Full transcript: Todd Pierce on London Real
8:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr Todd Pierce, who retired as a major in the US Army Judge Advocate General Corps in November of 2012.
8:51 You were on the defense team representing three clients held at Guantanamo Bay. That’s correct. You are a founding member of The Institute for the Study of American Militarism and a senior fellow of the Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota. You are currently working on a paper detailing the implications for free speech under the quote unquote “law of War.” Todd, welcome to London Real.
9:13 Thank you, thanks for having me, thanks for being here, you know, I saw a piece that 60 Minutes did, I think, 6 months ago or nine months ago, where I believe Leslie Stahl took a trip down to Guantanamo Bay, and she walked around and saw the facilities and talked to the people that work there, and she, you know, she heard some of the protests from some of the prisoners, and you know, I was in New York City for 9/11. I lost some friends in that accident. I was very close to it when it happened, and you know, it did make me quite angry, but you know, watching this show and seeing some of these people that had been denied a trial for, you know, 11 years or whatever it’s been, you know, made me equally as angry, and it seemed to me to be one of the most un-American things that I could imagine: someone not getting a trial.
10:00 So it’s just one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on today. I was just wondering if you could walk us through what’s been in your involvement with Guantanamo, and also maybe if you could later walk us through kind of the pre- and post-9/11, you know, mentality shift that happened with American policy, and, you know, what your thoughts are about it today. So I volunteered. As a, my military career has been Army Reserve and where I was on active duty a number of years as an Army Reservist until recently before I retired, and then it was shifted into regular Army anyway.
10:35 So I’ve been on and off active duty as an Army Reservist. I was on active duty then during 9/11 as a legal adviser and a major in Army Reserve command, so I saw how that, you know, affected the military in a lot of ways, because you could almost see it during the day as a, it’s like a change in consciousness of how people were looking at things, and unfortunately I think that’s continued up until the current day to many people. But anyway, I volunteered in 2007, 2008 to go and represent Guantanamo detainees as defense counsel.
11:12 I wrote an article about that in 2011 where I pointed out that my father had been in the Bataan Death March. He had been a prisoner of war until 1945. He was liberated, and from this prisoner of war camp. So I sort of grew up, you know, with that always in the back of my mind, maybe generating interest in the Nuremberg trials and in the whole era of that era of militarism and authoritarianism in Germany, Italy and Japan at that time. And so it’s sort of been a lifelong, you know, interest among many others, and so I volunteered, as I said, to represent Guantanamo detainees.
11:51 So I went on to active duty in 2008 and served until the end of 2012. I still represent a d key currently. His case is before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, one level below the Supreme Court. But anyway, as I pointed out, it offended me so badly when people like Gonzalez, who was in the Bush administration, and others talked about Geneva Conventions being quaint and we don’t need to give those rights to, you know, and they’re really not rights, or the treaty obligations we have to the people we’re picking up.
12:29 So, of course, I, like every American, you know, was obviously struck a lot with 9/11, but as a military officer I’ve, number of times, taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America against its enemies, and, you know, unlike other nations, as Americans in the military and government officials we don’t swear to defend the motherland or the Fatherland or the Führer, the leader. We defend the Constitution, and that is under attack. You know, if there’s a House of Un-American Activities Committee today, they should be investigating the Bush administration for everything they did to attack and subvert the Constitution in violation of their oaths.
13:11 So that’s really why I volunteered, because this is where those legal arguments were being made, in the military commissions, which itself is a violation of the separation of powers under the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has said as a fundamental principle of our Constitution. So they shouldn’t be even be doing. You’re saying the separation of military and the Constitution, they shouldn’t be even conducting these trials? That’s correct. We have a judicial branch for trials such as this.
13:38 There’s been a couple of periods in our history, and there’s a couple of very unique exceptions to that, and the government has misstated those justifying. The chief prosecutor Brigadier General Mark Martins has come to London, speaking at Chatham House, and he’s talked about this, you know, rich part of our history of the military commissions, and in fact, they’re not a rich part of our history. That may not have been the term he used, but they’re not, you know, part of a routine judicial history.
14:08 In fact, they’re, they’re an aberration. The cases where they’re allowed is only when you have martial law in your domestic territory, or when you have military government, which is over occupied territory, or for the trial of actual war crimes, international war crimes, such as happened at Nuremberg. But again, Nuremberg too came upon the occupation of Germany by the Allied Powers, giving them their authority. So what the government is now doing in our case, or our appellate case, is they’re arguing, having conceded, having conceded that material support for terrorism and conspiracy are not international war crimes, are not war crimes under international law.
14:49 So they concede that point, but what they claim now is that it falls under our US domestic common law of war, as if something like that ever existed before. They invented it. What our domestic common, and for that they go back to the Civil War, when the United States, and I don’t mean the Confederate States, they were treated as if they were a regular belligerent, you know, an enemy state, but in the northern states Lincoln, and I’m not second guessing him, and we obviously had a complete breakdown in our government, so don’t take this as Lincoln bashing, but during the Civil War, a big problem was that there’s a lot of divided loyalties.
15:27 So they, they, being the Union government, the northern government, Lincoln, the United States government, had declared martial law in certain areas, and under that, military commanders had the authority to detain, you know, make military arrests of anybody saying anything, saying anything even disloyal, up to guerrilla warfare. So there is military commissions held in places like Maryland immediately after the beginning of the Civil War, but in September of 1862, Lincoln declared martial law over the entire United States, meaning that part of the Union States, reaching as far as Eugene, Oregon, where a newspaper publisher had his newspaper shut down because he was a Quaker, and he said that, you know, we should find some way to end this war. So his newspaper was shut down, and he didn’t get arrested by the military, but under martial law it imposed an absolute duty of loyalty upon anybody under that Union territory, so even if you expressed dissent to waging the war, or how it was being waged, saying words embarrassing to the government, you were in violation of martial law, and the terminology of the day was that was a war crime, meaning simply you’re in violation of that, that one area of the law of war that permitted martial law.
16:51 So the government, the US government, today is mining those Civil War cases and extracting that sort of language, archaic language. Do they quote them specifically on the? They’ll quote them specifically, except they will omit certain critical points. And I may be going into more detail than you want, but William Winthrop, Colonel William Winthrop, is, you know, has been described by the US Supreme Court as the Blackstone of American law. So he pointed out that under the law of war there is what is known, and it still exists, but it’s seldom applied, except by the most totalitarian states, claiming that there, or authoritarian states, claiming that they’re at war with somebody, such as Pinochet in Chile, who declared he is at war with the Communists, and so that allowed him to jail and execute, extrajudicially, all these supposed enemies, Communists, which included journalists and others who were just critics of Pinochet, and that’s the practice of authoritarian states.
17:50 Well, we have now not fallen totally into that, but we are borrowing those same legal principles. So the principle is that when a nation goes to war, its population immediately has in its residence anybody within their territory, has an immediate duty of loyalty, and it’s called the law of non-intercourse, so one nation goes to war against another, each enemy’s population is the enemy of the other and can have no intercourse whatsoever with either of them, and that means any correspondence, any contact whatsoever, puts you in violation of this law of non-intercourse, or anything which, again, imposes an absolute duty of loyalty. So if you’re a guerrilla, you know, the offense would be, you know, might have been described in the military commissions as acting as a guerrilla or burning bridges, but also could include, you know, having correspondence with the enemy.
