04/05/14 – Todd E. Pierce – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, April 6, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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I'm Scott Horton.
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Our guest today is Todd Pierce.
He is a retired major in the U.S. Army and a former judge advocate general defense lawyer down at Guantanamo Bay.
He's got this brand new piece in ConsortiumNews.com.
You might not like it.
We're all Cheneyites now.
Welcome to the show, Todd.
How are you doing?
Very well.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you very much for joining us today.
A very important article that you've written here.
And this may be somewhat familiar ground to some people, but we're far from having an American consensus about what the problem is here.
And I think you've put your finger right on the nature of the problem.
Cheneyism, as you call it.
An ideology that, as you quote Paul Wolfowitz saying, has become the consensus in Washington, D.C. since the end of the Cold War.
What is Cheneyism?
What I'm describing as Cheneyism is rooted in many things that Cheney has written or has spoken of.
And ending up in the policy that you can see within the United States, the national security policy going back to 9-11, obviously.
But it had its roots back in 1991, when the Department of Defense under Cheney, and probably written by Wolfowitz and a couple of others then at the time, wrote with the collapse of the Soviet Union, in essence, that the U.S. won the Cold War.
It was a winner-take-all contest.
Therefore, the world was now under our military subjugation.
And we would not tolerate any other nation even having the ability to cause us to have concerns for them.
It is really a totalitarian declaration, you could say, to the world that you're now subject to our control.
In fact, I've seen a statement at one point, which I didn't include in that because I don't have the citation to it, but we would not even allow a nation to have the ability to interfere or cause us to hesitate in our decision-making.
And that was in some sort of official document.
So that was the mindset of Cheneyism.
And now this was leaked, actually, in that defense planning guidance when that came out after the first Gulf War there in 1991.
And people were pretty shocked by that, right?
With the Soviet Union falling apart, people kind of thought, well, maybe now we can end our side of the Cold War, abolish NATO, and bring our guys home.
Even Jean Kirkpatrick, the neocon ambassador to the UN, Reagan's ambassador to the UN, had said, oh good, now with communism falling apart, we can be a normal country in a normal time.
Exactly.
That's what it should have been.
There was no threat in the world to the United States anymore with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But instead, and here's why I call it Cheneyism, we were taken over, in a sense, by this un-American ideology that we now must be the rulers of the world, subject to everything, every space on the earth, being subject to our military domination.
And that also reaches internally, domestically.
We're also seeing, going along with that militaristic expansionism, which is one prong of Cheneyism, I say, is the other, the authoritarianism required at home.
And this, if you stop and think about it, we have adopted nothing other than what has been adopted under Chile, with Pinochet, any other authoritarian regime.
And not likening this to the Holocaust in any sense, but the Germans, under Hitler, did many other things before they even got to that.
And one thing they had done was created a near-perfect authoritarian state.
A German Jew at the time, Bernd Sprachl, wrote on this, his first sentence in his book, The Dual State, was, Germany is under martial law.
And this was written in about 1938.
And so what we've done, and what we can look to Germany for, not to say, well, we're all like Hitler now, or we're all like the Nazis with a plan for the Holocaust, but rather dissecting it as an authoritarian state and seeing common ground, how it was put in place.
And when you do that, again, there is so much that is very similar, whether it's under Chile with Pinochet, or Nazi Germany, or Franco Spain, authoritarianism has common roots to all of it, ideologically.
And so what I'm saying is, Cheneism is just one, the latest version of that style of authoritarianism, but even more insidious, because the United States has so much military power that we can apply it to the entire world.
And that's, in essence, what we're doing with the Military Commission Act, for example.
We're saying that, again, putting aside actual terrorist acts, we're saying even people who are just critical of U.S. policy are our enemies and subject to being charged with material support for terrorism, for example.
All right, now, one of the things that this ideology has in common, this kind of right-wing nationalism has in common with the Germans, as you point out in your article, Todd, is the stab in the back theory about how everything was going fine until we were subverted from within by those traitors.
