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Environmental Groups Slam G8 Leaders

Ellie Keen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:40:20 +0000

In Japan, world leaders at the G8 summit have announced they would work toward cutting carbon emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050. The White House hailed the declaration as a major step forward, but environmental campaigners criticized the lack of a commitment to midterm targets. Global warming ties into other big themes, such as soaring food and fuel prices, being discussed at the three-day summit. We go to Hokkaido to speak with Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South.

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AMY GOODMAN: G8 leaders say they will set a global target of cutting carbon emissions by at least 50 percent by the year 2050 in an effort to tackle climate change. In a statement released during a summit in northern Japan, the Group of Eight leaders agreed they would need to set midterm goals to achieve that “shared vision” by 2050 but gave no numerical targets.

The White House hailed the G8 declaration as a major step forward and said it was a validation of President Bush’s global warming policy. But environmental campaigners slammed the lack of a commitment to midterm goals. Greenpeace International called it a “complete failure of responsibility,” and WWF said the target date of 2050 was insufficient and the lack of progress “pathetic.”

Global warming ties into other big themes such as soaring food and fuel prices being discussed at the three-day summit. Leaders from the G8 nations—Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States—are being joined by counterparts from some fifteen other countries. The gathering is taking place at a plush mountaintop hotel on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, where 21,000 police have been mobilized. Despite the crackdown, protests have been occurring for days in the lead-up to the summit.

RENATO REYES: We’re here in solidarity with our Japanese friends who are standing up against the G8. We feel very strongly about this issue, especially since the poverty happening in the Philippines right now is really bad. The oil crisis, the fuel crisis and the war on terror has really affected many of our countrymen.

KIM HEUNG HYUN: [translated] What I’d like to say most is that food should not be used as a political tool. If you allow it to happen, food could eventually be a weapon. The important thing is for each country to maintain agricultural self-sufficiency.

MASUYUKI TOMITA: [translated] This is a meeting by world thieves. They, the G8 countries, are causing all the current problems, such as environment destruction and food crisis. That is why I am against them.

AMY GOODMAN: The G8 summit wraps up Wednesday. We go now to Japan to speak with Walden Bello, senior analyst at Focus on the Global South. He joins us on the phone from Hokkaido. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Walden.

WALDEN BELLO: Hi, Amy, yes. The line is a bit choppy, but I hope I can hear you and you can hear me.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe what is happening? First, your response to the stated set of goal, 2050, to cut carbon emissions by 50 percent?

WALDEN BELLO: Yes, I think that, you know, this has been sold as a big thing, but it’s really not, and it’s, in fact, quite backward, because the US in fact killed the efforts to have in the declaration in Bali last—during the summit over, that, you know, 25 to 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions should be cut by 2020. And the consensus right now is that you have to have at least an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. So this is really a low target. And this was really an effort to basically please the United States. And the thing about this also is that the US is subverting the UN process, because he’s put this within the context of another rival grouping called the Major Economies Meeting, which is a US effort to parallel the Kyoto UN framework process. So this is bad news.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, can you talk about the activists who tried to get in? There are 21,000 Japanese police there.

WALDEN BELLO: Could you repeat that, Amy? The line’s a bit choppy here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the difficulty of activists trying to get in to protest the G8 in Japan?

WALDEN BELLO: I—wow, you know, that really didn’t come across. The difficulties of what now?

AMY GOODMAN: Of the protesters getting into Japan, getting to Hokkaido?

WALDEN BELLO: Oh, wow, I can’t—I couldn’t get that. I couldn’t get that. I’m terribly sorry. It came up as very, very unclear.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll have the producer ask you the question. We’re talking to Walden Bello, senior analyst, Focus on the Global South, joining us on the line from Hokkaido. We’ll go to a break, and we’ll come back, and we’ll clear up the phone line. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back now to Walden Bello. He’s speaking to us from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. He’s senior analyst at the Focus on the Global South. And we hope the phone line has cleared up. Walden Bello, I was asking about the difficulty activists had of getting to the G8 summit.

WALDEN BELLO: Oh, yes. Well, they’re following the example of Singapore, which is to really screen people and not admit people that are, you know, people who have been longtime activists in these issues. And, you know, like it’s—these twenty-four Koreans who were here, they were held for about, you know, over twenty-four hours and then sent back. And many others did not receive their visas on time. And, of course, many of us who came through already had visas, we were pulled aside and subjected to heavy questioning. So this is what we call really the—Japan following Singapore’s policy of really, you know, restricting the entry of people associated with social movements. And this is a very, very bad precedent, because, in fact, in terms of—I’ve been in quite a number of summits of the G8, and I would say that, in terms of border controls, this is the worst so far.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the people who were actually prevented from getting in, like Susan George?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, Susan George, you know, was able to come in, and—but she was questioned for about, I believe, four hours in a small windowless room. And so, this—and Lydinyda Nacpil of the Jubilee South, for instance, the anti-debt coalition, was questioned for about three-and-a-half hours. And basically, this is—you know, this is harassment. So, you know, this is Japan on sort of a security footing that is really quite a departure from previous policies with respect to the entry of activists.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, can you talk about the food crisis?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, you know, it’s said to be—the agenda here is said to include the food crisis, but people are not really expecting anything to come out, because the G8 countries really don’t—or the G8 governments really don’t know how to deal with this problem, because, you know, it’s been something that’s been caused by their policies. Now, certainly the diversion of corn to biofuel production from food is a cause, one of the causes, of the sharp rise in food prices. But we’ve got to see this in a longer-term perspective, that basically the policies of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment and WTO-, World Trade Organization-mandated liberalization basically destroyed the capacity of so many developing countries to be self-sufficient producers. It turned them into net importers of food, and then they were made into dumping ground for highly subsidized food commodities from the European Union and the United States. So this is the sort of already weakened agricultural economies in which the biofuel diversion took effect. So the weakening of these economies really began with G8-supported free market structural adjustment policies.

