Alright y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio and it's my pleasure to welcome today's guest, Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
He's the author of Neck Deep, the Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush and I think there's a new one too I don't have in front of me, sorry.
Welcome back to the show Bob.
That is our latest book Neck Deep, we've done other books though, Secrecy and Privilege and Lost History for instance.
Ah yeah, Secrecy and Privilege was the one I was trying to think of there.
I have to tell you before we actually get started on the questions here, how much I value this website.
You have some really great journalism here and it's the kind of thing that cannot be found in the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Associated Press and yet ought to be found in places like that.
It's the kind of place that, I don't know how famous it is Bob, but it sure deserves to be.
Well Scott, I appreciate that.
Obviously I come out of AP and Newsweek and PBS and it used to be that stories like the ones we run, which are well-reported, well-sourced, well-documented, used to be more in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and AP and so forth.
So we just tried to continue that tradition using a newer medium, the internet, which our work on this goes back to the mid-1990s when we started Consortium News.
But the goal has always been to take those kinds of stories that deserve to be in the mainstream press and put them here as find a home for them.
Well you know, one thing that's been kind of preoccupying me on the show lately is the reporting of James Bamford and his new book, The Shadow Factory, following up on his previous books about the National Security Agency and really the software is the craziest part of it all.
They have the computers nowadays that can decipher information in the quadrillions of computations per second and yet what it really comes down to is the software.
If they can data mine all the electronic signals in the world, the programs necessary to actually turn all that electronic data into effective information for government to act on, and this is something that you've been covering quite a bit in regards to the battlefield in Iraq, which is still a battlefield, the American war over there.
Well I guess it was sort of news, they never really explained, I don't think Bob, but Bob Woodward made a big deal about there's this new advanced secret technology that is the real reason that America won the war in Iraq and the surge worked and all these things that they say.
And you've developed that and told us what you think Bob Woodward was referring to there.
Why don't we start with that?
Well I'm not sure what Woodward was precisely referring to, but we do know that there have been applications of high technology on the battlefield in Iraq, almost using it as a test tube for how to repress these kinds of uprisings.
And it includes collecting vast amounts of biometric data, obviously things like fingerprints, but iris scans, facial appearances, how people walk, their gait, and putting that into various sophisticated databases.
As one of the arms developers explained to the Washington Post a year or so ago, that the goal here is to have this information that can be readily made available to soldiers on the ground, if they come across somebody, so they can decide whether to let the person go or to kill him on the spot.
Because they also apply very loose rules of engagement.
That is, if you determine that somebody, in your view, is a terrorist or an insurgent, under the rules of engagement that the Pentagon has approved for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, people can be just executed immediately.
Even if they're unarmed, even if they're not threatening, they can be just shot and killed.
And there have been cases that have now been litigated through the courts martial procedure, in which soldiers have been acquitted because they've said, listen, yeah, we shot the guy, we executed him, but it was within the rules of engagement.
So you have that pattern of using this kind of biometrics.
And with the piece I just did, relating to a new DARPA, Plan DARPA is the agency that sort of thinks big about how to use technology for the Pentagon.
And sometimes its work has been very helpful to the society.
The internet, for instance, was derived somewhat from DARPA, groundbreaking, innovative technology.
But they've also done things or tried to do things like the total information awareness operation, which was going to collect every piece of electronic data available on everybody in the world, and sort of mesh it into a vast database and then find out supposedly, from that, who is this likely insurgent or terrorist or, or could be used, obviously, for any number of purposes.
And that was a plan that they that was that the Bush administration started in 2002.
However, it was objected to by by members of Congress and was supposedly stopped, but they simply they really just moved it over to the National Security Agency, and continue this work.
Now there's this new project that DARPA is pushing is to have algorithms that would apply to various kinds of movement.
So if you're, so for instance, since you're, since we're now seeing in especially places like Iraq, intensive aerial surveillance through the predators, that they're going to be sort of using algorithms to sort of define certain kinds of activities, whether they be somebody running or throwing something, or even kissing is one of the things they have on their list, and have that sort of stored away.
