That's right everybody, every hero's gotta have his own theme music, and my guest today is certainly that, and that's why he gets his own hero theme music here.
It's the other Scott Horton, no relation whatsoever, if there is some it goes back a thousand years or something, so please don't hold him responsible for my antics.
He's a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, he's an international human rights lawyer and expert in the laws of war.
He's the co-founder of the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
He's a former chairman of the New York Bar Association's Committee on International Law.
He sits on the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the Eurasia Group, and the American branch of the International Law Association.
He writes one of the best blogs on the entire world wide web.
It's called nocomet at harpers.org.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
Why, thank you, it's great to be here.
It's great to have theme music, too.
I always wanted to be identified with a gangster.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, no, Karas one's not a gangster, see that's, I don't know if you ever saw I'm Gonna Get You Sucka about the gold chain war?
Not yet.
Well, it's kind of a Keenan Ivory Wayans blaxploitation flick, and every hero's got to have theme music that follows them around playing, and so this is the hero's theme music there.
So that's for you, because you are, as far as I can tell, the most adamant and effective opponent of this government's use of torture in the entire country.
Well, I wish it were more effective, because I don't think we've succeeded in bringing it to an end yet.
Well, I suppose that's right, but I don't think there's anybody who's done more than you to try to make it so, at least.
And in fact, I'd like to start, obviously we've got to talk about Alberto Gonzalez here, but I'd really like to start with this July 20th executive order that George Bush signed, and I understand from breezing through this thing quickly before the show, and from checking out what you wrote about it on the No Comment blog at Harper's Magazine, that the military basically is instructed by this executive order to abide by the law in their interrogation handbook and so forth, but the CIA is not.
They're given much more leeway to torture people, and this has the military concern.
Is that right?
That's exactly right.
And so why would the military care who the CIA tortures?
Well, I'd say, you know, there are a number of different reasons for this.
I mean, one is that this is setting a new standard that can be used on personnel in future conflicts, and of course they're concerned about these techniques being applied against American personnel, military, and also non-military personnel in future conflicts.
But then there are two other specific reasons.
I mean, one of them is that the CIA isn't in the business of running prisons, doesn't want to run prisons.
Most of these prisoners are going to be held in prisons that are operated by the military, and the military bears responsibility for what happens to them in the prisons and has responsibility for their oversight.
And so this is a direct conflict.
If you allow the CIA to use these techniques, it's going to go into Guantanamo, Bagram, and other facilities that are operated by the Department of Defense and start using them, and then that's going to violate the DOD's own guidelines.
So that's an area of big concern.
And then the other thing is, well, of course, we know many of these techniques were used at Abu Ghraib, and we know that the CIA and civilian contractors came in and used them.
And the Department of the Army's report about this, the one that was done by Faye Jones and General Kerr, said that this contributed to deterioration of morale and discipline at the prison at Abu Ghraib.
So I think there's a lot of concern about that happening, too.
So it undermines traditional military discipline and norms.
And now, you even quote in your article, you talk about the Japanese war crimes trials at the end of World War II, and that some of the Japanese military commanders said, hey, look, torture happened at our military base, but it was civilian intelligence agencies that came and did it.
It's not our fault.
And that they were hung from the neck.
That wasn't a good enough excuse.
That's correct.
And the same thing happened also with the Nuremberg cases, because German military officers said, you know, we weren't the ones who were doing the torture.
That was the FD and other organizations who did it.
And the view of the American judges there, as well as the other international judges, was not good enough.
Sorry.
That's a rule of absolute responsibility.
So that's a rule that was advanced by the United States.
So you know, we need to plan with that in mind.
And now, you also wrote that the American Bar Association has gone to Congress and asked them to overturn this executive order.
How unprecedented is that?
First time, as far as I know, that anything like this has ever happened.
This was a major subject of discussion at the ABA conference out in San Francisco.
The ABA concluded, in fact, there was a vote of 54521, that the executive order itself was unlawful, and they committed to get it overturned by Congress.
Okay.
Now, this is the tough one.
If I remember right, and hey, you're the lawyer on the local radio show host here.
My best understanding, last summer, the Supreme Court ruled, you can't do this unless Congress says it's okay.
And then Congress said it's okay, and passed the Military Commissions Act that legalized the detention even of Americans as enemy combatants, and gives the president the authority to decide what's torture and what's not torture.
So in what way is this executive order illegal?
He cites the Military Commissions Act right in the opening paragraph here, Scott.
You got it right all the way up to the end.
The Congress required him, because Congress was concerned about the way he was gonna exercise his discretion.
So Congress said, we're not gonna allow you to do that quietly.
You have to put it in a written order that's issued and is published.
And that then created the basis for Congress to overturn it if they were unhappy with it.
And Congress also said that this order has to be consistent with Common Article III, the Geneva Conventions, which it isn't.
