10/21/11 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all welcome back.
I'm in Santi War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Glenn Greenwald.
He's the author of my favorite blog.
It's called Glenn Greenwald.
It's at salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
Actually, I have no idea what the web address is anymore, but it doesn't matter because that forwards on.
Good old salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
And he's also the author of some books.
How would a Patriot Act, a tragic legacy, great American hypocrites, and the brand new out in, I think, four days with liberty and justice for some, how the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful.
Welcome back to the show.
Glenn, how are you doing?
Great to be here, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
So your book is out in four days, huh?
It is.
It is.
It's out in just four days now on Tuesday, October 25th.
I can't wait to read it.
Now, are we going to be able to keep up our great tradition of publishing an excerpt at antiwar.com?
I hope so.
That's actually a really good idea that I was thinking about just a few minutes ago.
So I'm glad you asked that.
I would love to do that.
OK, good deal.
Well, I can't really speak for Matt and Jeremy, but I'm pretty sure that I think your readers will find interesting.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, this is a topic we've talked about here on Antiwar Radio for a long, long time.
The death of even really the precept of the rule of law.
I mean, it is just an idea.
After all, you have to live up to it or it doesn't exist.
Am I right?
Well, it is true.
And I mean, I started the book actually by examining the writers and the founders who disagreed about all sorts of things and had completely disparate views on a whole variety of topics.
And yet, embedded throughout all the writings was the idea that you can only free yourself a tyranny if everybody lives by a common set of rules, including the rulers.
And that's what I meant by the rule of law.
It's a pretty simple concept.
And so apart from that, it's not just a problem.
It's sort of a central problem.
And so that's why I wrote the book.
Damn right.
All right.
And don't worry about the dogs, man.
This has been one of those shows anyway.
So it's just fun.
It's true.
Yeah, yeah.
No problem at all.
We're just having fun here.
Just like Barack Obama's just having fun when he murdered Anwar al-Awlaki's kid the other day.
Well, you know, what's interesting is that the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki himself was only two weeks ago.
And obviously that sparked a lot of debate.
There were a lot of people who descended on the grounds that he was a terrorist, even though they have no evidence to support that accusation.
But since the government made the accusation, that's good enough for a lot of people to believe it's true.
But here you have his 16-year-old son killed two weeks later.
Now, it's not entirely clear that he was specifically targeted by the drone as opposed to being collateral damage, as the U.S. military calls it.
Although I think it would be extremely coincidental if he killed his father after trying for two years and then suddenly two weeks later killed the son by accident.
That would strike me as a pretty big coincidence.
And on top of that, John Brennan has been boasting for the last two years that we don't have collateral damage when we use drones because the technology enables us so clearly to know who's being targeted.
So, you know, whether it was targeted, deliberate killing, or sort of just something we knew would likely happen and we did it anyway, obviously he's just as dead.
His 17-year-old cousin and seven other people are just as dead.
And it's just, you know, on top of the huge number of corpses of innocent people that the Obama administration under the Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2009 has been piling up.
Yeah.
And I think you were going to say there, and nobody even cares.
It was controversial when they killed his dad a couple of weeks ago.
Now, look how far down the slippery slope we've gone.
Well, one of the things that I think happens, and you're completely right about that, I think that, well, you know, one of the things that I think you see is that the country is in desperate need to find things to feel good about itself.
And we don't have very much.
I mean, we don't have leading industries any longer.
We're not, you know, the first to do things like send a man to the moon or find cures for diseases.
I mean, we do a little bit of that here and there, but, you know, by and large, what we still do more aggressively and frequently and continuously than anybody else is we kill people.
That's what we specialize in doing.
We kill people continuously in multiple countries around the world and have been doing that for many, many years, far, far, far more than any other nation or group, including all the ones that have been labeled terrorists.
And so I think what ends up happening is in the instances where we kill somebody that we get to convince ourselves it was a morally good and uplifting thing to do, like when we killed Bin Laden or when we kill Anwar al-Awlaki, that gets a great deal of attention, almost entirely all positive attention.
You're almost not even allowed to raise questions about it because you're almost identifying yourself as being on the other side.
You're interrupting a national celebration that everyone across the partisan and ideological spectrum, with the exception of a few fringe individuals who define themselves as friendly by dissenting, agree to come together and celebrate.
And so that's why I think Anwar al-Awlaki's killing got a lot of attention.
It's why Osama bin Laden's killing got a lot of attention.
It's why the death of Qaddafi yesterday was applauded and cheered, even though it was so barbaric and brutal and inhumane and illegal.
It was a summary execution of a man who had been captured.
But if it's a killing that is completely and plainly unjustifiable, like when we drone to death large wedding parties or cars full of innocent people at a checkpoint or an entire family that we slaughter during a night raid, or in this case a 16-year-old boy who's an American citizen and a 17-year-old cousin, there's no benefit to paying attention because it doesn't enable us to feel good about ourselves.
In fact, it does the opposite.
If we did pay attention to it, it would create shame.
That's what it does for me at least.
And so I think that's really what explains why the killing of al-Awlaki received so much media attention while the killing of a 16-year-old son was basically ignored.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Listen, I'm sorry, but we're already over time and I got to go and get my next guest on here, but I'll end this interview by begging people to keep a tab open to salon.com/opinion/Greenwall, the blog of, I would say, the single most important commentator on current events that we have in our society.
No matter if you're on the phone or typing from Brazil or not, Glenn, I really appreciate your time and all the work that you do.
Scott, thanks so much for that nice word and for having me.
I appreciate your work too.
Right on.
All right.
And everybody, please run on over to amazon.com or whichever is your favorite website like that and get a hold of the brand new book with liberty and justice for some.
If you pre-order, you can get it for just 16 bucks, 15 and a half bucks right now at amazon.com.
Glenn Greenwald with liberty and justice for some, how the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful.