All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the Internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's my honor to welcome back to the show the other Scott Horton, the real Scott Horton.
He's a contributor to Harper's Magazine, writes the No Comment blog there.
He is a New York attorney specializing in human rights law and heroic opposition to America's torture regime.
He is a professor at Columbia Law School, served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and co-founder of the American University in Central Asia.
And Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association.
Of course, usually when we bring him, oh, there it is, the member of the board of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation.
That's what I was looking for before.
Usually when we bring Scott on the show, we're here to talk about, you know, debating the finer points of how long Cheney's term in the deepest, darkest dungeon should be for torturing human beings and disregarding the rule of law.
But today we're going to discuss the Caucasus region and the conflict in Georgia.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
Well, great to be with you.
And thank you for that overly generous introduction.
Oh, well, I'm a big fan.
Listen, I've always meant to ask you all about what you know about Central Asia.
And it seems like every time I have you on the show, there's just so much torture and bogus star chamber trials being set up and all these things.
I have questions about that for you today, too, if we can get to it.
But I'm very interested in this.
You're the co-founder of the American University in Central Asia.
That's in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Is that right?
That's correct.
Yeah.
So tell me a little bit about that.
Well, that started as an initiative locally in the Kyrgyz Republic by a bunch of teachers who wanted to introduce and set up American-style higher education, American-style college.
And they launched their initiative, and I and a number of other Americans got involved supporting them.
That's about 15 years ago.
And over time, it blossomed into a university with very strong support that came from the U.S. government, from the philanthropic sector, and from locals.
In fact, Congress voted an endowment for that university.
So it's been supported by the U.S. government.
Now very successful, 3,000 students there.
Wow.
So why you?
You have a background in that region of the world already?
I did Soviet-area studies when I was in college.
I always had a very strong interest in it, and of the region as a whole, I was always most interested in Central Asia and the Caucasus, which were the two areas that were least accessible to Americans.
And after the old evil empire collapsed, I went out there in 1990.
I spent a lot of time in the Caucasus, in Georgia, in Azerbaijan, especially also a little bit in Armenia.
And also in Central Asia, and I did a lot of business transactions there representing some foreign investors, philanthropists, and others.
Well, see, now I'm interested in that, too, the business part of it.
You're an international lawyer based out of New York City, and was this like really high-level pipeline deals and that kind of business?
What are we talking about?
I did a lot of deals more.
I did a little bit of deals, a little bit in the oil sector, helping people mostly get exploration contracts, and a little bit more in the mining sector.
And then I did work for major international financial institutions, especially the International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction Development.
So I represented them as they were financing projects out there.
Very interesting.
I guess sometime after that, you went to teach at Columbia, and you had as a student the guy who's now the president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili.
Yeah.
Along the same time, Misha, I think, was a student in 1994, 1995, and he came in in our LLM program.
We have roughly 30 to 40 students every year who come in from all over the world, and it's a highly competitive program, about 10 people applying, more than 10, for every slot that we award.
So they're pretty much the best and brightest from around the world.
And I remember when Saakashvili came in, he was a real standout in a crowd of very impressive people already.
I mean, I think particularly standout because his language capabilities would floor you.
I mean, not only did he have completely fluent, perfect English, he also spoke French, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, and on and on and on, several other languages, and many of them quite fluently.
Also, you know, many students, when they come and their native language isn't English, they're sitting in a university setting with seminars, it's a pretty intimidating setting to be in if your native language isn't English.
They tend to be pretty quiet.
Well, that was never the case with Misha Saakashvili.
He was someone who, you know, had views and was very aggressive in presenting them about many things.
Well, and you say on your blog and in statements you gave to the New York Times and so forth that you consider him a friend, and you then went and hired him to be your intern at your law firm working for you for how long?
That's right.
He worked for me.
He worked in New York in our office for about a year, and then in part of the following year he continued to be active on a couple of transactions where we needed a little bit of help with some local legal representation, so it was about, you know, a little bit more than a year.
Well, now, I've got to tell you, Scott, my alarm bells are kind of going off here when we talk about business transactions on this high of a level.
This is the kind of stuff that seems to always involve national governments and, you know, crony capitalism, that kind of thing.
