05/24/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, good.
So first guest today is John Glazer.
He's editor now at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
I'm pretty good.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, well, right on.
Thanks for joining us.
So Barack Obama gave his speech yesterday about foreign policy.
And he said some pretty nice things like, let's look back on the last decade of this war.
We spent a trillion dollars.
We've lost 7,000 of our own soldiers, KIA.
He doesn't include the Mercs there.
And I guess we've accomplished some things.
And maybe it's time we reassess now just where we're going.
And maybe it's time that the American people understand that war's got to end.
You can't just keep this thing going forever.
In fact, here's a handy James Madison quote about how no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare.
And so let's wind this thing down.
So my question for you is, what's not to like about that?
Well, the words were hollow.
And you're right.
I mean, much of the speech, he was employing the type of rhetoric that we heard from him and haven't heard from him since when he was a candidate in 2008.
He was criticizing the Bush administration.
He was railing against the inhumanity at Guantanamo Bay, the distraction and mistakes in Iraq, you know, the thousands of dead.
He hailed the rule of law.
And just like you said, he cited James Madison quotes about perpetual warfare, which I've cited at antiwar.com so many numerous times.
So he said a lot of the right words, you know, his lips were moving in the right way.
But we know from his first term and into his second that, you know, Obama's words mean very little in terms of what his actions are, what his predictable actions are going to be.
And he talked about several issues and said a lot of nice words and then sort of just dodged the harder questions like accounting for his own policies.
So for example, in the drone war, he was sort of harshest on the drone war in terms of he was defending it the most.
He talked about how we only drone when we can't go in on the ground, when the state that these terrorists reside in won't or can't, you know, extradite them or capture them or apprehend them in any way.
And so, you know, these are very limited targets.
You know, we've heard these arguments before.
The problem with it is that he assumed away any questions about the validity of the targeting process.
So as we know, the executive branch in a secret process that's unreviewable and unchallenged and unchecked by any other branch of government or any set of journalists or anything chooses who to kill, right, unilaterally.
And if we assume that all of those people are definitely evil terrorists, the worst of the worst, then part of Obama's logic here sort of makes sense.
Like, we don't want to deploy boots on the ground, so let's just drone them, right?
But you know, that assumes that the Obama administration's unchallenged, unreviewable assertions about who's a terrorist are accurate, right, and are sufficient death warrant by covert assassination.
The other thing that we know, thanks to reporting, especially from McClatchy a couple months ago, this guy from McClatchy got access to secret government documents on who we've been killing, and according to his reporting, less than 2% were described by the government's own classified documents as senior members of Al-Qaeda.
So the rest of the maybe 4,000-some-odd people we've killed in our drone war have been civilians or mid-level operatives or just clumps of people that might have looked like supposed terrorists in some world, because our grainy footage on the drone cameras made them, you know, saw them carrying guns or something, which everybody does, and the tribal regions of Pakistan.
Right.
Well, and a couple of things just on that one point, John, there's a couple of things about that.
First of all, he implied there that the media, and perhaps even this exact report that you're talking about from McClatchy, maybe he's referring to Chris Woods at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, I don't know, but he implied that the media has been lying about the number of civilian deaths in the drone war in Pakistan, and I just wanted to point out that the highest number, 4,700 of them, comes from Lindsey Graham from the U.S. Senate, not from any non-governmental organization.
He presumably is being given the declassified briefings, and he sort of de facto declassified that information by leaking it just a few weeks back.
Is that not correct?
That is correct.
I blogged about that, and it was surprising when a lot of the non-governmental-slash-journalistic organizations that were trying to estimate numbers of dead killed by drones, they were all sort of surprised, because Lindsey Graham suddenly gave a higher number than they had been able to estimate, and so it's certainly clear that we don't know how many are dead, we don't know...almost all of their names are classified, if they're even known at all, because we know that they've been employing signature strikes, which, you know, target unidentified people.
