12/02/11 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
One little positive note, I keep seeing, I mean it's terrible, but there's a silver lining in it kind of thing I want to get to, out of the corner of my eye here on CNN they keep playing footage of the wind blowing over the stage in I think Indiana somewhere, where it apparently crushed a bunch of people or something, I don't know, I didn't see the pictures that close, but what I noticed about it was, you know, obviously people with kids are grabbing their kids and getting the hell out of there, but there's, you know, more than a hundred people immediately, immediately run right towards the disaster to go and try to help.
Without even thinking for a second about it, they immediately take off toward the wounded to try to save them.
So you know, people are alright, man, if you give them, I guess if you don't give them a chance to think, give them a chance to think and they'll come up with a bunch of crap about why they ought to kill a bunch of innocent people instead of trying to save them.
But anyway, alright, so our next guest on the show today is John Glazer, he's assistant editor at Antiwar.com and man, he's been setting that blog on fire, it's like 2004 over there or something.
Welcome back, John, how are you doing?
Pretty good, Scott, thanks for having me.
I'm very happy to have you here and we have so much to go over.
I want to start, if it's okay, with Iran and the seizing of the British embassy this week and what all you know about it.
I guess Joe Biden, the vice president, has said that he hasn't seen any sign that the seizing of the embassy temporarily there was orchestrated by the Iranian government or anything.
I guess that's a talking point that could have gone the other way to the worse, huh?
Yeah, and it's good, but it's not as if he deserves much credit for it.
It was obviously not orchestrated by the government.
The Iranian people are a people that have been consistently victimized by the United States foreign policy and so they're angry at the West.
And so, you know, storming a British embassy is something that's, you know, understandable from their perspective.
Just as when Egyptians stormed the Israeli embassy a couple months ago, that was understandable from their perspective.
I mean, if we're not now at the point where we can understand that people tend to react when you do horrible things to them through foreign policy, then we're in deep trouble.
Well, that's the good thing about the American TV audience's history always just began yesterday.
So, you know, in the coverage of it, I saw it didn't even seem to matter that this had anything to do with new sanctions.
It was just, ah, man, look at them screaming brown people in the streets again, doing terrible things.
Like, remember that one time back in the day when we got all mad was basically all they said about it.
And never is there talk in the media about what these sanctions actually amount to.
I mean, the EU failed the other day, but is still trying to impose additional harsh sanctions on Iran's oil sector, which are aimed at crippling their economy.
That's a common word when we talk about sanctions, crippling their economy.
Well, what does that mean?
It means making the people suffer much more than the state will ever suffer with these kinds of sanctions.
And what you do then is you...
And it's not even between the lines like that.
I mean, MJ Rosenberg was on the show quoting Brad Sherman saying, yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Hurting the people of Iran so that they'll do the right thing someday or whatever.
That's right.
They want to hurt the people of Iran so that they start to resent their own government and then maybe overthrow them, which is the most twisted, mentally retarded approach to foreign policy that you can imagine.
I mean, first of all, what sanctions usually do is unite people behind the government no matter how nasty it is and cause a wave of nationalism, which doesn't get anybody anywhere.
That's why sanctions are so ineffective at achieving the goals that the imposer wants.
They go the other way.
And this is potentially going to have the same effect, although there is some good news.
I mean, after weeks, the Israeli officials like the defense minister there, what's his name, Ayub Barak, he came out just yesterday, I think it was, and said officially, we have no plans to attack Iran, but we will keep it as last option, as a final resort.
Okay, well, that's still technically a threat and arguably illegal under international law, but it is a step back from what they've been saying for weeks in the aftermath of that hyperbolic IAEA report.
They've been openly talking about attacking Iran for weeks, and I think that this shift to saying, okay, we won't do it now, but we'll keep it open, that old line about all options on the table, is a testament to how much the military and intelligence communities in both countries, the United States and Israel, were against attacking Iran.
