07/10/12 – David Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest today is David Swanson.
His books include War is a Lie and Daybreak.
He blogs at davidswanson.org and warisacrime.org.
That used to be after Downing Street.
Remember when the Downing Street memos came out and it was the head of British intelligence, the head of MI6, from his smithers, his notes on their meeting with Bush and Blair, that we have decided we're going to make up whatever lies we need to, to make it seem true that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction so we can justify invading the country we want to invade anyway?
Yeah, and it was right there in their thing.
So yeah, Downing Street, after Downing Street.
We were supposed to impeach and remove the president, but that never happened.
But anyway, so now it's warisacrime.org and he's, as I said, the author of War is a Lie and he hosts Talk Nation Radio.
I didn't know that.
This article is Veterans for Peace Supports UN Committee in Questioning U.S. Recruitment Killing of Children at dissidentvoice.org.
Whoa.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Good to be here.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Yeah, it's been way too long since we've spoken.
And what an occasion to do so.
I'll tell you, I don't like the UN and I don't like them poking around in my country's business.
But then again, I recognize that the U.S. government is the most corrupt and murderous on the face of the planet.
So I'm open to hearing their criticisms anyway.
Go ahead.
What the hell is this about recruitment and killing children?
Well, the United States, as you may know, is one of three countries that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The other two, in whose stellar company we are, are Somalia and South Sudan.
And yet the United States has ratified and is a party to an optional protocol to that treaty, which addresses the rights of children in armed conflict and puts in place strict protections on recruitment of anyone under 18 into the military, which must be strictly voluntary and with consent of parents and so forth.
And the members of this protocol must send periodic reports into, yes, an evil international body, but one that got Iraq right and Afghanistan right, as opposed to how the United States has gotten these wars.
And so this Committee on the Protection of Children in Armed Conflict has sent a report back to the United States just last week, and the U.S. has until November to reply, raising a big series of concerns.
Now, this is not strictly up to the standards of how, for example, African war criminals are treated.
We just saw one convicted within the past day of taking children into war.
But the concerns include how the United States recruits, the fact that it has these junior ROTC programs, that it has these tests, these standardized tests, the ASVAB, American Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, tests that are given to hundreds of thousands of kids in our schools, and they aren't told it's for the military, but the results are funneled to the recruiters, giving them all kinds of ammunition, for lack of a better word, for recruiting kids.
And it raises concerns about all these areas of recruitment, and also about how many children have been killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq by our wars, and has it been justifiable and proportional and so forth, and concerns about how many children are imprisoned by the United States under President Obama in recent years in Afghanistan, and children who have been or are unlawfully detained and abused in Guantanamo, as well as the United States arming foreign nations that are well known to employ child soldiers and so forth.
I mean, it's a long list of concerns, at the very same time that the United States is talking up the possibility of yet more wars in the name of human rights.
It's quite a contrast.
Yeah, that's, what a legacy, huh?
Yeah, you know, this one just happens to bother me, is, I like watching the skateboarding on the TV, since I don't get out too much myself anymore these days, but there's a Navy or Marine Corps commercial at every single break, and I'm thinking, well, I don't know, skater kids, they're my kin, you know, that's my tribe, is the skater kids of the world, and the military's picking on them and lying to them and trying to make this seem all very normal, you know, and it's not.
It's wrong.
It's stupid.
It's crazy.
And especially skater kids, at least when I was a kid, we were the outcasts, we were in trouble, that's why we were skaters or whatever, and so to think that any skater kids would grow up to join the military at all, to me, is just crazy, but especially, see, I mean, you watch the X Games on TV, I'm, believe me, the right end of that bell curve on the age list there, you know, most people watching that are probably 12 years old with their mouth hanging open and their eyes wide getting brainwashed.
Indeed, the military goes to great lengths in this country to indoctrinate children, and it doesn't care which children or what type of children, as long as they might go into the military, so of course there's more emphasis in poor areas of the country and poor rural and urban neighborhoods, but you have events happening around the country that we saw these on Flag Day and on July 4th with new recruits and soldiers and ROTC and JROTC and Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, and you have giant inflatable soldiers bouncing around and toys for the children, along with weapons for the soldiers.
We have uniformed generals going into kindergartens.
We have the military investing in video game development and production and Hollywood movies.
You have a budget of billions of dollars a year for advertising.
We're just today, as we speak, at RootsAction.org launching a campaign to try to take out the funding, the $80 million a year that the military puts into sponsoring NASCAR racers and sporting events, sponsorships of that sort, the biggest being the National Guard at NASCAR, overwhelmingly, and this is something that the Democrats combined with the more libertarian Republicans going against their own chairman have passed through the House Armed Services Committee, that there is going to be some little bit of something cut out of the military.
While the law put in place last year, the Budget Control Act requires minimal cuts to the military beyond this, and yet you have Congressman McKeon, a Republican from the drone caucus, pushing for a vote on the floor this month to get that funding back in there for buying NASCAR racers.
It seems tiny, $80 million, when you're talking about a trillion-dollar budget for the war machine in this country, but the Army claims to get a third of its recruits from motorsports events and recruitment stations at racetracks, so it is a step toward a saner, less militarized society, and the Army, not the National Guard, which is the big one, but the Army has already just today announced that they won't be funding NASCAR next year.
Still, we need Congress to put that ban on the books for all branches of the military.
That's funny.
It's like this is Sparta or something, you know?
The normalcy of it all, when there are no real enemies in the world.
You would think that they had found some new continents with some new major powers on them or something that we had to face down for all of this.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
Everybody, it's David Swanson.
His new piece at Dissident Voice is about the UN calling the US out for recruiting and killing and imprisoning children, our government.
We'll be right back after this.
DissidentVoice.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Swanson.
He's got a new piece at DissidentVoice.org.
Veterans for Peace supports UN committee in questioning US recruitment, killing of children.
Now, here's the thing.
I got my problems with the ASVAB thing.
In fact, I think it's probably the only news story I ever did, actually, was about some kids at a junior high school thwarting the military recruiter's attempt to get the student population to take the thing.
They exposed what it was and all that.
That was pretty cool.
Yeah, that's a big deal.
I don't like the brainwashing on TV all the time.
I don't like the ROTC and all the schools and all of these things.
I'm not sure it's the UN's business.
I'm not sure it really even counts as recruiting of children.
It's just, I mean, it's really, if anything, it's a reflection of our society and how much people love that kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
After all, jet fighters and tanks and stuff are really cool.
That's how people are.
I'm not really sure if that part is the UN's business.
Then you talk about buying children from Pakistani headhunters and imprisoning them at Guantanamo Bay.
Now, I'm not sure if that's the UN's business or whatever.
That's certainly an outrageous crime that is certainly worth focusing on, I think.
Can you tell us more?
How many kids are focused there?
We're talking Omar Khadr and things like this.
Well, I think it's absolutely everybody's business that the United States is violating legal and moral norms and exposing children to war propaganda, war recruitment, and lawless imprisonment and abuse in war, not to mention the bombs falling on children's houses in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and so forth.
I think it's, you know, I have endless complaints with the United Nations.
It is not democratic.
It is not international.
It is not consistently applying the law to all.
It's largely under the thumb of five major nations and one in particular.
But, you know, occasionally it does things right.
Rarely, even extremely occasionally, our own government does things right.
And when it does, and when it serves as a microphone for us in this country and around the world who are opposed to these kind of actions to join together and say, wait a minute, you are legally obliged to explain what in the world you're doing and how it could possibly be legal.
I think that's very helpful.
And we don't know.
And here's a committee asking how many children the United States has locked up since President Obama came into the White House in Afghanistan.
And the children that are known to have been held and then released without any explanation or restitution or compensation from Guantanamo and who are still there, who were locked up when they were children, how have they been treated?
How will they be compensated for the wrongs?
And so forth.
I think anyone who can compel the U.S. government even to offer a twisted explanation for how it can possibly dare such things is to be encouraged.
Yeah.
Well, I appreciate that.
