09/25/09 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com.
And I'm happy to welcome Glenn Greenwald back to the show.
You know him as the author of How Would a Patriot Act and A Tragic Legacy and a great blog at Salon.com slash Opinion slash Greenwald.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
Great to be back, as always, Scott.
Oh, by the way, I should have mentioned that you're in a former life there a civil liberties lawyer, constitutional litigator, right?
That's true, that was a long time ago in a former life, as you said, but that's incorrect.
Right, but that's important for people to know that you actually, you know, passed the bar and practiced this kind of law and know of what you speak.
So let's cut right to the, I don't know, second most important thing in the world after the continuing nuclear standoff between America and Russia, as far as I can tell, and that is the power of the president these days to abduct people and hold them in cages without ever giving them a chance to get out.
And this is something, obviously, that the Bush administration pushed as far as they could and they were reined into a degree by the Supreme Court, but there's been a major controversy about Barack Obama's statement that he wanted to pass a law to basically normalize what had, I guess, been just sort of an underhanded seizure of power by the Cheneyites.
He wanted to sort of make this all official, and now he's backed down from that.
Is that entirely a victory, or is there much more to it, or what?
I think it's a complicated issue in terms of figuring out whether it's a victory or not.
And the reason is because the options that actually exist are all so heinous that to try and choose between one or the other and say which one is preferable is a very difficult undertaking because what you end up doing, essentially, is praising something that's a complete assault on liberty, which is a real reflection of where our country is.
And what I mean by that is the status quo, under the status quo, the Bush administration asserted and courts have actually accepted the argument that when the Congress in 2001 authorized the use of military force against Al-Qaeda and whatever terrorist organizations perpetrated the 9-11 attacks, that implicitly within that authorization is the authority for the president to indefinitely detain anyone that he deems to be affiliated with those organizations.
That detention is such a natural accompaniment to the authorization to use military force that if Congress authorizes the president to use military force as they did against Al-Qaeda, then inevitably, implicitly, the Congress is authorizing the president to detain whoever under that authorization he can use force against.
That's what the Bush administration argued and that's what the Supreme Court accepted.
Now, the Supreme Court also said in 2008 that although he might have statutory authority to detain people under the Constitution, you have to provide them with due process and that denying them the right of habeas corpus, as the Congress attempted to do when it passed the Military Commissions Act in 2006, is unconstitutional.
So, at least under the current scheme, while the president, both Bush and now Obama, argue that they have the authority to detain people indefinitely, meaning without charging them with any crime, there's at least a constitutional limitation imposed on that, a weak one, but one that is meaningful by the Supreme Court, saying that these individuals who you detain have the right of habeas corpus to ask a court to review their detention.
And since that Supreme Court decision in 2008, 38 Guantanamo detainees have sought review of their detention by a federal court and 30 out of 38 have won court with federal courts, often very right-wing judges, pro-executive power judges, Bush-appointed judges, saying that there's no evidence, no credible evidence to justify the accusations against them.
Well, let me ask you this.
What exactly is the standard of evidence in a habeas hearing?
I'm somewhat familiar with the phrases, right?
Probable cause and objective, reasonable belief or reasonable suspicion or these different standards that are used to justify warrants, for example.
What is it called?
It's very low.
It's almost the lowest evidentiary burden that can be imposed on the government.
It's way less than, say, obviously it's way less than what a trial would require, which is proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
It's far, far less than probable cause.
The Supreme Court in 2008 didn't actually define it, but essentially the inquiry the courts have undertaken is, is there credible evidence to justify the detention?
Meaning, does the government have any credible evidence to suggest that the individuals they're detaining are actually part of a terrorist organization that Congress has identified in the authorization to use military force?
Really saying, is there any evidence at all?
Even then the question is, is there evidence at all of these things?
And then if so, then that means that the prisoner is a certain classification of individual under the law that now they may be returned to Guantanamo.
If that's no longer enemy combatant, what is that?
Well, essentially that's ill-defined, but essentially it would be something akin to being a prisoner of war.
Although, it really is an enemy combatant, because there is no declared war.
And so, and they're not complying with the Geneva Conventions, either in Afghanistan, Abhagram, or in Guantanamo even still.
There's no, you're not under the Geneva Convention, you're not even permitted to interrogate prisoners of war.
And so, the legal status has always been unclear and continues to be unclear, but the argument the Obama administration has been making is that these are enemy combatants, that they are affiliated with members of a terrorist organization who are waging war against the United States and can therefore be properly detained under the laws of war.
So, that's the status quo.
The status quo is that we can imprison people and arm prison people without charges of any kind.
At least at Guantanamo, the detainees have the right of habeas corpus.
The Obama administration is arguing that elsewhere, for example, in Bagram, the people they abduct and ship to Bagram, they're arguing, don't have any rights, including the rights of habeas corpus.
They're arguing the Supreme Court decision is confined only to Guantanamo and doesn't extend to war zones.
And so, that's the status quo as it exists.
As I said before, a horrible, horrible state of affairs, in fact, Guantanamo and even more so in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, to be perfectly clear, Glenn, on the most important issue to people listening, does this status quo as you describe it mean that Barack Obama could have the army arrest them or members of their family and hold them in these kinds of prison camps, like in Guantanamo Bay, for example?
Well, the status of U.S. citizens is up in the air in terms of all these issues that we're just discussing.
And by the way, I'm not trying to get into the whole everybody's going to get rounded up and put in FEMA camps thing or anything.
I'm only talking about the legalistic, because we saw what they did in Padilla.
First, you need to determine what the powers of the government are, because traditionally, powers of the government get abused.
And the fact that the government has a particular power doesn't inevitably mean that they'll use it, but it would be stupid for someone to say, I don't need to know what powers Obama possesses, because I'm confident that he'll never use them in any sort of untoward way against me.
That would be incredibly irresponsible to think that way and foolish, as history has proven.
So, the rights of U.S. citizens is actually up in the air, because the Bush administration, of course, did abduct and treat as enemy combatants two separate U.S. citizens, one being Yasser Hamdi, whom they picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan.
He was a U.S. citizen, and we shipped him to a military brig in the United States.
And the other was Jose Padilla, a U.S.
-born U.S. citizen, who was abducted on U.S. soil at Chicago's International O'Hare Airport and put into a military brig with no charges, no trial, kept that way for years, incommunicado from the entire outside world.
And what they did was they purposely put him in South Carolina, which is located in the Fourth Judicial Circuit, which is the most right-wing authoritarian circuit in the country.
And so that case got appealed, the Jose Padilla case got appealed, and the Fourth Circuit actually said that the president does have the right to imprison even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without charges of any kind, and that case was on appeal to the Supreme Court, and at the last minute the Bush administration indicted Padilla and then told the court that the case was now moot and they didn't need to hear it.
So that Fourth Circuit opinion, which isn't binding on anyone other than the Fourth Circuit, still stands.
The Supreme Court in the Hamdi case in 2002 actually did review that, and what they said was that U.S. citizens also can be detained as enemy combatants, but that at least a U.S. citizen is required to some level of due process.
They didn't specify what that level of due process was.
They said some kind of a hearing is needed in order to detain a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant, and rather than give Hamdi a hearing or test any of that, they just released him to Saudi Arabia on the condition that he renounce his citizenship.
So, yeah, U.S. citizens absolutely can be detained as enemy combatants under the current state of the law, but the Supreme Court has at least said there's some level of due process to which U.S. citizens are entitled but hasn't actually specified what level of due process that is, and there's this appellate court decision that says what they did to Padilla is actually legal.
So that's what's so interesting about all the butchers is none of those legal theories have actually been repudiated, and many of the detention powers that remain are ones that are still perfectly valid and that the Obama administration, theoretically at least, is embracing.
So then the question becomes, well, how can you say, as I've said, that it's actually better to keep the status quo than what the alternative was?
And the problem is that in May, Obama went to, before the National Archives, one of the most cynical acts ever, gave this speech on civil liberties in front of the original U.S. Constitution and proceeded to advocate a system of preventive detention, where he basically said that there's a group of people that we are currently detaining and that we might be detaining in the future who, in his view, are too dangerous to release and yet incapable of being convicted in a court.
So we can't charge them with a crime, we can't prove in a court that they did anything wrong, but they're nonetheless, in the judgment of Obama, too dangerous to release, and therefore he needs the power to imprison people, not who have done anything wrong or who we can prove have committed any crime, but who we think are so dangerous that they might commit a crime in the future.
And that's why he made this call, preventive detention, to detain people, not for things that they've done, but for things that we think they will do in the future and that we therefore need to detain them in order to prevent them from doing these acts in the future.
And he made a big deal of saying, look, the status quo now lets me detain people.
I'm detaining people at Guantanamo without charges.
But I don't think that's right.
I don't think it's a good thing for us to have a system where the president can make these decisions alone without there being a statutory scheme enacted by the Congress.
And I therefore vow that I will work with the Congress to create a new law that creates a very clear system for how people can be detained without charges.
And it will say what the standards are.
They'll be entitled to some judicial review where every three years they can go before the court and they can say, look, I'm not a danger anymore because I'm sick or because they've changed my mind or whatever.
And courts, rather than the president, will make the decision about whether they will stay in the cage.
No charges still, no criminal charges.
But at least he vowed that there would be this system, this very clear and specific structure that would govern how detention proceeded.
And he vowed that he would do that because he believes that the other branches should be involved, not just him.
Well, as it turns out, this week he changed his mind.
He's decided that he's not actually going to ask Congress to write a law like that.
He's going to continue to detain people under the same theory that Bush was detaining them, which is he already has the authority, the implied authority under the authorization to use military force that the Congress enacted all the way back in 2001.
There's no guidelines.
There's no limits.
There's no requirement for judicial review.
But he says he doesn't need any of that now.
He's completely changed course and said, I'm going to detain people the way I've been detaining them.
Now, the reason I think that's a good thing, even though it means that we're going to be stuck with the extremely oppressive, dangerous, and tyrannical status quo, is because I know for a fact that if the Congress of the United States sat down to write a presidential detention law, the only thing that would happen is that it would make things much, much worse.
Congress is actually more authoritarian when it comes to presidential powers than even the Obama administration is.
And you saw that when the Obama administration at least tried to close Guantanamo and transfer the detainees to U.S. soil in order to close Guantanamo and try them here.
And they actually threatened to defund any such effort.
And they actually are on the verge of passing a law barring him from transferring terrorists or terrorist suspects into the United States, even to hold them in prison.
So they're worse than he is.
And if people like Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein started writing up a law, these are the people who are behind the Military Commissions Act, designed to permanently and explicitly create a statutory scheme for preventive detention, it would just entrench that system on a much firmer footing.
It would institutionalize it.
It would make it a bipartisan policy.
And it would extend not only to Al-Qaeda, the way the current authorization does now, but almost certainly to all future conflicts, at least all future conflicts against terrorists.
And I just think that that would be infinitely worse, both in terms of the scope of the power and how solidified it would be in our political system.
Well, and I think that ratio that you brought up earlier, 30 out of 38 of these habeas hearings have ended with the judge saying, set him free right now.
And so that shows the level of honesty that the military, the CIA, the executive, at least thus far, have taken in terms of who they're willing to hold and say is the worst of the worst sort of terrorist, right?
I mean, it's kind of one of the most worrisome factors.
I guess one of the happiest factors, of course, is that they are at least getting habeas hearings.
And the judges, who normally would be happy to see innocent people go to prison and not care, happens all the time.
In this case, for some reason, they're standing up for these Guantanamo detainees, Glenn.
Well, you have to keep in mind, these are people who have been not in a regular prison, but held in the most excruciating confinement, in virtually 24-hour-a-day solitary confinement, pure isolation, in a Cuban island thousands of miles from their home.
I mean, ripped away from everything that made them human.
And they've been there for six, seven, eight years.
Some of them were as young as 14 or 15 at the time that they were first abducted.
And it's the cruelest and inhumane way to treat a human being as one can possibly imagine.
Of course, a lot of them have been tortured.
And what makes it so appalling, on top of all of that, is that all of this has happened without even a pretense of due process.
None of them has been charged with a crime.
None of them has seen or been inside of a courtroom.
None of them has had the opportunity for lawyers or to address the charges against them or to examine the evidence or to call witnesses or to do anything else that minimally civilized societies consider to be a precondition for justifiably incarcerating people.
And so any human being, even these hardened ideological federal judges who are very pro-government, who then, finally, after all of that time of treating a human being that way, say to the government, well, you need to at least show us some evidence, something credible to justify this ongoing confinement.
And then the government submits their brief, and there's nothing that is in it that is even remotely recognizable as evidence.
There's third and fourth person hearsay, like some sergeant in Afghanistan heard from somebody who they were paying that there was somebody in this other village who might be sympathetic to the Taliban, or that person got picked up, and no evidence that they've ever done anything remotely constituting taking up arms against the United States or would be a threat in any way.
And then you compare the complete paucity of evidence to the soul-destroying treatment to which we've objected them for almost a decade, while the government argues that we should continue to keep them in that state indefinitely, anybody but just the most evil person would react angrily.
And that's how these judges have actually reacted, in a very aggressive way.
And you're right.
Keep in mind that there's been 800 or so people coming in through Guantanamo, and we've constantly been told that they're the worst of the worst, and yet so many of them have already been released.
And these are the ones that remain, the 250 or 300 that remain, and Obama insists are the worst of the worst because they've gone through the process and none of them has been cleared, and an extraordinarily high percentage of federal judges who are very, believe me, they're very sympathetic to the government, very reluctant to oppose the government when it comes to torture, are saying in a huge percentage of cases, not that on balance these people seem innocent or that they haven't been persuaded, but that there's no credible evidence to justify their guilt, and then ordering them released immediately.
Amazingly, although 30 of them have won their cases, 20 of the 30 who have won are still at Guantanamo because we can't find a place to release them because the Congress won't let them be released inside the United States and no other country wants to take them.
So they continue to just rot away in prison, even though our own federal court system has said that there's never been any evidence to justify their detention.
That's how cruel and oppressive the system of detention is.
Can the court say, hey, I told you to release him, release him, or I'm locking you up, or not?
Well, there was actually a federal judge who tried to order, who gave the government a deadline and said, it was actually in the case of the Uyghurs, who were ethnic Chinese Muslims, who the only item on their agenda is to, I mean they're under extreme religious persecution in China, and they want to either have some independence from the central Chinese government as a breakaway province or some degree of liberation from religious persecution at the hands of the communist Chinese.
That's always been their only agenda item.
They have no hostility towards the United States.
The idea that they were treated as terrorists, the reason why we rounded them up as terrorists was because we wanted the Chinese to basically fund our war on terror and to stay on our side, and so we agreed that they hate the Uyghurs, the Chinese do, and so we decided to group them together with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and we picked them up in Afghanistan, and we kept them in Guantanamo, even though they were never even arguably a threat to anything having to do with American interests.
And even the Bush administration acknowledged after several years that these were not enemy combatants, that these had never been held at Guantanamo, and there were 30, 35 of them sitting in Guantanamo for years, and the Bush administration admitted that there was no evidence against them, but said that they couldn't find anywhere to put them because no other country would take them because every other country didn't want to alienate the Chinese by taking them.
And so a federal judge said, I'm ordering you to release them because they won their habeas corpus, and you have a deadline.
You either have to place them into another country, or you are to admit them into the United States and free them.
And there was actually a judge who gave them that order, not just that they won the habeas hearing, but that they were required to release them.
And the appellate court reversed that judge and said that whether or not to admit someone into the United States is a purely immigration issue, that the authority is vested fully in the executive to make those decisions, and no court can order the executive to allow someone into the United States.
In other words, John Marshall has made his law.
Let's see him enforce it.
Right.
And essentially a lot of these habeas hearings, though they're nice in theory that these individuals are being cleared and ordered released, continue to remain in Guantanamo.
And what's extra ironic about it is that there were a lot of countries around the world who have been demanding for a long time that we close Guantanamo, in Europe and elsewhere.
It's obviously been a universally condemned practice in the United States.
And so the argument always was, well, look, if you're really that opposed to Guantanamo, you need to help us close it.
And the way you have to help us close it is by accepting some of these detainees who we're judging to be released.
And most countries were ready to do that until the Congress of the United States said we're not going to take any of them.
In fact, we're going to pass a law banning the president from transferring any of them to the United States because we don't want terrorists on the loose in the United States, even though these people who we're releasing are people against whom there's no evidence whatsoever that they've done anything wrong.
Anyone who's ever been in Guantanamo, in our political discourse, is a quote-unquote terrorist, and therefore releasing them into the United States is to release terrorists, to let terrorists be on the loose in America.
And the Congress, members of both parties, including Kerry Reid, said we're never going to allow that to happen.
And so once the United States, which is the creator of this problem, said we're not going to allow any of these people to come into the United States, virtually every other country said, well, just politically, we can't take them if even your Congress is passing a law saying that you won't take them, and that's why we've been doing things like bribing tiny little islands.
We literally paid $200 million.
We made a commitment of $200 million to the Pacific island of Palu to accept 11 Uyghurs.
I think it's something like $16 million per detainee that we paid just for them to accept it because it's the only thing that they're left to do.
Yeah, so they're working at the golf course now.
I guess that could be worse.
Four of them got released into the Bahamas, or to Bermuda, rather, which is essentially a colony still of England, and we did it without consulting with the British because we knew that they would object vehemently, and when they found out they were furious, but at least four of them are living in Bermuda working on the golf course, as you say.
Well, I know that your favorite quote out of Federalist Paper No.
10 by James Madison is about how we need to set up the structure of this government so that ambition must be made to check ambition.
You'll have all these people who are so narcissistic they want to be the most powerful people in the world, and we'll set them fighting amongst each other so much that hopefully the average guy will be able to live his life in some sort of modicum of freedom, I guess is the principle there.
And I noticed the McClatchy stories.
I don't think I saw where you've written about this, but I'm sure you must have seen the McClatchy stories about how there are prosecutors in New York and in Virginia who want to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al-Sheib and them in federal court just like they should have done all along.
Is there a chance that in this case ambition can be made to check ambition and they can actually get back to following the law here?
Well, I think that the problem that the Obama administration believes that they face is that there is a lot of evidence that could be used against the highest profile detainees that would never see the inside of a courtroom, even in America's court system, because it was so plainly extracted by torture.
And the Supreme Court in 1935, in a case where Mississippi sheriffs beat and threatened to kill a black defendant who then confessed, and then they sought to use that confession against them, the U.S. Supreme Court said that confessions obtained via torture are inadmissible in court or via coercion.
That's just a basic precept of Western justice.
And so the Obama administration's fear is that if they try and put these high-profile terrorists on trial, that they'll be blocked from using the evidence against them on the grounds that it was obtained by torture and that they will then be acquitted.
And then they'll be in the position of having either to release Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which is something that they'll never do politically, or assert the power, which they've already suggested that they would assert, to exercise what they're calling post-acquittal detention power, which is where somebody gets acquitted in a court of committing a crime, of having done the crime that you've accused them of doing, and you assert the power to detain them anyway, based on the argument that they're still an enemy combatant, because they're still a member of Al-Qaeda, even if you can't prove they ever did anything against you.
And so they consider that to be a catch-22, a bad dilemma that they don't want to be faced with, and that's why they're reluctant to bring these people to trial and are claiming that there's this group of people, as I said before, who are too dangerous to release and yet can't be prosecuted, and that would include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others.
Now, the reality, first of all, the reason why you don't allow evidence obtained by torture to be admitted in a court of law is because evidence that's obtained by torture is intrinsically unreliable.
You can't trust it, because people say anything when you're torturing them.
And so if it's the case that evidence obtained by torture is intrinsically unreliable, and the only evidence we have against these people to prove they've done anything wrong is evidence we obtained by torture, then this is a matter of logical necessity.
It means that we don't have any reliable evidence in our possession to think that they've done anything wrong.
The only evidence we have against them is evidence that we've obtained by torture, and if the only evidence we have against them is unreliable evidence, then we shouldn't be wanting to hold them regardless.
And the other aspect of it is that the United States Criminal Code contains unbelievably broad statutes that not only make it a crime to engage in a terrorist attack, but even to lend, quote-unquote, material support for terrorism, which basically means that if you do anything at all that is an aiding and abetting of a terrorist cause, not only will you be found guilty of a crime, you'll be sent to prison forever.
I mean, if you're a Muslim and you even sneeze in the direction of a terrorist organization, you're going to be charged with material support.
There are people in prison right now for having done nothing more than being a cable operator in New York and including a channel from Hezbollah, which is deemed a terrorist organization by the United States.
All they did was put into the cable package the Hezbollah channel because a lot of their customers want to see it, and they support Hezbollah as a resistance force against Israel, and yet that's considered material support for terrorism.
If you even go anywhere near an Al-Qaeda camp, even if you never actually take any steps to engage in any terrorism, that is material support for terrorism.
And so the easiest thing in the world is to convict people in a federal court in the United States if they have anything at all to do with terrorism.
And so this excuse that, well, there's this group of people who we know for sure are dangerous but we can't convict in a court, everyone should find that extremely unconvincing.
It's just that if you're Obama, the politically easiest thing to do is to ensure that you never have to face any of these problems by just asserting the power to keep them in a cage with no charges.
And that's why I don't think that they're going to be charged.
Well, it's too bad he swore that oath to obey the Constitution and uphold it.
And it says in there, if that's his contract, he has to faithfully execute the law.
He doesn't really have a choice about what's political and what's not, right?
Well, right.
I mean, in theory, that's certainly true.
Well, and here's the thing, too, I wanted to add real quick, is that Yosef Fahoud, I believe is how you say it, the Al Jazeera reporter, he went to Pakistan.
He got not confessions and admissions, he got bragging from colleagues Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shid that they were the ones who did it.
And if anybody reads James Bamford's work or Lawrence Wright's work or whatever, we all know that there's plenty of evidence out there about these guys' involvement that does not, in fact, come from torture at all.
So the excuse that they can't prosecute because they only have torture evidence, as you say, it's a catch-22 there.
But I, I think, I'm pretty sure that, you know, if I could call the witnesses I wanted, I could convict these guys in federal court in New York City.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, I mean, the excuse, look, I mean, anytime the government wants a tyrannical power to be vested in them, any government, or anytime they want to be given license by the citizenry to evade the limits of their power, what do they do?
They invent fume-mongering campaigns of all the horrible things that will happen unless you acquiesce to the power that they want to assert.
So that's all this is.
They don't want to be bothered with the requirement imposed by the Constitution, which, by the way, Thomas Jefferson called the only anchor ever yet invented by man to secure the principle of the Constitution, which is requiring a trial by jury before the government can put you in prison.
They don't want to be bothered by that requirement because it's politically annoying and inconvenient.
And so they're telling the citizenry, look, if we are, have this requirement imposed on us, if you don't let us assert this power, then you're going to have the people who did the 9-11 attacks roaming loose in the streets in your communities.
And you don't want that because these are horrible killers.
And it works.
Let me tell you what I just read.
I just read this like an hour ago.
I was amazed.
You know, there's these accusations and arrests currently in this case where several individuals in New York and Denver have been arrested and accused by the FBI of plotting to detonate explosive devices.
And who are sympathetic to Al-Qaeda.
We don't know anything about these people.
We don't know anything about the cases.
All we know are the allegations that have been made against them that are obviously unproven.
Anyway, as is always the case, even Eric Holder came out and said that we don't know of any imminent specific plot they were planning.
We just believe that generally they posed a threat and had an intention to engage in a terrorist plot, but there was no imminence to it.
There was no specificity to it.
It wasn't as though tomorrow there was going to be anything that was going to happen, but they made them sound scary.
They said it's the most serious plot we've disrupted in years, and they really had bomb-making devices and blueprints of subways and buildings on their laptop.
And a writer for the New Republic, Michael Crawley, who has been a long-time writer there, wrote something today about two hours ago or three hours ago, and he said, I read something that said that there are still allies of theirs who are plotters, who are on the loose, who they haven't yet apprehended.
Isn't this pretty much a clear case of the classic ticking time bomb that always is brought up in interrogation discussions?
And I wonder how tough are we being when we're interrogating these people in our custody and how tough should we be?
And he said, you know, my inclination is to reach one conclusion, but then I think about how would I feel if we weren't tough enough, and then someone I knew got killed by being blown up on the subway in New York on Saturday, basically saying that this seems to be a pretty clear-cut case where we ought to be torturing people.
Wow, they really just don't waste any time at all over there at the New Republic, do they?
No, they're drooling.
They're eager and desperate in this really creepy way to find excuses to start torturing.
You know, I mean, this is as far away from a ticking time bomb case as you could ever conceivably get.
Even Eric Holder has said there's nothing specific to it, and, you know, it's just a run-of-the-mill case where you're trying to find people you think are dangerous.
That happens every day, and if you justify torture in this case, then, you know, when isn't it justified?
You would use it in run-of-the-mill domestic cases all the time, but that's the point is it's so easy to put people into that fear state where you've already demonized the target, the subhuman anyway, and so after everything that's happened, all the controversy and uproar over torture and should we prosecute, and here you have a New Republic writer, a New Republic writer, a writer of the liberal New Republic, just coming right out without any shame or caution at all and just saying, shouldn't we be torturing in this case?
And that's the sort of mindset that the American public has been put into, and so putting terrorists into prison with no trial, quote-unquote, is something very easy to justify.
What a disaster.
Give me the Old Republic, yeah?
Hey, I wanted to share this quote with you because I'm pretty sure you're going to find use for it.
It's a couple of years old here.
It's from Larissa Alexandrovna's interview of Michael Ledeen, Conversation with Machiavelli's Ghost, Part Two, and here Larissa Alexandrovna asks the National Review's Michael Ledeen and AEI's Michael Ledeen.
Is he one of the guys that got purged from AEI?
I forget.
Anyway, who should be held accountable for the torture we are now seeing evidence of, including the rape of women, children, and men, as well as all-out murder and unmarked graves?
Michael Ledeen responds, I want them and their superiors to be aggressively punished.
I abhor torture, and I've written about it.
And then he goes on to say that it is deadly to any civilized enterprise, such as this society we're attempting to have here.
I just thought that was worthy of note, since his buddy Douglas Fyfe helped orchestrate the torture policy and that kind of thing.
Maybe we're going to be calling to beat the neo-consulate on this.
Michael Ledeen is one of the most brazen liars that we have in our political landscape.
He actually was beating the drum as loudly as could be beaten before the Iraq war in favor of that war.
He actually went on MSNBC and was asked, when do you think the invasion would become justifiable?
When should we launch it?
And he said, yesterday.
And yet in 2006, when everything was going so badly and the war was so discredited and unpopular, he went to the pages of National Review and wrote that he never supported the war, that he was against it from the start, that he always thought it was a mistake.
He claims that we've been at war with Iran since 1979, even though in the 1980s he was at the center of the Reagan administration's effort to arm the Iranian regime with some of the most dangerous weapons in the world, which if we were at war with them would actually constitute treason.
If you arm the enemy with highly sophisticated weaponry, that's treason if anything was.
He says anything at any given moment, and I wouldn't put much credence on that, but you're right to notice, since it is sort of emphatic and he happens to be right, whatever his motives are, that that is exactly what happens, that once you start lifting the taboo on engaging in brutal and inhumane conduct, it does start degrading the character of the society and what it means to be civilized, to have limits, moral and ethical and legal limits, and if you don't have those, then by definition you're no longer civilized.
And I'm sorry, because we're already way over time.
Can I ask you one more thing?
Yep.
Alright, you've done some really good writing about, especially the hypocrisy of the conservative movement, such as it is, the right wing, on the issue of war in Afghanistan and the doubling down, and of course your analysis is really great in terms of the media construction of the debate and how the false arguments are set up around us and all these things.
It's wonderful.
However, I kind of, I guess, just have a special request, that it would seem my best guess to go along with everything that you've written in the past and what I think is your stance, why not just go ahead and write Glenn Greenwald style, that is point by point by point with no stone left unturned, the case against the war in Afghanistan and why we have to get out of there right now.
Well, here's why.
First of all, I mean, I've been increasingly, I've been writing about Afghanistan more and more, but I don't think that the way to make the case against Afghanistan is the same way as one would make the case against Iraq.
And the reason I don't think so is because virtually the entire country at the time that that war was commenced supported the invasion of that country.
Obviously not everybody, but it was something close to like 88, 89%.
And unlike as was true with Iraq, where there was no theoretical justification, people have become invested in the idea that there was a justification and that the government that was running Iraq harbored this organization that actually directly attacked us and believed that it was self-defense.
So unlike with Iraq, where the arguments are very straightforward about the immorality of the attack from beginning to end, people don't perceive that to be the case when it comes to Afghanistan because they believe there was not an original sin.
And so I think it's a more nuanced argument to make about why it is that we need to leave.
And so I think that engaging the argument in a sort of more complex way is much more effective.
Talking about the fact that we're achieving nothing, that we are slaughtering civilians, that we're increasing and inflaming anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, that we're squandering our resources and at this point are engaged in an unjust war are all things that I've argued.
But I think that it's going to have to be a slower and more incremental argument to make other than just beating people over the head because unlike with Iraq, where there was a substantial portion of the population who was opposed to the war from the start and believed and could argue that it was wrong from the beginning, I think Afghanistan is a much more nuanced case politically than that because a lot of people supported it and are therefore invested in seeing that it ends well.
And I think that it's a trickier case to make.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I guess at the same time, though, it's sort of an emergency.
I mean, it seems to me like our continuing war there is a serious threat to our society if for no other reason than the danger of our paper dollars becoming actually worthless.
I mean, it seems like this is where empires go to die, they say.
It seems like it's time to really, I mean, because as you say, you do take on each of these points in the context of the media criticism or the criticism of the conservatives or whatever, but it just seems like really right now we're kind of at a tipping point, right?
Obama says he's undecided and it seems like now's the time to say, no, man, we already know better than to do this.
But I think Obama, I mean, I think anyone needs to be careful about what Obama is saying.
He's not undecided about whether or not we should withdraw from Iraq.
Withdrawing from Iraq does not seem to be an option.
Afghanistan, Afghanistan.
Yeah, from Afghanistan.
I mean, that does not seem to be an option on his menu at the moment.
He's undecided about whether we ought to escalate by sending even more troops than are there now.
So one of the things that I do think is promising is that public opinion has obviously turned against the war and there's a particular skepticism about whether we ought to devote more resources there.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, the most politically effective argument against killing in Afghanistan is not one that I think that I'm particularly comfortable making because I don't think it is the most effective, which is the selfishness argument, which is that we just shouldn't spend our money on a country like that, that there's nothing to gain there.
And to me, I think that once you invade a country and shatter their infrastructure and spend eight years bombing them and occupying them, that you do have some obligation to the country that you wouldn't have otherwise had to do something to rectify what it is that you've done.
And so the argument the Democrats tried making with Iraq, if they felt politically comfortable making it, was, look, we've done enough for these people.
They're not taking advantage of all the great things we did for them, so screw them.
But that was the argument that Hillary Clinton and others were starting to make, which is that, look, it's up to them now to do it.
We've done enough for them.
That's probably the argument that appeals most to Americans, if you really want to make the anti-war case as effectively as possible, but that's not an argument that I think is true or valid or just.
And so I just think the case needs to be made in a bit more of a, I guess, complex way.
And I think you're right.
The financial aspect of it is true.
That's not the argument I've really been making, that being in Afghanistan is an imperial act.
And there was just a speech given yesterday by the CEO of a major hedge fund, Michael Sternhardt, who said that essentially China or Japan could destroy this country at any moment, not just by calling in our debt, but by ceasing to buy our debt, continuing to buy our debt, because we don't have any money.
And all our money comes from selling our debt to China and Japan.
And though there's not much risk that the Chinese will do it because they can't, they're too locked into us, there is a risk that Japan could do it.
The only way to get out of that is by saving our way and growing our way out of it.
There's not, obviously, any prospect of saving our way out of it if we continue to wage wars all over the globe and occupy a country that, as you say, historically is where empires have gone to die.
That is an argument that I think can be made, and made persuasively.
All right, everybody, that's Glenn Greenwald.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act, and for some reason I'm forgetting the name of the second one.
Tragic Legacy.
Oh, Tragic Legacy, of course, about the Bush administration and great American hypocrites, obviously, about the conservative movement.
And the blog is Salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show, Glenn.
I appreciate you and all your work.
Thank you, Bubba.