I mean, that was the basis for the decision of the ABA.It's not consistent with Common Article III.
Right, in fact, let me play this very short clip of George Bush complaining about Common Article III here.
And that Common Article III says that, you know, there will be no outrageous upon human dignity.
It's like, it's very vague.
And we can see that's why he doesn't like it, because it's vague, and he wants specific ways that he can violate human dignity, and then, you know, if you want to set aside other ways that he's not allowed to, then that's okay too, I guess.
Well, I think his complaint is not that it's vague, his complaint is that it's very clear, because Common Article III does not permit waterboarding, long-time standing, use of heavy stress techniques, sleep deprivation over two days, for instance.
All those things are clearly precluded, and President Bush has authorized them.
So that's the conflict is between George W. Bush and the Geneva Conventions, which is to say it's really between George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, Dwight David Eisenhower, and others who are responsible for setting the prior standards.
And now, and both of those presidents did use military commissions and so forth.
How different is the current system from what, say, Ike did?
Well, I don't think that there's really anything the matter with military commissions per se is a category.
And, in fact, military commissions, there's a long history of using them, they were used very, very heavily during the Civil War, for instance, and there are a lot of people who know their Civil War history from the South, know about how oppressive these things were pursued by Southerners.
But what's going on is the procedures that are used by the commissions is the issue.
And I think the thought amongst the lawyers and a lot of others who've looked at this is that if you use regular court-martial procedures, the standing rules that have been used by our military since, you know, roughly the end of World War II with a lot of tweaks and changes, that's fine.
That's not gonna raise any issues.
But, you know, what the Bush administration has tried to do is craft its own entirely new rules for use with these detainees, and the new rules that it's crafted are not up to stuff.
They're absolutely not acceptable.
And, you know, we saw what happened with the two proceedings that went forward in Guantanamo, two different judges, Colonel and the Navy captain, both said, you know, it doesn't work.
We have to dismiss the cases, you know, they don't meet minimum standards.
And then we also have the combat status review tribunal there.
And, you know, Colonel Abramson, you know, from California, who is one of the officers responsible for one of them, made public statements and announced what was going on there.
And he said it was a complete farce, that, you know, that there really was no justice or any probing going on here.
Decisions were predetermined and were sent to them.
So it's not a justice system at all, and, you know, not the sort of thing that our founding fathers would have ever approved or that Congress authorized.
Right.
In fact, there's even been some cases, right, where the original three officers found that there was no evidence that this or that guy had any ties to al-Qaeda, etc., etc.
And they just basically did the whole thing again and again until they found three officers who were willing to say, yeah, he's guilty as hell.
That's exactly right.
We had a lot of people with respect to him.
There really was no evidence against them, and they just kept going back two, three, four shots at the apple until finally they got a panel that had given them the result they wanted.
Well, what they ought to do is just tie a stone around their neck and throw them in the lake.
And then that way, if they sink, they'll go to Christ.
And if they can swim, then that means they're a witch, and then we can take care of them, you know.
They'll have to report back here for hanging or burning later.
Well, this has been an express train back to the eighth century.
I think you're right on that.
It really does seem that way, doesn't it?
I mean, what, the Magna Carta was, what, 1215 AD?
That's right.
That was a long time ago.
That's a lot of tradition of protection from double jeopardy and so forth to be flushed down the toilet.
And habeas corpus, not to be forgotten, because that was one of the major innovations brought in with Magna Carta.
And now when you talk about this whole new legal structure that's been set up to justify all this, last summer the Supreme Court basically found, although clearly they didn't say it this way, but basically what they said was, no, you're a felon.
What you've been doing this entire time is illegal, and you have to get Congress to legalize it or you may not continue doing it.
That's right, because everything the administration had done had been predicated on the idea that Common Article 3 didn't apply and they didn't have to obey it.
And the Supreme Court said, wrong, wrong, it does apply and you do have to obey it.
And that means all these techniques and procedures that had been used didn't comply with Common Article 3.
And something that doesn't comply with Common Article 3 is a war crime, actually.
It's a felony under U.S. statutes.
So, what had been done there was raise very, very serious criminal law issues.
Right, and here's where we get to the Attorney General, who announced his resignation yesterday.
He's the guy, it's his signature on the paperwork, right, that says that the Geneva Convention is quaint and does not apply to our current situation.
Not only that, but in that same memorandum he talked about the prospect that the authors of this new system, which is to say himself and Mr. Cheney in particular, may be prosecuted in the future by U.S. attorneys and other prosecutors for what they've done.
And he spent a lot of time trying to figure out how will we avoid criminal law liability for what we're doing.
And in this case, with the military commissions, Alberto Gonzalez crafted these rules and put them forward.
He didn't even consult with the senior military officers who were normally responsible for making them.
They had to go to Congress and complain about it.
