12/02/08 – Chris Hedges – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Chris Hedges.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, senior fellow at the Nation Institute.
He's covered wars all over the world for the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio.
He's a lecturer at Princeton University, currently writes for Truthdig.
He's the author of American Fascist, the Christian Right, and the War on America.
War is a force that gives us meaning, which, if you take my word for it, goes at the very top of your list for next book that you read.
Also, what every person should know about war and losing Moses on the freeway.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you?
Thank you.
I'm good.
Very good to have you on the show here.
Glad to know you're doing all right.
This is a great article that you have at Truthdig here, one that I wish everyone would read.
It's called Confronting the Terrorist Within.
And basically what you're doing here is you're holding what I guess in this society amounts to a funhouse mirror up to the American people in order to show them the truth from that other point of view, a truth that seems so hard to grasp.
And I guess I try to remember when I was younger and just couldn't get my head around the idea that it mattered, that foreigners being bombed as compared to Americans.
I guess I was in ninth grade during the first Gulf War, and the attitude around my neighborhood was, nuke them all until they glow, and who cares about them, and that kind of thing.
It seems like a pretty easy stance to take.
Our team versus their team, and they're just not very human, and we're good and they're evil.
And so somehow all the evil things that we do to them become okay.
Chris, that's basically how it works, isn't it?
Well, having spent 20 years abroad on the receiving end of American power, you begin to look at not only the world but what we do in the world very differently.
And I think we have to be really up front with the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when matched against every ethical and legal code, whether it's just war theory, whether it's the statutes of international law set down in the post-Nuremberg laws after World War II, define the invasion and occupation of nations that do not pose a threat to you as criminal wars of aggression.
That's what they are.
These conflicts, especially in Iraq, have left hundreds of thousands of people dead, people who did not pose a threat to us.
Millions of people have been driven from their home, and we have no moral or legal right to debate the terms of the occupation.
That's just from a start.
But when you, as I have, have spent time in villages that have been hit by American ordnance, 500,000 pound fragmentation bombs, you understand how an Afghan villager that's burying members of his own family killed in an American airstrike understands in a way that I think we, as Americans, do not, that terrorist attacks can also be unleashed from the arsenals of the American Air Force, from an imperial power.
And that really is the thing, right?
Terrorism means acts of organized aggression by people who don't have a state anywhere to control, but would like one someday or something.
But anything that a state does that is in the name of a response to that becomes somehow just blessed and legitimate, because they're all terrorists after all.
Yeah, and I think we have to understand the relationship between what we do around the globe and the response of people who define themselves as fighting against the reach of American imperialism.
I quote in the article from Robert Pape's book, Dying to Win, the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, where he studied suicide bombings and attacks from around the world.
And, you know, it's a great study, because it rips apart all of the mythologies that we use to demonize terrorists.
You know, he found that in almost every case, suicide bombers arise from communities that have deep feelings of collective humiliation by genuine or certainly perceived occupation.
He writes that every major suicide terrorist campaign, that's over 95% of them, are carried out to drive out an occupying power, and that would be true in Mumbai as well.
You know, as far as we can tell, most of these terrorists or militants come out of Kashmir, where the Indian army has used draconian and ruthless methods to crush a Muslim insurgency.
And in fact, it fits the rest of the criteria, too, in the sense that they're of a different religion, which is very important for people not just fearing their death, but fearing that their children, their lives and their entire society will be changed if they lose.
And at the same time, India at least is somewhat a democracy, and so pressure from below on their government by the people to come to a solution is actually possible.
As opposed to, I think he says terrorism doesn't work very well in China, because the Politburo doesn't care if you bomb a bunch of people.
It's not going to affect them.
Well, you need access to a media.
I mean, you know, that's one of the things you learn.
And when you live in a totalitarian state like China, they can just shut the national media down.
I mean, they can just make a terrorist attack virtually invisible, which we know they largely did in attacks that were carried out before and even during the Olympics.
Right.
You know, oh, I didn't know that.
Even during the Olympics, huh?
Well, there were a series of shootings and there were a series of minor incidents which the Chinese authorities pretty effectively covered up.
