Alright everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I got the other Scott Horton on the line, heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, harpers.org.
His great blog, his world famous, great, incredible blog is called No Comment.
You can find it at harpers.org/subjects/no comment.
Welcome back Scott, how are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you.
Very happy to have you here and I'm sorry but I just lied to you on the phone, not deliberately but it turns out it was a lie.
Before I get to the post piece about the Pentagon lawyer, I wanted to ask you a question that it's, I don't know how much I can get out of you on this but it's kind of a vague thing.
It's okay if you don't have a real answer for it.
But over the past week and a half or so, we've had at least 6 former CIA agents, analysts, officers come forward and say that they don't believe in the Iran terror plot story.
Michael Shoyer, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Flint Leverett, Ray Close and Robert Baer all have said, no way, we don't buy this.
And I was thinking, you know, you run around with people who have power and influence and that kind of thing and I was just wondering if your, you know, kind of the conventional wisdom is changing on this story, whether everybody still buys it the same way they did a week ago or a couple of weeks ago or whether, whenever it was, or whether it's getting kind of through to people that actually this isn't any more credible than the rest of the bogus FBI plots we're, you know, confronted with.
Well I don't really have any inside knowledge about it but I'll tell you when the story first broke, I was in London and, you know, picking up the newspapers there, I was just amazed at the different way the story was being reported from in the United States.
So in the English papers, just like also the German papers, the French papers and so on, the story was US claims Iranian plot, the word plot being put in quotes.
Yeah, and claims being all important there.
Exactly, and they would have, you know, long quotes of, you know, Mueller and all these other people and what they say and then they would right after that have the Iranian denunciation and pushback against it and then they'd have a couple of paragraphs saying that, you know, they basically didn't have any doubt that there would have been some sort of plot against Adel al-Jubeir, the current Saudi ambassador, but they were very skeptical of the evidence showing that this was some sort of officially planned Iranian government action.
On that they were very, very skeptical and they were asking questions like, why would the Iranian government hire a used Chevrolet salesman?
It just, you know, seemed bizarre and I think what we saw all across Europe was a tremendous amount of skepticism.
Now that is, you know, no doubt that in fact there was a plot, but skepticism that it was this high level government thing that reflected some sort of formal Iranian policy and then pretty much all the papers saying, well, look, you know, this is part, this all has to be understood in terms of this long ongoing battle between Washington and Iran and we know that elites in Washington are desperately looking for a casus belli, you know, for a justification for going to war with Iran.
So I'd say what I saw all over Europe, even amongst our closest allies and even amongst real conservatives and pro-American people in Europe was a tremendous amount of skepticism and that's pretty much what I thought when I read the story.
You know, not that Mueller or the FBI is lying about these specific allegations, but that they seem to be stretching it a bit far in a political context.
Right.
Well, you know, it often reminds me of 1984 there in D.C. where the higher level you get in the party, the more of a believer you really are.
And it seems to me like, you know, among the political class, if Holder and Obama make an announcement like this, well, oh, my God, you know, let's just forget it.
It's true.
Like you said, there is no claims and there is no quote unquote in the headline.
If the government said it, it's right.
And they all, you know, left the right Republican, Democrat and whatever join that consensus real quick, especially on a foreign threat story like this.
But I just wonder whether that's changing yet, you know, whether they're kind of going, hmm, maybe not.
Well, the other thing you have to do, you have to balance against this is the fact that, you know, the U.S. has repeatedly authorized covert action inside of Iran that's included assassinations.
I mean, there's been this whole series of cases where Iranian those involved in the Iranian nuclear program have been abducted and have been killed.
And you can think of that's just coincidental.
But I've talked to enough people at the agency to know that it's definitely not.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I think one of the Post stories even had it that or maybe the New York Times, one of the New York Times stories had it that the consensus is that America has given the OK to Israel to go ahead and do these assassinations.
Yeah.
I mean, definitely there are, let's say, U.S. supported hit operations that have gone on in Iran for some time.
So so let's say it's completely true.
And this is a an Iranian government project targeting a foreign ambassador in Washington.
You know, it in a sense would be a mirror of things that the U.S. and its allied powers have been doing in Iran.
So, you know, so is this justification for war?
Well, I think only if you're really desperate to justify war.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so let's move on to some other nonsense.
I guess it's all nonsense, although it seems like they're getting away with it.
There's a defense appropriations bill that has all these riders on it.
That's how they always do it.
The very worst things are always attached to some big thing that has no chance of failing.
And they're really trying to change it to where the guy arrested in this case, for example, would go straight to Guantanamo or some military base.
He would be turned over to the military immediately.
Same for, I guess, the guy that was accused of the plot to fly remote control planes with bombs on him into the Pentagon a few weeks back, that this would all be from now on no longer an FBI Justice Department matter, but instead would be handled by the military.
