Alright y'all, welcome back, it's Anti-War Radio, and our first guest on the show today is Ivan Eland from the Independent Institute, that's independent.org, and of course, we run, I think, every single one of his columns at antiwar.com/eland.
He's the author of Recarving Rushmore, Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, and before that, The Empire Wears No Clothes.
Welcome back to the show.
Ivan, how are you?
Thanks.
Glad to be back.
I'm very happy to have you here with us on the show, and a very prescient article that you wrote, what, just a couple of days ago, for the Independent Institute, that's on antiwar.com right now, A Double Standard for the Ultimate Penalty.
And you're talking about the execution of the, I think you say here, potentially innocent Troy Davis by the state of Georgia last week, and the double standard between the people who were protesting what happened to him and their silence on the issue of Obama's stated intention then to have Anwar al-Awlaki killed by a drone strike in Yemen.
Right, and of course, that happened this morning, so the article was written a couple days ago, but I think that now the question is, there's been nothing but cheering in the major media, turn on CNN and that sort of thing, they're just glad we got him and that sort of thing, but they don't discuss the ramifications for the republic of killing your own citizens without the legal authority to do so, and the reason I say that there's not legal authority to do so was, first of all, there's no declaration of war, but even if you're, if you say, well, that's a technicality, they got a resolution both for the, well, they got a resolution to go after the perpetrators of 9-11, well, a resolution isn't a declaration of war, but even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and you say, well, okay, Congress did authorize a war against 9-11 perpetrators, Awlaki had nothing to do with this 9-11, and he came along afterwards, and he's part of a group called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is sort of a franchise group, or a franchise of an affiliate of the main Al-Qaeda, which of course the war was commissioned for, but this brings up the case of where they've gone way outside this resolution and they're now conducting drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, et cetera, and not against the main trunk Al-Qaeda.
There are many groups that call themselves Al-Qaeda, but they really mainly have local interests, and I think this would be one of them if the United States hadn't gone after the group, because eight days after the U.S. ramped up its activities against the group, we had the underwear bomber.
Now the underwear bomber was supposedly recruited and planned by Awlaki, the man who was killed, but of course that's never been proven in a court of law, and the problem that I have with this is this is against the Fifth Amendment, which says you will not be deprived of life, liberty, without the due process of law, and of course we haven't had any due process for this U.S. citizen.
He was just whacked by his own government, assassination style, and that may work for other countries like North Korea or Burma or someplace like that, but we're supposed to be a republic here, and I think that's a real big problem.
Well, a few things there.
First of all, on the Fifth Amendment issue, the courts have long held, correct, that the Fifth Amendment protections apply to any American citizen anywhere in the world or anyone else inside the United States.
That's what counts as a U.S. person, right?
Yes, well, yes, it says people, not citizens, and the Constitution makes some provisions are for citizens and some are more wide for people, and now the Fifth Amendment applies to people.
Yes, so that would be certainly within the U.S. boundaries, but...
Well, and I think the courts have said that, you know, Ivan Ehlen, when you leave the country, the Fifth Amendment goes with you.
The U.S. government can't kill you just because you're on the other side of salt water.
Exactly, right, and so that's a problem, and we've...
I heard all the broadcasters on CNN say, well, you know, Jeffrey Toobin, who's a legal analyst for CNN, was saying, well, you know, the objections to this are, you know, he just dismissed them out of hand, really didn't discuss them, and said, well, we are involved in a war on terror.
Well, the war on terror has really not been legalized.
We have a war on the perpetrators of 9-11 is what we have, and, of course, both George Bush and Barack Obama have expanded it past there where the president can now kill U.S. citizens, but he still has to get a warrant to spy, in most cases, on U.S. citizens.
So it makes no sense the way this is being interpreted by the executive branch.
You know, surveillance should be not more restrictive than killing somebody, but less restrictive, but it's quite the opposite.
So it's kind of topsy-turvy, the whole thing.
Well, now, Obama gave a talk, basically a goodbye to Admiral Mullen thing this morning, but he added at the beginning to the text, I guess, a part about, hooray, we killed Anwar al-Awlaki, and the crowd went wild, which was nice, and then he went on to make a bunch of assertions about how this guy did know the 9-11 hijackers, at least a couple of them, which I guess means he helped them do it somehow, and then he went on to say that...
He's implying that, but the U.S. government has never said that he had anything to do with 9-11, and the act, the resolution, says that you have to have planned, assisted, committed, etc.
It's very specific in the...
And, you know, if you're a criminal, and I come up and talk to you on the street, and the police can suspect that maybe we're in cahoots, but perhaps you're just buying a hot dog from my hot dog stand or something.
I mean, criminals talk to people all the time just because you're talking to people, and even if your organization is suspect, it doesn't mean that you had anything to do with a particular crime.
So I think that's what needs to be proven in court here, and I think this war analogy...
First, there was an argument about whether we should have a war on terror or not.
Now, apparently, there's no argument about that.
All the media people are buying into the war on terror, but the war on terror is on very shaky constitutional and legal grounds here, and I think we really have to ask ourselves...
If you put it a different way, if you ask people in a poll, well, should the president just have the right to kill any citizen that he wants, which is what we're talking about here, they would probably say...
They would kind of be uneasy about that, and of course, then they would say, but this guy, he hated America, he was a terrorist, why do we care about him?
Well, in any situation like this, even if you're accused of a serious crime, our system is supposed to make you prove that this person was the person that did it, and as we know from Guantanamo, many of those people were not only innocent of terrorism, but they were innocent of everything.
They were picked up on the battlefield simply because the U.S. offered a bounty to poor people, and they turned in some of their neighbors so they could get the money or people they didn't like or whatever, but they had nothing to do with it.
So my point is, is the government competent to pick out terrorists and just kill them without a trial?
And I say, no, look at all the...
I mean, we've had...
My piece says, well, we've had 138 people on death row that were exonerated.
The government wasn't too good, and those people went through a due process, which was what?
We're not even having due process in this case, so there's no outside court, there's no outside jury looking at this case of Awlaki.
The government, we just have to believe them that he had something to do with this underwear bomber, that he planned it and he recruited the guy and that sort of thing, and that hasn't been proven in court.
The other stuff he's accused of is inciting, saying, well, kill Americans.
Now, of course, I can incite people by saying, well, you should go out and murder your mother.
Well, if I'm not specific, I don't know the people in a crowd, their mothers, or why would I have an incentive to kill them, but our laws require that you have to, for conspiracy and that sort of thing, it has to be a very specific crime, not just in general incitement.
Certainly, his messages of killing innocent Americans were reprehensible, but whether you can prosecute him for that or not, the more specific case is, if he did plan and he recruited this guy for the underwear bomber, then you might have him, but you should still bring him to justice and try him in a court of law and force the government to produce the evidence, and I think the government is better off, and certainly the people are better off when the government does that, rather than just, intelligence information is not usually of sufficient quality to bring in a trial, because it's sometimes based on hearsay, it's based on recorded conversations, et cetera, and there's a lot of art to piecing together intelligence, and we would call that circumstantial evidence in most cases, which would not rise to the level of proving in court, so are we just to go out and whack anybody that we want that Barack Obama doesn't like or George W.
Bush didn't like, or whatever, it's not one party or the other, it's just an abuse of power, I think, of the executive power to go out and do that.
You know, on Fox News right now, I've got the TV on mute over here out of the corner of my eye, they've got Judith Miller and Rich Lowry up there explaining why this is all perfectly okay, and it's based on, Lowry got the CC on, Lowry saying, look, he joined this enemy force against us, but of course, that's all still based on the completely unreviewed assertions of the cops, that's it, and Obama being the top cop in this case.
Right, and this guy may be a really bad man, and despite what his dad says about him, which his dad says he's not, but he may be a very bad man, but I think the government has to prove that, and I think if you know where he is, you can have people go and try to pick him up, that we have all these special forces, perhaps they should pick up people like Osama bin Laden instead of shooting him, or pick up this, Al-Awlaki, guys in the same category, pick him up instead of just whacking him with a drone.
The problem with these drone strikes is, it's a bigger problem than that is, you're basically waging war, and it makes it very easy and very costless for the president to wage war against anyone he doesn't, he wants to, without a declaration of war, without any sort of approval from Congress, or warrants examined by the court, so what we have is really executive fiat here, and that's going toward a dictatorship when you have, giving the president the power to do that without review by any of the other branches or the legal system.
You know what's scary is, the Congress though, a lot of times, it seems like the Congress would have nuked Iran, George Bush's calm wisdom prevented that from happening back in 2007.
Well, I mean, you know, it could go the other way, yes, but I think it's important our system is set up, and I think our system has resisted big government more than places like Europe, because we have a different type of system, we have branches which battle each other on occasion, and sometimes it goes one way or sometimes the other way, but it's important to have more than one branch doing it.
Now, it doesn't always work, as you're pointing out, sometimes the war fever just goes so high like right after 9-11 that we lose, everybody loses their sense of bearing, but I think our system is helpful because it can, in certain cases, act as a check, and we don't have those checks in this particular case, and I think it's particularly alarming, not on Fox News, but even the CNN people, who tend to be more liberal, are buying into this war on terror as well, and oh yeah, well this guy's a bad man, so he doesn't get any rights or that sort of thing, and of course the ACLU, to their credit, were trying to get an injunction to get this guy removed from the assassination list because he was a U.S. citizen, of course they didn't have too much luck with that in the courts because the courts basically said, well this is an executive function, which is absolute nonsense.
Well, and you know, it seems to me, and I'm not the expert on every bit of coverage of this story or whatever, but I have read quite a bit about it, and it seems to me, Ivan, that all the accusations that, well, he participated in the FedEx plot or the Underbomber plot or even September 11th, all those are just kind of glittering generalities, they never really give us any specific information that gives us any real reason to believe that those things are true.
But then there are other times where they basically seem to come out and admit, and Glenn Greenwald, of course, is the leader in chronicling this, they basically come out and admit, as you were indicating earlier, that what their problem is, is they don't like the things that this preacher says.
Now again, he's an American citizen, born in the United States of America, he's a religious leader, whether you like his religion or not, and he gives these speeches and puts them on YouTube and in English, where presumably radicalized American Muslims could get their hands on them and be inspired to terrorism by him.
And the thing is, this really is a test of the First Amendment.
If you take his threat as described by our government seriously at all, or whatever, this is the kind of thing about, well, should Nazis be able to give a speech down at the State Capitol, or should communists be allowed to meet and try to engage in politics, or are they just all a criminal conspiracy for showing up at a meeting somewhere, that kind of thing?
Yeah, well, by that standard, you should go out and whack all the members of the KKK, the neo-Nazi party, the communist party, because they're probably talking badly about America.
So where does it end?
I mean, then you could get after anti-war people for not talking badly about America, but raising questions about American policy, isn't that being disloyal to the U.S. government, etc.?
Where does that edge of dissent that you allow versus the people who get whacked, where does it end?
Where is that line?
Well, you know, people, it's so easy to just, if you don't think about it for a second step or something, it's so easy to say, well, who cares about Awaki's rights?
I heard a hundred different times on TV what a bad guy he was, and whatever, but the whole thing is, it's all about, never even mind his rights then, if we accept that, that he doesn't have rights because Obama says he's a terrorist, still that means that he can call any of us a terrorist, and why would we give a trial to any murderer at all?
If they're murderers, if the cops say they're murderers, what right to a trial do they have?
Why do we even bother with juries and courts in the first place?
Well, that's what we're essentially saying, that this guy's a murderer, or an attempted murderer in this case, because of the underwear bomber was a failure and didn't kill anybody, but he doesn't get a trial because he's been labeled as a terrorist, where murderers here in the U.S. fare better than that, so it's sort of an inferior standard that we have for terrorists, and I think, you know, the people who are gung-ho about going after terrorists say, well, you know, why should we care about terrorist rights?
Well, you shouldn't really care about terrorist rights, but what you should care about is your own rights, and that's, if they can do it to him, what if they get the wrong guy?
What if this guy they killed wasn't him, or, you know, what if he hadn't done this, but somebody else did it instead, and he's being blamed for it, or whatever?
Then you've got a real problem, I think, that you're just willy-nilly whacking people, and they may or may not be guilty of anything.
Well, and you know, the latest news out of there is that this guy, Samir Khan, another American citizen, was killed in the same car, supposedly, or at least in the same airstrike, and he was wanted for the same reason, for being an effective propagandist for the other side in the war, basically.
This is a war crime to upload a YouTube video.
In fact, one of the guys is, I forget if he was convicted or he's on trial down in Guantanamo Bay for exactly that, right?
Hacking together some clips of bin Laden and uploading them to YouTube.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, when we, as I was saying before, you know, when you get an incitement, you know, people get, could we indict Sarah Palin for the attempted murder of Gabby Giffords, simply because she put, we're going to target things on her video site?
Now, of course you can't, right?
That's stupid.
You can't do that.
But, you know, it's sort of like, traditionally in America, it's been that you have to be involved in a specific plot.
Like if I commission you and say, I really want you to go whack this guy, and then you go do it.
Okay.
That's, that's, you know, I'm culpable in that.
But if I go make an inflammatory speech, which is broadcast to millions of people, and they choose to do, to carry out something, am I really guilty?
That is a question for the first amendment.
And I think you have a much harder time proving that.
Now, that's not to approve of the speech, because the speech of killing Americans and innocent Americans is reprehensible, as I said.
But as you pointed out, in our society, the first amendment is so important that we have to allow speech sometimes that we don't, that most people think is repugnant and that sort of thing.
So there's a question of when this becomes a specific plot to actually murder somebody or do a terrorist attack versus just general incitement.
And they're killing people for just general incitement, which, you know, they don't, and they can get away with it.
Because of course, these people don't get much sympathy here, and they probably shouldn't get much sympathy.
But what they should get is a legal trial and that sort of thing.
And that's all I'm asking for.
And I think other people like ACLU and other people are asking for a trial instead of a war.
And I don't really think this war on terror is very effective either, because it just revs up more terrorism.
I think when you are a nation of the rule of law, you dredge up less terrorism, because people think, well, hey, they're being fair to these people.
And yeah, even people in Arab countries would say, well, hey, they're going after innocent Americans.
Yeah, these guys should be rounded up and thrown in jail, so they don't do it.
I think most people around the world would probably agree with that.
But just whacking them without any trial or even, you know, perhaps not even good intelligence or the intelligence is somewhat cloudy.
And certainly, even if the intelligence is good, it's been secret, and it's not put out there to the public.
So, you know, what you have is a perception problem that this is not kosher.
And I think it's probably even more than a perception problem.
It's really not kosher.
Well, and, you know, there's so much the cognitive dissonance for those who believe in this propaganda has got to really, you know, cause severe headaches at times where they say all day long in order to try to, you know, spin the failure in Afghanistan that, yeah, we just about beat al-Qaeda.
They're barely left at all.
There's just a few of them and a few more drone strikes, and we'll be done with that.
At the same time, it's on the front page of The New York Times.
There are three major new Islamist terrorist groups in Africa that we have to begin to have a war on terrorism against.
Yes.
Yes.
And I don't know.
The whole thing is it's just unbelievable that they're saying that in Afghanistan when the U.N. comes out and says, you know, there's a 40 percent increase in violent acts last year, and then NATO comes out with saying, well, no, it declined by 2 percent.
Well, even if it declined by 2 percent, that's still bad, and they're no chance of winning.
And plus, the insurgents are controlling northern areas now that they didn't control before.
And they say, well, they're desperate.
So, you know, our own government puts out a lot of propaganda and a lot of smoke and mirrors, and maybe we shouldn't trust our government at times.
One of the other things was, can we trust our government on terrorism?
They just made a big deal about this guy who was trying to get drone airplanes.
But then basically what they did was they funded him getting the drone airplanes, and they helped him get the C-4 explosive.
Well, could he have gotten those on his own?
Probably not, because he didn't have the money to buy it.
These drone aircraft are huge, and they're expensive.
And would he have the money or the connections to get C-4 explosive, which is a military explosive?
They're basically entrapping the guy, and then they're making a big deal about it.
And I think our agencies do that to show that they're making arrests and stuff, because they're getting all this money now for anti-terrorism activities.
So can we...
Our own government agencies have an incentive to hype the threat here, and I think that's what they did with the Lockheed, too.
I heard many CNN analysis, and of course they go by what government sources tell them.
And I think they were vastly overstating Lockheed's potential to inflict harm in America as well.
Well, yeah.
You know, the thing is, I'm sure it's not a one-for-one function or anything, but you look at all the terrorism against the United States engendered by the aftermath of the First Gulf War in the 1990s, leading up to the September 11th attack and beyond, and then all the vast spreading of terrorism as a tactic across the ever-expanding American theater of operations over there in the Middle East, a million people killed in Iraq, tens and tens of thousands in Afghanistan, and now the war's spreading into Africa.
And I can't help but think, at some point, some real terrorists who are actually intelligent and capable are going to wage some kind of spectacular attack, as they call it, against a soft target here in America, and then we'll be able to rest easy that good old FBI was just chasing their tail, going around and trapping goofballs into coming up with these ridiculous remote-control airplane plots, while actual terrorists were conspiring and preparing to get away with some atrocity.
Yes, and the other thing I think that you're pointing out is that the government creates the problem and then writes the rescue to do it, and of course, then they concentrate on the minor cases, and then of course, they've poked the hornet's nest, so some terrorists are more capable than others, and of course, they're less able to catch the less capable, and so then they do something like 9-11, and then we go through this cycle again, and each time the civil liberties are curtailed, but the government creates a demand for its own services by these interventions overseas, and of course, that's what's really causing a Lockheed to turn on his own country, and to bin Laden and all these, but they say it.
They dislike U.S. military intervention, U.S. support for corrupt regimes in the Arab world, etc.
So, I think we have a kind of a cycle here where the government is in charge of creating the demand for its own services.
All right, we'll leave it right there.
Thanks very much, Ivan.
I appreciate your time on the show today.
Thanks a lot.
Everybody, that's Ivan Ehlen from the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org, and he writes also at antiwar.com, a double standard for the ultimate penalty.
This is his most recent piece, right there in the right-hand margin on antiwar.com today, and again, independent.org, and his book, his latest book is Recarving Rushmore, Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.
