12/11/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey guys, welcome back to the show.
Yes, I am watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure out of the corner of my eye.
It's one of my favorite movies.
That's how we learn about history, right?
Yeah.
So I was recommending it to my friend Eric.
He's never seen it before.
I got the link here.
I'm going to send you the link to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure on Netflix there.
Thank you.
So that you'll have it.
And then that way you'll know history.
Thank you.
I need to.
Yeah, exactly.
Obviously.
All right.
No, seriously, though, Eric Margulies, he wrote history.
He lived it and was there and reported all about it all over the entire planet.
A longtime war reporter for and correspondent for some national media back when.
He writes for UNZ.com and for LewRockwell.com.
You can also find his website at EricMargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
EricMargulies.com.
And he's the author of the book War at the Top of the World, all about Kashmir and Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and all that mess over there.
And then, of course, American Raj, liberation or domination, which is about the American empire, mostly in the Middle East.
So anyway, yeah, read those books.
God dang it.
They're really good.
So I want to talk with you mostly about the war today, the Islamic State and all of that.
But then again, I imagine that you probably have something worthwhile to say about the torture report.
And so I thought I'd just kind of give you the floor.
You take that any way you want, if you want.
Well, every every American citizen should have something strong to say about the torture report.
I do for sure.
Well, go on ahead.
You have an open floor here.
OK, well, I've been following this story since 2003.
Most of the grisly details of the vile tortures inflicted on suspects or anti-Americans, who we call terrorists, have been reported in the media extensively.
I've written about them in my columns.
I find it horrifying.
I always have that the United States government would indulge in these practices.
Torture under American law is illegal.
Under international law, it's illegal.
It's un-American.
It is, as has been said, even the president said it, totally against American values.
But we did it.
And the question is, if we don't punish people who are guilty of this crime, because it was it was a war crime, it was a domestic crime in the United States under our law.
If we don't punish the people responsible, we are condoning torture and it will happen again.
And the danger of torture, as we saw, as I saw during the French repression of the Algerian revolution in the 1950s, is that unless torture is stopped at its source, it will spread like a virus into domestic police forces and domestic security agencies and become par for the course.
We can't allow this.
My and my final point is, you know, there's an old Taoist saying, you become what you hate.
And surely, as I read about these damn psychiatrists who were paid or psychologists were paid 81 million dollars to devise tortures and the foul acts were inflicted on people, the kidnaps and the murders, et cetera.
We I used to think we're as bad as the Soviet Union, but now I realized in my heart that we've become worse than the old Soviet Union.
Well, and now, you know, on the part about us becoming worse and I'm an individualist, obviously, I don't mean to be too broad brush with the whole collective thing, this, that, the other.
But then again, in 200 years, they'll say the Americans fairly speaking.
And, you know, what you're saying about it, how un-American all this is, the problem is, is like, you know, like you're saying, without the accountability, it becomes America.
It's not anti-American.
It is American.
You know, like when I was a kid, I heard a Chinese water torture like that's something from from some barbaric medieval Chinese past where they would torture somebody with water like this or something.
But this is not something that any civilized society would participate in at all.
This is the fate worse than death.
This is how we know that we're civilized is because we don't do this.
I mean, it's kind of as black and white as it could be.
And what happens because they've especially Karl Rove and them are so good at just turning this into a partisan issue where people just line up on their same old given sides and all this.
They've actually, I think, already succeeded.
Rice 2014, we're having this conversation here.
They've already succeeded in convincing, you know, half the population, the right leaning half of the population of this society to give up on even the pretense that justice is our cause and our creed and the thing that we're interested in here, fairness and liberty and justice for all.
That's what makes America America.
And Bush convinced them that, no, screw justice, line up behind power, conservative Republican power.
And they made that deal with the devil.
They're more than happy to hundreds of millions of Americans.
Well, that's right.
And it's shocking to see.
You know, you we can we continue to castigate Nazi Germany.
How could the Germans have allowed this to happen?
How could the concentration camps, et cetera?
But look, here's a perfect example of a large group of people who are frightened or terrified, which is what's been happening into closing their eyes and allowing the annulment of all our laws and traditions out of fear.
Well, the Germans did it and we've done it, too.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?
Personally, you know, I was asked to serve on the church commission way back when.
And he was in the late 70s and then investigated all the wrongdoings of the CIA.
And we probably need another purge of the CIA.
But I have a caveat, and that is having followed intelligence affairs very closely that the CIA and its leaders would rarely do anything under their own initiative.
They're bureaucrats.
And I believe that Bush and Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, all those people have full responsibility for what happened.
They know that they're scared to travel abroad because they might be arrested.
And they probably should be.
I add Mr. Blair to this list, too, and to say that some kind of action has to be initiated against the people for breaking the law.
But we have a Justice Department that has become a lapdog of the president, won't do anything on its own.
