Tariq Ali: Obama’s Expansion of Af-Pak War "Has Blown Up in His Face"

Amid ongoing U.S.-Pakistani tensions and fears of a military coup in Pakistan, we are joined by British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker and novelist, Tariq Ali. Ali discusses Pakistan’s internal turmoil, as well as Pakistani attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy, the GOP presidential contest, and the prospect of a military strike against Iran. "[Pakistanis] are basically suffering because Obama, arrogantly, escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and thought he could get away with it. That has now blown up in his face," Ali says. [includes rush transcript]

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to Pakistan, where some say a military coup is imminent. The country’s government is facing uncertainty over its future, four years after a return to democratic rule. During that time, there has also been a near collapse in relations between Pakistan and the United States. The last year witnessed an increase in drone attacks, the killing of two Pakistanis by CIA contractor Raymond Davis, and the U.S. raid that led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. Now Pakistan has forced the U.S. to close a key drone base and threatened to shoot down any U.S. drones. This follows an attack on a senior al-Qaeda member last week, the first drone strike after an eight-week pause. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports the United States is paying six times as much to send war supplies to troops in Afghanistan after Pakistan closed two key border crossings to NATO convoys. The closings came after a U.S. air strike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November.
Yesterday, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, said the relations with the United States were on hold.

HINA RABBANI KHAR: I would say they are conveniently on hold, until we start re-engaging. If an incident happened in a reaction to that, the government clearly said that we will be looking at, you know, re-evaluation of our terms of engagement with the United States. Now, that re-evaluation process is underway as we speak. So, ’til the time that that re-evaluation process is not complete, we cannot start the re-engagement.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the State Department announced the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, will visit New Delhi on his way to Kabul for talks with President Karzai and other top officials.
For more, we’re joined now by Tariq Ali, British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker, novelist. He’s the author of over 20 books, including The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, as well as The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!

TARIQ ALI: Great to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: First, is a coup imminent in Pakistan?

TARIQ ALI: I don’t think so. I think the military is not interested in pushing for a coup at the moment. They are relying on the Supreme Court to get rid of a corrupt president. And what has happened is that the Supreme Court has instructed the Prime Minister to charge the President with corruption and related crimes, and the Prime Minister has refused. So the Supreme Court is now charging the Prime Minister with contempt of court. That was the last news I got from Pakistan. And the military is going to let all this play out.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But now, the Prime Minister was at first saying that he believed the President had immunity. What is the legal situation in Pakistan of sitting presidents and leaders of the country, in terms of their immunity from prosecution?

TARIQ ALI: Well, there is no immunity, but a national reconciliation ordinance was passed by the assembly on the say-so of the military when the United States sent Benazir Bhutto back. And they said all the politicians’ crimes, financial crimes, the slate would be wiped clean. This was accepted. Now there’s an appeal in the Supreme Court saying that the NRO was illegal, and the Supreme Court has accepted that. So no one—no corrupt politician, in power or out of power, has immunity, if that decision is upheld.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, the Obama administration unveiled a new military strategy billed as a move toward a leaner, streamlined global U.S. force. The U.S. vows a stepped-up focus on the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the increased use of drone strikes that have targeted militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The plan also touts a reduction in military spending, but only when compared to previous increases. Unveiling the plan at the Pentagon, President Obama said military spending will exceed its levels at the end of the George W. Bush administration’s second term.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We will be strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region. We’re going to continue investing in our critical partnerships and alliances, including NATO, which has demonstrated time and again, most recently in Libya, that it’s a force multiplier. We will stay vigilant, especially in the Middle East. I think it’s important for all Americans to remember, over the past 10 years, since 9/11, our defense budget grew at an extraordinary pace. Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this: it will still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali, you wrote The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad. And included in answering this, talk about what happened with the 24 Pakistani soldiers, the significance of this, and how the U.S. is perceived in Pakistan.

TARIQ ALI: Well, Amy, the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers and the bombing of their checkpoint makes no rational sense at all. The United States did it. They knew it was a military checkpoint. They knew that it was Pakistani soldiers. They haven’t yet been able to come up with any reasonable explanation as to how that happened. So one has to assume that it was deliberate. And this happened roughly at the same period as Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, sent a message to the Pentagon saying, "Come and help us against our own army. We’ll do whatever you want," which has become a huge scandal in Pakistan. It’s like a Clancy novel. And the ambassador actually going and pleading. This ambassador has now been removed. Another one has been appointed. So all sorts of things are going on behind the scenes, of which we haven’t yet heard the whole—the whole story is yet to come out.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Tariq, I’d like to ask you about this whole trend of the relations with allies in the region, not just in terms of the huge tension between the U.S. and the Pakistani military, but the front page of the New York Times today, a lead article about the growing tension between the Afghan army and the U.S. military, to the point that Afghan soldiers trained by the U.S. are repeatedly attacking and killing U.S. soldiers.

TARIQ ALI: Well, the reason for this, Juan, I mean, I’ve pointed this out several times, that the insurgents in Afghanistan, like all guerrillas, have said to their supporters, "When you’re offered free training, if they want to try and recruit you into their army, do it. Go and learn how to do it." And they’ve infiltrated the Afghan army and the police force. And the United States is very well aware of this, which is why now serious negotiations are taking place with the insurgents to try and find some solution in Afghanistan. But this has been going on for ages. And it will carry on, because it’s a traditional way of resistance when your country is occupied. You take the weapons of your enemy. You use them against them. You infiltrate the enemy’s security services. And the Afghans have done all that.

AMY GOODMAN: This relation between the U.S. and Afghanistan—if the Afghanistan war comes to an end, does that mean Pakistan will not be getting the billions of dollars that it’s been getting as it plays both sides?

TARIQ ALI: Once the United States decides to withdraw from Afghanistan—

AMY GOODMAN: Which it hasn’t.

TARIQ ALI: —and the likelihood is that this will be sooner rather than later—the money will stop, of course. I mean, given the economic crisis here, it’s impossible to justify spending so much on military armaments and supplying the Pakistan army. The question is, will they do to the Egyptian army, as well? Both these armies are heavily dependent on U.S. funding.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And we here are so consumed, increasingly, by the presidential elections and the various Republican debates. The reaction in Pakistan to what’s going on among the candidates for president here in the U.S., if any?

TARIQ ALI: Bemusement. I mean, they are basically suffering because Obama, arrogantly, escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and thought he could get away with it. That has now blown up in his face. The candidate who is—people take quite seriously is Ron Paul, but simply because he says he’s in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from all over the world and ending the imperial role. And that, of course, is very popular all over the world. And people are not aware of some of his other positions, but this one they concentrate on, because they say no other candidate is even talking about America as an empire.

AMY GOODMAN: Nuclear-armed Pakistan—nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, talk about that dynamic and the United States, and the amount of money that the U.S. is putting into Pakistan.

TARIQ ALI: Well, both—the United States has now accepted the Indian nuclear weapons, which is why the Indians have come on board, participating in maneuvers, etc. And Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are a fait accompli. There’s nothing that can be done about it. The danger is that if the Afghan War continues and the U.S. carries on the drone attacks, that within the army there will be so much anger that there will be a split. And if the Pakistan army splits, then there is no guarantee what is likely to happen, which is why American policy should not encourage such a split, but actually stabilize the situation and calm it down. 'Til now, they've been doing the opposite.

AMY GOODMAN: Iran?

TARIQ ALI: Iran, in my opinion, the Pentagon generals are not in favor of a war on Iran, because that would overstretch the United States, and the Iranians will—are quite a strong country, economically and militarily. They will probably respond within Iraq, within Afghanistan, on the Lebanese border, and in Iran itself. So, is the United States going to be prepared to fight four wars to do something that the Israelis want more than anyone else? I mean, ideally, the United States should have been mending its fences with Iran. I mean, Nixon did it with China. Obama should have flown to Tehran and done a deal with them. They refused to do that, because of the pressure of the Israelis, and the result is now tension. And if the Iranians close down the Straits of Hormuz in any conflict, which they are threatening to do, this will affect oil supplies to the West. And given the economy is already in a mess, the situation will become catastrophic. So I think it would be a crazy president who ordered bombing raids on Iran at the moment.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And we only have a few seconds, but your sense of the post-Occupy Wall Street period, the impact on the progressive and popular movement here in the U.S. and its ability to affect policy in the country?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I think the Occupy movements in the United States are themselves a reflection of what happened earlier in the Arab world and the changes taking place there. So it’s an important beginning. My fear is that the movement might die out unless it moves forward. And the way to move forward is to have a set of demands, a charter for changing America. I mean, there should be a charter from progressives for changing America. No one is coming up with it from the mainstream.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us. The latest book of Tariq Ali is The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.

Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/20/tariq_ali_obamas_expansion_of_af

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks & Philosopher Slavoj Žižek In Conversation With Amy Goodman

In one of his first public events since being held under house arrest, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared in London Saturday for a conversation with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, moderated by Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. They discuss the impact of WikiLeaks on world politics, the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and Cablegate — the largest trove of classified U.S. government records in history. “From being inside the center of the storm, I have learned not just about the structure of government, not just about how power flows in many governments around the world that we’ve dealt with, but rather how history is shaped and distorted by the media,” Assange said. Assange also talks about his new defense team, as well as U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, the accused Army whistleblower who has been jailed for the past year.

Assange is currently under house arrest in Norfolk, outside London, pending a July 12 appeals hearing on his pending extradition to Sweden for questioning in a sexual misconduct case. He has now spent six months under house arrest, despite not being charged with a crime in any country. Assange was wearing an ankle monitor under his boot and Saturday’s event concluded shortly after 6 p.m. so he could return to his bail address by his curfew. The event was sponsored by the Frontline Club, founded in part to remember journalists killed on the front lines of war. Today we play highlights from part one of their discussion. [Includes partial transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! was in London this weekend for and unusual gathering. 18 hundred people gathered in an old theater in the East End of London, called the Troxy, to watch a conversation between WikiLeaks editor in chief, Julian Assange and renowned Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I moderated the event.
Our discussion centered on the impact of WikiLeaks on world politics, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, and Cablegate, the largest release of U.S. State Department cables in history. Julian Assange is currently under house arrest in Norfolk, outside London, pending his trial, pending his going to court next week. He is appealing extradition to Sweden for questioning in a sexual misconduct case. Assange has now spent six months under house arrest despite not being charged with a crime in any country. On Friday, WikiLeaks announced it intends to sue Visa and MasterCard for blocking donations to the service an action it described as, "an unlawful U.S. influenced financial blockade."
Saturday’s event was sponsored by the Front Line Club, which was founded in part to honor journalists who fall in the front lines of war. Its founder, Vaughn Smith, has given refuge to Julian Assange at his estate in Norfolk. Assange was wearing an ankle monitor under his boot and the event at the Troxy was concluded shortly after 6 p.m. so that Assange could return to his bail address by his curfew.
Today we play the first part of the conversation.

AMY GOODMAN: It is a great honor to be with you this afternoon and a shout out to all of the people who are watching this broadcast all over the world. We are live streaming this at democracynow.org. By the way, how many of you watch, or listen to, or read Democracy Now!?
[loud applause]

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve given out about a thousand fliers of where we broadcast in Britain and also where you can watch, read and listen to the broadcast. We’re also live streaming, we’ve offered the embed for anyone to take to put on their website. The Nation is live streaming us, michaelmoore.com is live streaming us, Free Speech TV is broadcasting Democracy Now! across the United States and there are many others. I hope people Tweet in and Facebook and let us know what you are doing with this broadcast. It’s extremely important because information is power. Information is a matter of life and death. We’ve learned that through these remarkable trove of documents that have been released in the last year. The Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs, and what’s been called Cablegate, the U.S. state department documents that are continuing to be released.
Why does it matter so much? Well, we’ll talk about that this afternoon, but let’s just take one example, that came out in the Iraq War Logs, February of 2007. The war logs show that two men were standing under an Apache helicopter, the men have their hands up, they clearly are attempting to surrender, the Apache helicopter can see this. So, they are not rogue. The soldiers call back to the base and they say what should we do? These men have their hands up. The lawyer on the base says you cannot surrender to a helicopter and they blow the men, attempting to surrender, away—that was February 2007.
Now, we will fast forward to July 12, 2007, a video that has been released by WikiLeaks. This devastating video of an area of Baghdad called "New Baghdad", where a group of men were showing around two Reuters journalists. Well, one was a videographer, a young up-and-coming videographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen and one was his driver, Saeed Chmagh; he was 40 years old, he was the father of 4 and they were showing them around the area. The same Apache helicopter unit is hovering above. They open fire.
The video is chilling. I am sure many of you have seen it. If you watch or listen to Democracy Now! we played it repeatedly discussing it with various people from Julian Assange to soldiers who were there on the ground, over time we dissected this.
The soldiers opened fire, you have the video of the target and you have the audio of the sounds of the soldiers cursing laughing, but not rogue, always going up the chain of command asking for permission to open fire. In the first explosion Namir Noor-Eldeen and the other men on the ground are killed. Saeed Chmagh, you can see him attempting to crawl away. And then a van pulls up from the neighborhood and they are attempting to pick up the wounded, there are children in the van and the Apache helicopter opens fire again and Saeed Chmagh, others in the van are killed. Two little children are critically injured inside.

US SOLDIER 1: Where’s that van at?
US SOLDIER 2: Right down there by the bodies.
US SOLDIER 1: OK, yeah.
US SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.
US SOLDIER 1: Let me engage. Can I shoot?
US SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.
US SOLDIER 3: Picking up the wounded?
US SOLDIER 1: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!
US SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.
US SOLDIER 1: They’re taking him.
US SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.
US SOLDIER 4: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.
US SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV —- or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
US SOLDIER 4: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.
US SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.
US SOLDIER 1: Come on!
US SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.
US SOLDIER 1: We’re engaging.
US SOLDIER 2: Coming around. Clear.
US SOLDIER 1: Roger. Trying to -—
US SOLDIER 2: Clear.
US SOLDIER 1: I hear ’em — I lost ’em in the dust.
US SOLDIER 3: I got ’em.
US SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about twelve to fifteen bodies.
US SOLDIER 1: Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!

AMY GOODMAN: Now, I dare say that if we had seen what came out in the Iraq War Logs in February of 2007, if we had learned the story at the time after it happened, of the men with their hands up trying to surrender, there would have been an outcry. People are good, people care, people are compassionate, they would have called for an investigation. Perhaps one would have begun, but it might well have saved the lives of so many. Certainly, months later, perhaps that same Apache helicopter unit under investigation would not have done what it did. And maybe Namir Noor-Eldeen, the young Reuters videographer and his driver Saeed Chmagh, not to mention the other men who were killed and the kids critically injured, none of that would have happened to them. That’s why information matters. It is important we know what is done in our name. And today we are going to talk about this new age of information.
We’re joined by two people, many of you know well. Earlier I asked a young man, who would come to the gathering, why he traveled so far. He said, "are you kidding, to be with two of the most dangerous people?" The National Review calls Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the most dangerous political philosopher in the West and The New York Times says he’s the Elvis of cultural theory. Slavoj Žižek has written over 50 books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory. His latest book Living in the End Times—and we’ll talk about what he thinks and talks about around the world.
Now, we’re joined by another man who has published perhaps more than any one in the world. In fact he wrote a book on the underground computer information age called, The International Computer Underground. (Correction: The title of Julian Assange’s book is Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.) But with the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs, and now the U.S. government cables that have yet to be fully released, I would say that perhaps Julian Assange is the most widely published person on earth.
Today we’re going to have a conversation about information and I’d like to ask Julian to begin by going back to that moment in 2007, as we talk about the Iraq War Logs. And talk about the significance of them for you and why you’ve chosen to release this information.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Amy, I suspect under that criteria perhaps Rupert Murdoch is the most widely published person on earth. Something people say Australia has given to the world Rupert Murdoch and me, big in publishing. Well, in some ways things are very easy for us and very easy for me in that we make a promise to sources that if they give us material that is of a certain type, that is a significant—of diplomatic, "cryptical", ethical, or historical significance, not published and under some sort of threat, we will publish it. And that actually is enough.
Of course, we have a goal with publishing in general. It has been my long term belief that what advances us as a civilization is the entirety of our international record, the entirety of our understanding about what we are going through, what human institutions are actually like and how they behave. And if we are to make rational policy decisions in so far as any decision can be rational then we have to have information that is drawn from the real world, and a description of the real world.
At the moment we are severely lacking in the information from the interior of big secretive organizations that have such a role in shaping how civilization evolves and how we all live.

