06/19/09 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

Hi y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's my pleasure to welcome back to the show Glenn Greenwald, our first guest today.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrites, which of course is about the conservative movement.
He's a former constitutional litigator and is a legal affairs blogger at salon.com slash opinion slash greenwald and also hosts a radio show there as well.
Welcome back to the show Glenn, how are you sir?
Doing well, great to be back Scott.
It's great to have you here, so let's talk about, well you know what, before we do the secrecy, let me give you a chance to talk about the firing of Dan Frumkin from the Washington Post.
I know this has got you all riled up this morning here.
It does have me riled up.
Well the reason it has me riled up is because there's a consensus among a lot of people that there was a profound media failure during the Bush administration, that the administration had this extremely radical and deceitful approach to so many things.
And most of the members of the political media treated it as though it was just a sort of normal standard administration, never really reported the extent of the deceit and the radicalism.
And there were very, very, very few people who did, and Dan Frumkin was one of them.
He was at the Washington Post, at the WashingtonPost.com for several years, writing about just how extreme in terms of the authoritarian and law-breaking policies of the Bush administration had actually been, and implicitly and often explicitly, he was very critical of media institutions in this country for being very irreverent of and sycophantic to political power.
And so you have one of the very few journalists who understands what it means to be a journalist suddenly get fired.
Interestingly, on the day before, the op-ed page of the Washington Post contained such diverse voices as Paul Wolfowitz, Charles Kraufhelmer, former Bush CIA director Michael Hayden, and David Ignatius, all basically saying the same thing, that Obama needs to get more involved in Iran's internal affairs, and that sort of thing, just advancing a neocon agenda.
And one of the very few voices that's different from that, Dan Frumkin, is fired.
The other thing that I think is so interesting is that part of the effort to marginalize him, in 2005 and 2006, when he was writing about the Bush administration, he used to be, on the reporting page, he used to be held out as a White House reporter, following the White House.
And Post journalists themselves demanded that he be essentially reclassified as an opinion writer rather than a reporter, because according to them, he was clearly advancing a liberal agenda, by which they meant that he was criticizing the Bush administration for things like breaking the law.
So that was a liberal ideology.
And Frumkin's response at the time was, I'm not actually a liberal.
I'm not anything except a journalist doing what a journalist is supposed to be doing, which is holding the administration accountable, pointing out when they're lying, pointing out when they don't do the things they say they're going to do, and if it's a Democratic president, I'll be doing exactly the same thing.
And they ignored him, and they said, no, he's a liberal, and he needs to be an opinionist.
And ever since Barack Obama was inaugurated, Dan Frumkin has probably been one of the most vigorous critics of Obama for retaining most of the Bush approaches to counterterrorism, for violating his policies, promising them that regard for being obsessed with secrecy, as we're about to discuss.
So it turned out Dan Frumkin was right.
He was never advancing a liberal agenda.
He was doing what a journalist is supposed to be doing, which is acting adversarially to political power.
But in our media world, that's the one thing that you really can't do, is to say when government officials are lying.
And so the fact that one of the very few real journalists got fired, I think, speaks volumes about what our media really is.
Well, you know, it's interesting to me that he, by criticizing Obama, perhaps from their point of view, he actually proved what a liberal ideologue he was.
Because, after all, you've got to be some kind of communist or something to be against Bush and Obama.
And so rather than showing that, no, he's really nonpartisan, he's just a journalist, and he's holding them both to the same standard, it makes him seem even more kooky to not roll over for the new administration.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
And I don't need to tell you or your listeners this, but one of the principal ways that our political discourse is controlled is that the media conducts all of our debates as though there are two sides and only two sides.
There's the mainstream establishment Democratic Party view, and there's the mainstream establishment Republican Party view.
And if you look at any cable news show or anything else, the quote-unquote debates that get conducted involve one person spouting the talking points of the Republicans, one person spouting the talking points of the Democrats, and that's how diversity of opinion and free speech and debate are demonstrated.
So if you're not a person who embraces the mainstream Democratic or mainstream Republican view, and of course many times those views converge completely, and part of Frumpkin's criticism was not that Obama was adopting the wrong policies, but that he was adopting the policies that Bush adopted that Obama continuously criticized.
But if you're not somebody who fits comfortably into that sort of very simplistic, mind-numbing, two-sided political debate, it's almost as though you're perceived as being bizarre and exotic and unserious.
And so I think you're right.
The fact that he wasn't either pro-Obama or pro-Bush, pro-Democrat or pro-Republican, made him such an anomaly.
And the irony of that is that the accusation against him was that he was a partisan, when in fact he's about as un-partisan as it gets, because he holds all politicians, regardless of party or ideology, to the same standard.
Well, and you know, that's what we all should be doing, whether we're journalists or ideologues or anything else, is holding them all to the same standard, right?
I mean, it's a constitutional republic.
It's called being a rational citizen.
I mean, I think one of the bizarre and unfortunate things that's happened to our political culture is that it's really become celebritized.
I mean, if you look at the way people talk about Obama, it's either, I really love Obama, I think he's a great person, or I dislike him, I don't like him, I think he's a horrible person.
And that's why things like the White House strategy, media strategy, is about personalizing him and treating him as a celebrity, what he eats, where he likes to travel, where he takes his wife, his cute kids, all of that, because that's the People magazine approach for making celebrities popular in the eyes of the public.
But we shouldn't be thinking about our political officials in terms of whether we like them or dislike them.
It's completely irrelevant.
The only question ought to be are the policies that they're advocating or the things that they're doing with the awesome power that they're given things that we agree with or things that we don't agree with.
And if we agree with them, we ought to say so, and if we don't agree with them, we ought to say that and work against it.
And that ought to be the end of it.
And Democrat or Republican or terming or unterming or any of those things ought to be completely irrelevant.
But they're not irrelevant.
They predominate.
Well, the fact of the matter is on January 20th, he inherited the greatest world empire ever in terms of size, the biggest government in the history of the whole solar system.
And he ran in some ways implicitly and in other ways explicitly against the powers of the presidency that he was to be inheriting.
I mean, he sounded almost like you, Glenn, sometimes during the presidential campaign in talking about the abuse of executive power and the taking of the powers of the imperial presidency as it already was when Bush inherited it, far beyond what could possibly be justified by the law.
And he was going to start scaling some of this stuff back for us.
What's your scorecard looking like?
Is he really doing that?
Clearly he's not.
To me, the linchpin of an authoritarian government and one that is dependent upon excessive executive power is secrecy.
Secrecy is the linchpin.
It's the enabling force that really fuels government abuse and abuse of power because when a government is opaque, it can do anything it wants.
It's transparency and sunlight that prevents true corruption and abuse from taking place.
So the starting point for me and the starting point for Obama, the candidate, in terms of what he said, was this obsessive secrecy because that really is the central cog that enables all the other excesses and transgressions.
And almost from the very first day that he got into office, Obama has actively embraced all of the radical secrecy doctrines in the Bush administration that enable them to do whatever they want without anyone knowing about it.
All right, now be specific here.
Give us some examples of what he's done.
So one of the principal weapons that the Bush administration used was the state secret privilege, which has always been, since 1950, a very limited, narrow doctrine that enabled the government basically to say, this specific document in litigation is too secretive and therefore the court should find a way to not use it.
And then courts would look at the document and decide whether or not it was too secret to use.
And if it was, they would look for a different way to use it, a summary of it or a redacted version of it, or maybe they would say, look, it's just too secret and you can't use it at all.
But, I mean, it was used roughly 30 times from 1950 until 2001.
The Bush administration not only used it hundreds of times, continuously, far more than all the other presidents combined, but they radically transformed it from a document-by-document doctrine into a broad claim that not really documents, but entire lawsuits would implicate and threaten the disclosure of state secrets to such a degree that the lawsuit itself couldn't be allowed to continue and the court itself couldn't even adjudicate the legality of the claim.
So if somebody sued, as they did, and claimed that the way the president eavesdropped on Americans was illegal, or somebody sued and claimed, as they did, that the president's rendition program of abducting people from around the world and kidnapping them, essentially, and shipping them off to disappearing them to foreign prisons was illegal, or in the cases when we actually abducted and caused to be tortured two completely innocent people who we acknowledge were innocent, it was mistaken identity, when they sued in court, the Bush administration came in and said, the entire subject matter of this lawsuit is such a state secret that you can't even have a court, you the court, cannot even determine whether or not what we did was illegal because to even look into this, to hear the case at all, would be to jeopardize state secrets, and they were successful for a good period of time.
Obama and the Democrats were vehemently critical of that use of the state secrets privilege, and yet Obama, in case after case after case after case, has invoked exactly that theory in order to prevent actions by the Bush administration from being subject to judicial scrutiny, and when you think about what that really does, what it's essentially saying is that if we, the government, do something secret, even if it's a felony, even if it's completely illegal, we have the power to prevent courts from ruling on whether or not we broke the law, and of course, if you have the power to prevent a court from ruling on whether or not you broke the law, it means you have the power, by definition, to break the law, since courts are the ones that say whether or not you broke the law and impose consequences.
Obama has embraced that theory completely.
He's even gone so far in the last couple of weeks to do the following two things.
Most of our secrecy and transparency laws exempt what are called presidential records because we want to encourage communications between executive branch officials, and there was a big dispute in the Bush administration, as most people probably remember, when Dick Cheney was writing our nation's energy policies by meeting in secret with executives of energy companies, and transparency groups simply wanted to find out with whom the vice president was meeting in order to write these policies, and he said that those records, the visitor logs that showed who was visiting him in the White House, were presidential records, and therefore not subject to disclosure.
They wouldn't disclose them.
They were vehemently criticized for that.
Two courts have rejected that theory, and yet the Obama administration now refuses to turn over visitor logs, even, showing with whom the president is meeting when he writes health care policy and financial regulations and domestic policy and the like because they claim that it's a presidential secret and they need not reveal it, and it's a complete turnaround.
The other thing that they did that I think is even more disturbing is under the Freedom of Information Act, which has been around for 40 years, it was written in the Lyndon Johnson administration, there are very broad exceptions for what the government is allowed to keep concealed, and there was a controversy because the ACLU said that the government had in its possession a whole bunch of photographs showing detainee abuse, and that under the Freedom of Information Act, they were required to disclose it.
The Bush administration refused.
They went to court, and two separate courts said, under the Freedom of Information Act, these photos have to be disclosed.
Obama originally said that he would comply with the court order, but then changed his mind and announced that he was actually going to fight the disclosure using all means in his possession, even if he loses in court on the grounds that the photos would make the United States government look bad since we brutally tortured people, and that that would increase anti-American sentiment and cause us to face a greater risk of terrorist attack and attack on our troops.
And the problem with that is that once you accept that rationale, that the government has the right to conceal information that reflects badly on what it did, it basically means that the government has the power to conceal anything.
And it's not even theoretical that they have that power.
I'm not just saying, oh, look, in the future, these things are going to happen.
It's already starting.
Now, in addition to the photographs, they're fighting to prevent the disclosure of documents that show that the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations, even though that was illegal, on the same grounds that these videotapes would inflame anti-American sentiment.
And I think most certainly of all, over the past several months, there's been numerous disputes between the U.S. military and local officials in Afghanistan, because every time we do an air raid in Afghanistan and we slaughter civilians, the U.S. military lies and says, oh, we just killed Taliban.
And the Afghan officials in the village say, oh, no, you killed a bunch of women and children, and you didn't even bother to check if the building that you were blowing up had civilians.
And there's a report on one of the most recent disputes that essentially concludes that civilians were killed.
And there's even videotape that shows that before we bombed, we didn't check to see if there were civilians inside.
The Obama administration had promised to release that report next week.
And now, according to McClatchy, it's been leaked to them by Obama officials.
The Obama administration is considering keeping that report concealed, again, on the same ground, that reports of civilians in Afghanistan inflame anti-American sentiment and therefore harm our national security.
And so you see this creeping secrecy obsession in multiple ways, consuming the administration after a year, four or five months in office.
Well, hadn't anybody ever told them that they hate us for our freedom?
It's not that our government bombs civilians that causes anybody to resist our power over there or resort to terrorism.
So I don't know what they're worried about.
Yeah, I haven't heard that.
Well, and they're taking care of getting rid of the Bill of Rights so that they won't hate us for our freedom anymore, too.
Let me ask you about one more thing.
I know we're short on time here.
Obama gave this great speech in front of the actual Constitution, original draft there on parchment at the National Archives, where he waxed Madisonian about the importance of the rule of law and why this was in his dueling speeches with Dick Cheney, why Dick Cheney was wrong, that we need to abandon law in order to keep ourselves safe and we need to torture people and all these things, and have this lawless, this ad hoc, I think he even called it, system of made-up law and military commissions.
And then he turned around and said, and that's what we're going to do, is we're going to write a new law to, rather than just invoking the unitary executive theory and the commander-in-chief clause of Article 2, they would go to Congress and pass a law to make it legal to preventively detain people indefinitely.
Have they done anything along those lines yet?
Are they starting to move that direction?
Tell me that that got such a bad reaction that they're not going to go forward with that.
Yeah, it's getting pretty bad.
You know, in theory, it is better to have policies enacted by the Congress rather than having the president simply do them on his own.
And, of course, the first term of the Bush administration was characterized by them pursuing a whole variety of illegal policies that not only hadn't Congress authorized, but that Congress had actively prohibited, including things like Warren Buffett dropping on American communications and also calling military commissions in Guantanamo.
The problem is that the Congress is so unbelievably subservient to the president and generally eager to give the president whatever power he asks for that, and this is always the mystery of the Bush administration to a lot of people, if the president says, I want this power in order to fight terrorists, Congress is going to give it to him immediately.
So had Bush said, I want you to authorize military commissions, or had Bush said, I want you to authorize me to spy on Americans without warrants, the Congress would have done that.
And the question always was, why didn't Bush just go off on his own and do it instead of getting Congress to authorize it?
And the answer was because they wanted to create this theory that the president had full-scale, unlimited power under Article II to do these things and didn't need congressional authorization.
But in the second term, the Bush administration, after these programs got revealed, did go to Congress, especially after the Supreme Court said they had to.
And they got Congress to authorize warrantless eavesdropping in the Protect America Act and the Five Amendments Act, and then got Congress to authorize detaining people without charges in the Military Commissions Act.
And so at this point, going to Congress and getting Congress to endorse it, as Obama said he wanted to do, is almost a formality that you really can't get excited about.
And it's actually, in some sense, it is almost worse.
Because what happens is the president, as the Bush administration did in the first term, simply does these things on his own.
It's sort of just an ad hoc secretive policy.
But when the president goes to Congress and gets an entire legislative stamp of approval in the form of legislation on these radical policies, That leaves John Roberts as the last check.
Exactly.
And it becomes the entrenched position of the United States.
And the only way then to get rid of it is, as you say, the Supreme Court ruling that it's unconstitutional.
And so what Obama, and actually Bush officials, like Jack Goldsmith, who was a high-level Justice Department official under Bush, he wrote an article in the New Republic, and he's made this argument many times.
He actually said that he thinks that what Bush did wrong was fail to get congressional authorization for these policies because had he gotten congressional authorization, these policies would have had a stronger footing in how the government is run.
And he wrote an article in the New Republic saying he thinks Obama is actually doing a better job of defending Bush's policies than Bush did because Obama is going about it the right way by getting congressional approval, which is going to institutionalize these policies, like preventive detention as the law of the United States, as a result of the collaboration of both branches.
So I think, yeah, I do think that that will happen.
I don't see how, if Obama's behind it, and the Republicans will certainly be, and more than enough Democrats will get behind Obama, I think it's pretty much a fait accompli.
All right, everybody, that's Glenn Greenwald.
The blog is at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
The most recent book is Great American Hypocrites, which is obviously all about the right wing in America.
Your blog rules, and great interview.
Thanks very much for your time, Glenn.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
And, by the way, there are a great many more issues that we didn't even get a chance to cover that are covered in depth on his blog, including the new Rison Lickblau story in the New York Times about the NSA and the e-mails, the lawsuit going forward against John Yoo, the torturer, and others like that.
Anyway, again, I'll tell you one more time, salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin.
We'll be right back.