18:44 Okay, let me just, let me come back to that. Let me just so: one father in the North had sent a letter to his Confederate son. He was tried by military commission for corresponding with the enemy. Okay, so that’s how extreme it can be. Okay, now, so you’re comparing using those examples as the similar as Pinochet, as similar as some of the things the Nazis were doing or the Stalin regime, and so let me be clear.
19:06 I’m not saying that we are doing the same things as a Stalin regime, and when you talk about, you know, we’re something similar to the Nazi regime, immediately people say, of course we’re not as bad as the Nazis, and they’re absolutely right. The Holocaust is something entirely different. But a book I’ve come across is called The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel. He was a relatively prominent German lawyer, a German Jewish lawyer. He left in ’39, and he got to the US and he wrote a book, The Dual State, and the first line in it was “Germany is under martial law,” something to that effect.
19:37 And what he points out is that all of the legal system of Germany was operating routinely except for that sliver, which, as I say, was under martial law, and that is finding those enemies and disloyalty, you know, anybody disloyal. So if you said something, such as one butcher said about Hitler that you know, we wouldn’t be sure to meet if it wasn’t for Hitler, or something, you know, he got picked up, put in front of the People’s Court, which was a military commission, and tried and convicted and executed. Now, of course, we’re not doing anything like that, but the principle, and you know, so what is valuable about looking at Germany, and I don’t mean entirely at Nazi Germany, but how a democracy can evolve from a democracy in 1919 under the Weimar Republic, with authoritarian elements within it constantly subverting that Constitution and pushing for dictatorship.
20:29 And that article I mentioned, Guantanamo at 10, I pointed out in there that we have prominent US law professors now, from one Harvard and one University of Chicago, who have written quite extensively on the need for some form of dictatorship, unitary executive theory, as Cheney famously called it. And incredibly, these two law professors have even written, and I have it in my article, that we need to go back and look at Carl Schmitt and study Carl Schmitt’s work. Carl Schmitt was the Nazi legal jurist.
21:00 He wasn’t a Nazi in the ’20s, but he’s an authoritarian German lawyer, and he eventually joined the Nazi party, and you can see just laid out how you evolve, with authoritarian elements adopting authoritarian forms of law into who knows what. Okay. So there’s potential parallels happening in America. So the parallels are the legal theories underneath it. Okay, can you walk me through Guantanamo?
21:24 Can you walk me through what’s currently going on down there right now, and where it’s kind of come from, the last, say, 12 years? So what is currently going on? In the beginning, remember, and this has been covered by so many others, but initially they wanted to find a way and you’ve got to really look at Cheney and the gang of lawyers that he put around him, who had in most cases had been saying the same thing: we’ve got to have unitary executive theory.
21:51 9/11 was their opportunity to say see, we’ve got to have a unitary executive, we’re at war now, and they’ve adopted this their own unique interpretation of the Constitution, that they claim war powers when you’re at war. So they needed a war to justify and implement their theory of unitary executive theory under this supposed war powers of the president, which in their interpretation means the president then can exercise extrajudicial, dictatorial powers because acting as commander-in-chief. Okay, so they invented this whole scheme of law, borrowing a little bit from international armed conflict, a little bit from non-international armed conflict, and now, in the Civil War, putting this, weaving this all together, and getting this idea that, well, we can have prison camps too.
22:42 I mean, just like these other authoritarian states did. So can we, but they had to intelligently place them, so they had to figure out a way, though, to get it out from under the Constitution, and some of these people have been working full-time at it, I will say, ever since, to try to justify that. Yeah, we’re at war, so we need to put the Constitution aside, and I vigorously disagree with that. Was this a plan for 10, 20, 30 years back, that Guantanamo would be a Cheney.
23:06 Dick Cheney has famously said, if you want to understand unitary executive theory, or put it, go back and read the Iran-Contra Minority Report, which he authored, largely authored, as the Cong, you know, member of Congress at the time. And I’m actually reading a book, which I highly recommend to anybody watching this, and to you. It’s the Family Jewels by John Prados, and it’s a current book, a recent book. The Family Jewels are the many secrets of the CIA, going back to its founding, of every sort that has been tried to be kept out of the public view.
23:43 And these are those things that came out when William Colby revealed them to the Church Committee in the United States Congress in the 1970s, showing how there had been plans to assassinate people, and a whole variety of things, total surveillance of the American people, etc. You’ve got to remember, during the Vietnam War, the Army was conducting surveillance of anti-war activists and others that they believed were in dissent, and now the Army, meaning the Department of Defense, the NSA, which falls under the Department of Defense, is now, as we know, surveilling everybody, you know, and including people in the United States, all people in the United States, virtually, with the, you know, picking up of all the data that they’re doing, right? And you’re saying we look at Iran-Contra.
24:31 That’s ’86-’87. So Cheney put it out then about, you know, again, his unitary executive theory, you know, and with 9/11 then everything, if you read the legal opinions written by John Yoo, he always, or virtually always, and it wasn’t John Yoo alone. Unfortunately, there are others. Robert Delahunty, who now teaches in Minnesota at a law school, was a co-author of many of these opinions, and there’s a number of other attorneys in that office, Legal Counsel, all writing on the same theme, that the president, under his unitary executive powers, can do anything he wants.
25:06 He can violate international treaties like Geneva know, and so Guantanamo was the perfect place to put. So Guantanamo is the perfect place. Any other options besides Guantanamo in your legal opinion? And here’s the other thing, and you mentioned 9/11, but Ali Soufan, who is an FBI agent who had been involved with investigating Middle Eastern terrorist incidents, or, you know, acts of violence like that, for a number of years, before he wrote in a book, The Black Banners, that the United States, the CIA, when they first went in, in the military, then when they first went into Afghanistan, they gave vehicles out to the Northern Alliance, and you’ve got to remember the Northern Alliance wasn’t a bunch of Democrats waiting, you know, to throw, you know, flowers at the US when they came in.
25:49 They were the old allies of the Soviet Union, but in any case, and ruthless, and have their own torture practices, but anyway. So we came in, according to Ali Soufan, and gave them vehicles to help us, you know, fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and in some cases they would drive their vehicle into some village that had never seen a vehicle before, offer a ride to villagers, they’d get on, and then they’d deliver them over to some US base, post, and collect a reward. So, you know, this, the people that Donald Rumsfeld said were the worst of the worst terrorists, I think they initially numbered around 770, or whatever the exact number was, were people that had been picked up and sold for a bounty, according to Ali Soufan, the FBI.
26:37 That number has diminished, actually really only started beginning to diminish when the Bush administration released a whole bunch, when they finally got some court scrutiny over what they were doing. Before that, they had, you know, claimed that nobody could know anything because these were such dangerous terrorists. Okay. But they weren’t bringing them to Guantanamo, so initially they were putting almost all of them in Guantanamo. When was the first person put in Guantanamo?
