10/03/12 – David Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, now our guest on the show today is David Swanson.
He is an associate, meaning non-veteran, member of and paid contractor for Veterans for Peace, which that's sort of written in a full disclosure kind of way rather than a job title kind of way.
But anyway, David Swanson is here, this time representing not just himself but Veterans for Peace, I think is maybe a way to say it.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Great to be here.
All right, now let me tell people that you wrote the book Daybreak, which is a liberal point of view on reinstating the Constitution.
And we need lots of that from all parts of the spectrum, at least.
You know, it ain't anarcho-capitalism, but it's a hell of a lot better than this if we had the Bill of Rights instead of not having it the way we're going, that kind of thing.
A very important book full of great insight and research.
And also War is a Lie, which basically tells the history of all of America's wars and how it's always lies.
And just like next time, too.
And very good stuff.
And I feel like I'm maybe forgetting the name of a third book that you've written.
Is that correct?
I have a few other books since those ones.
One is good, and you can just go to davidswanson.org and that has my books.
But one is called Win the World Outlawed War.
One is a compilation of statements, essays, chapters by a lot of great people that's called The Military Industrial Complex at 50.
And later this month I'm coming out with my first children's book, so we'll see how that goes.
Cool.
And then what's this radio show that you're hosting now, too?
I host a weekly half-hour show that's on a lot of radio stations, most of the Pacifica stations and lots of other non-profit and some big commercial stations.
It's called Talk Nation Radio, and it used to be hosted by Dori Smith.
She was unable to host it any longer and had me take it over.
And you can find that at davidswanson.org as well.
Yeah, cool.
That's very good.
I can't wait to hear it.
You have, I'm sure, a podcast in the archives, right?
Yeah, all the podcasts are available in full for free with code to embed it on your own website.
And by all means, please ask your local radio stations to carry this show we're currently on and mine.
Yeah, there you go.
Hear that, everybody?
All right.
So let's talk about Veterans for Peace and Code Pink and many other groups coming together and taking a giant trip to Pakistan to witness against Obama's drone war.
Please do tell.
Yeah, this was organized by Code Pink.
They asked peace activists to go with them.
I was unable to, but Veterans for Peace, which is a group that I work for and have long been an associate, that is, a non-veteran member of, was able to send about six people, including the organization's president, Leah Bolger, and numerous other peace and justice groups from around the United States sent people.
So about 40 peace activists are over in Pakistan.
They've been meeting with elected officials, with the leader of one of the political parties, with tribal leaders, with various groups and prominent individuals, and with family members of drone victims.
While we have officials in the U.S. government denying that there are any civilian victims, denying even officially that the drone wars exist, we have some of our best citizen activists over in Pakistan meeting with the victims and apologizing publicly to their country, to their government, and to these families about what our nation is doing with these endless drone strikes, which have been continuing during this delegation.
And they are planning to be part of a much larger march, maybe 100,000 or more marching this Sunday, the anniversary of 11 years in Afghanistan, marching into this sort of lawless northern territory in Pakistan where the drone strikes are most heavy.
Wow, so I'll expect to see all about that on CNN.
Well, you know, thus far it's been huge news in Pakistan.
It's been big news in British newspapers and other sources that I find online.
I've seen nothing in the United States outside of a few blogs and websites and good radio shows like this one, and it's crazy.
Just Foreign Policy did this, I think Code Pink did it, and RootsAction.org, which I work for, did this together with Veterans for Peace and various other groups, collected thousands and thousands of signatures on various petitions from people in the United States saying we need these drone wars ended.
We collected some 16,000 names, printed them out, and Veterans for Peace took them over there just from the RootsAction.org petition saying we need to end this criminality, and they're sharing this U.S. opposition to U.S. policy with people over there in Pakistan where their foreign minister was recently in New York saying that the drones are the number one source of Pakistani hostility to the United States.
This has turned the nation of Pakistan against the United States, as in Yemen, as elsewhere.
It ought to be a U.S. story.
And believe me, I know there are CIA-installed sock puppets over there.
Mr. 20%, now he used to be Mr. 20%, Zardari, the prime minister, Benazir Bhutto's husband, who's, I guess, the definition of corruption in shoes, right, running things.
But is it not true also that part of their military establishment, part of their deep state over there, wants the American government to use those drones to kill whatever Arabs they can find hiding out in those mountains?
That's why this continues, right, because they keep saying, oh, no, please don't do drone strikes anymore.
But really, they prefer it because, hey, at least Bush used to make them reinvade Waziristan every once in a while, and Obama hadn't done that.
Well, I mean, you're absolutely right that some in the Pakistani government have supported these policies and probably still do, but the tide seems to be turning.
At least publicly, the Pakistani government is turning very strongly against the drone strikes, denying and denouncing all U.S. claims that the government of Pakistan supports them.
