02/12/08 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

Alright my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Our next guest is Glenn Greenwald.
He writes the blog, uh, does it have a name other than Glenn Greenwald anymore?
I guess not.
At Salon.com, his book is A Tragic Legacy.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
Great to be back, Scott.
Thanks.
Good to talk to you.
And, uh, well, your blog is the place to go for anyone in the world trying to understand exactly what's going on with, uh, the Protect America Act and, uh, the, basically the Congress's ratification of the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping program.
And, uh, I just thought it would be a special treat for my audience if we could bring you on to really give them the lowdown, uh, about what's going on.
Now, if I understand correctly, at this point, there's a temporary version of the bill with the very short sunset on it while they're still working on the final version.
Is that right?
Right.
They passed this, this draconian bill in August, uh, with the six month sunset provision.
Um, they've extended it 15 days last week to give themselves time to basically make that bill permanent.
Um, and the Senate today, uh, just completed a series of votes.
They have one more vote, um, where essentially they will take the Protect America Act, um, and all of the vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers it provides to the president, make it permanent, um, and add on to that, uh, amnesty for, for telecoms that, that broke the law in the past and the way they spied on Americans.
So the Senate has one more vote before they, they complete the dirty deed.
And now, uh, what about the fact that in 2006, the American people turned out to elect the Democrats to Congress to finally put an end to these shenanigans on behalf of the Bush administration.
Don't they control the house and the Senate of the United States?
Well, they do nominally at least, but I think it's become, you know, pretty clear that the democratic leadership in both the house and the Senate has no interest whatsoever in doing anything differently at all.
I mean, there's been a lot of focus on how they failed to refuse to change our Iraq policy, which they did.
Um, but with the whole slew of other radical Bush policies, they've been just as unwilling to do anything differently than what Denny Hassler was doing when he controlled the house and what Bill Frist did when he controlled the Senate.
And in fact, um, what's so interesting is that Bush and Cheney were trying to get a version of the protect America act passed back in 2006 when the Republicans controlled the Congress and they were unable to do so the legislation just stalled.
And it took basically Perry Reed taking over the Senate with Jay Rockefeller taking over the intelligence committee and Nancy Pelosi taking over the house for Bush and Cheney to be able to get the new, uh, Warren with spine bill and telecom amnesty bill that they so desperately crave.
So it's not even just the Democrats aren't better.
In some cases, they're, they're affirmatively worse, more complicit, um, in enabling the most radical, uh, policies of the Bush administration.
Now, uh, you point out on your blog that the wall street journal characterizes this, uh, completely falsely.
Really.
They say that about the amnesty, the retroactive amnesty, that the lawsuits are trying to illegalize something that's perfectly legal.
Well, I mean, you know, most people are familiar with all of the abuses in the fifties and sixties and into the Watergate era of the government's spying power.
I mean, they spied on domestic political opponents, most famously on Martin Luther King, but for decades, they abused their spying cars.
And so in the mid seventies, the Congress passed a whole series of laws that made it a felony for anyone government or in the telecom industry to spy on Americans without warrants and made past numerous laws imposing the duty on telecommunication companies, not to cooperate with government requests for surveillance in the absence of a court order.
And these laws have been on the books for decades, telecoms with their huge armies of well-paid lawyers are very well aware that these laws exist.
And when they agreed to cooperate with the Bush administration and spying on Americans without warrants, they knew they were breaking the law and they chose to do it anyway, because by doing so, they received enormous fees from the government in terms of all kinds of government contracts that, that they rely upon for profit.
And so all you have is a simple case of corporations purposely breaking our nation's laws that were democratically enacted by the American people through their Congress, and now demanding that they be retroactively protected from the consequences of their law breaking.
And a lot of people who are arguing in favor of this amnesty are just lying when they say that, well, there's no clear law in the books that made this illegal.
There are multiple clear federal laws that made what these telecoms did and what the Bush officials did patently illegal.
And that's the very reason that they're demanding amnesty.
I mean, if what they did wasn't illegal, they wouldn't need amnesty.
They would just go to court and win, but they can't win in court.
And they've been losing in court because what they did was so clearly illegal.
And that's why now they're about to get from the Congress, this extraordinary retroactive amnesty.