27:02 January of 2002. Okay. So quite quickly afterwards, initially it went up to 700 and some. Now, there were some captured in that same period or shortly after that, they put into, you know, the so-called black sites. They only appeared, you know, four or five years later, whatever it was, but Guantanamo was probably the best option, because it was not on US territory.
27:24 The best option if you wanted to violate the law, if you wanted to violate international treaties and wanted to violate the Constitution. You know, they came up with this scheme, and they looked at, well, can we put them on ships, with just floating detention ships or whatever, and they decided on Guantanamo, because it seemed to fit their purpose. You know, we had got in that territory following the Spanish-American War. I won’t go into all those details, but so it’s been a sort of a lonely little Navy outpost for years, used only when there’s immigrant issues, you know, such as from Haiti or Cuba.
27:59 Have you been there? I’ve been there. At least somebody’s asked me earlier how many times. I forget exactly, but I went down about 15 times, 15 to 20. What’s it, what’s it like down there?
28:10 Well, it’s quite bleak. The golf course, remember, it’s a Navy base, so you’ve got a golf course that’s not on the standard detention camp side, but you carry a piece of carpet around to hit the ball off of. So it’s, it’s like a desert island. In a sense, it’s on that side of the island that gets no rain virtually except during hurricane season. So you come in, and it’s a small Navy post ordinarily except when you are having a trial.
28:36 Then the, I remember somebody, maybe the first Morris Davis, was the first prosecutor in the military commissions, and he’s totally repudiated them now and has spoken out against them quite frequently. It might have been him or somebody else who pointed out the very first hearing that they had, which was before my time there, but it was as if they expected the D-Day invasion, you know, expect Al-Qaeda perhaps even to have come up with a submarine. It just shows how hysterical some of the people in the, you know, Security Services, whether the intelligence or the military services, how they’ve seen all this, and you’ve got to keep in mind that they’re almost trained to think very narrowly, you know, because of their field, which is why you always have to have oversight, because again they’re, you know, self-censored, you know, they don’t think very broadly.
29:23 So I mean, this is how hysterical they were. They thought maybe submarines might land. But anyway, a high security environment. Well, especially when there’s a trial going on. Okay, otherwise you land and it’s a quiet little Navy base until you go out to the camps.
29:39 And Carol Rosenberg has written extensively, and I’m not saying anything that’s classified, but, you know, then you drive out to where the camps are, then it’s entirely different. Then you’re in a very high security zone, you know, a lot of prohibitions and whatnot, and you don’t actually go in to see the detainees where they’re kept, but rather you go, and they’re brought over from where they’re kept into meeting, you know, areas where they’re, and again this has been widely reported, shackled, and it’s a very onerous process even to bring them over. So it’s almost as if they’re trying to discourage detainees from meeting with their attorneys, you know, they do the body full body searches, and very embarrassing, etc.
30:22 Does anyone belong there? Well, no, actually, nobody belongs there. Where they belong, those people who’ve committed actual crimes, not made-up ones, and like I say, made up the material support for terrorism and conspiracy, which even the DC Circuit Court is saying is not an international war crime, but no, they belong in a federal court system, and there’s multiple ways that that can be done. So those people who there’s a suspicion or there’s allegations, who actually were responsible for killing Americans in 9/11, there’s a legal process and legal procedure that we created going back to our framing that is readily available and is the means that is supposed to try people guilty or alleged to have committed criminal acts.
31:07 Those people who were rounded up in bounties, paid and whatnot, I think it’s General Tommy Franks who said, at the very beginning, should have been given Article 5 hearings under the Geneva Conventions. Article 5 hearings are where the government has to, be able to show that there’s at least some reason why we think they’re with the opposing enemy, or something’s giving the government authority to hold them under international law as prisoners. And immediately, I, and I actually talked to somebody just recently who said, who was detained at that time and said for a day or two they were given the things that you fill out as a prisoner of war, and that was all taken back like a day or two later.
31:47 The decision that came down, from what I read, is no, there’ll be no Article 5 hearings. It was as if the, not as if we know. The attorneys surrounding Cheney, because they were his, you know, Cheney was really Cheney’s brainchild, this whole operation, right? The attorneys around him, the ones that he brought in precisely for this purpose. I mean, he didn’t know 9/11 was going to happen, but John, you had been writing on these same themes for years as a law professor, talking about unitary executive theory.
32:15 So, so it already brought him in. It was his job qualification, I guess, is, you know, you believe in dictatorship. Yeah, we can use you. Okay, how many people are at, how many detainees are at Guantanamo now? I think the number now is 164, 166, and I, you know, don’t hold me to that.
32:31 They released some people over the past few months. Are some of those people on trial now? So now, there is currently five people on trial for allegedly being responsible for the 9/11 attack, and they’re, they’re described as high-value detainees, high-value prisoners, and and then there’s another one, al-Nashiri, who’s on trial for the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Okay. Those are the two main trials going on, and just in the past week or so, another detainee has been charged and has already pleaded guilty.
33:08 I haven’t had good internet access, but he’s already entered a plea of guilty to conspiracy for allegedly having a role in that same attack, on a different ship, in 2002, I believe. The USS, or not the USS, is a friendship, the Limburg. I haven’t been following, and the other 150-some odd are awaiting trial. So about 76 or 77 have already been cleared for release, but mainly Yemen background, or I don’t know. I’m not sure the exact numbers.
33:38 And they’re ready to be released, and then we said, because of the unrest in Yemen, or supposed unrest, that no, it’s too, we can’t let them go back now. So they’re sitting there just cooling their heels, as you know, might have been said, in US waiting to be released. They’ve been cleared, and then there’s a number of others and I don’t have the exact numbers, who are claimed to be too dangerous to release, but there’s no evidence against them. So that would suggest, you know, that they are the ones, at least the larger number of them, are the ones who’ve been tortured, and they haven’t been able to get clean testimony from them or clean confessions, so they don’t, and they don’t have specific charges.
34:15 Or they have, they don’t have a charge, so they’re all just sitting there without charge. And if you don’t have charges, you don’t get an attorney assigned to you. Ordinarily, there’s a couple, and I have a friend who was assigned to somebody who briefly had charges against him, and then those charges were withdrawn, so he had an attorney representing him, and she, you know, has described, you know, he’s one of those who are just being held there, and his mental condition is, of course, deteriorating.
34:44 The Physicians for Human Rights group in in the US has written, produced a report that indefinite detention itself can rise to the level of torture, and that’s only logical. And so I think we’re seeing a lot of mental deterioration amongst a large number of the people, and even you know, some suicides as a result, as it’s almost as if they would rather be charged, cuz then you can have an attorney. At least then you get an attorney and have a chance to confront the charges, and you know, and and quite honestly, the only way you get out of there, and in, you know, these six high-value detainees, that’s another issue, but the only other way, for the most part, you get out is if you plead guilty to some very minimal, you know, claimed offense, such as one of my C, who basically admitted to cooking for al-Qaeda.