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue with this unusual rare gathering in the East End of London on Saturday of July 4th weekend. A discussion between Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Getting down in to Iraq, so that was 400 thousand documents. Each one written in military speak, on the other hand, each one having a geographic coordinate down often to 10 meters, a death count of civilians, U.S. military troops, Iraqi troops and suspected insurgents.
So, it was the first, rather the largest, because we also did the Afghan War Logs, the largest history of a war, the most detailed significant history of a war to have ever been published, probably at all, but definitely during the course of a war. And so it provided a picture of the every day squalor of war. From children being killed at road side blocks to over a thousand people being handed over to the Iraqi police for torture, to the reality of close air support and how modern military combat is done—linking up with other information such as this video that we discovered—men surrendering, being attacked.
So, as an archive of human history this is a beautiful and horrifying thing—both at the same time. It is the history of the nation of Iraq and most significant recording during its most significant development in the past 20 years. And while we always see newspaper stories reporting and revealing some individual, if we’re lucky, some individual event or some individual family dying. This provides the broad scope of the entire war and all the individual events. So, the details of over 104 thousand deaths.
And we worked together to statistically analyze this with various groups, around the world, such as Iraq Body Count, who became the specialists in these areas and lawyers here in the U.K. who represented Iraqi refugees—to pull out the stories of 15 thousand Iraqi civilians, labeled as civilians by the U.S. military, who were killed and were never before reported in the Iraqi press, never before reported in the U.S. press, world press even in aggregate—even saying today 1,000 people died. Not reported in any manner whatsoever. And, yeah just think about that—15 thousand people whose deaths were recorded by the U.S. military, but were completely unknown to the rest of the world—that’s a very significant thing.
I mean, compare that to 3,000 deaths on 9/11. Imagine the significance for Iraqis. That is something that we specialize in and that I like to do and that I always do is go from the small to the large, not just by abstraction or analogy, but actually by encompassing all of it together. And then trying to look at it and abstract, through mathematics or statistics. And so to try and sort of push both of these things at the same time, the individual relationship, plus the state relationship, plus the relationship that has to do with civilization as a whole.

AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Žižek, the importance of WikiLeaks today in the world?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Wait a minute, to understand properly this question, this question is just, you can withdraw and just give me two hours. No, but we’ll try to condense it. First, let me say also how proud I am to be here and mention something, which maybe most of you don’t know—that, how difficult it was even to organize this event. Like, it had to be moved two times—out and more out from Central London and so on.
And so, what again, what I want to say is let me begin with the, uh, the significance of what you—Amy started with, this shots, I mean not shooting, but video shots of those Apache helicopters shooting on...You know why this is important? Because the way ideology functions today it’s not so much that—let’s not be naive, that people didn’t know about it. But I think the way those in power manipulate it. Yes, we all know dirty things are being done, but you are being informed about this obliquely in such a way that basically you are able to ignore it.
Can I make a terrible, maybe sexually offensive, but not that dirty don’t be afraid, remark? You know, like a husband, sorry for making male chauvinist, uh twist—a husband may know abstractly my wife is cheating on me and you can say, okay I’m modern, tolerant husband, but you know when you get the thought of your wife doing things it’s quite a different thing. And I would say with all respect, something similar, it’s very important because it, just say no, I’m not dreaming here.
The same thing happened about two years ago in Serbia. You know, people rationally accept that we did horrible things in Srebrenica and so on, but you know it was just abstract knowledge. Then by chance all the honor who served media, to publish this, they got hold of a video effectively showing a group of Serbs pushing to an X and shooting a couple of Bosnian prisoners. And the effect was a total shock, national shock, although again, strictly saying nobody learned anything new.
So here, so that I don’t get lost, if you allow me just a little bit more, here we should see the significance of WikiLeaks. Many of my friends who are skeptical about it are telling me. So, what did we really learn? Isn’t it clear that every power in order to function you have collateral damage—you have to have a certain discretion? What you say, what you don’t say, but to conclude I mean to propose a formula, what WikiLeaks is doing and it’s extremely important. Of course, I’m not a Utopian. Neither me nor Julian believes in this kind of pseudo-radical openness—everything should be clear and so on. But what are we dealing with here?
Another example from cinema, very short, Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka. You find there a wonderful joke where, I think towards the beginning of the film, the hero enters a cafeteria and says, "can I get some coffee with cream please?" And the waiter answers him, "sorry we run out of cream we only have milk. So, can I serve you coffee without milk?" That’s the trick here. When we learn something from the media, like, if I may repeat the metaphor, they behave as if they are serving coffee with cream. That is to say of course we all know they are not telling the entire truth, but you know, that is the trick of ideology, even if they don’t lie directly the implication is the unsaid is a lie. And you bring this out. You are not so much putting them, catching them, as they put it, with their pants down and lying on behalf of what they explicitly say, but precisely on behalf of what they are implying. And I think this is an absolutely crucial mechanism in ideology. It doesn’t only matter what you say it matters what you implied to say.
So, just to make the last point, I think that—are we aware that what an important moment we are living today? On the one hand, as you said information is crucial and so on. We all know that it’s crucial economically. I claim that one of the main reasons capitalism will get in to crisis is intellectual property. In the long term it simply cannot deal with it. But what I’m saying is just take the phenomenon that media are trying to get us enthusiastic for clouds. Like you know, computers getting smaller and smaller and all is done for you up there in a cloud.
Okay, but the problems is that clouds are not up there in clouds—they are controlled and so on. For example, you rely on, maybe you have an iPhone, but you mentioned Murdoch. [His] name was mentioned here. Do you know, it’s good to know if you rely on your news through iPhone or whatever, that Apple signed an exclusive agreement with Murdoch. Murdoch’s corporation is again the exclusive provider of entire news and so on and so on. This is the danger today. It’s no longer this clear distinction, private space-public space. The public space itself gets, as it were, privatized in a whole series of invisible ways—like the model of it being clouds; which is why and again this involves new modes of censorship, repeat this.
That’s why you say, but what really did we learn new? Maybe we learned nothing new, but you know it’s the same as in that beautiful old innocent fairytale, the Emperor is Naked. The Emperor is Naked. We may all know that the emperor is naked, but the moment somebody publicly says, "the emperor is naked," everything changes, but the moment somebody publicly says the emperor is naked everything changes. This is why even if we learned nothing new – but we did learn many new things – but even if nothing learned, the forum matters. So, don’t confuse Julian and his gang – in a good sense not the way they accuse – don’t confuse them with this usual bourgeois heroism, fight for investigative journalism, free flow and so on. You are doing something much more radical. That’s why it aroused such an explosion of resentment. You are not only violating the rules, disclosing secrets and so on. Let me call it in the old Marxist way the bourgeois press today has its own way to be transgressive. Its ideology controls not only what you can say but also how you can violate what you are allowed to say. You are not only violating the rules, you are changing the very rules how we were allowed to violate the rules. This is maybe the most important thing you can do.