You know, I'm sure you remember in the presidential campaign, Robert Pape's book Dying to Win was brought up by Ron Paul and his argument that it was American occupation and intervention in the Middle East that caused September 11th, that history didn't begin that day, but that was a reaction to things that America had done before.
And, of course, that caused the giant controversy because Rudy Giuliani, who I'm not sure if you heard, was actually there that day.
He, of course, accused Ron Paul of blaming America for the attack and saying that we deserved it or something like that.
But he was simply observing the laws of physics, right?
Yeah.
I mean, look, you know, with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, we sent over tens of thousands of troops.
We had very little, by the way, military presence before 1990 in the Middle East.
We sent over tens of thousands of troops to the Middle East, which have not left.
And it's the presence of these troops, along with, of course, the continued abuse of Palestinians by Israel, that has been the most potent recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda.
You know, Pete points out correctly that this idea that, you know, there is sort of a supply-limited number of a few crazy, psychopathic, religious fanatics coming out of Madrasas who want to reap maximum terror on the West.
It's just wrong, that this is a demand-driven phenomenon.
That is, that it's driven by the presence of foreign forces on Muslim soil that is viewed by many Muslims, and correctly so, as a form of occupation.
And that the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and statistically this is borne out, has increased and augmented the ranks of suicide terrorists.
And given these radical groups, you know, a kind of new lease on life.
And you know, I think it is really important, you mentioned how they're middle class, the profile of the suicide terrorists, at least the lead hijackers, I don't know about the muscle guys, but the lead hijackers in the September 11th case, I know Mohammed Attaw, for example, was a graduate student in engineering.
They were all upper-middle class, university-educated guys, mostly from Cairo.
Well, most of them were from Saudi Arabia, 14 of them from Saudi Arabia.
Well, yeah, I mean the actual pilots of the planes, the crew, I mean the Saudi muscle was kind of brought in at the end, you know, sort of thing.
But anyway, they were, and I guess even the Saudis who were brought in toward the end also were sort of middle class types, which is in stark contrast to what, you know, mainstream media tends to depict and what the Bush administration depicts as poor, helpless people who need to be invaded and given democracy so that they won't be poor and helpless anymore and then they'll love us and not want to be terrorists anymore.
Well, I mean, when we look at the profiles, you know, I did this for a year for the New York Times, reconstructing where terrorists came from, Al-Qaeda terrorists came from, in various attacks, either those carried out or aborted throughout Europe and North Africa.
And that's true.
Most of them came from the middle class.
And in some cases, very privileged positions relatively to certainly the impoverished lives of most of their, most of the Tunisians or Algerians or wherever it was that they came from.
And so it wasn't that they experienced direct personal affronts to their dignity necessarily.
It was more often that they were fired up by abstract ideals, national, ethnic, religious, you know, purging the world of evil in a kind of bizarre, twisted way.
That's precisely what we're trying to do.
You know, we're trying to purify the world through force, which is always self-defeating.
We're trying to insist that we can use violence to mold the world into our vision of what it should be, which is precisely what they're doing.
And the more, you know, these kinds of utopian visions backed by violence feed off of each other.
So the more the violence is ratcheted upward, the more we are uncertain and afraid, the more reality impinges on this fantastic notion of a harmonious world, the more strident, absolutist and aggressive we become.
And I think that when you understand the psychology of those who carry out these kinds of attacks and match it to our own, you find disturbing parallels.
We keep doing what doesn't work until it destroys us all.
Yes.
Edwin, you know, I like the way you point out in the article, you kind of, in order to do the putting yourself in the other guy's shoes point of view, you talk about in the humiliation, that was really, you know, what happened on September 11.
And that's why the American people were willing to support not just an invasion of Afghanistan, but of Iraq, too, because Afghanistan just wasn't enough.
There weren't enough things to bomb there.
We've got to bomb some more people.
And, I mean, basically it's the same difference.
If you're an Arab, when America commits September 11th-type attacks against you all the time, it makes you just about the same amount of angry.
There's no reason why it shouldn't.
Yeah, I think that, you know, for us we had feelings of vulnerability as a nation, which were new, feelings of collective humiliation, and that we, by invading Iraq and Afghanistan, attempted to exercise through reciprocal violence what we felt had been done to us.
And this is exactly the driving force behind groups like al-Qaeda.