In fact, they went to Congress and they opposed what Alberto Gonzalez did.
I've never, I don't think in American history anything like that ever happened before.
Right, and in fact, that's how you got involved in this yourself, right?
Was that the Judge Advocate Generals, the JAGs, they came to you and said, help, because all this is going on under what's supposed to be our control and yet we're frozen out of the process.
We're going to get the blame for this.
No, that was back in 2003, they were trying, of course, not just to get my personal involvement but to get the Bar Association in, and I was chairing a committee at that time.
And we did, in fact.
You know, I think the Bar Association has been lined up behind the professional military lawyers from the beginning on this matter.
I'm talking with American hero, the other Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine here.
And doesn't it seem strange, all these things about, you know, Geneva being quaint and boy, I sure hope we're not hung for war crimes later and so forth.
All this was known before Alberto Gonzales was ever confirmed to be the Attorney General of the United States, wasn't it?
Yes, I think it was, and you know, it figured very heavily in the confirmation hearings for him.
He was hit with a lot of questions and gave a lot of embarrassing and evasive answers.
Yeah, I mean, you call him a crony in your blog entry on No Comment Blog at Harper's on Earth.
I was quoting Brit Hume at Fox News, by the way.
Right, and was it that surprising to see him saying that, huh?
Well, I think, frankly, it's what all the newscasters in Washington have been saying regardless of their political views for some time.
Everybody's looked at Gonzales and said, this man is, you know, nothing more really than a political hack.
Of course, they don't say that on their broadcast, but, you know, Brit Hume came out and said it publicly yesterday, so.
Right.
And it's always been obvious just, you know, to the average guy tuning in that this guy Gonzales is nothing but, you know, a personal friend and flunky of Bush and Rove.
I think that's right.
And, you know, really the right thing would be to have an attorney as an attorney general, somebody who stands on his own legs, who's independent, who has stature, who's respected the community, all things that weren't true with respect to Alberto Gonzales.
And, you know, we're in a position right now that's a lot like what happened with the Justice Department in the months right after the Watergate scandal reached its peak and Richard Nixon resigned.
And Gerald Ford came in then, and one of the first things he had to do was to replace the attorney general.
We had two attorney generals who were then under criminal investigations, that's another thing I think we're likely to see repeat, and, you know, he spent a lot of time thinking over who's going to appoint the appointed Edward Levy.
And Levy was the president of the University of Chicago, very conservative Republican, but he was a figure who was very far away from partisan politics and was respected by everybody.
So, a brilliant choice and went a long way towards restoring the reputation of the Department of Justice.
Right, and that really is kind of at least the tradition in America, not that we've always lived up to it perfectly, but I think the American people pretty much expect that the head of the EPA or the head of the Commerce Department or something like that is going to be a political crony, and what are you going to do?
It's Andrew Jackson's system, right?
But on the other hand, the attorney general of the United States, he's supposed to be a serious lawyer, he's not supposed to just be the flunky of the president.
I mean, we have a tradition of that, right?
That's exactly right.
In fact, L.U.
Root, who's a very, very famous Republican Secretary of State, also a former president of the Bar Association, said that half of the task of a really good lawyer is telling his client that he's a damn fool and he needs to respect the law.
And that's exactly what Alberto Gonzalez was not.
He would never stand up to people who sought advice from him and tell them that they were contemplating something was wrong and they needed to respect the law.
And what we really badly need is an attorney general who will adhere to that idea.
Well, we have a real problem, don't we, that he's been forced to resign basically over this U.S. attorney scandal, which, you know, hey, felonies are felonies and everything, but here's a man who was confirmed after passing, you know, these legal judgments that it's okay to torture people up to the point of organ failure, or even then if it's militarily necessary and, you know, I think it was the Bybee memo that says, hey, even if you kill him, we know that you meant well and that you were trying to prevent a greater harm.
He got confirmed after all that, and now he's being run out for the attorney scandal, doesn't it seem?
To me, it's like Clinton burning Waco and then getting impeached for Monica Lewinsky.
Well, I wouldn't underestimate the importance of the U.S. attorney scandal because what's at the bottom there is politicizing the Department of Justice and using prosecutors for partisan political purposes, and that's something that's not new in the history of the American republic.
It's happened, in fact, a lot in the history of the American republic, but it is a particularly serious problem when it happens, and, you know, if we look back to what's happened since 2002, roughly, we've got a lot of really suspicious political prosecutions to occur, then look at the case of, you know, Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama, you know, that's being exposed now as an egregious political prosecution that involved Karl Rove from the beginning.
He was convicted and he's sitting in a prison in Texas right now.
You know, I certainly expect that's going to wind up being overturned, but that's one of the cases that really badly needs to be explored right now by a special prosecutor and by Congress.
