01/04/08 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

And that Common Article 3 says that, you know, there will be no outrages upon human dignity.
It's a, it's a, it's a, like, it's very vague.
All right, y'all, so, uh, there you go, the Geneva Conventions.
Yeah, they're, they're very vague.
No outrages upon human dignity.
What exactly does that mean?
That's not fair.
All right, it's Anti-War Radio, and the guest, for the first time this year, returning to the show, Glenn Greenwald.
Welcome.
Scott, great to be back.
It's good to have you here.
Everybody, you can find Glenn Greenwald's blog at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And he's the author of How Would a Patriot Act and a Tragic Legacy.
And, and honestly writes one of the most compelling blogs on the entire World Wide Web there.
I urge everyone to read it on a regular basis.
It's good to talk to you.
Happy New Year, Glenn.
How are you?
Doing great.
Happy New Year to you, too.
All right, here's a subject that I admit I've not been able to really keep up with all that much.
I've been trying to at least, you know, check the headlines.
But I'm not sure I really know the whole story behind it.
And I was hoping I could bring you on to help fill me in about the scandal surrounding the videotapes of the CIA's torture of Al Qaeda suspects and the destruction thereof.
My understanding is that now there is a criminal investigation being launched by the Justice Department into this matter.
Is that right?
Yes, that's true.
That was announced a couple of days ago.
The new attorney general has decided to assign responsibility to a fairly well-respected prosecutor, federal prosecutor, to oversee a criminal investigation and convene a grand jury to see if there were crimes committed here.
And upon your cursory inspection from the get-go, does it seem to you like crimes, in fact, have been committed?
Well, I don't think there's much of a question about that.
And I think there's a lot of evidence, compelling evidence, that demonstrates that that's the case and the most powerful kind of explosive evidence suggesting that there were crimes committed here came a few days ago in the form of an op-ed in the New York Times jointly written by the two co-chairmen of the 9-11 Commission, Tom Keene and Lee Hamilton.
And what they said was that the videos that the CIA made of these interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects, including two individuals who participated in some way in the planning of the 9-11 attacks, was evidence that the 9-11 Commission explicitly requested on numerous occasions and were told that, in essence, both by the CIA and the White House, that those tapes didn't exist and that they had everything that they had asked for.
And two years later, in 2005, the CIA, at the direction of we don't know who in the White House or anyone else, destroyed those videos, the only copies, apparently.
And what the 9-11 Commission chairman said was that whoever did that knew that we wanted those videos.
And by concealing them from us and then by destroying them, and they used this word twice, obstructed our investigation.
So, obviously anyone who is deliberately obstructing the investigation of the 9-11 Commission is engaged in obstruction of justice.
The same felony for which Louis Libby was convicted.
Okay, now how clear is that?
I mean, when Congress mandated the 9-11 Commission, they were given that kind of legal authority that anyone refusing to go along with them would be considered in violation the same way as if they were prosecutors?
That's right.
They were bestowed with the same power that a court has or that the Congress has, which is to compel the production of relevant information.
And there were times when the White House resisted based on secrecy grounds or other privileged grounds, and they worked it out.
But they would have had the authority to go into court and seek a judicial order compelling the production of any evidence that they would have wanted to be produced.
And so they did have legal authority not just to request but to compel the production of evidence.
That was the whole basis of the 9-11 Commission.
Without that power, without that authority, it would have been worthless.
And so it certainly did have that authority, and therefore violating such a request or misleading the 9-11 Commission is clearly a federal offense.
I should add to that that there are also several actual court proceedings, again, various criminal defendants, where these videos are clearly relevant as well.
And so destroying the videos likely constituted obstruction of justice in those criminal cases.
You're talking about maybe the Padilla or Moussaoui trials?
Precisely, where federal judges clearly ordered the government to turn over to the defendants who were being prosecuted for various crimes relating to the 9-11 attack all evidence relating to things like statements of other witnesses, which this would have been.
And the government in those cases never said that they had this evidence and then went about destroying it.
And that's the sort of standard, classic obstruction of justice felony when you purposely deny a legal body the ability to obtain relevant evidence.
And now that would all be multiple counts, right, if they obstructed this court and the 9-11 Commission?
Yeah, exactly.
They're all independent proceedings.
And there may be perjury offenses as well.
I think beyond just what crimes were committed here, I think the more important question is, who committed the crimes?
And that's really the huge unknown question at the moment is, who is responsible for the destruction of these tapes?
And we already know, for example, that George Bush's top aide at the time, Alberto Gonzalez, and Dick Cheney's top aide at the time, David Addington, participated in a discussion with the CIA about whether these tapes should be destroyed.
And if they, in fact, told the CIA to destroy them, or implicitly authorized the destruction of the tapes.
And it's hard to believe that the tapes would have been destroyed without that.
Then it seems at least there's evidence fairly strongly implicating not just Addington and Gonzalez, but their bosses on whose behalf they were almost certainly engaging in this behavior, namely Dick Cheney and George Bush.
So this is when Gonzalez was the White House counsel before he was the AG?
Exactly.
And so, yeah.
Now, how do we know that Gonzalez and David Addington, Cheney's lawyer, were in on this?
Well, there were meetings that have been confirmed by the New York Times through participants who were present at the meeting.
And the White House has actually anonymously, by officials from the White House, have confirmed that both Cheney and Addington participated in discussions about what to be done with the videos, specifically whether they should be destroyed.
Now, the White House refuses to comment in any way on what it is that they did at those meetings, and what positions they've asked.
They're taking the position they always do, which is, well, there's a criminal investigation, and therefore we can't comment.
But one very interesting thing happened, which is, the New York Times about 10 days ago published a story that said that they quoted a senior high-level intelligence officer who was present at some of these meetings.
And this source said that very high-level officials in the White House urged the destruction of the tapes.
And the New York Times published that story, that they had learned that high White House officials urged the destruction of those tapes, and they had a sub-headline on this article that said, this contradicts the White House's previous claims that they weren't involved.
The White House objected to the story and said that it was inaccurate, but the only thing they objected to was to the idea that this contradicted what they had said in the past.
They said, well, we haven't commented at all, therefore it couldn't contradict what we said in the past.
But they didn't deny the key part of the story, which is that senior White House officials are urging the destruction of these videos.
Well, now, why wouldn't they deny it?
Or, like you said, I think someone from Cheney's office anonymously confirmed the meetings to the New York Times.
Why would they do that?
Well, I didn't say it was from Cheney's office.
I said it was senior administration officials who work in the White House.
I don't know if it's a current or former official, but clearly one of the reasons why one might be more optimistic than normal is that the truth will be revealed here in ways that it hasn't been in similar conflicts is because there's a lot of different factions that are involved, including various factions in the CIA that don't like the Cheney-Addington-Gonzalez axis in the White House and certainly aren't willing to be scapegoated or to take the blame for things that the White House itself authorized.
And since we know that the videos were destroyed, since that clearly happened, and since it's almost certainly a crime or at least a very serious wrongdoing that has occurred, the only question is not what happened, but who ordered it to occur.
And therefore, the really only choices are to try and lump it all on to some mid-level official in the CIA, like Jose Rodriguez, who was the one who sort of signed off on the tapes' destruction, or to finger the actual culprit.
And I doubt the people in the CIA are willing to take the fall for something that David Addington or Dick Cheney or even George Bush wanted to happen.
And I think that's what you're seeing in terms of a lot of these damaging leaks that you don't really see.
And that's why I think this story has the potential to be so volatile.
Yeah, yeah, that's really good news.
The CIA is tired of taking the rap for these guys in the White House at this point.
Well, right, and what's interesting too is, you know, the CIA officials who are trying to scapegoat, and there's been a lot of White House leaks trying to pin the blame on, as I said, Jose Rodriguez, sort of a mid-level official in the CIA, who really was the one who ultimately signed off on the tapes' destruction.