There's an important piece in the Washington Post today by Peter Finn or yesterday by Peter Finn talking about how one of the high level military lawyers has come forward and given this speech saying, this is a really bad idea.
You don't want to do this.
Give the power to me and my guys, he's saying.
That's right.
That's Jay Johnson, who is general counsel at the Department of Defense.
Very, very good guy.
I know him.
And I think he's very solid.
But I think, you know, it's sort of interesting.
You know, now we see a political game that's being played by Lindsey Graham and a number of other Republicans, and they have some Democratic allies, too, in which they basically want to create this military detentions and trial system, and they want to send all sorts of cases into it, even cases that don't really have anything to do with the existing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I think if you go back to the mid-1990s, remember the U.S. was involved in the military operation in Haiti, and we had Senator McCain and a number of others going up saying, hey, DOD doesn't stand for Department of Detentions.
That's not the traditional mission of the military.
It's not what they do.
I mean, their role is to go out and use tremendous violence, blunt force, to accomplish military objectives.
They're not a detention system, and they're not a justice regime, although they do have it for internal purposes.
And I think, you know, Jay Johnson, when he gave that speech at Heritage, is basically making those same fundamental points.
And I think these amendments to the NDAA, they're designed to put a real blinder, to really limit what the U.S. government can do.
So they don't give the government options to send people to Guantanamo.
They say, you must send people to Guantanamo.
You must hold them there, and you must charge them in this system.
So this is all being done for domestic political purposes.
They can beat their breast and say how aggressive and proactive they are, and, you know, how the military justice system is blunter and more certain of result, which really isn't the case.
But what they're doing in the end of the day is making it much harder for us to get our hands on people we may want to get our hands on, and to prosecute them.
All right, we'll have to hold it there.
The music's playing.
We've got to go out to this break, but we'll be right back after this with the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.
His great blog at harpers.org is called No Comment.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer, professor at Columbia, and writer, contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.
We're talking about the quite likely, I think, correct, Scott, militarization of all anti-terrorism policy domestically here?
Or they're saying, I guess, it won't apply to American citizens accused so far, right?
That's right, except that they want to strip citizenship from people who give material support and do other things.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, so they're trying to widen that, too.
Yeah, I think one of the big problems here has to do with our cooperation with other countries, because we may, from time to time, grab one of these people overseas, but far more likely, they're going to be picked up by police or military of one of our allies or of another country somewhere, and we'll want to get them extradited or sent back to the U.S. to be tried, and this legislation saying that everybody's got to go before a military tribunal in Guantanamo is going to be a complete killer, because I think in the entire world today, almost nobody will turn a prisoner over to us to be tried in this Guantanamo system, which they're trying to turn into some sort of kangaroo court.
So we won't get the people if they do that.
So this is one of the reasons why I think, frankly, Jay Johnson's absolutely right.
The U.S. government has to have flexibility.
So maybe they'll find some cases that are appropriate to charge before the Guantanamo tribunal, but they may find plenty of other cases that ought to be tried somewhere else.
Are there any that would be appropriate to turn someone over to Guantanamo Bay if they're arrested inside the United States?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, I think, you know, Guantanamo Bay is set up to try people on violations of the laws of war.
I think it would be, well, I can't say absolutely never, but I think it would be unusual.
The whole world's a battlefield.
Yeah, I don't think...
I mean, including your living room, right?
Well, you have to have, I mean, you have to have a traditional defined enemy, and it has to be an act that's a traditional defined violation of the laws of war.
So you know, some random, well, you know, let's say this terrorist in Portland who was planting a bomb to disrupt a Martin Luther King birthday commemoration there.
Is that something that should be tried before a military tribunal in Guantanamo?
You know, and I think the way they're drafting this legislation, picking up terrorist acts of all sorts, it seems it would be, and it doesn't really make any sense.
But I think the bottom line is the military doesn't want this, and it's really putting a ridiculous yoke on the military.
So the military can deal with matters that are directly related to, you know, operations that the military is running, they can deal with their own personnel, they can deal with people who are picked up in Iraq and Afghanistan who are enemies, but, you know, all these other various and sundry types of terrorists picked up all over the world, why should we be creating a special military justice system for all these people?
For Tamil Tigers, IRA members, Uyghurs from China, and so on?
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, well, I mean, basically, what they're trying to do, it seems like, is just make it where the standard is that any armed group, I mean, assuming, you know, depending, I guess, which side America's on in any particular situation, but any armed group that resists their government anywhere in the world, no matter if their cause is just or not, basically, they're all terrorists.
Well, that's, of course, terrorists in the eye of the beholder.
