All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
Back to it, I should say.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM.
And now Angela Keaton sends me this from freedomsphoenix.com.
That's Ernie Hancock's site.
The Freedom Summit, December 3rd through 5th in Phoenix, Arizona.
If you go to freedomsphoenix.com/Freedom Summit registration, you can sign up.
I'm on the list there.
I'll be giving a speech and it says here, according to Angela Keaton, my producer, if you mention Scott Horton, anti-war radio, or antiwar.com, when you sign up, you qualify for the $175 student rate.
How do you like that?
Pretty good, huh?
All right.
Now, let me see here.
It's time to welcome to the show Chip Pitts.
He is a lecturer at Stanford Law School and Oxford University, former chair of Amnesty International USA.
And just stepped down after five years as the president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
That's B-O-R-D-C dot org.
How is it I've never heard of that before?
Welcome to the show, Chip.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
My pleasure.
Obviously, we've got to do a better job of getting the word out about the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, if you've not heard of it.
Yeah, well, it's the last part of the Constitution that ought to be repealed.
If you ask me, we'll go ahead and get rid of Articles 1 through 7.
And then, you know, go back to the Articles of Confederation.
But let's go ahead and keep that Bill of Rights.
You know, that's my that's my view on it.
I don't like it.
I don't know if keep is really the right word, since I think we could probably go through 1 through 10 and establish how none of them are enforced in the United States anymore.
Are they?
Well, you're right.
I think every single one of them has been affected negatively, especially after 9-11.
You know, the idea of privacy, which runs throughout the Bill of Rights, has been completely vitiated.
And we've, of course, had recourse to torture in contradiction to the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and human degrading treatment.
Freedom of speech is under attack as it's been at times throughout our history.
But you never I wouldn't have thought we would seen the raids that we saw just a few weeks ago on peaceful activists.
So you're right.
I mean, the Fourth Amendment, warrantless surveillance is now the norm in the U.S. and increasingly in other countries.
So it's definitely under a lot of pressure, Scott.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you go through just the five protections in the First Amendment and you can find violations of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clause on religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to sue the government for redress of grievances.
Every single part of just the First Amendment is laying in tatters right now.
Never even mind the rest.
I wouldn't disagree with you.
That's my favorite amendment.
And I think you're right.
I mean, one might question whether we even have a free speech in this country, free press in this country anymore, which is why I'm happy to be on your show.
Yeah, well, we're trying.
We'll see.
We do what we can.
All right.
Now, and here's the reason that I brought you on, is that Lord Obama claims the power to murder you if he feels like it.
Right.
Unbelievably.
Yeah, it's just incredible.
You know, we have to feel like it, though.
Right.
He has to feel like it.
That's OK.
Well, you know, we had actually repudiated this, and it was for Gerald Ford originally who had the executive order against assassination.
And then we had, of course, the church.
That was in response to the church committee's discovery that the CIA had been doing this illegally and to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy interest and our image in the world and our true national security.
And then that order was reiterated by President Carter, President Reagan, President Clinton.
Yeah, that was a ban on assassinating foreigners.
That's different.
Well, there should be no distinction, and there is none in constitutional law when it comes to assassinating people without due process of law.
It's not a business that the U.S. government should be in.
Right.
Well, and that's the whole trick, isn't it?
That Amendment No.
5 says that no person, don't even say citizen, no person shall be deprived by the United States government of life, liberty or property without the due process of law.
Exactly.
And fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has reiterated that in several cases on multiple occasions.
But that seems to have been forgotten by the Obama administration, of course, the Bush administration before it.
But what's striking, Scott, is that, you know, just it beggars belief that the Obama administration, supposedly led by a former constitutional law lecturer himself, has actually doubled the drone strikes that we saw Bush implement in Pakistan and so forth.
So Obama doubled the last year of Bush.
And this 2010, we're on track to double it again from last year to 100 now instead of 50 last year.
And just completely problematic attacks that kill our civilians, cause backlash and harm our national security.
Are we not past time for him to be impeached and removed from office and prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison for being a murderer?
Are you talking about Obama or Bush?
Yeah, Obama.
Well, the problem is that we need to have accountability there.
And, you know, we have a crisis of accountability in this country.
And if you continue along the lines that we're pursuing right now, you know, we will be seen in history, along with the sort of corrupt authoritarian regimes, like the dirty war regimes in Latin America, Argentina, Guatemala, and so forth.
