11/15/11 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and my guest is John Glazer.
He's assistant editor at antiwar.com.
And you know there wouldn't be an antiwar radio, and there wouldn't be a news.antiwar.com, and there wouldn't be an antiwar.com/blog, and there wouldn't be an antiwar.nothing if we didn't have antiwar.com/donate.
Isn't that right John?
That's correct.
And if you go to antiwar.com/donate, you will see that it's our phone drive again.
Once a quarter we got to beg for a little bit of money, so we can keep this very small, very efficient crew together, putting together the very best website ever, and that ever will be on the subject of American foreign policy.
You know, I was thinking before I got on the phone with you, with the proliferation of the internet as people's primary source of news, the truth can get out much easier than it used to.
You know, we're living in good times despite everything.
All kinds of niche interests have cropped up for people to indulge in their reading about the world.
One thing that's great about that is that the internet is the great leveler.
Everyone's allowed on the internet, and most of the content is free.
Antiwar.com is a particularly special resource.
Nowhere else on the internet or in print that I know of can you find such consistent antiwar news analysis and commentary with such precision and constancy.
The thing is, it takes a lot of work though.
It's not a hobby for you and me and the rest of us.
It's a full-time commitment that, you know, certain individuals have made.
And yes, the content's free on the internet, and that's one of the most important aspects, but it's important for people too, for those of us who support our viewpoint, to pitch in for that content to be served.
Now, we cannot keep this up without a lot of help from individual donations.
We need help from our supporters.
That's the nature of the website and of our message.
So it's really important that people go on, and there's a million ways to donate, and we make it very easy for you.
Yeah, you know, I've run across numerous times the mistaken belief or understanding or assumption that there was some billionaire named Randolph Bourne who left a giant foundation with some million-dollar, billion-dollar endowment that supports antiwar.com or something.
I guess Randolph Bourne just sounds like such a upper-crust sort of a name.
Nobody names their kid Randolph anymore or something like that.
But no, actually he died penniless of the Woodrow Wilson flu back in 1918, and he just wrote an awesome essay that we all appreciate called, War is the Health of the State, part of his unfinished essay, The State, and that's our slogan.
And so they named the legal shell around antiwar.com the Randolph Bourne Institute.
But there's no billion-dollar trust fund here.
The work that we do is based on small donations from lots of people.
That's basically how it comes down.
And I'm not trying to discourage large donations for anybody out there who has the money to make large donations, but I'm just saying I don't want people to assume that some billionaire who was born that way has got it all covered for you or something, because he doesn't.
There's no such thing.
It's true.
Yeah, and it's important to note that there isn't some giant fund from some old dead guy that might have been smart.
We've purely taken his name as a result of the ideas that he proffered, and that's what we really care about.
We care about making these ideas more available and more mainstream for people in order to, you know, change things.
And the change is desperately needed.
I mean, it's unfortunate that that word has become dirty now, because it's used by politicians who want to take advantage of ignorant voters.
But, you know, there's a lot going on.
I mean, the Obama administration is increasingly shifting America's bloody wars into the shadows and out of the realm of debate.
U.S. troops are...
We announced recently that they're surging in the Persian Gulf, even though they're exiting Iraq for the most part.
They're quietly creeping into East Africa without asking Congress's permission or anything like that.
Covert wars now with drones are just spamming the globe.
And now, of course, with this hoopla over Iran, this war with Iran is still being propagandized, and it's on every headline of late.
And so, it's really important that we're able to keep going.
It's really important that we're able to keep pushing.
And it does have an effect.
Hey, Kevin Zeese was just on CNN International at the Occupy D.C.
He's a friend of Antiwar.com for sure.
Absolutely.
He's an ally of ours.
And the message is getting out there.
I mean, 10 years ago, that was five years into Antiwar.com's existence.
I don't think many people expected a libertarian antiwar candidate such as Ron Paul to have the platform he now has.
I mean, that's an incredible development in our ideas and how much play they're getting.
And we're all over the media, and we do our best to keep up with it.
We're on Fox and Russia Today and writing other things and getting cited by other prominent people.
And it's important to try and keep that going.
It takes a lot of effort, though, and we need help from people.
We can't do it alone.
All right.
Now, tell us about Antiwar.com/donate.
You said there's a million ways to donate or something like that.
It's a rough paraphrase.
I forget.
My long-term memory is good.
Short-term, not so much.
But anyway, Antiwar.com/donate.
How can people help?
They can apply for an Antiwar.com Visa card.
Every purchase they make with that card goes to Antiwar.com.
Some portion goes to Antiwar.com.
We're supported by every purchase you make.
The same sort of thing goes on for Amazon.com purchases.
Between 6 and 15 percent of all purchases on that website, if you click the Amazon button on any Antiwar.com page before you go shopping, it's easy to do, and it's no extra cost to you, and we get a cut.
You can shop at Antiwar.
You love, of course, your Liberty stickers.
That's really important.
We have other cool merch.
And of course, it's easy to just go on Antiwar.com/donate, and we set it all up for you.
It's very easy.
You can donate by mail or over the internet, by phone.
You can call 323-512-7095, and we make it really easy for you.
All you have to do is just go to Antiwar.com/donate.
It's very, very easy.
Yep, and there's every different way to pay online that has ever been imagined, or at least hadn't been outlawed yet, or whatever is there at Antiwar.com/donate.
And again, there's the snail mail address and the phone number for Angela Keaton, who's in charge of such things, who will bend over backwards to help you out and make it easy for you to donate.
And again, we know just as well as everybody else, hey, we were the ones who warned you about what's going to happen if you waste all your money killing Arabs.
You're going to be broke, and now here we're all broke.
And so at least the people who called it ought to, you know, get a little bit.
If you have a little bit to spare in these lean times, you know, just think how much broker you'd be if we hadn't warned you.
I don't know.
You know, hey, look, Jus Romano, after all these years, is still my favorite columnist.
Look at his piece today about Iran and the Mujahedini caulk and whatever.
You can't get better information than that, and following all those hyperlinks to where they go, you know.
And our columnists are great.
Kelly Blahos is one of my favorite writers, period.
She just got recently cited in the New York Times.
It's another example of how much progress we're making.
Right.
And of course, we've got Thurger Aldi, who breaks stories based on his intelligence sources in his column on a regular basis, who cannot be missed ever.
In fact, this week is hilarious in a very sad kind of way.
Washington loses on own goal hat trick.
That one's a lot of fun.
So, yeah, again, I'm sorry.
Always do talk you right up to the break, don't I, John?
It's John Glazer.
He's assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
And we get back.
We're going to count how many wars.
It's hard to keep track.
They expand so rapidly these days and we're going to cover them a little bit, too.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Hang tight.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
Like me, that's my job there, too.
Assistant editor.
I'm also the radio guy.
Antiwar.com/radio.
Antiwar.com/blognews.antiwar.com.
Antiwar.com/nothing.
Antiwar.com/donate, especially.
It's our quarterly fun drive.
If you look at our front page, you'll see why.
There we got all the news in the whole world.
We're opposed to everybody's foreign policy, especially our own.
And we cover everybody's foreign policy to an incredible degree.
And we feature columnists.
You know, our own in-house columnists are, like we were saying before the break, definitely a cut above the rest.
Vallejos and Raimondo and Giraldi and others, Pena and Elan.
And also we feature everybody from Glenn Greenwald to Pat Buchanan, like we're doing right now at Antiwar.com.
If you're good on foreign policy, you're good on foreign policy, we want to get your views out.
And, you know, John, I really think you're right, as you were saying before.
Well, it's one of your exact words, but I think the implication was Antiwar.com has really helped broaden the antiwar movement from a partisan left wing only issue.
Not that we're excluding left wingers in any way.
All brands of liberals and leftists are welcome at Antiwar.com, as long as the foreign policy is good.
But we've also really helped show that you don't have to be Michael Moore and you don't have to be wearing tie dye to be opposed to America's imperial foreign policy.
And, you know, I think, you know, Antiwar.com, not my part, but everybody else's over all these years certainly deserve a lot of credit for that, you know.
Absolutely.
The viewpoint section is really imperative because it does, just like you say, and on the page right now, there is Patrick Buchanan, a guy from the right, and Glenn Greenwald, a self-described progressive.
I see him as a little more of a libertarian, but we have all types of people from all across the spectrum.
And that's what's really important in terms of our mission, because we care so much about this issue of U.S. foreign policy, that it's important to see past a lot of the partisan stuff that other magazines and other websites can't get past.
And we really try to bring people together.
But again, we can't do it without a lot of help.
Yeah.
And, you know, I want to give Justin credit for teaching me about the neocons back when I just thought it was the Eastern establishment ran everything or whatever.
He said, hey, look, there's this Israeli fifth column of former commies who are trying to lie us into war because that's what Ariel Sharon wants.
And I thought, wow, that's a pretty extreme interpretation of the situation that I don't understand.
But then he named all the names, all the not just the guys in the vice president's office and the Pentagon who were lying us into war, but the Kagan, Crystal, Podhoretz family network in all their various think tanks and magazines.
And and he named names and and sure warned me way in advance 2001 or whatever.
I started reading about the crystals from Raimondo's point of view.
And I think really he deserves a lot of credit just for people even knowing the word neoconservative.
I mean, a lot of people eventually came out in other ways, but I think he certainly helped popularize that the idea that, hey, there's a difference between kinds of Republicans here.
You think that they're all just Houston oil men or something, but you'd be wrong.
Look closer kind of thing as they were lying us into war.
That's really important stuff.
And of course, we're out of the curve on every one of these wars now.
Like people wouldn't believe me if I told them that we got 14 wars going on, John.
But why don't you take them off for us here?
Let's see if I can handle that.
You start to lose count.
But if we measure war in terms of international aggression, whether it's through proxies or with our military, yeah, we do have quite a bit on our plate.
Of course, there's Afghanistan.
That's the one that everyone knows is going on.
The surge is still in full force.
There's over 100,000 troops there, plus almost 100,000 contractors.
It's a huge waste of money and life.
We're paying Afghan thugs as police forces, local police forces.
Those thugs have committed all kinds of widespread human rights abuses.
And that's part of our sort of war there.
Then add on the night raids, which have tripled under Obama and consistently result in detentions of civilians and dead civilians as well.
I was just reading last night, and I blogged about it as well, the human rights lawyer, the attorney that you spoke to not long ago, her name is Daphne Aviatar.
For human rights first, she just was investigating further Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan.
It's Obama's new Guantanamo, except her quote that I used in the blog is that it's worse than Guantanamo, because they have less rights.
So that's another part of our Afghanistan war.
Of course, you can't talk about the Afghan war without talking about the war in Pakistan, where we fund a corrupt military dictatorship.
But we got drones flying over the northwest frontier province, which by some estimates kill about 10 civilians for every one militant that is killed.
That's how the war is going on.
We can move along to Yemen.
Yeah, Yemen is a good spot.
Saleh, the president of Yemen, we've started to talk down and try to have him step down.
But it doesn't look like his promises to step down are any different than the previous ones.
And in fact, we're still supporting his regime in a technical sense, and we're asking for his deputy, Hadi is his last name, to replace him.
And they were all full of praise for his cooperation in the murder of al-Awlaki and his child.
That's correct.
He's a good partner in the war on terror, they said.
But the drone war is in full force there.
There's also a covert war with the CIA going on there.
Joint Special Operations Command is doing kill capture operations.
And so that's another war we got going on.
It's very deadly and very dangerous.
That's one of the most dangerous parts of the world.
Skip to, say, Somalia.
Okay, Somalia is Obama's new war.
He's running CIA black sites as prisons there and supporting thuggish militias to fight al-Shabaab while conducting covert kill capture raids with Joint Special Operations Command.
The allied regimes that are allied towards the United States, and by allied, I mean we bribe dictators to do what we say.
That's going on in Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and other places in the area.
We're sending drones to Uganda, and we just sent 100 troops, combat troops to Uganda and surrounding countries.
And we got to fight Boko Haram in Nigeria now, too, huh?
Yes.
So it's not just the Lord's Resistance Army in the Uganda area, it's also Boko Haram in the Nigeria area.
Don't forget the war for Al-Qaeda in Libya.
War for Al-Qaeda in Libya, that's exactly right.
They just raised a flag in Benghazi that was an al-Qaeda flag.
It was for their benefit.
One of the al-Qaeda people in the Maghreb came out the other day and told media sources that the U.S. war there was a benefit to them.
So great job there.
We talked about the war in Syria.
That's one of ours.
I think you can go ahead and add your list.
Syria is another thing that we should be really worried about.
We don't want to get more involved than we are, certainly.
And people shouldn't kid themselves about Iraq, too.
Yes, we're drawing down significantly the amount of troops that we have there, but the withdrawal causes lots of new problems, or should I say old problems, because we're just surging our permanent presence in various stations around the Gulf.
And that's what sort of led to the blowback that we're fighting now and going over there and creating more of it.
Then south of the border, let's say.
We've got the proxy war going on in Colombia, where we support a corrupt military regime, and the military themselves have committed widespread human rights abuses.
We're supporting right-wing paramilitaries there to fight against left-wing FARC guerrillas, all in the name of the drug war.
Drug war, of course, is also going on in Mexico, where we support the Mexican government, who is basically trying to do martial law in order to quell the drug war, but we're just making it worse.
And we have connections to drug kingpins all over the place, like in Honduras, and things are just getting really bad all over that region.
So we can go on and on like this, and this is the real problem, that there's no instance in the world where the United States, the leadership in the United States doesn't feel that they have the obligation and the right to get involved.
And that's the real problem.
We have to change that dialogue.
We have to change the notion in American politics that everywhere and everything is U.S. jurisdiction.
We need to get rid of that mindset.
Yep.
All right.
Thanks, John, for the part you play in it.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's John Glazer, news.antiwar.com, antiwar.com/blog, and this week, slash donate.
See y'all tomorrow.