All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
First guest on the show today is Karen Greenberg.
She's the executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security, the author of The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First 100 Days, and editor of The Torture Debate in America.
She's got a new piece at tomdispatch.com.
Of course, it's also running under Tom's name at antiwar.com, Tom Englehart's name.
It's called Intolerance R Us.
Welcome to the show, Karen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Well, appreciate you joining us here today.
This is a very important subject to me.
I think especially, although I don't think this really comes up in your article, but I think because of the continuing economic troubles, which I think are going to be lasting a while, I think it's very important that people take on demagoguery and make sure that if people really got to be that angry, they point their fingers up at people with real power instead of turning on the weak and minorities and scapegoats and things like that.
America's got a bad history, that kind of thing.
And I think basically what you're doing is sort of inoculation against that by saying, well, let's get this straight again.
Now, what exactly is it about Muslims that we're all supposed to hate so much?
And what's so politically correct about this bigotry?
You talk about how it's supposedly too politically incorrect in America to hate Muslims.
But I thought that was the most politically correct kind of bigotry there is of all now.
Yeah.
I mean, certainly it's you can't hate black people in polite company.
Right.
But you can hate Muslims.
It seems to be, you know, the fad.
And what I guess what I was trying to point out is that the public articulation of sort of the right to not really respect the Muslim religion is growing.
And it just sort of concerns me that it's growing and nobody's necessarily noticing somehow.
And it's complicated because the idea of jihad has become a kind of catch all for people who are, as you say, angry about a variety of things.
And it could be the economic downturn.
It could be American foreign policy.
It could be something personal.
But there aren't a lot of outlets that people are attracting to.
And so they might attract to whatever their vision of jihadi style violence is.
But that has nothing to do with religion.
And it is sort of beside the point to say, you know, well, it's a religion that counsels violence and to hold the religion accountable for sort of a hijacking, not just of the religion, because I don't know how much of the religion's been hijacked, but just of the association of the word jihad that's been hijacked.
So it's a complicated issue, but I think one we should not be ignoring.
Well, you know, my friend Anthony Gregory pointed out, in fact, he'll be on the show to talk about the occupation of Saudi Arabia and the blockade.
And it's really wrote an article reviewing George Gordon's book about the blockade of Iraq during the 1990s, which had a lot to do with how we were attacked in the first place, coincidentally.
But he was pointing out to me that when George Bush was in power, he would say, look, we're not at war with Islam.
They're people just like us.
We're at war with this this loose network of crazy terrorists who pretend to be Islamic, but really they're evil and whatever.
But when he was gone and hey, he waged war, killed more than a million Muslims at the same time he was saying that.
But at least that mattered, apparently, to American public opinion, because once he was gone, it was like the lid taken off the pot and it was allowed to just boil over on the right that now they don't have their highest leader telling them to not be like this.
And so now they're just going for it.
Seems like I think that's a really smart point and something, at least for me, quite unanticipated.
Somehow there was an idea that with a Democratic, somewhat progressive president, at least it was not in my sense that there would be a renewed sense of untethered bigotry and racism.
And it's just astonishing.
And what's most astonishing is how just blindsided some of us were by it and are by it.
Well, you know, part of it, too, is that when September 11th happened, they lied and they said, look, you all saw it on TV.
It all came out of the clear blue sky.
The only reason anybody would do that is because they were promised virgins in heaven to attack things that are good and true and beautiful, like the USA.
And so therefore, hey, we're only on the defense here against this terrible, completely unreasonable, un-understandable evil coming at us again out of the clear blue sky.
It's like on the TV pictures, you know?
Right.
I mean, I think that the other side of that is that there are people who wish us harm, whether it's, you know, the United States or individuals in the United States government or, you know, whoever.
And you want to have your eyes focused very, in a very kind of cold, rational way on those who have the capacity, as well as the intent, to bring harm along the lines of a terrorist attack.
And somehow I feel that focusing on this racist and bigoted way of viewing the world is not going to be helpful in helping us make some very hard and cold decisions about how we do need to protect ourselves.
And I do think that protecting the institutions of civil society, which are encased in civil discourse, is fundamental to protecting ourselves, whether we see it or not, as a society in general.
So there are a whole bunch of worries here.
It's not just some kind of theoretical conversation.
Oh, we should just be nice to intolerant of all people.
It's that we need to be nice and tolerant so that we are not blinded by our hatred to think that's which may harm us.
