07/31/09 – Jeremy Scahill – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, now, there's a website.
It's called RebelReports.com.
That's the new website.
I think it's a pretty new website.
Of Jeremy Scahill.
He obviously, as you well know, is the author of Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, and is a frequent contributor to The Nation, to Democracy Now!
, and has contributed to TV news and been interviewed all over the world, and on every channel, of course.
Welcome back to the show, Jeremy.
How are you?
Good to be with you, Scott.
It's very good to have you here.
Let me make sure I got you turned up nice and loud there.
So, I really like this blog.
I've been reading through it the last few weeks.
How long has this been here?
It is new, right?
Oh, yeah.
I started it, I don't know, I guess it's a few months ago.
I kind of consider it still just something that I pass around to my friends and colleagues.
I haven't really done anything to try to put it out there.
It's still relatively, not underground, but I'm just kind of informally sending it around to people.
Well, if I was to do your bio right, what would I say?
Are you right for The Nation, and you appear on Democracy Now!
, basically?
You know, it's interesting, Scott, and you're in a unique position to relate to this.
During the 90s, when Clinton was president, I couldn't, for the life of me, get published in any liberal magazines or outlets purporting to be left magazines, because I was reporting on the ground from the other side of the barrel of a gun that Bill Clinton had pointed at the rest of the world, Iraq, Yugoslavia, elsewhere.
And then when Bush came into power, and I was reporting about a Republican company, Blackwater, that was a major funder of the Republican machine, and was fighting in what many liberals consider to be a Republican war.
I never considered it to be just a Republican war.
All of a sudden, I became very popular, and I could write for these magazines, and I'd get invited on the talk shows, etc.
Well, lo and behold, a Democrat's back in the White House, and I've gone back to being the lonely guy who contributes to Common Dreams, Anti-War, Alternet.
And I started my own site, because it's very difficult to get published in much of the establishment liberal media these days, if you're critical of the Democrats.
So I guess you could just say independent report.
You'll always be welcome at AntiWar.com.
We don't fall for that left-right flip-flop stuff, as I know you don't either.
Well, you know, I started working with AntiWar.com over the war in Yugoslavia, and I was very familiar with Justin Raimondo's work, and was really appreciative that AntiWar.com sort of emerged as a voice in the wilderness to really home in on this notion of military humanism or cruise missile liberals.
And I started working with AntiWar.com very soon after the site launched.
Well, you know, I had your colleague Eric Stoner on the show yesterday, and one of the things we were talking about is the consequences, I guess, for the anti-war movement of having the Democrats elected.
Clearly they're not—well, I don't know how clear we can debate that, if you want.
It doesn't seem like the wars are wrapping up very fast anyway, and yet the anti-war movement seems to have really suffered as the result of the Democrats being in power.
What you're talking about as far as how easy or hard it is for you to write for some of these left-wing journals you used to write for in the Bush years is one symptom of that, I guess.
You know, what I think—one lesson that I hope that people in this country, in the United States, finally learn is that we don't actually have, particularly when it comes to foreign policy, we don't actually have two parties.
There's no such thing as an opposition party with any kind of substantial representation in the Congress.
I mean, you look at somebody like Russ Feingold, who is about as good as you can get in the Senate.
I just interviewed him last week and did a story called The White House is Whistling Past the Afghan Graveyard, and you have Russ Feingold being the only Democratic senator—this is amazing— the only Democratic senator that voted against the last round of funding for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the only U.S. senator from the Democrats.
One Republican voted against it, and Bernie Sanders, independent from Vermont.
But Feingold was the only Democrat.
And I talked to him about why he was standing up in opposition to the Afghan war, but then at the end of the interview, I was actually asking him, what do you say to people who voted for you, based on the fact that you stand up against warrantless wiretapping, against the expansion of these wars, against the violations of habeas corpus, against the expansion of U.S. prisons at Bagram and elsewhere?
Basically everything that Obama is going ahead with, that were Bush-era policies, you stood against.
So what do you tell your voters who say, why on earth is Russ Feingold running as a Democrat when he stands against everything, basically, that this president is doing?
And, you know, Feingold doesn't really have a good answer.
He says, well, I think I play a good role, a role that's challenging the president, and I think it makes the president better.
That's about as good of a line as we can get out of the Democrats, and quite frankly, it's not a very good line.