I just, I want to see all these solutions solved from the bottom up, you know, well, like what you do, try to get it to where maybe our society isn't so militarized and maybe we will be the ones who make the difference here instead of having to be told by the Europeans or anybody else.
Well, I couldn't agree more.
I mean, I only encouraged Spain to put George W. Bush in prison because the United States refused to.
I mean, I'd much rather have our own country handle our own screw ups.
But it's you know, it's not it's not your average American who is flying jets over the Super Bowl and sponsoring Dale Earnhardt's race car and creating multimillion dollar Hollywood blockbusters that make killing look like the coolest sport there is.
I mean, people just don't have the resources to do that.
You know, we it's not your average private initiative, entrepreneurial venture that's, you know, setting up recruiting stations at the Daytona 500.
I mean, this is something that tax dollars are being wasted on to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
And it militarizes our culture beyond whatever low point it's at currently.
It pushes it further for that kind of money to be dumped into a professional campaign to make killing look like a sport.
I mean, it no society could could be subjected to that level of propaganda and not become more militarized in its culture.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I guess we saw especially the best example to me anyway, was that show 24.
And there's an article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker where she went and really investigated the guy that put it all together.
And his avowed mission to normalize torture in American society and to use his TV show to get people to understand that sometimes you got to torture somebody.
Otherwise, everybody will die.
And they weren't even it's like it wasn't a secret.
It was that was openly this is the pro torture show.
And, you know, I guess you're just a wuss if you're not for torture.
You must be worse than a Democrat.
Well, that's that's the thinking twisted and misguided and factually unsupported as it is, is that the greater good is accomplished by gritting your teeth and doing the necessary difficult things that must be done.
And if you're afraid to torture one person to save 10,000 people, well, then step aside.
We need strong men to handle this for you.
And and the facts don't support it in the least.
It's never been a technique that's done good.
It's it's it's always made things worse.
It doesn't it doesn't pull useful, accurate, trustworthy information out of anyone.
It brutalizes them and the people who do it to them.
But but that's the way these people think.
And they are very, very successful.
I went to a to a conference in Washington, D.C. some months back with people from all over the world who work with torture victims, who work to get them asylum, who work to get them legal compensation, who who work to counsel them and cure their their their injuries.
And and universally, they told me acceptance of torture is up around the world.
I mean, it's hard to say whether torture itself is up because monitoring and recording of it is up.
But acceptance of it is up dramatically.
And universally, they told me the number one factor is Hollywood.
And many of them mentioned 24.
That's just sick.
It really is.
And what's funny is, you know, I'm the furthest thing from some utopian, but it's just so obvious that it does not have to be this way at all.
I mean, we're this is it's like a deliberate suicide here of our culture, of our society.
You know, it's crazy.
Well, we we need a movement at this point, not to not just to end wars or to end a particular war, but to survive as a species.
We need a human survival movement.
And that includes altering our our destruction of the natural environment.
And it includes demilitarizing and shifting.
And these are two interlocking campaigns, of course, as the wars are fought for the oil and use a huge chunk of the oil for which they fight the wars.
But we at this point have to act for survival of the environment of a decent form of government, of our civil liberties in the face of of patriotized militarism, or we're we're not going to survive as a species.
Yeah, well, and, you know, speaking of which, and I think you and I may have discussed this before, you think about the importance of what really still exists as the nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia, who still have thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at each other, thousands, and nobody even cares at all.
This is like the hundred and seventy fifth most important issue to the average person, at least in America.
I don't know about everywhere else in the world.
But isn't this the most important thing of all that we get rid of all these thermonukes before we all die?
I think these are I think between the climate being destroyed, our atmosphere being destroyed and the proliferation of and the threat of nuclear war.
I mean, these are the top two most likely things to destroy everything.
And the threat hasn't gone away just because the Cold War went away.
In fact, the Cold War is coming back and the United States is pressuring Russia and China quite hard.
I'm sorry, we got to leave it there.
David Swanson, everybody, dissonantvoice.org, warisalie.com.
Thanks very much.
Thanks, Scott.