For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio here on KPFK in L.A.
And I'm happy to welcome John Glazer to the show.
He's our new assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
How's it going, John?
Pretty good.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy that you joined us here today.
Very happy to have you on.
And, you know, you've shamed me in a couple of ways.
Obviously, you deserve great credit for bringing the AntiWar.com blog back to life.
That's AntiWar.com/blog with a ton of great stuff.
But also, I think you got me.
It's not six wars.
It's seven.
Here, I've been telling everybody all day long, every day, it seems like, about America's six wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Libya.
And you're telling me, hey, don't forget the other bogus war back before the terror war, but after the Cold War, for a short time, the fill-in was cocaine.
Remember that?
The war on cocaine.
That's still going on down there in Colombia.
It has been all this time.
And as you write, it's as bad now as it's ever been.
It says right here, supporting atrocities in Colombia at AntiWar.com/blog.
What have you found out here, John?
Well, you're exactly right.
I mean, in between the Cold War and then the global war on terror, there's this little pocket of time where the United States' prime pretext for imperial policy, especially across our southern border, was the drug war.
And policy towards Colombia is just as bad as it has ever been.
There's been a recent spate of killings by various armed groups in Colombia.
And part of what you have to understand here is that a lot of the funding that we give to the Colombian government is meant to counter certain Marxist leftist guerrilla groups, particularly the most popular one is FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
And they're a horrible group of people.
They certainly are a terrorist organization.
They kill lots of innocent people, and that's pretty bad.
But in order to counter them, what we've been doing is supporting other right-wing guerrilla groups that are just as bad.
Just in the past few weeks, on June 25th, where eight civilians were murdered, and some in late June and early July, where armed men shot and killed numerous indigenous leaders, they've been attributed to these successor groups from right-wing paramilitaries formerly associated with what's called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.
They regularly commit massacres, killings, forced rape, extortion.
Anyone that doesn't agree with them, they basically either kill or harass.
Seventeen massacres resulting in 76 deaths were reported just between January and May, according to Human Rights Watch.
And it's been an incredible increase in violence as of late, and it's exactly because we support both the Colombian government as well as the military, is in cahoots with these right-wing paramilitary groups, and it's an ugly situation.
Well, you know, the way you describe the level of cahoots between these right-wing paramilitary groups and the government forces makes me wonder why the army doesn't just go and, you know, force march, everybody do it.
Why even bother with the low-scale, you know, kind of secret police, when the army's basically involved from top to bottom, it seems like?
Well, there's two ways to respond to that.
First, I think part of the reason that not everything is done by the army is because these disparate paramilitary groups are sort of spaded all across the country, and they have sort of autonomous control over different regions.
So it's much easier to sort of have a decentralized, you know, campaign of atrocities as opposed to...
But it doesn't sound like they have much deniability on the matter, you know?
No, it doesn't.
And in fact, what's worse is that the army is participating in this very, very much.
The most famous widespread offense as of late regarding the Colombian government's tolerance and even collusion with these paramilitary groups, it was called the parapolitical scandal, in which over, like, 128 representatives of the Congress out of 268 total were accused of having ties to paramilitaries, or accused of trying to protect people that were accused of atrocities, and so on and so forth.
Virtually the entire government has ties to these terrorist groups, and elements within them has tried to obstruct criminal investigations.
This introduces the military, which, due to an army policy, which was...
There was an army policy that rewarded high body counts of the leftist guerrillas that America is ostensibly funding the Colombian government to fight.
And the Colombian soldiers engaged in a systematic set of massacres of Colombian civilians and dressed their dead bodies in the garb of guerrilla fighters in order to inflate military body counts and get their rewards and their promotions and so forth.
The prosecutor general said that there was more than 1,200 cases of these extrajudicial executions.
Yeah, it's really, really ugly.
Well, you know, it reminds me all of this, it always does, whenever we talk about Colombia.
