03/04/14 – Michael Hirsh – The Scott Horton Show

On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Geraldine McGovern, Kutowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew, and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show, The Scott Horton Show, Liberty Express Radio, and scotthorton.org.
Our first guest on the show today is Michael Hirsch.
He's now writing at the National Journal, and he's got this great new piece, a really in-depth piece, 5,000 or 7,000 words or something, Obama Will Never End the War on Terror.
The president stands to leave an open-ended conflict to his successor.
Welcome back to the show.
Mike, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks for having me.
Well, very happy to talk to you again.
It's been a little while.
So first of all, I guess you talk about this in the piece.
It seems a logical place to start would be Obama's speech, his State of the Union address from January, where he said exactly the opposite, that he does, in fact, mean to end the war on terror.
He even paraphrased or quoted James Madison, saying, a nation cannot remain free in the midst of perpetual warfare.
But you're saying, yeah, nice speech, but no dice.
Why is that?
Well, I mean, Obama's actually made this a consistent theme.
He delivered a speech last year at the National Defense University, where he really laid out in more detail how he wants to end this war on terror and take us off of a permanent war footing and treat terrorism acts more as they were treated before 9-11, you know, as law enforcement problems.
So there's no question that he wants to do this.
The main point that he's trying to make in this article is that it's going to be impossible for him to do that.
And he's not showing signs of really following through in terms of ratcheting down America's war footing.
So, nor is it likely that he's going to be able to do that, you know, in the next two and a half years or so, until the end of his term.
And by that, you mean that he's not instructing his bureaucrats to write the memos to reorganize the way it's working?
It continues to just go on under the old theories?
Right.
Well, one of the things he said in his speech in May 2013 at National Defense University is that he wanted to work to change and ultimately repeal the authorization for the use of military force.
This was the authorization that Congress gave right after 9-11, voted on, which basically authorized the war on terror for the subsequent 13 years or so.
And yet, our reporting shows that, in fact, there have been no serious negotiations between the Obama administration and Congress on this, what's called the AUMF, the Authorization of the Use of Military Force.
So, you know, they're not really moving forward here, despite the President's rhetoric.
And that, you know, raises the prospect that you could have just this open-ended conflict, drone warfare, special operations missions and things like that, that we've grown used to to the point where people don't even pay attention anymore, hardly, that that could just continue on indefinitely into the future.
Right.
In fact, I think he's saying in the article that one of the main reasons that he has to keep the AUMF is the legal cover for the operation down in Guantanamo Bay, which he hasn't followed through on that.
Explain that.
Well, exactly.
Because, you know, many of the prisoners have not had their status in any way clarified in terms of, you know, how or where they're going to be tried.
And so it's, you know, you can't sort of do that at the same time, get rid of the AUMF.
You need that in place.
I mean, that may be one of the reasons why the administration has not moved more quickly on this.
And then, well, that's funny.
You know, I wonder whether that's part of why, yeah, they keep Guantanamo open so they can keep the AUMF, so they can keep Guantanamo open, something like that, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, for years now, you know, there's been this huge debate.
I mean, this literally has been happening for more than a decade about what do you do with these guys?
Can they be tried?
Can evidence obtained under, you know, often under duress, or in some cases, a few cases, you know, even waterboarding, can that be used?
Should, you know, what should be the status and the organization of these military commissions?
I mean, these issues have been very, very tough issues, but they haven't been resolved.
And then, you know, as the decades go by.
Right.
Well, and what's really sad about that is, you know, me or any other fifth grader could have answered all those questions, you know, with just basic American flag 101.
You either charge them or you let them go.
And the burden of proof is on the state to prove that they did something.
And if you, even if you really believe they did something, but you can't prove it, tough for you, government.
You can't hold people unless they're convicted of a crime.
And it's as simple as that.
And they could have done it and treat these guys as prisoners of war or something like that.
But they deliberately chose not to do that.
And so, you know, I think it goes back to the simple default bill of rights system.
You get a trial and then you're either.
Well, I mean, they are kind of treating them as prisoners of war.
And that's, you know, one of the things at issue.
Should they be given, you know, normal legal due process, treated as criminals, for example, like the Boston Marathon bomber, you know, is being tried.
And in some cases, you know, a couple of these guys like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are going up to trial militarily.
But the disposition of so many others have not been resolved.
Right.
In fact, I think there was even a statement maybe from a friend of Holder's, something like that, in the media in the last couple of weeks saying, you know, if they'd let me try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I'd convict him and sentence him to death by now.
Yeah.