Well, you know, a lot of the business transactions I did were with people exploring potentially making investments and then deciding not to make them, so I wouldn't say they were necessarily entanglements.
I mean, I represented a number of people who were considering doing some things out there, and then after looking it over very carefully for a couple of years, decided not to.
I see.
Okay, so Sakhashvili left America, went back to Georgia, and got a job working for the previous president whose name I can never remember, the one with all the Zs in it.
Edward Shvernadze.
Famous guy, of course.
He was the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and he was a, you know, in those last years of the Soviet Union, he was one of the most aggressive and stubborn liberals, you know, who was pushing for reform and for transition from socialist systems, and Shvernadze, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, returned to Georgia, and after a civil war there, he became the president, and I remember when Misha was working with me, Shvernadze came to New York, and he asked to meet with Misha, but not just him, I mean, Shvernadze had a policy of rounding up all of the Georgians who were out studying and advanced graduate degree studies overseas, you know, in the U.S. and Canada and Europe and so on.
He was trying to recruit many of them to come back to Georgia and work with his government, and Misha was one of the ones he brought back.
And then, when the Rose Revolution happened, I mean, this guy wasn't democratically elected, it was a coup d'etat over there, right?
The Rose Revolution occurred as a result of public anger about a fraudulent election.
So there had been an election, and that produced an incorrect result as a result of rigging, which had been widely observed, and tens of thousands of people gathered on the streets of Tbilisi and several other cities, you know, demanding that there be a re-vote.
And I wouldn't say it was completely a revolution.
What happened is that the parliament took control of the government, and else did Shvernadze, and then as soon as that transfer occurred, there were new elections organized.
So he was elected, yes, he was elected, has been elected president of Georgia twice.
Well, but, I mean, wasn't that whole thing a big put-on, where George Soros funneled in all kinds of millions of dollars and trucked in fresh roses from God knows where, and it was one of those, like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where the whole thing was put on by the Freedom House and the CIA, right?
I don't think so.
In fact, you know, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, I would say, occurred notwithstanding people on the outside, including the U.S. government, including Mr. Soros and others, wanting the demonstrators in Georgia to pipe down and not be so aggressive.
I'd say it was really a homegrown event.
But, you know, there are very, very strong connections, of course, between the people who mounted the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution and the Tulip Revolution, three different revolutions, color revolutions that occurred in the post-Soviet space, and, you know, U.S. assistance programs and philanthropists, I think, because those programs were supporting people who were committed to democracy and democratic transition.
And when you look at it, you really see in all those cases, who rose up, it was the young people.
I mean, it was basically 20 and 30-somethings who mounted those efforts, so it was a generational shift that occurred.
The thing is, it seems like leaning west and having the tendency toward free markets and democracy and what that really means is pro-American and eventually, you know, members of NATO, basically, right?
Yeah, I would say more pro-European even than pro-American.
So in Georgia and Ukraine, and there are very strong similarities between those two countries, you have this generation of people who looked for their model as to what society should be, not to Moscow, the old way, but really more towards Europe and European notions of social democracy, and then some also the United States.
So it was a pretty sharp transition or transfer of attitudes.
And in Georgia in particular, we had a, you know, very, very strong group of Austrian school economists who were at the heart of the government, people who wanted a strict Austrian model market economy along the lines of Hayek and Mises.
Really, not even Chicago school, Friedmanite fascism, but actual Austrian school guys.
I'd say it's very much Hayek and Mises.
If you look at all the changes that were made, it was very much following the Austrian model.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, now, as far as democracy and Sockeyes-Wheeler's commitment to democracy, we've seen some pretty violent demonstrations, his riot police wearing obvious Western gear given to them by American taxpayers and cracking people's skulls last fall.
We've seen opposition TV stations shut down, that kind of thing.
This is what, Sockeyes-Wheeler trying to preserve democracy from its enemies?
Well, in fact, I criticized him at the time he did that, as did many other people.
And I would say that, you know, that Sockeyes-Wheeler has always had a somewhat authoritarian view of his prerogatives as president.
But in the end, if you look at it fairly, it really is democratic.
