All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Now listen here, I want you to go to Salon.com and find this article by Glenn Greenwald called The Real Definition of Terrorism.
It's a good article, but that's not why I want you to look at it.
Well, I mean, you can, but the reason I want you to look at it is because if you page down all the way to the bottom, there's a great interview of Glenn by Harry Kreisler from Berkeley, who asked all these personal questions about, by the way, who the hell are you anyway, man?
And what are you about?
And all these kinds of things.
And it's about an hour long and I thought it was really great to see.
So if you're a Glenn Greenwald fan like me, you're going to want to take a look at that, but not now, because right now you got to stay tuned to this because Glenn Greenwald is on the line from down there in Brazil.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn, how's it going?
Hey, great to be back, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Now your piece today is called Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law.
I'm not going to waste any more time.
Go ahead and hit them.
The bill is a law that Obama had been threatening to veto for several months.
It's a bill that's sponsored by two senators, one Republican, John McCain, the other Democrat, Carl Levin.
And its intention is to basically ensure that everyone that the United States government accuses of being a terrorist is put into military detention rather than into a civilian court system and tried with on charges to basically put them into indefinite detention.
It also includes more expansive language defining the war on terror than was in the original 2001 authorization to use military force.
The 2001 authorization to use military force said that the president can use force against, which means kill or detain anyone who's a member of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or a group bound to have perpetrated the 9-11 attacks.
And this new bill expands that language wildly.
It says anyone who's a member of or substantially supports Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces, which can really mean anything that the president wanted to mean, somebody who substantially supports a group that's an associated force of Al-Qaeda.
So it dramatically expands the scope of the war on terror 10 years after the 9-11 attack and after Osama bin Laden has been killed.
And the Obama White House made pretty clear that the reason they have threatened to veto it was not because they objected on civil liberties grounds to indefinite detention or anything like that.
They love those things.
What they were angry about was that the bill purported to constrain the president's choices by mandating that certain people be treated certain ways, so that certain people be put into military detention.
They didn't like that there was a mandatory military detention provision.
They didn't like that there was a provision that said American citizens can't be put into military detention.
What they were mad about was the idea that Congress could in any way interfere with what the president's choices were.
Basically, the John Yoo theory that these are decisions for the president exclusively to make.
And so the Congress, over the last couple of days, the House and the Senate got together and basically loosened the restrictions, gave more presidential discretion, so that if now there's still military detention in the bill, there's still this broadened AUMF, but it's more left up to Obama to decide what he wants to do, rather than having Congress mandate that it be done.
And that solved his problem, since the only concern he ever had was that was one of executive power and presidential discretion.
And he, therefore, has announced that he is withdrawing the veto threat and will sign the bill, which will mean that it will be the first time since the 1950s, since 1950, the McCarthy era, when Congress codifies a bill vesting in the president the power of indefinite detention, detention without trial.
Um, so just to make that perfectly clear, Glenn, if I understand you right, what you're saying is the veto threat as it formerly existed was based on the idea that Congress has no say-so in these matters whatsoever.
And they rewrote it to, to back off a little bit from whatever decision making of his they were trying to do there.
And so now he's going to sign.
It had nothing to do with protecting the Fifth or the Sixth Amendment at all.
Oh, it had nothing to do with civil liberties concerns of any kind.
In fact, there's a quote in the New York Times today on this story, on the story by Charlie Savage, where the White House has asked why they withdrew their veto threat.
They were very clear about this.
And to their credit, they were actually clear about it in their veto threat as well.
They were never really pretending that their concern was even civil liberties or constitutional rights.
I mean, who would take the Obama administration seriously if they did pretend to be concerned about civil rights?
They were very clear about the fact that their objection was to presidential power and time inherent to the president.
They dressed it up as a security concern.
They said, if you take away any of the tools that the president has in his arsenal to fight the terrorists, that will be jeopardizing national security.
But they had a quote in the New York Times today that basically said, we are now satisfied because the president is not in any way constrained by this bill in terms of what he can do to fight the terrorists, and therefore our concerns were addressed.
Right.
I wanted to ask you about this.
It seems like, and we'll get back to the specifics here and the most important stuff, but it seems like all your essays are written with the target audience of the average Democrat voter trying desperately to convince them that like, hey, these things are bad, even though Obama did them.
And it sort of seems like even after all this time, in the way that you write, you don't think you've made much progress in getting this point across to people.
Well, you know, you're right.
And that's perceptive of you that my audience does seem to, you know, I do tend to write to Democrats and progressives in part because that was the audience that I built up during the Bush years when it was Bush supporters who didn't want to hear anything about civil liberties.