A long time ago.
Yeah.
Because remember, he did try to do that.
They announced, oh yeah, I guess Holder, I don't know if he checked with Obama's political advisors first or what, but he just announced, yeah, we're going to try these guys in New York.
And then they had to take that back.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And, you know, and to be fair to Obama, you know, obviously many of these issues he inherited from George W. Bush.
Sure.
Although, you know, like when it comes to Guantanamo Bay, it seems like his political advisors I think really steered him wrong, where if he had just said, I'm the commander in chief and I am moving these troops and their prison to American shores and you can't stop me, what are you going to do about it, that the American people would have sided with him.
And for that matter, I mean, it was what George W. Bush and Colin Powell and all the Republicans were on the record.
Robert Gates, all of them were on the record saying that they wanted Guantanamo closed and that it was propaganda of the enemy.
So he could have hid behind all that right wing flank if he had tried to really fight it out.
Well, perhaps.
I mean, there were some, you know, very difficult issues about the disposition of some of these guys like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, people who had been waterboarded or endured other, you know, harsh treatment that could be interpreted as torture.
What would be their legal disposition at the same time?
You know, you don't want to you can't simply let them go.
I mean, this was a thinking, I think, of the Obama White House early on.
But, you know, reflecting what you just said, yeah, there was a there was a big argument.
In fact, one of the president's chief advisors during the 2008 campaign left a specific guy who was the White House Council actually left because of this.
Because they weren't taking it as seriously as he wanted to close Guantanamo Bay and the president refused.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, I don't remember.
I believe it was a Washington Post story.
I think it was highlighted at salon.com a few years back about Democratic senators saying that they started the project as soon as Obama was sworn in, they started really working on it and only kind of belatedly realized that the president did not have their back and was not going to help them push this thing through the Senate, wasn't going to make any calls or or call in any favors or do any kind of thing.
And they felt like real jerks for sticking their neck out and letting the Republicans all call them a bunch of sissies or whatever kind of right wing talking points.
And then they didn't have the president helping them when they thought they were only helping him in the first place.
Right.
Right.
Sad story.
Yeah.
And especially because I agree with Eric Holder that any one of his U.S. attorneys could have gotten Khalid Sheikh Mohammed convicted and sentenced to death a long time ago.
You know, obviously he could have.
The guy admitted it to Al Jazeera before they ever even kidnapped him.
He bragged about it to Al Jazeera.
So guilty.
Yeah.
Done.
But anyway.
So now let me ask you about the Pakistani tribes, because this is something that I don't I don't really understand the legalities of all this.
But they went from, hey, we're targeting Arab Afghans would be could be friends of Osama in Pakistan who had presumably run from Afghanistan upon the American invasion in one.
And then they immediately or I don't know how immediately they they bled that over into authority to attack whoever the Pakistani government wanted attacked or I don't know who many of the Afghan tribal leaders and and I mean, pardon me, Pakistani Taliban leaders and that kind of thing.
So is there is that still the same AUMF or is there any other authority for that?
No, that's under the AUMF, as well as drone strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, which are conducted by the military.
Ostensibly, the U.S., the CIA in Pakistan is still only going after Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda affiliates.
I mean, that is what the AUMF authorizes.
But the biggest question and I think to me, one of the most startling things that the American people should know is that the government has classified who the Associated Forces of Al Qaeda are.
I mean, we know that, you know, the core of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Afghanistan or mainly in Pakistan, we know basically who they are, but we don't know who some of the other groups are.
They're not confirmed by the government.
So we find ourselves effectively at war with an enemy that we don't even know that the Obama administration has has officially classified as a secret.
And, you know, that's pretty, pretty weird.
And I have not succeeded in discovering, you know, a really good reason why that is.
I mean, the ostensible reason why they classify this list is because they don't want to tip off, you know, a group that might be targeted.
But that doesn't mean that they can't at least tell them, you know, tell us how many groups there are or whether they're an add on to the list or subtractions from it.
I find that very, very strange.
And now, do you know if they have a definition for associated or not?
Yeah, an associated force of Al Qaeda is supposedly one that, you know, has made the United States into a strategic enemy in the way that Al Qaeda did, that targets U.S. or U.S. any U.S. facilities bases, you know, any U.S. target of any kind on an ongoing basis as part of this war.
I mean, that's loosely how they define it.
So, in other words, that, in the eyes of some of the Obama administration, that excludes, say, the lone bomber, like the Marathon bombers, Boston Marathon bombers.
