All right, folks, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 927-959 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Chris Hedges.
He's a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, lecturer and distinguished fellow at Princeton University.
He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who's reported from more than 50 countries and covered, I think it was 14 wars for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, the Dallas Morning News, was the Mid-East Bureau Chief of the New York Times for 15 years, he wrote for them.
He's the author of one of the most important books I've ever read, which is titled War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
Also, What Every Person Should Know About War, Losing Moses on the Freeway, the Ten Commandments in America, American Fascists, the Christian Right, and the War on America, and is co-author with Lila Al-Aryan, Collateral Damage, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
He holds a master's degree of divinity from Harvard, is fluent in at least six languages, and currently writes for Foreign Affairs, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Granta, Mother Jones, and Truthdig.
I encourage all of you also to check out my previous interview of Mr. Hedges from July 2005 at scottwortonshow.com on the topic of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
It's also available in my article archives at antiwar.com under the headline Individualism versus War.
Welcome to the show, Chris.
Thank you.
Wow, that's quite an introduction.
I was thinking last night when I was going through this, wow, there are some people who accomplish some things in life, and then there are other people who are just Michael Jordan compared to the rest of the guys on the court, I guess, if you know what I mean.
Well, thank you.
Now, your most recent article for Truthdig is called Outsourcing Torture, and in it you describe the people turned over to the Egyptians in our government's extraordinary rendition process, and you say they're dropped neatly into the same system of imprisonment and torture that the Egyptian government already uses on their domestic dissidents.
Yes, I mean, you know, I sat and watched this farce of the Bush administration, including the first lady, calling for respect for human rights in Burma, which was a safe piece of posturing and allowed us to, I think, ignore the complicity and alliance that we've built with some of the most venal dictatorships around the world.
We, of course, through extraordinary rendition, this process of kidnapping and detaining terrorist suspects and whisking them off to secret prisons around the world, fits neatly with the contempt for due process that regimes such as the Egyptian regime have.
The very physical act of capturing these figures is indistinguishable, whether the abductors are American or Egyptian.
They are hooded and taken off to these black holes.
They vanish in these black holes just as swiftly as dissident Egyptians.
It's exactly the same dirty and seamless process, and there's no difference now between what we do and what dictatorships such as the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt does.
Well, you know, it's really nice outside when I look out the window.
And I'm reminded of something Noam Chomsky said, and I don't usually quote him very often on this show, but something I remember him saying back in the 1990s was, we don't judge the Soviet Union by how people lived in the suburbs outside of Moscow.
We judge the Soviet Union by how the people lived in the satellite countries, the victims of the empire.
And if we judge America the same way, not by how people live in Austin, Texas, or in Georgetown outside of DC, but instead how people live in the tyrannies that we prop up around the world, we get quite a different picture, don't we?
Yes.
Well, I'm going to mangle this quote, but I think it was Nelson Mandela who said that you can finally only understand a country by looking at its prisons.
And I think that's increasingly true for us, not only in terms of the numbers of people we incarcerate, but of course, the treatment that we give to those we incarcerate, which increasingly is a treatment, you know, whether they're immigrants or whether they're people who are branded as enemy combatants, includes a complete disregard for international treaties and due process.
Well, geez, you could go ahead and throw in the couple of million people in American prisons too for regular crimes, even ones who are really guilty of crimes, pretty much denied all humanity and dignity and still, even in that totalitarian system of an American prison, still vulnerable to all sorts of violent attack and everything else.
Yes.
And, you know, it was Thucydides who wrote quite astutely at the decline of the Athenian empire, you know, as Athens became an imperial force, that the tyranny that Athens imposed on others, it eventually imposed on itself.
And I think that this growing disregard for due process, for international conventions and treaties, for, in essence, the rule of law, is one that is already seeping into the domestic society and contributing to the complete breakdown and ultimately eradication of American democracy.
And what we're seeing is a coup d'etat in slow motion.
It's republic or empire, you can't have it both ways.
Well, and you also can't have oligarchy and democracy.
You know, and again, going back to the ancient Greeks and writers like Plutarch, they got that as well as Thucydides, that when you create an oligarchic society or an oligarchy, democracy becomes impossible.
We already live in a country where the top 1% controls more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
I mean, this alone should terrify all of us who care about the open society.
And with the solidification of the corporate and the oligarchic state and the disenfranchisement of the American working class and now increasingly the middle class, the values and liberties that however stunted and imperfect they have been throughout American history, as they were of course in ancient Athens where women were disempowered and it was a slave society, are being eradicated.