So they can be easily accessed in the future by by people trying to figure out who's dangerous and who isn't now who's or who's an insurgent or who isn't.
So you have you have that kind of technology, which of course, one can maybe say, well, on a battlefield, you can understand why soldiers might want to know if there's a certain kind of movement might be threatening.
But it has an Orwellian component, too, which is that it can be applied, not just to some narrow battlefields, it can be applied broadly to a civilian population.
So all this data can be collected in ways you were talking about.
So they can have usable information of who Scott Horton associates with who it because they can take all this data they eventually might have in the in the United States or a place like Great Britain, where they already have a have a very sophisticated system of surveillance of people in public places.
All this sort of technology can then move it to a point where everything can be used to really know everything about you.
And you do go into this sort of brave new world using these kinds of repressive strategies.
All right, well, there's a bunch of things to follow up on there.
First of all, these rules of engagement.
Let me make sure that I understand you correctly.
You're telling me not just in effect, because the bogus court martial will let you escape scot free if you do this, but you're telling me that American soldiers are legally on paper allowed to shoot an unarmed man in the back of the head after they've captured him.
If the computer says this is a bad guy, they have the authority to just simply murder them on the spot.
Yes, that's been that's been adjudicated in various cases.
And there are times when sometimes they will get the alleged offender on something of a lesser charge, for instance, planting a gun on the guy afterwards.
But they have they've essentially agreed that you can if you've identified somebody as a as an insurgent, or as, say, someone you believe to be a terrorist organizer or something, you can kill them.
And they've been there been cases that have gone through the court marshals were in which that's exactly what the that's what the defense has argued and they've prevailed.
There was there was a case in Afghanistan, for instance, where they were a some special forces, American soldiers, with a with Afghan soldiers came upon a guy walking along near a building.
And they the American soldiers stayed stayed away because they weren't sure he might have he might have a some kind of vest bomb.
He was approached by the Afghans, they questioned him.
He but through this process, the Americans using less sophisticated technology, they basically radioed back and they decided that this guy was a certain militant.
And they shot him.
They shot him at a distance, they blew his head off.
And there were efforts to charge the soldiers.
But they defended themselves saying that the rules of engagement permits us to do this.
And they got off.
Well, and, you know, that cuts right back to the technology about whose responsibility is they typed in, or what they, you know, took a digital picture of this guy or something compared to my database.
And then the computer said it's okay to kill him.
And so it's not the responsibility of the men who pulled the trigger anymore.
Right.
And there was that case of, I mentioned of this, this person who was developing some of the biometrics for Iraq, and she was, and she explained to the Washington Post quite openly that, that this information, these biometrics, allow the soldier to know one of, you know, three things.
Should I capture the guy?
Should I let him go?
Or should I kill him on the spot?
Yeah.
And the post simply reported that as in not enough, they weren't even outraged.
Apparently, they just kind of reported this as part of a feature story about this arms developer.
Well, yeah, let's not get into what doesn't outrage the Washington Post.
That could take up the whole rest of this interview.
So, well, I think that that is actually, well, it's a surprise to me.
I don't know how well my understanding is representative of anybody else's.
I think usually on these issues, it's a little bit better than most people's, but I guess I would have thought that, you know, if a soldier is charged with a murder, he's got a real good chance of being let go by the court martial over any technicality they can find or what have you.
Right, that's true, too.
But, yeah, what you're saying, though, is entirely separate from that.
You're saying that, no, the judges have said, no, yes, you're absolutely right.
It says right here in the rules of engagement, you can murder somebody if the computer says to murder them and bang the gavel or whatever, and off they go.
Right.
There have been cases where they say that the judges have found them guilty for lesser kind of offenses.
For instance, there was a specific scheme that was actually authorized by the Pentagon in Iraq, where there were snipers who would go out and try to kill Iraqis who they thought were part of, who were doing things that would seem suspicious.
