For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show, it is Anti-War Radio here on KPFK in LA.
I'm Scott Horton, and if you ask me, which I'm imagining you are asking me right now, the very best blog in the world is that of Glenn Greenwald.
It's at salon.com/opinion/greenwald.
Well it'll forge you on to the new address now anyway if you do.
Salon.com/opinion/greenwald.
He's a former constitutional litigator, Bill of Rights cases.
He's a prolific author and has a new one coming out with Liberty and Justice for Some which comes out just next month, right Glenn?
Welcome back to the show.
Great to be back, Scott, thank you.
And the book comes out next month, is that right?
Yeah, at the end of October.
Okay, great.
I can't wait to read that.
It's a subject we've been talking about, you and I, here on this show for years and years now.
Absolutely.
I'm starting to get some white hairs on my chin, I'm getting old here.
All right, well, I guess that kind of leads us into the first question here.
We really have talked on this show for years and years and years on end, Glenn, about the state of civil liberties in this country, particularly in the era of the war on terror.
Here we are coming up on 10 years.
Of course, TV won't leave us alone about September 11th one bit.
It's like the thing happened yesterday or something.
So I figure, you know, why not go ahead and do like them and take this time to do a little retrospective, only we'll ask the questions that they don't ask, such as, Glenn, what freedoms have Americans lost since September 11th?
Well, it's really not hyperbole to say that if you think about the freedoms that you were taught when you were young, were the defining ones of the United States.
And I remember, you know, being in fourth and fifth grade and having government and social studies classes and the like, where teachers talked about how, you know, being in a free country like the United States, as opposed to tyrannical governments like the Soviet Union, meant things like the government doesn't have the right to put you in prison for whatever it wants to put you in prison for, that if it wants to keep you there, it has to convict you of a crime and charge you with a crime and then convict you, that it can't search our homes and our papers and our telephone conversations without warrants, that it has to be open and transparent.
All the things that we were taught were important, and that distinguished us from the tyrannical governments that we were constantly told we needed to fight.
And yet, if you look at every one of those rights that I just identified, without hyperbole, literally, they've all been severely eroded in the name of terrorism in the wake of the September 11th attack.
We've seen the government imprison American citizens on U.S. soil without any due process at all and keep them there for years and argue for the right to do so, and courts acquiesce to that.
We, of course, saw the government eavesdropping on Americans en masse without warrants in violation of the law, knowing they were caught, the law was changed to allow them to do that.
And there's virtually no transparency of any kind.
I was just on NPR yesterday with the Washington Post's Dana Priest, who wrote last year the series that even the Washington Post entitled Top Secret America, basically a secret, sprawling government that's accountable to nobody, even the people ostensibly in charge of it, let alone the public.
So what you really have is a massive, secret surveillance and national security state in lieu of a republic, in lieu of a democratic government, and you see, obviously, antiwar.com and radio shows like the one that you host and my blog, I've been pointing that out for a long time, but so overwhelming and glaring is it that you can even find those kind of discussions, those kind of descriptions, ones that used to relegate you to the fringe of radicalism, even in established media sources.
Well, of course, it takes getting to a point where it's so bad that it's too late for anybody to do anything about it before they finally get on board, though, right?
Right.
I mean, I mean, basically, it gets to the point where it can no longer be denied.
And so, you know, it's a straight face.
I mean, even people who, you know, it's interesting, you know, we make these assumptions about what the public knows a lot of times based upon what we're told the public thinks or based upon what mainstream and established media sources report.
And we assume that the public is sort of in sync with the kinds of things that these media sources are reflecting.
And yet there was a Pew poll released this morning that I actually just wrote about because it's pretty surprising.
And one of the questions that asked is, is it necessary to sacrifice civil liberties in order to fight against terrorism?
And although in the wake of 9-11, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the majority of Americans said that it was necessary to sacrifice civil liberties now by a substantial margin, like 54 to 40 percent.
Americans say, no, it's unnecessary to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of terrorism, that we can fight terrorism without giving up our freedoms.
But even more surprising was the question, is American wrongdoing, and that was the term, wrongdoing, one of the causes of why we get attacked by terrorists?
Amazingly to me, a very robust 43 percent of Americans answered yes to that question and said, yes, American wrongdoing is one of the reasons why.
Their terrorist attack, only 45 percent said no.
And, you know, those views, the pro-civil liberties view, but especially the idea that the things that we're doing in the world, bombing and occupying and drone attacking other countries, killing civilians by large numbers, is a reason why, the main reason why so many people want to do harm to Americans, that view is almost never heard.
In fact, that view is taboo in most media circles.
If you voice it, as I have before, you'll be accused of hating America or blaming America or whatever.
And yet a very sizable portion of the citizenry has come to realize that it's true.
And so I think that's why you start to see some of these discussions seep into establishing a media circle.
Americans know that this posture of endless war is degrading the political values they were taught to value, that it's leading to all kinds of massive corruption because of the wall of secrecy under behind which political leaders operate, and that it itself is the primary cause of the terrorism that then is used to justify erosion of rights.
Well, I can't tell you how pleased I am to see that number.
Forty three percent are, in fact, just as you emphasize there, the fact that they worded the question that way, you know, is it possible that anything Bill Clinton ever did to an Iraqi from Saudi Arabia might have angered anybody instead of just, you know, they hate us for their Islam or whatever, even have the question brought up wrongdoing?
The term used in a poll like in a Pew poll like this means that, you know, here we are 10 years later, we're right where we should have been 10 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it you know, one of the the amazing aspects of American political culture is that we love to think that we have such a robustly free press and that, you know, we don't have the kinds of control over information and censorship and the like that other less free countries have, especially, you know, once in the Middle East and the like.
And yet, if you look at things that the United States did prior to 9-11, that unquestionably you were part of what motivated not just the specific terrorists that attacked us, but also people who were supportive of them or just otherwise anti-American, you had very widespread discussions of those actions in that region of the world, the region that we think is so unfree and that his press is controlled.
Things like the sanctions regime that the first the Bush, you know, 41 and then the Clinton administration prosecuted against Iraq, which killed several hundred thousand people, at least including, you know, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
The blind support for the Israelis is they slaughtered all kinds of Muslims and Arab children and women and men in the neighboring states.
And of course, you know, propping up dictatorships from Iran to Saudi Arabia and the like, you know, these kinds of things that prompted clearly much of the anti-American animus that gave rise to September 11th and other attacks is widely, widely known throughout the world, but is barely known at all, or at least was barely known at all in the United States, which is why in the wake of 9-11 you heard the whole why did they hate us question.
People were genuinely baffled, Americans were, that anybody, you know, that we would be minding our own business, going about our business very innocently, not harming anybody.
Why would anyone ever want to do anything for the United States?
That really reflected just how deeply propagandized the population is and how much is suppressed.
But I think that, you know, with the advent of the Internet, making information freer and more international and just the fact that Americans are paid more attention now, given how much money has been spent and how many wars have been launched and how many rights have been eroded in the name of terrorism as to what really is the cause, I think there is this greater sense and appreciation for the fact that the things that we're doing in the world are a direct cause of it and that we are not innocent parties.
Hmm.
Well, now, I wonder if the conversation in the mainstream will start to reflect that more.
Maybe we could even have a conversation about whether doing more of the same is probably the best way to protect us from terrorism or not.
Well, I mean, you know, it's to me the you know, what I've always thought that, you know, looking back, you know, there's always every society always has policies that a hundred years later, 50 years later, look absolutely insane to future historians or even citizens.
And it's hard to know exactly what those policies are while you're living them.
But I've always assumed that the policy that was going to most be viewed that way would be the war on drugs and the fact that, you know, in the name of protecting citizens who are on drugs and helping them and preventing harm to them, we take them and put them in cages, separate them from their families and their jobs, you know, turn them into criminals and punish them as severely as somebody can be punished all in the name of helping them.
And and of course, the massive erosion of rights and waste of money that it entails and everything else.
But now I actually have come to change my mind.
And I actually think that what will be viewed most that way, and it's very similar, actually, is the war on terror.
The idea that we're going to solve or address the problem of terrorism by doing exactly that, which causes terrorism, which is going around the world and bombing other countries and engaging in violence and and really bringing our own form of terrorism to a whole variety of other nations.
I mean, the very idea that we can cause stop terrorism or limit terrorism by doing exactly that, which causes it, namely engaging in all kinds of aggression and violence in the Muslim world is like trying to cure lung cancer by smoking five packs of cigarettes more a day.
I mean, it's absolute lunacy on its face.
And yet that's exactly what we've been doing continuously since the September 11th attacks.
And polls like this actually do lead me to hope and believe that it's possible that, you know, Americans will start to see the inanity and the sort of Orwellian deceit behind these policies.
Yeah, well, I was so excited when Rick Santorum attacked Ron Paul and said, oh, you blame America first and whatever, because, hey, this presidential election, as you wrote on your blog recently, it starts way early these days and it drags on.
And Ron Paul is really the only person, maybe Dennis Kucinich, but pretty much Ron Paul is the only person in D.C. who takes the position that they don't hate us because of who we are, but for what we do and who's willing to really fight about it and cite Robert Pape's study of suicide terrorists and where they come from and what motivates them and all that kind of thing.
And of course, his antagonists have no idea what they're talking about.
So it always makes for a great fight, just like it did with Giuliani four years ago.
And I really hope that they just have this one out for months and months now, because, of course, all the facts are on Paul's side.
Michael Scheuer was on the show yesterday explaining, as you mentioned there, support for Israel, the sanctions in Iraq, the bases in Saudi Arabia from which to enforce that blockade and to do the no fly zone bombings and turning a blind eye to Russia, China and India and their wars against Muslims and manipulation of the oil prices and all this.
None of these have to do with how rich and white and Christian and free we are over here.
It never was about that.
Well, and I think, you know, I think that Americans are starting to ask those questions.
You know, you even saw with polls regarding Libya.
I mean, you know, think about especially over the last decade, even before that, but especially over the last decade, if the entire government media complex starts churning out a prop about this evil, murderous, homicidal, crazed Arab dictator who needs to be removed from power for our good and the good of the people.
I mean, instantaneously, huge percentages of Americans would be behind the military action to to stop this new Hitler.
And yet you saw with the war in Libya that actually large numbers of Americans, the majority of Americans were against the military action there.
You see very large numbers opposed to the war in Afghanistan, even though, you know, that has the greatest nexus between the actual terrorist attack that justified all this and the war that we're fighting and the scaremongering among the battle of Qaeda and the Taliban being able to go back into power.
It doesn't matter.
I think a lot more skepticism and a lot more questioning, and especially when you start telling Americans that they're going to have to start giving up, you know, basic economic security and entitlements that they value and favor, like Social Security and Medicare and the like, and they see that we are still spending, you know, hundreds of billions upon hundreds of billions of dollars in these foreign adventures.
I think then they really start asking who and whose name for whose benefit are these wars actually being fought and start realizing that it's no longer there.
I mean, when it's risk free, you know, and you tell them you're going to feel good about what you've done, but you don't have to fight this war and you don't have to pay for it.
It's easy to get a citizenry to go along with the war because they're not the ones in any way paying a price.
There's no attacks on them.
There's no financial sacrifice on their part.
They're not the ones fighting it.
But once you start once you start making the connection between the things they have to give up and the things that they are incurring the risk and the like, that's when you start to see real questioning.
I think that's what you're starting to see.
Yeah.
Well, and now back to the civil liberties question there, too, because, of course, they named the total information awareness.
Oops, strike that terrorism information awareness.
And the the tapping everybody's phone calls became tapping terrorist phone calls, whatever they call it.
Terrorist surveillance.
Yeah.
And and, you know, I think most Americans are, you know, fairly secure in the idea that, yeah, rights are being violated, rights of terrorists who I don't think have any rights.
So screw them.
And what does this really have to do with me anyway?
Glenn Greenwald.
Well, that, of course, is, you know, the most successful tactic for eroding civil liberties.
And it is true that there is a selfishness among, you know, not just Americans, but populations generally.
People are self-interested and care more about the things they perceive are directly harming them than they do others.
And so, you know, you saw, for example, some very mild, relatively speaking, mild infringements of people's privacy rights and civil liberties create a huge uproar, which was the new security measures at airports created a massive backlash because it was, you know, people who were sort of ordinary Americans being subjected to it.
And they cared far more about that than they did about much, much worse and more invasive and more extreme measures being directed at people that they perceive as the other.
But the problem, of course, is that even if you want to say, you know, even if you want to embrace your selfishness and say that you don't care if it's only Muslims who, when Muslims are subjected to civil liberties infringement because you're not Muslim and are never going to be, the way that it works always, inevitably, is that the way that civil liberties infringements are institutionalized is that they are targeted at first against marginalized, unpopular, vulnerable groups, you know, people who are weak or disliked or whatever.
And once people acquiesce to the infringement directed at that group of people, then the infringement, the powers that government has seized are institutionalized in general and can be easily expanded and always are beyond the original target.
So even if you're not bothered when your fellow citizens are subjected to horrendous rights abuses, as long as it's not your group of people who are being subjected to it, a pretty horrible way of thinking.
But even if that's the way you think, just in terms of your own self-interest, the only real opportunity that you have to oppose the erosion of rights is in that first instance when they're being legitimized in the name of some, you know, particular danger, because once legitimized in the name of that danger, inevitably other dangers will then justify it as well.
Yeah.
Well, we already see in the debate the other night, Rick Perry talking about all we need is drones flying all up and down the American-Mexican border from Texas to the Pacific Ocean, and then we'll catch those illegal immigrants.
And bring that war right home.
Right.
Well, I mean, you see, yeah, you see, you know, an expansion of drones in lots of ways in Mexico and the drug war to protect the border.
And there's actually a chart that I forget who just produced.
I think it was The Economist that showed applications of the Patriot Act since its enactment in 2001.
And of course, it was enacted, you know, based on the need in the wake of September 11th to guard against terrorists.
And yet the application of the Patriot Act has been far greater in drug offenses and financial fraud and immigration offenses, far, far more frequent than it has been to terrorists.
So this is what always happens is a power is seized by the government in the name of one danger.
And yet it invariably expands well beyond that.
Usually that becomes just the originating pretext for it.
And it becomes, you know, abuse.
The abuse extends far beyond those the original area.
Well, and, you know, as you've written repeatedly on your blog and as I guess is the subject of your new book and you've mentioned here, there's so many abuses that have gone on for so long.
And that kind of automatic self-correcting essence of the American system that we're brought up to believe in has been broken down for so long in a row now that the accountability, the lack of accountability and the corruption engendered by this has taken us much further down the path where it's going to be almost impossible.
Or I don't know if you can see a way to do it, to turn this thing around when the, for example, so much money flows into Pentagon contractors that all they have to do is spend a tenth of a percent of that on lobbying and they have their contracts locked up and the policy will continue on.
You and I and all the Democratic and Republican voters in the country are completely frozen out of the process.
It has nothing to do with us anymore.
Well, that is, you know, that is the root of every problem is that the solutions to these government abuses is supposed to be ultimately, you know, democracy.
It's supposed to be that people who are abusing power get voted out of office.
Um, and, uh, replace the people who aren't abusive.
That's supposed to be the punishment mechanism that citizens wield.
Um, and yet one of the problems is that there are only two parties who are viable in each election because of the system that we have.
Um, and each of those parties is equally culpable in this regard.
You vote one out and vote the other party in and nothing changes.
Um, they're, they're co-opted by exactly the same interest.
Um, that is, you know, the way that you, you ensure that there's no outcome, there's no impact to, um, to Democratic elections as you call it, both parties.
This has been the success, you know, the genius of AIPAC, um, that they don't want to ever be associated with one of the two parties.
They want to own both parties and they do.
So you can vote for Democrats, you can vote for Republicans and our Israel policy will never change.
Well, that's exactly what happens with the most financially potent sectors as well.
I mean, Dick Durbin, the second ranking Democrat, um, and the Senate gave an interview last year and he said, what's amazing is even after the Wall Street crisis, the crisis caused by Wall Street, Wall Street still owns the Congress.
They own the entire Congress.
Um, and the military industrial complex, the, the national security state, security surveillance state, um, you know, our key citizens can't compete either with any of that.
And so what you're really talking about here is the fact that, you know, democracy is made irrelevant.
I mean, we talked in the beginning about this encouraging public opinion funding, but public opinion really doesn't matter.
Um, because the people who don't want to give up civil liberties, um, have absolutely no power when compared to the people who want this continuous erosion because it gives them more power.
And the only thing that really changed that, um, is when people start to realize that it isn't that there's particular political leaders who are bad at one party that's causing the problem or anything like that.
That it's the system itself that is intrinsically corrupted, um, to the point where democracy is an illusion and nothing can actually change.
And, and, and, and until there's sort of a war on the system itself, the political system itself, um, you know, it is hard to see how there will be a solution.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, that's really good for marking where we are on this road.
It's still a battle of ideas because we're a long way, I think, from convincing the American people of what you just said, that it's not just a matter of throwing out Bush or throwing out Obama.
It's the presidency.
It's the Congress.
It's the way the thing works.
That is what's wrong with this country.
You know, I'm not sure I agree with you entirely about that in terms of that pessimism.
Um, you know, if you look at public opinion polls, what you find is that pretty much everyone in government is unpopular.
Um, you know, it's not that Obama is unpopular, though he is, um, or that Congress is unpopular, although it is, it's that every aspect of political life is basically held with very low esteem and contempt by the American citizenry.
That's why you've seen these huge wild swings.
I mean, in 2002 and 2004, you saw very significant Republican victories.
And then in 2006 and 2008, you saw wild swings to the Democrats.
And then in 2010, you saw the reverse.
And now there's signs that that will continue.
The Americans are just completely dissatisfied with what they're getting from the political class.
And the only way that they really know how to express it at this point, um, is by constantly voting out the people in power and replacing them with someone else.
Although they're seeing now that that doesn't change anything.
So you've seen more angry outbursts and expressions of citizen discontent.
Um, and I think as economic anxiety grows and the middle class continues to disappear and wealth inequality continues to explode, which it will, um, you know, I think that citizen unrest is only going to grow and it's not going to be in favor of one party and against the other.
It's going to be, um, you know, hostile to the system itself.
Yeah.
Well, I sure hope that that's right.
Um, it's, although it's funny cause it seems like, uh, hatred and mistrust of the government doesn't necessarily translate into wanting to give them any less power.
You know, a lot of times it's just, I'm mad at them cause they're not giving me enough soon enough or something like that.
You know, I want them to do more.
I want them to hurt Muslims more than they are.
I want them to, you know, do something wrong that they're not doing wrong enough.
Yeah.
Um, you know, and I, I think a big part of that is, is that for a long time, you know, basically the, the perception, the political perceptions of Americans, um, has been really shaped by, you know, establishment media outlets.
And as we discussed, there is a very narrow range of opinion that gets aired.
Um, but people are able more and more to turn to alternative sources.
And, and, you know, for a long time, this was the kind of promise of the internet that it was going to democratize, um, public opinion and political, um, movements and the like.
And, and it's taken a really long time to happen.
I think a lot of people started giving up on the idea that it could, but these kinds of changes are always very slow to develop.
You're talking about fundamental changes in how we communicate with one another and how information is disseminated.
And, and, and of course, I mean, the, the, the, the people who had been dominant in the prior system are trying to figure out how to stay dominant and keep control over the internet and, and other technologies.
But I do think you're starting to slowly see, um, you know, slowly but steadily see, um, the, the, the promise of, of internet technologies and communication technologies coming to fruition.
That is, you know, the, the erosion of, of the monopoly of, of established media outlets and corporate media outlets and the ability to disseminate, um, alternative ideas in a much more effective way.
Yeah.
Well, you're certainly getting it done over there at salon.com.
I don't know what I'd do without you, Glenn.
All right, Scott.
Why?
I really appreciate that.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thanks, Scott.
Have a good day.
Everybody.
That's the heroic Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional civil rights litigator.
And, uh, now blogger at salon.com.
He's the author of Howard, a Patriot Act, a tragic legacy, great American hypocrites.
And the new one coming out at the end of next month is liberty and justice for some.
And that has been anti-war radio for this evening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Friday from six 30 to seven on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
And you can find all the archives of this show and my other interviews as well at www.antiwar.com.