If you look closely at, you know, the statements and writings, for instance, of Osama bin Laden, he talks all the time about the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
This was the agreement that led to the carving up of the Ottoman Empire and the real beginning of Arab humiliation.
He constantly rails against the presence of American troops, especially on the soil of his native Saudi Arabia.
So, very much, the motives of Islamic extremists, you know, in many, many ways mirror our own.
Well, yeah, and their behavior.
I mean, they really, if you look at Osama bin Laden and his theory of collateral damage, he seems a lot like the Republicans in a lot of ways.
Well, of course, you've written a book about the American Taliban and the Christian right that really mirror their enemies in a lot of ways.
You know, Karen Armstrong has written about this, I think, very intelligently.
I mean, fundamentalists, no matter what their political hue, whether they're Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Jewish, have far more in common with each other than they do with their co-religionists.
Fundamentalism itself is, especially when fundamentalists believe that they can use violence to remove human impediments to a more perfect society, you know, have far more similarities.
They, in many ways, resemble the very people they're trying to destroy.
And, by the way, for the audience not familiar, this is not coming from Marxist-Atheist type by any means, right, Chris?
No, it really was learned the hard way, which is standing on the other end of American ordinance around the world and watching what we did to other people.
No, actually, I mean, I'm a seminary graduate and, you know, very anti-utopian, whether that's the utopianism of the left or the right.
Yeah, well, and, you know, we talked with a minister yesterday here on the show by the name of Bill Barnwell, who is a Protestant minister who's very critical of the sort of pseudo-theology of the left-behind series and worries of the end times and the Antichrist and discussing, you know, the political influence of that particular faction of American Christianity.
Do you think that's really still on the march, like when you wrote American Fascists, or do you think that the recent election marks any sort of real setback for that movement?
No, I don't think...
Well, I suppose the election marks a temporary setback, but the engine of the movement is personal and economic despair, primarily economic, and with the economic meltdown, you are seeing the working, especially the working class of this country, driven to real desperation, and that is the fuel of this movement.
It's almost like the Indian ghost dance or something.
Well, there's a lot of that.
I mean, you know, because you're leaving a reality-based world, which doesn't work for you, and to embrace a world of magic and, you know, divine intervention, apocalyptic glory, and weird stories of the creation of the earth 6,000 years ago, you know, it's a fantasy, it's a mythology, and it's irrational.
And that's what happens when people are pushed to that extent.
I mean, totalitarianism itself is a severance from a reality-based world.
The exaltation of the self, you know, your own destiny determined either by history or God, and so I think that, in fact, the economic turmoil that we're undergoing is only going to empower the movement.
These movements thrive on crisis, and they thrive on despair, and we've got lots of both right now.
Yeah, that really has been, for me, the most striking thing of this last era, or maybe just kind of being an adult now and really seeing, I don't know to what degree it's always been this way, not just people who have different faiths and believe different things than me or whatever, but people really willing, adults willing to, and masses of them together, you know, entire kind of segments of society, it seems like, willing to completely escape to a fantasy world where, you know, I heard that Barack Obama might be a friend of Osama bin Laden and an al-Qaeda terrorist, and where, you know, never mind all the million things that are true that would have to not be true for that in order to be the case.
I mean, really, if he was a terrorist, why wouldn't the Democrats have nominated Hillary Clinton instead?
I mean, come on.
We're talking about just, you know, comic book reality here for I don't know how many people, maybe everyone.
Well, tens of millions of people in this country, you know, who get all of their news and information and spiritual guidance and entertainment through this distorted prism of Christian radio and television.
It's terrifying, and it is completely disconnected from the real world.
Yeah, you know, sorry to just kind of be so far afield here, but I had a friend in the county jail serving some time for a DWI, and he talked about the rough treatment that was given someone who was being uncooperative, but they basically tied him in a chair and put a leather mask over his face like Hannibal Lecter and all this, and just kind of left him tied up there, and it sort of brought to my mind, you know, all the experiments where they prove how willing Americans can be, and just the drop of a hat to turn on each other.
And, you know, here are these local sheriff's deputies basically are people in my neighborhood, and they're willing to tie a man down in a chair and leave him there for six hours, where, you know, probably his spine is being bent out all out of shape.
Apparently he was yelling over and over, Why am I still in torture?