The idea that he would do that, given how involved the highest levels of the White House were without their authorization, seems entirely unbelievable.
But he has a lot of important allies, Jose Rodriguez, though.
In Washington, he's putting Sylvester Reyes, who's the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is a longtime friend of Rodriguez and political ally of his, and that strongly suggests that Reyes is not going to allow the CIA to take the fall.
And the only way to prevent the CIA from taking the fall is by pinning the blame on the White House.
And I think you're seeing a lot of those machinations going on, and I think that this is one of the more threatening scandals to threaten George Bush and Dick Cheney for precisely that reason, because the alternative is not to clue that there was nothing wrong done.
It's already established that there was wrongdoing, and now the only question is who's going to take the blame for it.
Right.
Wow, it is just like James Madison, Federalist No.
10.
Ambition must be made to check ambition and make them all fight among each other.
Yeah, and you're right.
One of the things that's interesting about that, and I think you make a really good point, is what you see here is really what's been missing from our government for so long, which is you want different factions in the government competing with one another, even adversarial and hostile to one another, because that's how they serve, is check on one another.
I mean, the idea of checks on our government, or different branches of government, is not this noble, ethereal idea that you're going to have noble people within branches of government watching what the others are doing.
The idea is that these factions will be adverse to one another, and will compete with one another, and will try and gain power by reducing the power of the other.
And through that is how you get balance, but no one faction becomes dominant.
That's what's been missing in our political culture for the last seven years, and you're seeing the benefits of it here, the truth-seeking and truth-revealing benefits here, where there are different factions with different interests by the government that are powerful, and no one faction can dominate how the whole thing plays out, and I think that's a good thing.
Okay, now there was an extra check and balance that had been created by Congress, which was the Independent Counsel Statute.
And it's funny, this is just a joke, so don't get me wrong like I'm being a kook here, but a friend of mine suggested that the entire Kenneth Starr persecution, prosecution, what have you, of Bill Clinton, was actually just a conspiracy to get the Independent Counsel Statute sunsetted, so they wouldn't have to deal with that thing anymore.
So I'm wondering if you could please help us understand with all your legalese and lawyerly technicalities and so forth, what exactly is the difference between the Independent Counsel, as the job was held by Kenneth Starr in the 1990s, versus the Independent Counsel, as Patrick Fitzgerald was in the Libby case, because he was some kind of independent prosecutor, I thought, and then those two cases versus this new guy, Durham, who's looking into this obstruction of justice.
What's the difference between these three different types of Justice Department prosecutions?
Well, in the normal course of events, when somebody is prosecuted for a crime by the federal government, the prosecution occurs within the Justice Department.
The Justice Department's responsibility overseeing the Attorney General to prosecute crimes, federal crimes that have been committed, and the way that normally works is, U.S. attorneys stationed in every district, judicial district in the country, are responsible for the prosecution, and they ultimately report to the Justice Department in Washington.
And one of the problems that arises is that when it comes time to prosecute or investigate federal officials in Washington who are suspected of crimes, what you end up having is the Attorney General and the Justice Department, that are political appointees of the President, overseeing these investigations.
And so the idea of the Independent Counsel law was, we don't want the Attorney General, we don't want the Justice Department, to investigate when the President or one of the President's top aides is suspected of wrongdoing because that creates an obvious conflict of interest because you're having the President's political appointee, the Attorney General, in charge of the investigation.
And so what you saw with people like Ken Starr in the Independent Counsel statute was that whenever it came time to investigate, for example, Bill Clinton, they would actually, the Congress and the Attorney General, would actually make a, would hire someone completely outside of the Justice Department.
In this case, Ken Starr, he didn't work in the Justice Department, he was actually a former judge, but he was not a prosecutor at the time, who then basically takes over the investigation and operates completely independently of the Justice Department and the Congress.
He's really his own kind of branch of government.
And the problem there was that it creates runaway investigations because they're accountable to nobody, they have unlimited budgets, and what you saw in the 90s was a lot of very insignificant offenses, people being persecuted for them with unlimited resources.