And I think that's the common, I mean, I think it's self-evident, it's a common belief amongst many people.
Every year in D.C. they have this big motorcycle ride, and frequently they'll quote somebody, you know, one of the participants in the newspaper as, we're not going to let it happen again like it did with Vietnam.
And if you go back, there's quite a bit of literature on the subject that, you know, it was the media that caused us to lose the war.
And there's a book, actually, written in the 1980s, early 1980s, on strategy by Colonel Harry Summers, where he put that in, he sort of dressed that idea up into military strategic terms, totally distorting plots of it for his own purposes, but basically said that because of this dissent by the media, or because of how the media reported the war and the dissent that resulted from it, it caused our, you know, American public to lose its will to fight the war.
And trying to put that in the class of, you know, terms of, the author of On War.
So he really dressed it up in military terms, and made it as an appealing argument to the military, where it was internalized, and we now have, as you well know, the various, much more confined, constrained information policies of the media, when we go to Iraq or Afghanistan, where they're very tightly controlled.
But to show how influential Summers' book was, Petraeus quotes from it, or refers to it in his famous Princeton dissertation, which was really a more moderate expression of this idea that, well, you know, here's why we lost the war.
So that gave us a whole lot of people, including within the military, this belief that, you know, when we're at war, we need to control information, and we need to be at war, in these former military officers' ideas, back to the Vietnam War, so that we can, in essence, be clear of martial law.
Well, we've done that with the AUMF, and with the Military Commission Act, and now with Section 1021 of the NDAA, where we brought in the law of war, the supposed law of war, martial law, really, into our system, waiting to be used against possibly American citizens like Chris Hedges.
All right, now, I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with retired major JAG lawyer Todd Pierce, a former defense attorney down at Guantanamo Bay, and we're talking about his article at ConsortiumNews.com, We're All Cheneyites Now.
Todd, tell me about this defense planning guidance, and this plan for benevolent hegemony, as they call it, in terms of America's policy in Eastern Europe.
It was kind of quiet NATO expansion during the Clinton years.
Of course, Bush was making so much noise in the Middle East, people didn't really notice that he had expanded NATO that much more, even than Clinton had.
And now we've got this problem in Ukraine with Russia, and coming right up to their border.
You talk about in the article about how Cheney had pretty extreme views about specifically what to do with Russia at the end of the Cold War.
As most people listening probably know, the first Bush one had assured Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was assured by Clinton, I believe, that the United States will never press its advantage by pushing NATO up against Russia's border.
That promise has obviously been broken.
Some time ago, long ago.
But you don't need to speculate on Cheney's actual ambition.
Robert Gates in his book, Duty, which I won't state my criticisms of it at this point, but he writes in it that Cheney, in fact, always had the ambition not only to break Soviet Union, but to break Russia itself into smaller pieces.
And by that, I don't mean the former Soviet Union empire, I mean Russia as a historic entity itself.
Just like others have expressed, like PNAC, that our goal should be to break the Mideast up into tiny little fragments.
Cheney had that same goal.
So if you look at it, the first Kosovo War, for example, put aside the humanitarian pretext that that was brought to us under, but thinking in strategic terms, that was really a means of breaking an ally, Russia away from Russia itself, Milosevic.
And I'm not defending Milosevic of him being a communist, but strategically, the idea of breaking away a potential ally, anybody that might be allied with Russia, away from them.
So if you start looking at things in those terms, then you see the pretext, the course of what we've been doing.
Yeah, and then it makes it that much easier to see it from the Russians' point of view for just a minute, just how threatened they are when they've pulled their troops back a thousand miles back behind the Ural Mountains, and we're still coming at them.
Yeah, exactly.
And again, going back to Clausewitz, Clausewitz was not this warmonger.
I don't mean to be too much of a devotee of him, but in his very first chapter, he talks about really more for a statesman, and pointing out that, no, nations should only fight defensive wars, they should not be going out looking for fights, and when things turn against them, the first thing they need to do is find terms that they can get out of the war.