I mean, first of all, what was the source of all the problems in Georgia, the riots that were going on, the demonstrations and so on?
They had been organized by a group of about a half dozen oligarchs.
These were people who controlled the Georgian economy, Badria Protakesvili, who's very, very close to Boris Berezovsky and who had done this media deal with Rupert Murdoch being one of them.
And they were leading the attack, basically trying to bring down the elected government of Georgia.
And Sockeyes-Wheeler said, no, that's not the way we're going to do things.
I mean, if you want to challenge me, you can do it in elections.
And he then called snap elections.
So there was almost immediately a new election for president.
And he took on these two oligarchs who challenged him and bested them in an election, which, according to international observers, was completely fair, open and free.
Well, the neocons, which include Rupert Murdoch, at least is very close to them.
They seem to love this guy, Sockeyes-Wheeler.
Well, Rupert Murdoch doesn't love Sockeyes-Wheeler.
I would say that the neocons like Sockeyes-Wheeler very much.
Rupert Murdoch has a problem because, of course, Sockeyes-Wheeler took his television station in Georgia, a matey.
So he's always had a rather rough relationship with Sockeyes-Wheeler.
But I'd say other than that, the friends at the at the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal and so forth, they do like him.
And a number of them are very close to him.
And a number of them have been advisers to his government at some point.
Well, that's because they hate Russia so much.
That's why they were members of the Committee for Peace in Chechnya and all that, too.
I'd say they're really interested in finding an enemy that they can define all the time.
And the old nostalgic favorite has always been Russia.
Yeah, this is something we've been talking about on this show is that, you know, you can sell some thick bottom trucks and that kind of thing for low level occupations.
But if you really want to sell fighter planes, you need an enemy that has fighter planes.
Well, I think, you know, the military industrial complex does play some role in our foreign policy discussions about that.
Well, now, you and I've talked about spreading liberty around the world before and how you do it is by setting a good example, not going around starting wars and forcing it down people's throats.
And I'm just a real George Washington kind of guy when it comes to entangling alliances.
And I just can't see why we should do anything but verbally encourage Georgia.
Why should our government have any ties to their government at all?
Look at the dangerous situation we've been put in here.
Well, you know, this was a debate that went on at the time our nation was founded, because back in the first decade after our Constitution, the country was really torn in half between people who adopted the day away or rather lean towards England attitude, you know, which was associated with Hamilton more and the attitude that the U.S. should be at the forefront and the vanguard of a revolution for democracy and liberty and therefore should lead to France.
And that was the Thomas Jefferson view.
That's funny.
I was stayed up all night last night watching the DVDs of the John Adams show from HBO.
And it was the last episode I watched was that one.
Yeah.
And that plays that plays very, very well, I think.
I mean, you get a very, very good portrait of the tension at that time on that issue.
And then I think when the French Revolution was betrayed and Napoleon rose, that divide in the United States broke.
But there still was a strong ideological divide about whether to engage or whether or not.
And throughout American history, you know, the U.S. has leaned much, much more towards the non-engagement side.
And it's, you know, only fairly recently, you know, during the Cold War and after the Cold War that we have this very, very strong pro-engagement policy.
So I think it's you know, this is a huge issue for the United States in this current election.
And I think, frankly, the U.S. is, you know, such a big, important player on the world stage right now that the idea of non-engagement is hard to defend.
But I think, you know, the real question is, yes, should this engagement always be with bombs, bullets and fighter planes?
No, I think, you know, the contribution that America has to make around the world, I mean, in my view, first and foremost, is education.
It's all these great American institutions, our universities, our colleges, our education system, our notions of a free media, our notions of independent professional values.
These are all terrific things that have already exercised wonderful, positive influence around the world.
And American bombs and bullets, I think there we got a pretty spotty record.
Yeah, they tend to, if anything, push it back the other way.
You know, this has kind of been an ongoing theme of if you said America to some, you know, the average guy and, you know, some third world nation you never heard of or something, well, you've heard of them all.
But, you know what I mean?
Somewhere in the 1990s, if you said America, he'd probably picture the Statue of Liberty or at least a smiling Bill Clinton or something.
Now they picture the naked man on a leash on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison.
I think, unfortunately, that's pretty much true.
You know, if you look at the polling that's been done by the Pew Charitable Trusts and others, they show that the view of America around the world is now really seriously tarnished.
And we're viewed as military adventurists all over the place, not by and large viewed in a friendly way.
And I think the real shocker is these polls are now showing that China, which is, you know, which I think you could argue is the last major Stalinist power on earth, which has an abysmal track record in human rights and human liberties.
But they're viewed more positively than the United States is and over the vast territory of the earth.
Yeah, well, something must have gone wrong.
Let me ask you this.
Did I misunderstand in your blog entry, Georgia, on my mind at Harper's Magazine, the No Comment blog?
Were you lamenting the fact that Bush and Cheney have so degraded American military power that we are unable to intervene in the caucuses?
I think in cases like this, it's more about ability and appearances which create the basis of soft power than it is about actual use of military.
So I think American soft power has been degraded because of over deployment of American hard power.
That was my point.
And, you know, we are waging two wars right now, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan.
A Pentagon leadership is telling Washington openly that the military is broken and needs to be fixed.
And the Russians right now, they're tracking all this and they know that, you know, threats of American military engagement and the caucuses simply aren't credible.
And thank God for that.
I'm sorry.
I just I can't imagine that, you know, Georgia is is worth having any sort of military conflict with Russia over if all of Eastern Europe wasn't.
Well, I think Georgia is definitely worth supporting.
But, you know, there are different ways you can support a country like this.
And I think in many ways, Georgia, you know, has tried very hard to follow the America model and has aligned itself.
And, you know, I know traveling around the world, you know, frankly, there are few places I travel today where people welcome me and they're very friendly and supportive and cheerful the instant they recognize I'm an American.
But, you know, Georgia is one place and you'll see American flags all over the place.
You see American names and so on.
And the population as a whole has a very, very positive attitude towards the United States.
Well, are you in favor of bringing them into NATO?
I am not in favor of them being brought into NATO right now.
But I mean, I'd step back and say, you know, that they're fundamental problems with NATO.
What is the purpose of NATO?
You know, NATO was defined basically as part of an overall policy of containment of the former Soviet Union.
With the former Soviet Union gone, that policy should have faded away.
But bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO looks like a continuation of that containment policy.
So I think, you know, NATO's purposes have to be redefined.
Now, over time, I'm in favor of an integration of Georgia into the Western alliances and potentially into the European communities and so forth.
And over time, I think it may very well be appropriate for them to become part of a security network that includes the Europeans and the North Atlantic alliance.
But that shouldn't be done as a stick in the eye to Russia.
Well, you know, at the very beginning of the Bush administration, I guess before September 11th, they were talking about how they created a NATO-Russia council.
And this may sound silly, but there was a Tom Clancy book, which I thought must represent the point of view, at least not too far outside the point of view of some within the national security establishment, that predicted bringing Russia into NATO and making them our allies.
Well, I think, you know, not having Russia perceived as being the object of NATO, you know, not continuing to pursue a strategy of encirclement or containment of Russia was a wise move, you know, during the Clinton years.
And we seem to have gotten away from it during the Bush years.
And I'd say Bush himself, you know, has just been astonishingly naive about Russia.
I mean, remember when he met in Ljubljana with Putin and said he looked into and took the measure of his soul and liked what he saw.
You know, I mean, if you know anything about Vladimir Putin, the guy is one of the coldest fishes ever to walk the face of the earth.
I mean, he's a KGB man from way back.
Right.
And if you know anything about George Bush, you know that he has no insight whatsoever.
I think it made it made that point.
And then the counterpoint to that was Dick Cheney, who has traveled around the region making these speeches, which are jingoistic, harsh, threatening military action against Russia at the drop of a hat.
I mean, he gave one in Vilnius about a year and a half ago, which was just astonishing.
I mean, which was all but threatened nuclear annihilation of the Russians.
And he does this just regularly and he seems to do it just to get a rush out of the Russians.
It's puerile.
So you don't even think that there's a real sort of imperial strategy around it.
It's just Dick Cheney likes to feel like a tough guy.
I think he he really relishes the idea of having a good, wicked enemy and nobody tops Russia.