And we are moving in a very frightening way towards a kind of despotism that is going to make this country unrecognizable.
And already, as you say, the connections are direct.
Here we have American kidnappers delivering the kidnapped to Egyptian prisons to be tortured.
This is not hyperbole, this is happening right now.
You know, not only Egyptian, Moroccan, Jordanian, Romanian, I mean these sort of secret interrogation centers or secret detention facilities are now dotting the globe.
It's funny, too, they reported that, oh, we closed all the ghost prisons and brought them to Guantanamo.
They brought, what, 15 guys to Guantanamo, but meanwhile all the press reports from at least in the foreign papers said that there were more than 10,000 ghost detainees in secret prisons around the world.
Right, we don't know.
But I think it's pretty clear and we know from reporting by Sy Hirsch and others that this, you know, this system or this network of ghost prisons, as you call them, are alive and well.
I didn't make up ghost prisons.
And I wondered whether they call them that just because they're secret or because they murder so many people in there that they're haunted.
Well, we don't know.
We know we get snapshots of it.
You know, there are people who have been released, for instance, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who was captured by U.S. forces in 2001.
He was a minor al-Qaeda commander and he was taken to Cairo where he says he was reportedly tortured by Egyptian officials.
And that case became interesting because the interrogators or the torturers told the CIA that he had confirmed a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
And that little tidbit was used by Colin Powell in his United Nations speech.
It turned out to be false.
You know, those of us who have interviewed torture victims have heard repeatedly that they will say anything to make the torture stop.
He was eventually returned to Afghanistan, although now he's since disappeared again.
So, I mean, we get little, you know, insights when people are released who, you know, describe to us the internal workings of this process.
And, you know, people might remember the article, Case Closed by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard was based on this guy's tortured testimony where I guess they even had some photographs of a plane that Saddam Hussein had at a training camp somewhere.
And of course, the plane was there for training in counter-terrorism, how to seize back a hijacked airplane.
And they tortured this guy, al-Libi, into saying, yeah, see, here's Saddam Hussein teaching al-Qaeda terrorists how to hijack planes.
We had a war over this, hundreds of thousands dead over this man's tortured testimony, Mr.
Hedges.
Right.
Well, torture is a very ineffective instrument for getting information because while you may initially get information that's useful, the more you keep torturing, the more fantastic these stories become just to sort of make it stop.
And I think that when you look at al-Libi's testimony, it's a classic example of how ultimately ineffectual torture is and how really useless it is as an instrument.
Unfortunately, it's an instrument that we have now sanctioned and adopted as a country and are using to prosecute or engage in preemptive wars around the globe or, you know, using information, for instance, like al-Libi to justify preemptive wars around the globe.
And I almost hate to bring this up because in a way, it's sort of just a shock value thing.
And this kind of really brings some further ideas home, some deeper concepts about I think where we are today here in October of 2007.
You write in your article on Truthdig that a man named Mamda Habib, an Australian citizen, as he was being renditioned, was threatened with rape by specially trained dogs.
Yeah.
He did not, quote, admit that he was a member of al-Qaeda?
Yeah.
He was beaten frequently with blunt instruments, including an object that he likened to an electric prod, and as you said, if he didn't confess to belonging, al-Qaeda would be anally raped by it.
This is his testimony.
The Washington Post wrote this story up, actually, and he was returned to U.S. custody after time in an Egyptian prison and flown to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo Bay where he was kept until his release.
This was another example of what thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people are enduring at American hands around the globe.
Now see, I think it's likely that some people would guess that, well, if this kind of terrible stuff is happening, it's probably only to the few who are the real terrorists, the real bad guys, friends of bin Laden and so forth.
But if we're talking about thousands and thousands of people here, it sounds almost just like fishing expeditions.
See what we can get these people to say while we're yanking their fingernails out.
Well, it's pretty clear.
We know from Guantanamo that the vast majority of these people who picked up had a minimal role in al-Qaeda and in the groups that oppose us.
I did an article, which, as you mentioned, will become a book later.
We interviewed for The Nation 50 combat veterans on the record and wrote this 15,000-word piece, which you can read online at The Nation.
They were going blind through Iraq.
They didn't know, you know, the intelligence was negligible and often nonexistent.
They just took huge cordons and hauled people away in hoods with plastic handcuffs.
What was the title of that article again at The Nation?