Cheney is the exact opposite.
And so Russia can look upon things, they're not stupid people, I presume, and they can figure this out, what the United States has been doing.
You know, Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton were the real warmongers within the Clinton administration.
You could call them the mirror image of Cheney, I think, although they are much better at expressing it.
But the fear back in the 1990s by so-called conservatives was, yes, Clinton wanted to put us under a one-world government.
That's what Jesse Helms is always concerned with.
But it turned out the conservatives didn't really care if it was a one-world government so long as they could have the belief that it was under our authority.
And that's what we've got with Cheneyism.
We've got a one-world government in essence now, but it's under us.
And the question I make as a retired military officer, though, is that really in our long-term interest?
Where is it going to generate, as you mentioned, so much blowback that we actually lose any strength that we have, and I mean that in the positive sense, economically, and freedoms that we have.
Well, I mean, this is another major part of Cheneyism, which I know you couldn't fit everything in your article there, but to me, one of the most famous Dick Cheney quotes, other than we have to go to the dark side, is deficits don't matter.
I don't know who taught this guy economics, but that was one thing that he really believed, was that America can afford to conquer the planet Earth and keep it conquered forever, because after all, we can just print the money.
And as far as he knows, there's no limit on that.
We can do anything we want.
We can conquer Mars in the asteroid belt too, I guess.
Well, and I think that's consistent with Cheney's view of the world, and then it would be consistent with Hitler's view of the world.
Hitler, and again, not to dwell upon Hitler, but any military dictator with global ambitions who think they can achieve it, think that they can then rule by decree.
So no matter how much debt we have, we could just dismiss it and no one would challenge us for it.
But I did want to go back to one other thing, this notion that coming out of the Vietnam War, and internalized by Cheney, I would say, that yeah, we need to have one person rule, and that we lost the Vietnam War because we had dissent.
I would say the opposite was the case.
By having had that dissent, we actually had the American people being able to overrule Westmoreland, who later became one of the biggest accusers of the media, to overrule him because he was incompetent and negligent in so many different ways, and causing irreparable harm to the United States.
And this is what I don't think many people really realize or have forgotten, you know, was that the reason we were founded with a civilian rulers over the military, the military is very narrow-minded.
They only can think of that next bill they think they have to pay.
Westmoreland's a perfect example.
He didn't have any sense at all of larger issues, of nations' true interests.
And so anything that obstructed his narrow little view of the world, he saw as being the enemy, such as the media.
If you think who was a greater strategist in the Vietnam War era between General Westmoreland and, let's say, Pete Seeger, I would say Pete Seeger was.
Because just like Clausewitz understood, when you have a war that's going against you, you get out of it.
And Westmoreland never understood that.
He was a guy who Seeger wrote about who wanted to keep on moving deeper and deeper into the big money.
Right.
Well, and this is where we get back to the Chris Hedges lawsuit against the federal government for the NDAA.
And for that matter, the difference between the national interest in the sense of what's good for the people, like you're talking about, freedom of information so that they can stop wars that need stopping, versus the interests of the state, which they always claim is the same thing as the interests of the country.
You know, the government itself, they claim it's the same as the interests of the country.
But, of course, it's not.
And when they're...
It seems to me, and maybe they're getting ahead of themselves, Todd, but it seems like if they want to go ahead and put language in the National Defense Authorization Act that says, by the way, we can give the Guantanamo treatment to Chris Hedges or Todd Pierce or Scott Horton if we want to, then they plan on using that because they plan on not tolerating his or your or my kind of dissent any longer.
And they've said that.
You know, without putting it in those specific terms like you just said, but when they say that the president, as commander-in-chief, has authority as commander-in-chief to decree somebody to be an enemy combatant and then to be held pending disposition under the law of war, that, in fact, is a de facto declaration, you could say, of martial law.
Martial law does not have to be total.
And, you know, I wrote an article on the Civil War cases when the United States actually was under martial law and that the U.S. government has been citing to now as precedent for what they're doing.
Section 1021 actually puts that into place where the president could decree Chris Hedges an enemy combatant and he could be held in military detention pending disposition under the law of war and then the government, using the precedents that they're citing in the military commissions down in Guantanamo, would just go back and say, well, see, this journalist was held to this case, not directly but indirectly, by including it, a newspaper publisher in St. Louis who was charged as an enemy combatant during the Civil War.
And you could easily say then, they could easily say that, well, here's precedent for charging and detaining Chris Hedges or Scott Horton, actually both Scott Hortons, and Todd Pierce for saying these things that are embarrassing to the government, embarrassing to the military, just as they did under the precedents they're citing to from the Civil War martial law cases.
Well, I sure hope they don't grab the other Scott Horton because I'm going to need him to be my lawyer.
Assuming I get one at all.
Well, that's it.
That one because, strictly speaking, you know, the detainees at Guantanamo, only a few have gotten attorneys only if they've been charged and that's more to facilitate getting a guilty plea from them because the Supreme Court ruled in the Bomediene decision that they have the right to at least one writ of habeas corpus hearing in front of a federal judge that some other court decision, appeals court decision or something had at least in effect overruled that or at least made those hearings moot in some way and either that process has stopped or it at least stopped leading to the release of people from the judge foundation when Judge Randolph of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said, and I can't quote his exact words, but said, okay, the Supreme Court can say they have a right to habeas corpus but they don't have a right to being released under habeas corpus and said himself that he was not going to allow that.
And so if you look at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the only court where they have not released anybody under habeas corpus, I don't want to, I don't think with any, I don't want to say conclusively, but virtually no one has been released under habeas corpus.
The D.C. Circuit has never upheld a lower court granting release.
And again, Justice Judge Randolph said that publicly at the Heritage Foundation, which I guess I would say that you put him on the subject.
But no, so habeas corpus has become a right without any actual teeth or effect to it.
Here's my point to it, why I said okay, by this time we now need to recognize it as an ideology.
We've had so-called liberals and so-called conservatives come to, as you mentioned earlier, a consensus that what they're calling and we're seeing liberal lawyers developing what they call national security law.
All of these are simply traditional authoritarian legal principles.
And if you begin comparing, do a comparative analysis of legal principles in Chile in the 1970s and 80s, what we're doing now, what we're adopting now, or Germany in the 1930s, before they were at war, they are all virtually identical.
The Germans had, in order, again, they had to stab in the back, legend, in a so-called people's court, I forget the German word for that, but to try those cases of disloyalty.
Just as we had done with the military commissions during the Civil War, and what we are in effect doing, and we don't know who's being held in Bagram, we know there's still a hidden prison site, and that people have been brought in from outside Afghanistan, been reported at least.
We don't know how really extensive this is being really applied throughout the world, but we do know journalists have been killed by drone strikes, for example.
And again, this gets back into what I wrote in another article on enemy combat.
When you, a hostile act, and this is what people, I think most people think if the government describes a hostile act by somebody, such as a Lockheed, they immediately think somebody with an AK-47 or an IED or something violent, but to the traditional interpretation of hostile act under law or war principles, a hostile act can be anything that might cause some psychological loss of will, for example.
And this is, so there really is a basis to what they're saying coming out of Vietnam War, but it's entirely contradictory to our constitutional principles.
Again, going back to Vietnam War generals, they believed that, and they lamented that we didn't declare war because if we declared war then, in their mind, we could have immediately shoved the Constitution aside, which in fact we did with the removal of the Japanese-Americans in World War II from the West Coast.
Doing so under the so-called principles of law of war.
Well, with 9-11, putting aside World War II, it was a war that we knew would end at some point, and it did.
The Vietnam War, we didn't know how that would end, but today we absolutely, by taking this down to the level of so-called terrorists, we're in essence saying we're now in a permanent authoritarian state because as long as they have an AUMF and they have a professed war with terrorism, they're saying, well, yeah, we can use these law of war principles and we can detain by the military anybody exhibiting hostile acts, and that can be speech.