I think for a while Dick Cheney was really focused on China, but he seems to change his attitude there.
All right, well, now let's get to exactly what happened in Osetia here.
In your blog, you take the view that the Russians are just sitting by waiting for an excuse.
And and frankly, Scott's not till the sixth paragraph that you get around to mentioning that Saakashvili started it.
He invaded Osetia and the Russians came to defend it.
Well, I mean, who started?
I mean, I don't agree with that.
In fact, frankly, if you look at reports that are out today in the media in Europe and they're coming in the press in the United States, one from McClatchy yesterday, one from the BBC Sunday evening, they're looking at what happened on this first day of hostilities, where pretty much all the media carried the story that that the Georgians invaded Skinvali and launched a major missile assault that leveled the city.
And what you saw last night and today and all these press reports, also a report just out from Associated Press saying now we've got people in Skinvali and we can tell you that that was wrong, that didn't happen.
There was no massive assault on Skinvali.
There never was.
And if we go back and look at who provoked it, you have to go back for years, because what's been going on in this area is mortar and missile shelling back and forth between the Georgian side and the Russian side for seven years, as long as I've been tracking it constantly, these little barrages back and forth.
And we had 1000 Russian tanks and Russia's best crack troops assembled right on the frontier looking for an opening to go in and attack.
And I think all this was a provocation designed to cover what was, in fact, the Russian invasion of Georgia.
And going back again, you know, invaded.
Well, you know, Ossetia is South Ossetia is Georgia.
It's a part of Georgian territory.
You don't invade your own territory.
Well, but I don't know the army invaded Waco.
I mean, and to be perfectly clear, I mean, is Ossetia part of Georgia?
My understanding was that during the Soviet Union, they had autonomy and that they've maintained that autonomy since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Well, we're talking about South Ossetia because North Ossetia is a part of the Russian Federation.
Right.
South Ossetia was an obelisk of Georgia, just as North Ossetia was an obelisk of Russia.
So that's the administrative unit.
And it had the name autonomous.
But in fact, these autonomous units were not at all autonomous in the Soviet period.
And of course, in the Soviet period, everything was subordinated to Moscow.
So, you know, it didn't really make much difference.
But I would say the South Ossetian region, Skambale, that area, which I've visited many times in the past, was under Georgian governance from about the 7th century A.D.
So this has always been viewed as a core part of the territory of the kingdom of Georgia, even in ancient times.
So that's really not much of an issue.
I think what's going on here is essentially a power grab by the Russians and the Russians have been pursuing it largely because of what happened in Kosovo.
In fact, I was told many times in the course of the last year by people who were close to and advisers of Putin that if the Americans and the Europeans went ahead with their plan to wrest Kosovo away from the Serbians, the Russians would respond tit for tat.
They were going to take South Ossetia and they were going to take Abkhazia.
And that's exactly what happened.
Well, that makes a lot of sense, at least as far as Russia's motivation goes.
But I mean, the South Ossetians are a different ethnicity.
These people, I mean, this is old world politics, right?
Everybody's a different little ethnic enclave and they all hate each other.
Yeah, when you're in the Caucasus, every single it's really a crazy quilt of ethnicities.
Every valley is a different ethnic group in it.
And many of those ethnic groups sort of banded themselves together and called themselves Georgian, for instance.
And the Ossetians are like the Georgians.
They're Christians.
And I think they were allies and vassals close to the Georgian state for a long while.
But I think more recently, the Ossetians have felt much more comfortable assimilating themselves into Russia.
And that's because their territory sits on either side of the Caucasus, part in the north, part in the south.
And there was no way that Ossetia as a unit was going to be joined together under Georgian tutelage.
The only option they see is it happening under the Russians.
So that's what they're pursuing, I think.
But then the ethnic Ossetians are a fraction of the people who live in the territory called South Ossetia.
And Abkhazia, the ethnic Abkhaz, who we're told rose up and revolted and so on, they account for roughly 12 percent of the people in Abkhazia.
The great majority of the people in Abkhazia were Georgians.
There are a large number of ethnic Greeks and others.
Yeah, we get these stories put out all the time about the horrible, oppressed ethnic minorities.
But in fact, you know, this is a point of Russian manipulation.
It's a game that the Russians have played in the Caucasus for more than 200 years and they continue to play today.
So in Ossetia, as well as in Abkhazia, the ethnic minorities who are the separatists, who would rather join with the Russian Federation, are the minority of opinion there?
Well, there's a tiny minority historically in Abkhazia.
There are a majority in South Ossetia, but there also there historically have been large numbers of Georgians and other peoples on that territory.
Well, so why not cheer on the South Ossetians if they want to split off and join with the Russians?
Who cares?
Well, my own view is that the right resolution of this should be through peaceful means.
It shouldn't be using mortars and bombs and tanks.
Oh, well, we can certainly agree about that.
You and I should be by, you know, allowing, you know, a peaceful transition and a peaceful government.
And I think the situation is complicated by the fact that, you know, there is a very thuggish government that installed itself in South Ossetia, headed by a man who used to be a major Soviet wrestling champion.
And his government basically runs an enormous smuggling operation.
By the way, smuggling is very and the North Caucus is considered to be a very honorable profession.
If you know the Tolstoy stories, they've been doing this for hundreds of years.
But that's how that story, how that government operates.
And they have not been interested in transparency, openness and democracy.
Yeah, I actually saw the headline today that the Ossetian president fired his cabinet and declared a state of emergency.
Yeah, it's basically been ruled by one from the beginning by that guy.
And, you know, Vladimir Putin has backed him up completely.
All right.
Well, now in July, the Americans and some say the Israelis, but I guess I haven't tracked down the real reporting on that.
But anyway, the Americans, at least in July, were in there on this big training exercise, as you discussed on the PBS NewsHour the other night.
There are a lot of mixed messages back and forth from the Americans.
It seems like with all our cameras floating around out in space, our government must have known that the Russians were massed and prepared on the north side of the mountains there.
Did they give Saakashvili a green light to do this?
Or he just took this gamble and thought it might work fast enough that, you know, they would they would you know, he would get away with it.
Or I don't understand exactly why a little bitty country like Georgia would would try to get into a military confrontation with the Russians that they can't possibly win.
Well, I think this is one of the big questions hovering over all these developments in Georgia.
You know exactly who did or who said what, and particularly in the American relationship with Georgia.
And because I've been there many, many times and I've been involved in a lot of discussions with senior Georgian government figures tracking this relationship, and I've gotten a good sense of how confused it is, frankly.
And it's confused because you've got American diplomats and intelligence experts who give the Georgians what I call, you know, seasoned, sober, sound advice, which has basically been, you know, don't rise to the bait the Russians are putting out, be cautious, pull back, don't use military force.
I think that's, you know, that was the right advice to give to Russia.
But it's largely come by people who are young, not really senior figures and so forth.
I mean, the senior most people from the State Department, they're like in their 30s, you know, and I think most senior has been like a deputy assistant secretary of state, so not not like Lawrence Eagleburger or Condi Rice.
And on the other hand, we have some very loud mouthed neocons who are fixtures and well-known faces on the Washington political scene who tell the Georgians these people are drones.
Don't worry about what the American diplomats and professionals are saying.
They're not making the decisions in Washington at the end of the day.
We're making the decisions with and we have the connections into the White House where the call is going to be made.
And, you know, we'll get you NATO membership and we'll get you U.S. support and don't worry about it.
And I think that's what created this crisis.
Mm hmm.
Let's see the guy that was also the guest on the news hour, quoted Condoleezza Rice as saying, we stand by our friends and that all she was really saying was, we're going to try real hard to convince France and Germany to let you into NATO.
But that's a pretty open ended kind of statement the way she made it here.
Well, I think you have to look back at the time.
This crisis really erupted in when and when Russian tanks were rolling into Gorey and Poti and Sanaki, Georgian cities in the heart of Georgia.
Condi Rice was on vacation and, you know, she couldn't be brought out of her vacation.
George Bush was attending the Olympics in Beijing, you know, patting a volleyball women's team member on her on her back, you know, not really concerned about what was going on in Georgia.
So and, you know, some of the Georgians I've spoken with, they believe that the Russian invasion occurred because the Americans gave the Russians a clear yellow light.
You know, you go and do this and we're not going to say or do anything.
And I think you pull back objectively and look at what Condoleezza Rice and George Bush were doing over that weekend.
They're right.
The United States was saying, hey, you Russians, stay back, don't cross the line, don't enter into Georgia.
Now, there were no statements like that.
Hmm.
If they kept that up, this wouldn't happen.
I mean, because ultimately, again, Putin knows that we can't do anything about it anyway without, you know, risking our cities to hydrogen bomb warfare and that kind of thing.
I think the Russians felt that they needed at least a yellow light from the Americans before going ahead and going in and they got it.
And you think that the yellow light was not deliberate, just a matter of Bush and Rice couldn't be bothered?
I think it was rank incompetence, frankly, and, you know, and I think that they've been handling this professionally and well, Condoleezza Rice herself or senior members of her team at the State Department would have been involved and would have been on top of this.
And instead they were paying it no attention.
Well, criminal negligence on the part of the Bush administration.
Imagine that.
Usually it's, you know, outright conspiracy to break the law.
But there's you know, it's half and half, I guess.
Yep.
And speaking of which, let's talk about Guantanamo Bay a little bit here before I got to let you go to go teach a class.
You have a new blog that we're featuring actually today on Antiwar.com and I'll have to click on no comment here for the title.
It's Military Judge Finds Political Manipulation in Gitmo Again.
And this is about Thomas Hartman, the guy, the same guy we've discussed before, who openly admitted that, yeah, the plan here is to set up these so-called military trials in order to coincide with the presidential election in order to help the Republicans.
And he has been now removed from a second case.
This guy.
That's right.
And Thomas W. Hartman was general counsel of MX Energy in Stanford, Connecticut, and he was brought out of the reserves, called up and basically signed to be the showmaster for the trials and Guantanamo.
And what we hear is that from the instant he came on board, he was telling all the prosecutors, you know, I want these cases lined up with juicy cases, with people who will play right to an American television audience.
I want these cases brought during the election season.
Right.
And the prosecutors are all looking, saying like, that's not the way we prosecute crimes.
I mean, not for the American election season.
Let me let me stop you there, Scott.
Let me make sure I understand you right.
This guy has been quoted, and I'm familiar with with the at least paraphrasing of him saying he wants this to coincide with the election.
What's the footnote for I want this to be good for the American television audience?
Oh, it's the images that he's citing.
You know, he wants people who are, you know, hairy, unkempt and who were involved in attacks on Americans because this, he felt, would would just be needy and real to the American audience.
Yeah, vote McCain.
That's the message.
And this tracks exactly with some of the early proceedings.
We had the testimony about some meetings that occurred in the office of the deputy secretary of defense, Gordon England, in which Gordon England is described as having made the same statements, essentially.
Also, yeah, we want these cases to play.
We want to get good election value out of them.
We want them in the fall of this year.
So, yeah, that's the reason, I think, for the very strong push to bring them at this time.
And all that came out, there was testimony about it.
In fact, another general came forward and testified about how he bullied and badgered the other lawyers trying to do basically the administration's bidding, trying to fix the proceedings.
And the judge hearing all this said, you know, you're out.
You can't participate in these proceedings.
You taint them.
So this is the second time now, two separate military judges who've handed down rulings saying that he's behaved unprofessionally and they've ordered his removal.
He will not resign.
He continues to stay on.
Well, somebody in the White House told him that is bad.
And that's his defense.
His defense is I'm doing exactly what the Bush administration wants me to do.
What's the matter with that?
Well, I guess as long as impeachment's off the table, we know that there is no accountability for whatever the president or vice president do, then that is actually good enough.
Yeah.
I mean, of course, there may be accountability in other quadrants and for a lawyer to be removed from legal proceedings for unprofessional conduct twice, traditionally something bar associations look at.
Now, we covered this on the show before, that even if Hamdan, bin Laden's driver, had been acquitted, that they can just hold him as an enemy combatant for the rest of his life.
And apparently this is my interpretation.
Scott, you tell me what you think.
It seemed to me that when the jurors gave him a sentence of what, 60 months minus time served and all this, that basically that was a slap in the face to the administration.
Those jurors said, well, OK, you got us on it.
We'll we'll go ahead and convict on this charge, but we're going to give him this really light sentence.
And then they announced publicly that, well, even after his time served, he's still going to remain in our custody forever because he's an enemy combatant.
And then it was in the headlines just the other day that the jurors didn't know that and they were really pissed off when they found out.
Well, you know, I agree with your characterization of it.
In fact, I read up a little piece talking about it.
You know, it seems clear to me that both the judge and the military commission panelists felt that this person, Hamdan, was a nobody, basically.
There was no evidence that linked him to any serious crime.
He was the sort of secondary or tertiary player on the team who and most conflicts never will wind up being criminally charged or prosecuted.
In fact, I think one of the things people looked at is the fact that, you know, Hitler and Mussolini also had chauffeurs and they were also arrested at the end of World War II.
And the prosecutors also looked at their cases and said, you know, these people are nobodies.
Why will we prosecute them?
Instead, they went after big people.
And the problem is here that the Bush administration has not apprehended Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri or a number of other senior figures.
So that's the reason why they're consciously going after the small fry.
Now, the the judge in the panel decided that that the Bush administration is not going to release this guy, but whoever succeeds Bush probably is.
So they decided to provide legal cover for what the Bush administration had done by providing a sentence for him that is exactly coincident with the Bush administration.
So it's no coincidence that his term runs up when Bush leaves the White House.
And it's just amazing that you could have these kinds of bogus trials like this in America, Guantanamo Bay.
This is just another thing.
But you've got to applaud the judge and the members of the panel, all these military officers.
There was a tremendous effort to press them to be harsh and vindictive, and they refused.
I mean, they were quite evenhanded and fair in what they did.
And the message they said at the end is a very strong rebuke to the administration.
Yeah, still, though, I mean, I actually don't even like it when good things, you know, relatively good things happen, like a military judge or a prosecutor doing the right thing down there, because that sort of gives legitimacy to the whole thing that it doesn't deserve.
You'd rather have them do the wrong thing, huh?
Well, not necessarily, but you know what I mean.
Well, these people aren't professional, though, and I think, you know, they didn't create the system.
They're not responsible for it and they're trying to do the best they can with what they've been given to work with.
And I think I really respect them for that.
Yeah.
Well, so what do you think is going to happen?
They're going to continue to try all the all the ones who they've charged so far with war crimes down there.
I think that these trials will continue until the last day of Bush's administration.
I think when he leaves Washington, they'll be over.
And, you know, how these other cases will will pan out.
I think it's very much a matter of question of what is the evidence and how clean is the evidence in these cases?
Because I think you look at the list of people who are charged.
They started with Salim Hamdan, who's a nobody.
But several of the other people on the list really are serious thugs and criminals who have been involved in horrible wrongdoing.
And I think they should be able to put together good, solid evidence in those cases.
Some of the other people they've charged are mighty peripheral.
Yeah.
And that's that's the real problem is they don't seem to distinguish between the kid who threw the grenade on the battlefield and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
Yeah, I think I think that's right.
And I think a lot of it has to do with the prosecutors not being allowed to act independently and exercise their judgment.
I mean, I think a prosecutor.
In fact, I think Colonel Moe Davis said that, you know, if the prosecutors had been permitted to act independently, Salim Hamdan never would have been charged.
Yeah, see, that's what I was getting at with the, you know, even when they do something right, it gives legitimacy to a process that is not legitimate.
Well, he testified that basically they were ordered to charge him.
You know, they didn't have any discretion about it.
But, you know, prosecutor exercising discretion wouldn't have done it.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, we're all out of time.
I know you've got to go teach a class.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Semester's already started.
It's horrible before Labor Day.
You know.
Yeah, I know.
When I was a kid, it wasn't till after, you know, the first of September or something.
And it seems to get earlier every year.
But have a great day.
All right.
You, too.
Thanks a lot.
OK, take care.
All right, everybody.
That's the other Scott Horton, the real Scott Horton from Harper's magazine.
He's a heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer.
The lectures at Columbia Law School writes no comment for Harper's magazine.
This is anti-war radio.
And we'll be right back.
