All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Santat War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Appreciate y'all tuning in today.
Our next guest is the great Nat Hentoff, nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.
He's a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
Welcome back to the show, Nat.
How are you doing?
Well, as good as the news allows, which isn't very good, but I have to write about it, so that's good.
Well, believe me, it is good.
I figured this out when I was a little kid.
If you don't have people who take responsibility for calling out the abuses of power, they just don't get called out.
If there's no ACLU lawyers filing suits, they don't get filed.
If there's no Nat Hentoff writing at Cato, it doesn't get written.
Well, as a matter of fact, Dick Cheney has just demanded that the Attorney General tell him which of the seven lawyers he has on his staff now actually committed the crime of being representatives of people held under conditions that are outside the Constitution at Guantanamo.
Indeed.
Well, in fact, let's go ahead and get into that and be specific.
You're talking about this new ad put out by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol from Keep America Safe, basically accusing Eric Holder of hiring the, quote, Al-Qaeda 7 to work in the Justice Department.
But who are the Al-Qaeda 7?
Are they Al-Qaeda agents?
No, I know some of them.
They are lawyers, some of them at the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, others at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was the key figure in organizing lawyers to go down to Guantanamo.
And also among them are the partners in Washington law firms, conservative law firms, who are felt impelled by the Constitution to go down also and help try to give representation to those of our prisoners there.
They like to call them detainees, who for a long time were not allowed even lawyers.
They had military representatives.
And for a long time, when all these lawyers came down that are now being accused of no patriotism, those prisoners were allowed, I mean, testimony was used against them that was extracted by torture by our people there.
So Bill Kristol just astonishes me.
How could he possibly get involved with this kind of thing?
But I guess he hasn't read the Constitution lately.
Yeah, well, or, you know, just doesn't care about it.
So in other words, these lawyers, this Al-Qaeda Seven, they're basically just as guilty as the Lackawanna Six, the Detroit Five, the Miami Seven.
That is not at all.
Exactly.
And I'm writing, happen to be writing now about another event that is going to absolve this president, who is continuing a lot of the Bush-Cheney legacy to distort the Constitution and make our rule of law a mockery around the world, and that is the exoneration by the Justice Department of John Yoo, who was the torturer, as you know.
The torture memos, oh, they were signed by Jay Bybee, who's now a life-tenured federal appellate judge, but John Yoo wrote them, and we've now been told by the Office, not the Office of Professional Responsibility, really.
They originally, after four years, found that John Yoo had committed unprofessional conduct and had been in reckless disregard of his duty to exercise independent justice, judgment, etc.
But then a veteran in the Justice Department, John Margolis, who's apparently very expert at cloaking reality, said, oh, no, no, we can't charge you and Bybee with that.
All they did was exercise poor judgment.
So that means that so far we have not had any bipartisan independent committee in Congress or ex-Congress, like the 9-11 Commission, with the power, the authority to subpoena and look into the crimes committed not only by Bush and Cheney, but by all these other people like David Addington, etc., because they violated American laws, our torture laws, they violated international agreements we signed.
And what this does is, I mean, this Yoo exoneration, among other reluctances by the President to go back.
He wants to look forward.
So what we've done is given future presidents, unless we finally do have a real investigation, the authority to just forget the Constitution.
And finally, Richard Nixon is validated.
You probably remember, he used to say, if the President doesn't, it's legal.
And that's how we've been operating under Bush and Cheney and now Barack Obama.
Right.
It's all about the President said, well, Abraham Lincoln did it.
Well, Harry Truman did it.
Well, George W. Bush did it.
So now it's all right.
When Abraham Lincoln did it, he at last was no longer here when the Supreme Court finally decided that he had violated the Constitution and not only suspended habeas corpus, but he had people arrested because they didn't agree with him about the Civil War.
The Supreme Court said the civilian courts were open when you did these things.
You had no right to do them.
So where is our Supreme Court now?
I don't have much confidence in the Roberts Court echoing what was done about Abraham Lincoln.
Yeah.
Well, there's so much to try to get into here.
I guess I wanted to bring up one thing about the Keep America Safe ad accusing, I guess, Eric Holder of being in bed with Osama bin Laden because he's going to he's looking at perhaps hiring some lawyers who represented some people accused of being terrorists.