And then, Why am I still in torture?
How quiet do you want me to say it?
Please let me out of torture, he was saying.
And they left him there.
My neighbors, the Travis County Sheriff's deputies, left this guy there for six hours in the Travis County lockup, as though handcuffs just aren't good enough, inside the jail.
And I'm thinking, especially when you talk about people this detached from reality, how easy, you know, you write this book, American Fascist, how easy would it really be to turn these people into some sort of, you know, Blackwater Army against the rest of us?
Well, Blackwater is run by one of the premier or the charter members of the radical Christian right, Eric Prentz, and the rise of a mercenary force, which now has three bases on American soil, isn't completely terrifying, because it is wedded to that ideology and disconnected from any kind of constitutional control or oversight.
So, yeah, I mean, I think what you learn when you cover as many countries as I have is that you can, you know, raise these kinds of inhuman organs in any society, and our society is certainly not exempt from that, as your story illustrates.
Well, you know, they talk about sort of the defining characteristics of fascism and that kind of thing.
In your travels and covering all these wars, do you see America really starting to fit into the pattern of, you know, say South American banana republics of the 70s and 80s and states in the Middle East today?
Are we really heading down the path toward the abandonment of law and the empowerment of a real total state in this society, Chris, you think?
As long as our oligarchic elite continues to rob us blind and funnel, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars upwards to Wall Street and probably the largest transference of wealth from the base to the pinnacle in American history, you know, what they're really doing is accelerating the collapse of the system.
I mean, the idea that, you know, we can throw enough money at anywhere, $3 to $4 trillion worth of bad assets and make a difference, you know, the issue is the most astute economists have pointed out is that people can't pay their mortgages, they can't pay their credit card bills, and banks are not lending because they understand full well that most of these loans are not going to be paid back.
So we haven't even begun to address the issue.
And the longer we allow economic elites, you know, all of them wedded to Wall Street, to continue this fantasy that we can sustain an economy through borrowing and consumption, I mean, that's a kind of disconnect from reality.
The faster we accelerate our own internal disintegration.
Well, right, and then the question is what comes after that?
When you have the next Great Depression, if that's indeed what it is, if the recession, the attempt to re-inflate continues to fail and the whole thing really unravels.
It already is failing.
Right, well, so if we have massive unemployment, 25% or better, that kind of thing, that's when you look at real civil unrest and revolutions, at least within the forum, if not the overthrowing of the forum itself.
Well, that is the great boon to the Christian right.
Well, and to every faction who wants any sort of desperate measure taken, I guess.
Right, but the only organized radical faction is on the right.
The left is bankrupt in this country.
Yeah, well, that's for sure, and they're certainly not as well-armed as the right, I know that.
No, our backlash is going to be a right-wing backlash, and they're going to be waving the American flag and carrying a Christian cross.
Yeah, all right, well, if we can change the subject a little bit back to the Middle East here, and you make the parallel, and I think it's a good one, I actually am crass and simple enough that I made a bumper sticker years ago that says Iraq, America's West Bank, and you compare Iraq and Afghanistan to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and their effects on our society here, and I guess I was just wondering if I could get you to explain the metaphor there a little bit, and then if we can sort of segue into what actually is happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
It's so little covered, even on this show, much less in the Times and the Post.
Well, you know, if you look at what destroyed Athenian democracy, Athens expanded its empire, became a tyrant abroad, and then eventually a tyrant at home.
The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.
And that's a pretty good window into what happens when you expand an empire as ruthlessly as we have expanded ours.
You've seen the militarization of Israeli society, the seizing of power by, you know, a messianic hard-right Kadima or Likud party, very far from the vision of Israeli's founders who were basically secular socialists in the 1950s.
And so that kind of corruption that took place with the occupation of the West Bank in Gaza in 1967 is, I think, affecting American society.
And the rise of groups like Blackwater and our mercenary forces, as well as the national security state, I think are evidence of that.
So, look, you know, what is the FISA Reform Act?
It's a giant step towards fascism.
It is the ability of the government to monitor private emails, conversations, phone messages of ordinary citizens without appearing to any court, without any kind of oversight.
So the consequences of brutal occupations always reverberate on the imperial power throughout history and are already reverberating on us.
So just as I have watched over the years the disintegration of the sort of moral fabric of Israeli society, I think we are also undergoing a very similar disintegration.
And what's happening in Gaza is an example of that.
You know, it is just appalling.
They're cutting off food, cutting off medical supplies.
They have bombed the central power plant, which means most, many Gazans live in virtual darkness at night with no electricity.
Businesses have just collapsed.
People, 750,000, half of the residents of Gaza depend on United Nations donations to eat.
And the world stands by and says nothing does nothing.
It is a form of collective punishment, which is a direct violation of the Geneva Convention.
And unfortunately, the Israeli lobby in the United States has captured its powerful, its wealthy, and it has really silenced any kind of critique of this tremendous abuse from both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Well, and this is, what, revenge for Hamas winning the election that Bush and Rice insisted they hold?
Yeah, I know.
I know.
They wanted a free and fair election.
They didn't like the outcome.
These are the birth pangs of a new Middle East, you understand.
All right.
You know, the Israelis created Hamas through one blunder after another, just like they created Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
That's the tragedy.
Well, let me ask you about that, because, you know, when you say created in southern Lebanon, created Hezbollah, I take that to mean Hezbollah rose up as a reaction to the Israeli invasion.
But in the case of Hamas, I know Richard Sale and others have written that the Israeli intelligence services actually actively worked with Yassin, the old man in the wheelchair that they killed with the missile a few years back, in order to create it in the first place.
Do you know about that?
I don't know about that.
I do know that in the late 80s, when I first went to Gaza, when they were trying to break apart Fatah, they would not arrest Hamas members because they saw Hamas as an effective wedge to Fatah's hegemony over the West Bank and Gaza.
To what extent did they create it?
It had very strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a lot of its original leaders had spent time in Egypt with the Brotherhood.
But, you know, I don't know, I haven't seen, I've heard that accusation, but I've never seen any kind of evidence to back it up.
But certainly the Israelis treated them at the beginning with kick gloves and wanted them to foster.
Well, they certainly had a policy of doing everything they could to marginalize the, what are, I guess, essentially kind of leftist, secular PLO guys, right?
The Fatah movement.
They wanted to break the power structure of Fatah, yeah, and they thought that they could do that by building up Hamas.
That was a conscious Israeli policy.
See, that's the thing that I never understand.
When you talk about regime change in Iraq or Syria or any of these places, who's left to replace these governments other than religious militant groups?
Well, that's the great failing of U.S. foreign policy.
I mean, look at Egypt, you know, these, under Hosni Mubarak, who have been in power, what, 27 years or something?
I mean, they have just, and to cling to power, they just become more corrupt and more repressive.
You have the same thing in Afghanistan.
I mean, I think people, it's not that people want the Taliban.
They're just so sick of the brutality and the corruption of the Karzai puppet government, you know, and so that the Taliban begins to look good by comparison.
Right, and if we have a situation in Egypt where Mubarak or maybe his son, who I think he says he's planning on...
Well, he's grooming him.
I don't know if it's going to work, but...
I'm sorry?
He's grooming his son Gamal.
I'm not sure it's going to work, because he doesn't come out of the army.
I think in the end, Egypt's a military state, and...
Well, so, I guess, do you think that it's a military state enough to keep it from becoming a Muslim Brotherhood state?
I don't know.
I mean, Egypt is, it has a very efficient secret police, and a very brutal one, and that's sort of the glue that's holding the place together now.
You know, if you get a huge sort of global recession, Egypt can't take a lot more.
So, I don't know.
I haven't been to Egypt for a few years, but certainly Mubarak's hold on power is one that has really, at this point, is solidified almost solely by force.
I mean, he's a deeply hated regime.
Right, and of course, the more cruel he is, if there's ever a backlash, the worse it's going to be.
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah, it's amazing how...
I mean, obviously, every time you have one of these interventions, whether it's just propping up a dictator only, you know, merely propping up a dictator or outright invasions, never mind the fact that you can predict that there will be unpredictable consequences, and who knows what, but there are even very, very predictable consequences to pretty much all of this stuff.
Like, for example, when they talk about bombing Iran, and what might, you know, we can all come off with a list off the top of our head of 10 or 15 horrible things that could very possibly happen if America and or Israel attack that country, and yet somehow it's still, well, on the table, they call it.
