Noam Chomsky Glenn Greenwald with Liberty and Justice For Some

former constitutional rights lawyer Glenn Greenwald contends that the United States has a two-tier judicial system one for the halves and one for the Have Nots this is a little over an hour so thank you thank you very much um and on behalf of Professor tomsky thank you for that very warm reception thanks very much for for coming this afternoon and and particular thanks to um Professor tomsky it is indescribably gratifying to be able to write a book and then attend an event to talk about it with the nation's bravest and and most accomplished public intellectual and and political activist so I'm I'm particularly grateful um to Professor shomsky for being here I just want to begin by um making a couple of points that I think will frame the discussion uh that we're going to have nicely and I'm not sure what that discussion will be because we haven't talked about it on purpose um but there are a couple points that I anticipate will help um to highlight that I think um I'd like to just briefly describe so the book really makes the argument that the rule of law as we have always understood it has been radically degraded in a way that wasn't previously true and the interesting thing about the rule of law is that it's a term that has a pretty clear u meaning by consensus it's not a particularly complex term it essentially means nothing more than the fact that in a society we are all bound on equal terms terms by a common set of rules and you can look to contemporary legal Scholars who Define it that way um you can look more interestingly to uh the 1980s and the 1990s when Western institutions like the IMF and the World Bank began demanding that lending country or uh countries that received lending comported with the rule of law and there were lots of lectures issued about what they were required to do in order to comport with the rule of law and there was a seminal Journal article by Thomas ks in foreign affairs that warned that countries that don't live under the rule of law in those countries Elites can use their Superior Financial power to Coop political institutions and that the critical requirement to live under the rule of law is that political and financial Elites cease placing themselves above the rule of law and are subjected to it on equal terms to everyone else and you go back to the founders and as much as uh disagreement as they had what you continuously find um is this emphasis not ancillary or second but really Central um that the American founding in order to be legitimate um and just had to venerate the rule of law and this was true despite the fact that Founders almost across the board um believed in the inevitability and even desirability and virtue of vast levels of inequality in all sorts of Realms um and yet they continuously emphasize that the only way that that inequality would be legitimate and just as if everyone were equal before the law now you know anytime you make the argument or or point out that the rule of law and equality before the law was important in the founding you'll be met with the objection which is obviously an accurate one as far as it goes though I don't think it goes very far that the founders violently breach those principles in all sorts of ways um and that the country did as well and that this concept of equality under law has never been um the predominant uh theme to describe American political reality and although that is true um the reason I don't think it goes very far is because the important uh part of that writing and and and that history is that that principle has always been affirmed as being Central even at the time that we violated it radically and the reason that's important is because if you affirm a principle and deviate from it in in in your actions um there's an obvious aspect to your behavior that is hypocritical but if the affirmation is sincere and ringing and consistent um then those principles even though you're not comporting with them become aspirational they become guides to what progress means how it's understood and how it's achieved so even though the founders violated that principle in all sorts of ways the fact that they continuously enshrined it and it was affirmed continuously throughout the next two centuries meant that most of the events that we consider to be progress in American history were driven by the reverence for this concept that we're all equal under the law that equality under the law is how we determine if we're perfecting the union and there's a real value in affirming principles even if they're not perfectly applied and what I think is radically different about today um is not that the rule of law suddenly is is not being applied Faithfully because that's always been true what's different about today radically is that we no longer even bother to affirm that principle we pay lip service to the phrase the rule of law but there's in terms of the substance of what it requires you can often and I would say more often than not in leading opinion-making Elite circles find an Express renouncement or repudiation of that principle so you begin with the forward pardon of Nixon continuing through the shielding of Iran Contra criminals into the Obama administration's decision to Shield all Bush crimes of torture and illegal warrantly seiz dropping um obstruction of justice the aggressive attack on Iraq um the decision now not to prosecute Wall Street criminals from precipitating the 2008 crisis with systematic financial fraud all of these acts entail very aggressive and explicit arguments that the most powerful political and financial Elites in our society should not be and are not subject to the rule of law because it's too disruptive it's too divisive it's more important that we look forward that we find ways to avoid repeating the problem and so you really see constant arguments um and you did for example during the debate over whether or not the Telecom industry should be retroactively immunized for its role in the illegal eavesdropping program that the rule of law is really not that important of a value any longer Jerry Ford when he addressed the nation and tried to convince it to accept the pardon said of course I believe in the rule of law the idea that the law is no respector of persons but and this was the amendment that was concocted for that episode the law is also a respector of reality meaning that if it's too D disruptive or divisive that it's actually in our common good not the elite criminals but in our common good to exempt the most powerful from the consequences of their criminal acts and that has really become the template used in each of these instances and that I think radically um is different than how things were in the past uh the the other point I want to make um just to begin then I'll turn the floor over to Professor chsky um is that the other difference is that if we had a society that just decided that we were going to be very lenient and forgiving and merciful when people committed crimes as I just described we do for Elites you could have debates about whether that was an advisable policy or approach to criminality about whether or not that would be produce good results or not but if it were apped applied across the board at the very least it wouldn't implicate rule of law as us there are countries that take very lenient approaches to criminal justice um and if we were a country that applied that same leniency to um ordinary Americans as we apply to Elites then there wouldn't be an issue with the rule of law so for example if you went and broke into someone's house and and and and bashed the owner in the head with with a baseball bat and stole