It turns out that Rudy Giuliani's law firm, according to the Talking Points memo today, Bracewell Giuliani has represented two detainee habeas cases, which means that Bill Kristol is now accusing Rudy Giuliani of being in bed with Osama bin Laden, too.
I am astonished because I'm a New Yorker and I covered the Giuliani mayoralty here where this will sound as if I'm making it up, but I think he lost all but one of 19 cases in which he had violated the First Amendment, among other things.
Well, that gives me new respect for Rudolph Giuliani.
But you know, it's a really important point, isn't it, that even if you're a lawyer, then the ethic is that you would defend the very worst person in the whole wide world that everybody in the whole world knows he's guilty and whatever, because even the devil gets a good lawyer in an adversarial process for determining his guilt.
And that's it.
Wait, wait.
The very important point is, you know, Donald Rumsfeld called those at Guantanamo the worst of the worst.
It turned out when the Seton Hall Law School people, using Defense Department information and documents, found that the great majority of them had nothing to do that was at all violative of any law.
Most of them had been handed over to us by warlords in Afghanistan for money.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm just talking about the particular point that it makes you a bad lawyer if you represent someone accused of terrorism.
I mean, look at the politics of this, what the Republicans are trying to do, what Dick Cheney is trying to do here.
He's trying to move the center so far to the pro-torture side that there's just no way around it anymore.
It's really a brilliant defense by him, accusing Barack Obama of not torturing people all the time and accusing lawyers of being bad lawyers for participating in a constitutional process.
Let me amend something you said.
I have a long file and I've written an article titled this and the file gets larger every day and it's called George W. Obama because Obama has continued a number of the Bush legacy total distortions of the Constitution.
He has Eric Holder, who should know better, go into court and say, you can't even hear this case because they're state secrets.
And how come, even though Obama said we would no longer have the CIA black sites, how come he continues rendition, sending suspects to be other countries to be interrogated, just interrogated?
And how come it is Obama who has been working very hard to be able to say we can hold people indefinitely if we can't bring them to trial here because we've tortured them or somebody tortured them.
So the evidence will, I mean, Obama is going to be just as bad as Bush and Cheney, right?
And yeah, that goes again to the whole precedent setting thing.
There's a parallel made before on this show, I forget by which great guest, about kind of the ratification of the New Deal, whatever you think of it.
After the 20 years of FDR and Truman, when Eisenhower became president, he did not roll back the New Deal really at all in the way that, say, Robert Taft would have.
He basically just went on from there.
And so that was it.
That was the last chance, basically, to undo it.
And it became, the fact that he didn't undo it meant it was permanent.
And that's really the legacy here is David Addington and Dick Cheney went insane and Obama has put his stamp of Mr. Cool Calm Collected Centrist Moderate Democrat on top and made it all okay.
And I'll tell you what alarms me, and that's why I'm doing a lot of writing about this, is we've got a population, and I'm thinking also of students now, you know, No Child Left Behind ended civics classes in a lot of schools.
And I don't think the new guy is going to do much about that either, the new Secretary of Education.
But we have a populace that is, to a large extent, ignorant of the Constitution, ignorant of why they're Americans, how we came to have these liberties, and what it takes to protect them.
And I don't see any mass rage at Obama or at, previously, at Bush-Cheney for what they were doing to the Constitution.
And you know, we were warned by Jefferson and Madison, I'll paraphrase, if you want to keep this republic, you've got to be an active citizen and be active to prevent crimes against the Constitution.
So I'm worried about, you know, Louis Brandeis, one of my heroes, he said one of the most dangerous things to individual liberty here is an inert populace, that is, citizens who are not aware of what the hell's going on.
I understand why they're angry about the Obama health plan, so am I.
I'm personally angry because of my age and what that might do to me.
And they're angry about no jobs and all that, but I don't hear much anguish or protest about what his predecessors, Obama's predecessors, did to our basic liberties, and that Obama is continuing to do.
And here you now have Liz Cheney and Crystal actually having the chutzpah to go after people who were, I consider, patriots, because it is part of our patriotic duty as constitutionalists to defend people who are being unjustly tried, and in this case, not even in a court, in a military commission that has very few of the absolute protections of justice that our legal, that our civilian court system has.
Yeah.
Everybody, it's Nat Hentoff, renowned civil libertarian, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and, well, we're talking about the Bill of Rights, and I'm really glad that you brought up the responsibility of the American people on this.
In fact, I had a conversation last night that I'm sure you and everybody else can probably relate to on this.
I brought it up because I heard on the radio a discussion by a right-wing talk show host on the AM there about a guy who kidnapped and murdered a girl down in San Diego, and they supposedly knew that he was the guy, but he wouldn't tell them where the body was.
The radio show host was saying, well, you know, I talked to an old homicide investigator friend of mine, and he said, back in the day, we would have just beat it out of him, and we'd know where that little girl was now, and the talk show host simply embraced this.
He didn't have a single, like, on the other hand, contrary note to say at all, other than, we know he did it, which is a shorthand for the cops say he did it, and so therefore, he ought to be tortured until he tells us everything we want to know, and when I brought this up to my friend, he agreed outright, out of hand, said, yeah, of course, and I, you know, went through the trouble of trying to teach him that, you know, the Fifth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment both ban that, and that the whole idea of American government supposedly, at least, is that free people created this government, and it is bound by the conditions we place on it, and even no matter how much you want somebody to be tortured, no cop in this country has the authority to torture anyone ever.
They are banned by our Bill of Rights, period, and this is new teaching to him.
This is not something he learned in eighth grade.
He didn't know anything about the Bill of Rights and what it meant at all, and that, it was, I told him, I had to put my hand in the air and say, I plead the Fifth.
Remember that?
They cannot force you to incriminate yourself, and then he went, oh, yeah, I plead the Fifth.
This shows you two things.
One is the, really, the ignorance of too many Americans about why they're Americans, and even if they had a glimmer of why, when you've got, now, two presidencies in a row totally ignoring the Constitution, that gets to be infectious, and I remember I was doing a profile once of Justice William Brennan, who knew the Constitution, and he said to me, he knew I was going off to lecture to some middle school kids about the Bill of Rights.
He said, how are we going to get the Bill of Rights off the page and into the lives of students?
Well, how are we going to get the Bill of Rights into the lives of Americans until we finally have a generation that is so used to being surveyed by the government all the time, and have so little knowledge of their own liberties, what then, what kind of country is this going to be?
Yeah, well, I certainly fear for it, although I guess I shouldn't, because what are you going to do?
Everybody dies.
Let's talk about your article, Torture, under Obama.
There are two cases that come to mind that I'm afraid I don't really know enough of the detail on.
Maybe you can comment on them.
I'm sorry for putting you on the spot, but one of them was a contractor who was accused of defrauding the Department of Defense on a contract in Afghanistan, who was renditioned brutally CIA-style by the FBI, apparently, at least reportedly.
And then there was also accusations of torture by the American, I guess Pakistani-Americans, who went to Pakistan, who are now on trial under their rule of law for wanting to go and join the fight against America and the Pakistani government over there.
But supposedly, at least, they claim that they were tortured by Pakistani authorities under the watchful eye of the FBI.
Do you know about these things?
No, but I'll tell you, that's very interesting, because I'm going to check on this.
The one thing I could say good about Robert Mueller, who was otherwise, in terms of domestic surveillance, is continuing what J. Edgar Hoover did.
You know, now the rules of engagement for the FBI is they can investigate, question people, infiltrate, without even going to a judge.
But the one thing that happened when all the torturing was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, FBI agents were sending anxious e-mails to Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI, saying, this is wrong, we don't want to be associated with this.
So if the FBI is indeed, and I have to check this out, involved in those two cases of torture, even Robert Mueller has now joined the crowd.
Well, we don't need a constitution when we're in the fighting against the terrorists.
Yeah, well, you know, this brings up the whole thing, you know, when Dennis Blair and all them talk about the targeted assassinations and their supposed authority to murder Americans in foreign countries.
You have a quote in your article from an ACLU lawyer saying that this goes far beyond any kind of battlefield.
I mean, if Americans went and joined the German army during World War II or something, obviously it's okay to blow them away in the middle of a battle.
But this is not that.
And it makes me wonder, well, what, who's writing the current office of legal counsel memos?
And what do they say about this?
Because the Bradbury memos and the John Yoo and Jay Bidey memos, they were all undone at the end of the Bush administration, right?
They said they were undone.
That's the point.
We don't know.
And one of the three you mentioned, Mr. Bradbury, who was very crucial toward the end in keeping a lot of this stuff alive, if you look at the inspector general's report about four years ago, you know who's at the office of legal counsel in the big position now?
Mr. Bradbury, in terms of who's making the rules there.
And I must say, Eric Holder is such a disappointment.
Before he became attorney general, he gave a speech before the Constitution Society the year before.
I could have written that speech.
You could have written that speech.
He was so outraged at what Bush and Cheney had done in terms of torture and violating the Constitution.
Now he's a good, loyal fellow doing what the president wants.
And I'm surprised that Mr. Cheney, if he were a gentleman, he would congratulate Eric Holder for doing what Dick Cheney would do now.
Yeah, well, and that's the whole thing, too.
There's been article after article, and I think Glenn Greenwald's written about this quite a bit, where Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, has done leak after leak to all of these different newspapers about what a great job he's doing and how every time something's gone wrong, it's because they don't listen to him.
And the primary example of what a great, moderate, wise adult leader Rahm Emanuel is, is his opposition at all costs to any civilian trials for anyone accused of terrorism.
And he's been working inside the Obama administration, he thinks, to his credit.
He's bragging about it all over the place, against Eric Holder's slightest attempts to do anything here.
You see, Holder, I think, is really conflicted inside.
The fact that he wanted the trial of the top-level five, you know, KCM, etc., in a federal courtroom, that was something I think he felt his conscience finally was bothering him.
But now even he is not so sure, because the pressure is against that.
And when you look at the record of terrorists who are convicted in our federal courtrooms over the past eight years, it's a considerable number.
Yeah, well, as we were joking earlier, they don't even have to be guilty of anything to be convicted.
No, I think in our federal courtrooms they do.
I mean, even Michael Mukasey, who turned out to be a terrible attorney general, he presided at some of those trials, and he tried hard within his political views to keep them honest.
No, in a federal courtroom here, I have confidence that they could get a fair trial.
No, I mean, I would agree with you if we're talking about the trials in the 1990s, or, you know, Moussaoui.
But, you know, well, you laughed when I made the joke earlier about the Lackawanna Six and the Detroit Five and the Miami Seven.
I mean, they put the Miami Seven on trial.
Was it three times or four times until they finally got a conviction out of these guys who were clearly just framed up?
Same thing in Detroit.
That was the most corrupt case.
I remember that because the prosecution was lying, and that was one case where you're right, the court was of no use at all.
But by and large, in terms of these high-profile cases, people have been convicted for reasons.
Yeah, well, I would certainly agree that they don't have a problem convicting anybody if that's the Republicans' argument that we need military trials to assure convictions.
And, you know, it's funny because I think Holder has even kind of said outright when he announced the three-tiered process that for the people that we don't have any evidence against, they're not going to get trials.
Only the people that we're 100 percent certain we can convict, even without torture testimony or anything, those people will get trials.
But we're just going to move Guantanamo to Illinois.
That's the point.
See, once we move to that maximum security prison, and that's horrible enough, these people who cannot get trials because we've tortured them along the way, those people are going to be held indefinitely in a maximum security place where they will not be able to talk to anybody or see anybody, including lawyers.
This is American?
Yeah, well, afraid so.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Nat.
I really appreciate it.
Well, thank you, and I'm sure we're on somebody's list right now.
Oh, absolutely.
Make no mistake about it.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah, outgoing phone calls from this line, man.
I'll tell you what.
All right, everybody, that's the great Nat Hentoff from the Cato Institute.
And let's see, do I got time?
Yeah, I'm going to play this short.
This is that new ad put out by Dick Cheney's daughter, who was born nine months and one day after they changed the rules to say being married ain't good enough.
You have to have a kid, too, or else you have to go risk your own life in Vietnam.
And William Crystal, the worst person on earth.
The pendulum is starting to swing.
America run by progressives is really, it's about to happen.
We're going to be looking for people who share our values.
So who did President Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder hire?
Nine lawyers who represented or advocated for terrorist detainees.
Who are these government officials?
Eric Holder will only name two.
Why the secrecy behind the other seven?
Whose values do they share?
Tell Eric Holder, Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al Qaeda seven.
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