And, you know, I think that we're violating our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, other international obligations, to investigate war crimes.
So for Obama to be complicit with them is definitely extremely problematic.
Well, and that's the thing, you know, Robert Higgs calls it the ratchet effect in his book Crisis and Leviathan.
He says every time that something goes wrong, government grows, even when it's their fault.
Like, for example, 9-11 happening on their watch, when that's their only job, really.
And then, but they get to benefit from it.
And then even when the crisis is over, which they already declared that this crisis will last until after our grandkids are in their graves.
But whenever the crisis is over, the power never goes back to the way it was before.
For example, the Department of Homeland Security will never be repealed until America falls.
It will never go back from that.
The TSA will never go back from that until the dollar is just worthless and the USA breaks into a million pieces, which could be, you know, 50 years from now or who knows what.
And so, if George Bush claims powers to, say, kidnap and torture people, then Obama claims the power to assassinate them.
And then I guess the next president will claim the power to, you know, I don't know what, you know, have sex with your wife on your wedding night before you get to, like back in the days of merry old England.
The Duarte Signoria.
Well, they are having our way with us.
And, you know, I don't know if you know, but I'm a plaintiff in a lawsuit that the Electronic Privacy Information Center is bringing against the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, the Transport Security Administration, precisely for the reasons that you indicate, which is that the government, the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security is just an abomination.
It was a bad idea and it hasn't done anything except add another layer of ineffective and inefficient bureaucratic control to our security apparatus.
And as a result, you have these feel-good measures like the body scanners that result in digital searchers of citizens.
They do not even work to protect against the plastic explosives that were their purported justification.
You know, they're extremely expensive.
And like the other security theaters, you know, are taking off our shoes at the airports.
They do nothing to enhance security.
And it's not just the government.
It is the government that's feckless and corrupt.
We've got to recognize that there's a huge private sector interest, that the military-industrial surveillance complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against and his farewell address has become bigger than ever.
And now there are very vested interests in perpetuating war, unfortunately, and perpetuating this new surveillance state.
And I think it's incumbent upon all of us as American citizens to realize what's going on and then take action in the strongest fashion to resist it.
All right.
Now, well, we only have a couple of minutes before the break, so I think I'll stick with the TSA subject for a minute, and we'll get to Anwar al-Awlaki and the assassination power in more detail when we get back.
But, you know, it occurs to me that especially just in the last few weeks we've had this real backlash about the backscatter machines, as you just mentioned.
These, you know, you can either let them take naked pictures of you or you can let them grope you, I guess, is the choice that we have as Americans still.
We call that freedom.
And it just seems like, you know, maybe if we just gave up our terror war, then we wouldn't need so much security.
It seems like if people preferred their daughter not being frisked to the right to slaughter Pakistanis all day, maybe they could make that trade.
But then again, maybe not.
I don't know.
Anyway, sorry, there should have been a question there, but now we're up against this break, so hold tight.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Chip Pitts from Stanford and Oxford.
Oh, no, if we don't let the TSA grope our grandmothers and little children, then the Islamic Sharia law will force gays into the Marine Corps.
And then, I don't know, I'm trying to put on a right-wing mindset and just believe for a day or something, you know, for entertainment purposes only.
All right, we're talking with Chip Pitts.
He lectures at Stanford Law School and Oxford University.
He's the former chair of Amnesty International USA.
Thanks for that, by the way.
So now let's talk about Anwar al-Awlaki.
Who's he and what's the big deal?
Well, that's a good question.
And we have to distinguish who he is from what the government's trying to do, which is to assassinate a U.S. citizen without due process in Yemen.
Anwar al-Awlaki is a Muslim cleric who has been linked to certain of the al-Qaeda figures.
The actual 9-11 bombers apparently heard some of his sermons.
And there's a good Wikipedia entry on him for people that want to find out more.
On the other hand, his father says he's an all-American boy born here.
He holds U.S. and Yemeni citizenship.
And his father says he's completely innocent.
And so it's hard to know what the truth is.
And that's important here because we have to remember that terrorist suspects are not terrorists necessarily.
And in fact, most of the people in Guantanamo, for example, that Rumsfeld and Bush and Gonzalez said were the worst of the worst, most of them overwhelmingly turned out to be innocent.
You know, a lot of them were rounded up by bounty hunters and so forth.
And so it's hard to know what the truth is about this particular character.
But what we have done, indisputably, is radicalize him more and more to the point where he is now apparently calling for killings of Americans.
And this is the situation we're seeing that, you know, there's this blowback phenomenon that by harsh actions and by taking the route of torture or extrajudicial killings that are universally recognized as human rights violations, we both diminish the U.S.'s legitimacy, its soft power and hard power, but we also increase extremism and terrorists.
We increase the threats to our security.
We create terrorists.
And I think that's what's happening here.
So what the U.S. government is trying to do now is assassinate this figure that actually said that he is one of several Americans on these kill lists that the government is now maintaining.
And they're asserting a right to do this under the legal authority of the authorization to use force and under the rubric of the global war on terror, which allows them, they say, to kill someone without due process, even away from the battlefield.
And I check Yemen.
We were not at war with the state of Yemen or the state of Somalia or the state of Pakistan, but our drone strikes and these assassinations of people we consider terrorists have taken place in all of those places as well as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Well, that was the question here.
That was why I started with he's claiming the power to kill you, because under the, I guess, Cheney-Addington doctrine that Barack Obama has continued to argue, the entire world is a battlefield.
And that includes your daughter's room, not just your living room.
That is the problem.
It's literally without end.
It's geographically boundless and without end as far as time goes.
And that's the main problem.
That's the question that's begged in all of these defenses.
You know, the administration and even Harold Koh, the State Department's legal advisor, former dean of Yale Law School, a personal hero of mine, I was very sad to hear him defend these extrajudicial killings in March.
He's basically going down the same road of convoluted legalistic sophistry that he eloquently condemned when it was deployed by Bush administration lawyers, like John Yoo.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, they're basically...
It's hard to explain, except that when you get in these positions of power, you tend to be influenced by the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, and you buy into the sort of military-industrial-surveillance complex that is a sort of self-perpetuating engine of bad things there.
Well, and it's actually really funny, too, to hear Democrats, not just, you know, the ones with power, but their supporters out here in the world, too, sound just like the Republicans in 2002.
Well, you know, come on.
I'm pretty sure that the president must have secret information that he can't tell us about that justifies the obviously evil things he's doing.
Word for word, he must have secret information he can't tell us.
And yet when his anonymous administration officials talk to the Washington Post, they say, yeah, we have a plan to assassinate this guy because we believe that he may have ties to terrorism.
That's their words.
We believe he may have ties.
Exactly.
And that's the problem.
You can't have a rule of law if you don't have, you know, legal action only based on facts.
And for the Obama administration, not just to embrace, but to extend the secrecy of the Bush administration, in this lawsuit that the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have against the government, against Obama, for this attempt to assassinate Awlowski, is that his name?
Awlowski, I think.
Awlowski, that's right.
Sorry, it's early here.
You know, they basically said that they cannot show the evidence on which they're relying.
And if you can't do that before you kill a U.S. citizen, we're in bad shape here.
Well, so now if you were a prosecutor and, well, I don't know, let's say Obama gets defeated in the next election and he's just a private citizen again, would you just go ahead and indict him for murder?
For conspiracy to murder, too?
I mean, what statute is he in violation of other than the same old kind of penal laws that apply to us?
Well, that's the problem, is that, you know, there's a whole cluster of laws here that are violated.
There's international humanitarian law issues, the law of war, which says that you've got to, you know, have a military objective, it's got to be proportionate.
These killings actually kill a lot of civilians.
And it's the things that we've condemned before, when it's been done by Israel, when it's been done by other countries.
The U.S.'s classic position is that that's a violation of the laws of war because the damage isn't proportionate.
And yet now we're defending the killing of, you know, people in Pakistan or in Afghanistan.
We will justify the killing of one supposed terrorist, you know, without showing the evidence, even though it's killed maybe hundreds of people.
That actually happened with, you know, several people have been, hundreds of civilians have been killed in the attempts to get at one particular terrorist.
That's just unacceptable.
Well, yeah.
Now, there was an argument in court last week.
I guess, as you indicated there, the administration stuck with the state secret's privilege and said that the court should not even review the case at all, because to do so would mean classified information would be revealed, et cetera, like that.
Was there any indication from the court as to whether they were going to take this seriously or whether they were just going to defer to the president?
Actually, there was.
One problem is that most of the judges on the federal bench now have been appointed by George W. Bush.
And so, you know, there's a lot of ideologues on there who are willing to defer to excessive executive power.
And that's creating a real problem.
But the judge in this case, I think it's Judge Bates, if I remember correctly, actually did ask some questions from the bench that said, hey, wait a minute.
You know, if the government needs a warrant before they surveil a U.S. citizen abroad, don't they at least need some due process before murdering, before killing that citizen?
So the decision's going to come down in a couple of weeks, and we'll see what happens.
But it would be horrible if this president is allowed to stand where the government, without any kind of, you know, jumping through the legal hoops they need to jump through, is able to kill a U.S. citizen.
Right, well, I mean, at that point, then, why couldn't they just force you to go to whichever church they want, or do whatever they want?
Well, that's right.
This is the most extreme form of totalitarianism.
I mean, there have been eloquent statements in history about the essence of charity being indefinite detention.
But, of course, this is worse.
Let me ask you, Chip, can I keep you another ten-minute segment here?
Of course.
Okay, good deal.
Everybody, it's Chip Pitts from Stanford and Oxford University.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Chip Pitts.
He used to be the director, the boss, the chair, the chair of Amnesty International USA, and we're talking about Lord Obama's claimed power to assassinate you, if he feels like it.
And now, Chip, so tell me about this court case, because I talked with Patrice Cabrieri from the Center for Constitutional Rights, and she was telling me that she and her colleagues at the ACLU were actually risking going to prison and attempting to represent Awlaki's father in this lawsuit.
How could that be?
Yes, that's another unbelievable aspect.
It's actually a separate case that's related to the first case.
And it's also related to this lawsuit that David Cole just argued recently in the last few months before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Humanitarian Law Project lawsuit, which people can Google or check on Wikipedia if they're interested in finding out more about that.
The government's basically saying that if you're assisting someone who is accused or suspected of terrorism, you can be accused of material support for terrorism.
And so they're requiring lawyers, even, giving uncompensated legal services to get a license from the government to defend their clients.
But this is unprecedented.
It's the sort of thing that you have in Communist China or in Stalin's Russia, the Soviet Union.
It's not the sort of thing that should in any way happen here in the United States.
And so they're arguing that these regulations violate the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, separation of powers.
They're really unconstitutional on a whole cluster of grounds, and I'm hoping that they'll succeed on that.
If they don't, again, that'll be another blow to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law.
Well, you know, that term, material support, apparently doesn't mean material support.
It just means whatever they want, huh?
It really does.
In fact, in a Supreme Court argument, the Solicitor General, or acting Solicitor General of the United States at that time, told the Supreme Court that if it was a little old lady giving money to a group abroad that she thought was strictly humanitarian, providing food and so forth, she could still be considered an enemy combatant for her material support of that charity.
Even if it also, you know, had social services, if it was involved in anything the government labeled as terrorism, then the supporter, someone even passively giving money, a little old lady, could be brought up as an enemy combatant and detained indefinitely forever.
It's just absurd.
And you know, if I remember that right, the judge, I was in response to a judge's question, and the way the judge had set it up was, a little old lady in Switzerland.
That's right, exactly.
And they said, nope, Switzerland's the battlefield too.
That's true.
I mean, this is the, it's a really fundamental but important point that's often forgotten about.
Now it's been accepted that this global war on terror is global and so forth.
And the Obama administration doesn't like the term global war on terror.
They call it the global war on Al-Qaeda, for example.
But it's the same thing in substance, despite the different rhetoric.
It's asserting a right for the U.S. to dominate the world, basically, through military force.
And again, they're just not thinking about the unintended consequences and whether that sort of policy is effective.
They're not thinking about whether, for example, the hundred drone strikes in Pakistan this year alone, killing all the civilians that it's killed, whether that actually runs the risk of destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power.
You know, that's a very real risk.
That's a much greater risk, by the way, than the limited risk.
It's a real risk as well from someone like this Muslim cleric in Yemen.
Right.
Now, they never have played bin Laden video on TV in America.
Starting in 2001, they said, well, you know, he could give secret messages to the, I guess, thousands of Al-Qaeda sleepers that George Bush had allowed into the country or something like that.
And so, therefore, we can't, you know, give you an opportunity to hear the enemy explain what his motives are.
And so, I like to explain what his motives are.
I've been paying attention to Al-Qaeda since before 9-11 and to their purposes, their aims and modes, I guess you could say, and what they're about.
And I've been trying to explain to people for years that the American government started it by our support for Israel and by our permanent occupation of Saudi Arabia to force the genocidal blockade against Iraq in the 1980s.
That's what 9-11 was.
Revenge.
It was, well, it was half revenge and half it was a strike and a war.
But a war that America started.
So now I wonder, could I be murdered or thrown away, declared an enemy combatant, and accused of giving material support to these terrorists because I'm simply explaining what their motives are to people?
Well, I think that you're not at personal risk right now, obviously, Scott, but especially since you're prominent on the radio.
And I don't see us, you know, seeing a wholesale slaughter of dissidents in the U.S. or anything like that anytime soon.
But the problem is a precedent like this, as Justice Jackson said in dissenting in the Japanese internment case, Korematsu, a precedent like this sits around like a loaded weapon that can be used at any time by the government.
And we know that power corrupts.
And look at what has happened with the drones.
It started small.
People forget.
In fact, I wrote an op-ed on the web about the drone attack in Yemen in 2002 that murdered a U.S. civilian, Kamal Darwish.
And that op-ed has now vanished from the internet.
You cannot find it anywhere.
And I don't know what happened to it, whether it just faded away, or whether there was something more active that happened, but there is very little information out there.
Few people know that the U.S. government under President Bush actually already assassinated a U.S. citizen, Kamal Darwish, in Yemen.
Although even in that case, though, they said, well, he was collateral damage.
That's what you get for riding in the wrong truck.
But we were going after this other guy.
That's right.
Well, I've heard contradictory things.
I've heard that he wasn't the target.
He was just riding in the wrong truck.
But I've also heard that he and Harithi, I think it was, was the other al-Qaeda operative that was targeted.
But in any event, you're right about the fact that asserting the force has this blowback, and that the main complaint of al-Qaeda, all you have to do is read what Osama bin Laden said before 9-11.
It is the occupation of Muslim territory.
And look at what we're doing now.
We're in Afghanistan.
We have Western forces there.
We're in Somalia.
And now the British are talking about entering Yemen.
This is something that's on the horizon coming up.
I ask you whether that's going to help or hurt U.S. security.
Is it going to further radicalize extremists and help the people like al-Qaeda in the Iranian peninsula?
Or is it going to defeat them?
No, it's going to make it worse.
Yeah, well, and you know, if only chronology counted for anything, I think people might remember a year ago, Obama gave his West Point speech where he lied right to everybody's face and pretended that the beginning of the end of the Afghan war was going to be in July 2011, which was preposterous and ridiculous and laughable.
But then at the end, he promised something evil.
And you can always take his word to the bank on that.
And at the end of the speech at West Point a year ago, Obama said, Yemen, Somalia, you're next.
And in fact, he'd been bombing Yemen for weeks and weeks with drones all through last November and December, culminating, leading up to, the Christmas Day attack by Abdullah Muttalab, who supposedly was put on the plane by this guy, Anwar al-Awlaki.
But no, I guess we're supposed to believe that history began on Christmas Eve 2009.
Well, I have to take issue with you.
I would give Obama more credit than that.
I think that he is, you know, he is saddled with this cluster of policies.
Kidnapping, rendition, torture, all sorts of horrendous violations of human rights.
He comes in.
He originally tried to close Guantanamo.
He hasn't done that yet.
He's flip-flopped on the drones.
He was against them during the campaign.
Now he's embraced them.
But he's under tremendous pressure, and they think that's the best way, they're misled, but they think that's the best way to defend the United States against terrorists.
And in addition to that, there is this horrible political bloc where none of the Democrats, Obama included, want to be perceived as soft on terror.
But what has happened is the drones have expanded under Obama.
And that's, getting back to your original point, that's the reason that you cannot establish a precedent like this.
And we'll see increasing a number of drone attacks.
And why is that a problem?
That's a problem because there is a huge arms race going on around the world right now with this military-industrial surveillance complex.
Many of our allies, not just the United States, but Germany, the UK, Japan, etc., are testing new and better-improved predator-drone-type devices.
This is a huge...
States already, too, the Mexican-American border.
How long before they arm them with missiles?
Well, what happens when our...
What happens when our enemies get these predator drones?
That's the big question.
All right.
I'm sorry we're all out of time, but I want to talk to you more sometime, if that's all right.
Thanks.
It's a pleasure to be with you, Scott.
I really appreciate your time.
Everybody, that's Chip Pitts.
He's from Stanford and Oxford University, former chair of Amnesty International.
