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 the great Glenn Greenwald, blogger at Salon.com and author of a couple of few New York Times bestsellers, How Would a Patriot Act?
What was the one about the Bushes?
Oh, Great American Hypocrites is one of them.
And the brand newest one is really great, With Liberty and Justice for Some.
Welcome back to the show.
Glenn, how are you doing?
Doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And I really appreciate you covering this story about the NYPD spying.
And of course, you talk about the media role in it a little bit, too.
From my understanding, as far as TV goes, this story doesn't matter at all.
And in fact, one could maybe even conclude that from listening to this show, since I haven't covered it at all yet myself.
And I really don't know that much about it.
So before we get to all the points, and I know you've got some important ones, could you please give us the background best you can?
If it takes a couple of few minutes, that's OK to tell us the facts of the case as best as you understand them here, because it's quite a story.
Sure.
Well, this is one of those rare instances where America's establishment media outlets actually did its job, its intended function.
So that makes the story both interesting and rare right off the bat.
Essentially, over the last year, the Associated Press, a team of four reporters at the AP, have been systematically uncovering a massive surveillance and spying program that the New York City Police Department implemented right around 2005, 2006, under Mayor Bloomberg and the police commissioner, Kelly, where they use all kinds of federal money that is designed for drug programs and even for terrorism.
And they did this massive surveillance program, not aimed at individuals or groups about whom they had any sort of suspicion that they were actually engaged in wrongdoing or terrorism, but literally an indiscriminate, broad, sweeping surveillance program aimed at Muslim communities, not just in New York City, but even outside of their jurisdiction in Newark, New Jersey and places in Long Island.
And they would do things like go to every single conceivable restaurant, bar, shop, school that had anything to do with Muslims, and not just Middle Eastern Muslims, but also African-American Muslims.
And they would gather as much information as they can about them.
They would create dossiers on them.
They would go into these shops and businesses and eavesdrop on conversations and find out who works there and who patronizes them and write them all down.
They infiltrated groups and organizations at various colleges and universities in the Northeast to gather information on Muslim student groups.
They made comprehensive maps of mosques and Muslim schools and Muslim places of businesses.
They gathered emails.
They monitored Twitter accounts.
It was basically a massive dossier that they created on entire Muslim communities within the New York City metropolitan area and in areas outside of New York City as well.
I mean, as indiscriminate of a spying program as you can imagine, aimed exclusively at citizens solely by virtue of their religious background and their ethnicity, without any remote inkling that any of these people have done anything wrong.
And now, was this the same scandal where they were working with the Central Intelligence Agency as well?
Right.
Well, what you'd put the CIA is barred by all kinds of statutes and its own charter from spying on American citizens on American soil.
It's supposed to be an exclusively foreign agency, just like the National Security Agency was intended never to spy on Americans domestically, and yet that has been violated in fundamental ways.
The NSA is now a massively domesticated spying agency.
The CIA is supposed to be barred from that as well, and yet they were working with the NYPD, supposedly just in an advisory capacity, to give tips to the NYPD about how they could spy, where they should direct their spying, the best spying equipment to buy, the best methods to use.
So supposedly it wasn't the CIA doing it itself.
They were working in very close conjunction with the NYPD, which just by itself is patently illegal.
And now, so this was all Rudy Giuliani, right?
Because he was the one running things back when this thing started, no?
No, this was the member that Rudy Giuliani famously left office shortly after 9-11.
If you recall, he was terminated out of office at the beginning of 2002, and he had suggested at the time that the crises mandated or necessitated that he should stay beyond what the law required, the sort of ultimate fascist move of capitalizing on a crisis situation to stay in office beyond what the law allows.
But he eventually did leave, and so Michael Bloomberg's been mayor of New York City for two and a half terms now.
So this was all done under Michael Bloomberg and the police commissioner who was Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner, Ray Kelly, who is basically the person who was in charge of implementing this.
All right, now, so wow.
I mean, the way you describe this thing, it really got out of hand here.
This is the kind of thing that you read about in history books that happened, you know, back in the first and second Red Scare, that kind of thing.
Maybe some Jim Crow-type persecution here, since, as you say, it's all just based on, you know, who these people are by their religious affiliation, of all things.
As you point out, if it was Christians or Jews or any other religious group, Hindus or whatever, singled out this way, it would be a massive outcry.
And yet this is all very normal now.
I guess after all these years of other types of persecution, for example, the NSA spying and whatever, well, what do I care?
I'm not a Muslim.
I'm not the one having my institution, you know, bugged or infiltrated or my cousin entrapped or whatever.
It's all happening to others, even though within our same society, they're still the other, you know, a bunch of Branch Davidians out on the edge of town.
So go ahead and do what you like with them, basically.
Well, just to give you an indication of how normalized it is, I mean, New York City has long been known, especially for its city politics, for being pretty liberal, for being kind of even left-wing.
And yet virtually every leading Democratic Party official in New York City, and those are the ones that really matter, it's basically a one-party city, have come out and defended the NYPD, including Christine Quinn, who is the Speaker of the New York City Council.
She's the leading candidate to replace Mayor Bloomberg when he leaves office.
Next year, she kind of got her start at this extremely liberal gay rights activist and housing activist for the poor, and she's become increasingly what they call centrist or moderate, which means authoritarian and just kind of accommodating to power factions.
She defended the NYPD.
The only people who were at all have raised any objections is the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, who was angry that he wasn't told about what the NYPD was doing in his city, and notably the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who's actually been quite good on a lot of issues relating to the demonization of Muslims, who also said that these allegations are quite troubling and that it needs to be investigated by the Justice Department.
And of course, Holder has said, well, we're looking into it, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that.
But the broader point is the more important one, which is what you alluded to, which is that all civil liberties abuses, all versions of the Constitution are always driven, always driven by the hyping up of a particular enemy.
So it doesn't matter who the enemy is in American history.
It's been Japanese Americans.
It's been the communists.
It's been a whole bunch of different kinds of groups, and people have played this role.
And right now it's Muslim.
And the reason is that once you designate this enemy that you scare everybody about, then they will acquiesce to whatever it is you want to do to them.
You want to put them in cages without due process.
Go ahead.
You want to have the president secretly order their assassination with no due process.
Feel free to do that.
And in fact, Attorney General Eric Holder is giving a speech today to justify the president's assassination of American citizens.
The whole Whitney is dropping, as you said.
It becomes justifiable.
But of course, the danger of it, inevitably, not speculatively or potentially, but inevitably, is that these powers that you acquiesce to in the name of this current group that you become afraid of, but fear of, is that it will always spread well beyond its original application.
So if you look at the Patriot Act that was justified in the name of Muslim terrorism, it's used far more in cases having nothing to do with Islamic extremism than it is in cases where it is.
That's what always happens with these powers, is they become far beyond the original application.
They become the way the government functions.
And that's what we've already seen and will continue to see.
All right, y'all.
Hold it right there.
It's Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com, author of Liberty and Justice for Some.
It's big and yellow and for sale where you buy books.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And I got some bad news, too.
The great Jeff Huber has died, apparently of old age or something along those lines.
Author of the book Bathtub Admirals, keeper of an archive at antiwar.com.
And he actually got his start, I think, writing his essays at my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna's blog at largely, which I don't even think is up anymore.
We need to get that fixed.
But anyway, good old Jeff Huber.
He was a great guy, a great satirist.
And he absolutely skewered the surge and its proponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, too, and stuck up for the little guy in the story of America's terror war.
And he was a really great guy, a real nice guy.
So sorry to bring you bad news.
But there you go.
That's kind of what this show's about, isn't it?
All right, so we're talking with the great Glenn Greenwald about the NYPD spying scandal.
Although we're not quite sure if it's a scandal, because apparently it's good Democratic Party politics to defend this.
The NYPD absolutely, if I understand it right, completely spinning out off their leash.
No oversight.
There was not an assistant DEA overseeing this thing or anything.