And it's a roundabout way to get out from under the Constitution.
Yeah.
And so we're giving it up.
We're giving the Constitution up without a fight by allowing this.
Especially if we were in a real war.
I mean, you mentioned the Civil War where Abraham Lincoln arrested newspaper editors and that kind of thing.
What if we were not just picking on a country like Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya, somewhere far away, but we got in a fight with somebody who could hit back and we already have this Carl Schmitt legal framework set up all around us?
Absolutely.
And why I termed it Cheneyism, why I said we're all Cheneyists now is Cheneyites is because you're absolutely right.
The hardcore right wing will take this to the logical conclusion as far as they can.
What has given them strength, though, is so-called liberals like we're seeing under the Obama administration, attorneys who worked with his administration, who had opposed the Bush administration, all of a sudden turning and now saying it's the same thing as John Yoo did, which only bolsters the strength of the right wing conservatives.
I don't want to even use that word.
I mentioned in the article that that sort of mindset, Cheney's, was called conservative revolutionaries in post-World War I Germany.
And they were war worshippers and authoritarian lovers.
That's what we're seeing now.
We're seeing a conservative revolutionary, American conservative revolutionaries like Merch Junger.
But the problem is they get strength from the liberals who, or profess liberals who have gone along with this whole program.
And it sounds so reasonable.
Well, yes, we should have national security courts, which is something frequently offered up by people more on the left side.
And all that means is institutionalizing a system of authoritarianism.
Yeah, I mean, that was, like you mentioned before, the people's courts in Germany, those were the people who executed Hans and Sophie Scholl for knowing better than the Nazi suicidal policy for Germany.
And here, at the very last moment here to wrap up Todd, can you address the judge's ruling just yesterday that if Obama wants to target and kill even an American citizen, 16-year-old son, that the head of the CIA is on the record claiming, at least, that it was a mistake, that it was not a matter of national security, it was an accident somehow, although he never really explained himself.
But then, that's none of her business as a U.S. federal judge to, you know, try to claim the Bill of Rights as a limit, the Fifth Amendment specifically, as a limit on the power of the president.
What does that really mean?
I mean, is there actually, by some technicality, is she actually right that somehow the Fifth Amendment does not apply because this entire argument is, as you're saying, really now within the laws of war, that the Bill of Rights actually is nothing but window dressing at this point?
Let me be perfectly clear.
When I talk about the law of war, I'm using an interpretation of something that has been outside of our Constitution.
So, I'm not trying to make it totally unconstitutional to say, well, the law of war displaces the Constitution.
But that is the argument.
And I think this goes to show because somebody was making these arguments to this court, to this judge, and that was the Obama administration.
So, I would say they're just chaneyites.
You know, DOJ was chaneyites.
In the, in the Chris Hedges lawsuit, the DOJ attorneys came out in open court and said that, yes, we do militarily detain Chris Hedges just for speech, depending upon certain circumstances.
So, what we've done, what we're allowing to be done is the same thing that was done in Germany.
Under the pretext of the, that Germany is under threat with the Reichstag fire, they had a, a out, you know, in their Constitution, Article 48.
So they invoked it.
Hitler invoked it.
We don't have that.
But what we've done is we've distorted history.
The government and people like Cheney to suggest that we do actually have this out, you know, this exception from the Constitution, and they're calling it the law of war.
It's hard to really detail this in such a short conversation.
But, again, I wrote an article for Consortium News six months or so ago about who the enemy is.
And again, under that strict militaristic view during wartime, the enemy can be anybody who is hostile in any manner, which would be the enemy.
And, and so you, you get large groups can be deemed the enemy.
And that opens them up to being killed, whether they're, you know, man, woman, or child.
And that, I think, probably why the government can say seemingly with a straight face that, well, we don't kill anybody, you know, we don't kill civilians.
Well, we don't if we first deem them to be not civilian.
You know, we could deem them to be not civilians.
And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, You