Yeah, and that's something that you've actually covered in great detail on your blog, No Comment at Harper's Magazine.
That's right.
I mean, we had a young Republican attorney in Alabama come out and disclose after Siegelman was convicted, she said, you know, this is a miscarriage of justice and I can't keep quiet about this anymore.
I have to come forward and announce what happened, and she described some of the conversations in which Karl Rove is mentioned and his involvement and his interventions and manipulations of the case come out.
And, of course, we know that Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzalez were very, very close to it.
New York Times this morning is reporting that in the White House, Alberto Gonzalez didn't have a lot of friends.
And it was really Karl Rove who was standing up for him and also giving him directions about everything.
Yeah, that's what Sidney Blumenthal has written on Salon.com.
Once Rove was gone, Gonzalez was sure to follow soon because he was the puppet and nobody working in his strings means he collapses, basically, I guess is the analogy he made.
I think that's right.
And, of course, the big struggle now, the showdown between Congress and the Bush administration is over a bunch of emails and other documents.
And what's the key there?
It is Karl Rove's relationship with the Department of Justice.
I think these documents are going to show that Rove was pulling the strings and what was happening across the department.
And that would be shocking.
In fact, it would be a crime.
And you know, the Bush administration has gone to a scorched earth policy to avoid having those emails become public.
Now, they quickly leaked the name after it was announced that Gonzalez was leaving of Michael Chertoff, the current secretary of the, and I'm going to need your help with the German here, it's the Heimitzsickerheitendeisst.
Yeah, Staatssickerheitsdienst they would call it.
You know, Stasi, they call it in East Germany.
If you translate that into English, you get Department of Homeland Security.
Wow.
And so now, he's been floated, the trial balloons are out that he would be the replacement.
And I can't remember if this was a conversation I had with you or whether it was with Jim Bovard or what, but somebody intelligent on the show was talking about how they're going to try to keep Gonzalez as long as they possibly can, because how hard is it going to be to find a replacement who's not going to immediately uncover everything his predecessor did in order to protect himself?
And I guess, bringing Chertoff in is the answer to that riddle, huh?
I think that is the dilemma.
And of course, Michael Chertoff previously was at the Department of Justice, he headed the Criminal Division.
And he's been an integral part, even when he left and went to DHS, he's been an integral part of all of these plans for, let's say, special war on terror law, including these extraordinary detention regimes.
He's linked all the way back to the beginning to the torture and torture process.
In fact, when he was nominated for Department of Homeland Security, he testified denying any involvement.
Subsequently, a lot of information has come out to show that he wasn't being candid with the Judiciary Committee, because we know that he was involved in reviewing the original torture memorandum, the one that John Yu and Jay Bybee wrote, and we also know he was approached by the CIA at an early point with his assistant, Alice Fisher, who now heads the Criminal Division, and they were asked to give assurance to the CIA agents and others who used these techniques.
They weren't going to be prosecuted for crimes.
They were pushed for that because pretty much all the lawyers who looked at it thought these are criminal acts and they could be prosecuted, so we want the head of the Criminal Division to say that won't happen.
Now, he's insisted that he never gave that assurance, but I've heard from a number of sources that indeed he did.
And in any event, we've got a lot of documentation that subsequently come out showing his involvement in this process, the solicitation of advice from him, also that he was briefed and members of his staff were briefed by FBI agents who were down at Guantanamo about the highly abusive techniques that were used.
So it's quite clear that Chertoff knew about all these procedures and absolutely approved them.
Well, so then that makes him a perjurer, right?
I think that's right.
In fact, if you look, Mark Benjamin at Salon.com this morning has got a big article about it in which he focuses on some of the specific statements that Chertoff made, and he says, you know, why is this not perjury, and I would say, you know, Michael Chertoff has got a lot of explaining to do, and it's not just that, too.
You know, we also have the incident involving John Walker Wind and statements he made about Jesslyn Raddick, who was an ethics officer at the Department of Justice who rendered an opinion.
He made a whole series of completely false statements about that, I mean, whatever opinion you may have about the issues in the John Walker Wind case, to put that to the side, he simply made false statements about what went on within the department and his involvement.
And I think he was trapped in those misstatements, too, so there's quite a bit there.
And by the way, this is not even getting into Hurricane Katrina, and, you know, he was the man in charge.
Right, absolutely.
And you say in your blog, too, that I guess it's been reported, but they haven't surfaced yet that there are two actual memos with his signature on them in regards to the torture policy?
Yes.
I've been told that there are further documents that have not surfaced that were crafted by him and by Alice Fisher that relate to this approval of specific techniques, so that was basically giving assurance that there would be no prosecutions brought if these techniques were used, and that included waterboarding, for instance, long-time standing, hypothermia, stress positions, things of that sort.