Ironically, in the Bush administration, the crimes that needed investigation were not petty at all, they were extremely serious.
And yet, what you saw over and over again was that Alberto Gonzalez used his position at the Justice Department in order to keep those investigations from proceeding.
The one kind of hybrid, as you mentioned, Patrick Fitzgerald, who was not an independent prosecutor like Ken Starr was, but he was actually, he works for the Justice Department, he's the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and ordinarily, in all of his investigations, he reports to the Justice Department and his boss is the Attorney General.
But in the Louis Libby case, John Ashcroft, who was the Attorney General at the time, recused himself on the grounds that he had too close ties to Karl Rove and other people who were involved in the investigation.
And that means the second-in-command of the Justice Department, who was James Comey, took over.
And what Comey did was a very honorable thing.
He said, I'm going to completely take everyone of the Justice Department out of this and I'm going to give to Patrick Fitzgerald full power that the Attorney General would have.
So Patrick Fitzgerald has no boss within this investigation.
He doesn't report to anyone.
He is the boss.
So he was really like Ken Starr was, or other independent prosecutors, except he was still part of the Justice Department.
And that made that investigation so effective.
That's why it led to the conviction of Louis Libby and almost the indictment of Karl Rove.
Unfortunately, what we have now is the prosecutor who's been appointed is still within the apparatus of the Justice Department.
Michael Mukasey hasn't recused himself.
The prosecutors still report to the Justice Department.
It's just like any other federal prosecution.
And so there is a ground to be a little bit concerned about whether or not this prosecutor will be sufficiently independent, given that he does not have Patrick Fitzgerald's independence and is still within the reporting structure of the Justice Department.
And I think that members of Congress, especially, as I said, Chairman Reyes and others, would use that fact to say, well, we intend to pursue our investigation as well because we don't necessarily trust Michael Mukasey to conduct an independent investigation.
So in a sense, it might have a good effect in getting the Congress to go ahead and do their job, too, rather than just deferring to the DOJ.
Yeah.
I mean, just because it's a criminal investigation doesn't mean that Congress no longer has oversight responsibility.
And, you know, Michael Mukasey has been trying to tell the Congress, look, you have no role to play here.
You should not be interfering in our investigation.
And I think, given everything we've seen over the last seven years, there's no reason to trust that an investigation led by a Bush appointee is going to be honorable or independent.
And Congress has the duty to find out what happened here.
Well, does this guy, Durham, does he have the responsibility?
Say, for example, he's, you know, convening grand juries and deposing witnesses and investigating the obstruction and the destruction of these tapes.
Can his investigation branch out from there to the point where, you know, he stumbles across hard evidence that Dick Cheney said, quote, torture him, I don't give a damn what the law is.
Can he then go ahead and expand his investigation the way Ken Starr would have, or he's going to have to go back to Mukasey for each and every little thing?
Yeah.
I mean, as I understand the scope of the investigation, it's really to determine whether there was a crime committed or crimes committed as a result of the concealment and destruction of the videos.
So if it turns out that there were crimes committed on the videos, such as torturing detainees, then in order to include that in his investigation, he would then have to go back and obtain approval.
But remember, the Congress has essentially granted immunity from criminal prosecution to the CIA and other interrogators for any war crimes that they committed in torturing detainees pursuant to legally authorized orders that they got from the CIA.
So even if those videos show torture, as they almost certainly do, they certainly show waterboarding, that's clear, and other forms of torture, it's unlikely that those could be prosecuted anyway.
Aside from the question of what is it that those interrogators were doing on those videos, a real question is, what is it that the detainees said as part of the interrogation?
Who did they blame the non-government attacks on?
What is it they said about their responsibility or Osama bin Laden's role or the role of the Saudi government or lots of other speculative possibilities is, I think, maybe a bigger issue than what did the CIA interrogators do?
We know that the CIA was waterboarding and torturing detainees.
That's not news at this point, but it might be news, and it might have been a motive if not the principal motive in why the tapes were destroyed as to what the detainees actually said.
That's what the 9-11 Commission was interested in.
Right.
Now, I want to get back to that question just one second, but I want to make sure that I understood you right, that various federal laws enforcing the Geneva Conventions, banning war crimes, banning torture, all these federal laws that have been on the books, these are all now null and void due to the Military Commissions Act, which says it's okay, you all have immunity for any tortures you've committed going back to at least 1997.
Is that right?
Yes, exactly.
We found out that on those tapes, CIA interrogators were torturing and treating detainees in violation of our laws, laws against torture, both in treaties and in federal law, that could not be prosecuted as a result of the Act of Congress in 2006 and the Military Commissions Act immunizing those interrogators.
Now, if they were doing something that the CIA had not approved of, where they were cutting off limbs for fun, that would not be covered by the immunity, but any torture that was authorized by the CIA, and they authorized a lot of torture, is immunized, even if it's in violation of the law.
Wow, America the Beautiful and everything.
All right, now, as far as what these guys were saying, very interesting point there.
I'm reminded of Susskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine, where in one scene, I believe it's George Tenet is explaining to George Bush that this guy Zubeda, Abu Zubeda, actually is completely crazy, split personality, mentally ill, basically was a travel agent for al-Qaeda, bringing wives and families to come and visit and so forth, was not any kind of high-level operative or terrorist, didn't have any operational plans or knowledge of what al-Qaeda was really doing, and George Bush replied to George Tenet, hey, I said he was important, and you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you?
And George Tenet, of course, responded, no, sir.
I guess he finally did, but that's who we're talking about here, that's the videotape we're talking about is the torture of this mentally ill man who the CIA guys say didn't know anything.
Right, and if you had the odd spectacle a few weeks ago of supposedly a freelance former CIA official who expressed remorse for his role in torture coming out and saying that those interrogations revealed critical information that enabled them to disrupt plots.
And so the whole point here is the whole reason why destroying evidence is so pernicious in general is because when you destroy evidence, you prevent anyone from finding out what actually occurred.
And the whole reason there was a 9-11 Commission in the first place was because it was so vital to the country's interest to find out what really happened in terms of these attacks and who really was responsible.
And part of it was that it was important to restore trust in the statements and versions that the government offers and to prevent conspiracy theories, and in part it was to ensure that we go after the people who really did it rather than people who are being scapegoated for it, and in part in order to figure out what we did wrong in not detecting it.
And so to destroy evidence that is so vital and central to those questions, interrogations of people who are actually involved in the attacks, is really so odious because it leaves a huge gap in our collective knowledge about what occurred in one of the most important events of our generation, and that's the most important event, and it leads to all sorts of doubt about what actually happened.
Were these detainees really critical participants, or were they sort of drooling morons swept up and forced to false confessions?
Did they offer incriminating evidence of certain outlaws of ours that we don't want the blame to be heaped upon?
And we don't know the answers to those questions because the evidence was destroyed.
And I just want to add, it has a lot to do with the Louis Libby prosecution, the same thing that happened there.
People say, defenders of Louis Libby and Neocon say, oh look, Patrick Fitzgerald obviously didn't even conclude that the law was broken here, that there was no underlying crime, because he never actually charged Libby or anyone else with criminal offenses for leaking the name of Valerie Plame.
And what Fitzgerald has always said is, my failure to charge anyone for the underlying crime is not a reflection of the fact that there was no crime committed, it's a reflection of the fact that by lying to me and obstructing justice, Libby, and really Karl Rove who did the same thing, prevented me from finding out what actually happened.
And that's why the crime of obstruction of justice is so important.
Yeah, through sand in my eyes and dirt in my eyes.
And that's exactly what the destruction of these videos do, and a far more important investigation, which is finding out what actually happened with the 9-11 attacks, and who was responsible and what we did wrong.