Well, now it's been a couple of years, but if I remember right, when the story broke about this eavesdropping program, the terrorist surveillance program, Bush gave a press conference where he said, yeah, I have been breaking the law.
What?
Isn't that right?
Well, I mean, you're absolutely right.
I mean, you know, I think people forget back to all the way to December 2005, just how much of a political controversy this was when it first got revealed by the New York Times.
I mean, the Bush administration for years and years was spying on American citizens inside the United States with no warrants, even though we have a law in place for 30 years that says it is a felony to do that.
And when Bush got caught by the New York Times doing that, you're absolutely right.
Days later, he went on national television and very defiantly basically said, yeah, I have been doing this and I was right to do it and I'm going to continue to do it because he knew that none of the other political branches and the media was anywhere near enough, strong enough or principled enough to take a stand against it and to impose consequences.
He knew that he could just come out and brazenly admit that he broke our laws and the way our country is right now and has been for quite some time.
There wouldn't be any consequences for that.
And he's absolutely right.
There haven't been and there are going to be.
And now another lie here, which forgive me, I forget if this was one that you pointed out came from the Wall Street Journal or not, but that was that all we're talking about here is a terrorist in one country talking on the phone to a terrorist in another country, but their call happens to be routed through the United States.
And you call that out as a lie.
And in fact, I know even Ron Paul came out and said, well, if that's the only thing we're doing, I'd be happily for that.
But that's not what this is.
Right.
What basically happened was under our laws, the FISA law that existed from 1978, it was never a requirement that if the government wanted to intercept a foreign to foreign call, someone in one country talking to someone in another country outside the United States, it was never the case that they needed a warrant.
The technology has changed for how those calls get routed.
So now sometimes if someone's in Afghanistan and they're talking to someone in Iraq, that call might, because of fiber optics, actually get routed through the United States, just coincidentally.
And earlier this year, the FISA court said any call that touches upon the United States, even if it's foreign to foreign under the current law needs a warrant.
And so everybody agrees that FISA should be changed strictly to fix that problem, to make it clear that foreign to foreign calls that just happened to touch on the United States network do not need a warrant.
And, you know, as you say, Ron Paul, even, you know, Russ Feingold, Rush Holt, the ACLU had problems with it, but basically we're fine with it.
Nobody really had a big problem with that.
That is not what the debate is about.
Most everybody agrees that foreign to foreign calls that touch on the United States shouldn't need a warrant.
But what happened was the Bush administration seized on the opportunity for the need, with the need to change that law, to demand that they basically be given not just the opportunity, the power to eavesdrop about warrants on foreign to foreign calls, but on every international telephone call and every single email that U.S. citizens inside the United States either send or receive.
And that is what the debate is about.
What the Congress is about to do is to vest the president the power to eavesdrop on all of our international communication, telephone and email, without warrants of any kind.
And people who are in favor of that can't even be honest and say that they believe in that power.
They lie about it and say, oh, this is just, you know, if a terrorist in Afghanistan talks to a terrorist in Iraq, we shouldn't need a warrant.
This bill goes far, far beyond that.
It really is amazing how every crime that they committed in secret in the first administration, they get legalized in the second, isn't it?
I mean, this should be like a whole chapter in a history textbook later on, I think.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that is worthwhile to do is if you look at what our country was like, you know, a mere 30 years ago, the Washington Post uncovered the Watergate crimes and won a Pulitzer Prize.
And what was the result?
The president would have been impeached on a bipartisan basis had he not resigned in disgrace.
Or, you know, the Church Committee, the Congress discovers a whole slew of eavesdropping abuses.
And what do they do?
They pass vast new laws safeguarding the privacy and constitutional interests of the American people by imposing all sorts of safeguards on the president's eavesdropping ability.
Fast forward 30 years, we have exactly the same thing that happens.
A whole slew of crimes uncovered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, they win Pulitzer Prizes for it.
But instead of any kind of accountability or laws being passed by Congress to prevent it from happening again, the Congress, under both Republicans and Democrats, do the opposite.
They pass bills retroactively making it legal.
So, you know, it's revealed that the U.S. government is torturing people.
They passed the Military Commissions Act.