A clip of Ron Paul I saw on the news years and years ago, I think back before he ever ran for president, saying, you know, when they talk about Plan Colombia up on Capitol Hill, it's not Concerned Mothers Against Cocaine Abuse up there lobbying, it's the helicopter companies.
And that's all that's going on, they're the only ones who show up to make sure that Plan Colombia is going to be extended for another year or two or whatever.
That's exactly right.
Actually, initially, back in, like, 2000 and 2001, the legislation that supported Plan Colombia was attached to a broader bill called the Military Construction Appropriations Act of 2001.
And then on October 30, 2009, under Obama, the United States and Colombia signed an agreement to provide the United States access to seven different military facilities in Colombia to conduct counter-narcotics and anti-terrorism operations over a ten-year period, or at least that's what they say.
So there are absolutely clear benefits to U.S. imperial policy for the military-industrial complex, for, like you say, helicopters, weapons, the military to spread, you know, even further into this country as they are and, you know, a million other countries.
Well, you know, and I don't even know if they could win, but I guess maybe all this is great incentive to not win, to just have this low-level war against FARC forever.
Why not?
I mean, last I heard, anyway, they control an area the size of Switzerland.
They might as well secede from Colombia.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
But that area, Switzerland, has been under, you know, pretty much our control for years since the start of Plan Colombia, at least the early 2000s.
Yeah.
Well, it really is amazing that this just continues to go on.
And as you say in your piece on it, you know, at the end there, maybe we need to start adding this to the list of America's dirty wars.
I mean, if Somalia counts, why not Colombia, right?
Are JSOC and CIA guys on the ground over there killing people, do you know?
There are special operations forces, but they're not there.
There was a limit to them put on during the Bush administration in 2006 or 2007 that said only a certain number can be actually on the ground.
So there's something like 800 U.S. military people on the ground at those various military sites that I talked about.
But in addition to those 800, the cap for contractors to be there is 600.
How much is this all costing us?
Well, we give the Colombian government about $40-some-odd million a year.
Now, back during the 47th, I think, oh, sorry, it was 40.
Let me think here.
It's in the $40 million range.
However, back in the Bush administration, their aim, their goal, was to get almost $2 billion to Colombia by a certain date, and that date hasn't reached yet.
So, yeah, it's quite expensive.
And to say that it's expensive in terms of U.S. dollars going there is one thing, but it sort of avoids the point, which is that this is really expensive to the poor peasants who just want to live their lives but keep being harassed by guerrilla groups that are supported by us.
That's the real cost.
And as you say in the article, for whatever real motives, whether selling helicopters or oil or whatever, clearly cocaine supply is a giant red herring excuse for this policy.
It has nothing to do with it.
These very same right-wing paramilitary death squads that you're talking about, they deal cocaine too.
That's exactly right.
It was only a few years ago that one of the former leaders of this AUC, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, said that 70% of their revenue came from the drug trade.
Which is interesting because I think Washington, D.C., and the Republicans and the Democrats in the Congress, they're 70% of the demand for cocaine in the United States.
So it works out well.
Yeah, exactly.
It's coming mostly to the U.S., we do know that.
They refine it, they produce it, and then they sell it.
On K Street.
Again, inside the Capitol Building, I'm sure.
Right, because they must be smoking it in order to do these policies.
But you're exactly right.
It's hard to try and delineate between what qualifies as a war anymore.
When we fund wars, is that a war?
When we fund terrorism, is that something like war?
When we bomb people from the sky and we don't have troops on the ground, is that a war?
When we occupy a country but aren't engaged in an all-out war, is that a war?
You know, it's tough to be able to start to categorize these things.
And what seems to be the case is that we need to just say, look, the United States is at war with anyone and everyone who they feel like.
And that comes from Colombia, like you said, to Somalia, to many other people in Latin America, too.
Latin America is an interesting case because, for example, have you heard about these WikiLeaks cables that show Haiti being dominated by U.S. foreign policy?