In fact, I mean, it sounds like what he's really saying is, you know, I'm helping Obama get away with it by providing a little bit of loyal opposition out here and trying to look credible doing it.
Well, I mean, I give people like Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich a lot of credit for the stance that they take.
The issue, though, when I talked to Kucinich about this last year at the Democratic National Convention, I said, Dennis, why do you stay with the Democratic Party?
Why don't you run as a third-party candidate?
Why don't you link up with libertarians and actual left anti-war people?
Because there'd be a tremendous amount of interest in Dennis Kucinich running as a third-party candidate.
He said, because I've cast my lot with the Democrats, and I'm a Democrat.
You know, I think that the reality is that you've got about 30 solid Democrats that are generally going to vote against the war in the House.
You've got lonely old Russ Feingold in the Senate, and then you have no analysis about what it would actually take to change U.S. politics, which is to break this corporate-funded one-party system in this country.
No one wants to talk about that, certainly not on the left anymore.
And I think what's interesting for the next round of elections is the phenomenon of, I think the libertarian movement, for all of its dysfunction and wackiness and all that stuff, is actually the place to watch for some sort of a third-party movement.
And let me tell you something, it ain't Bob Barr.
Bob Barr is not going to change U.S. politics, but you've got a lot of disaffected traditional conservatives who are anti-interventionists.
And I think that phenomenon, you have anti-war vets like Adam Krokash and others who are going to run as sort of independent Republicans.
I think it's a fascinating phenomenon that we're witnessing right now in U.S. politics, because the left was decimated by the Obama campaign.
They swallowed up and co-opted United for Peace and Justice, all of these broader liberal anti-war groups, and made them partisan operatives for the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party.
Well, and do you think they're going to make things worse as far as, I don't know, expanding into Sudan in the name of humanitarianism?
That's going to be a tough one.
I mean, you know, what's interesting, I was just reading yesterday, the U.S. envoy to Sudan was testifying on Capitol Hill and refused to say, in fact quite pointedly rejected the notion that there's genocide happening in Sudan, which is very, very interesting, and runs directly contrary to the stated position of Obama and the U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, who is a, she's a cruise missile liberal who, you know, hasn't met a humanitarian bombing she wasn't in love with.
But you have a reality where people who actually understand the situation in Sudan are saying, back off this stuff, lift the sanctions, take a different approach.
And then you have the Susan Rice, Obama version of things, which is very much the kind of Clintonian foreign policy, where I think they're very much itching to use military action.
But I think that the Obama administration is not going to use force against Sudan in his first term in office, unless there's some huge sort of Ratchak moment where they can say, oh, we need to intervene in Sudan now to save, you know, all these people.
This is an interesting, the Darfur Clause is interesting, because you have these fanatical whack-a-job right-wing evangelicals in sync with all of these cruise missile liberals just itching for action in Sudan.
You know, I don't want to be a part of any clause that Tony Perkins and James Dobson are a part of.
I don't care what it is.
Yeah, well, that's at least a good place to start.
That's a clue that something's going wrong here.
And also, you know, I like how you call them the cruise missile liberals.
These are, you know, especially you have all these Hollywood people, and this has become, you know, proof, if you're a Hollywood star, this is proof that you're political and care about stuff, is that you're trying to start a war in Sudan.
I don't know how that works out, but I guess it's really good.
It's sort of like it helps create a humanitarian fig leaf for blatant, naked imperialism, as we perceive it under the Republicans.
But, I mean, I think that, you know, all of these Hollywood actors who are so concerned about the people of Darfur, you know, and talk about starving children in Africa, should step back for one minute and say, what hell has my government unleashed on the world that I would be a much better spokesperson to try to stop than, you know, what the Sudanese government is doing, backed up by Chinese oil interests?
How about looking at the U.S. slaughter in Iraq?
How about looking at the U.S. illegal covert war in Pakistan that's killing hundreds of civilians through drone attacks?
How about looking at U.S. neoliberal economic policy that's just punishing people all over the world?
You know, they take on these causes that are sort of mainstream, George Soros-supported causes, and never touch the politics of empire in their own country, never touch the crimes of their own government.
Only people like Tim Robbins and Sean Penn, who are considered the sort of loony radicals of Hollywood, are willing to even remotely touch U.S. imperial crime.
Yeah, it's really kind of funny to hear people talk about free Tibet and no mention of Somalia, which is actually their responsibility to free and do something about, if anybody's...