And you also wrote, I think, on the no-comment blog there at harpers.org, that the visit to Attorney General Ashcroft in his hospital bed had something to do with this assurance that the CIA was seeking that they wouldn't be prosecuted.
Is that right?
Well, I think that's a little bit different.
That really relates to the telecommunications industry.
Oh, right, right.
I'm sorry.
I'm mixing up my personal interest here.
But let's get all that out, because I think that's extremely interesting.
The telecommunications industry had been asked to allow physical devices to be installed in some of their switches that would allow U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor traffic, telephone calls, emails, internet access, and things of that sort.
And I think as their general counsel looked at it, they said, well, you know, what you're asking us to do is illegal, because the FISA Act says you've got to have warrants for these things, and you haven't given us any warrants.
And I think the general counsel went back and said, look, we at least want you to get the attorney general's signature on an opinion or document telling us that this is okay, that this is authorized, because the FISA Act does have provisions in it that give the attorney general this extraordinary interim authority to approve things.
And he also is the officer who gives legal opinions on behalf of the government.
So they were saying, look, can you bring us a piece of paper that the attorney general has signed, and we'll go ahead with it, but not without that.
And that's the reason for this rush to the hospital bed of John Ashcroft to get his signature on the document.
Let's just stop and think about this for a moment.
John Ashcroft was sedated under tremendous pain, and he had turned over the responsibilities of attorney general to James Comey.
So they were trying to get him to sign a document holding himself out as attorney general when he was not and was not exercising the authority of the attorney general.
So if they were going to do that and use it with the phone companies, they were doing something unethical.
Well, and they've said now that it's all state secrets that if Scott Horton wants to have a client, wants to file a lawsuit on behalf of a client who thinks he's been wiretapped or what have you, you can't take them to court over this because state secrets would be revealed in the trial.
So if the administration has their way, even I guess the Supreme Court would not be able to review whether this new bill just passed and signed by the president basically legalizing all this stuff is unconstitutional or not.
I think that's right.
I mean, let's just go back and use the circumstances when they invoke state secrecy.
The most common circumstance we're seeing all the time is when they commit a crime.
So they're wiretapping people, they're engaged in surveillance without a warrant, that's a felony, and they don't want the fact of their criminal conduct disclosed.
Or they're torturing people, as in Guantanamo, because the transcripts that come out of Guantanamo are all redacted.
When they ask people, if something was done to you that you think is torture, describe what was done.
They're redacted, okay, because they don't want to provide evidence of criminal conduct.
And then the other instance in which we see it being used is when it would be politically embarrassing to the White House, the political leadership of the country.
Now, those are completely improper uses of state secrecy, but those are about the only uses that this administration, the only circumstances in which it invokes a state secrecy.
And then let's go back and look at this case involving FISA surveillance.
They told a court, the Ninth Circuit and the federal court in California, that all this stuff was highly secret.
No information could be given out about it.
And then Mike McConnell gives an interview with the El Paso Times down in Texas, in which he, over four pages, lays it all out in tremendous detail.
That's the national intelligence director.
That's exactly right.
So it's secret in that we don't want you court to know about it, but if we think it advances our political case in some way, we'll set it out in all detail.
Nothing is a secret.
So it's, you know, completely, you know, I just say, astonishing use of the state secrets document.
And I think this is the reason why we see judges all across the country raising eyebrows and expressing extreme skepticism when they invoke this.
And I'd say that's entirely appropriate.
Well, and it's the courts that made up the state secrets privilege in the first place, so they can ignore that point of view being put forward by the executive branch if they want, right?
I think that's right.
It was judicially created, and it needs now to be judicially compliant.
I think it was designed for extreme circumstances, and the problem is now that the Bush administration uses it at the drop of a hat all the time.
Whenever they think something's about to embarrass them, they pull out their penalty marker and throw it down and say, this game is over.
And you, court, are not even allowed to look at things.
And I think they've been doing this now for four years, and I think the courts are just about up to here with it.
I have to admit, I never even heard of the state secrets privilege until the Bush administration.
I thought that was, it was kind of on my list of the things that make our legal system different from the one in Great Britain, is they have this Official Secrets Act, and we don't.
We're a free country with a constitution and a bill of rights.
Exactly correct.
I mean, if you go back and you check on Google for state secrets, you're going to find it's being used in Britain all the time.
And it belongs to the legal regime of Great Britain.
And in the United States, it's something that's extremely rare and almost unheard of.
But of course, what Bush and Alberto Gonzalez have been trying to do, really for, you know, four or five years now, is introduce the British State Secrets Act system.
And of course, that's something that works just fine.
It's for a country that doesn't have a tradition of constitutionally protected free speech that we have.
Scott Horton, International Human Rights Lawyer, No Comment Blog at Harper's Magazine.
Can I keep you for another 10, 15 minutes here?
Absolutely.
Okay, great.
I want to talk about Iran.