It was only the psycho-political nutjobs that were for it.
Mir Dagan, the former Mossad official, came out yet again, he's been coming out ever since the IAEA report came out, and before, saying attacking Iran would be disastrous, it would be costly, it would be counter to our interests, so on and so forth.
And it's a sign that, you know, that side of the argument is winning out.
Well, and Dagan's point of view on this was that what Barack said wasn't good enough, that's why he came out again.
The quote here is, I am very concerned, my understanding of Barack's comments is that Israel must act within this time frame, but I don't believe this is accurate.
Yes.
And this guy, it should be said, by the way, I think, for people who aren't familiar, because you know, in America, we only ever get one side of this argument.
But this guy, Mir Dagan, is no peacenik.
This is the former head of Mossad.
This is the guy that, in August of 2007, exposed by the WikiLeaks, was threatening the United States that if you don't start the war, we will, and drag you into it.
Wouldn't you rather start it your own way?
We recognize your red line is different than ours, but we don't care about that.
So this is, you know, he's been very bad on this issue in the past, so to me, that means a lot that this is the guy who is saying, whoa, everybody hold your horses now.
That's precisely right.
I don't mean to pat him on the back, but he is saying the right thing at this point, at least partially.
And we should note that it's not just him.
Like, he's sort of been a spokesman.
He's sort of allowed himself to sort of risk his own reputation in Israel and elsewhere by speaking out against attacking Iran.
But he's not the only one.
I mean, I think it's an established feeling now that it's most of the military and intelligence community, which are more sort of scrutinizing with their estimates of Iranian capabilities and so forth, that don't want to do it.
They recognize what a disaster it would be, and they don't want it.
He's just a spokesman.
And I think that that sort of pressure from within has really started to roll back all this saber rattling from the U.S. and Israel.
Yeah.
Well, I should hope so.
It'd be a shame if this thing really was able to get, you know, too much more momentum based on the ridiculous IAEA report that just came out.
I mean, all the scary headlines of the couple of weeks leading up to it just more or less went silent at the end.
I mean, there were still people using the old talking point, but no one that I've seen.
I've seen a lot of people say, well, the IAEA report says this, but I haven't seen anywhere in any comment section or any article anywhere where somebody says, yeah, the IAEA report says this and actually quotes the damn thing and actually has any substance to their argument.
They'll paraphrase it.
Oh, yeah.
The Iranians are making nuclear weapons or something.
But anyone who actually has looked at the thing has reported that it's a giant joke, including people like Robert Kelly, who is the former IAEA weapons inspector talking to the Christian Science Monitor and that's just and to Seymour Hersh and everybody else.
Yeah.
The report was an amalgamation of, as you say, talking points.
It was nothing new that everybody that studied the issue had already known all the information contained in the IAEA.
Already known it was bogus, too.
And already known it wasn't enough to actually prove anything about Iranian intentions towards a nuclear weapon.
And what is always overlooked, and we've talked about this before, was the fact that it again, the report again, confirmed the non-diversion of nuclear materials, which means all of the thing, all of the nuclear material is accounted for and therefore they know Iran is not putting it towards a nuclear weapon.
That's what it said.
Right.
The only part that's any of their beeswax, as Gordon Braithwaite used to say.
The rest of it is all just nonsense outside the safeguards agreement.
All right.
Hold it right there, y'all.
We'll be right back with John Glazer.
We got a lot more after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
And he's just running things over there at the blog, Antiwar.com/blog.
So much breaking news all the time.
I don't know how you keep up.
I keep up by keeping up with you, John.
Tell us about the new WikiLeaks spy files.
Exciting.
It is exciting.
I'm excited by it.
WikiLeaks just yesterday released more secret files, about 287 secret files, that essentially uncover and expose what's being called the surveillance industrial complex.
It's this vast array of high-tech military and intelligence contractors which contract out with the government, our government and many, many governments abroad.