Right.
Yeah, explain that real quick.
Why the word signature?
Because it sounds like it's implying, wow, the president himself has to sign his signature on it, so it must be really legit.
So signature refers to the executive branch's ability to identify certain trends of behavior by people that they target in places like Yemen and Pakistan.
Right, so terrorists play on monkey bars, so people on monkey bars are terrorists.
Got it.
Okay, now here's another thing, real quick, is McClatchy DC, you mentioned this McClatchy report, well, it wasn't some guy, it was Jonathan Landay, who's among the best national security beat reporters in our society, and he's got a piece today at McClatchy, it came out last night, Obama's speech suggests possible expansion of drone killings, and he goes on to talk about how Obama usually likes to say, senior Al-Qaeda leaders, that's who we're killing, so quit your complaining, Glazer, but this time he's saying, oh yeah, you know, people who may be a threat to us, and whatever.
So on one hand, he sounds like what he's saying is it's time to start really ramping this drone war down, but really what he's saying is it's time to ramp up the drone war at the expense of, I don't know, shooting cruise missiles at Somalis from nuclear submarines or something else.
Right, so there's a couple of things here.
First of all, he is trying to loosen even the rhetorical standards that justify a drone strike.
So now that we know, not because he helped us out figuring it out, but, you know, hardcore journalists that do a great job figuring it out, now that we know that senior Al-Qaeda operatives are barely even two percent of the people who are killed, he's trying to widen the array of targetable people.
And you know, that speaks to a couple of things.
One of the issues is that we've known for some time now, especially since the Justice Department leaked a memo, a legal memo, or a summary of a legal memo, describing how the Obama administration has adopted a novel definition of the word imminent.
So imminent threat is something that in international law is required as a prerequisite for any state to use force against another state or another group of people.
And what the Obama administration said is, we just are going to kind of throw that away.
So we're using a different definition of imminence, which means any time we see any terrorist that could possibly in the future, you know, we don't need a specific impending threat in order to justify killing someone.
We can just kill them.
And that sort of is in keeping with the Obama administration's broad array of who we can kill and who we can't.
The other thing that this speaks to is the authorization for the use of military force.
So Obama said he won't sign anything, because right now in the Senate there's talks about revising or updating the language there in the 2001 AUMF.
And you know, he said he wouldn't sign anything that expands the definition of who we can target, but he also kept employing the term associated forces, which is not in the AUMF.
Those words don't appear in that document.
It just says anyone who is involved in the September 11th attacks, you can use force against.
Obama's targeting groups of people and, you know, sort of groups that were not even around prior to September 11th.
So he's already gone long past that, and so, you know, we can expect more of that.
Landay is right.
His speech yesterday proved that he was trying to expand who's targetable.
Yeah.
It's really interesting about Obama.
You know, I guess it was back in 2009 when he first came into power, or maybe that summer or something, where he went to the Czech Republic and he gave his speech.
And I guess they ended up calling this off anyway.
The Czechs called it off, not the Americans.
I don't even know.
Maybe you know the latest on it.
But anyway, the point is, at the time he gave this speech going, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world free of nuclear weapons?
And the people are like, all right, man, we really like the new black president of America.
He's great, man.
And then the second half of the speech, he was like, yes, maybe someday our great great great great grandchildren get around to that.
But anyway, in the meantime, I'm putting in some anti-missile missile radars here to provoke the Russians.
But but no missiles to actually protect you from any strikes that the Russians might make on your the new radars I'm putting in here.
And the Czechs, they're a lot a lot more savvy than the Americans at the time.
You could see the entire crowd of one hundred thousand people or something all folded their arms across their chest at the same time.
What did he just say?
And quit buying it.
He made it clear real quick that what he really meant was the opposite of what he was saying.
And that's the same kind of thing here.
Last week, Obama sent this guy to testify to the Senate that, oh, yeah, Cheney's grim vision.
Yeah, that's what we're doing.