The Other War.
The Other War, that's right.
We talked about that on the show.
I wish I'd had you on then.
Yeah, that was in the July 30th, August 6th issue of The Nation.
Okay.
I'll try to remember to mention that at the end of today's interview as well here.
Now, you're a world traveler, Chris Hedges.
Tell me a little bit about Egypt.
I've never been there.
What's it like?
What's the regime like?
Who's Hosni Mubarak, and how loyal of an ally is he to the United States?
Well, Mubarak is an Air Force general.
He's ruled Egypt for 26 years.
He's now in the process of grooming his son, Gamal, to succeed him.
He's deeply reviled by the vast majority of Egyptians, which is why his regime has become increasingly more repressive, including we're beginning to hear reports of the disappearance of dissidents, such as the Egyptian journalist Reda Khalil, who vanished four years ago.
American censure is tepid or non-existent because, of course, Mubarak handles for us those we disappear, or the Egyptian regime has a tremendous amount of U.S. support because, of course, it has a peace treaty and diplomatic relations with Israel.
They've subsidized the armed forces with about $40 billion in aid.
Egypt receives $2 billion annually, $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, and about $815 million in economic and support fund assistance.
It's the second largest recipient of conventional U.S. military and economic aid after Israel.
And for all of the sort of pious declarations about democracy and human rights, our close alliance with regimes such as the Saudi regime or the Egyptian regime, our refusal to engage Israel in a just and equitable solution for the Palestinians renders our hypocrisy in the Middle East, you know, makes it deeply obvious and renders the words that we utter about human rights hollow and probably obscene.
How does it rank as a police state on a scale between, I don't know, say, Houston, Texas and East Germany?
That's kind of arbitrary, I know.
Well, it's definitely a police state.
I mean, the annual budget for internal security in 2006 was $1.5 billion.
That was more than the entire national budget in Egypt for health care.
The security police forces have an estimated 1.4 million members.
That's nearly four times the size of the Egyptian army.
So as police states go, it's pretty high up on the list.
Is it the kind of place where if you keep your head down, you'd probably be all right or you're just as likely to get dragged off as well?
Well, in police states, you know, terror is pervasive and there is no protection for being innocent.
That, of course, is what keeps people cowed and silent.
So, you know, I lived in Egypt for four years.
I covered the Middle East for seven.
And it's, you know, if you're hauled into an Egyptian police station, you can be pretty sure you're going to be pretty badly beaten moments after you get there.
You know, the abuse that has become endemic within the regime is pervasive and touches the innocent and the so-called guilty alike.
Chris Hedges, it sounds as though we found the Islamofascists and they are us.
Yeah, they are us.
You know, Mubarak is us.
He's who we work with.
He's who we have become and are becoming.
And our despotic movements have nothing to offer other than fear.
But fear is a powerful motivating factor in a society that suffered collective humiliation and feels vulnerable and wants to be safe.
And you know, that has distorted and destroyed Egypt and is distorting and destroying the United States.
Okay, now, forget the neoconservatives, but wouldn't a realist American foreign policy establishment type person argue that, hey, listen, it's either Mubarak or it's the Muslim Brotherhood.
We have to back him.
He is, as much as he's a monster, a fascist military general, as you described, he's better than them.
Well, I think you end up with a situation like the Shah in Iran.
The more you stunt and repress popular aspirations, the more people turn to the radical French.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not al-Qaeda.
Look, I'm no fan of Islamic fundamentalism, let's be clear.
But the Muslim Brotherhood is a much more palatable alternative than the radical Salafist or these fringe groups that are deeply fanatic.
If we support democracy, then that means we're going to have to work with regimes that we don't necessarily like.
But the more we repress popular aspirations, the more people turn to fanatics and radicals who speak the language of violence, which is pretty much the language we use to speak to the rest of the world.
And I think the classic example is Iran.
We clung to the Shah, who became more and more repressive.
And we ended up with Ayatollah Khomeini and Ahmadinejad and these whacked-out clerics.
And that, of course, went all the way back to overthrowing Mossadegh, who attempted to take control of his country's natural resources, his oil industry, and ran afoul of large oil interests.
Yes, that kind of alliance with a despot like Mubarak works in the short term, but in the long term it's disastrous.
I guess if we just put the shoe on the other foot, I think about how much I detest, say, for example, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, and I think, wow, what if he was the puppet military dictator of the Egyptian empire from across the ocean?