Now, of course, we've seen this in Yemen, where the former dictator was exposed by WikiLeaks as supporting strikes and, in fact, taking credit for strikes that were actually U.S. strikes and so forth.
I mean, there's endless lies by the local governments, and you never know, but there are strong opposition parties in Pakistan and strong parties within the government in Pakistan that have been consistently and strongly against these drone strikes and that have the support of the Taliban and the tribes and the people in Waziristan who now, reversing their earlier plans, have promised to protect the people on this march.
Well, you know, it's funny.
There's a very kind of telling moment, I think, when David Gregory asked Leon Panetta, in regards to Yemen, but it's the same difference.
He said what you're talking about a little bit there.
You know, when you go after a bad guy with your drone and you kill innocent civilians, there are many reports out of Yemen saying you're creating more enemies than you're killing with the actual strike itself.
So, you know, is this all counterproductive?
Is this the right policy?
And Panetta, you know, he couldn't really outright confront the question, but his manner of ducking it was pretty clumsy, too, and he just said, well, you know, these are the tools we have.
And so, you know, if there's an al-Qaeda guy in Yemen and you've got a drone, you've got to kill him with it, even if whatever consequences, we'll just deal with those later, basically is what he's saying.
And this seems to be the same thing that's going on in Pakistan right now, where, as you're saying, here's a population that whatever there, you know, is wrong with their society over there that Americans might criticize, it never was, never included a big hatred of the United States, because what the hell did they need to hate the United States for?
We're way the hell over here in North America.
We didn't do anything to them.
And so, but now we have.
Now we've turned, you know, the government, like I was just implying, some of them are in on it, but the population of the country is 99% against this drone war.
And they, you know, we are making enemies out of millions of people that we don't even know here.
Well, this is the big lie about drones is that they do less damage and that they are a more humane alternative to other forms of warfare.
Well, we didn't have other forms of warfare in Pakistan or Yemen.
We have no congressional authorization or declaration of war against these countries.
We have no UN authorization or anything else that someone might claim legalized these wars.
We had no ground war or other form of warfare in Yemen or Pakistan or a number of other places.
And we go in with a drone war that creates such hostility and such chaos that we then end up sending in the Marines, as we're now doing in Yemen, and not to mention Libya and other places.
And so, predictably enough, and some of us, of course, predicted it, you go with this drone war as an alternative to nothing.
You weren't engaged in some other form of warfare.
And it develops into a ground war.
And so this is not a form of scaling back our militarism.
And, of course, by all the other measures, you know, the financial cost and so forth, drones are more expensive than other forms of warfare.
There's just this notion that with drones, none of the people that we're supposed to care about immediately die.
They may get post-traumatic stress disorder as drone pilots.
There may, of course, be massive global blowback, and we could escalate this madness into a third world war.
But there's no pilot in the drone, so nobody we care about gets killed, so it's fine.
I mean, that really is, this is the Democrat way of war, right?
This is how Bill Clinton did it, too.
You know, we'll bomb you with the longest range bombs we have.
We'll bomb you with the highest flying planes we've got.
You know, it was a disaster for their public relations when one plane got shot down over Serbia.
And I think what it is, honestly, and I'm not saying George Bush and the Republicans are courageous or whatever, because they sure as hell don't send their sons or anything like that.
But to me, it seems, at least in this case, not to say anything good about the right at all, but in this case, this to me paints the Democrats, it seems like it's just a projection of their cowardice, that they can't even volunteer other people's sons to go be brave.
They hide behind robots.
And I think about how mad I would be if some other country was flying over my country, bombing my people.
But then if they were doing it, hiding behind robots with the entire diameter of the planet as their shield, you know, like I might go hijack a plane and crash it into something over there if I had to.
Well, Scott, I would quibble with that a little bit, not to defend the disgustingly immoral criminal Democratic Party, but to point out that there is absolutely nothing courageous about sending other families' children to a war.
And Obama has done so in huge measure.
If you look at Afghanistan, Obama came in.
There were about 34,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, plus mercenaries, contractors, CIA.
He more than tripled it.
About a week and a half ago, there were all these news stories about how his surge was now ended.
Well, what remains in Afghanistan is more than twice the level of U.S. military presence that was there when Obama came into office, because his initial escalations in early and mid-'09 have just been absolutely erased from history, so that the surge at the end of 09 was something that existed and discussed publicly, and now it's ended, and we should move on and imagine that the war in Afghanistan has ended.
Well, the fact is that the U.S. presence there is over twice what it was when Obama came into office, courageous or otherwise.
That's what it is, and the death rate for Americans and for Afghans is higher.
The second leading cause of deaths for Americans and NATO forces after suicide is being shot by the Afghans you're supposedly training.