And Democrats were all too happy to watch Bush bashed over the head on civil liberties grounds because that was to their benefit.
So having built up that audience, and I have a lot of libertarians in my audience and conservatives and independents, but a lot of progressive Democrats as well.
And more importantly, having watched Democrats and progressives make all kinds of claims for all those years under the Bush administration about their concern for civil liberties and the things that they found so offensive.
I often do write to them to essentially say, look, these are all the things that you said you believed in.
When there was a Republican president, you claim that you found these policies offensive.
Well, here are these policies being implemented in exactly the same way on exactly the same basis, oftentimes even going beyond what you claimed to find so offensive before.
And you now have just the basic obligation as a citizen, as a person who has a minimal amount of intellectual integrity to object equally when this is being done by your president, your party's president, rather than just the other one.
And it is true that there's still lots of Democrats and progressives who don't care.
And as the election progresses, I think there comes closer.
I think they're willing to be to overlook these things even more.
But there are a lot of Democrats and liberals and progressives who are offended by these things and have become very disillusioned with President Obama on this basis.
And so I think, you know, my goal is to try and get more and more of them as possible to care about these issues.
Yeah, well, and I can only imagine that there are millions of people who, you know, I don't know exactly what your hits are, but there's got to be vast numbers, you know, cities worth of of human beings who have, you know, come around to your point of view on this.
And simply because all you're doing is being exactly consistent.
You don't have some pro-Hillary bias and you wish it had been her, not Obama.
So you're picking on him or something like that.
All you're doing is applying the exact standard, you know, the Bill of Rights to Barack Obama that you applied to George W. Bush.
Right.
You know, one of the I mean, one of the things that, you know, I I think about is I know I remember all the things I was saying about George Bush.
I wrote three books about his presidency, two of which were overwhelmingly about foreign policy and civil liberties.
And I wrote on a daily basis about those same topics.
And so I would not expect a single individual to place any credence in a word that I would ever say again for the rest of my life, nor would I be able to look myself in the mirror if I knew that I was endorsing the same policies that I spent those years so vehemently and vocally condemning simply because there was a Democrat now doing it as opposed to a Republican.
I get you right there.
We're going to take this break, Glenn.
We'll be right back with Glenn Greenwald.
He's the author of Liberty and Justice for some.
It's big and yellow and on the shelf at your bookstore when you're out Christmas shopping.
All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Glenn Greenwald.
He's a New York Times bestselling author, most recently of Liberty and Justice for some, which is awesome and which I interviewed him about.
My last interview with him, actually, if you look at antiwar.com/radio was on that topic.
It's an excellent book.
You really got to read it.
And it's about how they don't really pretend there's a rule of law anymore, which kind of brings me to my point.
And I'm not sure if this is really the right thing to do, Glenn, but I sort of can't help but try to beat you over the head and ask you, why not go ahead and come out full force for Ron Paul right now?
You and I both know that with Romney or Obama or Gingrich or one of these guys as the president, our economic situation gets any worse.
These laws being passed the way they're being passed, we're at risk of losing the Constitution as even a front for this thing altogether, having military roundups of innocent American citizens and moving into a complete fascist state.
And then in the middle of this, here comes our last gasp.
Hail Mary pass.
The one guy who really believes in his oath to the Constitution has kept it all this time, who introduced the Freedom Restoration Act of 2007 that repeal every bit of this madness and who is sworn to do the same once inaugurated.
That's a very convincing pitch for the Ron Paul candidacy.
I mean, as you know, I've written about Ron Paul many times in almost every instance to defend him from attacks that I thought had been unwarranted to highlight what I thought were the very overlooked and extremely positive components of his campaign.
I mean, I'm not, you know, I think it's a little pompous for me to, as some people have done, issue endorsements and the like.
I think it's much more effective for me to write about the substance of issues on a case by case basis.
And I think my views about Ron Paul and his stalwart defense of civil liberties, you know, is pretty clear.
He's in a GOP primary fight now.
But, you know, Andrew Sullivan endorsed him yesterday.
I don't know how effective that's going to be with GOP primary voters.
But, you know, I think I can be a lot more effective on the issues that we just, you know, that we've been talking about by writing about them and as opposed to becoming, you know, a sort of endorser of presidential candidates.
Sure.
Well, yeah.
And I understand that, too.
You have your specific role that you play.
It's just that, you know, if anybody goes through and watches Ron Paul's speeches from the House of Representatives, they could have been written by you, almost all of them, you know, I mean, not not so much on sound money, but on when it comes to war powers and the Bill of Rights.
There's no daylight.