I think I would probably be at war against him.
Yeah.
I mean, I think these people are, you know, in Egypt, and we are seeing, of course, increasing resistance in Egypt.
And this has led Mubarak to unleash, you know, the largest crackdown on public opposition over a decade.
Not only are dissidents such as Hillel disappearing, but there have been a series of journalists who have been arrested.
The leading human rights organization in the country has been shut down.
You know, there have been, Mubarak has sent in riot police to arrest dozens of striking labor union leaders.
I think there's more than a thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood who have been tossed in jail in the last few weeks, and these journalists who've been sent to prison have been charged with, you know, absurd crimes, you know, they're not crimes, but with absurdities, like misquoting the Egyptian justice minister, or spreading rumors about the health of Mubarak, or defaming the designated heir, his son, Gamal.
You know, that, I think, is an indication of how tyrannical and despotic the Egyptian regime has become.
And there are increasingly persistent rumors of death squads that are, you know, whisking away the regime's most outspoken critics.
They don't even bother coming up with bogus charges, actual charges, jaywalking or anything.
They actually charge people with spreading rumors about the president's health?
Yeah.
You know, the rumor about, I mean, we don't know what happened to Rita Hillel, who was, you know, a major figure, but the rumor is that he was making jokes about Gamal Mubarak's sexual preferences, and he vanished.
You know, we lost, last month, the Association for Human Rights and Legal Aid, which was the most important human rights society in Egypt.
Its doors were closed by the government.
They're, you know, and the United States remains mute.
I mean, you know, we wax sort of morally indignant, you know, when monks are being shot in Burma.
But in countries where we have tremendous amounts of influence, like Egypt, we do nothing.
I'm interested, too, in the blowback factor, I guess, like you talked about, repressing the Muslim Brotherhood makes them more dangerous, rather than less, and so forth.
I'm reminded of the story of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was a radical dissident and a dangerous person already, but when he came out of Egyptian torture prison, he was a mad bomber at war with the West.
Yeah.
You know, prisons around the world and tyrannical or dictatorial states have a habit of radicalizing their inmates.
That's not a new phenomenon.
You know, it goes all the way back to Tsarist Russia.
So yeah, I mean, there is a tremendous blowback factor, and these are very myopic and narrow and short-term measures which ultimately will result in a terrible conflagration, you know, both within Egypt and throughout the Middle East.
Okay.
Now, I know you have to go here pretty soon, so I just wanted to ask you this last question about the United States.
Our society here.
Where is the outrage?
How is it that America, the land of liberty, is supporting fascist, torturous tyrannies around the world and, you know, I guess some maybe a fifth or certainly less than half of the American people care at all?
Well, I think Neil Postman got it right in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Ah, Neil Postman fan, huh?
I like that guy.
Oh, he's great.
And I think that, you know, we have, you know, become sort of willfully ignorant and willfully passive, and we'll pay for it.
And I think when societies break down, when despotic movements are on the rise, we see the classic kind of bankruptcy within the opposition within the Democratic Party that was elected after all, you know, in the House and the Senate to end the war, and it is clearly not going to end the war.
It hasn't even moved to restore habeas corpus.
I think there's a deadly kind of cynicism and a self-indulgence that has led people to essentially give up.
And it's frightening because it has empowered the worst among us.
You know, it's that old Yates line, that the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
And I think that that has indeed what has beset the United States.
Our emotional life is invested in entertainment.
And of course, news is now entertainment.
You know, that entertainment has poisoned the civil and political discourse.
You know, we have this disastrous war in Iraq.
It virtually never appears on our television screens.
And we are fed gossip and trivia about Britney Spears or O.J.
Simpson or Anna Nicole Smith that, you know, it's passed to us as news.
You know, that especially for those of us who come out of the world of journalism is disheartening and frightening.
Well, it certainly is.
I hope you don't mind if I beg my audience to run out and get War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
It's the most important book I've ever read, I think.
And I've read a lot of really good books by Chalmers Johnson and all kinds of great people.
But this is the kind of thing that'll just, you'll pick it up and not put it down until you're done.
And it's really something else.
And I encourage everybody to check out As Much as You Can by Chris Hedges.
He writes for Foreign Affairs, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Granta, Mother Jones, and Truthdig.
You can find all his books at Amazon.com and you'll be able to find the links from this blog entry at Antiwar.com when the archive is posted up later.
I want to thank you very much for your time today, Chris Hedges.
Thanks for having me.
