were 40 years younger.
We're talking about people back then were in their twenties.
Those people now are in their sixties.
And the people in 1971 who decided that the only way to get the attention of the, of the government at the time it was Richard Nixon was to bring Washington, DC to a standstill to stop the functioning of government.
So half a million to a million people showed up led by young people, college students, and by God, the city was brought to its knees.
And, um, to get that kind of action now is, is, is almost a pipe dream.
Yeah.
Now you'd have to get some plastic pop star up there to sing a song for him or something.
That's pretty much the way it would go.
But even, even that, I just don't think that people are aware that it's the boiling frog syndrome syndrome.
You know, you put a frog in boiling water, it immediately dies.
But if you put a frog in water and slowly raise the temperature, it never has the sense to get out.
It doesn't notice little by little by little as the temperature is going up, it winds up just as dead.
But the process of boiling it, uh, it takes a lot longer.
And that's, uh, I think that's what has happened in this country in the past 30 years.
Right.
I mean, and really that is the case, right?
They're not just rounding up everybody, you know, uh, putting us all in detention camps and torturing us all.
They're torturing us one at a time.
You know, Amari, Jose Padilla, and now Bradley Manning, uh, you know, Americans, U.S. persons arrested on American soil, uh, now are getting the Abu Ghraib treatment.
It's true.
And, and the cover for all this.
And the reason I think most Americans are asleep at the wheel on this one, it's all being done under the cover of fighting terrorism.
It's all being done against some amorphous enemy that, um, uh, in, in, when I was a kid, it was communism.
That's what everybody, you know, there were communists all over the place.
I can remember as a little kid, my mom watching on television, the, uh, what was called back then the army McCarthy hearings where Senator Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin, a Republican nut bag, if ever one existed was, uh, declared that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist.
You know, the Supreme allied commander of U.S. forces during world war two as a communist, there were communists in the state department, there were communists in the justice department.
And this crazy bastard had free reign for so many years.
And Senator Joe McCarthy to, uh, to accuse anybody and everybody of being a communist.
Well, it's changed now to the point where anybody and everybody might be a terrorist.
Well, you know, that was a tragedy.
This is the farce though, because back then, at least there was such a thing as the Soviet union, which, you know, control the third of the world.
There was such a thing as the KGB in Washington, DC, you know what I mean?
Now we're talking about terrorism, Al Qaeda, which was only a few hundred people in the first place, 10 years ago.
The entire threat from the Soviet union was in my opinion, and I, I grew up in that period of time was chinned up to the point where people in this country weren't thinking clearly.
Um, there was, uh, yeah, there was the Soviet union.
There was, uh, uh, international communism, but there also was the, uh, United States and international capitalism.
And, uh, millions of people died after world war two, as these two ideologies, both, both of which, as far as I'm concerned, are perversions of, uh, the total perversions of both of them, as these two ideologies fought, uh, for dominance and, uh, the millions of people who died simply because they happened to live someplace where the, uh, um, uh, the totalitarians of the, of the Soviet union and the totalitarians in effect of the United States were battling it out.
So, uh, I, I don't disagree with what you said.
There was, uh, the Soviet union in the fifties.
There were, um, communist, uh, uh, agents who were working within the U S government, and it's very difficult, if not impossible to believe that there are now, uh, Al Qaeda operatives working in the government, although there are Republicans who are serious about running for high political office who would have us believe that.
Yeah, that was the only point I wanted to make.
One other clarification too, Scott, I was not arrested at Quantico.
I was at that, I was at that demonstration and participated, but I was not one of the people that, uh, uh, was on the list to be arrested.
I was arrested in Washington the day before, but not at Quantico.
They had a list to be arrested?
Uh, oh yeah.
There, there, there are things that you have to know.
Uh, there are risks that you're going to take if, if you decide that you are going to participate in civil disobedience, you have to know what you're, what you're facing.
Um, and, and I think it's only fair.
And the organizers of these events will tell you, these are the charges that will be placed against you.
If you do a, these are the charges that will be placed against you.
If you do B and, and write down the list, this is what you can expect during the arrest procedure.
Uh, this is what you can expect.
If you touch one of these officers, no matter what they do to you.
If you touch one, you could be charged with assault, which is a felony.
Assault on a police officer is a very serious offense, but this is what it goes back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, the right to peacefully assemble, uh, and express your, uh, um, uh, I forget how the first amendment states it, but to seek redress for grievances from your government, you know, that's a bunch of hog snot.
Uh, you can peacefully assemble and you can begin your protests, but, uh, first you better have a permit.
Secondly, when the permit, uh, when the time on the permit expires, you better get your ass out of town because if you stay there, then all of a sudden your first amendment rights have evaporated and you are now in violation of the law.
So yeah, there are all sorts of procedures that you need to know about.
And, and thank God the anti-war, the civil disobedience, uh, organizations learned from, uh, from all that activity of 30 and 40 years ago, they learned to let the people who are going to demonstrate, who are going to be arrested, to let us know what we're facing so that, so that we're prepared for it.
And, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
All right.
Well, let's talk a little bit more about, um, well, a little bit about Bradley Manning and why you're doing this in the first place.
I mean, I think if there's a symbol of, you know, the lawlessness and I'll if you want to call it fascism of the American government, I mean, I don't see exactly the corporate interest in torturing Bradley Manning, but certainly the, uh, out of control, authoritarian nature of the military and of the American, you know, corporate state, uh, is, is being unleashed upon this kid and that's, what's got you out there in the first place.
And I figure, you know, how it is with radio.
There's people listening for the first time right now, never heard of Bradley Manning, or maybe they did once and they don't really know the first thing about it.
So why don't you tell them what it was, got you so angry.
You were willing to go out there and screaming.
Well, first of all, I think we have to understand that the United States military now is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America.
We do not fight wars for peace, freedom, justice in the American way.
We fight wars for capitalism.
We fight wars for corporatism.
Now this is nothing new.
General Smedley Butler, two time, a Marine, um, or a two time medal of honor winner.
There's a Marine general back at the turn of the last century when the United States started its imperialists and ventures around the, around the country.
He wrote a tract, an essay called war is a racket.
And I would recommend anybody read that.
You just Google war is a racket and read with a twice winning medal of honor general in the Marine Corps combat veteran.
What he wrote, um, right now the military is nothing more than the, uh, stormtroopers for capitalism, for corporate America.
That's all the military is.
Bradley Manning's crime, his sin had nothing to do with the military.
Uh, it had, what it had to do with was revealing if Bradley Manning is guilty.
Now we're, you know, let's just go on the assumption.
This is what he's, what he's been charged with.
He hasn't been convicted of anything yet, but what, what really infuriated the establishment, what infuriated capitalism was the fact that he was responsible for leaking the secrets.
He pulled the curtain back, just like in the wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls back the curtain and there's this creepy bastard running all the levers and, and, and buttons and smoke machines of this big monster, the wizard of Oz, what Bradley Manning did allegedly was to, uh, make available to WikiLeaks, all of these documents and, and videos that concern criminal activity, lies, deception, deceit on the part of the U S state department, the U S military, a security state.
So Bradley Manning was not responsible for the death, the wounding, the maiming of anybody.
What he did was reveal the secrets that, that corporate America and it's, uh, it's slaves in the U S military do not want the American public to know.
Um, any, any kind of, of, of fascist activity has to go on in secret because if the people ever fully understood, and I still believe this, this is a belief, not a hope.
If the American people understood fully what was going on, I don't think we would continue to sit on our asses and let it continue.
I think that people would rebel and revolt and say, no, this is not, this is not our country.
This is, this is the, uh, this may be Germany in the thirties, but it's not the United States in a new century.
And people would rebel.
I believe that I have to believe that if I don't believe that, then I might as well just stay home and, and, and watch television.
So Bradley Manning's big crime, uh, allegedly was to, first of all, release the murder tapes, those videotapes that were decoded or D encrypted, I should say by other people, uh, videotapes showing a helicopter gunship three years ago in Baghdad, circling over people and butchering them with 50 caliber machine gunfire, uh, for, I mean, if you see that video, it goes on for what, 15, 20 minutes, just repeated slaughter of civilians on the street, including two, I think it was two Reuters journalists.
Um, when that kind of stuff is revealed, uh, all hell breaks loose.
Uh, back in my time, uh, the My Lai massacre where hundreds of villagers in Vietnam, the village of My Lai were herded into a ditch, women, babies, children, old people, the young men were out, um, getting ready to fight against the invader, the United States.
And these people were herded into a ditch and butchered until a couple of guys, a couple of soldiers, um, in helicopters, American soldiers landed and pulled their weapons on, on the, on, on the soldiers who were executing on these people and said, if you don't stop, we will kill you.
We will kill you if you don't stop.
These are innocent civilians.
So these kinds of atrocities, um, are, are, are not new.
Uh, you know, war is what it is.
It's total perversion of everything that human beings are supposed to stand, uh, stand for, uh, war strips away, everything, justice, decency, honesty, love, compassion, uh, concern.
It's all flushed down the toilet and it's all done, uh, for, for empire.
And in this case for American empire.
So Bradley Manning's sin is more than a crime to capitalism.
It's a sin.
Bradley Manning's sin was that he, uh, allegedly made it possible for the truth to come out.
And capitalism, corporatism, fascism does not ever want the truth to come out.
Everybody that's Mike Malloy.
Uh, check out the website, Mike Malloy.com.
Check out the radio show.
It's on a Sirius and XM and all over the place.
Thanks a lot for your time.
Appreciate it.
You bet.