their valuable belongings and a week later or two months later got caught by the police and you said look officer you got me I did what you think I did but isn't it more important that we could look to the future why let why focus on the past if that were something that worked for you or for people who sold drugs on street corners and the like then um there wouldn't be a rule of law issue but the fact that that applies only to um to political and financial Elites and not to ordinary Americans is the reason why there's a rule of law problem at the very same time that we've created this template of elite immunity we over the past four decades we have in the name of Law and Order and tough on crime built the world's largest and most sprawling prison State one of its harshest and most merciless systems of punishment for ordinary Americans and the irony that Richard um was the one who received this pardon when in the 1960s he rejuvenated his political career by becoming the Law and Order candidate following taking up the mantle of Barry Goldwater running against the disruption and an arrest of the 1960s demanding harsh sentences lesser parole lesser opportunity for release from prison um the drug war was really accelerated first under him the fact that he built his political career based on this harsh Law and Order mentality and then suddenly when he got caught committing crimes was complete shielded from legal consequence is really the personification of this two-tier justice system that I'm writing about and then of course the war on terror has brought all new tiers of Justice where uh people accused of terrorism just accused um can have every right deprived from them including the right to life without any sort of legal rights or legal process of any kind it's really a new class A Class where there's not even a pretense of due process it's a person non a subers um class where the government can do anything without any legal constraints at all and it's this contrast between the shielding and Immunity that we've vested in the elite class or more accurately that they vested in themselves versus the extraordinarily unprecedentedly harsh and merciless punishment system imposed on everyone else that is the real menace to the rule of law and that I think is the most responsible factor for uh the loss of faith in our political institutions and and the widespread accurate belief that you see motivating the Occupy Movement and other widespread citizen rage that our political institutions have lost all remnants of legitimacy and can no longer be used to effectuate change so I think it's one of the most menacing problems and also one of the most consequential so well let me just pick up on Glenn's last comments and say a few things about the rule of law uh happens that uh last night I was reading the current journal the current uh uh edition of the U journ one the main Journal of the American um Society for uh his historical historical relations the Matic history and that happens to be devoted several articles are devoted to the nberg tribunal and to what it means and how it developed and so on and the lead article uh uh points out that uh one of the most uh uh honorable uh uh and admired uh elements of the American historical tradition the legal tradition is the principle of presumption of innocence that is a person is Presumed Innocent a suspect is Presumed Innocent uh until uh brought to a fair trial and convicted with proper procedural guarantees uh that's the proudest achievement of the American legal and ethical tradition and of course it was U recognized at Norberg the British wanted just kill the Nazi work criminals but U Justice Jackson the US uh Chief prosecutor insisted that uh even though these people are maybe you know the worst criminals in history uh they should be brought to trial subjected to a fair trial uh uh condemned if they were proven guilty and furthermore he added that uh we're uh uh giving these defendants u a poisoned chalice and if we ever SHP from it meaning if we ever do the things that they're accused of we must suffer the same consequences otherwise these proceedings are a complete farce the core element of the proceedings the main crime for which the Nazi criminals were condemned and hanged was what was called in the tribunal the Supreme International crime namely aggression pretty clearly defined uh uh which they said is tribunal said is the worst of all war crimes because it encompasses all the evil that follows well I won't run through the way that's been we've applied that to ourselves but that point is correct presumption of innocence is a very deeply rooted principle not of American law but of Anglo American law or it used to be by now it's simply totally dismissed and with praise uh so for example when uh Osama Bin Laden was the Prime Suspect for 911 plausibly though in fact fact of the matter is the government has yet to provide the kind of evidence that would hold up in a credible court and is even more or less conceited it doesn't have it but undoubtedly he's the the prime suspect a couple of months ago Obama invaded another country uh uh Commandos apprehended him and murdered him uh tossed his body uh into the ocean without autopsy uh and this was praised this was praised as a great achievement great achievement of the Obama Administration a couple of months later the concept was extended in a manner that Glenn talks about in his book which is a terrific book I should say that's the case of Anar alaki a aaki uh an American citizen uh a cleric who was accused not of committing there was some talk about involvement in crimes but no evidence was presented the main charge against him was he was a fluent speaker of English and he was uh transmitting he was present giving offering support for uh Jihadi operations uh he was killed couple of weeks ago and the general reaction was U Illustrated adequately in a New York Times headline which said the West celebrates death of radical cleric well it wasn't just death it was murder along with another American citizen who happened to be near him uh and while it's true that the and there were some who didn't join in the celebration completely U almost all of them criticized it because he was an American citizen which makes him a person in theory as distinct from non-citizens who may look like persons but aren't uh that's incidentally a core principle of current American law with regard to undocumented aliens interesting interpretation of the 14th Amendment but uh so he was an actual person and maybe we're not supposed to murder people suspected of uh uh inciting others to carry out terrorist acts now again there were some critics uh and the response who went beyond that and said we should believe in the principle of presumption of innocence and the reaction to them actually I was one uh was uh quite interesting most of it was the usual shrieking which you can disregard but some of it was interesting and in fact the most interesting I thought was a column by a well-known respected U left liberal commentator Matthew eaus Who U wrote that it is uh as he put it amazingly naive to criticize the United States for violation of international law or other crimes because the international the inter ational order is established precisely in order to legitimate the use of Violence by the west and by the West he doesn't mean Norway he means by the United States so that's the nature of the international order it's set up to legitimate our criminal resort to violence and therefore it's amazingly naive to raise criticisms about this incidentally this is not said in criticism he's praising it uh he goes on to say it's silly even to raise these questions that happens