They just sent the NYPD off in total secrecy to infiltrate whatever they could in the name of its Muslim.
Is that really right?
First of all, the how off how far off their leash thing there were.
And then the second part about are they all just a bunch of Charles Schumers up there supporting the NYPD in this plan?
Yeah, I mean, it's it's, you know, as you say, the reason a lot of people haven't heard about it is because there's very little controversy surrounding it.
In fact, it took the New York Times editorial page, which usually is fairly decent on issues of civil liberties and surveillance until today, you know, all six months of this scandal being generated by the AP to editorialize against it.
And they actually had a decent editorial today pointing out that it's basically just indiscriminate spying and warning that, you know, if you accept this, then it'll eventually lead to all other kinds of groups being spied upon.
But when there's no dispute among the two parties, these kinds of issues generally tend to be buried.
And and that's what's happened.
Yeah, you quote one congressman, I guess, because it's so notable that there's one congressman who says, hey, I want an investigation here and is really making a big deal out of it.
Right.
And and, you know, that congressman is Rush Hold.
I mean, occasionally you get from New Jersey who, you know, some New Jersey politicians have actually spoken up about it because of their constituents who have been spied upon by the NYPD.
I think part of what they don't like is the NYPD entered their jurisdictions without their cooperation or involvement.
But some of it is is more substantive in terms of the indiscriminate spying program on their Muslim communities.
But, you know, this is the sort of thing that we often see is, you know, once the Democrat either do a policy or support it, the Republicans are obviously on board with it.
And so it becomes something that's just completely normalized.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, underlying this entire thing, it seems like to me is a big pile of nonsense that terrorism has anything to do with the devotion of religious belief.
When you look at the 9-11 hijackers, they spent their last days at the strip club.
They weren't afraid of Allah.
They were here fighting as soldiers in a battle about things that happen on earth, you know, politics and stuff like that.
And that's why they did what they did.
It wasn't because they were Muslim.
So if you were the NYPD and you were actually looking for a terrorist, you might start with, you know, people who know the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, something like that.
Somebody who has an association with somebody who actually put something like this together before, for example, rather than just casting a net and going fishing for anybody you can trick into saying something stupid into a tape recorder.
Well, this is what's really striking about it is, you know, if you ask, you know, just standard issue, progressive or Democrats or liberals or whatever to say something positive about George Bush, most of them would have a very difficult time doing that.
I would certainly have a hard time.
But one of the things that people will say that he did that was quite good.
And in my first book that I wrote about him, I actually praised him pretty obviously for it was in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
He gave in every single speech, he included very common passages warning Americans not to equate Islam and Muslims generally with the terrorists who would attack the country.
And in fact, he made a very public showing in the days after 9-11 of meeting at the White House in a very public spectacle with a bunch of Muslim leaders to make this point.
And so this idea that Muslims shouldn't be equated with terrorists generally, that Islam shouldn't be blamed for, you know, individual acts of extremism was something that the country embraced even in the height of the fear mongering and hysteria that followed 9-11.
And yet it's something that we really seem to have let go of and have forgotten.
And this NYPD program really is based in nothing more than the premise that if you are Muslim, you are inherently suspect.
And it's not hard to envision how this could be extended outward.
You could say, look at the state of shootings at abortion clinics.
Therefore, any Christian group ought to be held under this light of suspicion.
Or, you know, look at the anti-government groups that have committed sporadic acts of violence.
Let's subject conservatives or anyone who is opposed to government power to the same sort of surveillance on this ground.
I mean, this kind of mentality is pernicious and dangerous in all sorts of obvious ways.
And yet we don't seem to object or mind when it comes to Muslims.
Well, we've actually seen just that, you know, from Homeland Security.
And in fact, even going back to the 1990s, the FBI with their Project Megiddo or whatever, were basically any white man with a gun is a potential Timothy McVeigh right wing extremist terrorist outside the bounds of respectable politics and ready to resort to violence at any time.
And this is what the cops were training each other before September 11th was, you know, the last big terrorist attack was white guys that did it in Oklahoma.
