All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Well, Glenn Greenwald, of course, is the greatest blogger in the world.
I read every single thing he writes.
It's at salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
And he's the author of the books, Great American Hypocrites, How Would a Patriot Act?
A Tragic Legacy.
And there's a new one coming out.
I forget the title, but it's about the double standard.
Oh, Liberty and Justice for Some, about the rule of law and how there are a million of them that apply to us and apparently none that apply to our presidents.
But anyway, so hey, Glenn, you there?
Welcome to the show.
Great to be here, Scott.
Lots of important things to talk about today.
You got time?
Yes, I'm happy to be here.
All right, good deal.
So first of all, I want to talk with you a little bit about bipartisanship, which is I notice you've been stressing this a lot lately about the one party state nature of our political system.
And I always like to recommend this great quote by Carol Quigley, who actually taught Bill Clinton's foreign policy studies class at Georgetown back in the days.
And in 1966, he wrote, the only reason there should be two parties, one to supposedly represent the interests of the liberals and the other, the conservatives, is so that they can switch off every eight or even four years if necessary, when the American people get tired of them and want to throw those rascals out without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy.
And so we just go back and forth, back and forth like that.
And half the population will be satisfied and the other half angry, and then they'll switch off again.
And the policy stays the same.
And yet, as it's shaping out in 2011, it looks to me like you and I kind of had it right, that there's this whole other flip side of that bipartisanship.
And that is the new realignment against this one party state on behalf of people who call themselves all different political descriptions, but see this conflict much more in terms of us versus them, rather than left versus right.
What do you think?
It is interesting.
There has been talk about this realignment for a long time, and you and I have talked about it several times over the years, lots of other people have as well.
And I think as much as a prediction, it's really been a hope that the only way to essentially start to challenge the orthodoxies of the national security state and the posture of endless war and imperialism is to have it removed from partisan debate.
Because what tends to happen is whenever there's a Democratic president, Democrats support these policies.
And when there's a Republican president, Republicans support them.
And so each party in power is always supporting these policies by definition.
And so they never get meaningfully challenged.
And the only way that they would ever get challenged is if it isn't start to realize how wrong and destructive these policies are and band together to defeat them and challenge them, irrespective of partisan loyalty or ideological identity.
And you have seen things like that over the years, but you really seen an acceleration of it over the past few months.
If you look at who's questioning the war in Afghanistan, for instance, it tends to be anti-war advocates in the Democratic Party more towards the left, and then also some of the newer, more conservative members of Congress who have been elected under the Tea Party banner who are questioning it both in terms of its purpose and the cost.
And you really see it now in terms of challenges to the war in Libya, both the war itself and the president's authority to conduct it without congressional approval.
There was an amendment introduced by a Democratic congressman, very hawkish and pro-APAC congressman, Brad Sherman in California, that essentially said, we're going to cut off funds for the war in Libya unless the president complies with the War Powers Resolution and gets congressional authority.
And that amendment amazingly passed, and it passed with 60% Republicans supporting it and 60% Democrats supporting it.
And what was most notable was that the party leadership of both parties, Pelosi and Hoyer for Democrats and Boehner and Cantor for the Republicans, were both against the amendment.
They voted against it and in favor of the president's authority.
But the opposition came from the rank and file of each party whose parties are tiring of endless war.
And then that's the kind of coalition that has long been hoped for and I think anticipated and that you're finally starting to see.
Well, you know, the way it works in my fantasy world is that Ron Paul gets the Republican nomination and Dennis Kucinich, attacking and destroying Barack Obama from the left, gets the Democratic nomination.
And then those two go ahead and run together, president and vice president, and we'll just have a major shift.
If you want peace and liberty, you want the Bill of Rights, you want the troops home, you want to end to welfare for billionaires, you vote for these guys, the US party.
And then the other party can be the party of, you know, taxation and mass murder and lies.
Well, see, that's, you know, that's what I think, when I meant earlier that you've seen some signs of it, you have seen things like, you know, the more ideologically inclined members of each party joining together in the past, you have sort of the Ron Paul wing of the Republican Party and the Dennis Kucinich wing of the Democrats, who have been genuinely anti-war and pro-civil liberties, but they've constituted a fairly small percentage of each party and so haven't been able to get very much done.
And what you see now is a widening of that coalition.
It's not necessarily for the purest of reasons.
I think, you know, in some ways, the Republicans who are questioning these policies are doing so on a financial basis, that if they're going to advocate widespread cuts, entitlements, other programs that the defense industry needs to be cut as well.
Some of it is about nationalism, that we shouldn't be spending American taxpayers dollars to help people around the world.
And then you have, you know, sort of a mixed bag on the Democratic side.