to be directed to me and I'm happy to accept guilt for that on that charge uh but uh and if you look Beyond and ask just what does it mean to be a non-person uh uh say a ter accused of terrorism well there's a striking example in Glenn's book uh as he points out the first Child Soldier in American history to be brought to trial for crimes and that one's worth looking at that's Omar khader there a a 15-year-old boy uh who was apprehended in Afghanistan and the charge against him is that when American soldiers were invading Afghanistan and attacking his village he picked up a gun uh to defend his village so that makes him a terrorist a non-person uh and uh interesting concept of terrorism uh and uh he he was then first sent to Bam secret prison in Afghanistan then sent off to Guantanamo 8 years in prison no charges uh after 8 years in prison he was going to be brought to tr what's called a trial before a military commission we have to talk about that uh but he pleaded guilty and a plea bargain uh and was given an 8-year sentence in addition to the eight years he spent without charges we all know what it means to flee guilty in a flea bargain after eight years in a in torture chambers uh he actually is a Canadian Citizen and Canada could extradite him but they are courageously refusing to step on the toes of the master uh the concept of Terror and presumption of innocence is you know by now so far gone nobody even bothers to discuss it it's not maybe it was once an ancient tradition but not for us uh and Glenn is quite right that the fact that it's been violated in the past doesn't change the fact that by now we've changed the principle we've abandoned even the principal not I abandon it but forcefully rejected it uh even to the extent of saying the international order is established precisely to legitimate our violation of Elementary legal and moral principles well it goes beyond uh one of the just give one last example the U one of the most in there was an article recently by a law professor who in fact Glen sites a couple times in the book Jonathan Turley who argues that uh Obama may be breaking the record for a US president for violation of U civil rights and the law and you can make a case uh one example which actually involves the forine of the Harvard Law School is U happens to be Obama's latest Supreme Court uh appointee at Kagan uh she argued a case brought by the justice department uh against a group group called The humanitarian laww project uh holder the humanitarian law project uh with the support of the farri justices Obama won that case the charge is uh uh is one that might implicate plenty of people here uh it uh the charge is they provided material assistance to a group that's on the terrorist list the material assistance in this case was legal advice uh to U the pkk uh group that's on the Turkish group Kurdish groups on the US terrorist list which means and they expanded the concept of material assistance from say you know providing guns or something like that to providing legal advice and even advice to uh turn to nonviolent means that's now criminal under US law thanks to President Obama and uh uh it uh extends very broadly in fact shortly after this Supreme Court decision uh dozens of FBI agents raided uh homes in Chicago and other cities uh destroyed documents the usual thing when a couple dozen FBI agents raid your home uh the charge was uh they were trying to find evidence that the people they were uh finally indicted with the grand jury are um supporting a Palestinian group and a Colombian group pflp in farc well maybe they are maybe they aren't but the idea that uh uh expressing support for uh groups on the terrorist list is a crime is material assistance that's novel and the Justice depart Department position was explained by uh Kagan that uh if you provide legal advice to a terrorist group say advising them to refrain from Terror and uh pursue nonviolent means you're legitimizing them and freeing up their resources to carry out terrorist acts well just think how broadly that can apply uh as in these cases which are in fact underway and final comment which has to do with the notion of the terrorist list that's accepted in the United States as a legitimate category why is it a legitimate category how is the terrorist list established it's established by executive Fiat I'm have to give any justification for it those on the terrorist list can't say I don't belong there this is just a decision by the executive that I don't like you and we're going to prosecute we're going to kill you and prosecute anyone now who advises you not to pursue Terror and you look back at the history of the terrorist list it's uh very striking I mean one person who was just removed from it two years ago is Nelson Mandela uh the reason is that the African National Congress was uh uh characterized by the Reagan Administration in 1988 right near the end of a Part I as one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world therefore the US was entitled to support the part height South Africa as it did not only in its atrocities internally but in its U attacks on neighboring countries which apparently killed about a million and a half people but that's all okay it's part of the war on terror that in fact Reagan had declared uh and we have to defend the aparte regime against one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world including Nelson Mandela by today's standards holder versus humanitarian law project almost anyone who was involved in anti- aparte activity could be regarded as a terrorist giving material support for terrorism and as I said Mandela was just removed from the from uh the terrorist list two years ago he can now come to the United States without special dispensation there are other equally trtic cases take 1982 there was a state that had been on the terrorist list Saddam Hussein's Iraq but the Reagan Administration wanted to provide Aid and assistance to Saddam so therefore they removed Iraq from the terrorist list uh and proceeded to provide Aid and assistance right through his worst crimes denying the crimes and in fact rather strikingly when Sadam was tried it was for crimes that he committed in 1982 by his standards pretty minor crimes excluding the major crimes I presume because those were all supported by the United States and in fact even denied by the Reagan Administration well there was a gap in the terrorist list because Iraq was removed had to be filled so it was filled by Cuba Cuba was added to the terrorist list uh partly in order to give some justification for outlandish claims about uh why we were entitled to support murderous terrorist regimes in Central America which left a couple hundred thousand corpses much worse thanks to our involvement and you had to so the argument was well they're being supported by Cuba so it must be a terrorist State fabrication but that's doesn't matter in these cases however Cuba was a pretty good choice uh in the preceding years Cuba had been the target of more International terrorism than probably the rest of the world combined a lot of it coming from right here so therefore Cuba went into the terrorist list and Sadam was taken off so we could support his major crimes which were coming uh well these ought to we ought to think about why we even tolerate the concept of a terrorist list and it's it's just not questioned if the government says someone's on the terrorist list period end of discussion and now if you give say legal advice or other advice to somebody that they so designate uh you're a criminal uh and if you're a 15-year-old child who's uh picking allegedly picking up a gun to defend a village that's under attack by US soldiers you sent off for uh 16 years of prison torture and so on uh if that's what the rule of law is come too it's a sad situation so I think we want to do we have a few minutes and to start um before we we get to the question answer I want to make sure to leave a substantial time um but unsurprisingly um what we just heard has provoked um a lot of um thoughts that that um I want to make because I think um so many interesting points were just raised so um one of the interesting aspects of this two-tier justice system and the idea that Elites can impose standards on everyone else that they from which they exempt themselves it's something that is obviously mirrored in the context of foreign relations and I think probably was even pioneered there this idea that the United States imposes standards on everybody else um and exempts itself is is really the template that then got imported domestically and one of the fascinating things to do is to go and look at at what current political leaders say about things like war crimes investigations and accountability when they're in other countries dulling out sermons and lectures about what those other countries should do so for example President Obama who promulgated and gifted us all with the slogan that we as good citizens should look forward and not backward in order to justify shielding Bush era crimes from accountability gave an interview last year on television in in Indonesia and the Obama Administration has been pushing the Indonesian government to prosecute certain war criminals whom the United States has long disliked and what he told the Indonesians was it is impossible to move forward into a prosperous future until you've resolve the past um and Secretary of State Clinton has visited both Kenya and Cambodia where the United States is similarly urging um war crimes investigations to proceede and has told them the same thing essentially that you cannot be among the nation the the community of decent Nations while you continue to Harbor and shield war criminals from accountability and I think the time that she visited Kenya and said that was the time that George Bush's book was released and he was on every major television station being heralded as a great Statesman and of course if you read and I would really recommend that you do um I did this because I heard Professor Chomsky many years ago talk about it and went and read it the opening and closing statements by Robert Jackson of the nberg tribunals um it's incredibly enlightening because that was supposed to be the expression of modern Justice and not only did Jackson point out that aggressive war was the Kingpin crime the crime above all others um but he also said that the nberg tribunals would have value only if they were applied not only to the defendants in the doc but also to all the nations here assembled meaning the United States and its allies and yet if you were to cite that and argue that that meant that George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld should be prosecuted as war criminals for the aggressive attack on Iraq you could there's almost nothing you could do that's more self- marginalizing than that even people sympathetic to the idea that they should be investigated criminally for the torture regime or for a warrantless EES dropping somewhat recoil at the idea that they should be held criminally accountable for the at least 100,000 dead innocent Iraqis I think because they view the act of Congress authorizing it and the large majorities of the American citizen cheering for it as something that ought to immunize them from that and it I think shows just how Lawless we've become that you can't even site the nberg principles and argue for its applicability in the clearest possible case um without becoming self- marginalized um just a quick point about assassinations and the like um I certainly agree with Professor Chomsky that from a moral and ethical perspective there's zero difference between um send send in a sky robot over another country and eradicating the lives of non-citizens um as opposed to doing that to Citizens based upon mere suspicion or even a lack of Suspicion just as a desire to kill them but I do think there's a practical difference um that is that there is a greater and enhanced Danger on several levels when the government begins murdering its own citizens for political dissidents as opposed to citizens of other countries on foreign soil and the difference is this I think that you know just legalistically the Supreme Court for right or for better for worse right or wrong has said that the constitution applies to foreigners on us soil and to American citizens wherever they are found in the world but more importantly than that is that when the government starts acting against its own citizens it really can escalate a climate of fear that can lead to political um suppression and I think that's one of the things that you've really seen in the United States one of the most striking experiences I've had since I began ring about politics was um the first time that I ever wrote about Wikileaks This was um back in early 2010 and this was before really almost nobody knew who Wikileaks was at the time this was before they had released any of their news making disclosures inside the United States they had released several important documents and had exposed wrongdoing among corporations and governments in other parts of the world but not really in the United States and nobody including me really knew much about them um but the Pentagon had prepared a top secret report they literally about the top secret in 2008 um that declared Wikileaks To Be An Enemy of the State and it described ways that they could go about destroying Wikileaks and it's incredible because the way in which Wikileaks has been rendered all but inoperable pretty much comports with the things that Pentagon laid out in this 2008 report um but in any event in this 20 this 2008 report this top secret report um ironically was leaked to Wiki leaks which then published it um and the New York Times wrote about it and the New York Times article basically said said there's the Pentagon report that's been leaked that declares Wikileaks An Enemy of the State and talks about ways to destroy it and I didn't know very much at all about Wikileaks at the time but I kind of assumed that any organization that had been targeted that way by the Pentagon was one that merited a lot more attention and probably a lot more encouragement and even support and so I went and read a lot about them and I interviewed Julian Sange for um the article that I wrote and I I wrote about it and I posted the audio interview and at the end I encouraged people to go and donate to Wiki um because they had budgetary constraints that were preventing them from going public with a lot of these disclosures um it takes a lot of time and energy to authenticate the documents one of the things the Pentagon talked about to destroy them was submitting fraudulent documents to them so that when they published it it would forever destroy their credibility and The credibility of future disclosures um and in response to my recommendation that people go and donate to them and I provided a link how people could do that electronically and online and through PayPal um dozens of people literally told me in many different venues in the comment section to what I had written by email at events like this where I talk to people that although they agreed wholeheartedly with what I had written about the potential of WikiLeaks to achieve great good that they were afraid of donating money to WikiLeaks especially electronically because they would end up on some government list somewhere