Right.
So this is what they were training all the cops to believe.
And they're kind of doing that again.
Interesting about that.
But what's interesting about that is, you know, there was this scandal that erupted in the early part of the Obama administration when the Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Napolitano issued this report to local and state law enforcement agencies that identify terrorist threats.
And one of the terrorist threats were extreme right wing or anti-government groups.
And, of course, it is true that there have been, you know, periodic acts of violence committed by anti-government groups in the United States.
I mean, the Timothy McVeigh bombing of Oklahoma City is the most notable, but there's been others as well.
And yet the outcry of anger from conservatives, understandably so, was intense.
And I believe that the Department of Homeland Security ended up having to apologize or clarify that they didn't in any way need to impugn the, you know, integrity or the law abiding nature of conservative anti-government activists.
And yet those same people who objected so vehemently because it was their own political beliefs or background that was, you know, called into question were basically silent in the wake of this NYPD scandal, even though the powers being asserted and the work mentality on which it's based are exactly the same.
But that is part of the problem is that, you know, we tend to object only when our own interests are immediately threatened by the assertion of these powers and sort of ignore it or look the other way or even cheer for it when it's somebody else who's targeted.
And the problem with that isn't just, you know, unprincipled selfishness.
It's that that's how these powers are able to take hold and to take root.
And by the time they come to apply them to you, it's too late to challenge them because they become institutionalized.
They become legitimized.
It's actually amazing to me that they've been able to get away with this.
You know, later on the show, we're going to be talking with Stefan Salisbury about his new article about the complete and total militarization beyond what we could ever even feared in the 90s of all the domestic police agencies around the country and that kind of thing.
And it really is astounding that, you know, I mean, I grew up, I thought everybody knew that, you know, we have limited government.
Yeah, you might, for example, think that some mothers are unfit, but we don't let the government license motherhood because at some point you got to prefer liberty to, you know, some imagined benefit that you might get from expanded control.
There's got to be a line somewhere.
And yet we all just, I guess, decided there are no lines.
Go ahead.
They could put an infrared camera in all our living rooms and bedrooms right now for all I care, all anyone cares, you know?
Well, I mean, we've become, you know, it's really interesting because the, if you look at the conservative movement, for example, in the 1990s, it was sort of based on this idea that the United States is supposed to be this rugged individualist society that we resist any kind of collective impulse to provide security through, you know, the imperial hand of the federal government intervening in our lives.
And yet in the wake of 9-11, the most incredibly intrusive and invasive surveillance aid and system of control was committed to the cold with almost no objection.
And that's because fear is an incredibly potent motivator.
And so it's easy to say, I want the federal government to remain far away from me, and I don't want to, you know, I don't want to threaten my rugged individualism.
When you feel basically safe and protected, but the minute the government is successful in putting you into fear of something, as it obviously was able to do in the aftermath of 9-11, that's when the true individualists step forward and are identified versus the authoritarian sort of seeking this sort of illusory absolute security.
And that's what we've become as a country.
You know, there is no more weighing of freedom versus security or acceptance of the idea that because there's no such thing as absolute security, we knowingly undertake risk in order to preserve liberty.
It's now to the point where as long as the government can prove that there's any incremental increase, no matter how small or imperceptible, in the ability to detect or battle against threats, we immediately acquiesce to whatever it is they're proposing on the grounds that safety is the most important value and it outweighs all others.
And in fact, there were lots of Republican politicians during the Bush administration that made exactly that argument.
You hear these arguments being made now too by Democrats.
I remember Jeff Sessions and John Cornyn, people like this, you know, would say things like, well, civil liberties and the Constitution don't really matter if you're dead, meaning the only thing that matters is security.
And you'll hear, you know, presidents and their defenders and apologists make the claim that the first duty of the president is to keep us safe, even though the actual oath that the president takes is mandated by the Constitution, says nothing about security.
It says the president shall protect and defend the Constitution from domestic and foreign enemies.
And so we've completely inverted the value system on which the country was based.
