11/06/08 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet every Monday through Friday here at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is the great blogger Glenn Greenwald, you can find what he writes at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald, three great books, A Tragic Legacy, How Would a Patriot Act, and Great American Hypocrites, which obviously is about the conservative movement in America.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
Great to be back, Scott, thanks.
Hey, I'm really happy to have you here.
So okay, now you're going to stay a good guy, even though liberals are in power now, right?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
That's the number one priority.
I mean, you know, I think it's worth waiting to see what and who Obama is before forming any conclusions or reaching any decisions about what's worth saying about him.
I think he's entitled to some leeway in that regard.
He has had in the past some indications that he has relatively good instincts on questions like basic constitutional liberties and our constitutional framework.
He also in his past has done things and said things that reveal a willingness to violate those.
And so, you know, who the real Barack Obama is and what he intends to do in office is something that remains to be seen.
But, you know, as I told you many times before, instead of many other contexts, I think anybody who has devoted themselves for the past eight years to defending our constitutional freedoms and our basic framework of government will be consistent in holding Obama to those same principles.
Right.
Well, I appreciate what you say, too, about we've got to give him a chance.
I mean, I'm just way too cynical.
I don't like any president.
I don't think there should be a president at all, which basically kind of argues me right out of the debate.
But I'm trying to, especially after what we've just been through, I'm really trying to be optimistic and look for the kinds of things.
Well, you know, on the most important things, like you said, basic constitutional issues.
You know, when the Supreme Court issued the Boumediene ruling saying that, you know, you can't throw out habeas corpus like this, John McCain said this was the worst Supreme Court decision ever.
And Barack Obama said, thank God.
So, you know, I've got to give him some credit for not being John McCain.
We know for sure, you know, keep in mind that many of the abuses the past eight years have been ones that have been blessed by the leading Democrats in Congress.
And, of course, for the past two years, the Democrats already had control of Congress and did very little about them.
And in fact, they often legalized them.
Now, things will change when there's a Democrat in the White House, theoretically, because Democrats can no longer rely on the excuse that they're incapable of passing legislation that the White House will veto.
But so, you know, it's certainly unlikely that within the first couple of years or really ever under an Obama administration, there's going to be some libertarians paradise of returning to, you know, sort of the traditional view of the Constitution.
But I think that one of the what is reasonable to expect, because they've said they were going to do it, which, of course, doesn't mean they will.
But one of the things that you can look for are discrete, incremental improvement, specific policy measures that the Democrats claim to be foreign that Obama insisted he would support, such as eliminating the part of the Military Commissions Act that abolished habeas corpus, applying the prohibition on torture to all branches of the government, including the CIA, meaning eliminate the exclusion that John McCain arranged for the CIA, closing Guantanamo, making a much more open and transparent government, investigating the crimes of the last eight years.
There's lots of discrete things within the political mainstream that the Democrats have said they would do, and Obama says he supports that.
I think everyone has a right to expect, realistically, ought to happen.
Well, yeah.
And let me latch on to the last one there.
Investigations.
Criminal, as in, you know, he's actually going to have the FBI and Justice Department look at indicting Cheney's lawyers.
I mean, come on.
Well, I mean, you know, I think a lot of that depends.
I mean, I would agree it's unlikely that there's going to be mass investigations of the prior administration.
That's true for a lot of reasons.
But again, here's an instance where I'm willing to wait and see if Obama doesn't do that, if his attorney general doesn't indicate in any way that that's going to be part of what they do, then I'll criticize them then.
Obama was asked three or four months ago by a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch, whether that was something that he believed his Justice Department ought to do, and he drew a reasonable enough distinction between policy disagreements that shouldn't be criminalized, but actual lawbreaking that is criminal, and very emphatically said that if there's things that fall on the side of actual lawbreaking in the Bush administration that he would have his Justice Department investigate.
Now, do I believe that?
No, I won't believe that until I see it.