Very impressive technological ways of spying on people, of keeping track of them, tracking their cell phones, reading their emails by the tens of thousands.
They can even get a computer to snap a picture of its owner and then send the image to the police without the owner's knowledge or notification.
It allows updates for iTunes and other popular software programs to actually be sort of a Trojan horse.
So you click update, you want to get the new software, and then they have access to your computer.
All sorts of these types of obviously illegal, obviously intrusive and privacy-violating things.
What we find is that these companies hold all sorts of events and trade shows and trade events where the government, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department get special invites.
It's closed to the public and to journalists, and they get to go and shop.
It's like a big shopping mall for their tyranny.
And Wikileaks is exposing it.
It's just begun.
It's a whole new project.
So it's not just one dump that they've given all this.
There are many, many files, and they're going to keep releasing more as they get them.
All right, well, none of it's surprising.
I guess it's just nice to have our worst suspicions confirmed.
And of course, I remember there were stories back in the late 90s when the big topic was Echelon and Carnivore and all that stuff.
I think it was in probably Newsweek or something like that where they said, well, what we're going to do is we'll just have the CIA set up all these front companies, and then the front companies will do all the Big Brother stuff and then just turn around and sell it to the government.
And then that way it'll be wink-nudge legal, or at least it'll be much harder to get any accountability out of it.
Most of what's really impressive, and I mean that in sort of a creeped-out way, is the way that this kind of technology is used on other people, not Americans.
Because while all of this is wrong and very concerning for the freedom and liberties of Americans, when this stuff gets sold to the government in Syria or China, or when our government uses it to infiltrate and subvert people of other countries, they don't have the legal protections that Americans have.
So for example, the CIA purchased software that allows them to match phone signals and voice prints, so they recognize the voice of somebody, and they use this on predator drones, which are heavily armed and do a lot of bombing in, say, Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan.
And that's how they try and pinpoint whether or not they're actually bombing the individual that they intend to bomb.
That level of technology is extremely concerning.
Another example I read in the Washington Post was an example of a Syrian activist and blogger who started advocating for human rights on his website.
And certain software and certain technology that these types of companies in the surveillance industrial complex sold to the Syrian government allowed them to track his website.
And they began summoning him for regular interrogations that involved threats of torture and days in solitary confinement, and so on and so forth.
And he's been going back and forth between being able to blog and live his life and being called up by the government.
So this is the type of stuff.
And then, you know, in China, of course, they always block certain websites and certain search engines and so on and so forth for the people there that really want access to information.
I mean, these are terrible abridgments of freedom.
And it's happening because of this corporatist area of the technology industry, which is in line with governments, and it's very, very dangerous.
Yep.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry to change the subject, because we could stay on this for a long, long time here.
But anyway, Boko Haram.
Tell me why I ought to be afraid and cowering under my bed and voting for Newt Gingrich because of the danger of Boko Haram, John.
You know, it's amazing.
The past few months, especially since the war in Libya, the military industrial complex and the national security state has been getting more and more involved in Africa.
And it's so clearly forced.
I mean, first of all, Al-Shabaab got promoted to, you know, Al-Qaeda number two or Al-Qaeda junior, and they have virtually no ability to attack long range or, you know, wage any attacks against America and interest and so on and so forth.
They're just a band of thugs.
And now the new sort of militant group of the day, Dajour, is Boko Haram in Nigeria.
That's across the way to the West Africa, not East Africa.
And there was a congressional report that just was released that termed Boko Haram an emerging threat to U.S. interests.
It suggested that we put a lot more into developing local intelligence and security and military relationships with the Nigerian authorities, basically to imitate the type of military cooperation that we have with tyrannies all over the Middle East.
And what we should do in order to, you know, target and attack Boko Haram, which is some threat.