AMY: And, yet, Julian even as you were releasing information in all different ways, you then turn to the very gatekeepers who in some cases had kept back this information and you worked with the mainstream media throughout the world in releasing various documents. Talk about that experience and that level of cooperation and what has happened after that.
ASSANGE: If you want to have an impact and you promise an impact and you’re an organization which is very small where actually you have to co-opt or leverage the rest of the mainstream press. So, under our model of how you make and impact and get people to do things that you wouldn’t have been otherwise be able to do, unless you have an army that can physically go someplace and divisions that can roll over.
The only way you can easily make an impact is push information about the world to many, many people. So, the mainstream press has developed expertise for how to do that. And it’s competition also for people’s attention. So, if we had several billion dollars to spend on advertizing across the world, if we could get our ads placed, we wouldn’t easily be able to make the same impact as we did. And we don’t have that kind of money. So, instead we entered into
partnership with over 80 media organizations all over the world, including many good ones that I wouldn’t want to disparage. To increase the impact and push our material into over 50 different countries endemically. That has been, yes, subverting the filters of the mainstream press.
But an interesting phenomena has developed amongst the journalists who work in these very large organization that are close to power and negotiate with power at the highest levels, which is the journalists having read our material and having been forced to go through it to pull out stories have themselves become educated and radicalize. And that is an ideological penetration of the truth into all these mainstream media organizations. And, that to some degree, may be one of the lasting legacies over the past year. Even Fox News, which is much disparaged, is an organization that wants viewers. It cannot do anything else without viewers. So, it will try and push news content.
So, for example, with collateral murder, CNN showed only the first few minutes and blanked out all the bullets going to the street, completely blanked it out – and said they did it out of respect for the families of the people who were killed, well there was no blood, there was no gore. And then they cut out all the most politically salient points. And the families had come forward and said that it was very important for us to have seen it. Fox actually displayed the first killing scene in full. Quite interesting. So, Fox not perceiving itself to be amenable to the threat of it not acting in a moral way actually gave people more of the truth than CNN did. So,
Fox also motivated to grab in a hungry way this greater audience share as possible took this content and gave it to more people. Afterwards, of course, they put in their commentators to talk against it but I think that the truth that we got out of Fox was often stronger than the truth we got out of CNN and similarly for many institution in the media that we think of as liberal.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of other legal cases I just wanted to ask you about what you face next week, the extradition case on July 12th. The Nation magazine has done two pieces—one is forthcoming. And they quote your new lawyer, Gareth Peirce who is very well known for representing prisoners at Guantanamo, a renowned human rights attorney. And Tom Hayden, who writes the piece, interviewed many people in Sweden and the United States and sort of talks about a feeling in Sweden of an attack very much represented by your past lawyers on the Swedish justice system, and on the integrity of the women in Sweden. And he quotes Gareth Peirce saying
…
JULIAN ASSANGE: Our lawyers never attacked any integrity of women.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, he quotes Gareth Peirce saying, “the history of this case is as unfortunate as it is possible to imagine. Each of the human beings involves deserves respect and consideration.” And I just wanted to ask if you are seeing this as a change of approach with your legal team in dealing with your possible extradition to Sweden?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Possibly, I mean the situation….What has happened to Europe and what has happened to Sweden is fascinating. It is something I have come to learn because I’ve been embroiled in it. But it is intellectually extraordinary—so we see for example, that the European Union introduced an Arrest Warrant system. And that Arrest Warrant system to extradite from one state of the EU to another state of the EU was put in place in response to 9/11 to extradite terrorists—to have fast extradition of terrorists. And it introduced this concept, or rather recycled a European Union concept of mutual recognition. This is sort of a very feel good phrase, that one state in the EU mutually recognizes another state in the EU, and that shrunk down into mutual recognition between one court in the EU to another court in the EU. But actually what it seems to be talking about, if you think about it, given the reality that three people a day are extradited from this country to the rest of Europe, is a mutual recognition of the elite in each country in the EU. It is a method of, um, of being at peace.
So, the elite in each country in the EU, has, if you like, made literally a treaty with each other, to recognize each other and to not complain about the behavior. Now you might say that, well okay, we have justice systems in the EU and various countries. Some are better some are worse depending on your values system, but we have sunk so low that it’s not even like that anymore. The European Arrest Warrant talks about the mutual recognition of judicial authority—so courts. But it has permitted each country to define what they call a judicial authority, and Sweden has chosen to call policeman and prosecutors judicial authorities. And the whole basis of this term being used in the original introduction of the European Arrest Warrant was that you would keep the executive separated from the judicial system, that it was meant to be a natural and neutral party who would request extradition and it’s not.
So there are many things like this that are going on in that case. I haven’t been charged. Is it right to extradite to a state where they do not speak the language? Where they do not have family, they do not know the lawyers, they do not know the legal system. If you don’t even have enough evidence to charge them, you won’t even come over as we have offered many times to speak to the people concerned. So previous complaints about these sort of problems have lead to some inquires in Sweden. For instance, the biggest Swedish law magazine that goes out to all the lawyers had a survey on this and one third of the lawyers responding said that yes, these complaints about the Swedish judiciary system, they truly are a problem. On the other hand, it has entered a situation where the Swedish Prime Minister and the Swedish Justice Minister have personally attacked me. Um, and said, the Swedish Prime Minister said that I had been charged to the Swedish public, when I hadn’t been.
So it is a delicate situation, Sweden, the Sweden we have now is not the Sweden of Olof Palme in the 1970s. Sweden recently sent troops, recently passed a bill to send marines in Libya. It was the fifth country out to send fighter jets into Libya. This is a different dynamic, we have to be careful at dealing with it. It’s one thing to sort of be considerate of differences in the way various justice systems are administered, but it’s another to tolerate any difference. And I don’t think any difference should be tolerated in the EU.
You know, what it is that prevents the justice systems of EU states from fundamentally collapsing and decaying? You say there is mutual recognition. There’s mutual recognition between the UK and Romania, and what if the Romanian justice system collapses more and more and more? Who’s going to account for that? Who’s going to scrutinize it? Is it going to be some bureaucrats in the EC that are going to scrutinize the Romanian justice system? No. The only sustainable approach to scrutinizing the justice systems of the EU is the extradition process.
So it is extradition lawyers and defendants who have the highest motivation to scrutinize the quality of justice in the state that they are being extradited to. And that’s a healthy system that permits outside scrutiny—and so it can stop European states from decaying. But the European Arrest Warrant system removes that possibility; it’s not open to us to look at any of the facts in the case in the extradition at all, that is completely removed. All we’re arguing about is whether the two page request that was filled out, which literally has a box ticked rape, is a valid document.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Julian, about Bradley Manning. Mike Huckabee, who also was a presidential candidate, the governor of Arkansas, said that the person who leaked the information to Julian Assange should be tried for treason and executed. He said whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty. Bradley Manning is a young U.S. soldier who was in Iraq, um, has been held for more than a year, much of that time in solitary confinement in Quantico in Virginia. Um it was exposed that his treatment was tantamount to torture. P.J. Crowley, the White House State Department spokesperson, spoke to a group of bloggers at MIT and said his treatment is stupid. For that he was forced out of the State Department. Bradley Manning was then moved to Fort Leavenworth because of the outcry, but he remains, uh, in prison. He remains, um, not tried. What are your comments on him?

JULIAN ASSANGE: First of all, Amy, thanks for answering this question‚ asking this question, but it is difficult for me to speak in detail about that case, and but i can speak about why it is difficult for me to speak about it. So Bradley Manning is an alleged source of WikiLeaks who was detained in Baghdad, and then although there was very little ‚no mainstream press at the time, shipped off to Kuwait, where he was, if you like, held in an extrajudicial circumstance in Kuwait in a similar manner to which detainees are held in Guantanamo Bay. Eventually, through some legal, creative legal methods, he was brought back to the United States, and he’s been imprisoned now for over year. He was being kept in Quantico for eight months under extremely adverse conditions. Quantico is not meant for long-term prisoners. Other prisoners, the maximum duration over the past year has been three months, and people that have been visiting Bradley Manning say, and we have other sources who say, that they were applying those conditions to him because they wanted him to confess that he was involved in a conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States with me. That pressure on Manning appears to have backfired. So by all reports, this is a young man of high moral character and when people of high moral character are pressured in a way that is illegitimate, they become stronger and not weaker. And that seems to have been the case with Bradley Manning and he has told U.S. authorities, as far as we know, nothing about his involvement.
Now there has concurrently been a secret grand jury taking place six kilometers from the center of Washington. That grand jury involves nineteen to twenty-three people selected from that area. Now why was it in Alexandria, Virginia six kilometers [from] the center of Washington, that that grand jury was placed? And those people drawn? Well, it has the highest density of government employees anywhere in the United States. The U.S. government was free to select the place, and they selected this place in order to bias the jury from the very beginning. This, is in fact, wrong to call a jury. This is a type of medieval star chamber. There are these nineteen to twenty-three individuals from the population that are sworn to secrecy. They cannot consult with anyone else. There is no judge, there is no defense council, and there are four prosecutors. So that is why people that are familiar with the grand jury the United States say that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich; it would indict the ham and the sandwich. And that’s a real threat to us.
A grand jury, which was removed from U.K. jurisprudence because of abuses, combines the executive and the judiciary. So this old common lore notion of the separation of these branches of power is removed in a grand jury. U.S. government argues that these captive nineteen to twenty-three individuals are the branch of the judiciary, if they perform a judicial function, where of course, actually, they’re just captive patsies for the Department of Justice, United States and the FBI. So they have been going out and they have coercive powers. They can force people to testify, and they have been pulling in all sorts of people that are connected to WikiLeaks and people that are not. They have recently a number of individuals that have been pulled to the grand jury understand what is going on and they have refused to testify and have pleaded the First Amendment, Third Amendment‚ Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination to‚ well I’m not sure the purpose, I don’t have direct communication, but from the outside it appears to nullify that political witch hunt in the United States against us.
Now, in response, the grand jury has been instructed to send out immunity certificates. So these are certificates that go to subpoenaed individuals that say that if you come to the grand jury to testify, your testimony cannot be used against you and therefore you have no right to plead the Fifth. What this means in practice is coerced, compulsive interrogation in secret with no defense council. There’s not‚ not even lawyers for, for the subpoenaed witnesses are permitted into the grand jury. It is just the prosecutors and these people from six kilometers away from the center of Washington. That’s something that should be opposed. There is another grand jury that has sprung up here in the United States and is investigating anti-war activists, engaged in the same sort of witch-hunt. So these are a really a classical device that was looked at very critically in the UK four hundred years ago, and the result in the UK’s concept of, the, if justice is to be done, it must be done publicly. And, that is being a concept that is way late. It’s interesting why or how it has been way late. So on the surface this device of, well you want the police to have an investigation, an executive says it wants to conduct and investigation into some group of people. Well, we get people from the community, nineteen to twenty-three people from the community, and they monitor the investigation. They make sure it’s not overstepping and so on. But actually this has been turned on its head and used as a way to completely subvert the judicial system in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek speaking on Saturday before about 1,800 people in the East End of London. We had to end the event in order for Julian Assange to return to his bail address in order for him to meet his curfew. The event was sponsored by the Frontline Club. Part two of our conversation tomorrow, when among other things Julian Assange will talk about WikiLeaks’ case against MasterCard and Visa.
That does it for the show. If you’d like a copy go to our website for a copy, DemocracyNow.org. Special thanks to Julie Crosby, Dennis Moynihan, Rebecca Wallack, the Frontline Club.
Democracy Now is produced by Mike Burke, Renee Feltz, Aaron Mate, Nermeen Shaikh, Steve Martinez, Sam Alcoff, Hany Massoud. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

WikiLeaks video: 'Collateral murder' in Iraq

Classified military footage released by WikiLeaks showing an attack by US military in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. This callous attack left 12 dead including two Reuters staff. Two Iraqi children were also seriously injured.

Watch online here: http://youtu.be/to3Ymw8L6ZI

The Return of Socialism (video lecture)

On June 23, John Nichols, author of The “S” Word: : A Short History of an American Tradition ... Socialism, joined Phil Gasper in Madison, WI for an event to discuss the history of socialism in America and its increasing popularity during today's crisis of capitalism. The event was sponsored by the International Socialist Organization, Haymarket Books, Verso Books, and WORT 89.9 FM Madison.

“One does not need to be a socialist to understand that socialism has been a part of this country's journey from the start.”—John Nichols

Noam Chomsky: Conversations with History

On this edition of Conversations with History, UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler is joined by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky to discuss activism, anarchism and the role the United States plays in the world today. Series: "Conversations with History" [6/2002] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 6568]

Tariq Ali - Obama, Pakistan and the US empire

From Marxism 2009
http://www.counterfire.org

Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism (2009) - Naomi Klein - Documentary Film

Offering illuminating insight into the investigative journalism behind Naomi Klein's bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, this riveting hour-long lecture and interview explains the ideas and research behind the book that exposed the popular myth of the free market economy’s peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to today, this is the chilling tale of shock doctors, those powerful few making a killing around the world by cashing in on chaos and exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally implement their policies.




Watch the full documentary film:







See also:

End:Civ Resist Or Die (2010) - Documentary Film - END:CIV examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations. Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Naomi Klein on Anti-Union Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style: "This is a Frontal Assault on Democracy, a Corporate Coup D’Etat"

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country following the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. “The Wisconsin protests are an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine,” Klein says. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: Rallies for workers’ rights are spreading across the country. In Michigan, over a thousand people rallied at the State Capitol in Lansing to oppose a measure allowing the breaking of labor contracts by placing schools and districts under emergency management. In a scene reminiscent of Wisconsin, hundreds of demonstrators packed the Capitol Rotunda chanting slogans. Protests were also held against anti-union bills Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Florida and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, the state legislature has given final approval to a measure restricting the collective bargaining of public school teachers. The bill would limit teachers’ collective bargaining to salaries and benefits. It also ends teacher tenure, limits teacher contracts to one year, and removes seniority as a factor in determining layoffs.

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book 'The Shock Doctrine,' which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.
Well, Naomi Klein joins us today in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.
Naomi Klein, welcome to Democracy Now!

NAOMI KLEIN: Hi, Amy. Great to see you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Let’s talk Wisconsin. What do you see is happening in this uprising?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, first of all, it’s such an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine. And it should not be in any way surprising that we are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor stronghold, and they’re going after it. And these governors did not run elections promising to do these radical actions, but they are using the pretext of crisis to do things that they couldn’t get elected promising to do.

And, you know, that’s the core argument of and the thesis of the book, is not that there’s something wrong with responding to a crisis decisively. Crises demand decisive responses. The issue is this backhanded attempt to use a crisis to centralize power, to subvert democracy, to avoid public debate, to say, "We have no time for democracy. It’s just too messy. It doesn’t matter what you want. We have no choice. We just have to ram it through." And we’re seeing this in 16 states. I mean, it’s impossible to keep track of it. It’s happening on such a huge scale.

Teachers’ unions are getting the worst of it. Yesterday was International Women’s Day. This is—you know, as you pointed out on your show, it’s overwhelmingly women who are providing the services that are under attack. It’s not just labor that’s under attack; it’s the services that the labor is providing that’s under attack: it’s healthcare, it’s education, it’s those fundamental care-giving services across the country, which could be profitable if they were privatized.

AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio, more than 20,000 people marched to oppose the Republican Governor John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch. Kasich recently defended his policy proposals on Fox & Friends.

GOV. JOHN KASICH: It’s part of a big piece of reform. Come March the 15th, we will be reforming Medicaid, K-through-12, higher ed, prisons. It is going to be a reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen, all designed to get us in a good position. In terms of unions? I respect unions. I come from a union family. I mean, the idea that we’re attacking anybody is—look, what we’re attacking: poverty, joblessness. OK, that’s what I’m attacking. And all I’m doing is saying to everybody, participate. Everybody jump in this. Together, we can make Ohio stronger. If we do not do that, you know, then we’ll continue to lose jobs, and that means misery for everybody. That’s not going to happen. We are going to be successful here.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican Governor John Kasich, going back to his old haunt. He was a commentator for a long time for Fox and, before that, a conservative congressman.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, the reason why this isn’t working and why people are so outraged by it and why they’re in the streets and we’re finally seeing the resistance in this country that we have seen in Europe, with this chant, "We won’t pay for your crisis," that really started in 2008 in Greece and spread to Italy and France and England—and, you know, the rest of the world has been waiting for the United States to—you know, how much are Americans going to take of this? It seems that Americans were willing to say, you know, "We will pay for your crisis, and would you like a tax break with that?" Right? And finally, they went too far. And so, that resistance is finally happening.

And this attack on collective bargaining, the reason why people won’t take it is precisely because they understand that this is not shared pain. It is not being shared equally. The people who created the crisis in the first place are not sharing the pain. And the injustice of this response is so blatant. This isn’t just any economic crisis. This tactic has worked. And this is, you know, what I’ve tracked over a 30-year period, that it is really easy to use an economic crisis—people panic, hyperinflation, issues like that. In the '90s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, it was possible for him to argue that the source of the budget crisis really was so-called entitlement programs. You cannot do that in this moment in history because everybody understands that the crisis was created on Wall Street, it was created through speculation and greed, and a decision was made to bail out the bankers with public money and to pass the bill on to the public. And they're seeing the bonuses back. They’re seeing the outrageous salaries. They’re seeing corporations not paying their taxes. And it’s just too unjust. It’s just so morally outrageous. And then to turn on the television and talk about everybody sharing the pain? I mean, people are just not that stupid. Thankfully.

AMY GOODMAN: And where does the Obama administration fit into this?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We have played that clip of President Obama when he was running for president, saying, "If anyone challenges your collective union rights, I will be walking with you."

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the irony of this moment, and this is—it really is about democracies. Scott Walker was not elected with a mandate to bust unions and to strip collective bargaining rights. He did not mention that in his campaign. He talked about balancing the budget. He made some vague statements, you know, about shared sacrifice. But he absolutely did not campaign promising to do what he is now doing. Obama, on the other hand, campaigned promising to strengthen union rights. He promised, again and again, whenever he had a labor audience, that he was going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and he promised to stand with them.

And, you know, one of the things that’s so important for us to understand about why—you know, there are many reasons why the resistance is so strong in Wisconsin and why they’ve become this beacon for not just the rest of the country, but the world, and so much of it, I think—you know, my colleague at The Nation, John Nichols, has written beautifully about it this week in a cover story where he talks about the rich sense of collective history, of collective memory, and the fact that people know their progressive history in Wisconsin, so they’re harder to exploit. You know, they’re not going to fall for the latest Fox News messaging, because they know their history. But, you know, this is—there’s something else that’s going on here. And, well, I mean, I’ll just let you take it from there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about Michigan.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And then we’re going to go to a break.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: About a thousand people rallied in Michigan—

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:—reminiscent of Wisconsin. Talk about the proposal there.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I just found out about this last night, and like I said, there’s so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.

AMY GOODMAN: A municipal government.

NAOMI KLEIN: A municipal government. And it says specifically, "or dissolve the municipal government." So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, "OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts." You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools. You know, people in New Orleans—and you know this, Amy—warned us. They said, "What’s happening to us is going to happen to you." And I included in the book a quote saying, "Every city has their Lower Ninth Ward." And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over.

NAOMI KLEIN: A company takes over. So, they have created, if this passes, the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize the whole town? So—

AMY GOODMAN: And what happens then? Where does democracy fit into that picture?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein—yes, the journalist and author. Her latest book is called Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. You can go to our Facebook page, and you can post questions there for her and just continue to participate in the dialogue. Let me ask you a question that came to us from Facebook. This is a question about the Madison protest for you, posted on our Facebook page. Kevin Williams—Kelvin Williams asks, "Are there any specific ways that Wisconsin workers can use the ideas in [your book] 'The Shock Doctrine' to go on the offensive and force true fiscal responsibility, perhaps even rolling back the compromise contract?"

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm. It’s a great question. I think what’s finally starting to happen, and this is—Wisconsin has really been going from one victory after another. This started off with an attack, but people have been—have just found such incredible reserves of resolve and dignity and collective history that the ground is shifting. So, the situation under which those compromises were made, those concessions were made, it’s changed. You know, people are feeling their power and their possibility.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s amazing now. The Governor, who was just elected, Scott Walker, a few months ago, is now—his popularity has dipped to the 30s.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: And even the conservative newspapers are asking serious questions.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, he clearly made a real miscalculation. I mean, what was obvious is that he was really playing to the national stage. He’s clearly a very ambitious guy. He’s got real national political aspirations. I think that’s clear. You know, in that conversation with fake David Koch, the prank call, he compares himself to Reagan. He compares his actions to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers, that sort of "shot heard around the world" moment. That’s what he wanted, you know? And he is not getting that.

AMY GOODMAN: And then he said, first he fired the PATCO strikers, and then the Berlin Wall came down. He made that link.

NAOMI KLEIN: He said it. And it’s not a crazy link, in the sense that it was part of a frontal assault on labor and the left, and it continued for many, many years. But, you know, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and people are on to these tactics.

And I do think—you know, just coming back to that question—that it is possible. But the real key is that we have to be having the debate about where the money should be coming from. I mean, if there is a fiscal crisis—and in Wisconsin, there’s a crisis that was created by tax cuts, and this is why there’s so much outrage, because it comes back to that false claim that there’s shared sacrifice here. There isn’t shared sacrifice here. There are gifts that are being handed out to the elites. Scott Walker is governing based on this radical free market ideology that if we just create the perfect, most hospitable, most gentle, less demanding conditions for corporations to do business, then we’ll have a booming economy, and it will trickle down, and everyone will benefit. And that is exactly the ideology that Obama campaigned against—and won—saying we can’t keep giving more and more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down. And that was a message that really resonated with voters.

One thing I wanted to come back to that I was starting to get at earlier about why what’s happening in Wisconsin is happening in Wisconsin and what we need to take from it is that when bad things are happening, it’s helpful to have a bad guy. And Scott Walker is a good bad guy. And he has galvanized progressives. And people have, you know, an enemy to organize around and to point out these disparities. It hasn’t happened at the federal level, despite the fact that Obama is also involved in attacking labor rights with his pushing of charter schools and draconian budget cuts. He’s not a good bad guy for progressives. So, we’re still in a situation where Obama is getting away with, in my opinion, shock doctrine-style tactics, because people don’t—still don’t want to believe that Obama is doing it, too. So, when you have an easy bad guy, a Republican governor who’s obviously trying to be the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, you can mobilize the left. But it won’t just work if we are only going after the Republicans and if this is fought along just partisan lines, as opposed to being fought based on principle. No matter who is doing it, we need to be mobilizing, if it’s Obama, if it’s Scott Walker.

AMY GOODMAN: And the people that President Obama surrounds himself with, especially when it comes to the Wall Street insiders, especially as we move into the 2012 election, when it’s said Obama will raise more than a billion dollars for the presidential election?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of denial, still, about who Obama is and who he surrounds himself with. And, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit later about Tim DeChristopher, but I’ve said it many times: Obama is fundamentally a centrist. And I do think that when there is a mobilized progressive movement in the United States that is putting pressure on him, on Democrats in Congress, they will respond.

And that’s another lesson that we can take from Wisconsin. You know, I was talking, once again, to John Nichols the other day, and he said, "What’s really working here is that we have the inside-outside pincer." Right? You’ve got people in the streets, but you also have Democrat—Democratic lawmakers willing to put themselves on the line, being surprisingly courageous, leaving the state, and blocking it. So it isn’t just the people in the Rotunda. It isn’t just the protesters at the rally. It’s a kind of a partnership that’s going on. Why is that happening? Well, they looked out the window, and they saw their voters in the streets really committed and really mobilized, and that gave them courage.
And that’s something really important to remember about how—you know, so many liberal groups are involved in this gentle backroom lobbying, a token protest here and there, which says, "I’m willing to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday, but I’m not really willing to fight to win." And what’s going on in Wisconsin is something very different. It’s not just a rally on a Saturday afternoon. It is people really upending their lives for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. That sends a message to politicians who want to get re-elected that this is a big issue, a top priority. And they hear that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, as we turn now to Tim DeChristopher.

Noam Chomsky on Civil Rights, Obama, Latin America, and the History of the U.S. in the Middle East

We continue our conversation with world-renowned public intellectual, MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky.

Watch Part I of the Interview Democracy Uprising in the USA?here

NOAM CHOMSKY: We were talking about unions before. Union busting is criminal activity by the government, because they’re saying, "You can go ahead and do it; we’re not going to apply the laws," effectively. And the COINTELPRO, which you mentioned, is actually the worst systematic and extended violation of basic civil rights by the federal government. It maybe compares with Wilson’s Red Scare. But COINTELPRO went on from the late ’50 right through all of the ’60s; it finally ended, at least theoretically ended, when the courts terminated it in the early ’70s. And it was serious.
It started, as is everything, going after the Communist Party, then the Puerto Rican Independence Party. Then it extended—the women’s movement, the New Left, but particularly black nationalists. And it ended up—didn’t end up, but one of the events was a straight Gestapo-style assassination of two black organizers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, literally. The FBI set up the assassination. The Chicago police actually carried it out, broke into the apartment at 4:00 in the morning and murdered them. Fake information that came from the FBI about arms stores and so on. There was almost nothing about it. In fact, the information about this, remarkably, was released at about the same time as Watergate. I mean, as compared with this, Watergate was a tea party. There was nothing, you know?