Yeah, well you know, back in the 1990s, not just the moral indignation crowd, but some legal scholar types, I guess Bruce Fine helped draw up the articles of impeachment, and the argument against Bill Clinton, and an argument that I accepted and made myself was, I don't care if this is about Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, what I care about is the President of the United States obstructing in any way the judicial branch of government.
He's got to be removed from power for that.
Any president should be removed from power for obstructing the judicial branch.
And boy, it seems like if the underlying crime is what really counts to these people, in this case we have all the obstruction in the world, much more than in the Lewinsky case, and with an underlying crime that is torturing people.
Yeah, I mean one of the things that I think people don't have a sufficient appreciation for is just how destructive to justice lying in judicial proceedings is, and destroying evidences.
I mean in my prior life I was a litigator, and our justice system, which resolves disputes between people and tries to figure out if people who are accused of crimes are actually guilty, depends upon the honest disclosure of information and the full and complete disclosure of relevant evidence.
And when people go into court proceedings and lie, or lie to FBI investigators as a grand jury, or destroy evidence with the intention of preventing people from finding out what happened, it completely perverts our judicial system, because it produces unjust outcomes, false conclusions, and all sorts of wasteful and destructive outcomes.
And that's why obstruction of justice, standing alone, and perjury, standing alone, regardless of what they're intended to conceal, are themselves felonies, and very serious felonies, because they have enormously destructive effects.
I mean Richard Nixon's presidency was brought down, not because of his involvement in what was described as a third-rate burglary, but because of his actions in lying and concealing and covering up and preventing the truth from being known.
And that was a far less serious matter in terms of what was covered up than destroying evidence with regard to the 9-11 investigation.
Well, tell me this, as a former constitutional law litigator, what would they do to me if I obstructed justice in a federal criminal investigation, Glenn?
Yeah, I mean, you would be prosecuted for it without question.
And if you were found guilty, you would have a serious prison sentence.
I mean, remember, Louis Libby was a first-time offender and was given a 30-month prison sentence.
I mean, our federal courts take very seriously the crime of obstruction of justice.
And one of the things that I will say for the DOJ is that one thing that prosecutors really hate, and that judges really hate, is destruction of evidence, because they see firsthand all the time how destructive that can be.
And so here you have Michael Mukasey, a longtime federal judge, conservative federal judge, and a career federal prosecutor in Durham, who I think are more likely than not to take very seriously the alleged crimes here.
And so while I don't trust the Justice Department or Michael Mukasey in one sense, I do think that it's more likely than not that a serious and independent investigation will be conducted.
I still think Congress should investigate, but it is a serious crime, and I think they're likely to view it as such.
And that's why I say I think this is a real threat to the highest officials in the world.
Boy, I sure hope you're right.
I've been waiting for some real criminal investigations of this government this whole time.
And I really enjoyed it in the 1990s when there was a grand jury or a special prosecutor of one kind or another on the front page of the paper every day.
And that's how I think it should always be.
So I'm really glad I hope you're right.
These politicians have gargantuan power.
And the more light that is shined on what they're doing and the more they have to look over their shoulder, the better.
Hey, do you mind if I change the subject to the empire here for a minute?
Absolutely not.
I don't mind.
Oh, good.
Yeah, everybody, by the way, it's Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com.
Salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And I'm looking at this blog entry that you have here about the bipartisan consensus on U.S. military spending.
And I guess this is something that we all kind of know in the back of our head, but you actually have the chart here.
The rest of the world combined spends $500 billion a year on the military.
The United States spends $623 billion a year.
And that's not including the costs of the wars, right?
That's just the regular appropriations for the DOD.
Yeah, and, well, there's about $150 billion, a billion dollars in the U.S. total that is for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So even if you take those out, the amount of the U.S.
And why should you take those out?
I mean, that's the amount that we're spending on our war making.
But even if you did, we still spend, just in terms of our regular defense spending, more than the entire rest of the world combined.
And, you know, it's just an extraordinarily disturbing fact that I'd be willing to venture the overwhelming majority of Americans aren't aware of.
Because you don't have to.
You can be as strong a believer as you want in quote-unquote strong defense or in thinking that we ought to maintain our permanent war footing and keep our military superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world and still find that statistic, you know, just jaw-dropping and completely indefensible.
Well, and this is a subject that virtually all of the presidential candidates agree on.
As you say in your title here, this is the bipartisan consensus.
In fact, if you ever get any kind of criticism about the size of the Army, it's always that it's not big enough.
In fact, there was a great clip of Ron Paul on the Sean Hannity show last week, and he said, Sean, look, we're just overextended.
We're over 700 bases in over 130 countries around the world.
We can't do it.
And Sean Hannity said, oh, no, I agree.
We've got to make the Army bigger.
This is apparently the standard all the candidates other than Paul Kucinich-Gravel agree on.
Right.
I mean, you know, one of the things that has happened as a result of our toxic political discourse is, you know, a rational country would continuously evaluate everything that it's doing and debate whether or not it's the right course.
And yet we have a country, in essence, that has certain pieties off limits and can only go in one direction.
And so no political candidate that wants to remain in the mainstream, at least they believe this.
I doubt whether it's true, but this is what they believe and what their consultants believe and what our media class believes.
No political candidate can stand up and actually advocate reducing the amount of defense spending because they'll be immediately accused of being soft on defense.
I mean, you look at how Ron Paul is being treated and you get a good glimpse of that.
And so what ends up happening is even the candidates who are supposedly the less hawkish, like the Democratic candidates, Obama and John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, even they advocate increasing military spending to inoculate themselves against that charge.
And so all that can ever happen is that military spending can only ever go in one direction.
And that's up and that's what's been happening every year for many, many years.
Notwithstanding the fact that we are so far outpaced by the rest of the world that it's shocking to look at.
Yeah.
I saw a clip of Ron Paul saying, well, you know, the empire is going to end one way or another and it probably won't be because you listen to me.
It'll be because we just go broke.
You can't afford to just take over the world.
Hey, back in the days of the Roman Empire, at least they would steal everybody's gold and bring it back to Rome.
Now everything just goes out and nothing comes back.
Yeah.
I mean, you're right.
It's an empire that has no benefit.
I mean, it benefits corporations, but it doesn't benefit our country or our government.
And even though our government and our country through taxes are the ones that sustain it.
And you're right.
Even if you just leave aside the questions of whether you think empires are great, our liberties or the kind of country that we are, are constitutional or necessary to protect ourselves.
The simple fact of the matter is it cannot be done.
It's unsustainable.
Eventually we will collapse economically.
And it seems like if you look at all the relevant factors, sooner rather than later.
And yet it just continues inexorably without any debate.
And that's why I say I think the candidates would be able to stand up and say we need to reduce defense spending because if we don't, we're going to collapse like every other country that tries to maintain empire has done.
But, you know, they're all short-sighted and self-interested.
And so none of them will say it.
And the ones who do, like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, are immediately dismissed as unserious candidates.
Well, and you know what's really frustrating about all this, too, is I guess the underlying premise that that's never challenged beyond just, you know, how necessary all this defense is.
But the underlying premise under that is that this is such a dangerous world.
And, you know, all the clips of John McCain in Iowa in the past few days have been, you know, I've been involved in every foreign policy catastrophe for the last 20 years.
And I know what I'm doing.
And this is a dangerous world.
And you need a warrior like me in there and this and that.
And yet, you know, what's he talking about?
We don't have, there's no nation state in the world that threatens us.
We have a problem with Al Qaeda, which amounts to, I guess, a pretty large band of pirates.
But certainly a superpower can deal with that.
You know, the Wall Street Journal talks about this terror world that we live in.
But the peacekeeping forces are out of troops because there are too many ceasefires breaking out all over Africa that they don't even have the peacekeepers to come in to work the deals that the warring parties make with each other.
We've got peace breaking out all over.
We've got fewer dictatorships in the world than ever before.
We don't have a single nation state in the world that threatens the United States.
And yet, what?