They've more or less given up now on training the Americans to get along with the Afghans, and they've started publishing manuals to educate the Afghans on how not to be offended by the rude manners of the Americans.
Whereas it's not their rudeness and insensitivity, it's the fact that they are occupying your country, and in many cases do hold the offensive viewpoints that the Afghans are supposedly stupidly misreading and then shooting people.
So I think there's all kinds of wars going on right now, and there's pretty much bipartisan support for them, and the current plans are more or less going to go forward whoever wins the presidential election.
Yeah.
It still seems like a special kind of...
Well, look, I mean, none of it is a fair fight.
America's armed with hydrogen bombs, and everybody knows if you push us so far, we'll annihilate your entire civilization.
So none of this is a fair fight whatsoever.
But like when you're saying there's not even a pilot in the damn thing, they don't have any anti-aircraft weapons that could even shoot one of our planes down, but if they somehow ran out of gas, there's not even a guy who has to parachute out at this point.
There's no one at risk, and that seems to me like such an unfair fight, such bad sportsmanship, if you understand where I'm going with it, that it's sure to provoke enemies even worse than if they're being bombed by F-16s.
That's my guess, anyway.
Faisal Shahzad, he was an American, basically a naturalized American.
I forget if he was an actual citizen or not, but he was certainly living the American dream over here with a wife and a house and a professional job and a salary, and he went to Pakistan on vacation and he saw the drone war up close, and he joined up as a soldier on the other side.
He came back and he attempted to bomb Times Square.
Thank goodness it didn't work, but if it had, many people could have been killed, and Lord knows how many more amendments we would have lost to the Bill of Rights if that thing had gone off instead of smoldering the way it did.
Anyway, maybe I'm off way on a tangent here, but it just seems to me like such a cowardly way to fight, hiding behind the entire diameter of the planet Earth, in Syracuse, New York, in a little portable trailer, killing people with your Nintendo.
Well, I agree entirely.
I just don't want to give any praise whatsoever to any other means of fighting.
Right, yeah, I wasn't trying to say, yeah, the way Cheney fights, now that's valor, or anything like that.
Courage is of limited value to me.
It's courageous to jump off a building, but it doesn't do anyone any good, and so I want courage paired with good, right, noble, virtuous actions.
So the fact that it's courageous to fly a plane into a building doesn't mean I want to encourage it.
But I agree with you entirely as far as the drones go, and I would note also that that guy who tried to blow up that bomb in Times Square was the son of a man formerly engaged in guarding Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
I mean, that's just a little too close to comfort for me.
I think sooner or later our luck runs out.
We need to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and we need to rid the world of warfare.
Well, you know, and messing around with Pakistan the way we are too, well, a couple of things.
First of all, like you're saying, you never know whose emotions you're getting at with these drones and whose cousin it is getting killed.
It could be the son of a guy who's currently working on guarding nuclear weapons in Pakistan and decides that he wants to do something different at work today, something like that, that could lead to all kinds of untold consequences.
But also I wanted to get back to something you said too about the willful ignorance of the American media and the way that they treat all of this, any of these subjects, whatever it is, whether Afghans or Pakistanis or Yemenis, whatever it is they have against us, it's always their stupidity, their misunderstanding, their backwards religion that makes them believe these terrible conspiracy theories about us.
When meanwhile all these people have to do is, well, they don't even have to look out the window.
If they go outside, they personally fear being droned to death.
It's very real to them.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It has nothing to do with the Koran.
It's just a matter of being a Pakistani.
You have to live in fear of the drone.
And what gets me even more is that to the limited extent that the U.S. media tells us anything that our government is doing in our name, if you are a supporter of Obama, it appears that in most cases you go to great lengths to avoid those stories.
Not an hour ago I had another call from the Obama campaign wanting to know if I would vote for their guy, and I asked the young woman, as I always do, have you heard anything about Obama's Kill List program or his drone programs?
No, never heard about those.
Well, let me tell you a little bit.
And I explained to her my concerns, and she promised to go and read something during her break.
And then she comes back with, but what I really need to know is are you planning to vote for Obama?
And I said, did you hear anything we've said the past ten minutes?
I mean, I went to an Obama rally here in Charlottesville, Virginia, and eventually we protested inside and told him to get out of Afghanistan, and the Secret Service threw us out.
But we stood at the entrance for hours with posters and flyers trying to educate people, and we figured out that we couldn't shout anything in the event about the Kill List or the drone wars because nobody, nobody had heard anything about them.
It would be like talking about UFOs or just making something up.
So we had to say get out of Afghanistan because we knew that these people had heard of Afghanistan and knew that there was a war there.
That is just tragic.
That is just, you know, I can't say, I can give a little credit to the Ron Paulians because I know whenever he would bring up the NDAA or whatever, everybody already knew what he was talking about.