It excludes groups that might be arising, Islamist groups in Syria, some of them, that are not, you know, affiliated with Al Qaeda that might be just sort of battling against Bashar Assad or battling against other local or regional leaders.
So, I mean, that's what we hear.
But the problem is we don't exactly know who is who.
This is kept secret.
So, if the government is making a decision at any given moment, you know, we've decided that this group is a strategic enemy now, and we're going to target them, the American people are not informed of that.
So, I mean, you know, this is about as far as you can get from, you know, what used to be known as a declaration of war, you know, from Franklin Roosevelt standing up on December 8th, you know, 1941 and declaring the U.S. is at war, asking for Congress to, you know, to declare war against Japan.
I mean, this is really very, very strange and mysterious.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry I got to interrupt.
We got to go out to this break, but we still got a lot more to cover here.
It's a great piece at nationaljournal.com.
Obama will never end the war on terror.
Please go read it.
We'll be right back after this with Michael Hirsch.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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We're talking with Michael Hirsch from National Journal.
He's got this great piece, Obama will never end the war on terror.
So we're, you know, kind of talking about all the legalities and what have you is under the authorization to use military force and, of course, the whole dichotomy about treating terrorism as an act of war rather than a crime and Guantanamo Bay and all this stuff that all this entails.
And I'm so glad that you reminded me, Michael, right before we went out to break there about when they're working on this list, what you do know about the list of so-called associated forces of al-Qaeda, even though they won't release the whole thing.
One of the things that you found out was that after Ayman al-Zawahiri denounced ISIS, that is al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, basically, as basically not al-Qaeda because they won't obey him.
The spin was because they're too brutal for al-Qaeda, but I don't know where anybody got that.
Nusra will cut your head off, too.
But anyway, that in the White House, they had this discussion that, oh, hey, maybe we can take ISIS off the list of bad guys that we either got to fight or maybe that they're banned from supporting outright if they don't work directly for Ayman al-Zawahiri anymore.
And I just thought that's the way the bureaucrats think.
Did I get that right?
Yeah.
It, again, is rather odd and all happening behind closed doors.
And it's exactly what Obama said he didn't want to do in this important speech he gave last year.
You know, he said, we can't allow the enemy to define the conflict.
You know, we have to define it.
We have to decide when it's over.
And yet, here we are appearing to defer to, you know, the supposed al-Qaeda decision to expel ISIS from its ranks.
You know, is that really true?
Would there be some break-off groups?
This is something that we only hear about in bits and pieces.
It's something that intelligence officials debate and discuss, you know, in secret.
And so we don't really know, again, who we're fighting.
And I think that may be unprecedented in American history.
All right, now, when we're talking about the drone strikes against presumed al-Qaeda targets, but we know from a lot of good journalism that there's a lot of non-al-Qaeda targets, you know, Pakistani Taliban types being targeted, enemies of the Pakistani government being targeted as a favor to them and that kind of thing.
I wonder whether, does it matter not, I mean, the AUMF covers military authority and that's all the authority they need for the CIA, too?
Because the president can also just write a finding authorizing the CIA to do anything under the sun that he can imagine anyway, right?
Well, not anything under the sun.
I mean, there are strictures in place under Title 50 of the National Security Act.
This has to be, you know, overseen by Congress.
And technically, you know, you do need the authorization for the use of military force to launch a specific, or at least an ongoing campaign.
I mean, the president does have the right under Article 2 of the Constitution under self-defense authority to, you know, to authorize the use of force without Congress to say so.
But for a regular ongoing campaign, you know, the enemy is identified as al-Qaida.
And I don't, I wouldn't be so sure that the CIA is out there just simply targeting enemies of the Pakistan government again.
It may well be that there have been mistakes, there probably have been.
But the CIA's intention is to be, is to be targeting only al-Qaida under the AUMF.
Well, that's interesting.
I mean, and from the very beginning, they conflated al-Qaida with the Taliban, with radical Islam, with Saddam Hussein, with whoever they wanted.
I mean, I know that's mostly in public talking points and that kind of thing.
But legally too, I mean, they declared war on terror, not necessarily on al-Qaida, right?
I mean, they've, they've used this associated forces thing to go pretty far when you look at the fact that al-Shabaab didn't really exist until after America got Ethiopia to invade Somalia for them in Christmas 2006.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, I mean...
I mean, I heard that Somali once shook hands with a guy from Yemen, and so that makes him an associated force.
But that's pretty far field, don't you think?
Well, I do think it's one reason why it should be discussed more publicly, debated in Congress and so forth.
The secrecy thing does bother me a little bit, but let's, you know, again, be fair to Obama.
I mean, he has tried since he became president to narrow the focus, and they don't use the term war on terror.
The global war on terror, or GWAT, was a favorite term during the George W. Bush administration.
The Obama administration has made clear it's sort of abandoning that and has talked strictly about the war against al-Qaida and its associated forces.
So they have tried to sort of narrow that down and not go in the direction of, you know, just an all-embracing concept of everyone who's an Islamist radical is an enemy.
But at the same time, as I say, you know, there is this issue of who the associated forces are.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I'm sure you've probably seen...
I think this is actually, you know, the official story of what happened there that day, according to some journalism or something, but it's certainly in the Oliver Stone movie, Nixon, where he goes to the Lincoln Memorial and he talks to the protesting students.
And the girl says to Nixon, you can't stop it, can you?
And he's just kind of like, well, geez, you know, I guess I sort of would like to, whatever.
It sort of seems like that's a lot of what's going on here, too.
The president's the president, but the government is a really big government.
The national security state is a really big thing.
And I'm reminded of that story from DefenseNews.com.
And there's been there's one like this in The New York Times, too, where the army talks pretty blatantly about, well, now that we're out of Iraq and leaving Afghanistan, we really got to find some work to do.
So we want to pivot into Africa and find some enemies in Africa to fight.
And basically, as long as you can find a Sunni with a rifle, you can say that he once knew a guy who knew a guy who was part of Ansar al-Sharia and fought in the Iraq war or whatever, and authorized this kind of intervention on a low level and kind of proxy style wars and training operations and this kind of thing for a long, long time.
And they don't even...
I'm not even saying it's really all that corrupt, Michael.
I don't mean to portray it in the worst kind of light.
It's just sort of the institutional interests of the army as a government program that they got to keep their guys working, doing something right, can't just sit around Fort Bliss all day.
So, you know.
Well, I mean, there always is that danger, of course, particularly as the army is threatened with extreme downsizing, which is a discussion going on right now of, you know, sort of returning military forces to the pre-World War II size.
So I think you will certainly get a certain, you know, institutional defensiveness there.
But that remains to be seen.
I mean, because the wars have really spread.
There are more, I think, even in the State Department reports on terrorism and whatever.
And even if you take the most narrow definition of associated forces that the people in the Obama administration, that some of them in the administration are trying to apply, there's still more of these guys than ever before who are basically sworn allegiance to Zawahiri's goals.
Al-Nusra in Syria, for example, which I'm sure you saw the Wall Street Journal had a piece saying, well, maybe instead of Assad, or maybe at the same time as Assad, maybe we need to have a drone war in Syria against some of these al-Qaeda guys before they, you know, start moving on or coming back to Europe or back to even America.
Yeah, I mean, that is the danger.
I mean, up until now, you know, informally, basically core al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Maghreb, and in the Horn of Africa, you know, basically Yemen.
And I think parts of Somalia, drones have been used, but again, that's something we only know informally.
It's not something the government confirms.
And it was Obama, you know, that touched off this discussion that decided in 2012 to make the drone program public.
So when, right to question, I think, why he's only doing it half hog.
Yeah.
Well, you know, he does this sometimes, and then, you know, he follows up.
Looks like he's actually really trying hard on a Palestine peace deal and on an Iran nuclear deal after sort of futzing around for years on those issues.
So, you know, we could see how anybody coming after him, Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever it is, would be under all the same pressures to keep the thing going, and maybe much more so than Obama.
I mean, he's a lame duck, and especially after the next midterms, there won't be anything you can do to him now kind of a thing where maybe if he really wants to, he could do like you say in here and just go ahead and give a speech and say, no, that's it.
I want the AUMF repealed.
This thing really is over because I say so sort of a thing.
But that really is what it would take, right?
It would take that.
And he would be leaving himself open to a lot of criticism, you know, particularly Republicans, conservatives.
And, of course, you know, if there were some major terrorist act after Obama had declared the war over, that would be hugely embarrassing.
So I do think he's very reluctant for that reason, because of the issue of Guantanamo Bay and the other things we've already discussed.
So, yeah, I don't see it happening.
What are you going to do, count on the FBI to protect you?
Yeah.
Well, I can see that.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Michael, and for this great piece of journalism here.
Thank you, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
That is Michael Hirsch.
He's now at National Journal.
Oh, that's H-I-R-S-H, Michael Hirsch at National Journal.
Obama will never end the war on terror.
It's a very in-depth assessment of all the different issues at stake here.
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