And so what would happen sometimes is after they kill the guy, they drop some metal wiring down next to the body to make it look like he had been maybe laying an IED or something.
And they wouldn't get upbraided or punished for the killing.
They got in some trouble, though, for the cover-up or the effort to manage the, what you might call the crime scene.
So that's been the way it's worked more often than not.
There have been really very few cases of soldiers being found guilty of murder in violation of their rules of engagement.
You had the Haditha case, for instance, where the argument there was that even though that appeared to be a case of sort of a mass murder, the soldiers argued they were operating under the rules of engagement, and that was accepted, generally speaking.
You know, I'm reminded of some old TV movie or something that I saw a long time ago about the My Lai Massacre, and at the court-martial, at least the representation on TV was that one of the guys who participated in the massacre, when he was on the stand, that he was basically a real simple guy and an infantryman, and he explained that, well, but the rules of engagement said that everybody between here and there were the enemy, and they were the enemy.
And the prosecutor's saying, yeah, but they were women and children.
He's going, no, no, no, they were the bad guys.
They were the enemy that we were supposed to shoot.
That's what the guy told me, and so we were shooting them.
And, you know, he didn't really understand the distinction.
A person that you kill is somebody that you've been told from somebody higher up is the person you kill.
It doesn't, there's, it's not up to him to distinguish.
One of the interesting facts that a lot of people don't know about Colin Powell is that he, in his memoir, his best-selling memoir, My American Journey, essentially defends pretty much that position.
He has a section about how officers he knew would fly around in helicopters, and they would, and they'd see some guy, unarmed guy, in a rice paddy or something, tending to his crops, and if he was a, what they call a military-age male, a ma'am, they would fire in front of him.
And if he started to run, they would take his running as hostile intent and then kill him.
And Powell said, that may sound harsh or brutal, but, you know, war is that kind of process.
And he then explained that he knew one of his friends had been out on one of these helicopter missions and had been himself shot, and so Powell thought it justified killing innocent civilians.
And he writes this in his memoir, and yet he is hailed as a hero.
He also, of course, was the AmeriCol, by coincidence, happened to be the AmeriCol officer who was first alerted to a range of abuses that included the AmeriCol division being involved in the My Lai Massacre, and Powell proceeded to cover up, dismiss these allegations from an AmeriCol enlisted guy.
Well, you just don't get it, Bob.
That's what makes him a hero, don't you see?
Well, it certainly made him, it allowed him to move up the chain of command very quickly.
There was also a case where Powell was, one of his friends, a brigadier general, was actually charged in connection with doing this kind of thing, going around in helicopters and shooting civilians.
And according to a, I talked to one of the inspector general people who investigated, this is some years ago, and he was an older guy even then, but he recalled this whole event.
And this officer had been, they would take bets on how many people they could kill on these little hunting missions they'd go on.
And there was one case where these, this old couple were bathing and they gunned them down and got counted for two, I guess.
And this guy was ultimately charged because some of the pilots on the helicopter were so outraged.
And Powell filed an affidavit in defense of his friend, this general who was off on these missions.
Eventually, the charges were dropped because the two pilots who were testifying against them were sent to another military base and came under a lot of pressure to recant.
So the guy got off.
But these kinds of, this kind of attitude is not unusual.
Yeah, well, and it goes right to, it's funny because, I mean, in some sense, it really is, can be reduced to just racism.
And of course, you always have racist slurs against people in wartime.
But the part I want to focus on here is back to the Orwell and the Aldous Huxley kind of way of doing things.
The, what'd you say, the military age male, the ma'am, or in Iraq, the person under control, a puck.
And what you have is this new speak that is really just jargon meant to deny humanity, where if he's a ma'am, it's all right to kill him because what the hell is a ma'am anyway?
It's just a made up designation for someone, but it takes them out of the category of human being with a natural right to his life.
Right.
And you also have just the more general thing, bad guy, which is the one that's used mostly in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan.
If someone is deemed a quote, bad guy, you kill them.
Right.
All right.