Yeah, I've been very outspoken against the calls to bomb Iran for, you know, many reasons, not least of which is that it would trigger a regional war.
Are people who run American policy just blind and deaf, or how can it really be that the kind of reality that you and I are discussing here doesn't seem to come into play in their deliberations at all up there?
Well, I think, in fact, on Iran, they've, you know, saner heads in the Pentagon and the CIA have sort of stayed the hand of the Bush administration, and they didn't do that in Iraq, and they paid for it, but the Israelis seem determined to go ahead and do it.
I mean, that's the fear now, is that Israel will carry it out on their own.
And the consequences are just almost too frightening to contemplate.
I think there's little doubt that Iran would strike back against Israel.
Hezbollah, which is a Shiite organization, would certainly begin lobbying with everything they have at northern Israel.
I mean, it is, you know, the ability of the Iranians to hit U.S. targets in Iraq, including the Green Zone, it is just, it's a nightmarish scenario.
Right.
And, in fact, I think the last Guardian article that talked about Bush had told the Israelis of, you know, finally know that the main reason cited was the danger to American forces in Iraq.
Yeah.
I mean, the Sauder missiles could just devastate the Green Zone.
It could obliterate command and control in Iraq.
Well, and never mind the fact that we've installed the Supreme Islamic Council and their Badr Corps in power, and as Abdulaziz al-Hakim has said, you know, we would do our duty to Iran if America attacked Iran.
Right.
I mean, Iraq would disintegrate.
Well, but here's the thing that I can't, I still can't quite wrap my head around.
Why is it that anyone in the Israeli intelligence services or in policy positions there believe that they would be better off by attacking Iran's safeguarded nuclear program when they have to know as well as you and I do, you know, the obvious consequences, and never mind all the terrible unintended ones that are unpredictable?
Because it's long been Israeli policy that no one else shall have nuclear weapons in the Middle East but Israel, period.
And they are willing to suffer the consequences of that.
They want a complete domination, I mean, of a nuclear arsenal.
So that has been just an ironclad Israeli position, which will never change.
And they certainly do understand the consequences, but they're willing to take them.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess they're willing to let American soldiers go ahead and face the new battle they'll have to face in Iraq, because what do they care?
Well, largely the Israelis, not largely, but certainly the Israelis were pushing us hard to go into Iraq.
Well, and, you know, there are some, like Michael Schroyer says, has said on this show, that, well, and that's why we'll never leave, because the Israelis don't want us to leave.
They don't want to have to face the consequences of post-American occupation in Iraq.
They want to keep our army there, basically.
Well, they have nothing to worry about.
Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq.
No intention whatsoever?
No.
Well, when he says, well, he wants to get out the combat forces, but not, I guess, the rest of them, do you think that means that?
Well, he wants to leave 50,000 to 60,000 troops behind.
He wants to retain control of our imperial city, the green zone, the three super bases, leave behind the mercenary forces.
That's not a withdrawal.
Do you think that Israeli pressure is a major reason for his decision to...
I don't know about him, but within the Bush administration, that would certainly be true.
That and the contractors.
A lot of people are making a lot of money off this war, don't forget.
No doubt about it.
For many people, this war has been very, very good.
I guess you saw the profile of Barry McCaffrey in the New York Times.
Well, there you go.
That's a perfect example.
Yeah, that wasn't really great.
I'm sorry it was a few years too late there at your old newspaper.
I know.
But still, a very good, very thorough report.
Yeah, they did a good job.
All right, well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time and your insight on the show today, Chris.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
All right, everybody, that is the great Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force, that Gives Us Meaning, which, please, just put it at the top of your list.
Buy it for people you care about for Christmas.
It's extremely important.
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, senior fellow at the Nation Institute, writes for Truthdig.com, lectures at Princeton.
The books are American Fascists, the Christian Right, and the War on America, What Every Person Should Know About War, Losing Moses on the Freeway, and, of course, War is a Force, that Gives Us Meaning.
And I think we're going to go ahead and call it a day.
Call it a wrap for Anti-War Radio.
We'll be back here tomorrow, 11 to 1 Texas time.
We have great interviews lined up all week for you here.
So see you then.