Well, I mean, if you look at, you know, with the people with whom Ron Paul has been working, he's been working extensively on civil liberties and foreign policy issues with sort of a handful of Democrats who actually are are stalwart on these issues as well, like Mr. Kucinich.
He teamed up with the Civil Liberties Bill.
He, of course, worked with Alden Grayson on Other Than Your Fed.
And, you know, there was just an interesting interview with the president of the ACLU, not the executive director, but the president, Stephen Herman, who was interviewed by Reason TV, the video arm of Reason Magazine.
And she talked about how critical it is to have this sort of trans-ideological alliance among people who actually care about civil liberties, because it's not a Democratic Party position to care about civil liberties.
It's not a Republican Party position to care about civil liberties.
The leadership in both parties wages war on civil liberties.
And the only way that these rights are going to be meaningfully defended is if people across the spectrum are willing to stand together, regardless of ideological differences, and defend them.
And, you know, I think that there probably are a lot of, especially Ron Paul's younger supporters, who might be closer to the progressive realm than they are to a pure doctrinal libertarian realm, but are supporting him because of his positions on civil liberties and war and the drug war.
And I think you're going to see more of that, especially if he wins Iowa or comes close to winning Iowa, because especially Democrats and progressives have nowhere else to turn on these issues, because their party and their party's leader is so awful on them.
Well, you know, it also, you know, as you well know, as we all know, most Americans, they're not really left, right, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, or anything.
Many don't even know what those terms are supposed to mean, if they mean anything at all.
But they still know the difference between right and wrong.
And it seems, and we've been talking about this for years, too, it's silly to me that left and right are divided on the issues they're divided on, when it's so obvious, at the risk of sounding like a Marxist or something, that what we face here is a class war of the billionaires that own the state versus the millionaires and everyone on down from them all at the same time, and, and the empire and the war on our Bill of Rights.
And, and, you know, these things are so wrong, the corporate welfare, the mass killing and the indefinite detention, etc.
It seems to me just beyond question that the priority, these are the priority that people who are the good liberals, the good conservatives, the libertarians and anybody else, we ought to all be able to come together on these issues, something has got to be done to put a stop to this madness.
The you know, one of the interesting things is that you saw a pretty substantial libertarian component to the early Tea Party movement, where these issues were the focus of some of these protests.
You've also seen these issues get some pretty prominent play in the Occupy Wall Street protest movement as well, there's always, you know, prominent factions, they are protesting drone attacks, and Obama's wars, and civil liberties assaults, as well.
The problem is that, as you know, that people care about these issues only in general only when they're a club that can be used to opportunistically bash the other party's leader, or they care about them, not opportunistically, but in reality, only when only when the other party's card is in power on the grounds that the other party is the bad party that needs civil liberty checks, but the good party doesn't.
And so civil liberties defenses are not going to come from partisan loyalists.
They're too unreliable, and they care about the issues only artificially, and to the extent they care about them at all, only once every four years, it's going to come from people who are disenchanted with the political culture itself.
And there are a lot more of those people every day, which is why I hold out hope.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, we should get back to the most important substance here.
Well, on the particular anyway, this this law, this power that Bush and now Obama have claimed that the Congress is now ratifying.
Is there really a danger that this could be used against, you know, some guy in the audience's little sister?
I mean, after all, Jose Padilla, he may not have been a dirty bomber, but he was something and he was palling around with those guys.
And and that's the kind of people that Obama would do this to.
And we're all lucky.
Maybe he didn't organize attacks, but he did nothing but upload pro-Al Qaeda YouTubes all day long.
We know he was a bad guy, Glenn.
And so does it really put regular Americans at risk to have the government claim these powers?
Right.
Well, you know, every single abuse of power in human history that was done by people in power by the state has begun in very isolated cases, usually targeting people who are most marginalized, because that's the tactic used to institutionalize those power abuses and to render them acceptable.
And yet it's also just as universally true that each one of those powers expands beyond its original application.
So this is, you know, I remember very vividly during the Bush years trying to get conservatives who claimed always to believe in restrained federal power and small government that even though they trusted George Bush to, for example, imprison American citizens without due process or eavesdrop on telephone conversations without warrants, imagine if Hillary Clinton had that power or some other future horrible, evil, democratic, liberal leader.
Would you really want this person exercising power in that way?
And this is, you know, the story of the United States.
It's the story of every country that has centralized power, which is that it's always abused when it's exercised in the dark and without oversight and checks.
It's human nature.
So even if you believe the current president is magnanimous and there's nothing to worry about or the political culture wouldn't permit it, what about the next president?
What about the next time there's a terrorist attack and hysteria is renewed all over again?
Or there's some other concocted breath that, you know, people propagandistically or pots of fear to have these powers in place that allow the government to imprison people without trial or target them for assassination is the most dangerous thing that you can do.
It's kind of amazing in a way, isn't it, that they just kind of got away with it.
You know, I asked a friend of mine, did you hear about this, that they were passing this thing in the Senate over the weekend?
And he said, no, I hadn't heard that.
And I said, yeah, but you watch the Lehrer News Hour every night, right?
Yeah, no, I didn't know anything about it.
Really, the only press that made it big was that Rand Paul had fought with John McCain about it.
That was the only thing notable, but not even so much what they were fighting about.
This kind of went by like just another bill.
But, you know, here's the issue that I want to make clear about that, which is, you know, it took me a few days to write about this bill last week, and a lot of people were emailing me and asking why I hadn't written about it.
And the reason I hadn't written about it, and it took me a few days, and I actually talked to some lawyers who work on these issues all the time, it felt the same way, is that it's very hard for me at least to get particularly worked up over the idea of a bill or a law that creates the power of indefinite detention, because we've had indefinite detention in this country for the last decade.
That's what Guantanamo is.
It's what the prison at Bagram is.
It's what was done to Jose Padilla.
It is something that was done not through a statute, but through very radical legal theories that the first, the Bush Justice Department, and then the Obama Justice Department concocted to say that the authorization to use military force, even though it doesn't say anything about detention, actually vests us with the power to imprison even American citizens accused of being terrorists, not convicted, but accused of being terrorists without a trial of any kind.
And courts have largely acquiesced to this theory.
Or you look at the idea that I started off talking about, the expanded authorization to use military force that the president can use force not only against Al-Qaeda and Taliban members, but anyone who substantially supports those groups or associated forces.
Amazingly, even though the original AUMF says nothing about associated forces or substantially supports because you have to be a member of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the Bush administration and the Obama administration have argued in court that it should be read to include those phrases, to be read to be that expansive.
And again, courts have largely accepted it.
So the powers that are in this bill that are that are truly dangerous and odious, and they are dangerous and odious, are not new.
They've been creeping into our political culture to become more or less institutionalized as a result of the cooperation between the executive branch, which claimed them in courts, which have largely acquiesced to them in Congress, which did nothing about it.
Now, it's definitely a big step in the wrong direction for Congress to codify it.
But it isn't that huge of a change over the status quo.
We've allowed and acquiesced to these powers for a long time.
And on the war powers, too, right.
I mean, as you said, the first authorization to use military force after September 11th was based around Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and associated forces that had helped.
I don't know the exact language you've got in front of you, I guess, but people that had been involved in September 11th.
Now, under that authority, they've gone ahead and bombed people in Yemen and Somalia and all these other things.
And then this bill is actually ratifying all that, too, and basically saying, like Obama's completely and totally illegal war in Libya would be covered by this.
It would no longer be illegal.
Well, but that's exactly the argument.
I mean, if you look at the original U.S. that was passed weeks after 9-11, incredibly narrow, relatively speaking.
It says the president is authorized to use force against Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or any group found to have perpetrated the 9-11 attack.
No further authorization has ever been passed to vest the president with the power to wage war other than the one for Iraq.
And yet we, as you just said, are bombing in Yemen to target a group that didn't even exist at the time of 9-11.
In Somalia, same thing, a group that didn't even exist at the time of 9-11.
In Pakistan, again, against Pakistan, Pakistanis who are not allied with Al-Qaeda or the Afghans, but who are just deemed to be rebels and insurgents undermining the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.
And we've imprisoned people who are not members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, all based on this original AUMF.
And the reason that's been allowed to happen is because the Bush and Obama administrations have already told courts, you should read it as expansively as to include not just going after what it says we can go after, which are Al-Qaeda, Taliban and the groups that did 9-11, but any associated force.
So this group in Yemen is associated with Al-Qaeda.
This group in Somalia is associated with Al-Qaeda.
These rebels in Pakistan are associated with the Taliban.
Therefore, we should be able to bomb them, drone them, kill them, as well as imprison anyone who even helps them based on this original AUMF language.
Now, the new bill is coming out explicitly and basically saying the scope of the war is what it's been.
It's almost a little bit more of an honest approach because it's actually saying, well, this is the language that you've been getting courts to read into the statute.
So why don't we just go ahead and give you a law that actually says it?
It is certainly more dangerous, but it's basically been how our country has been functioning.
Well, and, you know, you won't have to wait too long because coming up next is Boko Haram in Nigeria, because I heard somewhere that one of them met with a guy who was tied to Al-Qaeda once.
Yeah, I mean, you know, remember, there are people who are sitting in prison, in American prisons, under charges of material support for terrorism for doing things like sending checks to what by all appearances seem to be perfectly legitimate charities in the Muslim world, which turned out to be connected in some way, you know, according to the government to Hamas or Hezbollah or some organization deemed to be a terrorist group.
And people have been charged and convicted of material support for terrorism.
That's how attenuated these relationships have been.
And I can guarantee you that there are all kinds of if you look at how the Patriot Act has been used in the war on terror powers have been used, it has been used to target domestic dissent.
There was just a scandal last weekend in Great Britain, because the British police classified in a memo, the Occupy movement in that country as being a terrorist group alongside Al-Qaeda and FARC in Colombia.
And so these powers that are being assembled are absolutely not only going to be used against people with Muslim sounding names in Yemen, like Admiral Aki, there's already an effort to make the war on terror far more domestic in nature.
Janet Napolitano and John Brennan frequently emphasize that the domestics of the real terrorism threat is homegrown terrorists.
These are moving onto American soil.
This bill is an extra step in that direction.
These powers unquestionably will be used more and more domestically.
That's clearly where this trend is headed.
Well, you know, we just talked with Will Grigg yesterday about them using a drone against a guy that they got from Homeland Security under the excuse that the Southern Poverty Law Center said that this guy lives in the same town as a guy who is a leader in the sovereign citizens movement.
So therefore, I guess they're all the Montana Freeman or the Elohim City Bombers or, you know, Branch Davidians or whatever.
So now they're a domestic right wing political group.
So break out the Predator drone, Glenn, in North Dakota.
Yeah, I mean, I absolutely, you know, it's funny, I wrote about that, that story.
And you're absolutely right.
I mean, at first, this is the most bizarre incident, because this is the first time a Predator drone has been used in the United States to arrest somebody.
And the story was that there were six wandering cows who had wandered onto their land.
And there's disputes over open range ownership.
And they claimed that the cows because they wandered onto their land with their property.
The police said, No, you have to they're not yours, you have to return them.
They went to the property, they had a little confrontation with the landowners, they tasered one of them.
And then they came back and they were brandishing guns, just sort of a standard dispute.
No, we're not a particularly significant offense.
It would they use predator drones for the first time to arrest the suspect.
And as it turned out, is exactly as he said, essentially, the government perceived that these were political dissidents, that they were somehow connected to this sovereign citizens movement, which even if true, isn't evidence they've actually done anything wrong, or that they've committed any crimes.
But because they were perceived as dissidents, they called in a predator B drone to help arrest them, I guess they can be thankful they weren't firebombed in their home, like David Koresh was, or have their wife shot the way Randy Weaver was, but they were targeted with this sort of extraordinary force, using a drone that is typically delivering payloads in the Muslim world on US soil, for no reason other than the fact that they have political views that the government finds threatening.
Yeah, well, and I gotta tell you, you know, the SPLC and ADL, they don't like anti war.com.
As far as they're concerned, we're terrorists.
And they've been telling the cops that the FBI report, you know, from a few months back, and then now there's a Homeland Security slat training thing for local and state police everywhere that has anti war.com listed under domestic terrorism, miscellaneous websites.
And here I got an anti war.com sticker on the back of my truck, Glenn, maybe I'm next with this.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And for what I'm not sure, like what anti war.com ever did, other than criticize Israeli foreign policy or something like that.
But we got way too many Jews work at anti war.com for us to be neo Nazis or something, which is the category they have.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I mean, if you again, if you look at the war on terror abuse, and over the last decade, you see them applying these powers to groups like anti war groups, environmental activists, all sorts of organizations that in some way are are dissenting from government policy.
And that is how these powers are increasing.
And it would be irrational not to fear their application and abuse that way would be irrational to assume that for the first time in history, these powers exercise with no oversight and no transparency won't be used that way.
Yeah.
Well, if it does come down to it, if they let me get rid of his corpus at all, I'm going ahead and requesting in advance, my legal dream team of you and the other Scott Horton and hopefully I know Marcy Wheeler is not actually a lawyer, but she'd be a great assistant on the case.
And I would very much like to not spend decades in prison for podcasting Glenn possible.
All right, Scott, I'm behind you on that.
All right.
Thanks, man.
I'm glad I can count on you always can.
Everybody, that is the heroic Glenn Greenwald.
Will Gregg said it yesterday.
He's the best writer on these subjects in the world salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
His best selling New York Times bestselling books include How Would a Patriot Act a Tragic Legacy and the brand newest Liberty and Justice for Some.
Thanks very much for your time, Glenn.
Appreciate it.