For example, Brad Sherman, who sponsored that amendment, is upset that he thinks we're helping members who have ties to Al-Qaeda in Libya and wants to put limits on that.
So, you know, but that's how coalitions work.
You have people who are of diverse views, who have different types of priorities and concerns, who come together in common ground.
And that's what I think they're saying.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the public opinion, we've had really high numbers of anti-war, you know, people in the country for a long time.
It's been better than 60 percent or whatever.
It seems like people are really starting to mean it again now.
They're really getting sick and tired of this thing.
That must be the only explanation for something like watching Mitt Romney pretend that he's got anti-war bone in his body the other night in that debate.
Right.
Well, the pressure must really be on.
This is really the question, though.
And I think, you know, this is a real question.
And I don't know what the answer is yet.
I actually had a debate about this with Justin Armando, who writes for anti-war dot com.
You know, the reason why this is changing is because Republicans have become more willing to challenge war policy.
See, a lot of those Republican candidates in that debate challenging not just the war in Afghanistan, but also the war in Libya.
And, of course, five, six years ago, challenging war policies was unthinkable in the Republican Party and even in the Democratic Party.
It was really just the fringe that we talked about before that was willing to do it.
And now you see it done much more pervasively.
And so then the question becomes, you know, is this a sincere transformation among this faction in the Republican Party who suddenly is now opposed to war policies, one that is based in conviction and that will endure when there's a Republican in the White House?
Or is it motivated by a desire to simply undermine Barack Obama to oppose whatever policies he has?
So, you know, there's a desire to exploit anti-war sentiment in the public by challenging and questioning the wars that he's waging.
And that, I think, is something that we don't know the answer to yet.
I mean, if you remember in the 1990s, it really was quite similar.
I mean, we had Bill Clinton, who was starting wars and advocating wars, and Madeleine Albright and the Clinton officials who wanted to go to war in all kinds of places and who did go to war in all kinds of places.
And there was an isolationist brain in the Republican Party, a significant one, that questioned that sort of almost from the left.
And George Bush, of course, when he ran in 2000, famously urged a more humble foreign policy.
And yet you saw that anti-war isolationist sentiment completely vanish the minute the wars started being Republican wars waged by a Republican president, rather than Clinton wars waged by a Democratic president.
Now, maybe that's because of 9-11.
Maybe that's because of partisan dishonesty.
But I won't believe that there's really a substantial anti-war sentiment in the Republican Party beyond the Ron Paul faction until I see that sentiment exert itself under a Republican president, challenge Republican war policy.
But there's clearly a rift for the first time in the Republican Party on foreign policy questions where the neocons are being meaningfully challenged.
And I think that's a good thing.
Well, you know, like you say, it's pretty easy to tell which ones are honest, call them the Ron Paul faction, Walter Jones, and this new guy, Justin Amash, seems like he's, you know, pretty much really good.
But yeah, you're certainly right when when John Boehner has taken the anti-war position, there's no reason to think he's sincere about anything.
No doubt about that.
But now, so that that really cuts to the heart of this argument that is, this is really a mind blowing thing, isn't it?
The Obama administration's backflips trying to justify the intervention in Libya here, and provoking these kinds of responses from Boehner, you know?
Well, what's really bizarre about it is that, you know, and the reason why John Boehner is now, you know, questioning Obama's authority to conduct this war is not because he really believes it.
I mean, he's been one of the Republicans who at least Lindsey Graham was honest about it yesterday, who said, I think the war powers resolution is unconstitutional.
Presidents have the right to wage whatever wars they want without Congress.
That's been the mainstream Republican position for a long time.
That was what John Boehner was saying, you know, during the Bush years.
So there's nothing genuine about John Boehner's view.
He's doing it because his caucus is demanding it, and he's responding to that.
But I think, you know, one of the things that really is so interesting is that had Barack Obama gone to the Congress at the beginning of this conflict and said, I want the authorization to conduct this war in Libya, there's no question he would have gotten it.
I mean, the leadership of the Republican Party was very much in favor of the Libya war.
In fact, if anything, he was being criticized by people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and lots of hawks in the Congress for not starting the war quickly enough or not waging it aggressively enough or not using enough force.
So when you combine that hawk, that still hawkish faction of the Republican Party with, you know, the fact that most Democrats would never oppose a war conducted by their own president, there would have been clear majorities in both the Senate and the House to give him the authorization he needed.
By not getting it, by waging a war plainly in violation of the law and the Constitution, the Republicans now have a political controversy that they can use against him.
And now it's questionable whether or not he could get authorization, certainly not unlimited authorization.
That's not something that he's going to get.
And so it's really kind of a problem of their own making.
Not necessarily so, but, you know, it was the same with George Bush and Dick Cheney.
They could have easily gotten congressional approval to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants had they asked for it instead of just breaking the law and doing it anyway.
They could have gotten congressional authorization for the detention and the military commission regime at Guantanamo instead of just going ahead and doing it anyway.
But they didn't want to go to Congress and ask permission, even though they could have gotten it, because they wanted it clear that as president, George Bush didn't need anybody's permission to do whatever he wanted in these realms.
And that seems to be what's driving the Obama administration as well.
The idea that he's the president, he's the commander in chief, and he doesn't need permission from the Republican Congress, the Republican House, to start the war that he wants to start.
But that's what I don't get is why didn't he just say that?
Why didn't he just take the Lindsey Graham position that Congress can't pass a War Powers Act and we're not afraid of them?
And we stand by the David Addington theory that the commander in chief clause is, and not even the end of it, only the words commander in chief is the only operant part of the Constitution.
The president can do whatever he wants.
Why all this nonsense about, well, we're just helping the British and the French do it, and so it doesn't count.
And our troops aren't in harm's way.
Right.
For one thing, there has been, I mean, the War Powers Resolution has been a Democratic crown jewel for decades.
I mean, to believe in the War Powers Resolution is almost as much of a litmus test to be a Democrat as believing in Social Security or Medicare or, you know, the rest of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
I mean, it was a reaction to the accesses of Vietnam and to the sort of mid-1970s response to Watergate that the executive was out of control, and these were Democratic reforms.
So for Barack Obama, Democratic president, to come out and take what has been Ronald Reagan's position and the Republican Party's position of the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional because the president is omnipotent under Article Two would be just too much hypocrisy, even for our political culture, and too much of a war on his own party's long-stated position.
But more specifically, when Barack Obama was running for president, he answered a questionnaire about executive power submitted to him by Charlie Savage, then of the Boston Globe, now of the New York Times.
And one of the questions that Obama was asked was, would George Bush have the authority to attack Iran without congressional approval if he concluded that doing so was necessary for the national security of the United States?
And Obama very clearly said, and I'm not quoting here exactly, but almost, presidents under our Constitution do not have the unilateral authority to deploy the military, except when doing so is necessary to defend against an attack on the United States.
And so for him, three years later, to take the diametrically opposed position to say, of course, presidents have the authority to unilaterally order wars without Congress, even in instances where national security or self-defense aren't the reason, would be too embarrassing of a reversal.
And so they don't have much of a choice.
They have to claim that he believes in the War Powers Resolution and that he's abiding by it.
And that's when you get these absurd theories that what's happening in Libya are not hostilities, and therefore, the War Powers Resolution is inapplicable.
What a joke.
Yeah, you got to be a really bad president to make John Boehner write about you.
All right, well now, so let me ask you this real quick.
Another policy of Barack Obama's that I know you strongly object to is the persecution of WikiLeaks, or I guess they're calling it a prosecution.
They've got a grand jury right now.
And is it your understanding they're looking to charge Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with espionage?
Is that it?
Well, they want to charge Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with something.
They want to criminalize what they've done and put them in prison.
And there are a variety of theories that they're considering in order to do that.
One of them is absolutely prosecuting them under the Espionage Act.
The problem that they have with that theory and with any other theory is that WikiLeaks did hear what newspapers and media outlets do all the time, which is they received classified information from someone in the government who wanted to leak it, and they then went and published it.
That's what newspapers do all the time.
They win Pulitzer Prizes when they do it.
Bob Woodward has gotten very rich doing it.
And so it's impossible to criminalize WikiLeaks and Julian Assange without criminalizing literally the heart and soul of investigative journalism in the United States.
And that is now their challenge, is to come up with a way that they can distinguish what WikiLeaks has done from what newspapers do every day.
And what they're trying to do is to claim that WikiLeaks did not merely passively receive classified information from Bradley Manning, that instead they conspired with him before the fact to help him access this system, to direct him about which documents they wanted him to download.
Now, there's no evidence at all that that has happened.
And there's been nobody who suggests that it has.
And that's the reason that they've kept Bradley Manning in such oppressive conditions, because they were trying to break him and get him to incriminate WikiLeaks and Julian Assange by saying that they helped him before the fact.
And that's what this grand jury is designed to do, is to come up with anything that will let them prosecute WikiLeaks in a way that they can claim WikiLeaks was a conspirator in the leaks, not just a passive recipient of them.
All right, y'all, that is the great Glenn Greenwald.
He writes at Salon.com Salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
He wrote, How would a Patriot Act, a tragic legacy, and great American hypocrites.
The brand new one coming out in October is called Liberty and Justice for Some.