The war on terror will last generations, at least another couple of decades.
And then Obama comes out and gives this speech where it sort of seems like what he's saying is that, no, that's not right.
We're winding this thing down.
It's time to end the war on terrorism.
We don't want a war on terrorism.
That was something that George Bush wanted.
It's time for us to realize that we need peacetime again and whatever.
But what he really meant was, yeah, exactly that.
Generations of war still.
Yeah, I think that there's a really simple explanation for this.
And it's a trite saying, you know, it's always it's people.
Everyone always says this.
But he's a savvy politician, so he knows he's a smart guy.
He's not an idiot, like a lot of people in the last administration.
And he knows what to say in order to placate his critics.
If you see any of his major speeches, he does this on the one hand thing and on the other hand thing.
He'll say one thing, and it placates the critics that hate perpetual war, and then he'll say the other hand thing, which is, you know, but we face a new enemy and we have to have unlimited power to wage this war.
At least George Bush was honest when he was lying.
Look, I'm about to tell you a bunch of crap.
You're going to believe it.
And then, you know, I mean, like, yeah, Obama was much more savvy about it.
But one thing that I just want to mention before we perhaps move on to something else with regard to the drone war, you know, Obama yesterday or the day before declassified officially that that he's killed four Americans in the drone war.
Oh, yeah.
No, we'll get back to all.
No, no, no.
We're going to get back to a lock in a second here.
But I want to say I want to go a different direction on the drone war real quick, which is this the first time that I'm aware of anyway.
I don't keep it.
I don't keep good enough track, I guess.
It's the first time I'm aware of the president, at least admitting that there is such a thing as, you know, the idea of blowback anyway.
It's possible, however unlikely, that we might create he might create new enemies against the United States with the drones particularly.
But he only brings it up and then drops it.
And when he picks the idea back up again, he goes back to the cause of terrorism being poverty and religious extremism.
And therefore, how to drain the swamp of the terrorist swamp is to build new schools in Pakistan.
Right.
That's where the Taliban came from in the first place, right, is the American funded schools in Pakistan.
But he's being savvy again.
So he can do that on the one hand.
On the other hand, thing on stuff that, you know, is less controversial.
But the stuff that really gets in the stuff that really paints him as a terrible president or a war criminal or someone who's laying the groundwork for blowback, he papers over it.
Just like he said, he's I know Obama is not a moron and has access to intelligence, so he knows what the real motivation of terrorists are.
But he he does he completely papers over it.
He told a lie that was almost as empty and inaccurate as Bush's claim that that terrorists hate us for our freedom.
He said something like, you know, all all terrorists are fueled by an ideology that says Islam is in conflict with the United States and vice versa.
And he says that's not true.
That's not what is motivating terrorists.
OK.
It's a very simple thing.
They're they're in opposition to our brutal foreign policy.
And part of that brutal foreign policy is the drone war.
Multiple studies of on the ground investigations and even intelligence reports that have been at least partially classified and CIA operatives have said this publicly and so forth, that we're creating more terrorists and we're eliminating from the battlefield.
That's the case in both Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen and elsewhere.
Obama certainly received these intelligence reports.
He knows this.
But this is a more uncomfortable fact that he doesn't he he's not going to address.
He's not going to do on the one hand, on the other hand thing on that he's going to paper over it.
And that's exactly what he did.
You know, he's being a knucklehead, in my opinion, because he knows what's driving a lot of these terrorists.
He's continuing with these absurd policies.
Yeah.
Well, and what Islam has to do with it is solidarity, right?
That's how someone in North America can feel a nationalist kinship with an Iraqi or an Afghan is that, well, geez, we're all getting down on our knees and praying to the same prophet at the same time kind of a thing.
And so it's just like, you know, all the time on the show, I try to because I, you know, most Americans identify themselves as Christians.
So I try to point out that, hey, some Arabs are Christians.
Are they human then?