It's revealed that the U.S. government is keeping people in secret prisons.
They passed the same bill to make that legal.
It's revealed that the president is spying on us without warrants.
They passed the Protect America Act and now make it permanent to make that legal.
So it really is a complete erosion of the rule of law in our country, as easily seen by the fact that when Congress finds out about lawbreaking, they immediately have to immunize the lawbreakers and to pass a law making it legal.
I mean, that is the very definition of a country that doesn't live under the rule of law.
When you have the persecution of the people who stand up to him, like Quest, I guess, right, was the telecom company that refused to go along.
And then the CEO was indicted for other charges.
And I think it was on your blog where I read that James Risen, the reporter for The New York Times who broke this story, is now being persecuted relating to things that he wrote about Iran.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
You know, James Risen, the reporter who broke the warrantless eavesdropping story, won a Pulitzer Prize, just got a grand jury subpoena from Michael Mukasey's Justice Department demanding that he disclose his sources for the book that he wrote back in 2006, and that if he doesn't, he's going to go to prison.
And he's certainly not going to reveal his sources.
And it seems likely that he's going to spend some time in prison.
Clearly a retaliatory act against the reporter who uncovered the warrantless wiretapping program.
And you're absolutely right.
They're trying to flush out these whistleblowers.
So they're only criminals in the United States.
The only people who are actually in danger are the ones who expose lawbreaking at the highest levels of government.
The political officials who break the law have all sorts of protections given to them by Congress.
I mean, look what happened to Louis Libby.
I mean, he actually finally got convicted, and then he was saved from prison, and he'll certainly be pardoned when Bush goes on the way out.
All of the lawbreakers who spied on us legally are about to be given amnesty.
The CIA officials who committed war crimes and tortured people already have been given retroactive amnesty in the form of the Military Commissions Act.
The real criminals in our system are the ones who report on and expose that government lawbreaking, whistleblowers and journalists alike.
And I mean, it's hard to think of a more dangerous situation than that.
Yeah, it is just absolute blatant lawlessness.
And it sort of seems like so for its own sake, when Congress will go ahead and make legal whatever they want to do, it's sort of like they're getting away with it just, you know, like a kid smoking cigarettes because it's against the rules.
Yeah, I mean, we have a clearly a two-class system justice.
I mean, you know, there's always been differences in the type of justice to which you're subjected in the United States based on things like financial resources and social standing.
I mean, that's inevitable in any society.
But what you really have now literally is a completely separated two-class legal system where people who are politically powerful and politically well-connected, or people who can, corporations that can hire, you know, former high-level political officials as their lobbyists, literally are protected from blatant lawbreak.
You know, if you're a U.S. citizen, unconnected to anyone in the Beltway, and you go out and commit some petty crime, like, you know, you buy marijuana or in a quantity that makes you be accused of being a dealer, you know, you're going to have the justice system mercilessly slam down on you and face enormous amounts of years of jail time and potential bankruptcy-inducing judicial proceedings as a result of these petty crimes.
But if you're a high government official, and you violate, for years, very serious federal laws that make it a felony to engage in the crimes that you engage in, you're not going to pay any consequences.
You know, Congress is, you're going to have lobbyists acting on your behalf to get immunity for you.
The president's going to give you amnesty or commute your sentence or pardon you.
And so what we really have is a system of government, literally, where politically well-connected people and politically powerful people are not subjected to the rule of law.
It's a real oligarchy, and you can see that.
That two-class system is as vividly as you could possibly want to see it with things like the Senate vote today.
There's no hyperbole needed for it.
People who break the law and are politically well-connected don't pay a price.
Yeah, it seems like it's almost a mathematical function of just the amount of power held in D.C.
It's so much power that it has to be abused.
I mean, if even on a defensive basis, if you're just some guy going about your business and the government is clamping down on you, if you have the resources, you have to hire some lobbyists in self-defense.
And then it's not too long before you're the guy that people need defending from.
It's just too much power for any to be centered in any city in the world, right?
Well, I think, yeah, I think there are two aspects to that.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, one is we were never meant to have an omnipotent federal centralized government in Washington, D.C. exercising power in every realm precisely because it just becomes so powerful that this sort of profound fundamental abuse becomes inevitable.
But I think the other aspect of it is one of the things that's really changed is even if you look back to the 90s and all of this sort of shenanigans of the Clinton administration, at least back then, there was some adversarial force working against the Clinton administration.
I mean, you had, you know, the Newt Gingrich who had Congress, you had Republicans in both the Senate and the House who hated the Clintons.
You had a media that was sort of wrapped up in these scurrilous affairs and investigating them.
And so to be sure, there were all kinds of unchecked abuses, but at least you had some adversarial forces working against the central power in the beltway.
That has completely disappeared over the last eight years.
And you see that with the fact that even with the Democrats in control, these supposedly, you know, hardcore partisans like Kerry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, all you see is a one-party government that works far more cooperatively to protect its own prerogatives and to conceal its own wrongdoing than it does to work at any odds with itself.
And the same is true for the media.
And so you have no adversarial forces.
You really have this kind of monolith of power that really works undivided to preserve itself and against the rest of the country.
And that, I think, is what has changed so profoundly over the last, you know, eight years.
Yeah, it's the blogosphere versus everybody else.
It's all there is, really.
Yeah, and it's not enough.
I mean, it's not, you know, close to enough.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and it's the people who cash in, the military-industrial complex money, the media companies, which, of course, are wholly interwoven with the federal regulators in terms of, you know, radio and television bandwidth and that kind of thing.
And, you know, as a one-party state, I like the way you say you don't really need hyperbole.
I mean, I guess if I could go a little bit further, I would say just have McCain and Hillary Clinton run on the same ticket.
Let her be his vice presidential nominee.
And then maybe we could have another party, say, have Ron Paul and Nader run or something and actually have a two-party system in this country.
But I don't see the daylight, really, between McCain and Clinton other than on message a little bit.
No, I mean, they're just different branding approaches.
You know, you look at, I mean, if you look at, for example, the forces behind the bill that passed in the Senate today, I mean, it really is, no matter what your view of it is, it's an extraordinary bill.
I mean, to give the president the power to ease up on America without warrants for the first time in 30 years is extraordinarily significant.
And to protect, you know, telecoms that broke the law and just force these cases to be dismissed against them without resolution, also very extraordinary.
And yet, you know, you look at who the forces are behind them.
I mean, the leading lobbyists on behalf of AT&T and Verizon, on the one hand, were the former attorney general under Bush 41, William Barr, who's the general counsel of Verizon.
And then the lead Democratic lobbyist was the former Clinton deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorilla, who, if Hillary Clinton is elected, will almost certainly occupy, you know, a high position in the next Clinton cabinet.
And so you have this permanent ruling class, completely independent of parties, that is in complete agreement with one another on all of the major issues and works together and profits greatly when they're out of power and when they're in power.
And they work so much more cooperatively with one another than they do against one another, that, as you say, there is just a one party permanent ruling class in Washington.
The proof of that is that each side's most, you know, establishment figures, their most significant individuals are always on the same side with all of these folks.
They have this myth, I think, that's generally accepted, that the Democrats are just too scared to confront Bush.
They're scared that the Republicans will say, well, you're just soft on terrorism or whatever.
And so therefore, because of just the simple cowardice of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, that's why the Republicans are getting away with it.
But but I guess you're really making the case.
And I think I agree with you that, no, they love it.
They love war and torture and wiretapping.
And they've never read the Fourth Amendment and couldn't care less, even if they had read it.
And that's why they don't oppose the Bush administration, is because they hope to inherit what the Bush administration has created.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's mixed.
I think it's hard to talk about, you know, what motivates Democrats and talking about, you know, hundreds of them.
I think a lot of them don't actually have any votes.
You know, they just sort of do whatever they most cravenly calculate is likely to lead to their reelection or their advancement politically.
I think some of them are actually sort of opposed to this stuff and afraid that there's a political cost to opposing it.
But they don't care about the opposition anywhere near enough to take a stand against it.
You know, you do have a handful of them, some of them who really do take a stand against it, even when it's contrary to their political interests.
You know, you look at someone like Russ Feingold, who's from a pretty conservative state in Wisconsin, who, you know, he was the one vote against the Patriot Act, you know, days after 9-11.
So you do have a few of them of some constant principle.
And I think you're right, the overwhelming bulk of the leadership and the crux of the Democratic Party does what they do in cooperating and colluding with the Republican Party, not out of fear, not out of, you know, a craven desire to be reelected, but because they share the same political values.
They believe in the same things, and they vote the way that they believe.
And I think it's important to keep that truth in mind, because otherwise you say, oh, they would like to vote against this stuff, they're just afraid to, you know, kind of let them off the hook.
It gives them way more credit than they really deserve.
Yeah.
I don't know how the American people are supposed to put the pressure on them and make them actually feel it.
It seems like, you know, any real anti-state or anti-war sentiment is just co-opted and used cynically.
It never really seems to get anywhere.
Yeah, you know, I think, you know, one of the interesting things that happens, too, is, you know, for example, today you had Barack Obama, who was in the Senate, and who did vote against every single one of these warrantless eavesdropping and telecarmality votes.
And he voted to filibuster the bill, and he voted the right way.
He left the campaign trail to go to the Senate and vote each way in the right way.
John McCain was there and voted, of course, in favor of these vast surveillance powers, and Hillary Clinton didn't bother to show up.
So I think sometimes what you have are these politicians in the mainstream who are marginally, you know, a little bit better.
You know, I mean, there was Barack Obama casting politically potentially costly votes, you know, but at the same time, he knew those votes were going to be futile.
And by and large, he has made himself, you know, a mainstream politician.
And because of that, his power base is within the establishment.
Even if his heart is a little bit better in the right place, the ability to do anything about that is extremely limited, as I think is the willingness.
And it ends up almost, you know, deceiving people into believing that there will be something fundamentally different when, in fact, there won't be.
So, you know, I think a lot of these things are nuanced and complicated, and most human beings are motivated by all sorts of different desires, and it's hard to talk about people in two-dimensional terms.
But it's the system itself that has such inertia and such power to it, that unless you make it your central political identity to oppose it, you're unlikely to be able to do much about it.
I think that's the core truth.
Yeah.
Well, tell me about some of these details.
This is all very interesting.
John Rockefeller IV and Harry Reid, and whether or not the Republicans are going to filibuster you get into all these details about the process in the Senate and passing this law, and that's some pretty interesting stuff.
So I was just wondering if you could give us some of the highlights of the real debate and the phony debate going on.
Well, yeah, basically what happened was there were two different committees in the Senate that looked at the issue of eavesdropping powers and amnesty.
One was the Senate Intelligence Committee, run by Jay Rockefeller.
The other was the Senate Judiciary Committee, run by Pat Leahy, and they reached wildly different conclusions.
I mean, the Rockefeller committee basically handed down a bill that was worked on with Dick Cheney.
It was exactly everything the administration wanted, vast new powers and amnesty.
The Leahy Judiciary Committee bill was infinitely better.
It didn't have telecom amnesty, and it didn't allow for warrantless eavesdropping.
And so you had these two different bills.
And here we read the Senate Majority Leader, who claimed that he was against the Rockefeller bill and in favor of the better bill, had the discretion as to decide which bill to bring to the fore as the principal bill.
And whichever bill was brought to the fore as the principal bill had a huge advantage and was almost certainly going to pass.
And so while on the one hand he said, I'm against warrantless eavesdropping and I'm against telecom amnesty, on the other hand he made the decision to bring the bad bill to the floor of the Senate as the principal bill, virtually guaranteeing that that's the bill that would pass.
And that's the kind of sleight of hand that these Democrats do all the time, is they pretend to believe in one thing, but then their actions, often carried out in sort of complex procedural ways that few people understand, prove the exact opposite and are devoted to achieving the exact opposite result.
And so all that the kind of Chris Dodd, you know, Russ Feingold, Pat Leahy faction was left to do once we did that, was to offer a whole series of amendments to try and improve that bill.
And because the Republicans can block all of those amendments with filibusters and you need 60 votes in order to overcome them, it may have been possible for that bill to be changed.
And that's what you're seeing today is one amendment after the next offered by various Democrats to provide at least some increased safeguards on the President's eavesdropping powers or some ability to hold telecoms accountable, whether it be transferred to a secret FISA quarter or something else, one after the next, are all failing because under the rules of the Senate, you can block all of those amendments by preventing them from from getting 60 votes.
And there's way more than enough Democrats joining with Republicans on every one of these votes to make sure that they have nowhere near the 60 votes required.
You know, the other last thing I'll say about that is the House passed a quite a good bill about a month and a half ago with almost all Democrats in support of it.
The bill contains no warrantless eavesdropping.
It doesn't contain amnesty.
But the problem is now the Senate's going to have one bill, a horrible bill, and the House will have a good bill and they have to reconcile it in order to send it to the White House.
And what's almost certainly going to happen is that the so-called blue dogs in the House, the pro-Bush blue dogs, are going to switch their vote and vote in favor of the Senate bill along with Republicans, which they intended to do all along, so that the bill that gets sent to the White House that's passed by both houses of Congress is the horrible bill that both Bush and Cheney wanted.
So even there you see this game that the House Democrats play where they pretend to vote in favor of a good bill, knowing that before it's all done they'll just switch their vote and give Bush and Cheney everything he wants.
Nice.
Well, see, that's good.
You don't get that kind of analysis on CNN.
Everybody, it's Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com, and he's the author of the book A Tragic Legacy, and you point out in your blog at Salon.com that last August when they were first passing the Protect America Act, they brought up a bunch of scaremongering about an al-Qaeda attack and that they've done the same thing this time.
So that in the background, in a way drowning out the what would be major headlines about the warrantless wiretapping, and at the same time bolstering the need for warrantless wiretapping, are these stories of al-Qaeda threats that of course pan out to not really be what they were touted to be.
Absolutely, and that's the story of the last seven years, is every time the Bush administration wants increased power or wants protection from the lawless acts they've engaged in, they simply start prattling on about al-Qaeda and how we're all going to be slaughtered by the terrorists unless they get everything that they want.
And every time they do that, they scare enough members of Congress or enough members of the press to completely acquiesce and give them everything they want.
And you're right, the Protect America Act, which nobody ever thought the Democrats were going to vote for last August, occurred because Mike McConnell, the Bush administration Director of National Intelligence, literally went into meetings with members of the House and Senate and said, we have reports that over the next several days there will be a major al-Qaeda attack, perhaps one even on the Congress, and we need these new surveillance powers in order to prevent that.
And if you don't give it to us, the attack, the blood from the attack, is going to be on your hands.
I mean, that is literally what he said.
Wow, that is the most cynical fear-mongering I've ever heard in my life, I think.
Yeah, I mean, they're very brazen about it, you know, they're very explicit about it.
And that was what, you know, the Democrats had two days before they went on recess in August, and they ran, you know, scurried and passed the bill that the White House wanted.
And that's why they put six months' sunset provision in, because they said, well, we're being bullied and pressured to do this under these time delays, so we want to be able to come back and think about this in a more deliberative setting.
But of course, as the six months' deadline approached, the administration simply did the same thing.
McConnell went and issued a report saying al-Qaeda threats are rising and we're faced with the greatest threat from terrorism that we've been faced with since September 11th, and created that climate once again for the votes that you're now seeing, where exactly the same thing is about to happen.
Well, and as is being reported, finally, more and more recently in Rolling Stone magazine and other places, pretty much all of these actual terrorism busts, never mind all the orange alerts, geez, Glenn, if we had to go back and count all the orange alerts and what they were based on, it seems like that'd probably be impossible.
But at least in the prosecutions, you just name a handful of cities across the country where bogus prosecutions of so-called domestic terrorists and al-Qaeda suspects and so forth have taken place in this country, they don't really have any credibility to issue threats at this point, I wouldn't think.
No, no, they don't.
And you even see with the few convictions that they received, I mean, if one remembers back to 2002 when John Ashcroft peacefully called a press conference to announce that we caught a dirty bomber, someone who was planning to smuggle a radiological weapon into an American city and detonate it there, Jose Padilla, and then when it came time finally to charge him with a crime, that allegation was nowhere near the indictment, because it was just complete fiction, it was a cartoon.
And there was one after the next like that, of supposed plots that were disrupted in, and these grandiose schemes that they had disrupted, and that really kept the fear levels extremely high in the United States for a long time, and while seven years later, those tactics are somewhat less effective.
Certainly with a lot of members of Congress who live in Washington, you know, they are scared, and if you watch some of them, you know, I watched Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat who's voting for all of these horrible bills, she basically stood up and just talked about how scared she was on September 11th, and she never wants to have to face that again, and that's why she's voting for all these powers.
I mean, you could see that, you know, some of them are just dumb and easily manipulated, and are very affected, you know, by those things.
They send down officers in shiny uniforms, military uniforms, and intelligence officers, and they scare them with all kinds of secret reports about, you know, nefarious al-Qaeda attacks, and even though Americans are sort of tuning out to that a lot more than they used to, I think a lot of members of our political class and our media class that live in Washington and New York are very vain and kind of stupid, you know, are still pretty affected by those things.
Yeah, I guess, you know, here in Austin, Texas, that's far away.
I mean, it was a big deal, but I don't know.
Really, the idea that 3,000 deaths and some big towers collapsing would be the signature on a blank check of power, the ultimate Gulf of Tonkin resolution for the government to do basically anything to anyone they feel like, and even call, you know, America part of the battlefield and so forth.
I mean, really, you know, if we were just getting here from outer space and looking at this, that doesn't really make a lot of sense, you know what I mean?
If, for example, at the start of the Cold War, if the Soviet Union had amounted to some Trotskyites holed up in the Ural Mountains, you know, in exile, like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are now, would that have justified the Cold War?
Some Bolsheviks holed up in the Ural Mountains?
No, they needed a Soviet Union to justify creating a world empire to oppose it.
Here, we're doing all this in the name of some kooks in the Hindu Kush Mountains, Glenn.
Yeah, it's amazing how kind of crude and simplistic and yet incredibly effective the whole, you know, fear-mongering campaign has been.
I mean, you look at the laws that the Congress is right now, as we speak, in the process of dismantling, you know, the safeguards on government eavesdropping.
I mean, those were passed at the height of the Cold War, you know, in 1977 and 1978, when the Soviet Union had, you know, thousands and thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear tips pointed at all of our cities, and we kept hearing about communist infiltration and supercells inside the United States.
You know, Ronald Reagan waged the Cold War and never once argued that the Pfizer restrictions on his eavesdropping powers were too extreme and that he couldn't defend the country.
And yet, for threats far less significant, as you say, these kind of roving bands of stateless, you know, very primitive terrorists in caves, you know, we're essentially dismantling the entire form of government that has served us so well since the post-World War II era, and we're doing it without much, you know, controversy and uproar or backlash or debate.
It's incredibly rapid and incredibly easy.
You know, I've heard the complaint, and I think it's probably true, that part of what's limited Ron Paul's appeal is his repeated references to the Constitution of the United States, that to most people, they hear that and they just think, a bunch of rich old slave-owning white men, and it was a long time ago, and what does that have to do with now?
And it just makes him sound older in referring to it all the time, that he should focus just on the practical consequences in the modern day, that kind of thing, because to refer to the Constitution turns people off.
And I just wonder, you know, how much of it can we ignore and strike out and pretend, oh, well, this section or that section is actually alive, so we don't have to obey it anymore, and that kind of thing, before we just don't have a Constitution or a Bill of Rights at all.
You know, the Founders warned about exactly that, that what they were creating in the Constitution was nothing but a piece of paper that wouldn't endure by itself, and that the American people, you know, had to be invested in it and be willing to fight for it in order to ensure its continuation, otherwise it wouldn't.
And they all were very clear about that fact.
You know, I tend to think that we're all kind of inculcated to understand that one of the things that differentiates our country is that we have these political values that are safeguarded by the Constitution.
And so I'm not, I don't necessarily agree that simply referring to the Constitution is some, you know, political albatross, but I think what is true is that the media and the political establishment basically use the Constitution as kind of a prop and nothing else.
And so, you know, its impact on political debates has lessened significantly, not because Americans don't want to hear about it, but because there are very few political leaders who ever actually talk about it and can articulate the reasons why it's so important to defend that and why what the dangers are of allowing it to be eroded.
You know, and I think if there were a political movement in this country that really were devoted to doing that and doing it well, you know, I think it would resonate.
And I think you've seen some of that with Ron Paul, and I think you see some of that in various precincts, as you say, in the blogosphere and other places that are kind of concerned about these issues.
It just hasn't really infiltrated, you know, the mainstream political discourse, because most political leaders don't talk about it.
Yeah, it's funny, the statists in the Democratic and Republican parties and the conservative and liberal movements, for that matter, they're united as a one party state against us.
But the opposition, we remain divided along so many lines.
And that's unfortunate.
I'm glad I, you know, last hour was William Norman Grigg, who used to be the senior editor of the New American Magazine, and then this hour is you.
And I'm, of course, a plumb line libertarian.
And we all see things pretty much eye to eye when it comes to maintaining our Bill of Rights before we lose it forever.
It doesn't seem like there's any doubt about that.
So maybe there really is hope for a new realignment among the opposition.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny, actually, now that you mentioned it, I was in Las Vegas last week, where I gave a speech to the annual summit of the Cato Institute, which, of course, is, you know, an organization of libertarian and devoted to limited government.
And that was one of the things to which I devoted my address was the idea that I do think there is a political realignment taking place, because the policies of the Bush administration have nothing to do with the sort of liberal conservative wars that occurred in the 1990s and 1980s.
These are completely unrecognizable and radical policies.
And whether you support the transformation of our government brought around by these policies, or whether you oppose them, and oppose that transformation is really more of a determining factor of your political ideology these days than, you know, sort of standard left, right, liberal, conservative distinctions of the past.
And I think the sooner that realignment becomes clear, and the sooner people who have been traditionally kind of on opposite sides of the political fence are able to work together, the better off we'll all be.
Yeah, well, I guess I've always thought this for years and years, that if we can't find that we have the Bill of Rights, and, you know, Article One, Section Nine, and the basic structures of our Constitution in common, you know, the Declaration of Independence, as you know, the core of the American belief in individual liberty, and so forth.
If we can't rally around that, Glenn, then we got nothing.
What are we going to rally around?
You know, identity politics, and who gets what share of the government budget pie?
Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
It makes, you know, I actually interviewed Chris Dodd back in August, and he was explaining why, you know, he wanted to make the constitutional issues the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.
And for the most part, you know, not to the extent Rob Paul did, but certainly compared to other Democrats, he did.
And what he said was, you know, if you don't have agreement on these core constitutional principles about how our government works, basically what you're running is to be president of a trade association.
You know, just something that kind of oversees the exchange of goods and services, and economic transactions, and things like that, but has no political core.
And who wants to do that, and what worth is there in any of that?
And the answer is none.
And you're absolutely right.
If you don't have basic agreement on how the framework of our government works under the Constitution, then there really is no more, you know, United States as a political system, or a collection of common political values.
It just ceases to exist.
You know, the reason I'm such a loudmouth about these kind of issues is because I fear we're headed toward the edge of a cliff.
This is really the setup for things to get much worse later on, you know, because it seems like things actually are more or less the same as they were before an average day in the life of the average American.
Well, sure.
I mean, you think about, you know, all these presidential powers that are being institutionalized, you know, the power to detain Americans with no charges of any kind, and to torture, and to eavesdrop and spy with no oversight, no warrants.
And as bad as those powers have been exercised now, once they're institutionalized, the potential for abuse is unlimited.
And, you know, you think about the potential for another terrorist attack, or enhanced fear-mongering in the future, or some legitimate crisis.
And now is the time to put an end to these things.
And if they're taking root as they are, and becoming increasingly legalized and authorized as they are, you know, the way government power works is it only expands and becomes more and more abused, not less.
And that, I think, is the real concern, is that we're only at the beginning of the process by which these powers are going to be exceeded and abused, not at the end.
Yeah, those of us who get it need to fight back while we still can.
Otherwise, we're all just going to be roommates in concentration camps, you know, finally meet each other in person.
I think there's a temptation to believe that there's a limit on the extent to which our government will abuse these powers, but you just look at history, and there never is any limit.
Right.
All right, everybody, it's Glenn Greenwald.
He's the author of A Tragic Legacy.
His blog at Salon.com is absolutely indispensable to those concerned about American liberty.
I really appreciate your time today, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
Enjoyed it.