You wrote a blog entry under No Comment Blog recently, which we actually ran in the Viewpoint section at antiwar.com, I think yesterday, and maybe the day before.
And you list quite a few reasons to believe that we are headed toward a strike against Iran within perhaps the next six months or a little more than that.
And I kind of wondered whether, you know, we can tie this all together with what's going on with the situation in Iraq.
You characterize Bush's speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars as his Weimar speech, the stabbed in the back speech, everything's going great, except for the people who are against the war are going to ruin everything for us.
And of course, the Vietnam analogy and all that.
And we've seen a lot of talk recently about, and as you've noted also on No Comment, about Maliki being replaced, perhaps with Iyad al-Alawi.
And I just wonder if we can kind of discuss this in the context of what Seymour Hersh calls the redirection, the stab in the back of the Shia that America has installed and protected in power all these years in Iraq, and moving back toward our Sunni Arab allies in an effort to contain the influence of Iran.
I guess if we could start with this Weimar speech here, this VFW speech, the stab in the back.
You compared this to the German propaganda after World War I, that this is the only reason we lost is because the civilian leadership stabbed our heroic soldiers in the back.
That's right.
I mean, that's especially associated with Erich Ludendorff, you know, who was one of the major military leaders during World War I.
And first of all, it's completely untrue because, of course, Germany at the end of World War I was just a military dictatorship, and Ludendorff and Hindenburg were running the country together with the Kaiser.
The political leadership had been basically thrust into a corner and silenced.
And so they lost that war completely on their own with all the resources of the state behind them.
But I think they realized after the war that there really was no more effective tool you could use to silence your political adversaries than this, because if they say anything back, you'll say you're disparaging the soldiers, you're disparaging the military.
And you know, in Germany, of course, the military was a sacrosanct institution.
And since that time, this idea of stab in the back has been viewed as politically one of the most powerful propaganda tools or weapons that can be wielded.
And William Crystal is one of the people who's written and talked about this, in fact, and he's advocated using it, and lo and behold, he uses it in articles and the Weekly Standard.
Now we're seeing it as a centerpiece of Bush's speeches, you know, the American Legion and VFW speeches, for instance.
But we ought to come back and talk specifically about the issues in Iraq and Iran right now.
And I think there really is a very serious prospect of a new war being started against Iran right now.
Iran, of course, is a nation of 70 million.
It's, you know, much more formidable power than Iraq is.
But you know, what's driving us towards this, you know, there seems to be a sense within the White House that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which I think is correct, and is developing delivery systems, which is probably true, but they're probably sometime back.
But there's also a recognition that this is not something that's really imminent, but there is a real clock on the amount of time that Bush has got left in office.
And Cheney and many of his people feel that this is the last administration for a while that'll be able to take decisive action, so it'll be us or no one.
So they're really pushing and pressing for this military action.
I'm kind of surprised to hear you say you think they are working on a bomb.
I saw George Bush just two weeks ago, I guess, one day he said, oh, they've openly declared they're going to make a nuclear bomb, and then a day or two later he came out and said, well, the fear is that if they continue working on the uranium enrichment program they have now, that that could lead to them beginning to create a nuclear weapons program, basically admitting that they don't have one.
Well, I think that's exactly right.
It's not that they have one, but that they aspire to have one, that's a different question.
And you know, and I think as it stands right now, let's assume that this program that they have running continues to accelerate a good bit.
We're probably talking about, you know, 18 to 20 months before there's enough enriched uranium for a bomb, but that's one bomb, mind you.
And then you've got, you have the whole delivery system issue, and you know, if you're really going to be anything like a nuclear power, you certainly need a lot more than one bomb.
So practically speaking, we're talking about several years.
So it's, you know, beyond, so we're talking about this threat arising on the horizon sometime after George Bush's term in office leaves.
That's the key point here.
Well, and they'd have to kick out, they'd have to withdraw from the NPT and kick out the IAEA before they even started enriching to a high enough grade to make a bomb out of it, right?
Well, I think that's right.
I mean, there is time, but I would say, you know, you need to be weary of these people, and Ahmadinejad is, I think, is a very, very dangerous figure and certainly aspires to have this kind of armament.
I think also, you know, he's got no better friend in the world today than Dick Cheney because, you know, his position within his own country was deteriorating very, very rapidly, and he needs this enemy from abroad in order to maintain his grasp on power.
So you know, I mean, I think Ahmadinejad and Cheney are like, you know, babies separated at birth.
Yeah, peas in a pod, those two.
They feed off of one another.
Now, so do you think that all this talk about a coup against Maliki and his replacement by Alawi is part of this, what Hirsch calls the redirection preparation for a move against Iran?
I'm not quite sure what to make about all of this.