I mean, Patrick Henry, give me liberty or give me death.
You know, that kind of mindset, if you express it, would almost render you crazy.
The idea that you'd be willing to risk security and safety in pursuit of freedom, that's something that's just unheard of that no politician could ever advocate.
And then we become a country that comports with that value system.
Well, now, I wonder, basically, with the Constitution, they didn't amend it to say, OK, we can do whatever we want.
They just decided they'd ignore it from now on at different points, you know, where now it's certainly a post-constitutional era.
We could quibble about where that era began or something, maybe.
But it's sort of the same thing with the laws here, too.
I don't know which ones they are.
You're a constitutional litigator.
Which laws that, you know, back when there were laws are being violated by this NYPD or were violated in this NYPD scandal?
Not that they would apply, but it's curious.
Well, for one thing, you know, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to prevent a surveillance state from taking hold by permitting government surveillance only when there is reasonable cause to believe or probable cause to believe that you've actually done something wrong.
We're not supposed to have the government spying on us on our papers, our homes, our persons or anything else unless they first go to a court and obtain a warrant from a court demonstrating that there's probable cause to believe that we've actually engaged in criminal activity.
Well, the Fourth Amendment barely exists in the country anymore.
It's been simply kind of waved away by a series of court rulings and exceptions and just sort of, you know, acquiescence to the idea that it no longer applies.
So now the government is free to spy on whomever they want at will without any notion of going to a court or getting court orders or anything like that.
And that's obviously one.
And also, the Constitution prevents discrimination based upon religious identity.
That the conduct of government can interfere in religious liberty.
That we're all entitled to equal protection under the law.
And obviously having the government target entire communities based exclusively on their religious or ethnic identity is a core violation of those guarantees as well.
But look, I mean, this is how little this matters.
You know, I mentioned earlier, it's really an amazing event.
I mean, the Attorney General of the United States really is going to go today to Northwest University and he's going to stand up and he's going to explain for the first time the Obama administration's views about why they have the legal authority to target American citizens for execution, for assassination by the CIA, without any transparency, without any due process, without any legal framework or checks or oversight of any kind, no matter where the person is found, far away from a battlefield, any country in the world, it makes no difference.
And you don't have to be a constitutional scholar to know how unconstitutional.
You can just go and read the Fifth Amendment, it just says that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.
I mean, the idea of targeting people for execution without charges or a trial or any other remnant of due process is as violative of what the Bill of Rights was intended to prohibit as anything you could possibly think of, literally.
And yet you're going to hear Republicans and Democrats, one folder stands up to the extent they pay attention at all, supporting it and cheering it on the ground that the people that they're killing are terrorists.
Now, of course, that begs the entire question of whether they actually are terrorists.
All we know is the president is accusing them of being a terrorist.
The whole point of the Constitution is to prevent you from being punished based solely on government accusation, but that's the fear-mongering mentality that we've accepted, that once the government utters the word terrorist at someone, everything and anything is fair game, including exactly that which the Constitution was designed to prevent.
Well, I guess we didn't even really understand what they meant when they said everything changed, that it had gone this far.
But that's how it is.
And I guess on the same, it's only one more step of logic.
Why should we ever give a trial to an armed robber or a murderer or a rapist or a child molester or anybody that the cops accuse of anything ever again if they're all guilty and everybody knows that?
Yeah, I mean, and if you believe that, you know, some accused murderer should actually get a trial before being put in prison for life, that must mean that you're, you know, pro-murderer or you don't really, you know, have any concern for the victims or whatever the rhetoric is deployed against those of us who stand up to these other things under the name of terrorism.
Amazing.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today.
As always, Glenn, I keep your blog open in one of my tabs 24 hours a day.
All right.
Thanks, everybody.
That is the heroic Glenn Greenwald.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act?
A Tragic Legacy.
That's the one I was trying to think of in the intro there.
And Great American Hypocrites.
And the brand new one is With Liberty and Justice for Some.
Please go and read it and read his blog.
He's good on virtually everything.
We'll be right back.