Yeah, absolutely.
The State Department working directly on behalf of whichever companies bribe them the most.
The textbook empire.
Yes.
There was a deal signed by the new president, Praval, with Venezuela.
It was a deal that said Haiti would pay 60% up front for their oil and then pay the rest at 1% interest over the next 25 years.
It would have saved them like over $100 million per year.
And the U.S. didn't want to do this because they don't want to give any influence to Venezuela.
So they basically were in collusion with Exxon Mobil and Chevron to pressure Haiti out of the deal.
And now Haiti is, you know, living there is like the most grinding poverty in the whole entire hemisphere.
And we've just made them a little bit poorer because our corporatism in our southern neighbors is so, you know, egregious.
Yeah, well, and Haiti is really a case history where the U.S. empire has been intervening there since before the Civil War, making matters worse for those people I don't think they've ever led up for a day.
That's exactly right.
It's been under constant control and domination, and it doesn't let up at all.
It started to get really bad, of course, in the Wilson administration, which I'm sure you know all about.
He actually intervened in Haiti very early on.
Our military has been there.
We occupied it for a while, then left.
We've intervened in their elections.
We've kidnapped their leaders and sent them to Africa.
You know, it's been a constant problem, and it generalizes throughout the region.
We can think about Guatemala.
We can think about Honduras.
We can think about, you know, various countries.
Latin America has suffered probably the most from American imperial policy.
Indeed.
Well, and, you know, on the other side of that, there's been more and more independence declared.
Well, the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, excuse.
It's been much harder for the empire to maintain its grip down there, and for PR purposes it's a lot harder to support mirrored sunglasses, you know, groups of colonels and dictators running the places.
And so there's more democracy and more independence than ever before.
But, you know, this article that you've written here, this blog at antiwar.com/blog illustrates, John, it's not over yet.
The American empire doesn't give up that easily at all.
In fact, remember, this might be one people remember, you know, from hearing the headline of the news.
It might have even made Jay Leno or something when they were trying to work their deal to keep their bases in, I think it was Ecuador.
The new democratically elected president down there said, yeah, sure, as soon as we can put a military base in Florida.
Right.
That was his side of the negotiation, which immediately ended, and the base didn't go in.
I mean, you know, so it's hard work, but we're making progress, like George Bush used to always say.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Thankfully, you're right that, you know, there is much more democracy there.
There is an independence movement, and it is harder for the U.S. to sort of keep its grip on all of it.
Thankfully, that's beginning to be the case in the Middle East as well, although they're much further off than Latin America.
I mean, the Arab Spring is exactly the kind of situation that the U.S. did not want.
Well, let's talk about that in just one second after I remind the people that I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio, and I'm talking with John Glazer.
He's our new assistant editor at Antiwar.com, and he's just written a ton of great stuff at the blog there, Antiwar.com/blog, on all things Antiwar.com related, which is just about everything that matters in the world.
Seven wars and counting now we've got.
Email me, Scott at Antiwar.com, if you have eight and nine and ten that you want to add to the list.
I don't know if the CIA in Syria counts.
John, what do you think?
Yeah, I know less about Syria, but I've been focusing.
You mentioned the blog quite a lot, which is good because I've been trying to keep that up as much as possible.
I've been doing some stuff in antiwar news, news.antiwar, and stuff in the Gulf has been sort of like what we've just been saying.
Bahrain?
Bahrain is a very good example.
So recently, just the other day, beginning of this week, there was an international panel that was set up by King Hamad to begin to investigate the mass protests, the pro-democracy demonstrations, and then the brutal crackdown that followed by the government.
The Bahraini monarchy was accused of killing over 30 people, detaining and torturing many others.
They started to detain and torture medical professionals who wanted to treat people injured in the crackdowns as patients, and the government said, no, don't do that, and then arrested them.
That's an ongoing case.
And so, you know, there's been a lot of bad news coming out of Bahrain, and it's even getting to a point where it's becoming a PR problem for the United States.
A couple weeks ago, it was revealed that the U.S. Navy is considering, it seems to me to be not likely anymore because things are dying down in Bahrain a little bit, but they're considering moving their fifth fleet, which is one of the largest military forces in the region and one of the biggest U.S. military bases out there.
It's been stationed in Bahrain's capital, Manama, for a very long time, and it's a perfect illustration of sort of U.S. manifestation of U.S. power in the region.
The Obama administration's support for Bahraini dictatorship and its violent response to peaceful protests have been assertive.
$92 million in aid since Obama's inauguration has helped prop the Bahraini dictatorship up.
$26 million is slated for 2012, which is even more than last year.
You know, and the Crown Prince even visited the White House, you know, last month, and the Obama administration reaffirmed their support in the whole deal.
It's a brutal dictatorship that has been, you know, crushing their own people who simply want democratic reforms, and it's suddenly coming to the forefront that, you know, this is what U.S. policy is.
This is what we do.
Similarly in Latin America, but it's hard to get, for some reason, Americans to pay attention to Latin America.
Middle East sort of seems more important, but that's what's been going on in Bahrain.
Hopefully it becomes enough of a PR problem for the U.S. to simply stop propping up that dictatorship.
Well, and this goes right to, you know, back to basics in the war on the Muslim world, a piece that you wrote on July 25th at antiwar.com/blog, and that is that this has been American policy in the Middle East for lo these many years, and this is the reason we have a terrorism problem in the first place, and I don't know if I told you this before, but I said it a hundred times, and I'm going to keep saying it, because this is what I think, at least for now, that one of the major driving forces, one of the chief reasons that the Obama administration decided to go ahead and intervene in the war in Libya, I mean, obviously they thought it would be easy and all that, but they were trying to disrupt the obvious narrative, write plain truth in front of the faces of six billion people on this planet.
Is it seven billion now?
That America's the bad guy.
America supports every monarch, every king, every sultan, every emir, every so-called president from Morocco to Pakistan, and the only exceptions being Syria and Iran, because they won't do what we say.
In fact, Syria tortures people for us from time to time, so how do you like that?
You know, and that narrative on TV had to be broken, and so they thought, well, if we go in here and bomb Libya, yeah, Gaddafi is our dictator again, but he's pretty much expendable.
We're not that close to him.
He's been giving us some trouble even since we brought him in from the cold.
We'll go ahead and sacrifice our dictator in Libya just for the PR goal of making it look like America is still World War II Superman here to save the little guy from the imperial Japanese, or whatever it is that they're trying to sell on TV.
I think that's an impeccable analysis.
So this Arab Spring started in Tunisia, the regime which we supported.
Then it went to Egypt, the regime that we supported more than any other regime on the planet with the exception of Israel for over 50 years.
And then it started to go through the Gulf and Yemen, where we support that dictatorship and how it brutalizes its own people.
And then it went to places like Bahrain, which I just mentioned, and it started to become much too apparent to the public and to the world that the United States was the main prop of all of these dictatorships and the main cause of the suffering of all these people in these dictatorships and these various countries.
And this horrible and pathetic yet apparently convincing PR job by the Obama administration to go in for, quote-unquote, humanitarian reasons in Libya was just a total farce.
It was a lie, and the fact that it helped them out and said, okay, now we're doing something humanitarian, we're trying to free some people, that you're exactly perfectly right there because it sort of cleared the air and started to change the dialogue a bit about should we go into humanitarian intervention or should we not?
And instead of the dialogue being what it should have been is should we continue to repress millions of people across the Arab world or should we stay out?
And that should have been the dialogue, but instead it was about humanitarian war, quote-unquote.
And I forget if it was Gareth Porter or who it was pointed out on the show that just right during all this in the last, what, I guess two weeks ago, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of the American created government in Iraq, threatened there will be blood up to your knees if the Sunni-dominated Anbar province declares any sort of autonomy, never mind attempts to actually secede from Iraq.