35:30 Excuse me, I’ve got a cold, and maybe being a gopher, and so he pleaded guilty of material support for terrorism, and he’s now back in, you know, his home country of Sudan. Obama famously ran on the platform that he was going to shut it down, and then a few years after he was elected, he, I, he pretty much said he couldn’t shut it down. Is that correct? What did he try to do, and was he ever going to be able to do that? Well, I don’t know if he was ever able to, and I can only, I can only speculate on that.
35:59 I think his intent was sincere in running and declaring that, and a lot of people were very happy. It sounds like this national nightmare might come to an end. I mean, by national nightmare, it’s, it’s spilling over into our own domestic system in a variety of ways, which I’ll explain in a few minutes. But so they had a year, and one of the things attorneys did was present cases that went for a review on why their client should not be charged with an offense and should be released.
36:31 And of course, we pointed out that the person who went back to Sudan, that you’ve got to keep in mind. Remember, we recruited, and by we, the CIA recruited a lot of Arabs to go fight in Afghanistan back in the 1980s when we were trying to, you know, bankrupt the Soviet Union, and, you know, the C client had been on a team representing from Sudan. In fact, he had been one of them, you know, whether or not it was a personal solicitation or just heard. But anyway, go, go to San, fight the Soviets.
37:04 So he had gotten there way back in the 1980s, and so anyway, we’d pointed out that, you know, he’s not Al-Qaeda, you know, in the sense of planning terrorist attacks. You know, there’s a whole very loose association in Afghanistan, because obviously there’s still internal, or there was back in 2001 struggles, fights, you know, between a variety of people without any clear allegiances to necessarily one particular group. So the people under bin Laden was made up of one faction.
37:34 The Northern Alliance was made up of a number of different factions. The Taliban too was made up of a number of different factions and varying, you know, and shifting alliances. We all fighting, and we basically went in and said, well, if you’re not Northern Alliance, you’re all terrorists, and we’re all going to throw you all in in Guantanamo. You know, we pointed out that, yeah, this guy, you know, our client was not an Al-Qaeda terrorist, and nobody got released following those reviews, is my recollection, and our client didn’t, and we did go to and in fact, I made a motion, and it was granted that he was, you know, he had an Article 5 hearing coming, and there’s only been one or two of those.
38:18 Well, one would have been this one, and another one was HED on, where they too argued to have an Article 5 hearing, and so that, or you know, the court ordered an Article 5 hearing to be held 30 days out from the hearing in 2011, and when that was ordered, it was as if the government just changed its entire theory. Before he was the worst, the worst, and afterward, after they, you know, were ordered that they’d have to provide some evidence that, you know, he is what they said he was. It seemed like they were willing to talk, and what’s the spirit of your clients when you go down and talk to him?
38:53 Well, it’s obviously very depressed. How can it not be? You know, but it’s, it’s, it’s resignation in a lot of ways. Are they suspicious of you? Yeah, I mean, and back in the earlier days, maybe not now, certainly still some.
39:10 Obviously I would presume some distrust, but you know, there was some surveillance going on in the cells and in the med. Yeah, I mean, I just assume that, being the skeptic or cynic that I am, and so did most people. But there they found evidence of it. You know, found an old camera, but this, you’ve got to keep in mind, the government had always been denying, you know, or lying, that that was taking place, and it turned out they found evidence that it was right, which is against attorney-client privilege and all that.
39:38 So they like to present, you know, yeah, they’re getting all these due process rights, and this is full and fair, courts and whatnot. Brigadier General Mark Martins, he’s really the seller of that idea. And no, that’s that’s false. What about your, what was your reception like in the military when you took that role on to defend these guys? Well, I’ve got a couple, you know, friends I’d worked with on active duty before then, and one is very, you know, hardcore right wing, I’ll say, and so he he didn’t believe they should even get military commissions.
40:08 I think in his less guarded moments he might have even said, go out and shoot him. You know, what do you say to those people that say, go out and shoot them? One, I think one of your clients, you’re saying that the worst thing he did was make videos for al-Qaeda, and was otherwise, no, not involved in any specific planning. What do you say to those people in the military? I mean, again, how how much more un-American can you get?
40:27 I mean, again, they took an oath, and they just, I mean, I hate to make comparisons to these authoritarian states, but it’s that mindset, that militaristic mindset, or authoritarian-minded thinking, that basically, well, they’re not on. Well, this book I mentioned, The Dual State, and a couple of other books on that same thing, same thing, that you know, they point out in these trials that Germany held in the People’s Court, which were about, you know, not having total absolute loyalty to the Führer. It’s the same principle as I say, this law of non-intercourse.
41:00 So it just was ominous almost when Bush said, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” that is the way of thinking of authoritarianism, where anybody of any sort of dissenting opinion is acting disloyally, and that was never brought in during the entire Vietnam War. We had hundreds of thousands of people gathering outside the Pentagon protesting the Vietnam War, and I would say they succeeded in bringing war that was unwinnable to an end, which is actually against our own, the United States’ interest, for a variety of reasons. But coming out of it, people like General Westmoreland, who had been responsible for not knowing what he was doing, was a thorough incompetent, as has been documented in some recent books lately.
41:44 But he had this conceit because he had the command. I mean, again, there’s sort of a conceit that goes with too many military commanders, that, well, they gave me command, so therefore I’m the infallible, you know, person at the top of the heap that knows everything, which is why you, which is why you want a judicial system in the first. Which is exactly… So they came, some of these people came out, call them the dead-enders, or this, you know, people.
42:05 They came up with their own stab-in-the-back myth, just like Ludendorff did after World War I, and led to this whole idea that they would have won the war but for the press, and the press, you know, led to this loss of will to fight, and therefore that’s why we lost the Vietnam War. Well, that too much of that has been internalized in military thinking, and I won’t go through, I’ve written some on this and writing more, but this was internalized to where we have this very information-managed management system in place now, and we saw that with embedded journalists. We don’t allow journalists to go around and actually gather facts anymore, but we put them in a group and have them bond, etc., so you don’t get this really wide-ranging investigation into things.
42:48 Do you have something specific you say to your friends when they say they don’t deserve a trial, we should shoot them anyways? I mean, do you just say that’s not what this country was built on, or, oh, you make that argument? And the, here’s the argument I make too, is, again, you put a person like a Westmoreland who, you know, his accomplishment before that, his major, Congressman was getting funding for the football stadium at West Point, one day he’s doing that, the next day he’s in Vietnam running a war.
43:13 He didn’t know anything about running a war, and yet we had him in place, having American lives being lost and killed. And so, you know, with hindsight, you could say that the Vietnam War protesters actually knew more about the actual facts of what was taking place than Westmoreland did. That’s why you need oversight. And that’s why, you know, when we’ve turned everything over to the security services, and Britain would have the same problem. We’re deferring to people who have deliberately closed their minds because of their past training or their pre-, you know, predisposition to looking at the larger picture.
43:50 Okay, and that was a genius, I would say, of the American Constitution. We ensured, and that was one of our grievances in the Declaration of Independence, that King George had placed the military authorities over the civil authorities. In other words, we had martial law under the English troops in places like Boston, so that was a grievance, so we demanded the civil authorities being over the military authorities, and that’s what our Constitution was built upon, and that’s what the Bill of Rights was put into it.
44:16 The Bill of Rights is not a bunch of luxuries given to Americans because we’re American citizens. It was put in, and it was almost as if it wasn’t an afterthought. There’s a lot of demands for it by people who realize that, wait a minute, we don’t have, we don’t want to reproduce what a king, you know, basically government officials without any oversight. The Bill of Rights was put there as a means of oversight of our government officials. You can go back and read Madison and others, but critical to it was a First Amendment, which, you know, you put it all together, it’s really the right to know.
44:46 How can you have a democracy and make wise decisions by the people who are supposed to be making the decisions, the electorate, if you don’t have the right to know, if they don’t have access to the information they need? And that’s what is so dangerous today under, and there’s a law case, lawsuit, going on right now. I’m not sure the status of it. It was decided against the journalist Hedges v. Obama, where we have section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, now put in the public law, providing that the president, as commander-in-chief, has authority to deem people who are just a wide, ambiguous list of associated with terrorism, in some way, to be put in military detention pending disposition under the law of war, that signifies, I think, that declares that if there ever is a military detention of a US citizen under that provision, the law of war that they would then turn to would be these military, these martial law cases that we now call our call, our US domestic common law of war, that they would make that same argument and say, here’s our, here’s our domestic common law of war, and so we’re going to apply that.
45:56 So under those precedents, all of a sudden, a Chris Hedges, a journalist, they might analogize and say, yeah, here’s this Ed Mandelis, whom they, the government, actually cited his case, who has a newspaper publisher in Missouri who was put into military detention and tried by military commission. They’ve actually cited that as a case in some of the filings that they’ve done. Okay, so it’s laid the predicate for that type of a few just other, like, off-the-wall questions.
46:21 You know, President Obama orders the execution of Osama bin Laden, and I believe they also ordered the execution of the American citizen that was the al-Qaeda representative in Yemen, I believe it was. He has the right to do that, but now he can’t have the right to detain someone indefinitely in Guantanamo. Well, why would you say he has a right to do that? That’s asking you. Yeah, and I don’t know if, whether or not he ordered Osama bin Laden to be killed or executed, but certainly, indisputably, he did for Awlaki, and they claim that Awlaki’s an operational leader.
46:56 What does that mean? In the military, you have a whole lot of people doing lots of different things who have combatant status, but they don’t carry, you know, or you know, they may even carry a gun somewhere, they long since forgot how to use it. You know, you have psychological operations, which is, you know, propaganda. And so what does it mean to be an operational leader? Is that somebody just again?
47:17 In the Civil War, I hate to keep going back to it, but those are the precedents that we’re now using in the military commissions. Ed Mandelis, the newspaper publisher, sure, you know, would have been said, and there’s, and you can go back, there’s lots of stuff available, and I cite to it in some articles I have written. William Whiting was a solicitor general of the War Department. He talks about how judges and journalists and people saying things that are critical of the government, they’re even more dangerous than the actual combatants, the people wearing uniforms, because they saw them as insidiously subverting the will of the people to fight.
47:50 So it gets dangerous here. When we start, extremely dangerous, and again this is what I mean. These are the same legal principles that authoritarian states always used to suppress their own dissent. We see this right now in Egypt with the prosecution of the Al Jazeera journalists. So the government has conceded in the Hedges v.
48:08 Obama lawsuit, and they won, or rather, you know, the court held that Hedges and these other journalists, including some German and a journalist and an Icelandic parliamentarian, you know, they said they all had no standing, but the government conceded in one of their statements that, okay, under these particular facts, what they’ve said is we don’t have authority for military detention, but, you know, depending on what else they might say, yes, there is, and in fact and they said too, as far as the German and the person from Iceland, the parliamentarian, I think she may have been involved with protests there about, I maybe WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, I don’t know, but said yes, they are subject to military detention. So this is what nobody should delude themselves about.
48:54 What we’re saying with the Military Commissions Act, and calling you know, we may have won on the material support for terrorism, but they still have conspiracy. This is dangerously authoritarian, and we’re already, one person has written, a commentator, frequent commentator, you know, somebody who’s supportive of all the military commissions, has written that this appears a lot like martial law being exercised globally, and in fact it is, when we take martial law precedence from the Civil War and say that those same cases apply to somebody that we picked up in, say, Bosnia, like, the case of Boumediene, that’s in essence, you know, or in fact, exercising martial law over the world. Okay, and the assassination of these targets is exercising even further, because you could argue that, as opposed to taking these people down to Guantanamo and giving them some type of trial, which is fair or not, that they could be executed in the field, and we wouldn’t even know about it, under what currently the administration deems is appropriate, if you know, and and that’s what’s so dangerous, because it seems, yeah, reasonable.
49:56 Okay. But are they civilians, or are they actual combatants? They invented, again, John Yoo invented this term, enemy unlawful combatant, unlawful enemy combatant, and they took that out of a case. I won’t go into the legal analysis of it, but Quirin, but it was taken entirely out of context. But again, it falls under this law of non-intercourse, which imposes an absolute duty of loyalty, so when those eight German saboteurs came ashore and took their uniforms off, so they weren’t distinguishing themselves as part of the enemy, just even though they were the enemy soldiers, they still incurred this absolute duty of loyalty as now being resident on our territory under this law of non-intercourse, so that’s what put them into violation of the law of war.
50:39 This is from World War II. This is from World War II. So, in writing the opinion, one of the justices wrote, they’re unlawful enemy combatants, meaning their enemy combatants are German soldiers, but they’re, you know, because they took their uniforms off and were within our territory, they then, therefore, for that reason alone were unlawful, and therefore we had authority to, you know, have a military commission, and then the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply.
51:05 And in the Geneva Convention, this is before the final version of them, the current version, but, you know, it provided as long as you have a trial. And so in the same time, but what the government has argued is that just by their very nature, somebody who is somewhere picked up in the world without a uniform on is inherently an unlawful enemy combatant if they’re deemed to be so. Okay, so it’s extremely subjective. So it’s, well, it’s subjective the way the government has been using it.
51:31 What we’re talking about with somebody, in most cases, are civilians, and in and under the Geneva Convention’s current one, fourth Geneva Convention, it does give authority for a belligerent to protect itself from saboteurs, spies, and people who might be within their own territory who are dangerous, and it uses the term “who commits a hostile act,” but it applies to military government, which means where the military is exercising authority over occupied territory or under martial law. Okay, doesn’t apply globally. Nothing provides it.
52:06 So when you pick up somebody like Boumediene from Bosnia, he was a civilian in a foreign territory that was not under military occupation by the US, nor was it under martial law. So he falls under the protections given to civilians under various human rights treaties. Okay, and we treated them as an enemy combatant, that was a war crime itself, the way we treated a civilian. And the same thing applies to deeming somebody a civilian, an enemy combatant, and killing him.
52:32 Okay, I understand your point there. Where do we go from here? I mean, how can we change any of this? I mean, how can we change the next administration believing that they have these rights, you know, to target these individuals, you know, to continue a lot of this behavior? Well, I think a big first step is just realizing how dangerous it is.