At the same time, I'm not going to condemn him for failing to do it until he actually fails.
Right.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
Now, this guy Rahm Emanuel, I guess it's not a done deal that he's going to be the chief of staff, but he's been offered the job so far.
Is that right?
I think there are reports today, actually, now, credible reports, including Krabi Cheney, that he has accepted.
Oh, I see.
So I think it's a fairly good bet that he will.
Now, I think I remember learning quite a bit of this from you.
I know it's something that's been written about at Antiwar.com a lot, and that was that, in fact, well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you covered this in great detail back in 2006, that this guy was sort of leading the charge in the Democratic Party to keep all the antiwar candidates from winning the primaries.
Four horrible things you can say about the Democratic Party over the last two years can be traced directly to Rahm Emanuel.
Oh, no!
Yeah.
I mean, he is one of the worst and most corrupting influences within the Democratic Party of any single other figure in Congress.
I mean, I can understand why Obama wants him as his chief of staff.
He's extremely cunning and shrewd and ruthless.
There's an argument to make that he's actually less powerful as Obama's chief of staff than he would be continuing to rule the House of Representatives, which he in fact does.
He probably has at least as much power as Teddy Hoyer and certainly more than Nancy Pelosi.
At the same time, a chief of staff has only as much power as a president vests in him.
And so it's possible that Obama has chosen him because of his ruthless, strategizing skills and can enable Obama to get things done.
He's not really a reflection of substantially how Obama will rule.
Or it's possible that he is and that that's where Obama's true heart lies.
Wow.
All right.
Well, now, I got to tell you, man, I'm really worried.
It was very hollow support and agreement, and I think that's more clear now in hindsight.
But there was a period in the 1990s where I sort of got along with some right-wingers because they hated the government, and that was great.
And then, of course, conservatism, there's really nothing left now except worship of the leader and whatever.
They proved that they were willing to abandon any principle to rally behind the Republican Party.
So believe me, I'm through with them, and I don't want them, I don't want to be allies with them again.
You know, no matter how much I'm going to disagree with Obama, I don't want a bunch of pro-torture, Bush-loving, Sean Hannity-listening crazies to come and be my allies the way good liberals have been my allies over this time during the Bush administration.
And already I see the change.
It's already happening.
I'm hearing stories of liberals talking about, yeah, you know, the Afghan war, now that's the good war, that's the one we really need to fight.
And I saw Rachel Maddow on MSNBC declare that we were attacked on September 11th by nihilists who have no motive and have no thoughts or beliefs, they're simply crazies, oh, and they want to take over the whole world if we don't stop them, and said all that in praise of Obama's tough talk in his speech about, you know, anyone who wants to tear down this world will destroy it.
And I'm already seeing liberals abandon the peace position for whatever they, you know, think the Obama position might be.
You know, I think there's a, there has for a long time been a split among people who identify with, for purposes of labels, call them Democrats, as people who identify essentially as Democrats.
Obviously, there has been, within the Democratic Party, a very strong, and even among, if you want to define it a little bit further, as a subset among liberals, you know, kind of establishment liberals versus, I guess, people who are more considered on the left, you know, a strong belief in American interventionism.
Our military was hardly inactive during the Clinton administration, it wasn't nearly as active as it was during the Bush administration, but there were lots of interventions and military actions against other countries.
And of course, in 2002 and 2003, many of the leading advocates for the invasion of Iraq were people who were previously considered liberal, or at least on the Democratic side of things, like, you know, Ken Pollack, and Tom Friedman, and, you know, obviously half of the Democratic caucus in the U.S. Senate were outspoken advocates of the war.
So the fact that there are Obama supporters who are going to cheer when a Democratic administration proposes military action, I think, is entirely unsurprising.
I think it would be shocking if that weren't the case.
I think what the question for me is going to be, how sizable of a faction is that, or have lots of these liberals and Democrats who previously might have been supportive of interventionism been changed by the endless occupation in Iraq?
I think that, too, remains to be seen.