But what was interesting is that the chairman of the committee that released that report, his name is Patrick Meehan, said that while, I'm quoting him, while I recognize there is little evidence at this point to suggest Boko Haram is planning attacks against the U.S. homeland, lack of evidence does not mean it cannot happen.
And if that's a justification for re-upping and committing more military interventions, which will obviously end in death and horror, into Africa, it's really amazing that this is the type of, is the level of proof and credibility that we need at the top of our government to actually engage in more of this, and it's just terrible.
It's crazy that he admitted there's no evidence that Boko Haram is a threat, but he said it could be.
And so, therefore, we need to pay the government, get involved with their security, send true troops, so on and so forth, and it's just horrible.
Yeah, it is horrible.
And you know, the intriguing thing to me about this, or one of them, is the name Boko Haram means Western education is un-Islamic and forbidden, right?
Right.
Okay, so my thing is, the whole neocon talking point, and for that matter, the Wilsonian Hillary Clintonite talking point for all this intervention is, we're all doing it for their own good.
We're all doing it so they can have democracy and be brought into modernity and whatever.
And of course, there's going to be crazy reactionary groups of people all over the world who don't want to live in the 21st century, you know, regardless of the American empire's reach, but just, you know, Western education is bad, Boko Haram, fine, you know, I expect for there to be things like that all over the world, as communication improves and air travel and all these things, you know, it's a changing world, people are going to react.
But all we do is just push them so hard and just make matters so much worse.
It seems like if it was just a battle between local customs and the future of mankind, that, you know, these things will work themselves out, there will be a little bit of blood here and there.
But we go and turn every one of these things into such a mess, we end up, you know, radicalizing the entire Africa and Eurasia, the whole chaos stand, as Richard Mayberry calls it, against us and against the values that the neocons claim they're trying to export to the world here.
It's a good point, and it should be reiterated that the United States is forcing this situation to be a situation of blowback, because for a long time, Boko Haram only had domestic interests, domestic aims, and now they're expanding, they want Western influence out of their country, and now it's going to get worse and worse, it's going to be about blowback, so we should have our heads up.
Yeah, well, you know, it really is funny, kind of, too, how they just have this perfect script from now on.
The more they invade, the more blowback they get, the more they invade, the more blowback they get.
I mean, it was easy to see for a while how, you know, just crisis and Leviathan is just the economics of state power or whatever, but obviously, the guys at the Pentagon now are reading Bob Higgs and getting bad ideas, talking about how, hey, we could just end up conquering the whole wide world like this.
I guess they don't know too much about the value of the dollar.
And they just assume that the more they intervene, the more enemies they create, the more insurgencies there are to put down, the more excuse for more intervention, and there's just no way that even the dumbest general is ignorant of the folly and success of his policy at this point, you know?
Seems to me.
No, I agree.
I agree.
I don't.
Fortunately.
I don't think I'd have fun if I went to a party with one of them.
Yeah, no, probably not.
But you know, I remember like William S. Lynn was, he wasn't a military guy, but he was a military strategist, and he used to hang around with all these Marine Corps generals and stuff and, and try to explain to them the folly of all this overreach, and it's just deaf ears.
Yeah, he's a good writer.
I wrote with him in the same magazine when I wrote for the American Conservative magazine.
Yeah.
But yeah, all of this needs to be put into the context of our greater and greater intervention into Africa.
I mean, right now we have obviously our interventions in Somalia, which we know a lot about, in Uganda, in Libya.
We also have training and equipping militaries in Algeria and Chad and Morocco and Niger and Nigeria and Senegal and Tunisia.
I can't really believe that they don't know that perhaps we should not exploit this entire dark continent, like we have the Middle East, like we did with Latin America.
They're going head, you know, headstrong into this, and it's gonna, it's gonna end poorly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we're over time.
We got to leave it there.
But I thank you very much for your time.
It's always great, John.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
That's the great John Glazer.
Everybody can find him at antiwar.com/blog, and also at news.antiwar.com.
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