52:51 I’m not for a moment saying that President Obama would use these legal arguments to the most extreme case, although I did write an article on, how it might be without more transparency how drone warfare is almost resembling, the Phoenix Program out of Vietnam, where we were killing civilians, where civilians were deliberately being killed, because the theory was under counterinsurgency that they were the infrastructure providing support to the actual Viet Cong. So we weren’t kill, the Viet Cong or they would have been surplusage, but we are killing the civilians that, you know, we allege were supporting them, and that means family groups, other villagers, etc., and that was put into the Church Committee, and denounced so we’re, you know, it has to be asked.
53:46 I actually seen a couple of military officers who’ve written, at least one of whom, on my site, say, yeah, maybe this is back in 2005, maybe we need to adopt something like the Phoenix Program again. I spoke to somebody the other day, and was sort of saying, you know, how many of these civilians, you know, that are being killed are questionable, you know, that they might have just been exercising some sort of dissent from what we’re doing. And so it’s dangerous territory here.
54:13 So I’ll leave it. It’s very dangerous. So you want to educate people so they’ll be aware of these things are happening, and that they’re just fundamentally unconstitutional. Exactly, fundamentally unconstitutional, and violative of international treaties, Geneva Conventions, and human rights law. Okay, now, from here, where does Edward Snowden fit into this whole picture?
54:34 Because I know, in your Institute for the Study of American Militarism, and you talk a lot about the First Amendment and how that is an important thing to talk about when it comes to all the trickle-down consequences and how that affects. Let me be clear: the Institute for the Study of American Militarism is something that’s been incorporated. We’ll see where this goes. So it’s really nothing organized at this point, other than having a corporate name. But there are a number of people who have already said they’d be associated with, people who you know we have, who are very credible and have a lot of respect in the community, as of National Security and, there’s a book I mentioned already, The Family Jewels, and it talks about surveillance, and I could go on about what surveillance ultimately means.
55:20 Is it really about tracking to centers? So my understanding is that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden they both tried going through the chains of command, you know, to bring this to the attention and get some notice that wait a minute, we’re violating the law here, and in both those cases they were dismissed, you know, and, you know, don’t you know, we don’t want to talk about this. So they ended up going in, resorting to the means that they did. But it is fundamental, as I say, for a democracy to have the right to know, and this has been so closely controlled, and Bradley Manning has shown the consequences of, you know, what happens if you reveal it and there’s other whistleblowers who have too, all of whom pay a huge price in various ways, which I, I again, I believe has the additional intent of making an example of them, so that nobody else dares to reveal anything, but this book, The Family Jewels, it’s all about this, generally, what is done and even what the United States now has and the courts of state secrets privileges.
56:23 You know, if you look at it factually, historically, it’s more often to cover up criminality, dereliction of duty, or just plain negligence, and which is what the original court case that was decided proved, you know, when they finally did a Freedom of Information Act request, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years later, and got some information, turned out what the United States was protecting as a state secret was merely negligence by the air crew that caused, you know, the plane that was a subject of the lawsuit to crash. Was this, what was this? No, no.
56:57 This was, shortly in the early ’50s. I believe, I forget the exact name of the case. Now it’s been a long time since I even thought of it, but, yeah, so some survivors, some family members of the people who were killed brought a lawsuit, and the government protected itself, defended itself by saying, claiming state secrets, and it turned out the only state secret was negligence by the air crew, and that’s how it’s been so often used, or, more particularly, as The Family Jewels shows, and William Colby, the director of the CIA, admitted was to cover up criminality, and it’s not about protecting us.
57:32 It’s not about, you know, what we have now is this huge amount of information. Again, using this Hedges v. Obama lawsuit, and just speaking hypothetically, that let’s say Hedges gets, you know, the journalist who’s named in the, who’s bringing the lawsuit, you know, reveals something more than what the security services want, written, criticizing. I’m not revealing any, you know, classified information, and so they go back, and so easy now when you have all this information.
58:03 You’ve captured all of his emails, all of his, websites he’s visited, and you can contrive a legal case, you know, by weaving these things together, daisy-chaining it in together to make something that, you know, creating something that’s legal, turning it into what appears to be illegal. This is extremely dangerous spy agents have admitted this is how you do it. Right? Cuz most people have a hard time identifying your, a fundamental right to privacy, to this, this American military state.
58:28 What do you call it? The unified, unitary executive. Those are two that’s a big, a divide for most people to cross, you know, you being able to read my Gmail, to being able to have some militaristic state. But that’s the argument you’re making? Yeah, and, and again, we, again going back to Vietnam, there this argument, coming out of the stab-in-the-back myth that some of these generals adopted and perpetuated.
58:51 We now have prominent commentators, you know, arguing that we need to have censorship. You’re in war, we’re in a multigenerational war or the long war or various terms they use, salivating on the fact that we can keep scaring the American people into giving up any liberties they have under the Constitution. So they argue, actually argue, for, yeah, we need censorship, we need military detention for people who might be critical of the government. We, and they actually say, for things that, saying things that might, you know, cause our militaries, you know, to lose their will to fight.
59:25 This is authoritarian, pure authoritarianism, and and, you know, again, I hate to even use the word liberties or rights, because it suggests that these are luxuries we have in peacetime. No, these are how we keep track of a whole lot of incompetence in government, and, you know, incompetence, or those who will use the government, the power that they achieve for their own purposes. I mean, William Westmoreland had his own presidential ambitions. He was deliberately, and this is, we, a group of former intelligence officials came up, you know, Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, which I’m involved with.
1:00:02 Sam Adams was a CIA analyst who went up the chain of command in the CIA, pointing out that Westmoreland was manipulating, and lying about intelligence to make it look like he was winning in Vietnam, and this was done to the detriment of American soldiers. I’m not unsympathetic to the additional Vietnamese who were killed in the war, but, you know, this is pure, the traitors in this thing were people like Westmoreland, because they were creating the conditions that more Americans would die. Okay, and this is what we need to realize: you put somebody in charge with no oversight, and people die, and they may well be our own soldiers.
1:00:39 So speaking as a retired soldier, I’m outraged, and you’re not against the military per se. You think this is going to help the military? I’m, I’m, I’m for the military being used for those purposes of defending the nation, and not for intervening, and where we become overly aggressive, and waging, what, you know, somebody else does, what we might call crimes of aggressive war, but for, for National Security, genuine National Security, and not contrived, you know, wars to just keep the idea going that we’re in this perpetual state of war.
1:01:10 Yes, I’m okay. So what makes you optimistic these days? Well, that you, I can still be on here talking to you. I guess that’s caused for a little bit of optimism is the fact that Snowden was successful in a lot of these revelations. Make you optimistic?
1:01:26 Well, it’s optimistic that people saw how far this is going, but it makes me pessimistic to hear so many people think who want to defer to these national, I don’t even like to call them National Security, you know officials or whatever, because I think it’s National Insecurity. A former CIA analyst actually wrote a book, National Insecurity, showing how these practices are making us much less secure. Chalmers Johnson wrote a book called Blowback, and then he wrote a couple, you know, before 9/11, pointing out that this, putting military bases everywhere around the world, you know, and we have combat and commands, US has combat and commands covering every inch of the globe, maybe with the exception of Antarctica, and I don’t say that facetiously.
1:02:10 I mean everywhere else, exercising some kind of military authority everywhere we go, and I would recommend you read the book Dirty Wars, and how this is even getting, you know, how this has escalated over the last 12 years, and again, this, the book Blowback is about how this generates hostility toward us, and, you know, to those people, military authorities, who think tactically, you know, they see that as a threat to our national security, but it used to be, before Cheney, you know, before 9/11, before Cheney got to rewrite everything in the Department of Defense, we understood that grand strategy, or those larger interests, and that’s why the genius of our Constitution, by separation of powers and placing the civil authorities above the military and requiring them to act as civil authorities and not acting as if they’re part of the military, like this commander-in-chief theory does, gave us the greater wisdom of realizing that the true National Security of a nation includes its economic well-being, you know, being able to educate its population, and that’s what really makes for a nation’s greatest strength, and then, of course, use it responsibly, versus these tactical thinking that, well, let’s go into this other nation, beat them up, kick ass, as some people like to say, you know, neocon commentators used to always talk about kicking somebody, some other nation’s ass, as they put it, and thinking that’s what made us strong, so that ultimately hurts us, having all those power pres, that hurts us, and here, and here you can see
1:03:40 It, no better terms, and we just cut in the proposed budget. I don’t have the exact numbers, I, I, I, for close, I think it’s $22 billion for food stamps or something like that in the US budget, and at the same time there’s a corresponding increase for military spending of like 24 or 26 billion, so we’re at that stage now because of the economic realities that now we’re having a steal from the domestic economy to continue giving it over to what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex to keep these, you know, perpetual state of war going, so that we can then justify even more authoritarianism at home. It’s a vicious circle that does not end well.
1:04:20 You’re happy that Snowden made these revelations, but your fellow Americans aren’t taking their lack of privacy very seriously, is what you’re saying? And, and again, I hate to even use the term lack of privacy. Again, it’s what’s necessary for us to keep oversight over these people, without fear. I mean, again, losing privacy means that we’ve, you know, we have to be more fearful of, and writers have said, they, you know, yeah. How, I mean, myself, what I’m saying now, you know, to some authoritarian like my former friend, you know, still friends, the guy who’s, to take him out and shoot him, you know, he’d probably see this as some form of disloyalty I mean, again, because that, that authoritarian mind.
1:04:57 But yeah, but the other population that has to be concerned is, the global population. Why are they giving up global democracy, giving it over? You know, you’ve got to realize how draconian, totalitarian Dick Cheney really thinks he and Paul Wolfowitz wrote way back in 1991 what was called the draft planning guidance, asserting, in it, it was secret, asserting that the United States now exercised global military domination over the world, and we would not tolerate anyone, even our allies, to have the means to question our policies.
1:05:31 That was leaked by somebody from within the Pentagon. And of course, even our allies most vigorously objected. You know, we were telling Britain that we’re not going to tolerate any thing that might contrast with our, you know, our policies, and so they pulled it back, rewrote it a little bit, not meaningfully, and, you know, it was out there. Yet Dick Cheney, when he came back into power as, you know, his vice president, wrote, following, you know, and again there’s ample evidence out there that they were planning the war on Iraq even before 9/11.
1:06:05 General Wesley Clark pointed that out, that they had a plan to take down seven different Arab countries, you know, following Richard Perle’s recommendation of fragmenting the Middle East. But in the end of 2001, Dick Cheney wrote the introduction to the cenal defense review, and amongst the threats he identified to the United States were what he called access threats. And, I mean, what he meant exactly, does that mean?, any nation that would not allow Halliburton to come in and exploit the oil resources of that nation, to the detriment of the people of that nation, was that an anti-access threat, or would not allow a pipeline going through?
1:06:42 And quite honestly, I suspect that that’s really what he meant. Okay, anybody that did not submit to what he had called, I basically, re-, you know, created this idea of military global military domination. From his 1991 paper, was written of as an anti-access threat. Okay, is this, things going to get better or worse from here? Well, when people realize what this really means to global governance as well as US governance, do we really want to turn the world into a, you know, authoritarian state under, you know, the US military, you know, domination?
1:07:17 And that’s, that’s not an exaggeration. Anyway, there’s a book out I recommend if you want to see the thinking of this. It’s, The Pentagon’s New Map, which I’ve come across a couple different places, and, it was on the recommended reading list of a number of the, you know, officers in the US military and was, very influential, and, within the Pentagon, at least a few years ago. And, and I actually read as part of my professional military reading, and it asserted that, outside of a few core countries, which You know, Great Britain might be happy to know that they were included, in, the rest of the world was seen as basically hostile or, savage, or, or something like that, and the United States military had a duty to police those areas, and, that’s how that covered the entire globe, and, and that’s how expansive this authority is being asserted by some neoconservative or conservative, you know, advocates of this sort of point of view.
1:08:12 Does the president have any control over this or not? Really, you know, it makes you wonder. That’s, and that’s again, I have no insight and knowledge so. But President Obama came in saying certain things. He’s going to shut down Guantanamo, and, and now we still have Guantanamo and in fact it’s almost like we’ve escalated into it.
1:08:32 It took another step, into this line of authoritarian thinking, where you know, we’ve now got the case of US citizens, and I was at the hearing, the al-Awlaki hearing, you know, case brought by, brought the action by Ali’s father to try to get an injunction against killing al-Awlaki, and, again there’s no, I’ve seen no evidence that Ali ever did anything violent. He is certainly an, advocate against US policies, but I’m not sure who he, or if he ever actually advocated, you know, military violence. But in any case, So I was at that hearing, and, and the government, the Department of Justice, you know, unashamedly argued that of course the president has authority to kill US citizens., so again, it’s, very dangerous, and, and obviously candidate Obama would not have made that claim, but President Obama’s Department of Justice does make that claim.
1:09:25 Right? What’s, what’s, things that people listening or watching us can do? How can they, how can they learn more about this, and what are the few changes they can make? I mean, is it about really trying to go out there and protect your privacy, or to know about what the government’s actually doing? I just got an email on one of the lists I’m on today, by a person you, who I consider very knowledgeable, and he’s very knowledgeable about European politics, And he said, okay, so we’ve stood down.
1:09:51 I guess an order has been issued, according to this, that, okay, we won’t, we won’t, trap, we won’t surveil, eavesdrop on Merkel, you know, but we’ve increased the even closer surveillance, eavesdropping on all other high-level German government officials, again, you know, and, we’ve admitted, I mean, economic interests are one of our national interests. So why would other people in other nations want to give to the US Security Services the right to, eavesdrop on discussions taking place on how they’ll negotiate contracts?, I mean, a whole line of things that are all to the economic detriment of other nations by giving that information to the US government for us to exploit for our own economic advantage. You know, this is not about terrorism.