or that they could even be subjected to criminal liability under the extraordinarily broad material support for terrorism statutes that Professor Chomsky just talked about and these were not people prone to Wild conspiracy theories these were very sober Americans who I had interaction with in the past on other issues a lot of them were um and I could just tell from the way that they were expressing these fears that they were very rational people and they these fears were well grounded and the reason it was so amazing to me was because it really highlighted how this extraordinary climate of fear has been created in the United States Wikileaks is a group that had never been and still has never been charged with a crime let alone convicted of one and they couldn't be because what they're doing is pure First Amendment activity that the New York Times And The Washington Post in theory do every day which is publish publicized leaks that are given to them by other people and yet these were American citizens who were petrified of exercising core First Amendment rights which is what donating money to an organization whose political cause you support is and they were basically intimidated from the things we've seen over the last 10 years in terms of lawlessness um by what the government has done from exercising these rights so you can offer all the rights in the world on a piece of paper or a piece of parchment that you want you don't need to eliminate those rights if you can intimidate and Bully the population into refraining from exercising them and this really occurred to me even more when I wrote for the first time about the extremely harsh and oppressive conditions in which Bradley Manning was being detained and I remember when I first wrote about it a lot of people wondered and I actually even wondered myself why would the Obama Administration basically turn Bradley Manning into almost a martyr and even jeopardized its own ability to prosecute him by subjecting him to this extremely severe um you could call it torture but at the very least it's inhumane treatment he was in prolonged solitary confinement for nine months despite being convicted of nothing his clothes were taken from him he was stripped nude and forced to stand naked for um many of those days um just completely punitive measures and at some point shortly thereafter I realized that the reason that that was done was the same reason that the bush administ ation took people who were completely Innocent by the hundreds and shipped them thousands of miles away to a Caribbean Island and dressed them in orange jumpsuits and shackles and show the world what we had done it's a way of signaling to the world and to would be Challengers to American power both domestically and internationally that we are not constrained by law we don't have any limits on what we can do if you're somebody who thinks about challenging what we can do take a look at these pictures of people at Guantanamo who are going to be there for as long as we want to keep them there even if they're innocent or if you're somebody who discovers wrongdoing and serious illegality on the the highest levels of our government and you want to expose it to the world think about and look at what we've done to Bradley Manning or what we're now doing to WikiLeaks without any even pretense to Legal Authority and without any constraint whatsoever it's really the use of law as a means of coercion which is the exact antithesis of what it was supposed to be it's those in power using law as a weapon to entrench their power and to Shield their ill gotten gains and the fact that we can call terrorism whatever we want it to be the fact that people who as professor tomsky said take up arms and fight against American troops are terrorists the fact that we just indicted someone nine months ago for quote raising funds to kill American troops in Iraq this was an Iraqi who had raised money to defend his own Homeland from an evading Army so if you're an Iraqi and the American Army invades your country and you take up arms against them you're a terrorist nidal Hassan who attacked a military base of a country that has spent 10 years proclaiming we are at War and killed soldiers about to be deployed to war he is a terrorist as well um and yet when the United States or Israel or our allies directly Target and kill uh civilians by enormous numbers whether recklessly or deliberately um it would be a radical act to describe that as terrorism this is all designed to be able to criminalize whomever the United States wants namely those who challenge it in any meaningful way and that really is the use of law coercively um to entrench those in power rather than to equalize the playing field the final point I want to make and then I think we can turn it over to questions and answers um is Professor tomsky referenced this post by Matt glacius um who um is a byproduct of this school near near where we're talking um and he also works for the center of American Pro Center for American progress which is basically an organization run by John podesta the former Clinton White House official that was founded in essence to justify and defend whatever the Obama White House does um with some exceptions here and there if you search hard enough but basically that's its function um and the fact that um people who write for them um do things and say things to mitigate or defend things like assassinating an American citizen with no due process probably the most radical act that you can think of um really underscores an important point about the way the Obama Legacy is being defined and the way that lawlessness has become normalized um so if you know three years ago and I know I say this to somebody who is doing it if you were to go to an event like this and fill the room with 50% Republicans and 50% Democrats and you were to talk about and condemn things like um wild assertions of executive Authority the idea that the president can act against anyone he wants um with no constraints whatsoever including killing him that he can do so in total secrecy um and with no transparency or checks and of course after we killed anoir Milwaukee two weeks later a drone attack killed his 16-year-old son and his 17-year-old cousin in Yemen and that the US government refuses to even account for what it did there or describe what principles if you were to talk about those things and the other radical secrecy doctrines the Bush Administration use you would have 50% of the room the ones identified self-identified as Republicans supporting it cheering for it justifying it apologizing for it um and being happy with it but 50% of the room the ones self-identified as Democrats would be figting anger over it they'd be um objecting to it as shredding the Constitution and right-wing radicalism and all of this if you were to take that same exact group of people and put them in a room like this now and talk about those same exact things that I just described you would now have 90% of the room cheering for it and supporting it or at least justifying it and mitigating it the way Matt glaus and that posted or at least acquiescent to it and maybe 10% of the room continuing to be angry about it because they were actually angry about it's being done the first time around and not pretending to be angry opportunistically for partisan gain and this has really changed the way that these issues are discussed the fact that now it's not just the Republican Party standing for this form of lawlessness but that it's become under President Obama bipartisan consensus which means it's removed from political debate um it is hardly controversial any longer and it's entrenched as Orthodoxy and American political life for at least a generation there's Jack balkin who's a y law professor has talked about how um what when one party objects to a policy and the other opposes it uh or supports it what happens when the other party gets into office and starts continuing it it becomes no longer a controversial policy it becomes American consensus and endures without much challenge for at least of generation that is what has happened to these policies of lawlessness and wild theories of executive power and the right of the American president to Target anyone for violence or interrogation or incarceration without any oversight it has has now taken on the face of both parties and is therefore likely normalized for um a very long time and to me that's one of the most significant legacies of the Obama presidency so with that I think it's a good time to take questions I think the mechanics were described at the start I didn't hear it so I will rely on you to well first thanks to our speakers uh we have about 15 20 minutes for questions so just head down to this mic and try to keep your questions brief so we can get to as many as you as possible thanks so how do you feel after all these years uh seeing and all that you've done seeing what's happened to our country is that yes to well to you uh Professor chowski first I've had more years well actually uh it's it's it's pretty bad but we should recognize that it's not really all that new uh go back to the uh the day the the modern conception of international law was pretty well founded right after the second World War nberg tribunal Charter of the United Nations so on what so what was the position of the United States then well the United States was instrumental in setting up the world Court International court of justice uh but at once the United States declared that it is not subject to any charges based on International treaties meaning the US Charter the charter the organization of American states or others and in fact that actually came to the court it came to the court during the Reagan years when U the government of Nicaragua brought a charges against the United States for Cally war against Nicaragua or International terrorism if you want to lower the charge uh the Nicaraguan case was presented by a distinguished Harvard Law School Professor most of it was thrown out and it was thrown out because the case appealed to U the core principles of inter modern international law you Charter OAS and so on So In fact when the case was finally you know judged it was restricted to very narrow grounds a bilateral uh us Nicaraguan treaty and what's called the common common international law was generally understood even on that narrow basis the US was accused of unlawful use of force which means terrorism and lay language and ordered to pay substantial reparations well how did the bipartisan Congress react by increasing Aid uh to the cont increasing the U uh actions just condemned this criminal uh meanwhile the New York Times for example dismissed the court as a hostile Forum a proof that it's a hostile and therefore insignificant hostile Forum because it made charges against the us a couple of years earlier the same times and other commentators were praising the court because it supported the US in a charge against Iran well that's uh in fact the United States went on to veto I think two Security Council resolutions which called on all states to observe international law well all of that passed with virtually no comment almost nobody knows about this except maybe some Specialists and it goes beyond in 1948 uh the uh United Nations passed a genocide uh condemnation of genocide genocide major crime 40 years later the united states ratified it but with a reservation inapplicable to the United States and that came to the courts too a couple years later Yugoslavia brought charges against NATO for bombing and among the charges was a reference to genocide uh the United States Representative appealed to the court and uh said that the United States would withdraw from the proceedings because the United States was formally entitled to commit genocide uh which is true by this reservation and the court accepted that correctly the Court ruled are that they can't try bring anyone to trial unless they agree to the proceedings so the United States was excluded from the charges uh the rest of the NATO Powers weren't uh that was reported but with no comment if we declare that we're entitled to carry out genocide fine then we're entitled to carry out genocide uh now these things are pretty deep I mean it's perfectly true that bush broke let's take even the T charges uh if you look carefully it's not so clear that Bush was in serious violation of US law When They carried out torture at Guantanamo or at Abu gra because the US never really signed the torture convention it was Rewritten by the Senate to exclude certain categories of torture and if you look at those categories they are the categories that the CIA carries out the CIA back in the ' 50s basing themselves on KGB manuals and so on redefined torture to allow what's called mental torture you know the kind that doesn't leave marks so for example actually even water boarding uh so you know take Bradley Manning and solitary confinement which is of course torture by any reasonable means but not by US law uh and uh That Was Then signed in legislation under Clinton uh so what's called torture here is a very narrow category and a good deal of the torture that the US carries out is actually legal under us law well you know this is discussed by specialists in constitutional law Sanford levenson and others but uh almost nobody knows about it well you know these are things everyone ought to know about okay yep go Ahad okay I wanted to ask you about two implications or suggestions that I drew from your book um the first is it the excuse me um the there's really the unmistakable conclusion that um that our officials you know judges politicians uh won't or can't um which is more scary Hold powerful powerful criminal behavior um accountable even in the most egregious examples such as torture and this the the possibility that the cognitive dissonance that this raises in our officials that they're not you know the constant awareness that they're not fulfill in their role as officials um may be driving this need to sort of scapegoat to find the most vulnerable um the mo the least politically powerful um for the most trivial offenses accountable so to be able to demonstrate okay look we are holding we're holding a lot of people accountable they're just not holding you know accountable according to law so it's this kind of charade of judiciousness that sort of passes for lawfulness and this kind of vigorousness behind it that may be you know this knowledge of this imbalance may be dve in this kind of and and perpetuating the imbalance and then the second implication was that when our um when our officials give up on law enforcement as their role um that perhaps law breaking greater greater extremes of law breaking becomes a means of expressing power so that yes you know our our uh Financial system engages in widespread fraud but only the president can violate the constitution yeah those are both um interesting and important points it you know it is true that Law and Order basically tends to mean um get drug dealers off the corner who are smelling selling small quantities of drugs to um to other adults who want to buy them um and of course that has all kinds of implications I mean the drug war is incredibly racist it has incredibly disproportionate effects on um the poor and yet at the same time um or or Law and Order means and the rule of law means you know pepper spraying protesters and putting them into prison for peacefully assembling um at the same time that the police are protecting um the criminals on Wall Street who destroyed the economy and committed fraud on an incomprehensible scale um so I think you're right that essentially these kind of petty transgressions that are punished so harshly is a way of um obscuring the fact that the most significant criminals the most consequential crimes um are are shielded and that the the the biggest criminals are allowed to continue to run rampant with their criminality um the other point about as a way of expressing power you know one of the fascinating things about um this whole idea of look forward not backwards um and the like is that um at the same time the very same Administration that has invoked this orwellian slogan as a means of saying that we shouldn't look to political Crimes of the Bush era um has waged the most um the harshest and the most unprecedented war on whistleblowers um people who have leaked what unquestionably is evidence of serious wrongdoing so for example the NSA Scandal that revealed that the Bush Administration was spying on American citizens without the law without the warrants that the criminal law said is required and that the law calls a felony if you do um the only person to suffer any consequences from that Scandal is someone named Thomas Tam who was a mid-level Department of Justice lawyer who found out the Bush Administration was doing this and one day called Eric liblau at the New York Times to tell him that this was going on he was um he was a grand jury was convened he was continuously he lost his job he couldn't afford lawyers he went bankrupt and became had serious um emotional and and psychological problems as a result of that persecution um all of the people who broke the law um have been completely shielded they've went on to write books and get very rich um only the person who exposed it um has been subjected to any form of of sanction and and punishment that absolutely is about um expressing power and saying that um you know if you expose any of the things that we're doing that are criminal and wrong um you will be the one who will be punished using the dressings of law to do it um while we simultaneously Shield ourselves hi um I hope you both have time to answer this but first to Professor chumsky um I came down from occupy Burlington Vermont today um to be here and uh I'm really inspired by the number of people that have risen up to protest the bullying as you put it um of American Elites in many respects uh through the Occupy Movement do you think uh that the Occupy Movement has the potential to Revolution revolutionalize the system to the point that we can topple the power that has so corrupted the rule of law what do you think the movement will need to achieve in order to achieve and overcome in order to do this that's for me for me yeah well I mean I think the the Occupy movements which are now all over the country in fact all over the world are a very exciting development in fact uh inspiring in a lot of ways and really unprecedented I don't know anything quite like them in the past which is makes sense this is an unprecedented period in many ways uh what can they achieve they've already achieved a lot I think they've put things they shifted the range of discussion which is quite important uh they've at the very least are lay laying down a legacy from which you can move on uh there are short-term things that they might be able to achieve which are quite urgent so to take one uh in just a couple of weeks the uh deficit commission is due to reach its a decision which will probably be stalemate uh but whether it reaches a decision or stalemates it's a real dagger pointed at the heart of the country either way because e if it doesn't reach a decision you go into uh kind of an automatic trap that's been set up uh which is aimed at doing exactly the opposite of what Americans want so rather striking fact you take a look at polls first of all large majority of the people don't think that the deficit is the problem anyway and they're right the problem is joblessness there shouldn't be a deficit commission but even if you keep to this minor question of the deficit very large majorities have a solution tax the super rich bring taxes back to what they once were were during our period of rapid growth in fact so tax the super rich and preserve benefits uh even tea party supporters take that position uh uh support protect the benefits which are not great but are crucial for people well the com the commission if it reaches a decision or the automatic process if it doesn't reach a decision are going to do just the opposite uh they'll cut away at The Limited benefits uh incidentally ignoring the reason why they're in fiscal problem Social Security is not a problem at all that's just thrown in in order to try to destroy it uh Medicare is a problem because it works through the privatized uh unregulated refer to unregulated insurance-based Health Care system which is a complete International Scandal if the US had a Health Care system like other industrial countries wouldn't be any deficit in fact it' be a surplus but that that that can't even be discussed because the financial institutions are against it and this goes back to things that Glenn outlines very well in his book uh the the uh but that's coming right away and it's possible it's a long shot but if the Occupy movements get enough kind of force and energy and influence they might do something about this short-term problem now that's very far from RE revolutionizing the society when you talk about deeper problems more long-term ones it has to be understood and I think is that you don't get these things overnight take say the Civil Rights Movement I mean that really began in a militant form in the 1930s it was years of struggle before it even you know reached the possibility where you could discuss it finally thanks to very courageous activities uh students sitting at lunch counters Freedom Riders all sorts of other things it was possible to get to the point where Martin Luther King a great figure in Modern Life was able to give a talk and I have a dream talk and some gains were won they shouldn't be underestimated the south is a different place from what it was and in fact as long let's take people right around here Boston as long as civil rights movement was aimed at racist Alabama sheriffs a lot of support for it as soon as king began to move on to opposition to the Vietnam War and class issues remember that when he was killed he was on his way to organize a Poor People's movement and he was killed during a s in supporting a s while it's supporting a sanitation strike soon as he moved on to those he was dismissed when you listen to the uh adulation on Martin Luther King Day you hear about the racist Alabama sheriffs well gains were one after many years of hard struggle is a long way to go the uh criminalization that Glenn talked about is basically kind of reinstituting uh what was done in the right not long after the Civil War criminalizing black life and pretty much restoring the conditions that existed uh so there's a long way to go and that's one of the successful movements and it's true of other things too there can be very significant gains in the long-term really revolutionary gains but they're not going to come quickly and the main task of the Occupy Movement in my opinion is to make use of the quite remarkable uh network of associations and linkages and mutual support and building spontaneous building of communities make use of all of that to turn it into something that'll be long lasting and enduring and will'll face the inevitable failures and go on to overcome them which is a hard uh long uh course to follow we have just two or three more minutes and two more questions to go so thanks I'd be interested uh what both of you think about this taboo subject the US attorney Scandal the bogus Acorn Scandal the the current re um redistricting efforts the making photo ID requirements the making the assault on the Union and and early voting and registration all seem part of um a concentrated war on the the right to vote so first of all given that these people seem willing to say and do anything um in pursuit of their agenda what is the likelihood that having um highly hackable easily often failing machines um that they own and operate with zero citizen oversight would not be part of their strategy and do you have any advice for what I can do to get get this subject on the radar of my hero Glenn Greenwald well I guess um you just forced it on my radar um because I'm about to address it um but you know I think just conceptually and I will address the specific question in a second but you know it raises the question about whether or not significant um economic and wealth inequality can coexist with rough political equality um or whether or not once there's a small faction that can gain so much power through its wealth then political equality or Democratic institutions cannot possibly resist it any longer or or or remain invulnerable to it um and there are ways and you know even the founders talked about this the the problem that if you're going to allow wealth and income inequality that there is the danger that it can become so concentrated that it'll infect political and legal institutions as well where it's not supposed to make a difference um and yet we've seen periods of time in American history where there's been lots of wealth and income inequality and yet at the same time time political and Democratic institutions have been able to act fairly meaningfully um against the most powerful oligarchs you know Standard Oil and and and JP Morgan were broken up um Franklin Roosevelt was able to create lots of uh redistributive and and social programs um lots of social progress of the kind that Professor chsky was just describing so you can it's been empirically proven that you can have significant wealth and income inequality at the same time political equality that's contingent upon subjecting those who are the most wealthy the wealthiest and and the most politically powerful to the same rules and limitations to which the rest of us are bound and and which we democratically impose on them and once that starts not to happen that's when you get the kind of corruption um that seeps into all the other institutions as far as um control over the voting machines and the like um you know the all political processes are subjected to corruption um and uh Co and the like um I haven't seen evidence that there's systematic fraud on the part of um in terms of our electoral process that comes from voting machine control and at the same time I'm not particularly convinced that there's anyone who has such an overwhelming interest since both parties seem to serve the same interest anyway um I'm not really sure who would be motivated uh to care enough about about that other than the two parties themselves um but you know certainly there's instances where um there's irregularities but I think the more important danger is the one that you talked about which is efforts to start restricting the right to vote more to make to sort of return to the pole tax era where people who have certain political views or have huge impediments thrown in the way and that to me is just part and partial um of the generalized trend of of using what is supposed to be law um and political equality to achieve exactly the opposite yep last question here and then we can hi all the hassle and trying to get me to ask this question is reflective of how my civil rights and the civil rights of all the people who can't be here with PE with disabilities are violated by the elite of Cambridge who also exempt themselves from the basic civil rights of access for 20 years I've had the right to full free and front door access to every building in the country but the elite of Cambridge and the good people of Cambridge who support them exempt this Elite by using the term historic which is an ideological term meaning looks good and keeps property values up and by that process there is a special entrance for me that I got to go in in which the elevator fell an inch and a half when I got in when we got to the top of the elevator we ran into a hand cart and boxes blocking my way out and then the door into the auditorium was locked and then when I came in finally after knocking to get in no one knew what to do with me or where to put me so I I call this bullying it's it's really a constant ongoing humiliation now of of course the burden that would be placed on the Brattle by making it fully accessible through the front entrance would cost a lot but maybe that money is meanwhile being used to put the torturing brick sidewalks on my way to try to get to the front entrance which everyone knows tortures people with disabilities and anyone pushing any wheels and yet they're all over this area because the elite have Exempted themselves right in front of everyone and unfortunately you end end up participating in it Glenn by coming to an event where people can't get to we're bullied all the time I was in the street most of the way on the way to get here and I hope that in the future that you would not speak in a place that didn't have every single person who could come in come in the front door because coming in the front door used to be something that was seen as a civil right in itself thank you very much ask for your um yeah so I you know obviously I wasn't aware of this building ever before um there's laws that um require reasonable steps to be taken to provide access to people who are disabled i' I've litigated those cases before on behalf of people who are disabled um whether there's issues around historic designations and the like um is something I'm just not aware of I'm I'm appreciative of you're bringing it to my attention though and and to the attention of everyone here it's something I I'll certainly give some thought to if I can just add a word to that I think the complaints are quite legitimate but um it also Bears on the preceding question of can we do anything about it and the answer is yes we can it's very different from what it was 40 years ago uh and those Chang which have are part of a part of the general civilizing of the country in many ways that has traced us back to many things but in particular to the U activism of the 60s and its aftermath uh large part of the civilizing effect of the' 60s actually began later so the Fe feminist movement for example has had a huge change the support for Access of disabled people that's all pretty much post 60s and it shows what can be achieved by popular engagement recognition of serious issues pressure to do something about them and progress progress still has big gaps but we shouldn't Overlook the fact two facts one that there has been progress and two that that progress has not been a gift from above but has been achieved through popular engagement often struggle and that's a lesson for the future for more information about Glen Greenwald visit salon.com riter glenore Greenwald

Channel: TheEthanwashere

Views: 63,608

Keywords: glenn, greenwald, with, liberty, and, justice, for, some, noam, chomsky, Noam Chomsky (Film Actor), George, Freedom, America, Cheney

Id: v1nlRFbZvXI

Length: 69min 51sec (4191 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2013