You know, as I noted, you know, I heard beginning about three weeks ago down in Washington, I kept hearing from people that there's a lot of money flowing around all of a sudden being spread out by Alawi and that he'd engaged, you know, Haley Barbour's old PR organization and a number of others.
And I sort of dismissed that when I first heard it.
And then I started looking at the newspapers all of a sudden I see he's running an op-ed in the Washington Post, he's on CNN, he's on Fox, he's all over the place.
And then I start hearing all these political figures standing up saying, you know, Maliki needs to go and isn't Alawi a wonderful person.
I mean, and by the way, this is not just Republicans.
I mean, this is all across the political spectrum.
I mean, after all, we had Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin make these statements as well.
And I, you know, of course, I think what we all need to be suspicious of is, you know, is this money being spread around in Washington, D.C. and talking?
You know, that would point to a real corruption of our democratic institutions.
But I think aside from all that, you know, there are real problems with Maliki.
I mean, you know, he has a narrowly based government, his government's falling apart.
And the problem, the biggest problem we've got in Iraq today, you know, it's not the U.S. military failing to fulfill its mission.
I think, you know, the U.S. military does exactly what it has to do and does it very, very well.
It's the political side of things.
You know, their mission is to create an environment in which this government can consolidate power and strengthen itself.
But instead, what's happening is we see a centrifuge going on.
I mean, this government is falling apart and spinning apart.
So it doesn't really make any difference what the U.S. forces are doing on the ground or what successes they achieve.
The political objective is nowhere in sight.
Right.
Well, and see, that's the whole thing, too, is you have this nonsense strategy and you can have tactical things on the ground that actually do, quote, unquote, work, like, you know, Al Qaeda has overstayed their welcome and killed far too many civilians and they finally get the local Sunni tribal militias and so forth fighting against them.
And America takes all the credit for that and starts farming and financing them.
But of course, that doesn't help create a situation to bring them into the government.
That only makes them stronger for resisting the domination of the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council, which they've been doing a great job of resisting all this time.
So it's one step forward, two steps back.
Yeah.
You know, I think there have been important successes by the U.S. forces in Al-Anbar and in Diyala province.
But I think you have to also step back and look.
Well, a lot of these successes are achieved by taking groups and units that we defined as the enemy and suddenly saying they're not the enemy and they're our friends and we'll support them.
And of course, as soon as you do that and you change the label, then we've achieved a big success, you know, not to take away from them that, you know, that there have been.
I think there's been a big step forward, especially in Al-Anbar and turning people against some of these foreign terrorist organizations.
That also points to the complexity of the political problem you have in Iraq, where, you know, it's not the U.S. fighting against Al-Qaeda and that's the whole struggle.
The situation is incredibly complex and difficult with dozens of different rival groups and bands that, you know, reconstitute and realign themselves on a weekly basis.
It's an impossible situation to work with.
Now, about labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards terrorists, you're an international law expert.
When I interviewed Ron Paul the Friday before last, I asked him if he was concerned that the administration had done this in order that they could try to use the authorization to use military force against Osama bin Laden and those who attacked us on 9-11 and to try to bring in the Iranian government under that umbrella of international terrorism, that Bush might actually be able to refer back to that original authorization to use force from September 2001 as his legal cover for starting another aggressive war, this time against Iran.
And Ron Paul said he was concerned that that was exactly what they were trying to do there.
Is that plausible to you, that they would try to use the original authorization to go after bin Laden in Afghanistan to bomb Iran?
I think there are a lot of people in Congress who are concerned about exactly that.
In fact, there's been an initiative put forward to impose some limitations on the authorization for use of force to ensure that something like that doesn't happen.
And I think this is a pretty complex situation.
Let me just say, first of all, I have no doubt that the Revolutionary Guard had been involved in terrorist practices.
That goes back a long time.
I mean, the attack on the American Marines in Beirut, for instance, all sorts of terrible things that they've done in Lebanon and elsewhere.
So they have a long track record of that.
And on that point, of course, it's a valid point.
On the other hand, they're a part of the Iranian state.
They report directly to the Iranian president.
One of the tactical maneuvers that was available to the Supreme Leader, not to the president, and one of the maneuvers that was available to the government was bypassing Ahmadinejad and dealing with Khatami.
And of course, by doing that, you foreclose that as a possibility.
And also, when you label the armed forces of another state as terrorists, you're raising questions about whether you're going to abide by the laws of war, because the laws of war require that the armed forces of another state that you attack have to be treated in accordance with certain standards.
And the U.S. has abated that at several points in the past.
So all this raises a lot of issues.
I would just say in the end that, you know, in my mind, there's no doubt that we're dealing with real bad dudes in Iran and that there's a great threat in Iran.
The question is, what's the most effective way of dealing with that threat?
And you know, I'm far from convinced that these sorts of taunts and threats are the most effective way of dealing with them.