1:10:42 This is about, you know, vacuuming up all this information to be used for, again, economic negotiations, a whole lot, you know, all under the pretext that these are part of our national interest and therefore part of our national security interest. So again, people, I don’t know exactly the answer, but, if, I was in a foreign nation I would be demanding of my officials that they not go along with this sort of thing, recognizing that it might affect the economic well-being of a country such as Greece or Iceland, where, you know, we’ve already done a lot of harm with our own banking systems, selling the derivatives and whatever, that all goes. So, yeah, so a lot of our economic policies are not to the benefit of people in other nations, and why are we given that authority as the United States Security Services to harm other nations’ economic interests by having access to all this information?
1:11:39 There’s again, I don’t know. I have the answer., maybe you do. That’s a good place to start. I mean, it’s a good place, especially in Europe. Here, but one big start would be, and here’s, this Institute for the Study of American Militarism, our argument is the Constitution is our greatest strength, that was framed that way, developed that way, and that has actually been vindicated over a couple hundred years when all these authoritarian regimes, like the Nazis, the Soviets, Mubarak and others, Mubarak, jury is still out on what’s going to happen there, have all come and gone, and we’ve, and again I’m not excusing lots of different things in the past, but, you know, but at one time we were, I’d say, pre-9/11, you know, no nation is perfect, but we were sort of a beacon of liberties, and I don’t think anybody considers that anymore, at least in the polls I see, some people say the Constitution is out of date, it’s old.
1:12:31 No, I vigorously disagree, and we probably don’t have time for the many reasons, but I think I’ve already covered that. I don’t want to give Military policy development authority to General Westmoreland and two or three of his cronies, you know, or his current general, you know, Petraeus, just a couple years ago., we’ve been sold this bill of goods at the Iraqi surge was a result of military genius on the part of General Petraeus, and I mentioned to somebody earlier today this one journalist, Thomas Ricks, was very critical of how the Iraq war is conducted at the beginning, very critical of the generals, etc., and he’s absolutely right, but he, he, he was seduced, I’ll say, in my opinion, by Petraeus, you know, we know. And anyway, in, you know, and he wrote a second book, I forget the title of it, The Generals, maybe, but anyway, there he was very, you know, he could have been more enthusiastic, of Petraeus as a, so, you know, supposed genius.
1:13:31 And so I was at the book signing for this book, and I pointed out, when at the end of his, going on about Petraeus, his genius, said no, it seemed to me we actually, lost the war because we did not obtain, attain, a military objective that, you know, requires the reconciliation of different groups within Iraq. You know, we now had, the, we only exchanged one group in power over the other., nothing else had really changed and I’m not exaggerating. He immediately conceded the point, and he said, yes, you’re right.
1:13:59 We, we lost, the surge failed, and he said exactly that. We didn’t get that, reconciliation between the Shiites and the Sunnis. So much for, you know, Petraeus as genius, right? But I won’t speculate why this journalist would go on, and, and,, but, but, there are witnesses to this too. So, so no, I don’t want, you know, to defer.
1:14:20 Now we’ve got, you know, another issue came up earlier today, somebody talking about how many people stay in Afghanistan., I think the one thing that did succeed in Iraq, and the one thing that might succeed in Afghanistan, was when we told the people, who the insurgents that we’re not, you know, against us occupation, that we’re not going to stay here forever, and gave them a date certain, and immediately, in the case of Iraq, most people no longer had a reason to fight the US because they knew we were leaving., the uncertainty of whether or not the US will stay is part of the motivation for continuing an insurgency against the US staying in a nation. Okay, no, no point, point well made there. Todd, I ask everyone on the show a simple question at the end, and I’m going to ask you as well., if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Todd Pierce and give that young man a bit of advice.
1:15:04 What would you tell him? You know, you know, I sort of had a very non-traditional path into the law. I didn’t go to law school till my 40s, and, and, you know, there’s times I wish I’d taken a more direct path, or whatever, had a greater appreciation for education when I was young., and I did pass that on to my own son, a greater appreciation for education., but the caveat would be, don’t just rely upon the information you’re fed, you know. You’ve got to rely upon a wide variety of sources of information.
1:15:39 Don’t be afraid to look at different ideologies and try to understand what is motivating the thinking behind those ideologies. So I guess, you know, yes, get educated at an earlier age than I did, but also don’t constrict yourself, you know, to, restrict yourself to only some sources of information you think outside of the education you’re being given., actively seek more information, and depending upon the issue, realize you’ve got to look at every side of that issue., Michael Scheuer, who’s a CIA analyst, has written a book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes about how the people in our, you know, associate with al-Qaeda think, and that’s absolutely essential to understand in whatever field you’re in, is to understand the underlying thinking of others and to appreciate it, even when you think that they’re just the enemy.
1:16:32 We can’t have anything to do with them. You know, you’ve got to understand how people think. That’s well, so, what’s, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received?, I’ve gotten lots of good advice, so,, you know, I’d have to think about that., anything in the military that that stands out? I’m not, try, I’m not, I’ve gotten a lot of good advice, and, in different stages of my life, you know, so, nothing immediately comes to mind. But I will say, yeah, I, I will say, I have a great co-counsel, lead attorney on one of the cases., I don’t want to embarrass him by naming his name, but, he’s really the one who sort of directed me into looking more into the right to know, and, so again, my lead attorney in one of the cases, and, that’s caused me to dig deeper and deeper and really try to sort out where these arguments are coming from, in the costs, that we’ve already incurred, in the even greater potential costs if we give up this right to know.
1:17:41 So, having not having thought about, I could come up with lots of people who have given me good advice, but,, or, or, and, you know, but,, nothing immediate. No, it’s important that you came on here and told us about kind of that right to know, and how, you know, we really need to educate ourselves and become aware of what’s going on, or, you know, the state can get a little bit out of control. So if people want to find out more about your Institute, more about you, I know you’re not on Twitter.
1:18:07 How do people get a hold of you? How can they contact you?, so, like I say, the Institute is not up and going yet. It’s under development., so,, I guess I’ll just do. I give up my email address. People email you.
1:18:25 Let me just give out my email address., te1 1983 msn.com. Okay, fantastic. And you’re heading back to the DC area sometime this year or next year?, yeah, I’m going to move back. Minnesota, where I’m currently at. It’s just too cold, but, too much snow.
1:18:44 It’s also too far away from people that share my concerns and, you know, and to work on these issues. Todd, thanks so much for, coming on today and telling us a little bit about Guantanamo and how that relates to so many other things. I mean, I had never even thought that the Civil War might have history that carried over, or even mentalities that carried over into our policies you know, 150 years later, but, it’s now obvious that there is, so thanks so much for, kind of enlightening us on these issues.
1:19:13 And, no, it’s been very educational for me. It’s interesting, because I, I think, you know, Guantanamo had its time where it’s talked about, and this is probably one of the times where it’s not talked about as much, you know, but it’s still a glaring, glaring, you know, eyesore on American policy. So I’m glad we can talk about it. Well, if I can just add one final thing, because it’s no longer being talked about much, it makes it even more dangerous, because, again, the underlying legal principles, as I’ve said, are what are really dangerous here and not just to Americans, but to everybody on this globe.
1:19:45 Okay. Todd, thanks so much. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours, and, all the best. Thanks a lot.
1:19:53 Okay, thanks for having me all right take care. What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination