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you—we’re obviously entering very soon a new presidential season, and for many of the progressives and liberals who had placed some much hope in the Obama administration, they’re now going to be faced with the quandary of what to do as they move into a new administration. On the one hand, they feel betrayed by many of the things the administration has done; on the other hand, they see this extreme right that is attempting to paint Obama as a socialist, as destroying the Constitution and freedom in America. And they’re going to have to figure out how they’re going to maneuver in this new reality, especially with the Citizens United case, the enormous amount of money that’s going to be poured into. Your thoughts on what progressives who are still glued to the ground and understand the reality of what’s happening in the country should be doing?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, my feeling—actually, I had the same feeling in 2008. I’m not disillusioned, because I didn’t have any expectations, just looking at the funding, looking at his background. Actually, I wrote about it before the primaries even. But nevertheless, you know, when I was asked in 2008, "Who should you vote for?" my own feeling was—and it will be next time—that if you’re in a swing state, you better vote against the prehistoric monsters, because they’re going to cause much more trouble. Well, in our system, the only choice you have would be to vote for Obama. Hold your nose and vote, but don’t expect anything.
Just take a look at where he’s coming from, where his funding is coming from. Over a long period, like a century, you can pretty well predict policies by just looking at concentration of campaign funding. Thomas Ferguson, very outstanding political scientist, has done the main work on this, and it’s convincing. So, when you find that the core of the funding is the financial institutions, you can pretty well expect that the major policies will be to reward them. Yeah, OK, it’s pretty much what happened. You shouldn’t be disillusioned. But if you have to make a choice between that and, you know, Newt Gingrich, well, OK, you have to make that choice. Don’t expect anything.
What has to be done is what’s happening in Madison, or what’s happening in Tahrir Square in Cairo. If there’s mass popular opposition, any political leader is going to have to respond to it, whoever they are.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I wanted to ask you about the situation in Haiti. The country is preparing to hold a controversial runoff presidential vote next month. The U.S. has resumed deportations to Haiti despite the earthquake-ravaged, cholera-ravaged country. And former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide has been given a passport that would allow him to return home seven years after he was ousted in a U.S.-backed coup. I wanted to go back just to a brief clip. I spoke to President Aristide at the time of the coup in 2004, and he talked about the role of the United States in Haiti and in the world.

PRESIDENT JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: They went to Iraq. We see how is the situation in Iraq. They went to Haiti. We see how is the situation in Haiti. Pretending imposing democracy, we saw people killing people. Why don’t they change their approach to let democracy and the constitutional order flourish, slowly, but surely? After imposing an economic embargo on us, being, from the cultural point of view, very rich, from an historic point of view, very rich, but from an economic point of view, very poor, because we are the poorest country of the Western hemisphere, after imposing their economic embargo upon us, because the people wanted one man, one vote, so equality among us.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Aristide in 2004.

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s right. I mean, in 2004—I don’t have to tell you—the United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti for hundreds of years, joined by Canada, you know, plodding along, carried out a military coup. They kidnapped the president, sent him off to Central Africa. The United States has tried hard to keep him out of the hemisphere ever since, blocked him from coming back to Haiti.
This last election, which is a complete farce, I think about less than a quarter of the population voted even. By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti. He’s kept out of the election. His party, Fanmi Lavalas, has easily won every election in which there was even a modicum of sort of honesty. They were kept out of the election by the United States. So we have an election in which the most popular political figure is out, most popular political party is out, country is a total wreck, people can’t get registration cards. I mean, that’s a total ruin. A lot of money was pledged; very little of it has actually been allocated. Having an election under those conditions, it doesn’t rise to the level of a joke. There was an OAS, Organization of American States, investigation, but if you look at the people on the commission, it’s mostly the United States or its puppets, totally unserious. You can’t even laugh about it. I mean, Haiti, once again, is being denied the possibility of having a democratic election.
Now, it’s not the first time. The first real democratic election in Haiti was in, 20 years ago, 1990. To everyone’s amazement, Aristide won. Everyone assumed—me, too—that the U.S. candidate would win. Former World Bank official, he had all the money, all the elite support.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bazin.

NOAM CHOMSKY: He got 14 percent of the vote. You know, nobody was—it’s kind of like Egypt and what Marwan was saying about the Middle East. Nobody is paying attention to what’s going on in the slums and the hills, which happens to be where the population is. They’re just paying attention to what’s happening up in the rich sectors of Pétionville, you know, where the rich people live. Well, it turns out a lot of popular organizing was going on, a really impressive democratic achievement. It’s something that I wish we could even come close to here: actual, real, live democracy.
And they swept into office, with a big majority, a populist priest who immediately initiated programs which were in fact pretty constructive. They were in fact highly praised, even by the international financial institutions, you know, which don’t usually go for this. He cut back corruption. He fixed up the budget. Well, you know, just kind of waiting, and it took seven months for the military coup to come, which threw him out.
The OAS declared an embargo. The U.S. technically joined the embargo, but within weeks the government, that was Bush number one, announced that U.S. firms would be exempt from the embargo. I remember the New York Times, that report, saying this is a very humanitarian gesture: the embargo is being fine-tuned for the interests of the people of Haiti, namely by exempting U.S. firms. It turned out—and trade increased. Actually, I was there during—it was a horrible terror. I was right during it. Maybe you were, too. It was just awful. The CIA was reporting that all—to Congress, that no oil is coming in. You could see the oil farms being built by the rich families. And in fact, it later turned out that first Bush, then Clinton, had authorized the Texaco Oil Company to ship oil to the military junta and to the elite in violation of presidential orders. Barely mentioned. The Wall Street Journal had an article on it. And so it went on.
You know, every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it. And that’s what’s happening now with this so-called election.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you one final question on the U.S. situation. Yesterday the Federal Reserve Bank upped its prediction for growth in the United States. Corporations are getting record profits. The banks are back in great shape. The Dow is back up before it was in the crisis. And yet, we still have massive unemployment, conservatively estimated at nine percent, and we still have a huge mortgage crisis in the country, more and more people losing their homes. The disconnect between what the indicators are saying and the reality of what the American people are facing?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, actually, it depends how you look at the indicators. I mean, for the last 30 years, for a majority of the population, real incomes have pretty much stagnated. I mean, there’s growth. And the growth is going to—and the wealth is going into very few pockets. That’s by design. Tax laws are designed that way.
Take, say, the Bush tax cut. It was very cleverly done. It’s devastating the economy, but not the rich. The tax cut was done so that at the beginning, the first—right off, everyone got a check, you know, so it looks, "Oh, great. We’re getting a tax cut, couple hundred dollars." But it was designed so that over the years the cut would shift. By the end, over half the tax cut, I think, was going to maybe one percent of the population. But by then, nobody notices anymore. Well, that’s the way fiscal policy has been designed. It’s the way corporate governance rules have been designed. They come from the federal government. And they effectively give the CEO the right to pick the panel that gives him the salary, and all sorts of things like this, along with the deregulation, which—bipartisan, incidentally—which has led to a situation where, you know, maybe you can talk about growth on the average, but for most of the population it’s not there.
For a large part, especially maybe the lower half of the population, they’re basically living in the Depression. Not quite. I mean, I’m old enough to remember the Depression. My family was mostly unemployed working class. It was objectively worse than now, if you count, you know, objective standards. On the other hand, it was hopeful. There was a sense that something is going to happen. You had a government which was doing things that helped the population, because they were under pressure. In fact, Roosevelt famously talked to the labor leaders and said, "Make me do this. You know, so you go have sit-down strikes and you protest and so on, then we’ll push this legislation through." Well, it happened. So you had WPA. You had—Social Security was coming in. There was a sense that we’re going to get out of this somehow. There was hope for the future. Now there isn’t. The industrial workforce is living in the Depression. Unemployment is at Depression levels.
And the jobs aren’t coming back, because policy is designed, by the man in charge of jobs for the Obama administration and others like him, to send production abroad. It’s cheaper. It’s more profitable for the banks and the management. Or to move from investment in production to investment in finance, which does nothing for the economy, probably harms it, but it is very profitable and has the nice feature that when it crashes, as it’s going to do, the taxpayer will come in and bail you out. It’s a great system. It’s a real racket. We will—the regulations are such so that we can take very risky transactions, make a lot of money, it’s going to crash, but no problem, there’s that nice taxpayer. They will come in and bail us out. We’ll be richer than before. And each time it gets worse than it was the last time. Now, this one is really bad. So whatever the growth figures show, for the population, that’s not happening, except for a small sector. So the numbers could be right, but that’s not what it means for people’s lives.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you quickly about Vermont. You have Madison, Wisconsin. You have all of Wisconsin now, Scott Walker saying they’ll break the unions, bring out the National Guard if the teachers and other union workers protest. In Vermont, the new governor, Peter Shumlin, has run on a platform of instituting single-payer healthcare immediately. And in January, a landmark measure was introduced to revoke the granting of personhood rights to U.S. corporations. The bill calls for a constitutional amendment declaring corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States. you live next door in Massachusetts. How significant is this whole movement?