And you know, let's start with Michael Mukasey and Rudy Giuliani, you know, who in December of last year made a trip to Paris to speak at an assembly of Mujahedini Halk, which is a scheduled terrorist organization.
And what they did, I think, could easily be argued to be material support of terrorism.
So should we arrest them, strip them of their citizenship, and send them to stand trial before a tribunal in Guantanamo?
Well, them first, anyway, if it's got to be that way.
But yeah, whatever happened to closing Guantanamo?
I mean, Obama, I think it's in this post piece, they mentioned that Obama has stopped bringing people to it.
They're trying to phase it out over the long term or something anyway, right?
Not just that, he's now given two more speeches in which he says he is going to close Guantanamo.
So I think what we see here really is the subtext of all this.
It's not really that people like Lindsey Graham believe that this measure is necessary for administration of justice purposes, or that it would really even advance our war on terrorism.
They want to stick it in the eye of Barack Obama.
That's what this is all about.
And just keeping the thing open for the longer term.
They want to force him to keep it open, so that this is another point where they can say, you failed, you haven't done what you promised you were going to do.
So I think it's sort of infantile politics.
But you know, we got a lot of that in Washington.
Well, but I mean, the thing is, he's the president.
So he has unlimited power, right?
Is this not just a matter of a troop movement, and him simply ordering the military officials there to pack up their things, or at least, you know, the prison part of it and close it down?
Yeah, I actually think in the first year of his presidency, first two years of his presidency, he could have done it using executive authority.
Now he has the problem that Congress has passed these laws that make it very, very difficult for him to do so.
And so of course, if he were like Bush, he'd just say to hell with that and do what he wants to do.
But I think Obama is trying to be much more conscientious and paying attention to what Congress does.
Well, now, a couple weeks ago, speaking of the unlimited power of the presidency, Barack Obama ordered Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, assassinated, and then in a separate strike killed his 16 year old son.
The first one created a lot of controversy.
No one even cares.
They killed this kid, who was also born in the United States in Denver in 1995.
That's how young the kid is.
Yeah, I have to say, I think, you know, I don't agree with the action against Awlaki, because I think they really haven't made a clear showing that they weren't able to arrest him and bring him in.
But this business with his son is just impossible to explain, and they haven't really offered an explanation.
I mean, this is a young kid, and I think, you know, the administration owes it to explain why this guy was killed.
I expect what we're going to hear is that he was collateral damage, that they have a legitimate target, and it was someone else.
Well, at least the story coming out of there so far is it was him and his friends, you know, sitting outside having dinner.
Yep, and the fact that someone is the son of a legitimate target does not make him a legitimate target.
That's clear enough.
Yeah, obviously, and that's assuming that Awlaki was a legitimate target, even though they admit that their evidence that he was in on any of the plots they say he was in on is patchy and, you know, hardly...
They did a piece in the Washington Times where they said, there's no way we could convict him, so that's why it was such a good idea to kill him, because they actually don't have any evidence they could convince even a federal jury with.
That's right.
The case against him won't stand up in court, so therefore let's not arrest him and try him, let's just kill him.
That does not sound like a very convincing act by a government dealing with one of its own citizens.
All right, now tolerate my paranoia for a minute.
Let's say it's a few years from now and the economy is much worse, as certain people who predicted our current circumstances are predicting right now, and this war has gone on for another few years, all these, you know, continuing revolutions and evolution of executive power and military power in terms of the war on terrorism, you know, continue advancing.
Is it really an unlikely scenario if terrorist suspects can be defined so broadly and if they're to be turned over to the military that before long we'll just have the Northern Command in the United States doing the rounding up of, you know, risks and terrorists and whatever if we've gone this far beyond what the Constitution allows the government to do already?
Well, we have a specific piece of legislation called the Posse Comitatus Act that forbids exactly that sort of thing from happening, and that was part of the compromise that ended Reconstruction after the Civil War, but I think we've also seen, I mean, John, you apparently wrote memoranda trying to undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, and I think I wouldn't put it beyond an assertive American executive to try and do something like this now, but I think you're on to something significant here, which is that these precedents, you know, you can stack them up one after another, and these precedents can be serially relied upon to justify very aggressive police action domestically in the United States against U.S. citizens, including potentially using the military, but certainly using, you know, lethal force of a military nature, not of a normal police nature, and so I think it's an appropriate point to be concerned about.
Yeah, well, you know, I think it was during the Lockheed hit controversy a couple of weeks back where some of the Republican candidates just simply said, oh, it was Kruthhammer, that's who it was, on Fox, and well, Lincoln did it, and that's the ultimate excuse for any president to do anything, I guess, because he did everything.
And indeed he did.
Thanks very much again for your expertise, Scott, really appreciate it.
Okay, well, great to be with you, take care.
The heroic other Scott Horton, everybody, harpers.org.