And then we just miss what's actually going on.
And that's a huge issue now.
And, you know, you get so focused on what you're sure the evil is and what you're sure is going to harm you.
And then all of a sudden you realize, oh my god, we weren't paying attention to what we should have been paying attention to, whatever that is.
Well, you know, Robert Pape in his book says that here's what Islam has to do with our war.
It's the differentness between the occupiers and the occupiees, the different language, different race, predominantly different religious beliefs, makes it a lot easier for the very worst crazies, you know, those who would recruit suicide bombers, for example, to get away with portraying the invasion as an attempt to completely remake their society, destroy their most core beliefs, and those kinds of things.
Not only will they kill you, but they'll convert your daughter to Christianity.
Go blow yourself up and get them, kind of thing.
And there's a breaking story today that mob kills eight UN workers in Afghanistan after a sermon that referenced the burning of the Quran in the United States.
And so you could see how, you know, at the National Review they would just say, see, it's all about Islam or whatever.
But the point being that here's their country is occupied by combat forces killing people, and they're white Christians from across the world.
They're, you know, as alien to them as those people are to us, you know, mostly.
And so then when they hear something like that, that's kind of the outrage, the final straw that makes something terrible happen.
Like they went and killed eight Filipino UN workers just, you know, in lynch mob fashion.
But it's not Islam, it's the degree of oppression perceived by the people doing these terrible things.
Yeah, and the stakes are so high.
And so therefore, you know, it's sort of hatred on both sides.
You know, who can make the worst narrative, victim narrative?
And how do we deal with that?
And it's almost like you need a timeout.
Like, can we just have a timeout for a little while before all these passions get heated?
And is there anybody, you know, trustworthy to talk about this any recognized leader or group of people that are and there isn't, you know, it's sort of like whoever it is, it has a vested interest one way or another.
And, and people know that.
And yes, you know, these stories prey on a kind of partisanship, mingled with ignorance.
But, but the real issue here is that whatever the story is, whatever being fun, to whoever the consumer audience is, whether it's people prone to violence, or people on in the national security arena, or the global security arena, the point is, there's, it's very hard to be able to assess facts and not think that things are just being spun.
And that's the world we live in right now.
And it's completely destructive.
Right?
Yeah, everybody's floating in space.
Nobody even agrees on what the words mean that we use.
And, you know, when we get back from this break, we're talking with Karen J. Greenberg has this new piece at Tom dispatch intolerance are us, we're gonna talk a little bit more about the specifics of some of these very powerful people using this twisted interpretation of what's going on here.
This baseless interpretation to make things much worse for all of us.
It's anti war radio.
We'll be right back.
All right, welcome back to the show.
Y'all.
It's anti war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Karen J. Greenberg.
She wrote this piece America's growing intolerance.
How enemy creep is Guantanamo Ising America.
It's at Tom dispatch.com.
And of course, under Tom Englehart's name at anti war.com as well.
And I guess there's one more thing outside of you have more of a domestic focus in your article.
But there's one more thing outside of that, outside of your article, I'd like to mention in this context, which is the word Libya, which seems to be argued.
You know, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, when the collateral murder, so called video came out, said, well, that's looking at war through a soda straw.
And it's you don't really have the ability to see the whole context that matters and whatever.
Well, that's what seems like to me is going on here with this Libya thing where everybody's pretending this is a big Berlin airlift of humanity and wonderfulness when in fact, it's America killing people in another Sunni Arab country, a Sunni Muslim Arab country in the Middle East.
And as far as the narrative of Osama bin Laden goes, we couldn't do a worse thing to make their argument about what we're up to and that they're the ones fighting on the defensive against us seem correct.
And yet, because of the I would call it outright lie that Islam is the motivation for the war against us, rather than its reaction to our occupation and support for dictatorships, etc. in the region.
We continue to make these wrong choices because we're not taking the actual facts into account, right?
Because we have this, this myth instead, which is so much easier, which is bad, scary, Muslim, funny hat and weird language and whatever.
Yeah, well, you've packed a lot in there.
So let me try to respond to part of it, which is sorry.
No, that's okay.
I never consider it a deterrent, but I do consider it a deterrent.
Okay, I never consider it a deterrent, that, you know, it fits Osama bin Laden's narrative, meaning that it's sort of you want to put that aside.
Because whether we do or we don't, that's not a reason to do something or not do something, at least in my opinion, you know, I mean, however, I think that the issue is Libya is so complicated, because of the humanitarian issues have been that that's been raised.
In other words, the President saying and his advisors that we did this, you know, for humanitarian reasons.
And, you know, there are a couple of things to think about on this one is that in the in the past, you know, intervening in, in a civil war or war inside a country has been something that the international community used to be quite loathe to do.
And so do we cross that with Rwanda across that bridge, but it's, this is a really hard call.
The real issue here is the United States and what the United States is doing there and what its interests are.
And to my point earlier, how we really need to protect ourselves.
And I guess what Gates has gone on record saying is that he didn't think it was a strategic threat to the United States.
And so this is a different form of, you know, humanitarianism and probably something that really should be the UN if it's going to be done.
Having said that, you know, the issue of using the humanitarian reasons to use American power and warfare, this is not new to Libya in recent months.
I mean, this is how the discussion of the predator missile has been contextualized.
The idea that we use the predator until we can kill more strategically, and therefore we should use that and it's humane because we don't have to send our soldiers in and we won't have the kind of collateral damage that we originally had with the predator.
Almost, you know, almost everyone disagrees with me on this and supports the use of the predator.
For me, this is all part of the same thing that the United States military has a blank check to do what it wants.
And now we use the name of humanitarianism, just like in the past, we use democracy, we're spreading democracy as sort of catchall for how can you disagree with that.
So, you know, I find it very discomforting, no matter which side of the political spectrum you sit on when you start to think about these things in terms of the cost, both in terms of American reputation, which you've talked about, but in terms of forget our reputation, what about our sense of self and who we are?
So, which of course is tied to our reputation, but I think you understand what I'm getting at here.
And I, again, I think it's quite worrisome.
Right.
Well, and you talked about before where, you know, kind of the unreality of so much of the argument, it sort of makes it a real uphill battle where we have to get our definitions agreed upon before we can even really have a discussion, that kind of thing.
And as you point out in your article, I mean, there are major consequences because we haven't really settled this after all this time.
And we've been at war now for a decade since September 11th, almost.
And, you know, your article is really about how this kind of, you know, whatever, however you want to characterize it, understanding of what we're up against has led to, you know, severe damage to what used to be considered the most basic definitions of the American way, like, you know, brutality and fair trials and these kinds of things.
And we're scared.
And we have yet to have a president, either George Bush or Barack Obama, who has found a way or even has cared to calm the American people down and let them know that they live in a world where there are risks, but the risks are manageable.
And there's no sense of that coming out of Washington or anywhere else for that matter.
And fear has justified a lot of, not just foreign policy, but domestic policy.
And that's going to happen forever until somebody's able to turn that corner.
And as it is politically inadvisable to turn that corner, you're not going to get somebody who wants a second term in office to do it.
And that's assuming that he would even embrace that, which he might not.
But this is all about very, very poor leadership in the sense of not articulating some of the issues as the presidents, these past two presidents have done, but in the sense of really owning the enterprise and thinking about it in a broad, broad terms rather than very, very narrow terms.
And that's going to take an extraordinary kind of individual or group of individuals, and they're not on the horizon.
And I'm not just, you know, this is not just about the great man or woman theory of history.
This has to do with stepping up to the plate.
And we're not.
We're dealing with details.
We're dealing with pettiness.
We're allowing to ourselves to live inside of a discourse of hatred.
And this is not, it's not a productive way forward.
And so that's what we're seeing both internationally in terms of what you've raised and domestically in terms of what my article pointed to.
Well, can you talk a little bit about this Judge Kaplan and his decision in the Ghailani case?
Sure.
It's complicated in the following way in that Judge Kaplan began...
Well, and I'm sorry, because we don't have very much time.
No, I'll do it in 30 seconds.
He began the trial famously by excluding the government's chief witness on the grounds that the government had found him by torturing Ghailani.
And therefore, that evidence could not be introduced in court because it violated constitutional law.
Whether he knew it or not, that contributed to the fact that Mr. Ghailani was acquitted on all of the murder charges and 283 of 284 charges.
And so that's sort of what happened with with Kaplan who sent Ghailani to prison for life without parole.
And as you cite in the article, he cited revenge as one of the reasons why all of this was OK.
All right.
I'm sorry we're all out of time, but I highly recommend everybody go check out this great article.
Intolerance R Us.
It's at TomDispatch.com and under Tom Englehart's name at Antiwar.com as well.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thanks, Pat.