So let's see here.
Let's get back to some of this technology here.
You talked about this in terms of the predator drones and algorithms, basically trying, basically creating software that attempts to make, I don't know exactly what sort of sense out of just following people around, recognizing them, seeing who else they're around day in and day out.
And that basically on the battlefield, what happens is it's maybe for the first time in history that you really have the guys on the ground with the M-16s have access to this information in real time.
And so is it effective?
Is this, is Bob Woodward right that using this technology is how they identified the last members of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and won the surge, Bob?
Well, I think, you know, some of this, some of this new DARPA technology has not been fully developed yet.
They're working on it.
They're letting some of the contracts now.
So that is, so this idea of being able to index, and we talk about battlefield, we're talking about people really in cities and towns.
We're not, we're not talking about some normal sort of battlefield you might think of the World War I.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
The Iraqi army ceased to exist in March of 2003.
It's been a war against the people of that country since then.
Right.
So basically the drones travel over, fly over the cities and look down and there's real time video that pours into these, into the intelligence centers.
And what they want is just ways to catalog and index at all.
So they can, so if someone's with somebody else at certain times and that, you know, they can be able to pull it up and be able to identify who was with whom.
That's sort of the, that's kind of the basic idea, as well as, you know, obviously identifying something that may not make sense to an intelligence person watching it real time that could represent a real threat to some troop.
But it's a way of, of making, as you pointed out, sense of what they're seeing and also being able to save it for recall purposes later.
But what we, I think with Woodward, it's probably more he's talking about some of the biometrics that have already been applied here.
And obviously this sort of technology that they're, where they're kind of indexing all this stuff could then be, you could then use it with some of the biometrics to help catalog people and what they, who they associate with and things of that sort as well.
Even though the DARPA contract sort of separates these, those two elements, the indexing is being done separately from the biometrics.
They could obviously be, be linked in the future at some point.
As far as Woodward's, what he's thinking about, the best guess is it has to do with some of these highly sophisticated classified programs for, for identifying people and figuring out who's who and then, and then getting rid of them.
Well, you know, some of this is, well, it's kind of funny just in sort of a science fiction kind of weekday wings discovery channel kind of way when it's like a science fiction almost when they talk about gate recognition and you know, the computer knows how Bob Perry walks.
And if Bob Perry is walking a little bit different, it's going to, I guess the AI is going to wonder, why are you limping?
Or why are you in a hurry?
Or, and then it's going to compare your hurry to, I don't know, your tone of voice in the last five phone calls you made.
And it's going to track and see who it was that you talked to.
And it's going to see if you called a cab, where you took it.
And it's going to take all these things and try to basically it's a, it's a government conspiracy theory machine basically is what it is, right?
Well, it gives them extraordinary powers.
If the government uses them, you can see maybe some legitimate uses for some of this material, but if they use it in an abusive way, it does get into essentially controlling population.
That's what it's about.
You know, and one, one of my, one of my former special forces friends sent me some of this, some actual video that was, that was taken in this way.
And it was night vision.
It was sort of, so what they were able to do was to have a predator using heat, also heat sensing.
So there was this truck where presumably there was like some heated part, which was supposedly a gun that had been used.
And these guys, and they follow this little truck as drives around, the guys hop out of the truck and they go toward the woods.
And then they come in and they, and the guys are all machine gun to death and the truck is blown up.
Now, presumably according to the, the, the, the, the narrative that went with this, these were all terrorists and they were, and they had some, they had some weapon in the truck, some anti-aircraft thing they thought.
So basically you get these fuzzy little things, these pictures, and then you kill the people who are these little moving blobs of heat as they walk along and they, and they just get wiped out.
And I think that may be a lot of what Woodward was talking about, highly sophisticated means of, of sort of identifying people you believe to be insurgents and then eliminating them.
Well, unfortunately, I think probably most people, when they hear about stuff like this, they think, well, better the Iraqis than me, something like that.
And try not to really worry too much about it.
Iraq is far from here after all.
And yet, as you talk about in your article here, I'm sorry, it's called the new technology of repression.
You refer to the total information awareness being transferred over to the NSA.
It's now called basketball, but this total information awareness, I don't know, is it keeping you and I and different, you and me, I guess, and, and other Americans in a separate category from the terrorists?
Or they were, they're basically watching all of us as though we're all Osama's buddies now.
Well, one of the dangers is if you and I've also encountered this during my many years in Washington now, back in the 1980s, for instance, there was this sense that any American who in some way was getting in the way of these programs, that is, in the case of the 80s, it might have been the wars in Central America, that Americans who oppose Reagan's policies down there were almost put on the same page with insurgents, say, in El Salvador, there was this, there was a blurring of this, there was Jean Kirkpatrick's famous line at the 84 Republican Convention about people who blame America first.
And these were Americans they were talking about.
So some of these groups, groups like Cispus, for instance, which was a group that dealt with El Salvador, Americans who were opposed to Reagan's policy, they were put under intensive review and surveillance.
They had people who penetrated them and spied on them, because they were considered somehow helping the Salvadoran insurgents.
This is also the same time, of course, when the when the US government was secretly involved in helping the Contras, the Nicaraguan Contras conduct essentially terrorist attacks inside Nicaragua.
So there's a lot of blurring of morality here.
But there is a real temptation on the part of, especially the neoconservatives who then focus on Central America, the Elliott Abrams's of the world, that they saw Americans who opposed their policies as essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.
So it was not a big step between these efforts to kill radical students or labor leaders in El Salvador, and go after in various ways, less violently, one would hope people who, who were seen as helping them.
And we've seen the same problem with with terrorism in the in the current frame.
If you go to the fine print of the Military Tribunals Act, or Military Commissions Act of 2006, what you see in the fine print is that it's not the military commissions are not just for al Qaeda captives, or people they find on the battlefield of Afghanistan or someplace.
There are sections that apply specifically to Americans who are perceived as aiding and abetting the enemy.
That's right.
We get one, we get one day in court with a writ of habeas corpus.
But if the government can convince the judge at all that there's the slightest reason to consider us an enemy combatant, off we go back to life in prison.
Right.
You do not get a normal trial under this procedure.
Now, that is not, it has only been applied to American citizens in a couple of cases so far.
I mean, there's Padilla, this is not the MCA, but Padilla was deemed an enemy combatant, and locked up in the brig in South Carolina for four years, essentially in communicado.
And there was an American citizen who'd been captured on the battlefield who had similar treatment.
But the point is that these rules do these laws as written would apply to Americans as well as as non American.
So you have this, there's always going to be this temptation, especially when you get extremists in the government of the United States, to want to see people who are not loyal Americans and treat them with the same kind of legal disdain that is applied to others.
So that's the risk.
The risk is really whether the US government wants to develop these techniques, and this technology of repression, what it uses it for, and who gets targeted.
But Americans should not be too confident that just because it's supposedly only for Iraqis or people like that, that it might not someday be used by some government against them.
Well, and you know, you're right that it's been kind of limited so far.
But, you know, beyond Padilla, and Omari, and that kind of thing, we've had the DoD investigating peace activists around the country.
We've had DoD guys lurking around here at the University of Texas in Austin, spying on people attending political rallies, and these kinds of things.
They got busted for it.
I think it was the Daily Texan, the local student paper, that, you know, called them out.
Who are you guys?
Show me your badge.
And what are you doing here?
So it's only been since 2005, really, Bob, since Hurricane Katrina, that it's been okay to be opposed to this government without being a traitor in the minds of, well, the talk radio audiences around the country, if not the Republican Party and the guys in the White House, particularly.
That's right.
And I think that there's a blurring of these points.
And it's gone back, it goes also back to the 1980s, as far as I'm concerned, because that's when I started seeing this idea that, and it comes also out of the Vietnam period, that they didn't want that to happen again.
They didn't want the American people to turn against their foreign adventures, like the American public turned against Vietnam.
So there's always been this idea of how do you stop that from happening?
And that's where there's the developments of concepts like the perception management.
How do you control how Americans see events abroad?
So the propaganda techniques that the CIA might have developed for Chile or Iran, Guatemala in the old days, that's come back home to roost.
And then, of course, the idea of intimidating people who oppose your policy.
We saw that in 2002 and 2003, when anyone, whether it be Al Gore, who spoke out against the war in the fall of 2002, and was widely attacked and ridiculed.
People go back and read some of the things written about Al Gore for saying, don't go into Iraq.
And then people, even people, sort of more citizen types, the Dixie chicks, when they criticized the war, came under death threats and faced boycotts of their music.
And Scott Ritter, who was the weapons inspector, who faced a great deal of abuse and attack for saying what turned out to be true, that he didn't think that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction.
So this idea, so a lot of these things do come home to roost.
Well, you know, one thing, we did a show about the Constitution last week, since nobody's talking about it in the election, and it's the charter by which the government is allowed to exist, I thought, you know, it might be worth reviewing.
And treason is actually the only crime defined in the Constitution.
And it's defined very specifically that treason does not mean that Cheney wishes Bob hadn't written that article.
Treason is direct aid and comfort to an enemy, waging war against your own country on behalf of another country.
So like even the weathermen who set off a pipe bomb at the Pentagon or whatever, they weren't doing it on behalf of a foreign power.
That's not treason.
And that's, you know, even setting off a pipe bomb.
It's very specific in the Constitution, what treason is, it's not the old world standard where the king doesn't like you anymore.
That's right.
And the whole the idea of the Constitution, one of the most significant, and I agree with you, this should have been dealt with much more in the campaign has been a been sadly not part of the campaign.
That would what really is at stake here is whether or not the Supreme Court will tip to favor the right wing view of the Constitution, which is that at a time of war, even something as vague as, as the war on terror, which will guess I guess will go on forever.
Even in that case, the President has total or that what they call plenary authority, that in effect, all the rights that Americans have under the Constitution no longer exist.
If the President decides they don't, that so he can he can lock you up, he can deny you habeas corpus, he can, he can deny you a lawyer, he can deny you a fair trial, he can, he can, as Al Gore once put it, in reviewing what what the Bush administration was claiming, he said, what would stop them from killing people, kidnapping people?
What?
Where are the limits?
And the fact is, there are no limits under the Bush theories of executive power.
And what's really troubling is that right now, the US Supreme Court is poised at a five to four margin, with the five more moderate justices, opposing total presidential power at these times, and four of them favoring it.
And and and what john McCain has said publicly is that he wants to appoint more justices like that you want to appoint more people like Roberts and Alito who are two of the four.
So So amazingly, this has not been much of an issue.
But it may be the preeminent issue.
Well, you know, this is something that's really interesting to me, too, because, you know, I'm a libertarian.
And it really makes me mad when I hear people like Roberts and Alito, who are the champions of this unitary executive theory, pretend that they're the strict constructionists.
I've read Article Two, three fourths of it is about who's allowed to be president and how he's to be elected.
He has very little power.
According to the Constitution, certainly he there's nothing in there that says that he can kidnap, torture and murder anyone in the world that he wants.
And yet on the other side, and and believe me, I'll side with the liberals when they say, you know, that when they, you know, write the majority opinion in the Hamdan Russell and Boman Dean cases, and that kind of thing, habeas corpus and all that.
And yet, they're the champions of this theory of the living Constitution, where really, the Constitution says that the government's allowed to exist, but there's no real limits on the Tenth Amendment, for example, is completely meaningless.
We're past that now.
And, and the interstate commerce clause now means that Congress can do anything that it wants without limit.
And that's the other side, where I have an argument that is a strict constructionist argument that, you know, certainly doesn't frame the president as dictator and emperor.
I have Alito basically stealing all my thunder and yet turning it into this madness.
Well, I think I think, you know, one can be a strict constructionist.
And I would tend to be, I would define myself that way, someone who actually believes in the Constitution.
You know, obviously, there can be debates about what, what the founders meant here or there, but you believe in it.
But what we've seen really on the right is hypocrisy.
They claim to be strict constructionists.
But they're not as strict constructionists would not have, for instance, in December of 2000, said, Florida can't count its votes, because we've decided George Bush should be president.
They wouldn't do that.
That's not what they would be a respect for the states, the state should proceed as best they can, and the federal government should stay out of it, which would actually ironically, is what some of the conservative justices in the in the appeals court in Georgia agreed when that was first brought to them.
And then it was bumped up to the Supreme Court, where some of the right wing justices decided, no, we're just going to take it over.
And did say whatever we want to say.
So there wasn't.
So in so many cases, wasn't like that a political power question or questions relating to whether people have habeas corpus rights, that that what you really see are people on the right claiming to be strict constructionist, but really being activist judges, much like you've seen on the left.
And instead of people saying, listen, they really should be restrained on the part of judges, judges really should be arbiters of fairness.
And following the law, which you you get both sides kind of doing what you're saying, which is, we want this to come out a certain way.
So we're going to make it come out a certain way.
Yeah.
And that phrase plenary authority, that means unlimited, right?
Total, right.
Total.
It means that the president has all power.
What it means is that the founders concept of unalienable rights is over.
And that's the real significance here, that we have to find ourselves as a nation, as a nation that believes in the and these founding principles.
And key among them is this is this concept that has inspired the world of unalienable rights, that these are rights that cannot be taken away from you.
You're a you're a you're a human being, you have certain rights.
Now, what what Bush has been arguing is that at a time of war, i.e. the war on terror, which has no beginning, or has no real beginning has no real end.
He would have all power plenary power to decide who gets those rights.
So in other words, you don't your position is just changed, you're no longer a citizen with fundamental rights that can't be taken away from you.
You are a subject of this kind of executive monarch who decides, well, you can have those rights.
I like you.
You're OK.
This guy, this bad guy, you know, he can't.
So it gives the president the discretion to allow you these fundamental rights or to take them away from you.
And four members of the Supreme Court agree with him.
That means that if one more member gets appointed to that, that thinking, then the Constitution effectively gets rewritten.
And that's how we really change the Constitution in the United States.
We don't do as much by amendments.
We do it by having five or more people on the Supreme Court say, well, I, you know, I want this to be the way it goes.
And they and they get to say it.
And what McCain has argued is he wants to appoint two more justices or justices in the mold of Alito and Alito and Roberts and obviously also Thomas and Scalia.
And considering the age and health of some of the other judges, you're going to have that.
And so, you know, all the oldest ones are the liberals.
Right.
Basically.
And, you know, so you almost certainly will have one or two justices named by President McCain and or by President Obama.
So but but that should have been, to my mind, almost there's almost nothing more important as an American and as you know, the Constitution, the United States, and before that, the Declaration of Independence were two of the most of the two seminal documents in the history of mankind.
And the effect of this is to say we're throwing them out.
We're going with a whole new system.
And that is there can be fewer stories more important than the effective gutting of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Yeah, well, I absolutely agree with that.
And, you know, it's really striking to me that you don't have to be an expert.
You could be an expert and you'd still be 100 percent right.
But you could be an eighth grader.
You could be a fourth grader and no better than this.
I mean, I think back to elementary school and the little blocks representing the legislature here and the court here and the president here, because, you see, America was founded by people who just overthrown a king and they wanted to make sure they would never have a king again.
I mean, the idea that somehow the framers of the Constitution meant for the president to be the dictator of North America or the emperor of all the world or whatever, with plenary authority is just ridiculous.
And on its face, it's preposterous.
Right.
And when you combine that with the ability now to have this technology, which we started off with, it can be truly frightening.
I mean, people shouldn't be overreact to anything, in my view, but but they have to be aware of these dangers, that if you combine this these theories about unlimited presidential executive power with the techno technological capabilities that are now at the hands of that executive, there is there is the specter, at least of some Orwellian future where everything we do that somehow is a threat to that power can put us in grave danger.
Now, maybe if you'd go about your life and just go to ballgames and take your kids to the movies, you'll be OK.
But if you decide to intervene and try to change things in some way, these powers will could present a real threat to anything kind of anything meaningful about democracy or about a constitutional republic.
We're in a whole different place.
And that has to be understood.
And I think at least the dangers have to be recognized.
Yeah, I mean, that really is the thing.
It's the the advances in technology combined with the theory of unlimited authority.
We have basically a system already that with the flip of a switch, you know, if it turns out that Barack Obama is really Lex Luthor, the great dictator or whatever, and and he decides to completely unleash this police state on us, it's already so effective they could turn this country, this formerly free country into 1984 in the space of a year or so.
Well, that's really the kind of potential we're now talking about.
And one of the you know, one of the reasons that the DARPA concepts, while certainly challenging technologically and scientifically, should be dealt with very carefully.
And one of the what you know, if you remember back in the total information awareness network that they were going to do, they put john poindexter, the formerly convicted National Security Advisor to Ronald Reagan, whose, whose conviction was overturned by a conservative appeals court in Washington.
But he had been convicted essentially of ignoring the Constitution in the Iran Contra scandal.
And that was not exactly the there were technical terms, but they, but essentially, he had been found to be involved in an illegal operation and covering it up.
That was a was the was the concept of the Reagan White House, evading the laws themselves and asserting this very broad power.
So you had a guy who had a history of seeing himself in this very grandiose way, or seeing the executive in this grandiose way, being put in charge of the total information awareness network, which would have allowed him to have details about every person involved in the modern economy, their most intimate details, what they buy, what what movies they watch, what, what they read, where they go.
I'll tell you, you know, my thing, Bob, I actually started with my anti government, paranoia or activism or whatever you want to call it back in probably the first half of the 1990s.
When I first saw the idea of, you know, moving toward a cashless society, having cameras on the roads everywhere, having the computer systems where the FBI doesn't need to break into your house and put a clip on your phone, they can just hack right into the network.
And I guess I read a Dean Koontz book where they had the mama computer that had the access to all the databases.
I've seen this coming for so long now.
And then to read Bamford's book is just to see how how ready to go they are with all this stuff.
I mean, they're literally vacuuming up all the electronic data in the world.
They've got the software now that can do such a good job of sifting through the information and making sense out of it and figuring out ways to apply it to us.
As Frank Church said back in the 1970s, when I was just a little baby and the Congress was done investigating the illegal activities of the CIA and the NSA, et cetera, he said then that basically it's just the law is the only thing between us and absolute Orwellian nightmare here.
And now here we are.
I guess we'll see whether the rule of law will be restored at all in the new administration.
But it sure seems like and I agree with you about not being too alarmist and making predictions about the near term and these kinds of things.
But it certainly seems that we have the architecture of a slave state being put up all around us right now.
I think that's true.
I think that's true.
And I think that means that the only real answer we have is a vibrant democratic process that can stop it or limit it or make it or make sure that it operates within very tight constraints.
And we have not had that in the last eight years.
The Bush administration has taken an extremely expansive view of its own power and its written and its ability to do these things supposedly to protect the country.
But what they've what they've actually done in quote protecting the country is eradicate or wipe out some of the key principles that protected the country as a as a democratic republic.
And that's the danger.
And if that can be restored, that vitality of a democratic process can be restored, then maybe we have a chance of containing this.
But if people sort of accept this idea that, well, for our safety, we must surrender our liberties and the Constitution is outdated for the near war on terror.
If that's the thinking of enough Americans, we're in really deep trouble.
Well, I know you'll be keeping an eagle eye on them and on the most important issues that the new administration faces faces over there at Consortium News.
Robert Perry, Consortium News dot com.
The book is neck deep.
The disastrous presidency of George W. Bush.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thanks, Scott.
