All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the Internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is the indispensable blogger Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com, and he's not just a blogger, he's an author too.
He's got a brand new book coming out on top of his two New York Times bestsellers.
Let's see, How Would a Patriot Act is the first one, and A Tragic Legacy the second.
The new one is called Great American Hypocrites, and of course, that's got to be all about the modern American conservative movement.
His blog is Salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
How are you doing, Glenn?
Doing great, Scott.
Good to have you here, and boy, oh boy, I mean it when I say indispensable.
You just cover everything in the world, and you call out pretty much everyone who needs calling out, and don't miss a beat on this thing, and I just love this blog.
But first of all, let's talk about this new book, Great American Hypocrites.
Did I guess right?
This is about Republicans, conservatives?
It is about that, and about the myth that they create surrounding their leaders and the candidates and the things that they pretend to believe in, and the reality, which is that the things they pretend to believe in are the things that they violate most, as well as the role that the established media plays, both deliberately and unwittingly, in helping them to perpetuate those themes.
But it definitely focuses on the sort of neoconservative and dominant right-wing faction of what's become of the Republican Party.
Yeah, so what do you mean?
You think that the conservatives don't really mean it when they talk about how they want government to get off your back, and let's have free markets, and small government, low taxes, that kind of thing?
Yeah, there's a whole chapter on what I call the small government pirates, the people who endlessly repeat Ronald Reagan's famous convention speech from 1980, that government's not the solution to our problems, it is the problem, the whole concept of constantly removing government from the individual's sphere of life, and yet when Republicans are in power, especially over the last eight years, but previously as well, all that ends up happening is that they increase government intervention and control over our lives, and now we have things like a sprawling, virtually limitless surveillance state, president who can break the law, detain American citizens, intervene in every aspect of our lives, from the drugs we use to the doctors and medical treatment we get, to how we spend our money, to whether we can gamble.
In every single sphere, this political movement that claims to stand for small government believes in huge government, and the most obvious of those facts is that they spend extraordinary amounts of money and create huge deficits whenever they're in office.
Right, yeah, absolutely, the deficit spending, and not just the expansions of the police power, which we're going to spend the bulk of this interview on, but even just of the basic welfare state, the entire federal budget across the board, if you completely exclude all the war on terrorism spending and other violent conflicts going on under the aegis of the war on terrorism, still, federal spending across the board has gone up by more than any president since FDR or LBJ, I forget which it was.
Yeah, I mean, gee, that's right, even if you just look at discretionary spending and exclude, as you say, spending on the various wars and the military, purely domestic discretionary spending, George Bush is a more profligate spender than even Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the so-called Great Society, so it isn't just, as you say, intervention through using the power of state power to try and control the lives of individuals or to spy on us or collect data about what we're doing, it's also just, you know, the standard, what used to be attributed to the liberal mentality of getting into office and spending on enormous social programs in order to curry favor with various constituencies, I mean, that has become a standard Republican political tactic, and the federal budget has just grown massively in every realm, even under Republican leadership.
Well, and you know, the conservatives, too, claim to believe in the idea of, you know, the Constitution really means what it says, enough of this living Constitution doctrine, it means what it says, if you want to change it, you have to amend it, the law is the law, and you can't just go around breaking it like these darn liberal relativists want to do all the time, and yet, we've seen, I don't know, it's not even the turning inside out of the Constitution, it's the shredding and then burning of the Constitution in the last eight years here.
Well, if you look at, I mean, the fair piece of the conservative constitutional argument over the last eight years is that under Article II, the President has the power essentially to do anything he wants, including violate the law, ignore the law, because he's the Commander-in-Chief, but within that Commander-in-Chief power lies virtually every other power.
Including the power to break the law.
And yet, the plain language of the Constitution in Article II basically bests the central power of the President to take care that the law shall be faithfully executed, I mean, the power that the Constitution gives to the President is the exact opposite of what the right-wing movement claims it is, the President has no power to break the law or to act outside of the law, the President's defining power is to execute the laws, faithfully execute the laws that the American people through their Congress enact, and yet, as you say, the Constitution has been completely perverted by this movement that claims to believe in a literal interpretation of the Constitution in the plain language that it contains.
In order to that, virtually every power you can think of within the President, based on things that the Constitution doesn't even come close to mentioning, like the ability to detain American citizens without due process of law, the ability to spy on American citizens without obtaining search warrants, I mean, so not only powers that aren't in the Constitution, the powers of the Constitution explicitly prohibit any government official from using they believe, or argue at least, that they believe that the Constitution bests the President with those powers.
And it's hard to imagine a movement that more profoundly violates the political values they claim to embrace.
And, you know, the consequence of this, too, is going to be the same as the way the bigots latched on to the theory of the reserve powers of the states that don't belong to the government in the name of, you know, keeping blacks from having civil rights in the South, and they forever associated, you know, the idea of the states keeping some limited sovereignty away from the national government as simply being a wish to oppress black folks.
And from now on, anybody who argues for strict construction of the Constitution, people are going to automatically think, oh, yeah, you believe in the unitary executive theory where this guy can go around crushing a child's testicles, like John, you said.
If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop that.
No treaty.
And also no law by Congress.
That's what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
Right.
It's funny.
I actually just heard a clip of Noam Chomsky a couple days ago.
He was asked about the death of William Buckley, who people tried to say was somehow tied to Chomsky because they weren't at a debate 30 years ago.
What Noam Chomsky said is that, you know, if you look at the successors of William Buckley, neoconservatives and even just the dominant faction of the right-wing political movement, they actually defame and to call them conservatives actually defames conservatism to the extent that it ever existed in an honorable form.
And I think you're right that these neoconservatives and all of their domestic brethren who believe in these theories of endless war have basically sullied what are ideas that are at least reasonable and deserve consideration for a long time, because the extent to which they've completely perverted that by claiming to believe in them and yet pursuing policies that are their very opposite.
Well, I don't know if you know, but Russell Kirk, the guy who wrote The Conservative Mind in the 1950s and really coalesced the post-war conservative movement to a great degree, he wrote that George Bush Sr. should have been hung on the White House lawn for the war crimes during Operation Desert Storm.
Those war crimes were enough that the president should have been executed, Russell Kirk had said.
Yeah, well, you know, I think you can see the shift.
I mean, you know, William Buckley was hardly, in my view at least, you know, some overwhelmingly impressive intellectual figure.
Nonetheless, there's a huge difference between him and the conservative movement.
And you know, you would see them things like, I mean, in the middle of the Iraq War, Buckley essentially declared that it was a fool's mission, that it was a failure, that there was something that could never be won militarily, that we ought to stop it.
He went on this famous National Review cruise a couple of years ago and just viciously argued with Norman Podoritz about virtually everything.
I mean, it isn't as though they share a common philosophical or political foundation and that differ, you know, on the margins.
I mean, what the conservative movement of today has become, there's very little resemblance to at least the principles and theories that it was previously.
And I think, and my book focuses on this a lot, at the heart of that is this idea that the way that you show that you're courageous and strong and resolute is by constantly starting wars and sending other people off to wars.
And you know, I think that there was a real, at least reluctance or resistance to war in conservative movements of the past, and that has been completely turned on its head.
So now there's a hunger for war, a desire for it, a belief that that's how you prove that you're worthwhile and meritorious and strong as an individual.
And when you, you know, advocate endless wars, I mean, any political movement that does that will inevitably embrace the whole litany of abuses and tyrannies and lawbreaking and everything else that always follows that, that mentality.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
And of course, you know, Justin Armando has told the history and Murray Rothbard also about how at the beginnings of the Cold War, really, I guess, you know, early, mid fifties there, most of the actual conservatives were not really for a worldwide crusade to roll back or even necessarily to contain communism.
And so what William F. Buckley did was he brought in a bunch of former Trotskyites who hated the Soviet Union, one, because they were Americans, and two, because they were Trotskyites and so they hated the Stalinists in the USSR.
And he brought in all these guys, Sidney Hook and James Burnham, and the list goes on.
There's 15 of them or something, Whitaker Chambers and a whole bunch of these guys.
And it was a bunch of ex-communists who basically became the foundation of the modern American conservative movement because, of course, Buckley put their warfare ideals above any other part of conservatism that might matter.
And that's, again, where we are to this day.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I think, and it's why I think that there has been a pretty significant shift, a realignment in how our political spectrum works and how political ideology is identified.
The reality is that, you know, obviously the old Marxist theory and that sort of, you know, trans-morphed into, you know, the Trotskyite outlook of the world is that one country that discovers the best way of being not only has the right but the obligation to start exporting that and recreating the world in its image, that that's really the duty.
And that was an idea that really did take hold of the Trotskyites and had great appeal for them because it sort of endorses this notion that you're superior to everybody else and that you have the entitlement to control the rest of the world, to create that in your image.
And that is exactly the core mentality that was imported into, you know, this kind of right-wing imperialist mindset that led to not just the Vietnam War but the Iraq War and the whole litany of policies designed to control the world and keep it under our thumb.
And I think you're right.
It doesn't really fit into this clean conservative-liberal ideology.
It's sort of a mix of the worst parts of both that, you know, the Republican Party has become.
Yeah.
Well, forgive me for, you know, making a statement as shallow as the kind of people that you regularly attack on your blog for this very kind of thing, but I think there's really something important to this that all the guys at the AEI, for example, seems like are a bunch of big, fat, doughy, soft-handed, girly men who've never been in a fight in their life, who all dodged the draft during the Vietnam War.
You know, Richard Perle, Frederick Kagan with his, you know, triple and quadruple chin.
And these are the guys who are proving what tough guys they are by sending other people's children to die.
We're not talking about a guy who, you know, I fought in Vietnam and I'm proud to send my son too.
We're talking about guys who are living this thing completely vicariously.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, the idea that people who don't know war and who could not possibly fight a war will be tempted to, you know, send others off to war so they can vicariously feel the strength that they know that they're lacking inside.
This is not a new concept.
I mean, you go back to, you know, people like Adam Smith and even a lot of the founders who, you know, ridiculed those who would cheer on war while never getting anywhere near it and being physically incapable of doing it.
It's just a basic psychological fact that people who perceive that they lack a certain quality have the need to be very flamboyant about demonstrating that quality.
You know, people insecure about their intelligence run around and try and show how smart they are.
That's me.
Yeah.
I wouldn't say that.
You know, people who grew up poor, you know, tend to be flamboyant in their displays of wealth and people who feel physically weak and know that they have none of these traditional masculine virtues that they worship have a need to demonstrate that they are the embodiment of those things.
And cheering on one war after the next, beating their chest, and talking about, you know, being resolute and Churchillian and fighting for freedom and all the, you know, militarized language that neoconservatives love to use, it's still obviously just a need that they have given who they are and what they do and can't do to compensate for that.
And you know, it's sort of these awful psychological dynamics being played out on the world stage because they've gotten control of the most powerful country on earth and can use its power as a means for satisfying those cravings.
And I think, you know, that as much as anything tells the story of the last eight years.
Yeah, you know, Fred Kagan in the New Weekly Standard talks about the dangers of premature withdrawal.
And I thought, what am I reading?
A George Carlin bit?
Right.
I mean, come on.
You can, yeah, you can.
I mean, there's this, you know, it's interesting, there was this, you know, George Bush I was plagued for a long time by whispers that he was a wimp.
And in fact, when he announced that he was running for president in 1987, Newsweek ran a cover that said the wimp factor and talked about how he was perceived that way, even though George Bush I was an actual combat hero in World War II.
And Ronald Reagan, who never had that one problem, avoided combat.
But what, you know, what really was the first thing that got rid of that problem for George Bush was when he ordered the invasion of Panama, you know, a small, tiny little country that couldn't threaten us and hadn't threatened us.
And when he did that, the New York Times ran a long story on the front page that I talk about in my book that said that he finally fulfilled the ritualistic rite of passage that all presidents, U.S. presidents have to fulfill, which is to prove that they're willing to spill American blood in order to show that they too can carry a big stick.
And it was unwittingly filled with all sorts of imagery like that, talking about how in the American psyche, the way that you demonstrate that you're a real man, that you're not a wimp is by starting wars and sending other people off to war.
And of course, his son became the biggest beneficiary of that dynamic by, you know, essentially being held up as sort of the new MacArthur, Potner, Napoleon when he pranced around on that aircraft carrier, you know, dressed up as a fighter pilot declaring that we had won the Iraq war.
So it clearly lies at the center of so much of what our country does.
Yeah.
Well, and while it's funny, because I would think that, you know, maintaining peace and being careful is what would make one a hero in this society.
And I think that's probably what the average guy would think, you know, if you asked him, you know, all things being equal, maybe it's more of a social class type thing where, you know, people that lay in the tomb at Yale are the ones who believe you have to have a war all the time.
Right.
Well, you know, I think that, you know, it's certainly the case that when there is one own self-defense at stake, and war is the only option to defend oneself, and somebody really undertakes the real risks in order to do that, or when one fights truly for one's own freedom, as the founders did when they waged war against the crown, and you actually sacrifice in pursuit of those principles by risking your life or your fortune or your own country, there is an element of profound courage to that that's commendable.
But when war becomes just another option for achieving policy ends, and it's pursued without any risk whatsoever, only by sending other people to be subjected to those risks, then it becomes the greatest act of cowardice.
Because then what it is is almost this hysteria, this fear-driven hysteria that resorts to the most extreme option at the slightest risk or the slightest threat.
And that behavior is behavior that we associate with hysteria and extreme weakness, and not at all with strength.
And I think it's this kind of twisted mentality, this idea that the media has perpetuated that those who are strong and tough are those who favor and advocate war, that they don't have anything, you know, to risk by doing so, is really the one that needs to be uprooted most if it were to start to reverse some of the things that are damaging our country so much.
All right, now, I want to get to the first excerpt out of your new book, Great American Hypocrites, that ran on the Huffington Post yesterday, McCain's old packaging.
It seems like everybody in the entire media, except maybe you, thinks that this guy is descended from heaven.
Boy, is he a straight shooter and a maverick?
And boy, did you hear his tough questions for General Petraeus this morning?
And isn't he dreamy?
And really, the media is letting this guy get away with bloody murder, aren't they?
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's very hard to talk about this in a way that appeals to a lot of people, because we've been inculcated for so long into believing that what we have in the United States is a, quote unquote, liberal media.
But if you go back to 2000, I don't think there was any journalists anymore who can test the fact that the journalists who were covering George Bush were so enamored of him personally and thought that he was a great guy and hated Al Gore and thought he was a horrible person because Bush was amiable and had that swagger to him and was playful and that kind of frat boy, college jock sort of way.
And Al Gore was just kind of this pompous, annoying bore who just was so earnest about talking about all these really dull issues.
And the coverage was exactly what one would expect.
The coverage of George Bush was adoring.
He was exactly the way McCain is depicted now, a new kind of Republican, not a doctrinaire conservative, but a compassionate conservative, someone who could work with both liberals and Democrats and was going to bring honor back to Washington and change the way that Washington works and make it less partisan.
All the things they say now about McCain.
And that Al Gore was, you know, these tiny, petty little gossipy stories were used to destroy his character.
You know, he claimed to have invented the Internet.
He claimed that love story was based on his life.
Naomi Wolf was calling him to earth callers in order to teach him about masculinity.
These sort of completely vapid and petty gossip items were used to demonize him and turn George Bush into an icon.
The love that the media have for John McCain makes what they had for George Bush pale in comparison.
Well, wait, let me interrupt you for just a second, Glenn.
I want to add to your characterization of how they put George Bush across.
They also put him across as being from Texas rather than from Connecticut, of being kind of a good old boy, even though he can work with the Democrats and he's a uniter, not a divider and all those things you say.
They also tried to make it seem like this guy was not the son of a Bush and a Pierce, which he was.
Right.
I mean, you know, if you look at the way, for example, John Edwards was depicted when he ran this time, it was he couldn't possibly relate to the common man because he lives in a, you know, in a huge mansion, wealth that was entirely self-made and honorably made.
And even though he grew up to report and they're sort of doing the same thing now with the Clintons and their great wealth, they have a mass recently, even though Bill Clinton grew up poor as well.
And yet George Bush is depicted as sort of the icon of the regular man, even though, as you say, he was comes from a very patrician family in Connecticut, grew up with great wealth and great privilege that was handed to him that he didn't earn.
The father, the son of a president, the grandson of a U.S. senator.
And you're right, this iconography is not just petty, but it's also completely misleading.
Yeah.
I mean, he bought that ranch, that pig farm with the Hollywood set to make it look like a ranch with the bay hails and old rusted tractor and everything that they brought in fresh.
He bought that at the very end of 1999.
I mean, it was a campaign stunt from the beginning.
They didn't even make bones about it when he bought it.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, he would prance around in the the the ranch hats.
And, you know, this all comes from the way that Ronald Reagan was depicted as well.
I mean, at least it was a little more authentic in the case of Reagan, a little bit more.
But but what the Republican Party realized and Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, you know, perfected these methods was that these kind of personality themes work and it has, you know, it's irrelevant the extent to which they're true.
All that matters is is the imagery.
And that's how George Bush became this, you know, swaggering, you know, ranch, brush clearing, regular guy.
And it's sort of what they're doing to John McCain as well now.
I mean, McCain, 40 years ago, you know, had honorable military service.
There's no question about that.
And since then, his life has been filled with, you know, political corruption and linkage to all sorts of beltway lobbyists and a very questionable personal life with the way that he dumped his first wife when she was disfigured and disabled in a car accident and married, you know, his much younger, prettier and extremely wealthy, wealthy mistress whose family funded his political career.
And yet, you know, the those kind of personal issues are constantly explored with the political figures they dislike.
John Kerry was raked over the coals for having a second wife who was wealthy.
John Edwards, personal wealth was used against him.
And yet, you know, they they don't do that with George Bush.
They don't do that with John McCain.
And so it's not just that personal issues dictate political coverage to the exclusion of what our country is really doing.
That is true.
It's that it's done in this extremely misleading and one sided way that that makes these these image these images not just petty, but but false.
And, you know, here's the thing that really gets me.
You have this developed on your blog today.
Again, that salon dot com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And you're you're reviewing a couple of other media critics who are saying who are criticizing you and saying, no, it's actually good and important that they cover bowling and they cover, you know, the Monica Lewinsky story again or whatever it is instead of torture and murder.
And you make the point and I think you prove your point that the only reason why is because they really are that shallow, that this dire emergency that you write about every day, that I talk to people about every day on this show, where the Bill of Rights is thrown in the trash, where we start aggressive wars and kill a million people.
This doesn't matter to them.
This is nothing to them.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting, I think, I mean, there's a couple of very, you know, immovable problems there that that cause that pain.
One thing that I think is important to realize is that, you know, most of the political and media establishment, the overwhelming majority, supported the Bush administration, supported and cheered on the invasion of Iraq, completely demonized the people who were opposed to it and warned about what would happen if we did it.
And so all of the things that followed from that, you know, Abu Ghraib, the institutionalization of the torture regime that we're learning more about all the time, the lawbreaking, the extreme amounts of secrecy, the dismantling of our constitutional liberties, all the things that follow from that are on the account of the political and media figures who supported all that and cheered for it and refrained from criticizing it.
And so they're now in a situation where they are desperate to avoid having what they've done be blamed on them.
And so they don't want there to be this idea that our political and media establishment are fundamentally corrupt, that the Bush administration is filled to the brim with war criminals, which undoubtedly they are.
It's in their interest to say, you know, these things were just isolated bad acts that were done by lower level functionaries and not anything that really is fundamentally wrong with what we've become as a country, because it's they who enable all of these things to happen.
And so it's very much in their interest to keep it concealed and to minimize it and to suggest that somehow it's not really at a level where we're in a fundamental crisis and hence we can afford to continue to talk about, you know, whether Barack Obama can bowl and how much money John Edwards spends on his hair and does Obama eat chocolate like a man or, you know, things like that, because we're still basically a good, free and healthy country and have a healthy political culture and therefore don't need to act as though there's serious problems that we need to face because they're the authors of those problems.
Right.
And that is sort of the unsaid premise to all these fluff news stories is that, trust us, there's really nothing else going on today.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, if you if you're an American citizen who, you know, unlike you or I, who essentially follow these matters very closely as our job, if instead you're the average American citizen who by, you know, design understandably relies basically on the media outlets that you know to inform you about what's going on.
And if you turn on, you know, those television programs or open those newspapers and see journalists talking about petty, vapid, frivolous matters, the assumption that you're going to have naturally is that there's nothing, as you say, grave to really just talk about.
But there's nothing really going on that's so wrong because we can afford to kind of be wallowing in this, these good times and this morality.
Now, if you look at public opinion polls, Americans know deep down that there is something has gone terribly awry in our country.
I mean, eight out of ten Americans think that the government is going in the wrong direction, is doing the wrong thing.
This administration has been extremely unpopular for a very sustained period of time.
So Americans do know in their gut and public opinion polls conclusively demonstrate this, that there's something deeply wrong with our political process, our political system.
But the fact that the media literally conceals these stories at the expense of trivialities and just stupid distractions does bolster the idea that there must not be something much going on that's terribly wrong.
And it keeps the population essentially ignorant about what our government is really doing.
All right, Glenn, now forgive me for only leaving us 10 or 12 minutes here to cover this really most important issue, and that is the lies of the attorney general, Michael Mukasey, in order to justify more criminal violations of the Constitution of the United States.
And I have the audio here that I got from your blog.
Appreciate that.
Again, that's salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And this is from a Mukasey speech last week.
But at where the problem appears to be, and again, surveillance of electronic surveillance when it's conducted in the United States is conducted with the permission of a court based on a showing to a court, and when it's conducted abroad, shouldn't have to be shouldn't have to be conducted with the permission of a court.
That's the point of the legislation.
We shouldn't have to go to court to get a warrant to find out what somebody who picks up a phone in Iraq is talking to with somebody he's calling in Afghanistan.
We should need a warrant for that.
And we also shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up a phone in Iraq and call somebody in the United States, because that's the call that we may really want to know about.
And before 9-11, that's the call that we didn't know about.
We knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan, and we knew that it came to the United States.
We didn't know precisely where it went.
We've got a.
We've got three thousand.
We've got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn't come home to show for that.
Wow.
Well, how about it, Glenn Greenwald, take us through this.
Apparently, the terrorist loving Democratic Congress is willing to get Americans killed in order to force the government to have to get a warrant in order to listen in on a phone call between someone in Iraq and someone in Afghanistan.
That sounds like treason.
Yeah, it does, doesn't it?
And that's why he teared up in the end, because he hates treason.
There's so many lies and deceitful aspects to that, that it's actually hard to know where to begin.
So I'll just highlight the most significant ones.
First of all, virtually nobody, and I don't think anybody in Congress, disputes the idea that if someone in Afghanistan is called a terrorist, that they're If someone in Afghanistan is calling someone in Iraq, that no warrant is required in order to listen on that.
I mean, everybody in Congress agrees that FISA should be changed, that FISA already excluded international and international foreign calls from the warrant requirement.
And to the extent that change in the laws needed to make that clear, everyone, even Russ Feingold and some of the most anti-surveillance members of the House, were willing to make that change.
And so to talk about that as if that's a dispute is just misleading.
But I think the far more important deceit here is that what he's essentially saying is that there was this call that we knew about prior to 9-11 that came from what he called an Afghan safe house into the United States.
We knew about the call, but that we weren't able to either listen in on it or investigate it adequately because there were laws in place that prohibited the government from doing that.
And that those laws, such as FISA, are what prevented the government from finding out about the 9-11 attacks and caused the death of 3,000 people.
Now, first of all, the call itself, this idea that there was a call for an Afghan safe house, is something that nobody has ever heard of before Mukasey claimed that this happened.
It's nowhere in the 9-11 commission report.
The joint committees of Congress that issued their report made no mention of any kind of a call.
I interviewed the executive director of the 9-11 commission, Philip Delico, who said that he had no idea what Mukasey was talking about.
And the day after I wrote about this, John Conyers, the chairman of the House Judicial Committee, wrote a letter to Mukasey, along with two other congressmen, saying, you referenced this call that had we investigated, we could have stopped an 9-11 attack, but came from Afghanistan.
No one's ever heard of any such call before.
So what's your evidence that this happened?
Are you just making it up?
And so it seems highly likely that Mukasey just made up that story in order to manipulate Americans into believing that we need to further loosen our surveillance laws in order to detect terrorist attacks.
But beyond that, I submitted some questions to the Justice Department about what Mukasey was talking about, and they claimed in response that there were incidents like that referenced by the report of the joint congressional committees about 9-11.
And there are a couple of incidents that the committee, that the committee talks about, where we knew about calls between an Afghan hub overseas and the US, but that the intelligence community failed to investigate those adequately.
But that had nothing to do with FISA, or the laws that were in place to protect us from abuse of surveillance powers.
The contrary was true, said these reports.
The intelligence community had all of the legal authority it needed to investigate calls of that type.
FISA allows eavesdropping on calls without a warrant, where you're targeting someone outside of the United States that's not a US person.
And of course, even if a warrant were needed, you just go get a warrant and you listen on that call.
And that's remarked in the congressional report that where the footnote is for this even existing.
That's their point is that, ah, come on, you could have stopped it if only you were doing your job.
Yeah, even if the call had happened the way Mukasey described it, and it didn't, but even if it had, there were other calls like that, that the committee said, should have been investigated and could have been investigated under the legal authorities that they had.
And the fact they failed to was reflective of poor intelligence work and inability to distinguish between what was important and what's not important.
It had nothing to do with constraints on their ability to gather up information.
I mean, this is these are calls that they were aware of, they just failed to listen in and failed to investigate it.
Not because they under the law, they couldn't, but because they just did it.
And yet, this is what the government does over and over and over is it uses the emotional appeal of 9-11.
And you saw how he teared up to claim endlessly, that they need to be given the power to suck up more and more information about what we're doing inside the United States to listen to our more and more of our calls to do so with less and less oversight to collect more and more data on us, as though sucking up as much information as possible is going to lead them to be able to stop terrorist attacks.
And the exact opposite is true.
If anything, if they had too much information, prior to 9-11, it was their inability to find what was important to recognize it and to take necessary steps that prevented them from discovering the attacks.
They're not interested in counterterrorism, they're interested in getting more and more surveillance power with less and less accountability.
And that's what Mukasey was tearing up about it and was demanding by citing this incident that had nothing to do with constraints on their ability to eavesdrop.
It was just misleading, both in its particulars and in the broader point.
Well I think it's an important point, well there's a bunch of them, but one of them is that just the structure of these kind of agencies, they don't really have, and I don't know exactly what would be the right way to do it instead necessarily, but they don't really have the incentive to, or even the structure of incentive, to really get these things done right.
And I'm reminded of one of the least of Isabel Edmonds' accusations against the FBI was that she was told deliberately by her FBI bosses, don't translate those, let them pile up.
We need to be able to show Congress that we need more money for next year, etc.
And that's just sort of, if you take all questions of competence and corruption and everything, and laziness and everything, and just say all things being equal, these people really don't have the incentive structure to do their job right.
Their incentive really is to fail, so they can get more for next time.
Well that's right.
I mean I think it's hard to say that the government should have discovered the 9-11 attacks.
I mean there are things that happen, even with great intelligence, that you're not going to uncover.
But whatever was true, it wasn't that they hadn't fucked up the right information.
I mean they knew that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States.
They had, you know, the president was briefed on exactly that fact.
They knew that two of his operatives were inside the United States.
According to the Attorney General, they knew of calls that were coming from Afghan safe house into the United States to speak with those operatives.
And yet they just didn't have the incentive or the ability to distinguish between the information that mattered and the information that didn't matter.
And even now, their incentive is not to succeed in counterterrorism.
Their incentive is to find ways to just loosen the restraints on their ability to know what Americans are doing.
And I mean it's this disconnect between constantly fighting the 9-11 attacks and demanding more and more power that has nothing to do with those attacks.
That's so profoundly dishonest.
And you know, until two months ago, when the House finally refused to pass the latest such piece of legislation that would have left the president with more power, it's worked for the last seven years.
And that's how this surveillance state has grown and civil liberties and safeguards have been almost completely eroded.
And hopefully, you know, that House vote that was so critical is a sign that they're drawing a line there.
And the more abusive behavior like we just saw from Michael McCasey in that speech and the anger that Congress gets, as John Conyers did, hopefully that conflict will be exacerbated between the Congress and the White House and there'll be a lot less cooperation.
And now on Conyers, is he actually in a whole hearings, do you know?
I don't know.
I think he's gonna wait for a reply, I understand, from McCasey.
And if the reply is unsatisfactory, as it almost certainly will be, I do think that he intends, from what I understand, to follow up with that, you know, aggressively.
And he has a good record of doing that.
So, you know, if they're saying that, I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And now, just to be absolutely, perfectly clear, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended even or even before, tell me before or after amending with the Patriot Act and so forth, gives the National Security Agency the authority to monitor a phone call from any suspected foreign power inside the United States and then to refer that information to the FBI for any further investigation in this country.
And they can even start their investigation three days before they bother dropping by the FISA court to get a rubber stamp on their warrant.
Right.
Under FISA, the old FISA, pre-911, pre-Patriot Act, if you wanted to target, you know, a safe house in Afghanistan and listen to every call they make, you could listen to all of their calls without a warrant, even if they called into the United States, you could just follow wherever they called.
Even pre-911, you know, pre-911 reforms and pre-Patriot Act reforms, if you learned that they were talking to people that you suspected of being criminals or terrorists who are inside the United States, the NSA was not only entitled but obligated, under their own rules, to alert the FBI to what they had learned so the FBI could go and investigate that.
And so even with the wall in place and with the various restrictions that had been in place, there were all sorts of authorities that the NSA had internally that obligated them to tell the FBI.
Since the Patriot Act, there are no more restrictions.
I mean, so even if you bide the argument that pre-911 FISA was too restrictive and pre-911 intelligence restrictions were too severe, they've all been severely loosened, repeatedly, by the Patriot Act and numerous other amendments to FISA and to the Patriot Act, so that now we live in a virtually limitless surveillance state, and yet McKinsey is out there, you know, still trotting out and exploiting, you know, the dead people of 9-11 in order to argue even further that we need to give the government more spying power and eliminate the few remaining restrictions that exist, and that's what makes it, you know, so deceitful.
Alright everybody, that's Glenn Greenwald.
He writes the indispensable blog at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald, and he's got a brand new book coming out called Great American Hypocrites.
Thanks again very much for your time today, Glenn.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks.
Alright folks, and Glenn brought up George Bush and the wimp factor.
Well, here's Bill Hicks on that.
So, it's good to be here, wherever I am.
Gosh, as I was here we had a war.
That's pretty fucking weird, huh?
A war?
Wasn't really a war.
Hey Glenn, hang on and listen to this, man, if you're still there.
This is funny stuff.
I don't know if you could call it a war, exactly.
You know, the Persian Gulf Distraction is more like it, I think.
Pretty amazing thing, really.
Bush turned out to be a major fucking demon, who would have guessed?
Remember when he was first president?
He was the wimp president.
Do you remember that?
Cover of Newsweek.
Cover of fucking Newsweek.
Wimp president.
Apparently, this stuck in this guy's crawl a little bit.
Guy was a dynamite waiting to go off.
Weesler Endah, not good enough.
We run away, too little too late.
Call me a wimp.
Come on, fuckers, come on.
Hold him back.
Those guys were in hog heaven over there, man.
They had a big weapons catalog opened up.
What's G12 do, Tommy?
See, it says here it destroys everything but the fillings in their teeth.
Helps us pay for the war effort.
Well, fuck, pull that one up.
Pull up G12, please.
Cool, what's G13 do?
Big Sears weapons catalog.
Weapons for all occasions.
You know.
See, everyone got boners over the technology.
You know what's pretty incredible?
Watching missiles fly down air vents.
Pretty unbelievable.
But couldn't we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?
Fly over Ethiopia.
There's a guy that needs a banana.
A stealth banana.
Smart fruit.
I don't know.
Once again, I was watching the fucking news that really threw me off.
It depressed everyone.
It was just so scary watching the news how they built it all out of proportion like Iraq was ever or could ever possibly under any stretch of the imagination be a threat to us.
Whatsoever.
But watching the news, you never would have got that idea.
Remember how it started?
They kept talking about the elite Republican Guard and these hushed tones like these guys were the bogeyman or something.
Yeah, we're doing well now, but we have yet to face the elite Republican Guard.
Like these guys were 12 feet tall desert warriors.
Never lost a battle.
We shit bullets.
Yeah, well, after two months of continuous carpet bombing and not one reaction at all from them, they became simply the Republican Guard.
Not nearly as elite as we may have led you to believe.
And after another month of bombing, they went from the elite Republican Guard to the Republican Guard to the Republicans made this shit up about there being guards out there.
