All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Colleen Rowley.
Boy, if the bosses at the FBI had only let her and her team do their job back in the summer of 2001, the 9-11 plot could have been stopped.
For an entire discussion of that subject, you can check my archives at scotthorton.org.
For example, and I don't know, Colleen, if they ever give you credit for this, but I like to, your warning against the invasion of Iraq that you gave in 2002 was as prescient as any in warning about the disaster that would befall the Americans as they attempted to occupy that place and the long-term ramifications.
It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember being impressed once again by it, and I remember when it first came out, too.
I think I even cited you, that here she's saying, look at what she's saying.
If our enemy is terrorism, then invading Iraq is the last thing we want to do.
Invading any Arab country, especially, is the last thing in the world we want to do.
But maybe terrorism isn't the enemy, but the excuse right now.
So anyway, I just want to say thanks for that.
I wish more people had listened to you then.
Well I wish more people would be remembering the lesson of Iraq.
We thought they kind of had learned that you can't start wars based on deceit and lies from Iraq, and now here we are repeating the same thing with Iran.
I mean, it's incredible to see the sad situation we're in, in an out-of-control military-industrial complex and special interests just controlling our foreign policy, with almost not a whimper from civil society.
It's mind-boggling.
Yeah, well, you know, that left-right dynamic is very powerful in electoral politics, and as long as you prefer this one guy to that other guy, that can, as we can see, can lead people to justify any manner of things.
I mean, if you look at George Bush, I mean, after September 11th, it made sense that he'd changed, I mean, to a conservative, it made sense that he changed his proclaimed humble foreign policy, but on so-called conservative Republican things, like Ted Kennedy's education bill or Medicare expansion or whatever, whatever, conservatives overlook the fact that he did all of those things because he was George Bush, their warmonger hero.
The same way that Democrats overlook Barack Obama continuing Bush's wars, because he's their guy.
And if Romney wins, then we'll switch just right back again.
Yes, that's exactly right.
Glennon Greenwald wrote a piece on this blind loyalty factor, and it's something that I actually, in my talks, picked up on Stanley Milgram's electric voltage test and Solomon Esch's social psychology test about groupthink, and so I've been preaching this stuff, and you would think that if people realized that they're being manipulated this way through this groupthink and through these different kind of propaganda techniques, that they would be mad about it, and again, nobody wants to be the dupe or be manipulated this way, but the two political parties, that's their bread and butter, is manipulating their bases.
And of course, now in electoral season, it's at its peak, it's almost hard to bear to watch these kinds of things going on, because the truth is, 70% or so of the people mostly agree.
I don't care what party you're in.
When it comes to war and corruption, I don't think parties differ on this, I think people actually agree to a huge extent on these very important issues.
This is why you have every right to be shocked anyway, even if you understand the whole left-right dynamic sort of thing, the way they manipulate our loyalty thing, you still have a right to be surprised after the Bush years, because that foreign policy was so bad, so ham-handed.
People were burning to death by the hundreds of thousands.
It's just the worst freaking thing.
It was just madness.
So to have the Democrats, the people who are so incensed, left-leaning at all under any description of left, liberal, progressive, whatever in America, who were so incensed at the Bush policy, to have them go as silent as they've gone, or even turn to outright pro-war mongers under Barack Obama, is really amazing.
And I'll give you my anecdote, which goes straight to your article here, Selling War is Smart Power, Colleen.
A year ago, I interviewed a guy from Amnesty, and I just assumed that we were going to talk about what a bad idea it is to pick and choose these rebels, because we don't know who they are either.
And I was amazed to find out that the guy had, I forget his name now, but he had no concern whatsoever for, yeah, but this war is being waged by the most cynical, murderous power on earth, the American empire right now.
How can you possibly support that?
Even if Gaddafi's 100% the devil you say he is, which I would tend to agree with the information I have, that still, I mean, really, you want the same empire that invaded and destroyed Iraq to save the people of Libya?
And to this guy, the Iraq war, I guess, might as well have been back during the Eisenhower years for all it had anything to do with whether we should have a war in Libya or not.
And I really was astonished to hear it, that really, you want America to pick and choose the best outcome for the people of Libya, for their democratic future and whatever?
I mean, how long ago was the Iraq war anyway?
Well, people, I guess the only thing you can say is people have short memories, and this political propaganda techniques do work.
You know, I'm always constantly citing these five buttons that get pressed in people so that they don't, facts don't matter.
Of course, the first one's from Goring, fear, hate, greed, false pride, and blind loyalty.
And by pressing those buttons in populations, you can pretty much turn them into monsters quickly.
And I think the challenge was after 2006 to 2008, when civil society actually emerged and got pretty strong under the Bush administration, those last two years, lame duck years, even Bush-Cheney's Republican base turning against them, and civil society forced Bush to repatriate detainees from Guantanamo, et cetera, you actually saw the kind of the peak of civil society.
Then new ways and means had to be devised so that when the election occurred in 2008, that you could continue what McCain aptly and honestly called an endless war.