He threatened to kill them all, just the same as was the excuse for starting this war in Libya, and you didn't hear the Americans do anything about that except start bombing the south, some Shiite militia that apparently opposes Maliki.
That's exactly right.
That's a perfect test.
We can do a little litmus test to see if the justification that the Obama administration gave for the Libyan war is at all worth considering as anything close to reality.
That is, do we go in in other countries when the exact same situation is going on?
The answer is, of course, no.
We do something very different.
The exception is perhaps Syria.
We pay the government to commit those atrocities as opposed to committing them ourselves.
There was a lot of people dying in Libya, and there were some signs that it was going to level off and things were going to calm down.
But we didn't tend to go in.
We're not going into Syria.
We're not going into Bahrain and Yemen.
We're not going into many countries because it's not politically and militarily an advantage for us to do so, at least as perceived by Obama.
They sure yell through the bullhorn about Syria all day, though, even though they don't want to do anything about it.
Again, they want to pretend they're on the side of the protesters.
Look, everybody, in one case, never mind Hillary Clinton's self-declared close family friend, Hosni Mubarak, who's going on trial next week in Cairo, and what's going on in Bahrain, which is covered in very few places.
Roy Gutman did a lot of great work in McClatchy newspapers before they kicked him out of the country, but he talked of doctors being tortured for having the temerity to treat people who'd been wounded in the fights with the police, things like this, people being sentenced to solitary confinement for life for daring to participate in these pro-democratic protests, and the King Khalifa there is America's bosom buddy to this day.
Same thing for, I'm looking for the headline, I know I saw it on Antiwar.com earlier, with America's continuing support, Saleh continues to hang on to power in Yemen from Saudi Arabia.
That's right.
That's right.
Yemen's President Saleh, I suppose pat the jerk on the back for being so resilient, but he refuses to cede power by anything, he calls it the ballot box, and by adhering to the Constitution, which is a load of BS, of course, he's never respected either of those things in his life.
But there was a deal brokered by the Gulf states and Washington that calls for Saleh to step down and be absolved from prosecution if he steps down within 30 days and a new election takes place, and Saleh objects on the ground, on fallacious ground, and so on.
But despite official U.S. calls for Saleh to step down, Yemen is still set to receive $120 million in aid next year, which is the largest slice of which is going to be security and military assistance, so that this crackdown on protests can continue.
The Obama administration is implementing an intensified covert war in Yemen to boot, they're attacking people there, supposedly Al-Qaeda, but that doesn't get reported enough, so we don't actually know.
And, yeah, it's just as bad there.
But actually, just to jump back to Libya for a second, what's interesting is that the dialogue has actually started to change a bit, because right now the U.S. and NATO demand that Qaddafi leave power and they justify it on two assertions.
First of all, Qaddafi is a threat to innocent civilians.
NATO doesn't have any credibility saying that Qaddafi is a threat to innocent civilians, and on the other hand, they say that the brutal rebel groups have legitimacy more than Qaddafi, but they don't, because they've been killing people and doing extrajudicial executions as well.
And so they promised them billions of dollars and so on and so forth, so there's absolutely no justification for a continuing war there.
Yeah, well, and it looks like really bad news.
If they're willing to perhaps leave Qaddafi in power, that sounds like crying uncle to me.
They can't bear to go ahead and send the troops in and finish the job, thank goodness.
Precisely.
All right, well, we'll have to leave it there.
We're all out of time, but I want to really tell you how much I appreciate yours tonight on the show, John.
No problem.
Everybody, that's John Glazer.
He's our new assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
You can find him on the blog there, AntiWar.com/blog, as well as in the news section, news.antiwar.com.
And that's it for the show this evening.
I really appreciate you all tuning in.
Again, I'm Scott Horton.
All the archives of this show and many others are available at AntiWar.com/radio.
Thanks for listening.
See you all next Friday.