Well, this is a story that's getting almost no attention, but the United States and Obama have been a major supporter of this, is really expanding the operations of AFRICOM, the U.S. African Command, and the Horn of Africa, of course, where Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea lie, that area is rich in natural resources.
It's a very strategic area of the world for the U.S. military, but also for U.S. oil interests.
I used to work with Michael Moore years ago, and we were talking about how no one ever covers Africa, and Michael used to say, if it's happening in Africa, it ain't happening, meaning the media couldn't care less about what's happening in Congo, what's happening in Somalia.
No one pays attention to it.
The U.S. military has quietly been building up this neocolonial military force on the African continent that is ultimately representing a reemergence of colonialism under the guise of military humanism.
That's the only way you could put it.
Yeah, and I don't think that's hyperbole at all.
I mean, it was just in the news last week, they're threatening Eritrea, the one place there where they don't have bases yet, I guess.
Right, I mean, Djibouti is where the big U.S. military presence is in the east of Africa.
You had the flare-up recently with the Somalis who briefly took over a U.S. vessel, the Alabama, which is interestingly owned by the Maersk shipping company, which is the largest shipping contractor with the United States Department of Defense.
So these Somali kids end up on a ship that's owned by the Pentagon's largest contractor when it comes to shipping vessels around the world, and then Obama sends in U.S. Navy SEALs and they snipe these guys, then they take one of these kids back to the United States, who by some reports is as young as 15 years old, and they're trying him as an adult in federal court in the United States.
That was the only coverage we had of Africa in the corporate media, because it was a sensational story about Somali pirates, when in reality the United States, going back to the early 1990s, when Clinton sent in the Army Rangers to Mogadishu and 13 of them were killed, Black Hawk Down incident, when they tried to take Somalia and failed, the U.S. has devastated Somalia economically and at times militarily, and the only mention of it is Somali pirates.
No one talks about the nuclear dumping.
No one talks about the pollution of their waters.
No one talks about the root causes of young Somalis taking over these vessels.
They only portray it as a bunch of, it's like a banana republic over there, with no context of the U.S. role.
Right, exactly.
I mean, and especially right now when they're backing the people that they used the Ethiopian Army to overthrow in Christmas 2006, this was the start of the most recent part of overt American involvement there anyway, and after the Ethiopians got licked by the guys that our government was trying to overthrow there, now we're backing them against the crazies who are the so-called Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab guys, who are even worse than the ones we overthrew in the first place.
I mean, this is a classic part of U.S. history.
George W. Bush Johnson really, I think, wrote the definitive book on it about blowback, where the United States, in the classic example, of course, is Afghanistan, where you have Robert Gates, who is now Obama's defense secretary, was one of the key people in the Reagan administration facilitating the smuggling of weapons to Osama bin Laden's friends in Afghanistan, and now Gates is the one in charge of supposedly the war against Osama bin Laden and his associates.
I mean, you have in the Obama White House people whose careers are a metaphor for what an outright disaster U.S. foreign policy has been, not just for the world, but also for the U.S. military.
Look at how many young men and women have lost their lives in this fool's errand in Afghanistan.
Well, and they've only really just begun.
Yeah, I mean, there's going to be a surge.
Maybe we're going to have 78,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan sometime by next year, perhaps more if McChrystal and others get their way.
But the other part of this that's untouchable, The Washington Post talked about it recently, but it was no mention, is that there's a massive surge in mercenaries and other contractors in Afghanistan right now because the U.S. is expanding its military presence.
They're also expanding the contractor presence, and Obama, in the first few months of his administration, increased the number of contractors in Afghanistan by about 28% off the bat.
He's now hiring more and more armed contractors.
They're building this huge imperial fortress in Islamabad, Pakistan, that is modeled after the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which is the size of 80 football fields.
They're building another one in Peshawar.
They already have a huge outpost in Kabul.
The election is coming up, and their puppet Karzai is a bit on the ropes.
You have various powerful U.S. Democratic power players, like James Carville and others, that are now involved in the Afghan election.
Zalmay Khalilzad, who was one of the major neocon figures in the Bush administration, is now vying to be appointed the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.
I kid you not, that's the actual position that Khalilzad is trying to wrangle out of the Afghan government.
He was going to run for president and kind of read the riot act on that, so now he wants to become the unelected CEO of Afghanistan.
It's crazy.
But remember, it's a Democrat in office.
Oh, right, yeah, so everything's okay, that means.
Like when, in the 90s, when Clinton was coming to people.
Well, so, tell me this, didn't Obama run in his campaign something about the way we've been handling the contract situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is not right, and we need to replace them with a regular army or something?
You know, I spent a lot of time on the phone with various people from both the Obama and Clinton campaigns, when they were running for president, but also when Obama was in the Senate.
And on the one hand, I would give Obama some credit for at least paying attention to this issue while he was in the Senate, because almost no one would touch it for years.
And Obama actually put forth what became the Democrats' leading legislation.
However, I was very critical about the Obama legislation, because what it did is it tried to incorporate mercenaries into the broader U.S., what's called the total force.
In other words, Obama wanted to regulate the industry, not ban the linking of corporate profits to warfare.
So I think it's kind of a bait and switch.
Obama would speak critically about Blackwater, but at the same time would say, Blackwater's going to have a continued role, we just need to make some rules that they have to abide by.
What's interesting is when I reported on Obama's position in an article called Obama's Mercenary Position that AntiWar.com ran also, the Clinton campaign, which refused to talk to me about this issue for weeks, leading up to the California press, the next day issued a statement saying that Hillary Clinton has a better position than Obama on mercenaries, and that she actually, if elected president, will ban the use of Blackwater and other mercenaries.
Scott, let me tell you something that's incredibly ironic, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad and lethal.
Hillary Clinton now is guarded by these mercenaries, which she goes, and Secretary of State around the world.
So you have a situation where even the candidate who said she'd ban them, is now their boss.
That's how it works.
So yeah, Obama made some statements, Hillary Clinton said she'd ban them, the fact is Obama's expanding their use, he replaced Blackwater with a Chicago company called Triple Canopy, and now Hillary Clinton's guarded by them all over the world.
It's a Chicago, Triple Canopy is from Chicago, I like that.
Well, so let me ask you this, though.
How come they don't just use Marines as their guard?
I mean, I thought the State Department always just had Marine guards.
Is it just for the kickback?
Well, this is, I mean, as an intro, someone could do a whole history book about this.
It actually goes back to Bill Clinton.
When Jean Bertrand Aristide was restored to power in Haiti, you know, at the barrel of a U.S. gun, the Clinton administration created a program at the State Department, which is the privatization scheme within the State Department's Diplomatic Security Division, and they created something called the Worldwide Personal Protective Service.
And the idea of this was that you don't want to risk U.S. military lives guarding foreign officials for USAID, so you'll encourage private companies to bid on executive protection or security contracts, and they'll operate a small-scale bodyguard team for friendly foreign officials.
So, for instance, Aristide was guarded by a U.S. mercenary company called the Steel Foundation, which is based out of San Francisco.
In fact, they were the ones that flew him out of the country when he was overthrown for the third time a few years ago and took him to Africa.
So in 1994, Clinton created this program.
They used it widely in Bosnia and elsewhere, using companies like DynCorp and Military Professional Resources Incorporated.
They trained the Croatian military, which then turned around and carried out Operation Storm and Lightning, the single greatest ethnic cleansing of the war.
250,000 Serbs forced out of Criena.
The program continued to grow under Clinton.
Bush then put it on massive steroids and turned it into a paramilitary wing of the administration reporting directly to the Secretary of State.
It is outside of the military chain of command.
So to directly answer your question, yes, the Marines have typically done diplomatic security.
What Clinton and Bush sort of conspired over the course of their time and power to do was to create a paramilitary force that answered only to the White House and was not under the military chain of command.
So there's a couple of reasons why they do this.
One is it's a completely unaccountable force that the executive branch has ultimate authority over, supreme authority over.
Like the NSA.
Well, yeah, I mean, you could say that.
The second part of it, though, is that you are able to mask or cover up the true size of your occupation when half of your army are people from the private sector.
You can tell the American people, well, we only have 130,000 troops in Iraq.
That doesn't sound as bad as we actually have 250,000 U.S. forces there.
The reality is there are 500,000 personnel on the U.S. government payroll fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq right now, 500,000 people.
They come from 100 countries around the world and work for 600 corporations, yet no one ever talks about it.
So why does Obama do it?
Why did Bush do it?
Because they wouldn't be able to wage these wars of aggression and conquest without them.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I know that just in terms of the Army's occupation, it's a pretty small percentage of the infantry who are actually the ones sent out into the pitched battles, and there's a million men of support for every one guy actually out there fighting or what have you.
But how do those numbers break down?
And I don't know.
Obviously, I'm making those numbers up.
Do you know what the ratio is of actual armed combat people that are mercenaries versus people who are peeling potatoes or whatever?
Right.
Well, we don't know for sure because there's never been an effective accounting system.
In fact, in the recent Government Accountability Office report on it, there's all sorts of estimates, and I'll give you those in a second.
But no one ever really knows.
When I testified in front of the Congress, Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, in front of the Appropriate Committee, told me that she learned more from me talking there than she has in two years of questioning government and military officials because the fact is that they're not forthcoming with the statistics.
It's not in their interest to publish them or make them available to the public.
But the reality is that you have about 160,000 contractors in Iraq right now.
Of those, you have approximately 25,000 to 30,000 of them are armed contractors.
And that's just counting those that are on U.S. government contracts.
In other words, you don't just have contractors working for the Department of Defense or the State Department, but KBR hires its own contractors, and they're not counted in that number.
So we're in the ballpark of 25,000 to 30,000.
The other part of this that's important, though, Scott, is that what we're seeing, the Obama administration's strategy in Iraq right now is the same as Bush's when he left office.
They are trying to implement what's sort of known in military circles as the Iraqification of the occupation, meaning they're trying to get Iraqi forces to essentially do all of the blood work while the U.S. calls the shots.
And that's what this whole myth of the U.S. withdrawing from the cities is about.
You actually try to encourage the Iraqis to take more of the bullets than U.S. soldiers, but the U.S. is still running the show.
It's a classic sort of colonialist operation.
Well, tell me this.
It seems like most of the people that I talk to, Patrick Coburn and Gareth Porter, and I interviewed Ray Girard last week, talked about this, and there seems to be a consensus among my favorite experts anyway that Maliki and his coalition that he's put together is basically dependent on his position against the United States.
So thanks a lot for helping me build my army, but now from his point of view, the only way he can even maintain any legitimacy at all is by allying with all the nationalists in the country against the United States occupation.
It seems to these guys, at least the way they explain it to me, that the United States is actually going to get kicked out, not that General Petraeus wants to leave or that that was the plan all along or anything like that, but that they really are.
They've installed people in power who actually are powerful enough that they don't need us and are in fact going to insist on a total withdrawal from their country.
What do you think about that?
I recently did a public event with Patrick Coburn.
I interviewed him publicly at the Brex Forum in New York, and then I was just recently on another radio show with him, and I have tremendous respect for him.
I loved his book on Muqtada al-Sadr.
I have some minor disagreements with some of Patrick's analysis, as well as Ray Girard, who I have tremendous respect for as well.
I think that much of what you're characterizing them as saying is true.
I think that Maliki has allied himself with forces that are overtly opposed to the U.S. occupation for domestic political reasons.
He has an election that's not too far on the horizon.
He needs to not be perceived as a U.S. puppet, but I also think that the United States has allowed him to go off the ranch a bit and criticize the United States.
It's very telling that Maliki slammed the occupation in speeches in Baghdad, in interviews with the Iraqi media, and then comes to the United States in Washington and has asked a question at a gathering of U.S. policymakers and says, oh yeah, but the United States may have to stay longer than 2011, which is something I've been reporting for a very long time.
I do think that it's impossible to imagine that every single U.S. soldier is going to leave Iraq any time in the near future.
I think that they're going to keep in place what Obama said, which is a residual strike force of somewhere in the ballpark of 30,000 to 50,000 U.S. troops that can intervene at a moment.
Perhaps some of them will be positioned in Kuwait or one of the other client states of the United States in the region, and they'll be able to hammer away, and you'll have U.S. military advisers.
That is what the Iraqification of the occupation means.
But don't be under any illusion that Maliki somehow has the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people.
Polls just contradict that left and right, and I think it's going to be very fast.
I think Patrick, Ra'ed, myself, others who follow Iraq closely, we all generally are on the same page, maybe with some slight disagreements about the particulars of who Maliki is.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in a way, though, it doesn't really come down to what the people of Iraq as a whole think, in a sense.
It's what the armed political factions, or at least ones who could be separate armed political factions, are participating in the state, what compromises they're willing to come up with.
From what I understand, Muqtada al-Sadr has said, I mean, partly because he was beaten by Maliki's forces and then by ours, but he said, look, I'll go ahead and support you as long as you're insisting on withdrawal.
But if you stray from that at all, it's on again.
Things like that.
He's going to be holding the coalition together based on the promise that he's going to be a nationalist and force us out.
Right.
Let me tell you who you should have on your show, if you haven't already, who I consider to be, if not the best expert on Iraq, certainly the most experienced reporter in Iraq under the occupation.
That's Rick Rowley of Big Noise Film.
He has done incredible documentaries.
Richard Rowley from Big Noise Film, Big Noise Tactical Media.
He has an incredible understanding of all of the armed factions in Iraq, has traveled with them, been embedded with them, and has been a true media hero.
He even picks up his work in the States because he does it for Al Jazeera.
And he's in Honduras right now covering the coup there.
But Rick Rowley would be the guy to have on to talk about all of these various factions and answer exactly what you're saying.
He's the mascot.
Cool.
Well, I sure appreciate that recommendation.
It's duly noted, and I'll try to act on it as fast as I can.
So let me ask you about this in the last couple of minutes here, about the assassination program and all this controversy.
You have an article questioning whether Obama is actually continuing the very same policy that the media frames as simply one of these off-the-books Dick Cheney, David Addington exercises here.
I mean, I think both things might be true.
I don't doubt for a minute.
I think we don't even know a fraction of the shady, unconstitutional, unlawful, extrajudicial conduct that was being authorized regularly by Dick Cheney.
We saw the recent report on Democracy Now!
where you had U.S. Army intelligence infiltrating Students for a Democratic Society in Tacoma, Washington, infiltrating these organizations, direct violation of posse comitatus.
You had Cy Hirsch talking about the executive assassination ring.
I think we don't even know.
We haven't even scratched the surface of what Dick Cheney was involved with.
I think the point that he was making is that these Democrats, who now express outrage that there's an assassination program, or talk about how it's somehow some nefarious thing that Bush and Cheney were doing, obviously don't want to bring up the fact that Bill Clinton signed several lethal findings, as they're called in the 1990s, to assassinate various individuals that were considered declared enemies of the United States.
The Obama administration regularly carries out Israeli-style targeted assassinations in Afghanistan and Afghanistan.
And yet you have executive orders on the books going back to the Ford administration, the Reagan administration, the Carter administration.
In fact, Oliver North wrote some of these himself, explicitly banning the assassination of individuals by U.S. intelligence forces.
So I think that in order to have a thorough investigation of the CIA assassination program, you would have to be willing to dig into the closets of Democratic power players, and I just don't see that happening.
Unfortunately, this is still being portrayed as a partisan issue, rather than the bipartisan hit squad that it's been for decades.
Well, and I'm always confused about some of this stuff, too, because I talk with the other Scott Horton, the legal expert on all these war crime statutes and all these kinds of things a lot, and there seems to be, in his perspective, a clear line between what's war crimes and what isn't, what's prosecutable and what isn't, and what's a violation of this, that, and the other statute.
But the National Security Act of 1947 says, oh, yeah, and the CIA, by the way, from time to time can do other things that the president imagines he wants them to do.
And so, basically, they've already legalized this, you know, generations ago, that that's what the CIA is for, doing things that are illegal, by definition.
That's why it's covert, because they're crimes.
Right.
I mean, look, I think that, you know, Noam Chomsky, I think I've been right about this all the time, the issue isn't whether or not it's legal.
The issue is U.S. exceptionalism.
The issue is the U.S. believing that it has the right to act militarily all over the globe whenever it pleases.
You know, legalism is only one aspect of this.
It's one that Democrats are very fond of speaking of.
But I also think there's an issue to be made of just the overall justness of it, or is this actually going to make us safer as Americans?
I think, overwhelmingly, the answer is no when it comes to both Clinton-Obama-style foreign policy and, you know, Bush-Reagan-style foreign policy.
Both of them make us a less stable, less safe nation.
All right, so there's this giant phenomenon going on.
It's as big as the 9-11 theories already, which is the birther thing.
And here's going to be the extent of my coverage of this issue is going to be in the form of a question to you, hopefully by the end of it anyway.
It seems to me like what's going on here is people know that they are getting severely screwed.
They know something is terribly wrong.
In this case, trying to externalize it and believe in a myth that, oh, I get it.
You know, this guy who's in charge now is some foreigner who's this external force against us, and that's the source of our problem.
That kind of thing is sort of the easy psychological answer.
But the real answer that everybody, left, right, libertarian, and every other kind of self-described definition that people have, the problem of what we face and what's ruining our society is empire and permanent warfare.
This is the source of our problem.
All the yellow ribbons and American flags and all those things aside, isn't it the case that birtherism or any of these other things are simply a stand-in for the corporatist empire that is tearing us down here, Jeremy?
Yeah, I mean, in short, yes.
I think the best coverage of the birthers has been from Jon Stewart and Comedy Central.
A lot of this stuff also is false nationalism.
There's white supremacy, and there's also just stupidity.
I mean, people who are up in arms, running around with their birth certificates, disrupting town hall meetings and getting endless airtime from Fox News, these people couldn't be bothered to take to the streets to protest any issue that actually affects people in this country or around the world.
And I think the Democrats and these loony birthers have something in common in that they love, love, love to find things that are completely irrelevant to the lives of the people of this country and the victims of U.S. policy around the world and make that the central focus of discussion.
And that's what this whole birther thing has been.
It's been a distraction from the fact that we don't have adequate health care in this country whatsoever, that Obama's plan is very pro-corporate.
We don't have a foreign policy that ever is about justice.
It's always about conquest.
Those are the premier issues of our day.
This birther stuff is a ridiculous movement of crazy people for the most part.
Well, but see, here's the thing.
I mean, I think there's a lot of people who you might meet in the neighborhood and on any other level but the political level you'd think they're perfectly nice people, and they're dying to believe in something like this.
There's a reason that this is catching on.
I mean, I agree with you that the people pushing the lawsuits and whatever are just a bunch of hoaxers and whatever, but there are apparently millions of people who are glomming right on to this because they see everything falling apart around them and they need a reason why, and so why not?
There's a foreign KGB agent guy running things or whatever as the explanation.
But you have to stop and step back for a minute and think of it.
How could the conspiracy have happened?
So Obama's Kenyan father had this idea to have an ad taken out in the newspaper in Honolulu to announce his birth so that one day 40-something years later his son would be elected president.
Yes, his black son born in the early 60s should be president one day.
Right, and what, push the Kenyan agenda?
What's the endgame here?
I don't get what the point is to these people.
And even if they were right, what would it do?
What does it mean?
Does it mean that Obama didn't kick John McCain's butt up and down the court in the last election?
I mean, give me a break.
That's why it's a big distraction.
I mean, it's a non-story and it's a complete distraction.
It gets sad.
I do.
I really think it's sad that these people have been given so much airtime for this cause.
But you're right, a lot of people believe it.
They also believe that his name is Barack Mohamed, you know, Obama, and he was born in Indonesia in a madrasa.
I mean, come on.
These are the people saying this stuff.
Well, see, this is what really bums me out, because here you have the greatest conspiracy theory movements ever, and they're not about banks and arms manufacturers and politicians killing people overseas, and we all call it war, and we all know exactly what it is.
It's all right in front of our faces.
Instead, it's all about silliness, and it's great anti-government spirit, but it's so misdirected.
It drives me crazy.
I mean, the fact of the matter is we have a one-party system in this country whose primary function is to serve corporate interests and extend the reach of the U.S. empire so that corporations continue to benefit.
We live in a corporatist society now.
In the Bush administration, it was sort of made naked in front of the world.
The Democrats come back in and they repair the reputation.
Mark my words, Obama is going to extend the hand of U.S. empire further than the Republicans could ever have dreamt, and he's going to do it and repair the U.S. reputation in the process, and he's going to expand the politics of empire.
It's up to independent journalists, sites like antiwar.com, shows like yours, all of us who struggle on a daily basis, whether it's a Democrat or Republican in office, to actually say that the emperor has no clothes and call it what it is and talk about empire and not be afraid to condemn it for what it is.
Well, consider your words marked, and I'm afraid that I can't disagree with you.
I think you're absolutely right, but that's going to be what it is.
But we'll certainly be keeping an eye on your journalism, everybody.
Again, that's Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
He writes for antiwar.com.
His blog is Rebel Reporters.
You can see him quite often on Democracy Now!
And, again, I want to thank you for your time on the show today.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for what you're doing.