And as you say, we don't have the indignation in America or the fact that people are horrified.
But what happened?
Oh, they're just Arabs.
Who cares?
Right.
Well, and that is the headline at USA Today.
Justice Department will not reopen torture inquiry.
And all they ever had was what started as the obstruction of justice inquiry into the destruction of the torture tapes, which the prosecutor then expanded to a preliminary investigation into the two cases of CIA murder.
And Lawrence Wilkerson is going to be on the show in 20 minutes to talk about how the military murdered more than 100 people, tortured more than 100 people to death.
But the CIA apparently, excluding down at Penny Lane, murdered two guys in Afghanistan.
And he looked into that for a minute and then said, no, that was as close as the Justice Department ever got to looking at torture at all, was simply the murders.
Forget the torture.
We got a memo.
All right.
One sec.
More Eric Margulies in just a sec.
All right, you guys, we're back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
I got Eric Margulies on the line.
We're talking about the evil American empire.
Yeah, let's get back to that, which is said worse even than the commies, huh?
Eric?
Well, yes, as I reflect back, I mean, the the torture inflicted by the KGB.
And I've been to the KGB's Lubyanka prison in Moscow.
I've seen the cells.
I've seen the torture devices that what we have done is as bad, if not worse than KGB.
It's the same old story, the freezing to death in people's cells, beating them to death, injecting them with psychotropic drugs, terrifying them, starving them, etc.
It's it's it's worthy of a total totalitarian police state.
And I think that's what's happening now.
As you know, we have a confluence of these crises.
We have Snowden, who revealed how Big Brother is listening in and now probably starting to listen in to us at night, too, in our bedrooms.
We have the kidnapping of citizens.
We have the assassination of American citizens.
We have the big steps forward to a police state.
And if we don't dig in our heels over this torture issue and do something, the process towards a totalitarian state will continue.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, man.
It seems like we're really giving up, not we, but American society.
So much of it has given up on, you know, keeping our priorities.
You know, like people want to argue about Social Security payments or they want to argue about, you know, whatever other kind of, you know, public policies, this and that.
That's one thing.
But it's they're supposed to be a 100 percent unanimous consensus by all Americans over the age of 18 that, no, we all insist on fair trials, even for child molesters and killers and murderers and terrorists.
And and we always will.
We always insist on free speech.
We always insist on search warrants.
We always insist our police call us, sir and ma'am, and not treat us like we're damned dogs.
And we always insist, et cetera, et cetera.
Just the very basic things up piece, the very basic things that people at least used to think were the kind of very underlying basis of what it means to be American.
Although, you know, you don't even hear people say, hey, this is America to mean it's a free country anymore.
Right.
They say it to justify evil sometimes, but they don't say it like, hey, so that's why you should back off because it doesn't even mean that anymore.
That's right.
Well, you know, it's after the Reichstag fire in Germany and the German parliament passed what was called enabling legislation.
And within within six months, for sure, all the safeguards of German democracy have been made void and the Nazi Party to complete control.
This is a terrifying example, because 9-11 was a similar example now that we're learning about all the horrors of the so-called war on terror, which I've always called a faux war on terror.
And I refuse to use the word terror because it's a propaganda term.
We should start questioning other things, too.
Let's start.
Let's let's go back to 9-11.
We still wonder how much was covered up and obfuscated there.
We're at a point now where we really don't trust our government.
We should as Americans.
It's our government, but we are finding things that are more and more disturbing.
And finally, you know, there's a movement afoot already.
You could see it, even though Dick Cheney, I just saw him on TV saying that Bush knew all about and authorized the torture from day one.
So did he.
There's a Bush movement saying, oh, well, you know, the president really didn't know about it.
And he was misled by these evil CIA officials.
That's the standard line.
Well, it wasn't the CIA evil officials there, though there were some like Hayden.
But this comes right from the White House and its fingerprints are all over these things.
And we mustn't let the high officials escape, as happened in the question of the Arab prison scandal, where, you know, a couple of lowdown people were left holding the bag and the big boys escaped.
Right.
Well, so let me ask you this.
Is it possible at all that Obama is our Gorbachev and that this will be the fall of the U.S.S.A. here?
I mean, there's a severe lack of confidence in government on all levels.
Right.
The polls for the last few presidents and the last few congresses, the approval ratings are as low as they have ever been.
We have the crisis of our murderer police on the streets still continuing protests in almost a dozen cities or something across America over police murder.
Right now, we've got, of course, all the corruption of the bailout of all the banks and all the resentment for that.
That'll never go away.
We got the endless wars and all the endless scaremongering propaganda, the torture report coming out.
Is it possible that Americans could just give up their consensus for D.C. rule in the first place?
Like, you know, if the Constitution doesn't bind their power, then how does it create their power anyway?
If it's no law at all, then it's no law at all.
We should be completely free of them.
Well, Scott, I don't think I don't see Obama as an American Gorbachev.
I wish he had been because we desperately need some glasnost and perestroika and honesty and decency in Washington, which has become totally, but totally corrupted by money.
I guess I just meant in the sense of accidentally bringing the empire down, which is not what he meant to do, but sort of did anyway.
Gorbachev was a man of principle and conviction and honored.
Bad comparison.
You're right.
Obama has none.
He just wishy washy and won't take a position on anything.
You know, I remember when I was in the military, there was a concept called command responsibility.
And if your ship hits a rock, well, the captain of that ship is responsible, even if he was fast asleep in his bunk.
And but, you know, the idea of the buck stops here.
It happened on my watch doesn't exist anymore amongst these low grade politicians that we have in power.
Somebody has got to take responsibility for this.
Time for an American spring, if you ask me.
All right.
So now I guess we can make I wanted to kind of just talk all about the war with you, but it's still part and parcel of the same conversation.
What about the next disaster?
Because I know it's already ongoing.
But then again, I'm predicting huge advances.
And that's the wrong term for it.
Huge, you know, incremental advances in the numbers of troops fighting in former Iraq and Syria and the Islamic State next spring, next summer.
They they say they are determined to sack Mosul and drive the Islamic State out of power there.
Seems like I don't know if Afghanistan helped bring down the Soviet Union.
Seems like this terror war might just be able to break America's back and bank, you know, permanently, as it was meant to.
Well, certainly that's what Osama bin Laden said.
He wanted to draw the U.S. into all these little Lilliputian wars and bleed the United States economy.
The Iranian militants have said that to me, too.
They said, let them invade Iran.
We welcome them.
America will break its teeth on Iran.
So there's a there's a lot to that.
And what we see is is Obama sneaking troops back into Iraq.
What this is is really white officers leading native troops there.
And it's an absurd situation.
We've been a war in Iraq for I think it's 13 years now.
And we're we're deepening our involvement.
I don't even think I think ISIS barely exists.
I think it's like another Al Qaeda that never had more than a couple of hundred people to begin with.
The battle for Kobani on the Turkish border has been going on for months where heavy bombers are bombing it.
And it's been called this Kurdish Stalingrad.
Nothing has really happened.
It's almost a theatrical rather than military events.
Well, it seems like their ability to expand much further than they've already conquered is seriously in question.
But then again, it doesn't seem like anybody's really coming for them.
I mean, who's going to be able to kick them out of Mosul?
And I don't even think the Peshmerga and the Americans are going to do it's going to take the American Marines, right?
Well, the Americans.
Don't forget that we we Americans had 5000 troops in Iraq before ISIS even appeared.
They were they had been kept there after the alleged U.S. withdrawal.
They were as private contractors.
You know, I love free enterprise in world affairs.
We have private contractor torturers and private contractors, security forces.
These were U.S. military forces rebranded as private contractors.
5000 based in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which is one of the two biggest in the world, along with the embassy in Kabul.
What Osama bin Laden called crudest crusader fortresses.
And they are.
So we have mercenary troops who were paying for their among them these Peshmergas.
So there's a lot of military involvement.
And the U.S. military is just down the road in Kuwait.
We have about two to three mechanized brigades based in Kuwait, which can be in Baghdad in a matter of hours.
So we haven't really we're gone, but we haven't left.
Right.
Yeah, well, I'm predicting the worst there.
It seems like really just the news cycle has already taken care of it.
Americans, it's not like oh, two or three where people are really engaged in.
All right.
Even if they're four, at least they're paying attention.
There's a big war going on now.
It's like just another war when really this thing I don't see it.
They claim that David Petraeus said the day that they were invading or the week of the initial invasion in 03 as they were rumbling toward Baghdad.
So tell me how this ends.
And I don't see an exit ramp here other than going back in time and electing Ron Paul in 2012 or something.
Well, even his son wants to full on declare war like we haven't done to anyone since Hitler.
So we have the Republican jihadists waiting to take over in January.
And a lot of these I used to be a Republican, by the way, I'm a fallen away Republican.
A lot of these guys are very extreme.
They have nothing to do with the old Republican Party that I belong to.
They're they're Midwestern Prairie Bible Belt extremists.
And they they want more war.
Just listen to them.
The only ironically, the only person who made sense, really, in Congress on the Republican side was John McCain, who actually saw war, was a prisoner and denounced this whole torture episode.
I see the other people, particularly my own New York State ghastly Representative King of loading torture and saying it's a wonderful thing.
And the Republican Party has become the party of torture and worse warfare overseas.
We should really call it what it is, the imperialist party.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for your time, Eric.
I'll let you go with that.
I already kept you over, but I sure appreciate it.
That's the great Eric Margulies, everybody.
War at the top of the world and American Raj liberation or domination are the books.
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