Is it OK to kill them if they have the same religion as you?
Does that make them half a human at least?
It's not OK to just genocide their entire sect off the face of the earth.
You know, like what happened to the Assyrians and Chaldeans in Iraq.
And so that's what it has to do with.
It's not that because Mohammed says conquer North America, it's that Mohammed says if somebody is wantonly trespassing on Muslim land and slaughtering innocent Muslims, then you have a duty to help them, which is the same thing as if the English invaded New York state and a bunch of Californians and Texans jumped in our trucks with our rifles to go and kill them until they stopped.
It's as simple as that.
You have some Canadian volunteers in that one, although, well, Mexicans.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, this is about solidarity.
It's about community.
It's about mobilizing people against U.S. foreign policy, because for a long time it was a minority of people that even had access to the information that would anger them so much.
But, you know, this is why it's not a surprise that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote inside the wall of the boat that he was almost dying in that this attack in Boston was revenge for America's foreign policy in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
The guy that just hacked up a British soldier in London walked over to someone with a camera phone and said, you're killing our people, and we're going to keep killing you back until you stop.
So, you know, we know what it's about, and the veneer of Islam and, you know, community with other Muslims and defending Muslims, you kill one Muslim, you kill all Muslims, stuff like that, is a way to mobilize people, and, you know, this is well-known.
I'm almost sick of talking this.
I know.
Me, too.
All right.
Let's go ahead and move on, because we only got nine minutes, and I've talked way too much over your interview here, but we need to talk about, you need to talk about al-Awlaki and Guantanamo Bay, so just go ahead and go.
So with regard to al-Awlaki, one thing that's really important, Obama claimed in his speech that, okay, we killed al-Awlaki not as has been said because of his words or because he was, you know, advocating violence against the United States, which is technically covered under the First Amendment, but because he was an active operative in terrorist plots against the United States.
He planned or helped organize the Detroit bomber, you know, the underwear bomber, and then again with the flights that had explosives in printers from Yemen and so forth.
So he was actively plotting to kill us, but he doesn't mention, and this was reported by Jeremy Scahill, is that Obama tried to kill Anwar al-Awlaki in drone strikes back in 2009 before any of the incidents that he mentions as justification for al-Awlaki's killing.
So, you know, we wanted to kill him before there was any evidence of any plot that he was trying to actually turn against us.
The other obvious point is that it doesn't matter what Obama simply says that accuses someone of saying, that's the whole point of due process, that government claims can't just be trusted, can't just be taken for granted, they have to be tested in a court of law.
There's plenty of opportunities that he could have extradited al-Awlaki and worked with the Yemeni government, which are our puppets anyways, and tried to get him out.
He was actually in jail before as well, you know, he could have got him then, so on and so forth.
So that's really important for people to remember about the al-Awlaki killing.
The other thing about, you know, Guantanamo is he claims that he wants to close it up just like he always has since the first day of his administration, claimed he was going to close it in a year.
Well, wait a minute, we're going to have time, wait, wait, we're going to have time, I guess, so let me follow up on the al-Awlaki thing here real quick.
Sure.
And forgive me if you sort of already addressed this, but it stood out to me the way he framed the question about imminence there, where, you know, of course he doesn't have the right to kill.
I mean, he was like trying to concede Glazer's point as much as he can, right?
Oh, no, of course I don't have the right to just murder, you know, any old American without due process or something like that with a drone or with a gun or anything else.
But in this case, that's like saying the cops, a SWAT team, doesn't have the right to go after a live sniper, right?
Like they don't have the right to, you know, like when that guy's sniping people in L.A. in traffic or Charles Whitman in the UT Tower, right?
Something like that.
That's like saying that the cops don't have the right to use immediate violent force right there.
That's not punishment.necessary force to end a current and imminent kind of threat.
And then he immediately just sort of conflates that into plotting and planning and sitting around and someday he's going to do something, which is taking it right back again, because wasn't he in a cafe when they bombed him?
