For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio here on Pacifica 90.7 KPFK in LA.
I'm Scott Horton and our guest today is Glenn Greenwald.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act?
A Tragic Legacy and Great American Hypocrites.
And his fourth book is coming out at the end of next month with Liberty and Justice for Some, How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.
He also, of course, keeps the great blog at Salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
How are you?
Always great to be back.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Now, big news came out, I guess, last night, late last night, early this morning, that Barack Obama had ordered and apparently successfully gotten the assassination from the sky of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in the state of Yemen over there.
And you immediately fired off this great essay.
The due process, free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality.
I would note that Barack Obama's, I guess, commencement address or whatever for Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who's retiring, included many assertions about the guilt of Anwar al-Awlaki and his association, particularly with the Fort Hood shooter, Hassan, supposedly with some of the September 11th hijackers and others.
So I was hoping maybe we could just start there and you can tell us what it is that as far as you can tell, we really do know about this guy, Anwar al-Awlaki, and to what degree he really was an enemy of the United States.
Well, here's what we know for certain, meaning things that we know beyond just government claims, government assertions that are unproven and untested.
He was considered to be one of the most moderate Arab Muslim clerics by the United States government in the wake of 9-11, in fact, the Pentagon invited him to a luncheon to talk about how best to root out extremism in the United States.
The Washington Post gave several columns where he would host chats on the Washington Post page to talk about the religion of Islam and Muslim holidays.
And essentially what happened was over the course of the last decade, he became, like many people, very radicalized against the United States because of all the carnage that the U.S. has left in the Muslim world, the huge numbers of men, women and children, civilians that the U.S. has killed.
And he began preaching against the United States and saying that the U.S. was an aggressor state and that Muslims had no choice but to defend themselves against the United States because they were the target of so much lethal aggression.
And so the reality is that the United States began hating al-Awlaki not because of anything he did, but because his sermons were so effective, particularly effective in reaching the English speaking world, because he is an American citizen.
He was born in the U.S. and educated in the United States.
And so he knows how to speak to Western Muslims, especially, and he would give sermons in English and use the Internet to spread them.
And so the U.S. became concerned about the expression of his opinion about what the United States is doing in the world and what Muslims ought to do in response, clearly protected by the First Amendment.
You're allowed under the First Amendment to even advocate violence against the government, said the Supreme Court in the Brandenburg case.
And so what he was doing was clearly protected speech.
And so you couldn't punish him for that.
And so about a year and a half ago, it became it was leaked.
And the Washington Post, Dana Priest reported, the Obama administration has begun maintaining a hit list of several American citizens, at least, whom the president has ordered to be killed.
It's fascinating.
Without due process, al-Awlaki is on it.
And once that controversy emerged in public, the Obama officials began whispering anonymously to the media that it wasn't just his speeches and sermons, but that he had a, quote, operational role in various plots that originated in al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula, which is al-Qaeda based in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
And there's no evidence presented for this.
There's been no indictment of al-Awlaki, which they could have easily done if they really do have evidence.
All there is is a whispering campaign of anonymous government officials claiming that he's guilty in the media.
And that isn't how we try American citizens and find them guilty and punish them with death.
In the United States, at least, it used to not be the way we did that before Barack Obama was inaugurated.
All right, well, I wonder, just hypothetically speaking, if he had made YouTube videos saying, yes, I did send the underbomber to bomb the plane over Detroit and yes, I did recruit the Fort Hood shooter and told him to do it.
Is there any circumstance under which this American citizen would basically, in your eyes, have surrendered his right to not be killed by this government by making himself an enemy of the people of this country?
Well, first of all, even people who confess their crimes still have to go to court and be found guilty before they can be punished.
So if there's some individual who says to five friends or even on video, yes, I murdered the girl down the block and the older couple on the other side of the street.
You can't then just go in and order the police to go shoot him in the head.
You bring him into court.
You have him present his confession in court.
You examine whether it's voluntary, whether he's sane, whether it's under duress, whether there's some motive for the confession besides just telling the truth.
And only once it's examined in a court of law and he's found guilty by virtue of the confession is the state then permitted to punish him.
Now, in a case where you're talking about an international conflict, you know, even then you would have lots of questions.
For example, if he said, I had a conversation with Nidal Hassan and with Abdul Muttalib and they asked me as a cleric whether I thought violence against the United States was justifiable.
And I told them that I thought it was given the United States' actions in the Muslim world, that very well would be could be the kind of opinion that the First Amendment protects.
Again, you are allowed to express your view that violence is warranted.
If, on the other hand, he's actually engaged in plotting the attacks, laying out the plans for which planes should be blown up, which explosives should be used, recruiting the people to do it, then he has crossed over into an operational role.
But the problem is these are very difficult and tricky questions, and we don't allow the president to act as judge, jury and executioner in the United States.
That's the reason we have courts and a system, a process for examining the evidence, evaluating it and then reaching conclusions beyond a reasonable doubt of someone's guilt before we go in and take their life.
Well, and in fact, in this case, they're acting, Barack Obama is acting as the cop and the prosecutor before he's even the judge, the jury and the executioner.
All of this comes from he says so, basically, correct?
Well, I mean, that's absolutely correct.
I mean, there is no other branch of government.
There is no other process that is involved.
And I should also point out that a lot of his father, about six months ago, sued Obama in a federal court represented by the ACLU and the son of constitutional rights.
And his father started an injunction against Obama, axing a court to enjoin the president from murdering his son without due process.
And rather than go into court and say, here's the evidence that we have against Milwaukee that proves his guilt, the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, went into court and said, you, the judge and the federal courts have no right to even stick your nose into these questions.
These are military questions and political questions, not legal, judicial or constitutional ones.
And beyond that, who the president targets for assassination is a state secret.
And as a state secret, courts should not risk the disclosure of important classified information by even entertaining this case.
And based upon the argument that this is a political and military question, not a legal one, and especially based on the argument that Al-Waki's father didn't have standing to bring this suit, but Al-Waki had to bring it himself, the judge threw the case out.
So there was an opportunity brought to the Obama administration to present their evidence in court, and they hid behind a bunch of procedural claims as to why courts had no right even to be involved in these issues.
So if it's the case, as lots of Obama supporters are claiming, that there's all this evidence that we just haven't seen, but that the Obama administration has, proving that he was actually an operational terrorist rather than just a preacher whose sermons the U.S. didn't like, that's all the more reason why the U.S. could have and should have indicted him.
There is nothing easier in the world than to go into federal court.
Indictments in general are extremely easy to get, but when a federal prosecutor goes into court and tells a grand jury that this is a dangerous terrorist who is plotting to attack American civilians overseas and at home, there is not a grand jury on the planet.
You will not indict that person if you show them just a small amount of credible evidence.
Well, let me ask you, I mean, I'm sorry to ask you to speculate, but I will ask you to speculate.
Do you think that they're not doing this, taking the case to a grand jury because, say, one, for example, they just don't have the evidence?
Really, they just want him because they don't like the way he speaks.
And when it comes to assertions about, for example, putting Abdulmutallab on the plane, they just don't have it?
Or is it that in that Scooter Libby, David Addington, Dick Cheney way, they're determined to set the precedent that Obama can kill American citizens if he feels like it?
Yeah, I think it's the latter.
I mean, the question was often asked about Dick Cheney and George Bush.
Why did they go and eavesdrop on Americans about warrants required by law?
All they had to do is go to Congress.
Congress is completely subservient, would have given them anything they wanted, would have changed the law to whatever they wanted it to read.
And they would have happily said, you can spy on whoever you want without warrants.
Why didn't they just go to Congress?
Why did they break the law?
And the answer was because they wanted to establish the precedent.
If you said that they didn't need Congress's permission or the court's permission to spy on people, they eavesdropped on people.
They could do it on whoever they wanted.
The same exact question and answer is applicable to the question about why Obama didn't go to Congress at the very beginning of the war and ask for an authorization or declaration of war against Libya, given that Republicans and Democrats were both pushing him to get involved in that war and Republicans were actually accusing him of not doing it quickly enough, he easily would have gotten a war authorization from Congress to fight that war in Libya.
And yet he purposely chose not to.
And the question was, again, why didn't he just go into Congress?
And the answer was because he wanted the unilateral right not to have to get permission from the Republicans in Congress to fight the war that he wanted to fight.
I think that's exactly the same here, is he, they believe that they have the right and they've demonstrated they believe this over and over and over again to identify target anyone they want anywhere in the world without showing anyone any evidence in complete secrecy and target that person for death off a battlefield far away from a battlefield.
Now, obviously, if, you know, combatants are on a battlefield and they're engaged in a shootout or they're wearing a uniform of an enemy and they're fighting a military, obviously the U.S. has the right to kill anyone on the battlefield that it's fighting against.
Every nation has this right, including American citizens, without due process.
What we're talking about here is our people far away from any battlefield, not wearing any uniforms, no indicia of engaging in actual combat.
And the Obama administration believes it has the right and wants to keep the right for itself to kill anybody it wants anywhere in the world at any time without doing anything other than having the president order that it be done.
And that includes American citizens.
And I think that's the reason that they didn't go into it.
All right.
Now it's Glenn Greenwald, former civil litigator in the federal courts, now blogger at Salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
We're talking about the Obama administration's assassination of the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last night.
And I guess I just want to nail this down technicality wise, Glenn, for sure, that the courts have ruled correct over and over again that any person inside the United States or any citizen outside the United States all count as a, quote, U.S. person protected by the Bill of Rights.
A citizen on vacation in Spain or off in Yemen or anywhere else brings his Bill of Rights with him.
He's protected by the Fifth Amendment, for example, from just this kind of thing.
That's your understanding, correct?
I mean, that's not my understanding.
That's just fact.
I mean, you can't even the U.S. government can't, for example, wait for you to step outside of the U.S. if you go to visit Montreal or Mexico City and send hit squads after you and kill you for crimes or the things you committed without proving your guilt.
Or if you go to Spain and you give a speech against the U.S. government, the government can't then indict you for giving a speech criticizing the president on the grounds that you lose your First Amendment rights when you step outside the country.
You carry your constitutional rights with you as a U.S. citizen no matter where you go.
That's just basic constitutional jurisprudence.
All right.
Now, what if any federal laws make this a criminal act by Barack Obama and the people below him who carried this out?
Well, I mean, you could certainly make the case that if political officials like anybody else murder somebody without legal rights, that that is murder.
It's first degree murder.
Now, the reality is that our political system doesn't even prosecute people in the clearest cases of criminality when they're high level political officials.
That's certainly not going to ever happen here.
But it is certainly a lawless act, one that clearly violates the Constitution.
And at the very least, I think it's within the scope of high crimes and misdemeanors to go around killing American citizens without any act of Congress, without any due process and purely as a byproduct of secret deliberation.
So I do think it's clearly illegal.
And I'm noticing your writings on this over the time.
You've emphasized the fact that this man was a religious figure, a cleric, whether it's a religion that everybody wants to embrace or not is really beside the point.
Is your point there that in the case law that that's a religious figures, free speech is or ought to be protected maybe even more than a regular guys on an average day?
No, I mean, I think, you know, I know I think that, you know, if you look at First Amendment jurisprudence, there's a hierarchy of speech that merits different levels of protection.
And the highest level of speech is political and religious speech.
I think the speech that bothers the United States that Milwaukee delivers is more political than religious in nature.
But it really makes no difference.
I mean, the idea is that he is expressing political opinions.
I mean, you have to be able and are able as a U.S. citizen or anybody else to go and make the following argument.
The United States is, for the last decade, been engaging in wholesale aggression against the Muslim world and has been slaughtering enormous numbers of women, children and innocent men without any just cause.
And there's no end in sight to that slaughter.
And therefore, Muslims in that part of the world have not just the right, but the duty to start attacking the United States back to attack military installations, to attack soldiers, to attack their armies, to attack government institutions, in order to fight back and engage this war, that Muslims don't have the obligation to let this be a one-sided war.
That is an absolutely legitimate political opinion to express, whether you agree with that opinion or not, whether you think it's horrendous or immoral or anything else.
It is clearly a political opinion exactly of the type that the First Amendment protects.
That is the kind of sermon that Anwar al-Awlaki has been given to the Muslim world for several years now, and it's why the Obama administration decided to kill him.
And so what this is, it's not just imprisoning somebody for the expression of views that the state dislikes.
That would be bad enough.
That's the reason the First Amendment exists, is to prevent that.
It's the execution of somebody, an American citizen, for expressing views that the state finds troublesome and threatening.
And that really ought to disturb everybody.
All right, again, it's Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
And you mentioned the Brandenburg case there.
And I just want to make sure I understand exactly the difference between inspiration, as they keep saying in their celebrations of this murder on CNN today, and direct incitement.
Right.
So let me just tell you quickly about two key Supreme Court cases.
One is Brandenburg, which you mentioned.
And Brandenburg is just a very simple case.
There was a Ku Klux Klan leader who stood up in Ohio in a speech and said, threatened violence against Caucasian political officials, as he called them, for betraying the white race.
And he said, if this continues, we will have to take revenge, that's what he called it, against the white race.
And he was arrested and prosecuted under an Ohio statute that said that it's illegal to advocate violence or terrorism in pursuit of political goals.
And the Supreme Court in that case in 1969, unanimously said that that statute under which he was prosecuted is unconstitutional, because you have the right even to advocate violence and terrorism abstractly to say that you think terrorism and violence against the state are justifiable.
Remember, that's the way that the United States was born, was by people standing up and advocating violence against the British crown.
The other key case that is determinative in this area is the case of the NAACP versus Claiborne, where the NAACP in the South, in Mississippi, sponsored a boycott of white-owned stores.
And many of the leaders gave very fiery speeches, inflammatory speeches, that inspired various NAACP members to go and burn down white stores or to otherwise attack white stores.
And the state of Mississippi sued the NAACP and its leaders and tried to hold them liable for the damages on the theory that even though they didn't burn down any stores themselves, they inspired people, their members, to go burn down stores with their speeches.
And the Supreme Court said, unanimously, that the First Amendment does not allow people to be punished for what the acts or the consequences inspired by their free speech.
That you cannot be punished for the consequences of protected acts.
Otherwise, you know, there'd be no free speech.
If you went on the radio and said, I think abortion is wrong, and somebody heard you and went out that day and bombed an abortion clinic, or if you said, I think that corporations are bad for polluting the environment, if somebody blew up a corporation, if you could be held liable for inspiring those kind of violent acts, then there'd be no free speech.
So the Supreme Court said you cannot be punished for the consequences of your protected speech.
Well, what if I said, Glenn, I wish someone would do this, kind of in general.
Yeah, I mean, you're saying, I wish somebody would go and do this, is nothing more than your opinion.
That's absolutely protective.
The only thing you can't do is, you cannot essentially recruit somebody to do it by paying somebody, for example, to go blow up a building.
And you can't stand outside the building and direct a mob that has gathered to go burn down this building, because that really is imminent.
That is directing a crowd to go and do it.
But you have the absolute right to express your opinion that violence is warranted in pursuit of political roles, and if you express those views and people hear you and are persuaded by them, and act in accordance with them, you cannot be held liable.
That is absolutely clear for a mature person.
All right, it's Glenn Greenwald, salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
Glenn, I'll ask you to try to wiggle that cord.
We're getting a lot of static on the line now.
Yeah, I'm trying.
No problem, we'll get through it.
Well, now, and here's something that you've written about time and again, and that is the thousand different definitions of terrorism to the point where the word has no definition anymore, other than behavior, maybe even speech by someone that the government doesn't like.
And, you know, I saw earlier this afternoon on Fox News, they were asking Ron Paul what he thought about this assassination.
And, of course, he took the Bill of Rights position that it's illegal and that as president he would not do anything like that.
But he also brought up, I'm pretty sure he was referring to this man, Bernard von Notthaus, who basically was prosecuted, and I think the guy was a shyster, but that's besides the point, he was prosecuted for creating his own silver currency.
And regardless of how guilty he was or wasn't on those charges, at least they gave him a trial, at the end they said that this was terrorism, that trying to create a competing currency against the American dollar is terrorism.
And how this term can really be used, we saw the RNC-8, I know you were there during some of that melee, and some of those people are being charged with terrorism.
This really is, it's not really hyperbole, is it, Glenn, to say that this could be used against American citizens here in this country or abroad on a much more frequent basis from here on with this precedent set, am I right?
Well, I mean, if you look at the way the word terrorism is used, it's really amazing.
If you have a Muslim who attacks a purely military installation, the way that Nidal Hassan attacked Fort Hood, or even this individual who was just arrested for planning to send model airplanes packed with explosives to the Pentagon and to attack U.S. soldiers in Iraq using the same method, those people are called terrorists even though they're targeting exclusively military targets.
By contrast, the United States repeatedly kills civilians, and of course you could never describe them as being terrorists, or Israel and Gaza, that purposely defined legitimate targets to include not just Hamas, but civilian infrastructure that supports Hamas, or the U.S. and Libya bombing, NATO and Libya bombing government buildings, none of that is terrorism, even though it's clearly aimed at civilians and civilian buildings, and yet Muslims who engage in violence on military targets, that becomes terrorism.
The word has been completely impoverished of all meaning, it's completely manipulated as a result, but you're right, I mean if you look for example at the way the Patriot Act has been used, the Patriot Act of course was justified in the name of terrorism back in 2001, in a tiny percentage of cases it has been used against actual terrorists, the kind that we would think of people who have sought to bring violence to civilians for political end, and has been used far more for things like fraud or the drug war and things like this, so constantly these powers that are justified, and even the term terrorism itself, starts wildly expanding to give the government more and more power even beyond the realms that originally we think is going to be confined.
And now a little bit about the reaction to this killing here, I'm sure that you must not have been surprised, but had to have been a little bit shocked to see Obama supporters coming out to defend this much worse action compared to say tapping our phones, or just kidnapping and torturing people, this is actually killing them.
All the things that were bad when George Bush did it are just fine when Obama does it, it seems like.
Well it's not just the fact that the policies are so comparable, and you're right, I mean look at the controversy that ensued when George Bush sought simply to eavesdrop on the telephone calls of citizens without due process, or to detain them in prison without due process.
The Democrats and progressives in unison, you know, stood up and said this is tyranny and shredding the Constitution.
Here you have Obama not merely eavesdropping on or detaining American citizens, but ordering them killed off a battlefield without due process, and many many of his supporters are vigorously defending it.
But what I find even more disturbing is the fact that if you, you know, I was somebody who criticized Bush-Cheney terrorism policies for many years, and what it would ultimately come down to was that the people defending those policies, Republicans back then, would always resort to or collapse to the same rationale, which is look we are in a war, these are terrorists you're talking about, people in Guantanamo, people who are being tortured, people who are being eavesdropped upon, and therefore we have to stay safe.
That has to be the first priority, and so I'm glad Bush is doing what he's doing.
Now of course it would beg the question, because whether they were terrorists was exactly the question that wasn't being addressed, because they were being denied trials, but that was the argument they would resort to.
If you look at the way Obama defenders are defending this assassination, it's verbatim the same thing.
We're in a war, he went and joined the other side in a war, he was a terrorist in Al Qaeda, he got what he deserved.
Now of course they have no idea whether or not that's really true, but for them the fact that the president said so, just like the fact that Bush accused people in Guantanamo being terrorists, is enough for them to believe it's true.
Basically we're in a state, and it's a pure authoritarian mentality, where the minute the government utters the word terrorist and points at somebody, huge numbers of people start screaming, kill him, kill him.
And you know, Republicans were the ones leading the chorus back when there was a Republican president, Democrats are now the ones leading the chorus.
Now there's a Democratic president, but the mentality and the behavior is indistinguishable.
All right, well and to try to leave this interview on a positive note, Glenn, I wonder if you can tell me if you think there's a ray of hope from there in the political realignment on the other side.
Basically everyone who is anti-American citizen assassination on one side, and the war party on the other.
And I don't know if you saw this interesting set of remarks in the American Conservative magazine by Ralph Nader, saying about Ron Paul, and I'm not plugging for him on the show today, I'll save that for my other show, but the point is about priorities.
And Ralph Nader is saying, look at what we have in common, opposition to empire, and war, and this kind of thing, this sort of assassination, opposition to the erosion of our Bill of Rights, and the Patriot Act, and all the rest of the things that flow after that.
And of course, opposition to bankers and corporate welfare, etc.
And according to Ralph Nader, this is the basis of a new coalition, a new big tent that ought to be put together.
And I wonder whether you really hold out hope that we could actually do that, maybe even realign the two parties, where one of them is the war party, and the billionaires on welfare party, and the other party is everybody else?
You know, it's interesting, I mean, there's, there's an article from several days ago, in the American Conservative by Michael Tracy, who's a very liberal writer who typically writes for Mother Jones and the Nation, making essentially the same argument as the one that you just described, Nader making, which is that liberals and sort of Ron Paul-like libertarians have huge numbers of things in common, not just ancillary issues, but on the big issues.
And it's not just civil liberties, and war and empire, and the drug war, that would be enough.
But it is also the idea that, you know, this sort of crony capitalism, this sort of corporatism, has taken over government.
And it's not capitalistic, it's not free market, it's really corporate welfare, as you described.
And there was an interesting article in the New York Times, of all places, very surprisingly, praising Sarah Palin, for giving speeches that are deviating from Republican orthodoxy, in the sense that she's out there saying, basically, both parties are controlled and corrupted by the same forces, and drawing distinctions between small businesses that actually create jobs, that actually are entrepreneurial, and the large corporations that feed off the government and control it.
So I do think you start to see this kind of realignment.
The problem is, is that, you know, political tribalism in the United States is so potent, and it's so grounded in left versus right, the dichotomy of Republican versus Democrat, that it's very difficult to get people to stop thinking in those terms.
And there are very significant influences, not just political, but cultural, that reinforce it constantly, you know, religious, social issues, and these are things that inflame this tribalism, and prevent people who have huge amounts of things in common, from even considering working together, and cause them to support politicians in the party with which they identify, even though those politicians oppose most of the things that they believe in, sometimes rather violently.
And I think that the way realignment happens is when economic and political circumstances become extreme, and it starts to shake things up.
And the United States political culture and its economy is nothing if not extreme right now, and so I do see a greater possibility for that to happen than I ever did before.
Right on, great to hear it, and a great point to leave it.
Thank you very much for your time today, Glenn.
Alright, Scott, always good talking to you.
Everybody, that's the great Glenn Greenwald.
His new book is called With Liberty and Justice for Some, How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.
It's coming out at the end of next month, but you can pre-order it right now at amazon.com, and please check out his great blog, absolutely indispensable.
Glenn Greenwald at salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
We're all out of time.
In fact, we're over time.
Thanks very much for listening to the show tonight.
It's been Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Keep all the archives at antiwar.com/radio.
See you next Friday.