There's this permanent crisis we have to solve.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting that the post that you began by referring to was responded to by a couple of people, including Michael Farber at Weekly Standard and Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review.
And what they said in response was so telling.
Ponnuru gave this analogy and he said, well, of course we're going to spend more than the rest of the world combined.
I mean, don't you think that police forces spend more than the world than the total of what criminals spend in and firehouses spend more on fire prevention than what arsonists spend to start the fires?
I mean, spending in order to prevent those crimes is actually more cost effective than trying to clean it up once it occurs.
And it's this twisted, absurd view of the world that the United States is basically keeping the law and order in the world and enforcing what's good for the world.
And the rest of the world are criminals and thugs and lawless rogue states that we need to spend all of this money on our military in order to keep in line.
Even if you accept the premise, this ridiculous premise that we're spending all this money because we're good and enforcing the good in the world, the idea that we need to spend more than the rest of the world combined would still be inane.
Because as you say, you look at, for example, Russia and China, two of the states that follow the United States, each spending about one-tenth of what we spend.
Russia and China, the idea that those two countries could ever go to war with one another is obscene.
They would never consider it.
Their militaries are far too vast to make that even thinkable.
So the idea that we even need to, no matter how you want to look at the world, maintain this level of spending in order to deter people from attacking us is just so obviously incoherent.
But they've either disseminated fear-mongering for so long or been the recipients of it for so long that they actually see the world in such irrational, hysterical terms that they think that's what's necessary in order to keep us, quote-unquote, safe.
Yeah.
Well, geez, I guess if Exxon was funding my think tank, they'd keep me convinced of that, too.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a very self-interested worldview.
I don't think there's any question about that.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is another thing that I think you wrote about this, Bill Kristol getting fired from Time but then getting hired at The New York Times.
Is there a certain point where when a neocon is wrong about some particular number of things, say 5,000, 10,000 assertions that they make, that at some point they're no longer considered credible political pundits?
No, there doesn't seem to be.
I mean, it's really the case that punditry in our political culture is really accountability-free.
And it isn't that, you know, Kristol has been wrong in his opinions, that he's advocated things that turned out to be ill-advised.
I mean, that's just a matter of it being wrong politically.
He's just wrong factually.
I mean, the things that he says are factually false, and that's proven to be the case time and time again in a way that a rational society would consider him to be beyond any realm of credibility.
And, you know, The New York Times tried to respond to these criticisms by acting as though the objections were to their hiring a conservative pundit.
That wasn't it at all.
They ought to have conservatives on their op-ed page, just like they ought to have liberals on their op-ed page.
The objection was that the person whom they've hired, Bill Kristol, just using objective metrics of the things he says, has no credibility whatsoever.
He's just a rank propagandist and a liar.
And that's been proven over and over and over again, that to give him that platform means that The New York Times really has no concern whatsoever for things like credibility or honesty in whom they hire as columnists.
Yeah.
Well, and you know me, I'm a libertarian, but I know some conservatives who would object to that label being applied to Bill Kristol.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I think neoconservative is the only term that applies to him.
And I think the New York really is un-conservative, is really, you know, more than anything what he is.
Unfortunately, you know, the Republican Party and foreign policy has become dominated by neoconservatives.
And so, you know, that you look at all the candidates who are viable and have a chance of becoming the nominee, they all pay homage to the neoconservative agenda because they think they have to.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, back to the original topic of the show.
I want to thank you for keeping your legal eagle eye on this DOJ case.
And I'll certainly be watching your blog at Salon.com in order to try to keep up with it.
Let's hope that some administration officials go to prison.
David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, that'd be a good start.
I kind of got my eye on Bush and Cheney.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, remember that Bush has the power of the pardon, and he always can exercise it in as broad a way as he wants on his way out.
But it would be good at least to see the prosecution machinery in action.
And if he ends up having to pardon everybody, then at least there ought to be some political ramifications for that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, everybody, it's Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And the books are How Would a Patriot Act and A Tragic Legacy.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Glenn.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks.