10/16/09 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And I am looking at the blog salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
That's where you can find the writings of Glenn Greenwald.
He's a civil liberties attorney, and he's the author of the books How Would a Patriot Act, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrites.
He's also got his own radio show, which I usually neglect to mention for some stupid reason whenever I introduce him on the show.
But I urge you to listen to it because it's really good.
Glenn Greenwald Radio.
It's all at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
How are you doing?
Doing great, Scott.
Great to be back.
I'm really happy to have you here.
I really appreciate you coming on on short notice here.
Believe it or not, I about blew my top when I saw this thing.
I just can't believe it.
Tell me it ain't so.
GOP House members call for investigation of Muslim political activity.
We got a bunch of al-Qaeda sleeper cells in America trying to take over the Congress or what?
Well, that's how it's being depicted.
The reality, though, is much different.
There's an organization, which is the largest American Muslim organization for political activism called CARE, which is the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
It has long been a bugaboo of the far right and the neoconservative right because they represent Islamic political interests in the United States.
They're American citizens who engage in political activism.
And for people who hate Muslims, which is a large segment of the neoconservative right and the far right, that's considered nefarious.
And there are some individuals who have really extreme and blatantly bigoted backgrounds who have been investigating CARE for years and have come up with nothing.
One of the things they did was they sent one of their sons, who grew a beard for several months, an Islamic-style beard, and went, quote-unquote, undercover in this organization and pretended that he was a Muslim wanting to engage in political activism.
And he got access to their files and their records and a whole bunch of other things.
And he writes through it and took the things that he thought was incriminating.
And apparently the most incriminating document that he got in the several months that he was doing this was a memo, a one-page memo, that outlined the political strategies of CARE for the upcoming year.
And one of the bullet points or one of the items there was that they were going to, it said, quote, we will focus on influencing congressmen responsible for policy that directly impacts the American Muslim community.
For example, congressmen on judiciary, intelligence, and homeland security committees.
We will develop national initiatives such as a lobby day and placing Muslim interns in congressional offices.
Now, that is what I just read.
It's something that virtually every organization of any kind does, just trying to influence congressmen to enact policies that the organization thinks are constructive.
And the aspect of that that caused the uproar was the plan to place Muslim interns in congressional offices.
And four members of congress, all part of the House Republican Caucus, held a press conference and they announced that CARE was attempting to infiltrate the U.S. Congress using spies that were going to be placed in congressional offices in our sensitive national security positions in order to influence policy.
And they called on the sergeant at arms and the Department of Justice to conduct an investigation to see whether or not any interns had actually been placed pursuant to this memo as though placing interns by a group of American citizens is somehow some sort of act that requires criminal investigation.
It's pure bigotry and Islamophobia and it is really kind of repulsive and dangerous.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's really the thing, right, is they just, I'm sorry, I don't find the phrase right in front of me here, but basically it just goes from CARE was trying to place interns in congressional offices to terrorist spies or whatever.
But that was it.
That was the whole leap of faith and conclusion right there.
Nobody ever tried to prove, you know, the giant bolded point number three in the syllogism there, that if CARE is trying to place interns in Congress, then that means some nefarious foreign terrorist force is doing so.
But is there even an argument there?
Do they try to even make that argument?
Or is it simply just a leap to conclusion and fear?
Well, CARE, of course, because they're a group that is representative of the American Islamic political agenda, they're automatically suspect in terms of their loyalties by a substantial part of the neoconservative right.
Beyond that, you know, CARE is a group that has never, ever been charged with a crime.
They've never been indicted for any crime.
They've never been convicted of any crime.
And so there are all kinds of groups, of course, in the United States that try and influence Congress and have far more power within the United States Congress who have, in fact, been charged with all kinds of serious crimes.
I mean, tons of defense contractors, for example, have been convicted of all sorts of serious offenses.
AIPAC had two of its senior officials indicted and charged for involvement in espionage.
And although those charges were dropped because there were legal standards that couldn't be met by the prosecutors, there was an official in the Defense Department, Larry Franklin, who pled guilty to espionage because he passed classified information to AIPAC with the intent that it would go to the Israeli government.
By contrast, now obviously the influence of AIPAC in the United States Congress is vastly greater than virtually every group, certainly greater than CARE, and yet nobody seems to care about any of that.
So the one thing they try and latch onto in order to draw this black cloud over what CARE is, is in 2002 and 2003, the Bush Justice Department prosecuted the Holy Land Charity Foundation, which at the time was the largest Islamic charity in the United States, because they claimed that that charity was raising money and then transferring some of it to Hamas because they were involved in helping Palestinians for humanitarian reasons, and they were passing money to Hamas.
And now this is a criminal prosecution, and CARE was never named as a defendant.
They were never indicted for any wrongdoing.
None of their officials were either.
But the government had a list of what is called unindicted co-conspirators, which is where the Justice Department says, here are the defendants that we're actually charging with a crime, who are going to have the opportunity to prove in the court of law that they were innocent.
But there's other people who were involved in this that we're choosing not to indict.
And usually those lists are not made public because it smears somebody's reputation to be named as an unindicted co-conspirator without having the opportunity to prove your innocence.
Well, in this case, the unindicted co-conspirators were anybody who ever helped raise money in any way for the Holy Land Foundation, which included CARE.
And so the Bush Justice Department, wanting to smear Islamic groups, released a list of the many names of people who were named as unindicted co-conspirators, and CARE was one of them.
And they never had an opportunity to defend themselves.
They were never charged.
They never got to go into court and confront evidence against them or witnesses or anything else.
It's just a way of smearing people through accusations that are never proven in a court of law.
And that's the sole event to which people like these Republican Congress members cling in order to create this nefarious image around a group that has never been indicted, let alone convicted.
You know, it seems like there's even a subset among neoconservatives, really the jokes like front-page mag and Horowitz and all these people who are sort of the wannabe neocons.
Urkel over there at Family Matters for America.
And there's this whole conspiracy theory, right, where Al-Qaeda is Hamas, is Hezbollah, is the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, is CARE, is every Muslim and every Muslim organization.
As Harvey Kushner from Family Matters told me in a debate back in 2008, there are thousands of terrorists, sleepers around the country waiting to attack us all right now.
Thousands and thousands of them.
There's this sort of little cottage industry of neoconservative conspiracy nuts who try, who are really, they're very bigoted, aren't they, Glenn?
They're really just racist against Muslims.
They want all of us, who aren't, to hate and fear all Muslims.
Yeah, they're repulsive and they're unhinged and they're insane.
And just to give you a sense for how true that is, the source for this memo and for all these allegations against CARE were the authors of a book that was entitled Muslim Mafia, Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America.
These people actually believe that Muslims are in the process of Islamizing America, of taking over America with the intent to impose Sharia law, Islamic law.
And the foreword to that book was written by one of the members of Congress who was on the switch front, Sue Myrick of North Carolina.
And in 2003, Sue Myrick was asked, she was at an event for the Heritage Foundation, she was talking about the terrorist threat inside the United States and to justify the fact that the terrorist threat was greater than people think it is, she said, quote, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.
And she went on to say, you know, my husband and I have been going around for 20 years and every time you go into a convenience store, look at what you see, to justify the fact that Muslims were taken over the United States.
Anyway, one of the authors of this book is Dave Galbitz, who was a civilian agent who worked in an office of the U.S. Air Force.
And in 2007, he claimed that he was in Iraq.
And as part of his work there, he said that he was part of a military unit that found where Saddam Hussein kept his weapons of mass destruction.
And it led to this headline in the British Spectator, which is sort of a tabloidy, British newspaper by Melanie Phillips, who has a long history of aiding Muslims.
She wrote a book called Londonistan, claiming that Muslims are taking over Europe.
And the headline was, I found Saddam's WMD bunker.
And it details how he claims that he saw the WMDs.
He knows where they were kept.
But the Bush administration failed to act on his information.
They lost classified reports.
And now, as a result, the Russians and others were able to transfer those WMDs to Syria, where they now reside with Syria.
And that proves that Saddam really did have WMDs because he saw them himself.
This is the person.
And also, in 2006, he created a project called Mapping Sharia in America, the purpose of which was to create a comprehensive map of every mosque and Islamic school in the United States.
They were going to map out every mosque and Islamic school in order to justify the threat.
So these are the kinds of people who are behind the allegations that these members of Congress are working with closely.
I mean, true hate mongers, people who believe, as you suggested earlier, that anyone who is Islamic is, by definition, part of al-Qaeda, which in turn is part of a worldwide conspiracy not just to defend their homelands but to take over the world and impose Islamic law, including on the United States.
I mean, it's as crazed and hateful of a group as it can get.
And the fact that four members of Congress are calling for an investigation and working in close conjunction with people like this ought to be really alarming to everybody.
All right, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Glenn, a lot.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Glenn Greenwald.
The book is Great American Hypocrites, of course, about the conservative movement.
And the blog is salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And the article in question here is GOP House Members Call for Investigation of Muslim Political Activity.
This is your freedom under attack here, folks, yours.
We'll be right back.