But then I guess that's why they weren't Obama supporters.
My favorite comment from Ron Paul was at the South Carolina presidential debate, the primary debate, the Republican crowd, and Ron Paul suggests that we might try using the golden rule in U.S. foreign policy, and they booed him.
They booed him.
And then, you know, not a split second later, he says he wants to end our wars, and they cheered.
So they want to end the wars.
They want to end the wars.
They're not out for bloodshed, and they don't want their kids to go die, and they don't want to make enemies around the world.
But the idea of treating other nations with respect and treating them the way we would want to be treated and suggesting that they might have rights as we have rights is just outrageous, and not just to Republicans, to Democrats too.
I mean, this is where too many Americans sit.
They want to be superior and exceptional and unique and fulfill their unique responsibility as the one indispensable nation that, you know, whether it's racist and genocidal or racist and humanitarian, is going to do what it damn well pleases and other nations be damned.
And that gets the golden rule booed at a primary debate.
Amazing.
It's like white supremacy, only it's just nationalism, but it's basically the same kind of thing.
You know, we're the human beings and everybody else is the not quite, at least, you know?
That's right.
That's right.
There's 5% of humanity that, you know, the war planners have to pretend to care about, which is in some ways a positive thing to the degree it goes because they're trying to move away from ground forces to drone wars and so forth.
But the other 95%, the targets of the wars, the vast majority of the victims of our wars, the casualties of our wars that were never told about, well, we aren't supposed to care.
And the media knows and the government knows that Americans are capable of caring, which is why we don't see the videos that we saw in Vietnam of people getting shot in the head.
You know, that's not shown to us.
If we saw the images every day of what our military is doing in a dozen different countries, it would change our politics.
But we don't see the images, we avoid the words, and we choose not to know.
Yeah, the only image of the war that they'll ever show would be a profile of an American soldier shooting, but never who he's shooting at.
Right, right.
You know, it's always just a profile of a guy just shooting off into the distance somewhere.
When NBC a couple months ago launched this war attainment reality show with Wesley Clark as co-host, and they had these Olympic athletes and sort of B-level celebrities engaging in war games and contests to see who could kill everyone faster, and RootsAction.org and others protested, and it's off the air.
But it was sort of the visual presentation of U.S. news reporting on war, because there was no enemies and no casualties and no foreigners.
They were shooting at cardboard.
They were pretending to get shot at by nothing.
They would, you know, shoot a guard tower down that had no guard in it.
They would blow up houses that had nobody in them.
They would burst through doors and shoot the heads off cardboard dummies.
And then they would talk about how they barely survived and they almost got killed, as if they'd convinced themselves they were at war, and there was literally no opponent.
And, you know, something had to look wrong to most viewers, but I bet most people couldn't tell what it was that was wrong, because in the normal news coverage on NBC and everywhere else, it's the same thing.
The other side has been removed.
Yeah.
By the way, you are the only other person that I've ever heard, I think.
Maybe I've read it written correctly before, but I think you're the only person I've ever heard say out loud correctly about the two surges of 2009 in the spring and the summer before the surge that was announced at West Point and got all the fanfare and, you know, how much higher the troop levels really are compared to when Obama took power.
Nobody picked up on that except you and me, I think, so congratulations for that.
Thank you for that.
Fair got it right, fairness of accuracy in reporting.
Oh, there you go.
I have a little post about it.
Yeah, Peter Hart and those guys, they're sharp, for sure.
Yeah, yeah, they're good.
But, no, it's almost universal.
I mean, things can be chosen by the media to become big, endless stories, and we all get sick of them, or can be chosen for elimination.
And something that was known and public and happened over a period of months, not more than three years ago, can be absolutely erased.
So it's just removed from all discussion in our media.
It's remarkable.
Yep.
Well, at least there's that lesson in it, just how powerful they are, just how much they can get away with.
Wow, they really can get away with that much, huh?
Good.
That must have other implications that I need to concentrate on.
All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show.
I want to give you a little bit more, though, so that you can tell the audience about all different websites that they ought to be looking at for all this different activism.
Obviously, there's veteransforpeace.org and davidswanson, is it .com or .org?
.org.
.org, davidswanson.org, veteransforpeace.org.
But then you mentioned Roots Action something and a bunch of other things, so please go ahead.
Oh, yeah, rootsaction.org, and then I always blog and other people blog at warisacrime.org.
Oh, yes.
I really appreciate it, Scott, and we've got to have you on Talk Nation Radio soon, too.
I'm happy to do it, and there's plenty to talk about, so no problem.
All right, well, thanks very much for your time.
It was great talking to you, David.
You too, thanks.
All right, everybody, that's David Swanson, Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.
War is a Lie and When the World Outlawed War.
Those are his books.
You can click the links right there at davidswanson.org.
We'll be back right after this.
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