I think, you know, one other word of caution, which is, and I think this is natural, and ultimately I don't like it, but not too bothersome to me, you know, it's been a long time since Democrats have really felt empowered.
I mean, certainly for the last eight years, they've been the opposite of empowered.
They've been completely rendered infinite, and, you know, obviously before that there was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and before that, in 1994, the takeover of the Congress led by Newt Gingrich.
It's been a long time since Democrats have really felt politically galvanized.
And the election that just occurred, and Barack Obama's pretty impressive victory from a political perspective, is going to endear Obama to lots and lots of Democrats and create enormous amounts of goodwill.
Were they going to be supportive of him, in the short term at least, and be willing to give him some flexibility?
So, you know, the fact that there are lots of liberals gearing up to defend Obama, I think is unsurprising.
Again, I would say there needs to be a little bit of a wait-and-see attitude to see how – he might be right, and it might be that there's just this mass hypocrisy where the vast majority of Bush critics on the left over the last eight years suddenly start defending the very things they've been criticizing.
I don't expect that to happen.
There'll be some who do that, but I think it's too early to tell yet.
Well, I mean, if anything, it's pretty clear that, as you implied there, that what's happened in the last eight years in terms of wars overseas, there's got to be some lessons learned in there.
I think you're right.
There's reason to be hopeful that people are going to stay anti-war, but I guess it was the Maddow thing that really got under my skin, because she didn't just say what would be even reasonable to me, maybe, you know, I would at least, you know, not be too upset by it, which is like, hey, look, bin Laden and Zawahiri are still alive in the world.
They still have allies.
There's a danger, and we need to have, you know, I don't know, good national police efforts and intelligence to protect Americans, where that would have been perfectly reasonable.
Instead, she goes straight for the George Bush line, that they hate us for our freedom for no reason.
They're crazy, and they don't even have beliefs or motives.
They're just nihilists.
Yeah, that's right out of the crazy depths of the right-wing bogus here.
You know, look, I mean, that's what, you know, the time that I realized for sure that Barack Obama was going to win the election was in the second debate, the town hall debate that they had, when the part of the debate that focused on foreign policy and specifically about Afghanistan basically entailed Barack Obama taking a more hawkish or aggressive position than John McCain was taking, and he actually basically provoked McCain into criticizing Obama for being too much of a militarist.
I mean, McCain was criticizing Obama for being too reckless in his threats against Pakistan and telling him that he shouldn't be beating his chest and making those kind of threats, and, you know, after sort of brushing him off and saying, well, you're the one who sung songs about bombing Iran and made jokes about, you know, the extinction of North Korea, he said, nonetheless, you know, I will defend my position, and if you don't agree with me, tell me that if we know where al-Qaeda is and the Pakistan government can or won't apprehend them that we're going to take them out, and because we must kill them alive.
That was when I knew that he was going to win, because he had basically established, you know, his willingness to spill American blood, which the New York Times in 1989, after George Bush I invaded Panama, said was, you know, the sort of ritualistic rite of passage that American presidents must go through, which is demonstrate a willingness to shed blood.
So, obviously, Afghanistan is what Obama latched onto in order to demonstrate that attribute.
He did so, you know, pretty successfully from a political perspective, and we'll see how much of a militarist and an imperialist Obama really is.
All right, now, here's something that's really troubling me, I mean, seriously troubling me.
56 million people voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and now just, you know, the cherry on top, the icing on the cake here is the news that came out yesterday that this woman couldn't name the three countries in North America, Glenn.
She didn't know that Africa was a continent.
She thought South Africa was just a region in that country, Africa.
And this woman apparently has no attachment to the world that you and I live in whatsoever.
You know, it's so interesting.
When Sarah Palin was first named, I was actually a little bit sympathetic to her, and had kind of a negative reaction to the criticism of her, because I did think there was an element of kind of, you know, sort of Washington-Beltway elitism, this sort of unmerited sense of superiority, because she wasn't from the Beltway, and because they didn't know her and hadn't gone through the meet-the-press rituals, that somehow that meant that she was unfit for office.
You know, she hadn't sat before Tim Russert and, you know, Charlie Gibson enough, and all that.
And I, you know, I also thought that there was, kind of like there was with George Bush, sort of a rush to proclaim that she was stupid when she didn't strike me as stupid.
As I watched her more, I still don't think she's stupid, but it really became, you know, unbelievably shocking, just how incredibly ignorant of the world she is, how unbelievably incurious.
You know, you would think, I mean, it's not that surprising that someone who's been a local official and then a governor of a fairly removed state, like Alaska, knows more about state policies and provincialism, you know, she knows about her religious and social conservatism issues and her tax and energy issues.
It's not surprising that she knows more about those issues than she does say about, you know, the Middle East or about foreign policy more generally.
But what was so amazing is you would think that somebody who was a governor just involved in our political mainstream would have the basic working knowledge that just a standard politically interested person, you know, would pick up just by reading the New York Times or watching like a half an hour of the evening news.
And her level of ignorance is so far beyond what the ordinary person's is that to consider the fact that she really was so close to the presidency, it is, it really is extraordinary.
I mean, it's just, it's staggering, actually.
Yeah, you know, I saw this report from Fox News, Carl Cameron talking with Bill O'Reilly explaining some of the leaks out of the McCain campaign about just how horrible it really was and O'Reilly actually started saying, well, now, you know, they could have got her up to speed.
They could have been to like the idea that it would be acceptable at all that someone who can't tell you what are the countries in North America when, in fact, she's the governor of a state that has the second country there in between her and the rest of her country.
And that just leaves Mexico there.
And, oh, she could be brought up to speed and that would be anything like acceptable in this country.
It just, I'm sorry.
Well, one of the interesting things I was actually just writing about this is, you know, Carl Cameron said that he's known about this for quite a long time, that the McCain aides were the ones who told him this and were expressing their deep concern about the fact that she was so ignorant and knew so little.
And yet he never said it because he claimed that he was told this off the record, which is understandable if a journalist obtains information, even critically important information, which they agree to keep off the record, they ought to keep it off the record no matter how important it is.
And that was what made that controversy over the Los Angeles Times refusal to release that videotape of Obama at that dinner with Rashid Khalili so absurd was that the LA Times had said that they abandoned on the condition that they wouldn't release it, same with Carl Cameron.
He got this information he said off the record and, therefore, he didn't reveal it.
That's fine.
But I went back and looked at some of the transcripts of what Carl Cameron was saying, say, two to three weeks ago, and he was regularly going on Fox News and saying that McCain aides were thrilled with Sarah Palin and that she was bringing to the ticket everything that they had hoped that she would bring.
So it wasn't just a matter that he had failed to inform the country about this extraordinary fact that the woman running for vice president was completely ignorant about the world.
He was on television overtly lying, saying things he knew to be false about the McCain campaign's perceptions of her because he was propagandizing for her.
I find that pretty amazing, too.
Yeah, well, I'm not too surprised by Fox News.
But anyway, I sure appreciate the way you keep tabs on them.
I thought, I actually consider, like, wow, that's funny because I haven't heard Fox News talking like this, but you actually went back through the transcripts, man.
That's doing your job well there, Glenn.
Yeah, I mean, I just, it's funny, when I first read about the Carl Cameron little controversy this morning, that was the first reaction I had was, OK, fine, I sympathize that he didn't disclose what he had learned off the record, but I just knew that had I gone back and looked at the transcripts, I would find him praising Sarah Palin in the eyes of the John McCain campaign, and sure enough, that's what was there.
All right, well, hey, listen, I really appreciate your time.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Glenn Greenwald.
He's about the best blogger around, if you ask me.
The website is salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald, and his latest book is called Great American Hypocrites, toppling the big myths of Republican politics, and we'll be back.