So, this is why the G8 governments really don’t have, you know, a solution for this, except platitudes, to say that they’re going to help increase food production. Some of them have been talking about supporting a new green revolution based on genetically modified organisms, seeds, in Africa. You know, so it’s all these real techno fixes, which are dangerous in the case of so-called green revolutions on genetic engineering. So this is really the wall, you know, that the G8 faces. They—it’s a problem of their creation, and they don’t really have any solutions for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, we reported yesterday that The Guardian newspaper obtained an unpublished World Bank report that found biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent. The report apparently was finished in April but reportedly not published in order to avoid embarrassing the United States, which has claimed plant-derived fuels have pushed up prices by only three percent. The report found biofuels have distorted food markets by diverting grain away from food for fuel, encouraging farmers to set aside land for its production and sparked financial speculation on grains.

WALDEN BELLO: Yes, definitely. I think that is a very critical report, and I think this just goes to show how the World Bank essentially follows, you know, the concerns and lead of the United States here. So, I mean, if it were a really transparent institution, they should have come out with that.

And what I’m—I guess what I’m trying to say is that the weakening—you know, the biofuel diversion has certainly been a very big factor behind the food crisis, but that this occurred within the context of already weakened economies that had been destroyed by the imposition of free market policies. So we’ve seen that over the last twenty to twenty-five years, from Africa to Latin America to Asia, self-sufficient economies have been turned into import-dependent economies. And it is those countries that—for instance, like Mexico, you know—that have become—made dependent on corn imports from the United States. They are the ones suffering now very greatly the impact of this diversion of corn from food to biofuel, because they’re dependent on corn imports from the US. Now, that dependency was created in the first place—and this is the sort of total context, this is the sort of comprehensive view that we need to have in order to be—to really understand the causes of the agricultural crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, I want to thank you for being with us, senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, speaking to us from the Japanes island of Hokkaido, where the G8 are meeting and thousands of activists have come out to protest.

Zimbabwe and the Question of Imperialism

Ellie Keen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:54:38 +0000

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Criticism of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and the actions of his ruling Zanu PF party is growing. The most recent condemnation comes from former South African President Nelson Mandela, who mourned the “tragic failure of leadership” in Zimbabwe on Wednesday. They were the former leader’s first comments on the situation.

President Bush also criticized Mugabe Wednesday for defying international pressure to cancel a run-off election scheduled for Friday.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round of elections in March but withdrew from the run off late on Sunday and sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare out of what he says is concern for his safety. On Wednesday he called for the African Union backed by the United Nations, to lead a “transitional process” in Zimbabwe. He also emphasized that Friday’s vote would not be recognized.

But Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission has ruled that Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from the election last Sunday was filed too late and has no legal force. Meanwhile at least 300 Harare residents have taken shelter from the political violence at the South African embassy.

Today we host a discussion on Zimbabwe: We’re joined in Washington DC by Professor Gerald Horne. He is the Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of numerous books including “From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980.” Joining us on the phone from Syracuse, New York is Professor Horace Campbell. He is Professor of African American Studies and Politics at Syracuse University. He has written extensively about Pan-Africanism and Zimbabwe.

Gerald Horne, Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of numerous books including “From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980.”

Horace Campbell, Professor of African American Studies and Politics at Syracuse University. He has written extensively about Pan-Africanism and Zimbabwe.

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AMY GOODMAN:As we move now from Iraq to Zimbabwe, Juan?

JUAN GONZALES:Well criticism of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and the actions of his ruling Zanu PF party is growing. The most recent condemnation comes from former South African President Nelson Mandela who mourned the quote tragic failure of leadership in Zimbabwe on Wednesday. They were the former leaders first comments on the situation president Bush also criticized Mugabe Wednesday for defying international pressure to cancel a runoff election scheduled for Friday.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Friday’s elections appear to be a sham. You can’t have free elections if a candidate is not allowed to campaign freely and his supporters aren’t allowed to campaign without fear of intimidation—yet the Mugabe government has been intimidating the people on the ground in Zimbabwe. And this is an incredibly sad development. I hope that the AU will, at their meeting this weekend, continue to highlight the illegitimacy of the elections, continue to remind the world that this election is not free, and is not fair.

JUAN GONZALES: Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round of elections in March but withdrew from the runoff late on Sunday and sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harari out of what he says is concern for his safety. On Wednesday he called for the African Union backed the United Nations to lead a quote transitional process in Zimbabwe. He also emphasized that Friday’s vote would not be recognized.

TSVANGIRAI: That our decision to pull out of this shame election was in the best interest of the people of Zimbabwe. Any election conducted arrogantly, unilaterally on Friday will not be recognized by the MDC, by Zimbabweans and by the world over.

JUAN GONZALES: But Zimbabwe’s electoral commission has ruled that Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from the election last Sunday was filed too late and has no legal force. Meanwhile at least 300 Harari residents have taken shelter from the political violence at the South African embassy.

MAN SPEAKING: My house is destroyed to the ground level. And my whole apartment has been destroyed and looted, and my family-–I do not know where my family is right now. I don’t know where my wife, my kids.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we host a discussion on Zimbabwe. We’re joined in Washington D.C. by Professor Gerald Horne, Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of numerous books including “From the Barrel of a Gun, the United States in the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965 to 1980.” Joining us on the phone from Syracuse is Professor Horace Campbell, Professor of African American Studies and Politics at Syracuse University in New York, has written extensively about Pan-Africanism and Zimbabwe. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I want to begin with Gerald Horne in Washington. Can you talk about what is happening in Zimbabwe and the coverage of it, how we understand what is happening in Zimbabwe in the United States?

GERALD HORNE: Well obviously what is happening in Zimbabwe is quite tragic and I would hope some of the sympathy that is extended to Zimbabwe could be extended as well to other African nations that do not have white minorities. For example, the statement condemning or questioning the Zimbabweans elections emerged from Swaziland, a South African nation that is one of the last absolute monarchies on this small planet. Some might well question why isn’t Swaziland’s human rights situation being interrogated and investigated? A scant year ago in Nigeria, the continent’s giant, you had shambolic elections, had hundreds killed yet that barely registered a blip on the international media. At least not in the North Atlantic. Many talk, perhaps understandably, about the fact the President Mugabe has served as President since 1980, but what about Omar Bongo of Gabon, a close ally of the U.S, an oil-rich country in West Africa, which of course, he has served as president since 1967? 13 years before Mugabe came into power. I mean, I could go on in this vain, but I think the fact that thousands were killed in Zimbabwe in the 1980’s and yet, he received a virtual knighthood from Queen Elizabeth and received an honorary degree from Massachusetts, and yet, today in 2008, he is a subject of international scorn after of course he expropriates some white farmers, really speaks of profound racism in terms of how this issue has been covered in the North Atlantic media.

JUAN GONZALES: Horace Campbell, I want to ask about this issue. It does seem that the western media did not focus on Zimbabwe at all until the expropriations began of land. But does that deal with—the land of the white-minority there-–but does that deal with the underlying class conflicts that are obviously clearly percolating in reaching ahead right now in the country?

HORACE CAMPBELL: Well, thank you for having me on the show. First of all, I would say this platform on Democracy Now! is a platform for the progressives, the left, and those who are involved in the peace movement. Our discussions on what is going on in Zimbabwe or any other part of Africa should be guided by how our solidarity with the peoples of Zimbabwe, with the oppressed workers of Southern Africa, and in all parts of Africa can assist our own struggle in this country against all forms of oppression. And so, comparing Zimbabwean’s oppression with other oppression in Africa does not excuse the oppression of the Zimbabweans people by any means. I think Gerald is very right about these oppressions across Africa, but organizations in this country that are in solidarity with the peace movement across the world ,that are in solidarity with the Zimbabwe people, should take the cue from the Congress of South African Trade Union that is calling for a blockade of Zimbabwe because of the oppression. And I think what distinguished Zimbabwe from those countries that Gerald speaks about is that none of those countries is representing themselves as being in the forefront of liberation. Robert Mugabe and Zanupe started out like they were Lumumba in the Congo. They ended up like Mubutu, killing from the people, arrested opposition leaders, killing people, calling homosexual pigs and dogs, and killing hundreds, tens of thousands of people. 18% of the Zimbabwean people are unemployed. While the stock exchange is the most successful in Africa. We on the left, in the peace movement, we acknowledge that George Bush nor Brown have any moral authority to criticize Zimbabwe because of the unjust war that they’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But having said that, we on the left and the progressives, we must take the moral leadership in having solidarity with those opposition leaders, those workers, those human rights workers in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa who are being oppressed by the Mugabe government.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Gerald Horne?

GERALD HORNE: Well I think there is very much to recommend with what Horace Campbell said. As a taxpayer to this government here in Washington, my first approach must be this regime of George W. Bush. And I think we have to question the hypocrisy of George Bush who has engaged in questionable elections in Florida and Ohio, questioning the legitimacy of the elections in Zimbabwe. More than that, if the situation in Zimbabwe is so terrible, and I agree it is, why is it that the Bush administration continues to send undocumented Zimbabwe workers back to Zimbabwe? There’s been talk about a so- called genocide unfolding in Zimbabwe, yet, you see the Gordon Brown administration in London not giving asylum to Zimbabwe workers who are exiled now in London. We talk about the Mugabe regime, but just the other day it was revealed that Anglo American, the major transnational corporation with close South African ties and headquarters in London, is about to make a $400 million investment in Zimbabwe. Barclay’s bank is in Zimbabwe. Rio Tinto-Zinc, the major mineral conglomerate is in Zimbabwe. It seems to me in the first place, we in the North Atlantic should be focusing on these kinds of contradictions that we can affect and as the African National Congress has said, leave Zimbabwe to the Zimbabwean people themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to a break and we’ll come back to this discussion. Our guests in Washington, Professor. Gerald Horne, Professor of African Studies at the University of Houston, he has lived in Zimbabwe, Professor Horace Campbell also joins us, professor of African- American studies at Syracuse University. We will be back with them both in a moment.

[music break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. We’re talking about Zimbabwe. Professor Gerald Horne of the University of Houston is in Washington, Professor Horace Campbell of African American Studies and Political Science of Syracuse University is speaking to us from Syracuse. If you could respond, Professor Campbell, to what Gerald Horne said before the break.

HORACE CAMPBELL: Yes, I want to reiterate a point that any kind of political work we do on Zimbabwe should assist us in educating our people here so that when the Zimbabwe political leadership represents itself to say that it is being persecuted because it expropriated the land of the former white settlers, we have to interrogate what did the expropriation of the land mean for the millions of Zimbabweans workers, small farmers. It is very clear that the Zimbabwean people needed to reclaim the land from the white settlers. But the Mugabe government, when he was receiving his knighthood from the british government, never negotiated about the land because throughout the period from 1980- 1992, Zimbabwe had the legal powers to be able to set in motion the possibilities for strengthening the working peoples, the farm workers, the women, the plantation and agricultural workers. And hen we speak about land, we must understand that whether the land is owned by white farmers are black farmers, the fundamental productivity on the land emanates from the labor of the working people—working people. So our task is how is it we defend the working people of Zimbabwe? The hundreds of thousands of workers who live on the conditions of wretchedness, who have been exploited by the black capitalist farmers, who are in the Zimbabwean government just as the whites have done. So any kind of transition in Zimbabwe must involve strengthening the rights of the workers, the women, and the use in Zimbabwe. I think that what Gerald said should throw away all of the talk about Mugabe been against imperialism because it was very clear that anglo- American, Barclay bank, and Rio-Tinto and diamond dealers have made billions of dollars while Mugabe was talking about the land. And what we’re calling for is for any transitional period in Zimbabwe to be one where there is intervention by the African Union so that the billions that have been carried out by the ruling elements in Zimbabwe, that we do not have them carried out repression of the workers with impunity and then stealing the money as they have done the past 8-10 years.

JUAN GONZALES: Gerald Horne, I’d like to ask you. Obviously Mugabe has been an icon and a hero, a giant in terms of the liberation movements in Africa for decades. But your sense now, do you believe that he still represents any forces for progress in Africa or has he gradually transformed himself into a dictator?

GERALD HORNE: Well, I think that president Mugabe is a force to be reckoned with in Zimbabwe. And I agree with those leaders in the region who feel that he and his party must be contented with if there is to be a settlement of this controversy in Zimbabwe. I should also say that with regard to professor Campbell, I’m here not to carry a brief on OPS, but they have argued they did not move on land reform before 1994, i.e. the date of the South African elections, so as not to unsettle the situation in neighboring South Africa, which of course has outstanding land claims of its own. We all know there are more white farmers killed in South Africa than have been killed in Zimbabwe. And likewise, there are outstanding land claims in neighboring Namibia as well. I think it’s understandable why there has been a focus on on Zanu PF, but standing in the wings of the opposition of the MDC and sadly, unfortunately, there has not been considerable focus on them such as their leaders, Roy Bennet, a top leader, a former major land owner in Zimbabwe who of course throttled an African leader on the floor of the Zimbabweans parliament—I would of thought that kind of behavior would have ended in independence in 1980. You have other leading Rhodesians in the leadership of MDC. One thing that worries many of us is that if MDC does come to power, there will be a split and quite frankly, they will pave the way for the rise of certain retrograde elements like Roy Bennet come back into power. In some ways, MDC, a trade union-led movement, is akin to solidarity in Poland which of course paved the way for the present right wing in Poland to come to power in Warsaw. So we have to be careful when we try to butt in to the internal affairs of a sovereign state. I think our energies would be best served by putting pressure on this government here in Washington and its comical sidekick in London.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Horace Campbell?

