10/23/08 – Matthew Rothschild – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, streaming live at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is Matthew Rothschild.
He's the editor of The Progressive and author of the article, concerned about NORTHCOM's new army unit.
Welcome to the show, Matt.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
It's great to have you here.
This is quite worrying about the 3rd Infantry 1st Brigade Combat Team being assigned to NORTHCOM, but first, why don't you tell us, what's NORTHCOM?
Well, that's a good question.
NORTHCOM stands for Northern Command, which is a Pentagon command structure.
They have several around the world.
I think one that people probably heard most about is CENTCOM or Central Command, which governs the Pentagon actions in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Now, we've never had a Northern Command before October 1st, 2002, when Bush implemented or established NORTHCOM, and he did so according to its website.
The command is to assign forces whenever necessary to execute missions, as ordered by the President and the Secretary of Defense, over the continental United States and Alaska and Hawaii.
So that itself should concern people, because we're supposed to have a split in the United States between law enforcement and the Army.
The Army is not supposed to be able to patrol Main Street, and yet you had this institution brought into being six years ago that seemed, in its very essence, to be violating that split.
The Posse Comitatus Act had prevented this in the long tradition of the United States.
It prevented this, including the Constitution.
So here you have this going on, and then on October 1st of this year, just a couple weeks ago, the Northern Command, NORTHCOM, got its first dedicated Army unit, and this unit is, as you mentioned, the 3rd Infantry, 1st Brigade Combat Team.
It's not just any unit, because this unit spent three of the last five years in Iraq, and it led the attack into Baghdad.
It was one of those units that fought in Fallujah.
One of its fields of expertise is counterinsurgency, so you've got to ask yourself, why is this battle-tested, war-fighting unit assigned to NORTHCOM?
That's exactly what I'm asking myself.
Now, just to be clear there, you said, I just want to reiterate, we're to understand this Northern Command, this is the same thing as the Central Command, the Pacific Command, the European Command, the New Africa Command.
This is how the Pentagon divides up the world into battle zones, and, you know, this general is the chief of, you know, we have Petraeus, I guess now, as the head of CENTCOM, replacing Fallon, and we have different generals and admirals and whoever who are the chiefs of all the different sectors of the world, and you're saying that America has never been part of that.
This is our empire dominating the rest of the world.
We don't have this here, except now we do.
Now we're living under our empire that we've been forcing on everybody else, it sounds like.
Yeah, you know, there's SOUTHCOM for Southern Command for Latin America, and in the 80s, a lot of people got to know SOUTHCOM because it was involved in trying to overthrow the Sandinistas and helping out the dictatorship in El Salvador.
So, yeah, now we have a NORTHCOM, and it's supposed to operate in the United States.
I mean, this should be appalling people.
I don't know why there aren't hearings on this, but there you have it.
Well, now, at the same time, I think it was even the same day that they passed the Military Commissions Act, which says that they could take you or me and turn us over to the military, call us enemy combatants and give us military trials.
They also passed something in the John Warner Defense Appropriations Act that, to my understanding, rewrote parts of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act.
Could you please, first of all, I guess, tell me if that's right, explain what is the Insurrection Act, the Posse Comitatus Act, and what were those changes?
And then, of course, the follow-up there is then what happened to those changes.
Sure.
You're correct.
Those changes, the Bush administration did get through on one of these Defense Appropriations Acts over the last couple of years, and it was really sweeping.
It knocked down the Insurrection Act and the Posse Comitatus Act.
These are laws that have been on the books for more than 100 years that say the military cannot be used for law enforcement here in the United States except in cases of insurrection.
Well, and isn't the Insurrection Act from the days of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington and way back?
These go way back.
The Insurrection Act was from the late 18th century, Posse Comitatus Act from the late 19th century.
And what Bush got Congress to do was to pass a bill that said the president could have troops patrolling our streets in all sorts of different circumstances, not just outright insurrection, but in response to disasters, natural disasters, epidemics.
And there was a catch-all phrase, any condition he might cite.
So this is given the president carte blanche to essentially declare martial law and send troops into the streets at his whim.
And a lot of members of Congress saw that finally and said, you know, that's not our system of government here.