We got to remember that in Iran proper and, you know, in this entire region, you've only got one country where a very large part of the population likes the United States.
That's Iran.
That's a tremendous asset.
We should be working with that asset to achieve the results we want in Iran.
And you're never going to achieve that by launching an air war on them.
What you'll do is unite that entire people around their loco leaders.
Yeah, well, and even the propaganda about, well, we're going to try to, we are going to try to help the pro-American, pro-democracy forces in Iran, just marginalizes them and labels them as all dupes of the CIA and hurts them.
Seems like the best way to help them is to ignore them completely.
Right.
Which, you know, which resulted in a bunch of Americans being imprisoned there.
You know, of course, that was also a bit of tit for tat for a bunch of Iranians that we seized and who we seized and imprisoned in Iraq.
So that sort of game has been going on on the back burner for a long time, too.
And, you know, that's something that Dick Cheney has been deeply involved in.
Now, in terms of labeling the Revolutionary Guards, the forces, I'm only asking you to speculate here unless you have sources who told you or something.
But do you think that this is why they labeled Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist forces so that they can use the authorization to use force against bin Laden and them as their legal cover?
Is that the most obvious purpose for this?
I think that is a potential purpose.
You know, I'm not convinced that it's the first purpose, but I think this step does make it easier for them to launch a war if they want to.
And I think the other thing to really look at will be this use of new generation of improvised explosive devices in Iraq.
They've several times tried to try it out and make the case that all of this has to do with the Iranians, that they're behind it, they've supplied them, they're behind it.
There is some evidence for this.
Of course, you know, Iran is not the only country, foreign country, that's involved in Iraq.
You know, Saudi Arabia is involved, a lot of Saudi money backing terrorists there, too, and we're not making threats about invading Saudi Arabia.
So I think, you know, if we see them making that case, you know, that's going to be the casus belli that will be used.
And then the new status given to the Revolutionary Guard will make it a lot easier for them to launch the attack.
Yep, I think that's exactly right.
I think they've kind of given up on trying to claim that a nuclear weapon is imminent, and so they've kind of switched which lie they're going to use to justify the war.
And you know, I'd just like to throw in here, it's been reported over and over and over again in Western media from Iraq that American soldiers have found EFP factories in Iraq.
So the whole assertion basically comes down to, well, these bombs must be being made in Iran because the Iraqis surely couldn't be making them, but that's just not true.
And moreover, the number one supplier of arms to these terrorist organizations operating in Iraq is the United States.
They've come from supply defoes that we left unguarded.
That's right.
That was you, wasn't it, that cited a military study that said that the majority, was it the majority of the American deaths and woundings and so forth are coming from American supplied weapons?
That's right.
And then there's more being supplied from Saudi Arabia than Iran.
So it's not, so I think you can't say that Iran isn't involved and isn't up to mischief, they are, but everybody is, frankly.
Now you also talk about in your blog entry at harpers.org, preparation for a dirty war.
The branding of the Revolutionary Guard as terrorist raises troubling prospects.
It would mean that they are denied the Geneva Convention.
I guess that's what you just mentioned, right, that this would turn the laws of war from the laws of war between nation states to Geneva's quaint and doesn't apply.
That's exactly right.
And of course, you know, we didn't apply the Geneva Conventions properly to operations in Afghanistan.
Then when we got to Iraq, we had mixed application.
I would say there was general application going in initially, but very quickly after the occupation began, there were very serious lapses in application of the Geneva Conventions, which embarrassed us a lot.
I mean, that's what led to Abu Ghraib, for instance, and a number of other things that happened there.
And, you know, and that was a result of decisions that were taken in the White House, you know, not by the uniformed military who wanted to apply those Geneva rules.
And, you know, the question is, is there a plan now to wage a war with Iran again not applying the Geneva Conventions?
And we're already over time here.
So last one really quickly here, you talk about the American military pushing contractors for unit costs.
This seems to be implying ground operations, not just airstrikes.
Yeah, I think, I mean, I've been told consistently that it's going to be an aerial war, but you can't do it without at least a minimal presence on the ground.
You know, they have to be able to paint sites, guide missiles, do follow up detection and so forth.
There's going to be some sort of presence on the ground, too, I think.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, there's a new story by Larissa Alexandra from that Raw story today about this British study that talked about absolute full scale war against every part, every facet of the regime, their nuclear program, their military.
And this number just did not sound right to me, 10,000 targets.
That sounds like far, far more than we were talking about with Wayne White six months ago.
So I don't know.
I don't know exactly.
But in that story, apparently these British scholars have come forward and are predicting a massive attack against Iran here.
We should all be concerned about it.
Well, we are.
And thankfully, we have you as a great source of information, always ahead of the curve.
Scott Horton, contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.
The blog is No Comment.
Thanks very much for your time today, Scott, appreciate it.
Take care.