That's where Rand Paul got that ridiculous thing about the cafe.
That was where they killed him, right?
He was sitting somewhere eating lunch.
So the imminence became not an active sniper or say, take the D.C. sniper is Obama.
He just said that if the D.C. sniper basically, you know, to paraphrase, if the D.C. sniper was asleep in his motel room at night, that he doesn't have the right to drone strike him or kill him like that.
Only if he's in the middle of shooting somebody kind of thing.
And so he just took two total opposite ideas and conflated them together.
I'm sorry.
I'm so clumsy and explain what I'm trying to say there.
It's even more than what you say, because these are these are alleged crimes that a lucky committed and was a party to, according to the Obama administration, but they happened in the past.
So, you know, unless he can actually prove that there was an impending plot against the United States to kill Americans, that's the only way he can compare it to killing a sniper who's actively shooting people from a tower or something.
And even then, they never proven that he helped Abdulmutallab do anything or whatever.
All they say is that that's what Abdulmutallab told them when they were threatening him with the death penalty.
But so what?
It's never been tried and tested in a court of law anywhere.
That's right.
And this is their say, so their hearsay, his 16 year old son was the one that was killed in a cafe.
I saw a lot.
He was actually in a car driving away and they shot him like three times and he was trying to dodge all the all the drones.
And the third one, I think, got him.
But yeah, you're right.
I mean, Obama didn't bring up the son at all, right?
He didn't.
Not by name.
He said we killed four Americans and then he talked all about a lucky didn't talk anything about the lucky son.
The government is just staunchly non non responsive on that point because they're embarrassed.
It was either a terrible mistake or an outright crime because they actually targeted this kid.
We don't even know what the reality is.
OK, and now I'm real sorry, because now we are real short on time.
We got what?
Two two minutes.
So go ahead about Guantanamo.
Oh, all that all there is is that, you know, Obama keeps shifting the blame from himself onto Congress, saying that's why Guantanamo hasn't been closed.
But he's still been holding eighty six detainees that have been cleared for release.
He's torturing the majority of people that are in there by force feeding them.
That's according to U.N. officials, torture.
They're starving themselves in protest for their injustice.
He could do many, many things to close that down within a matter of months.
And he still has refused to do it.
And so much of the blame still lies with him.
But, you know, that's the gist of it.
Yeah.
Well, and did you notice that he said, so I've ordered the military to come up with a place in America where they want to hold their military commissions here.
So he's not outlawing Gitmo justice at all.
He just wants to import it from communist Cuba.
Yeah, he's still a fan of indefinite detention.
He just doesn't want to do it on Cuba's land.
He did say he's going to let the Yemenis that have been cleared go home at least.
Right.
Right.
You know, the reason he hasn't done that yet is because of a moratorium.
He said he's going to lift the moratorium on sending people back to Yemen.
The reason there was a moratorium was not because of Congress, his administration.
That was a self-imposed moratorium on shipping people back to Yemen.
He did it.
And so you're saying he's going to lift that.
But then again, they're just words.
He said he was going to close Guantanamo in 2009.
So let's see.
Yeah.
And hell, yeah.
Here's some words.
He's the commander in chief.
I mean, you know, if you ask him, it means he can fund al-Qaeda in Syria or start a war for regime change in Libya without even so much as notifying Congress.
Who cares about that?
But in this case, he wants us to believe that he's helpless to close down a prison in Guantanamo Bay.
He has all the authority in the world to close down that entire base if he felt like it and tell Congress to go to hell.
That's right.
But he doesn't.
He doesn't know when and where to impose his authoritarian will.
And when he doesn't want to, he just ships the blame.
Hey, listen, you guys need to be reading John Glaser all day, every day.
Him and Jason Ditz.
They're on top of every bit of what you need to know at Antiwar.com.
Thanks, John.
Thank you.
Hey, y'all.
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