And so you get people like Susan Nossel in the think tanks and the Council of Foreign Relations and different, what I would call war think tanks, where they are saying, well, this language has to change to transform the dark, dreary war on, Bush's dark, dreary war on terrorism into this new, enlightened, progressive search for liberal internationalism.
And we'll use some new words to work our will.
And we're going to use humanitarian intervention and human rights, of course, bringing democracy to the world, which is ever, ever a nice thing.
And we're going to sell it this way.
And these people in these think tanks that have gone from government positions into a private sector and now into leadership of human rights organizations.
And so, of course, it's a big revolving door.
And it would be ludicrous to think that somebody can work for Hillary Clinton one day, basically one of the architects of the Libya bombing, and then go as executive director of Amnesty International.
But all of that is behind, you know, and say that I'm now working in a neutral, detached way to elevate human rights throughout the world.
Of course, that's not the case.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it seems to me that really this whole thing about, yeah, one day the U.N. through international law is going to take good care of everybody, it's really just a fig leaf.
That's kind of a line of propaganda that the right wing militarists or, you know, I don't know exactly who it is, that they sell to liberals to try to get liberals on board for what's ultimately just the same old conservative empire, right?
Well, you know, think about this.
If there is an endless war, I mean, if basically there is a consensus, not amongst the people, which I say there's at least 75 percent of the people are not with this consensus for an endless war and growing military empire.
You know, I know that good conservatives and certainly libertarians and good progressives all agree on that.
But amongst the people in D.C., in the Beltway, the military industrial complex and Israeli special interests and et cetera, they're prey to that force.
The consensus is very different, and the consensus is McCain's point about we're going to be in this endless war for at least another hundred years.
So I think that we have that fundamental disconnect.
Now the people, again, they're manipulated kind of through this divide and conquer thing.
You know, if you're the loyal Democrat or the loyal Republican, already that consensus goes down to half because you've already split the two camps.
And then, of course, if you can distract with other issues, you know, we need jobs or the Medicare, the debt, of course, which is a consequence of the endless war.
I mean, nobody connects the dots here, but here we are so worried about the national debt and having to cut Social Security and different programs to pay for this, to pay down the debt or at least try to make a dent in the deficit.
And no one connects it to what's causing that deficit to begin with, what's causing the deficit spending.
So then the argument becomes between these two sides on what to cut.
And it's basically a complete distraction because you need to understand what's the underlying problem, what's growing this thing to begin with.
But this is politics.
And to the extent that our media, to a large extent, goes along with this because they're making money off the political ads, that's their bread and butter, too.
I think that we have to look to civil society and we somehow need to reach across partisan lines and make, I see some of this happening on Facebook a little bit, where people slowly are starting to kind of get their critical thinking skills back.
And I think that what will happen, let's say Obama is re-elected, I think we could look for something very similar to Bush's lame duck second term, that at least in the last couple of years, that people will finally wake up and, of course, we may be in another war at that time, which will prevent people from being able to be too effective.
But if things stay the same, that finally those last two years should be the kind of a way, the timing should be good for civil society to get some force back.
I've been trying to give people hope because people are very discouraged right now seeing what's going on.
Well, you know, it's just like the Arab Spring itself.
It's so easy for any kind of, you know, when you say civil society, it's a pretty broad definition.
It can include, you know, anybody who wants to make a difference at all, kind of thing.
And people just get co-opted so easily, where, you know, in fact, this kind of thing, humanitarian war is the perfect thing too, where people can kind of be, can feel like they've been invited to particiVate in the consensus to use force the right way this time, instead of the wrong way, rather than learning the lesson to just not use the force at all.
They get to, you know, particiVate and be somebody a little bit better.
And I can't get over the thing in Rolling Stone by Michael Hastings about the argument inside the administration in the lead up to the war in Libya, where apparently sources in the White House are describing Samantha Power as very anxious to stop doing the rinky-dink do-gooder stuff she'd been assigned, like teaching Iraqis to read or something stupid like that.
She wanted to improve her own position inside the White House and thought that if she could join forces with Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice in order to promote this war against Qaddafi, then she could be somebody, you know, like she always wanted.
Well, you know, somebody in my, wrote a comment after my article about the 1% iron fist being cloaked in the velvet glove.
And I think that's a good imagery to use about these female war hawks.
Essentially, the most powerful females in government, beginning with Madeline Albright and then Condi, who was, Condi was Madeline Albright's father's student.
I mean, there's a big connection between Albright and Condi Rice.
And then Hillary, the three secretaries of state, as well as the wannabe secretaries of state, which are Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and I would throw Suzanne Nossel into that group, the current amnesty director.
All of these females overcame the male military, including Gates, who did not want to launch the war on Libya.
And the only thing that explains it, of course, liberals think that females, and of course this velvet glove image, people think of females as being motherly, and you can go back to the founding of Mother's Day as if females ruled the world, that we would be a better place and there would be no war, etc.
So by deliberately putting the face of war as feminine, already that's very effective to confuse people.
Nobody can imagine that a female could give orders to go to war or be the architect of a war.
It's hard to believe.
Right, or at least it must really be necessary if even they all agree.
Exactly, exactly.
Even if a Samantha Power can overcome a Robert Gates in arguing for war, that's the reality there.
Now, I think a lot of this is that actually the military, industrial complex, whatever, are using these women as well, because they are power-hungry, and they know that the way to climb, as you kind of just alluded to, is to show the toughness and not have any concerns about wars and drone-bombing, etc.
But the hypocrisy here is selling this as humanitarian, and I'm hoping...
I mean, that's the thing too, right?
If you work at a think-tank in Washington, D.C., whether it's a liberal or a conservative one, you're getting your money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and we all know that, the Center for a New American Security, it said that in the Wall Street Journal.
This is where they got their money.
The Rockefellers have always financed the Council on Foreign Relations since the 19-teens or 1920s at least, and this is a big part of, if you look at the Project for a New American Century or the American Enterprise Institute, all their money, and it says right on their own website.
It comes from Exxon, it comes from Lockheed Martin, of course.
So if you're Samantha Power and you really do just mean well for the little brown people of the world who don't have a fair shake or what have you, then that's fine, and it's believable, I guess, right?
Who am I to question what's going on in the inside of the lady's brain?
But somewhere in there, she's got to know that there are vested interests with a conflict of interest, as us regular civilians might say, who promote her high idealism for their own gain, which when you're talking about the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Lockheed Martin, it's a very cynical gain.
It's not a, yes, and they all care very much about the little brown people, too.
I think we can see right through that when we're talking about Exxon, you know?
Yeah, I think what you often have in these institutional relationships are symbiotic, and oftentimes the funders will think they're using the organization.
The organization, of course, will think they're benefiting from the funding.
So you have these kinds of things.
If you can gain control of a humanitarian or even a peace and justice organization, and Amnesty, with its three million members, of course the members are pretty oblivious to this.
Unless it gets exposed and more and more people explain what's going on, the members are all doing good work.
Amnesty, of course, has in the past a great, well-deserved reputation for helping prisoners of conscience, and they have in the past been quite fair and balanced.
But when these co-opting things occur, and the leadership now is working really for U.S. foreign policy, of course, slowly the membership ...
I've had people actually who are themselves donors to Amnesty that have said, what is going on?
So there has been a teeny bit of wakening up here.
But when that happens, it's enormously effective.
I wrote a thing about the Nobel Peace Prize, which is controlled by the Norwegian parliamentarians who are part of NATO, now picking and choosing very carefully to advance really a militaristic policy.
Here you have it completely twisted, the Nobel Peace Prize being used now to give to Obama, who has launched new wars and surged in Afghanistan, et cetera.
You have the Carnegie Endowment for Peace that was originally ...
Andrew Carnegie was one of the anti-imperialists, strong with Mark Twain at the turn of the century.
And now that became a force for war.
Now you're seeing Amnesty.
There's a whole bunch of progressive groups that now have been ... and some of it's pretty subtle.
They ...
Avaz is one where a lot of the things that they're putting out are still fine, but there's an emphasis that changes.
And the emphasis now is to be stronger on the enemies of the U.S., the so-called foreign policy enemies that are declared.
I just noticed something today.
This is something to remark.
With Amnesty, of course, yesterday or a day ago, Eric Holder announced that there would be no prosecution.
There's not enough evidence to prosecute the CIA for having tortured to death.
Really it was a hundred detainees, but they were only looking at the two worst ones.
And so that case now has been closed by- I think most of the hundred were the military.
I think it was at least the two that were the CIA.
Right.
Right.
And those were never even, as far as I know, the hundred were not even really investigated.
These two seem to have been looked at by a Republican U.S. attorney.
And during that time when he was looking at these cases, the U.S. officially answered Spain and other countries saying, no, don't go forward with your case because we're internally handling this.
But now, of course, it turns out that there's no evidence, et cetera.
So Amnesty does have a press release on that, a couple of paragraphs.
You have to click three times and you'll find this press release saying, isn't it too bad that Eric Holder is not holding anyone accountable for U.S. torture?
Meanwhile, their front page, and I think I've gotten 20 different emails from- I may be exaggerating- maybe a dozen emails from Amnesty on the Pussy Riot case, where these three females who frankly did commit some- I mean, you can say it's free speech, but they were kind of vulgar acts in churches.
And there doesn't seem to be a terrible populist support for Pussy Riot in Russia, but in the United States- Yeah, the foreigners love it.
Right.
Look at the discrepancy between torturing people to death by the U.S. forces and a 14- it looks like it's going to be an effective 14-month prison sentence for these three women for having committed these acts, and yet that can't be- I'm sorry, Colleen, we've got to leave it here.
We're all out of time.
Oh, all right.
But you're absolutely right, though, and I think, well, it's not the first time that Amnesty has kind of embarrassed themselves in that way.
Anyway, I'm sorry, we've got to let you go.
And if you haven't already, check out Colleen Rowley and her associates at Women Against Military Madness, that's worldwidewham.org, and check her out at consortiumnews.com.
Thanks so much for your time, Colleen.
Thanks.
And that's it for the show.
See you all next week.