NOAM CHOMSKY: The movement is significant, but of course it has to take root and spread. I mean, take, say, the personhood goes back a century, and it was not by law. No legislation saying corporations are persons. That was by court decisions, a series of court decisions over time which have given these fictitious legal entities—established by the state, incidentally, and protected by the state; they’re basically state-based organizations—giving these entities more and more rights. It was bitterly attacked by conservatives when—because it was a big attack on the classical liberal ideals a century ago. Citizens United, which you mentioned, is just the last state of it. So that’s quite right.
The other thing about single payer is extremely significant. I mean, you know, we’re supposed to be upset about the deficit. Whether we should be or not is another question. You should have a deficit in a recession. But let’s say we’re worried about the deficit. Where is the deficit coming from? About half of it is military spending, which is out of sight. You know, it’s as much as the rest of the world combined. It’s not for defense. In fact, it probably increases dangers to the United States. But it’s there. The other half is our totally dysfunctional healthcare system. I mean, it costs about twice as much per capita as comparable countries and doesn’t have—has pretty poor outcomes, plus 50 million uninsured and other scandals. And it’s the only privatized, virtually unregulated healthcare system. So costs are out of sight. Administrative costs are very high. You have profits. You have cherry picking, all sorts of things that cost money. That’s about half the deficit. In fact, if we had a healthcare system like comparable countries, we’d problably have a surplus.
Well, if you look at the debate that’s going on—you know, you read New York Times, anybody—they say the big problem is entitlements. Entitlements means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Well, Social Security is just pure lies. I mean, Social Security doesn’t even add to the deficit. It’s funded by payroll taxes. And furthermore, it’s in quite good shape for decades. So that’s just mentioned in order to try to destroy Social Security. Social Security does nothing for the wealthy. It’s a means of survival for working people and poorer people, so therefore let’s get rid of it. Also, Social Security is dangerous. Social Security is based on a principle which is frightening: namely, we care about each other. So, Social Security is based on the idea that you care if a disabled widow across town has food to eat, and you have to drive that out of people’s heads. They’re supposed to care only about themselves, not anybody else, like part of the reason for attacking unions. So you’ve got to get rid of Social Security, so therefore lie about it. But what about Medicare and Medicaid? It’s true, those expenses are going through the roof, and they’re going to tank the federal budget. But that’s because of the healthcare system. I mean, Medicare—

AMY GOODMAN: So, what could Obama do right now?

NOAM CHOMSKY: He could do what the population has wanted for years: put in a national healthcare system like every other industrial country has in one form or another. That was just given up during the healthcare—they didn’t talk about it. There was one last residue of it in the healthcare reform: namely, the public option. The public was in favor of that by I think about five to three or something, substantially. That was just given away, you know? We’ve got to make sure that the rich—financial institutions are richer and richer—insurance companies, in this case.
Same with pharmaceutical corporations. Drug prices in the United States are much higher than comparable countries, with one exception: Veterans Administration. Veterans Administration has reasonable prices, and there’s a reason. The government is allowed to bargain with pharmaceutical corporations for the VA, but not for the rest of the population. So, of course, the prices are out of sight. Well, yeah, the public has views on this, too. In fact, actually, it’s only one poll. It showed about 85 percent opposition. But it’s not even discussed.
So, yes, entitlements are a problem, but not the entitlements. What’s a problem is paying off the insurance companies and paying off Big Pharma. That’s a problem. And unless we do something about that, that problem is going to get worse and worse, and you’ll have a bigger and bigger deficit, plus the military. So what Vermont is doing is picking the right problem. But, you know, it’s a small state. What they can do depends on how—if we have a popular uprising like, say, Tunisia or Egypt or Bahrain, yeah, then you could get somewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: We just had this breaking news that the Obama administration is making a call to Bahrain to use restraint. I mean, again, we have the U.S. military base there. But did you ever think you’d see, Noam, in your lifetime, what we are seeing now in the Middle East, this rolling revolution?

NOAM CHOMSKY: No, not really. But then, I never expected to see what’s happened in Latin America for the past 10 years. Over the past 10—what’s happened in Latin America is very dramatic. There’s 500 years of history here. And this is the first time, since the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors came, that Latin America has started to take its fate into its own hands. They’ve kicked out all the American military bases. The countries are integrating. They’re beginning to deal with the absolute scandal, that’s internal to each country, a tiny sector of extreme wealth, Western-oriented—

JUAN GONZALEZ: The wealth gap is shrinking.

NOAM CHOMSKY: And it’s shrinking, and they’re doing something about it. A long way to go, but at least being faced. And there also integration of the countries, which is a prerequisite for independence. Now, that’s dramatic. It’s far more significant than what happened in Eastern Europe. I mean, the comparisons to Eastern Europe I don’t think are very convincing. First of all, in Eastern Europe, remember, you had Gorbachev. Now, the person who was in charge, basically, and had the guns was saying, "Go ahead." You don’t have any Gorbachev in the West, nothing like him. Furthermore, in the case of Eastern Europe, the major power sectors in the world—the United States and Western Europe—were supporting the uprising, of course, because it was undermining an enemy. There’s nothing like that here.
In fact, about the only comparison to Eastern Europe that isn’t sort of ridiculous is the one that’s never talked about: Romania. Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute. They couldn’t support him anymore, so, you know, turned against him—the usual game plan. But that’s about the only analogy.
On the other hand, what happened in Latin America is extremely significant, and what’s happening in the Middle East could turn into something similar.

AMY GOODMAN: And the role of the U.S. in the Middle East, what it should play right now? And I know you have to go after that.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, what it should do is say, "OK, we’re out of here. This is your country. You live there. You do what you want. We’re going to support democracy. Or we’ll support whatever comes out." But think what’s involved in that. Just take a look at Arab public opinion. You take a look at Arab public opinion, you see democracy would be a disaster for the U.S. leadership. I mentioned the figures, but the whole of U.S. policy in the region would instantly collapse if you had democracy.
Well, you know, the Middle East is an important area. It goes back to almost 90 years, since oil was discovered, especially since the Second World War. Take a look at internal documents. The Middle East oil was regarded as the most important and strategic—the strategically most important area of the world, because it’s got the major oil reserves. And if you think what’s happened in the Middle East over the years, the big—the United States and Britain have traditionally supported radical Islamic fundamentalism. The core of radical Islamic fundamentalism is Saudi Arabia. That’s also the main fundamental of jihadi terror. That’s our main ally. In fact, in 1967, when U.S. relations with Israel took on their current form, the primary reason was that there was a war going on, literally, between Saudi Arabia and Egypt in Yemen. And Saudi Arabia is the center of radical Islamic fundamentalism. Egypt was the center of secular nationalism. And secular nationalism is frightening, because—it wasn’t democratic, it was autocratic, but it was secular and it was nationalist. And Nasser was talking about using the resources of the region for their own populations, not to enrich Western oil companies and, you know, the Saudi elite. Well, that’s frightening. So there was this conflict going on, the U.S. and Britain of course supporting radical Islamism. Israel won that battle for them. That’s when relations were established in their current form, and that continues. It’s not 100 percent, but substantially the U.S. and Britain have supported and continue to support radical Islam, because it’s a barrier against democracy. If it goes the wrong way, they don’t like it, but as long as it’s going your way, fine.
Actually, during this entire crisis, I thought one of the most astute comments was a two-sentence comment by Marwan Muasher. He’s a former high Jordanian official who’s head of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. He said, "There’s an operative principle in the Middle East." He said, "The principle is, as long as people are quiet and passive, we’ll do whatever we like." That’s a general principle of statesmanship that applies here, too. As long as people are quiet and passive, we’ll do whatever we like. Now, of course, if they stop being quiet and passive, we’ll have to adjust somehow. Maybe they’ll even throw us out, but we’ll try to hang on as much as we can. And that’s what we see going on in the Middle East. That’s what we saw going on in Latin America. It’s what we see right here.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, thank you so much for spending this time.

Source:  http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/17/noam_chomsky_on_civil_rights_obama_latin_america_and_the_history_of_the_us_in_the_middle_east