We're not a ten-headed dictatorship here like there is or used to be in Latin America, and we have laws and constitutions and separations of power.
So Senator Leahy successfully this year got a bill through Congress that would repeal that change that Bush had made and basically restore the old Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act restrictions.
And Bush signed the bill, but true to form, he issued a signing statement that said he didn't feel bound by the repeal and he would take his responsibilities as commander-in-chief as more important.
So, I mean, that's one of the reasons why we should have impeached this guy a long time ago, because he doesn't operate according to our Constitution.
He doesn't, you know, either sign a bill or veto a bill.
He takes a third course, and he showed total disdain for what Congress was trying to do there.
Well, you know, the continuity of government plans, they've had different incarnations ever since the days of Ike Eisenhower.
And, you know, Nixon supposedly had all the executive orders where he could basically nationalize the economy and put troops on the street.
I remember Clinton had an executive order called, it was number 12919, Defense Emergency Preparedness, something like that.
And it basically described the blueprint for a fascist dictatorship in the name of emergency.
And yet, these are things all these presidents have had and never really put into effect.
Therefore, in case there's a nuclear war or something like that, right?
Yeah, and they didn't have a NORTHCOM either.
And Bush has his own.
He has his own National Security Presidential Directive 51, which he issued in May of 2007, which gives to himself the authority to run the whole federal government in case of some extraordinary catastrophic emergency.
But, you know, he defines catastrophic emergency pretty broadly again.
So, you know, he could basically do it today, because this National Security Presidential Directive 51 defines a catastrophic emergency as, and I'm just going to read now, any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.
So, any of those things the president could invoke.
And we are in a situation here with kind of an extraordinary situation with our economy.
So, you know, if you read that, literally, President Bush could declare a catastrophic emergency today.
And then at that point, do you have, I mean, do you, I don't know, I guess I'm calling for speculation here, how you think it would play out, but you would have the Congress basically suspended for the time being, or he would still be accountable to them at that point at all, or no?
Well, I mean, he is accountable to them right now.
Has he ever been?
I mean, you know, I need to say that I think the odds of this happening are really remote.
And I'm a poker player.
I play the odds.
And so, you know, I don't think it's likely to happen.
But the problem is it could happen.
And the pillars of this little martial law situation are already, have already been erected.
And that's the thing that's scary.
I mean, it is conceivable that he could do it and pull it off.
I would put it at, you know, less than 1% of a chance.
But when there are such anti-democratic institutions and kind of blueprints just rolled out there on the table, I think we need to take heed and demand, you know, that we get back to a democracy.
Well, you know, one thing that ought to be alarming is the governor's reaction immediately.
I believe it was unanimous.
Even Rick Perry, all the governors, signed on to this letter saying, hey, you can't just take our authority away from us like this, back when they passed this thing originally in that Defense Appropriations Act.
Yeah, they were worried that they, and properly so, that the president was seizing their powers to run their own state national guard, taking those powers away and basically federalizing the National Guard.
And they didn't want that to happen.
And so the governors asserted themselves.
One of the reasons that Leahy was able to prevail in returning the Posse Comitatus Act to where it was before.
But, you know, it's quite clear that Bush has these plans on the books in case of emergency.
And then the question is, how do you define emergency?
And that's something he defines very broadly, whether he would invoke it or not.
That's a big question.
I think the odds of that, as I said, are real small.
But why even entertain that chance?
Right.
It's pretty strange, isn't it, how the pillars of police state are being built all around us, and yet so far it's only Al-Mahri and Padilla who have been turned over to the Navy and the CIA to be tortured.
You know, they've basically left the rest of us alone.
But then there's been news that they gave a contract to Halliburton to build a bunch of empty prisons around the country.
And we have, of course, I'm sure you're probably at least getting a hold of Bamford's new book about how total information awareness never closed down.
It just moved over to NSA.
And how they're basically intercepting every signal on Earth and keeping permanent files on all of us and everything we do on the Internet and so forth.
Well, certainly our freedoms have been greatly curtailed over the last eight years.
There's no question about it.
We are not the same kind of a democracy as we were eight years ago.
And we need to fight to defend the rights that we still have and restore the rights that Bush and Cheney have taken away.
That's one of our fundamental tasks, no matter who is elected president.
We've got to stand up and defend ourselves.
Fortunately, there are some groups that do this day in and day out, like the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
And I urge people to support them and go to their website.
The ACLU, incidentally, has called this deployment of this Army unit to NORTHCOM.
It said it's possibly illegal on its face and calling for more information on that.
And I know Senator Leahy is looking into it as well.
But I would think it would be more of an outcry, and the mainstream media hasn't been picking it up either.
Well, for people, this is all because you can only get into so much detail on the radio.
That's why everybody needs to go and read your article here, Leahy concerned about NORTHCOM's new Army unit.
But can you distinguish for people who kind of get in just a general picture here, why is this different than, come on, they use the National Guard in case of a flood or in case of the L.A. riots or whatever, and this is the kind of thing.
Posse Comitatus aside, the military is operational inside America in extreme circumstances.
It always has been.
Yeah, but the governors of these states are supposed to ask the federal government in.
That's how the system is supposed to work.
It's not that the president is supposed to say, okay, I'm in charge here, I'm in charge of, you know, Louisiana, or I'm in charge of Wisconsin, and I'm going to send, you know, this little brigade in there.
I mean, so that is a huge distinction, and that's why the governors were insisting on their rights to control their own National Guard.
Well, now, when Bush nationalizes the Guard units to send them off to foreign war, the governors can't override in there?
He doesn't have to ask them for permission there, does he?
No, but, you know, I don't think so.
But this is an interesting point of politics right now.
There are groups that are trying to have the governors tell the president that the president can't take their units to fight in Iraq, for instance, or in Afghanistan.
So that's really kind of an open question.
Yeah, well, I'm always going to side on more checks and balances and separations of power and power flowing from out here toward D.C. rather than the other way around, if possible.
Yeah, well, as I am, there's a really good group that's doing work on that, and so it's important for people to see what can be done.
It's called the Liberty Tree Foundation.
The Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, that's one of their causes to get states to try to bring their National Guards home.
That's very interesting, and, you know, that gets to the kind of broad-based appeal, I think, that is really the most important.
I like to talk with Glenn Greenwald often on this show about what we call the new realignment in trying to get the very most important issues, the Bill of Rights, separations of powers, basic constitutional things like, for example, presidents can't do these signing statements like you talked about, they can't just override the Fourth Amendment by saying that they're the commander-in-chief, and ending the foreign wars.
If we can put these as the most important issues, that we ought to be able to put together a really broad coalition of leftists, paleoconservatives, libertarians, liberals, just it's a matter of priorities.
You know what I mean?
There are certain issues that people aren't ever going to be able to agree on, but we ought to be able to agree on having a limited constitutional republic and all come together for that, right?
Yeah, you're absolutely right about this civil liberties issue going across ideological categories.
I mean, Bob Barr, who was a republican from Georgia and now is running as a libertarian, was a member of the ACLU and is very strong on these civil liberties issues, probably stronger than Obama is.
And I know Ralph Nader has spoken about it, Cynthia McKinney has, but you can draw people across the spectrum here to defend our civil liberties.
And it's not just those of us on the progressive side.
I mean, few people, except the most statist-oriented people, want the cops to come into your house without showing you a warrant, or when you're not home.
But they can do that under the Patriot Act.
They can come in, they could have a warrant, but they know you're not there and they can go crashing through.
And also, as we saw with the case of Jose Padilla, they could pick you up at O'Hare Airport even if you're a U.S. citizen and throw you in a military brig for two years.
Yeah, or until they feel like it.
And in fact, they only let him go because it was still illegal at the time what they were doing to him.
Congress has since legalized the Padilla treatment, haven't they?
Well, that was the appalling thing about the Military Commissions Act, that they've basically told the Bush administration what it's been doing all along, and the same thing with the FISA bill.
The illegal apprehending of people, the illegal spying on people got retroactive approval from Congress.
And now, on the realignment thing there, as far as the argument that, hey, the states have priority over their guard units for, say, for example, when there's a horrible flood in Louisiana or wildfires in California, that that's what these units are for.
They're to serve the governors and the legislatures of the several states, not to serve the empire fighting over in Iraq.
That's the kind of argument that ought to really sound good to conservative ears as well.
Yeah, and I'd encourage listeners to go to bringtheguardhome.org, and you can find out a lot of information on this effort to get the National Guard even more under the control of governors and less under the control of the President of the United States.
Yeah.
Wow, that's great.
I hadn't heard of that one.
I'll certainly look that up.
Now, I wanted to ask you about the conventions.
Did you attend the Republican and Democratic conventions in August?
You know, obviously there were grotesque violations of civil liberties there, including the arrest of Amy Goodman and two of her producers there at St. Paul.
But an interesting thing about what happened in St. Paul is, to bring the conversation around to where we started, NORTHCOM was involved in sharing intelligence and being in on the joint task forces that were involved in controlling St. Paul.
You had NORTHCOM in on that conversation.
And why NORTHCOM thought it needed to participate in, you know, something that police have done forever and a day, which is patrol conventions, beyond me.
Yeah, I have to say, you know, I wasn't able to go, but just from watching the clips of Amy Goodman being arrested and some of the footage of the goons marching in the streets, it really was shocking to see that during a convention where they're picking the president in the United States of America.
And yet it looked like some kind of nightmare footage of the Soviet Union or something from when I was a kid.
The thing is, it wasn't exceptional.
That's the sad thing.
I mean, you can remember back to the mass arrest at the Republican convention in New York in 2004 and the free trade agreement protest down in Miami, where you had just police rounding people up randomly and denying them the ability to go to a protest, a nonviolent protest.
And, you know, these things have been happening repeatedly in this country.
And, you know, at some point we need to rise up and defend our rights here or we won't have any rights.
Yeah.
Well, I refuse to get used to it.
And I appreciate that you don't either.
Can you tell me this?
Do you really think that there's any reason to believe that Barack Obama will not have signing statements, that he'll even go back and repeal some of this stuff or try to undo some of the things that George Bush has done in terms of centering power in the presidency over the last few years?
Well, he said at one point in the last couple of months that he'd have his attorney general as one of the first acts in that office examine every executive order that Bush has issued to see whether they could be repealed if they're infringing on civil liberties.
That's what he said.
I don't know whether he was good.
You know, I'm skeptical that he would use some of his political capital right off the bat to defend our civil liberties when he'd be attacked right away for doing them.
But, you know, Fox and all these people who made, you know, a human pinata out of Bill Ayers.
And so that worries me that Obama might backtrack on that.
At The Progressive Magazine, you're the top editor there, right?
Yeah, I'm the editor here.
I've been here 25 years.
I've been the editor for the last 14.
Oh, there you go.
And so does your magazine have an official position on the wars?
Are you guys demanding unconditional withdrawal immediately?
You know, we've been against this Iraq war from the very beginning and have been urging a withdrawal for the longest time.
And we're very skeptical about what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan, and were from the very start there, too.
In fact, we've had Howard Zinn writing recently about what a quagmire that is and this kind of military overreaction that we've been seeing in the papers, you know, bombing civilians time and time again.
It's just not the way to prevail there and not the model for intervening.
And so, yeah, we've been clear on that.
We've been clear we're on for impeachment long before almost anybody else as well.
Good for you.
Yeah, impeachment, that's an important thing.
I remember really before learning about real politics in the world, I learned about the politics of the founding fathers and the creation of the Constitution.
And apparently back when they were deciding whether to ratify that thing or not, the power of the Congress to impeach and remove the president and any other executive officers played quite strongly in their debate about whether they were going to allow this government to exist at all.
Yeah, and it'll go down in history as a terrible abdication of constitutional duty that the House of Representatives did not put Bush and Cheney in the dock on impeachment charges because Lord knows what they've done in the last eight years has been exactly what the founders had the impeachment clause in there for when a president starts acting like a king.
And that's what Bush has been doing.
All right, listen, I want to thank you very much for coming on the show today.
It's been good.
Hey, Scott, my pleasure, anytime.
All right, folks, that's Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive.
That's progressive.org.
And also he mentioned BringTheGuardHome.org and the Liberty Tree Foundation about re-decentralizing power over the National Guard units.
That's some interesting stuff.
This is Antiwar Radio.
We're not quite done yet.
Hang around.