HORACE CAMPBELL: The intellectual subservience of the MDC and the leadership ofthe MDC is clear to most workers in Southern Africa. But this point in the history of Zimbabwe, the MDC doesn’t have political power. The social forces that are organized in Zimbabwe against the government have thrown their weight behind the MDC at the present moment. The Women of Zimbabwe rise, these are independent organizations, Padari, the workers, agricultural and plantation workers. I do not think—we do not have the right to say to the Zimbabwean workers that your under oppression and therefore, we should decide for you because of the history of Mugabe’s relationship to the liberation movement, 28 years ago, then we should be saying to you what your choices should be. In Southern Africa, the Congress of South African Trade Union movement has called for a blockade of the Zimbabwean government and is the Zimbabwe leadership and the Congress of South African Trade Union which is the largest trade union movement in Southern Africa is a movement which is calling for the isolation of Mugabe government. What we agree with Gerald is on as the falling—the land question in Southern Africa is an urgent question in the media, in south Africa, and in Zimbabwe. But having said that, we must learn lessons from Zimbabwe. To say that when land his been reclaimed it should not be reclaimed for rich, black farmers to replace white farmers. Land when it is being reclaimed in South Africa or in Nambia should be reclaimed in a condition where there is health and safety conditions for the working people’s. So yes, we should take lessons from Zimbabwe and we should introduce new politics in Southern Africa that is coming out of the politics of reconciliation. That no concept of victory should be victory which gives power to one group over another there should be ways in which the transition towards a new political dispersion—in south Africa it is one that strengthens the producing classes, the small workers, farmers, students. And these are the forces that have been repressed, brutalized, the trade union leaders that are in jail right now in Zimbabwe should be released. Opposition leaders should be released. Women should be released. Human rights workers should be released. So that yes, we can criticize the leadership of the MDC and I have done so in my writing, in my book, “Reclaiming Zimbabwe” but the government of Zimbabwe must now arise in a situation where we provide leadership in a condition where 80% of the people are unemployed, where women have been persecuted as prostitutes when a walk on the streets. Were homosexuals have been called pigs and dogs and where men go around trying to have sexual relations with young virgins saying this would prevent HIV/AIDS. We need a new political leadership to go against this kind of backwardness that came out of the kind of patriotic leadership that we had for the past 28 years.

AMY GOODMAN: We wanted to bring South African archbishop Desmond Tutu into this. He also came out forcefully against the violence and intimidation in Zimbabwe speaking in Cape Town Tuesday, who warned Mugabe should bend to international pressure or could risk facing universal sanctions and could risk facing an international criminal court.

TUTU: We are seeing a country not just steadily, but rapidly going down into chaos. The international community should, I believe, had intervened long ago when some of us appeared for a peacekeeping force, to ensure that people who are not intimidated, people are not attacked. And that the conditions for a free and fair election would then have been sustained. Now, I think obviously the effort should continue where we are hoping against hope that good sense might get to prevail and that Mr.Mugabe would agree that really his time is up. It’s 20 years or more that he has been head of state. I think they’ve got to tell him he still less the chance—if he continues and everyone decides to grant his administration illegitimate, then he stands a very very good chance of being arraigned before the ICC for human rights violations.

AMY GOODMAN: Archbishop Desmond Tutu Gerald Horne, your response both to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Horace Campbell.

GERALD HORNE: Well obviously we have enormous respect for Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But I must return to the question that should occupy us in the North Atlantic. Which is why is it the Zimbabwe gets so much focus and attention on this side of the Atlantic when Paul Biya, the leader of Cameron a few weeks ago basically named himself President for life and it barely registers a blip? Similar situation unfolding in Uganda with Yoweri Museveni. I think part of the reason, not only the race and racism question, there’s also the question that many of the former Rhodesian have kith and kin on the side of the Atlantic. The spouse of Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State. The spouse of Chester Crocker, the former assistant Secretary of State for Africa under the Reagan administration. Even some distant relatives of George Washington for whom the city of which I’m sitting is named. Ian Smith, the former Rhodesian leader of course has relatives in San Diego. There were hundreds if not thousands of white mercenaries who flocked to Rhodesia in the 1970’s and 1980’s to fight against liberation of that particular country. And it befuddles and baffles me why this kind of basic historical background is not integrated into the conversation, integrated into the discourse on Zimbabwe. I think it gives a very bad impression on the African continent which leads many Africans to consider their only focus on the North Atlantic is on Zimbabwe because there is a white minority and that perhaps explains to why there has been such a lethargy in responding to some of the human rights violations that are unfolding in Zimbabwe. And until that kind of situation is rectified, I dare say there will continue to be an uncivil situation in Zimbabwe.

JUAN GONZALES: Gerald, all that being true and we clearly recognize that disparity in approach and coverage, back in 2005, there were massive forced relocations of hundreds of thousands of people by the Mugabe government that really stunned people, even here in a progressive community of the United States who have supported Mugabe and the past. Your response to those relocations and again to the issue of whether the government has increasingly become iron handed and dictatorial in dealing with its own people?

GERALD HORNE: Well, those dislocations were tragic and unfortunate. I know about them because I hail from St. Louis, Missouri. And of course it used to be said, with regard to that city and many other cities, that urban renewal meant negro removal. That kind of situation is not unique to Zimbabwe. In Senegal as we speak, there been tens of thousands of Africans who have been displaced because of a civil conflict there reaches back 25 years. It has barely registered a blip on the international press screen. So yes, those situations that are referred to in Zimbabwe are quite tragic and they need to be criticized as well as other analogous situations. And when those analogous situations are not criticized, it basically provides fodder for those who would like to downplay the situation in Zimbabwe.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Horace Campbell, we just have about 30 seconds, your response and your summary?

HORACE CAMPBELL: My response is that the government of Senegal, the government of Cameroon does not represent itself as a liberation government. The Zimbabwean government is very aware of the racism that exists in North America. And it is exploiting that racism and the antiracist sentiment among Africans in the west in order to legitimize its repression on the people. The government of Zimbabwe at this moment is illegitimate we must avoid war at all costs. Mugabe says only god can remove him and he will go to war. At present, he is at war with the Zimbabwe people and we must end the silence in the progressive and pan-African community against this type of manipulation and repression in the name of liberation.

AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there. Professor Horace Campbell of Syracuse University and Professor Gerald Horne of Houston University, thank you for joining us. That does it for today’s show, if you want a copy of the show go to democracynow.org, tomorrow night I’ll be at Des Moines, Iowa at Simpsons College, tomorrow morning at ten in Fairfield Iowa at the library, and Tuesday night the Aspen Ideas Festival.

1968: Tariq Ali Looks Back

Ellie Keen — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:23:22 +0000

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Guest: Tariq Ali, acclaimed British Pakistani historian, activist and commentator. He is one of the editors of the New Left Review and the author of a dozen books, including Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. His forthcoming book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to the latest part of our series “1968: Forty Years Later.” For a discussion on the legacy of 1968, I’m joined by the political activist, novelist and historian, Tariq Ali. Back in the 1960s, with the Vietnam War at its height, Tariq Ali earned a national reputation through debates with figures like Henry Kissinger and then-British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart. He protested against the Vietnam War, led the now-infamous march on the American embassy in London in 1968, and edited the revolutionary paper Black Dwarf, where he became friends with numerous influential figures, such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Forty years later, Tariq Ali continues his lifelong struggle against US foreign policy across the globe. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, as well as five novels and scripts for both stage and screen. He is currently one of the editors of New Left Review. His memoir is titled Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties.

Tariq Ali, welcome to Democracy Now!

TARIQ ALI: Good to be with you.

JUAN GONZALEZ: There’s so many things that happened in 1968, and obviously you’ve had time to reflect on all of them. Talk to us first about what was going on in England at the time and your involvement in the social movements that developed at that time.

TARIQ ALI: What we had in Britain in the ’60s, late ’60s, was a Labour government, which had been elected. This Labour government, despite all its promises, had decided to carry on backing US foreign policy, and the war in Vietnam was at its height. And the government, to our anger, decided to support the war in Vietnam. So there was a wave of anger amongst Labour supporters, who said this is not on. And w then set up the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, though it has to be said, Juan, in retrospect, that that Labour government resisted heavy US pressure to send troops to Vietnam. They backed it verbally, but neither Britain nor any other Western European state sent troops to Vietnam, unlike Iraq. So even though they backed it, it was very different. And the United States embassy—

JUAN GONZALEZ: The only troops, I think, that were sent by other countries were South Korea, Australia, some of the—

TARIQ ALI: South Korea and Australia, always there. But no European country sent troops to fight in Vietnam. Very interesting when you think back on that. It was the height of the Cold War. You would have thought they would, but they didn’t.

And so, a big movement grew, demanding dissociation from the war in Vietnam and for Britain to withdraw political support. And this became a very large movement and backed by virtually every serious political figure in Britain at the time, apart from the government. We had lots of Labour members of Parliament who were opposed to the war, rock singers coming on demonstrations, Mick Jagger writing “Street Fighting Man,” numerous other people involved in it. And the fact that this was Britain’s closest ally in Europe made it a problem.

And I remember Senator Eugene McCarthy, the Democrat peace candidate, saying publicly, “What is our country coming to, when our embassy in the friendliest country we have in the world is permanently under siege?" That cheered us up enormously, because it meant that we were having an impact.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the protest at the US embassy that you were involved in?

TARIQ ALI: Well, you know, this was after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, where the Vietnamese had taken the US embassy in Saigon for a token period. They had all been killed. I guess you could call it a suicide attack, using today’s language.

And so, we thought, what can we do to show solidarity with the Vietnamese? Can’t we just capture the embassy for a short time and run the Vietnamese flag up and then withdraw? And in October ’67, we got very close to doing that. And we were surprised, as well, and so were the people in the embassy. So we thought, in March ’68, we would do that. But this time, everyone was prepared, and the police, mounted police, charged us and prevented us from reaching the embassy, so there was a big clash. And then Mick Jagger said, “Well, you know, it’s obvious what we have now got to do. We’ve got to have our own cavalry. So why don’t we train people to fight on horseback against the mounted police?” But we thought that we’d give this one a miss.

So that was the big clashes outside Grosvenor Square, which stunned the country, actually, because they weren’t prepared for that. But it showed the depth of feeling. And then, a few months later, France exploded in May-June, with ten million workers on strike, which just shifted the whole political locus or focus of the struggle to something completely different, that something which had begun as an antiwar movement was now becoming a deeper social movement.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the French convulsion, of course, didn’t actually start in Paris, as you mention in an article you recently did at the Guardian. It started at a smaller university outside of Paris, and it started in March, right? Could you tell—

TARIQ ALI: It started on March the—

JUAN GONZALEZ: —for a lot of our younger listeners and viewers, some of that history of that amazing movement, how a few students ended up leading a movement that paralyzed the nation?

TARIQ ALI: It’s quite astonishing when you think back on it. On March the 22nd in a campus in Nanterre outside Paris, students came out to protest against the restrictions, against bad housing conditions, and the government overreacted, beat them up. They set up the March the 22nd Committee, which called demonstrations in the heart of the Latin Quarter, and that quarter exploded on the night of May the 10th.

Two months later, the campaign erupted with massive clashes. And, you know, the French have this magical capacity to erect barricades. Historically, from the eighteenth century onwards, they’ve been very good at doing barricades. It’s almost genetic now. And so, they put up the barricades in May, and the country was on the—completely divided.

The students were then joined by workers. There were factory strikes. And soon, by the beginning of June, you had ten million workers on strike, many of them occupying their factories and wanting to run society. And you had Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French philosopher, congratulating the students and workers and saying, “You have put imagination on the seat of power.” So that French upheaval transformed the mode all over Europe, without any doubt, and people were scared.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And how did the students build that kind of alliance with the labor movement? And how did it spread beyond just the students to the labor movement?

TARIQ ALI: I think when workers saw students fighting on the barricades, the effect of that was exemplary. It’s just like the students had seen the Vietnamese fighting in Saigon; that had got them going. So the Latin Quarter in the heart of Paris was, when it was under student control, was renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. And when workers saw students fighting on the barricades, they said, “Hey, hang on a minute. You know, these namby-pamby kids are taking on the state. We suffer much more than they do.” And slowly, delegations of young workers started coming from the car factories, from other factors, and joining students. Very funny story, when building workers suddenly came and said, “Hang on. We can show you how to build better barricades,” and immediately barricades went up. So this exemplary effect then went into the factories, and the trade union leaders, which were communist, all of them, were completely thrown by this and couldn’t control the workers at all, and the workers occupied.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the impact of that movement on the social conditions of the people in France, because obviously Charles de Gaulle, the World War II hero, was the president at the time, and the impact on the government and what kinds of reforms emerged from there?

TARIQ ALI: Well, the government panicked. Charles de Gaulle, in a very rare outburst of anger, because normally he was very lofty, but when he found out what was going on in his country, he said, “Chie-en-lit”—it’s “[expletive] in the bed.” And the students then put up a poster with de Gaulle, saying, “No, you are the chienlit,” which went all over the streets of Paris. But de Gaulle panicked. During the general strike in France, he panicked.

He went secretly to address French troops stationed in Baden-Baden in Germany and said to them, “If Paris falls, will you help me to retake it?” And the army—the general said, “We will, provided you release the generals who were involved in the Algerian coup,” total sort of right-wing generals. And de Gaulle made the deal. Never came to that, thank God, because there would have been massive bloodshed. So it didn’t come to that, but that’s how scared they were.

And you had French journalists traveling Europe and being asked, “Do you think the disease will spread? How serious is it?” because the entire rulers of Western Europe became very nervous.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And again, what kind of impact was there on French society, in terms of the conditions of workers and students following that?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I mean, the impact was that they won massive reforms. You know, the government which came after de Gaulle, Pompidou, actually made a lot of concessions in levels of wages, working conditions, the conditions inside universities. So, in order to prevent revolution, they acceded to a great deal of the workers’ demands. In some factories, trade union bureaucrats would go to the factory and say to the workers, “Guys, we’ve won a 25 percent wage increase,” and they’d say, “Screw it.” “And what do you want?” “We want the factory.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what most people don’t realize, I think, is that, the past forty years, the ruling classes of France have been trying to take back all of the reforms that were achieved in that short period of time back then, and the French working class has always been considered the most pampered by capitalists of Europe, in terms of their general conditions.

TARIQ ALI: They are. And the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, came to power saying, “My victory shows the death of May ’68 and that legacy in France, and I will destroy it forever.” Well, exactly the opposite is happening. His ratings, a year after he was elected, are now rock-bottom. He’s a disliked president, even more unpopular than Chirac. Even as we speak, there are public-sector strikes taking place in France.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to move on to Czechoslovakia, also 1968. Certainly, what was happening in France had an impact as well on what happened in Czechoslovakia and in the confrontations with the Soviet Union.

TARIQ ALI: You know, Juan, I always felt that in some ways what happened in Czechoslovakia offered a great deal of hope, because here you had a reformist faction inside the Czech Communist Party trying to make Czechoslovakia a socialist democracy. Dubcek, the leader of the reform communists, said, “We want socialism with a human face.”

And that socialism with a human face had already led to the most amazing discussions in the Czech press and Czech television, which became the freest in Europe, even though it was state-owned. Journalists took control, and the newspapers and television were transformed. Political prisoners could confront their jailers on prime-time television and say, “Why did you torture us? Why did you say this?” So the whole country was politicized.

And then, fearful that this particular disease might spread to Russia and Eastern Europe—and there was every chance it might have—the Russians sent in the tanks. And the response of NATO was not so critical, if you look at what—

JUAN GONZALEZ: And they sent in the tanks around—in what month again?

TARIQ ALI: August.

JUAN GONZALEZ: August.

TARIQ ALI: It was the 21st of August, 1968. The Russians and the Warsaw Pact powers sent in the tanks to crush the Czech experiment. And by doing so, they didn’t know it, but they signed their own death warrant, because, interestingly enough, people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize Russian novelist who wrote the famous books on the gulag, he was asked, “When did you lose faith totally in your own country and its capacity to reform from within?” and Solzhenitsyn said, “21st of August, 1968. When they stopped the Czechs from doing what they wanted and transforming the system, then I knew it was the end, and I lost all faith in this regime.” Interesting.

But the response of the West was very mild, because they were not happy with the socialism with a human face either. But if the Czechs had won, who knows? The history of Europe might have been very different, because you never had a socialist government which was also democratic. And here, there was a possibility that the two could come together, and that would have given a very different shape to the world in Europe and elsewhere.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re talking to Tariq Ali, the political activist, novelist and historian. His memoir is called Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. We’ll be back with him in a minute. Stay with us.

[break]

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re talking to Tariq Ali, the political activist, novelist and historian. His memoir is called Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. He has a big article in the Guardian of London called “Where Has All the Rage Gone?” about 1968. We’ve been talking about England, France, Czechoslovakia, where the fermenting in Europe in 1968, but it wasn’t just in Europe or in North America. There were widespread movements, amazing movements, in other parts of the third world at the same time. And those have gotten far less attention in many of the retrospectives about what’s been going on.

TARIQ ALI: I know. It’s really awful, that, actually. It shows the sort of nostalgia side of it. People only want to remember what they remembered at the time. But I think the two big events in the third world, one was the Mexican students’ uprising at the—it was Olympics year, don’t forget. And the Mexican students fought for democracy in their own country against an oppressive semi-one-party state regime. And the Mexican authorities decided to massacre them. There was a gigantic massacre by the Mexican regime. You know, hundreds of students were killed, thousands were wounded. And at the same time, the Olympics were about to take place. No one at that time in the West said, “Let’s boycott the Olympics,” by the way.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. And in terms of some of the issues that they were raising at the time in Mexico?

TARIQ ALI: The issues they were raising were social justice, democracy, democratic rights, an end to an authoritarian, corrupt one-party state government. That is what the Mexican students were demanding, and they were mown down. And the most striking image that came out of the Olympics was the two black US athletes who had won the gold—the runners who had won the gold and silver medals, when they went to the podium. I mean, it was a moment of real pride and internationalism that, in solidarity with the students, they had their medals, and they stood with their heads hanging down and raised their fists to give the clenched fist salute, a very moving event which was seen all over the third world as a sign of solidarity with that world by Afro-American athletes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, in Mexico itself, the achieving justice or rectifying what happened back then is still a political battle that’s ongoing in a series of Mexican governments since then.

TARIQ ALI: It has been ongoing, and it’s still ongoing, because in the last Mexican elections, as anyone who followed them closely knows, Juan, they tricked—they tricked the electorate once again. They rigged the elections, not as massively as they used to do in the past, but sufficiently to deny López Obrador the presidency. The Obrador campaign, election campaign, in Mexico mobilized more people than any other campaign they’d done, literally a million people in the Zócolo, in the heart of Mexico City. And then they say he didn’t—and this was the case in most parts of the country. Everyone thought he was going to win. But suddenly, at the last moment, they rigged the elections, and all the people who accuse Chavez in Venezuela of all sorts of crimes and send hundreds of observers to watch every move were not present when the pro-Western government in Mexico was rigging the elections against López Obrador.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Then, of course, the events in your own homeland, which are perhaps the least covered or remembered of all the major upheavals of 1968.

TARIQ ALI: You know, people sometimes get surprised when they ask me, “Well, we know about ’68, but we lost everywhere. We fought, and we lost.” And I say, hang on a minute. There’s one country where they fought for three months, the students in Pakistan, against a military dictatorship. And the struggle began on November the 7th, 1968, went on ’til March the 10th, 1969.

And if you look at the chronology of that struggle, Juan, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Workers join, white-collar workers join, lawyers join, women join, judges come out on the streets, prostitutes get organized and come out. It became a massive social struggle. And every day, the number of people getting killed gets bigger and bigger and bigger. We still don’t have accurate figures of how many people the police and army shot dead in Pakistan.

But finally, when railway workers began to disrupt the railways, taking out the railway lines from the track, and the demand was very simple: end of dictatorship, and democratic free elections in the country. These were the two central demands. But the military dictator of the time, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, backed by Washington and London, was standing firm, ’til he realized he couldn’t carry on. And in March, he was toppled. And I remember—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Why was he so backed by Washington and London?

TARIQ ALI: Well, because Washington, in Pakistan, have always preferred to rule via the military than through civilian politicians. They don’t trust the civilian politicians too much. So all the three key dictators Pakistan have had had been backed by Washington. And in fact, Ayub was put into power by Washington in October ’58. So after ten years, the students—he was removed. It was an insurrection, and he had to go.

And I was in the country at the time, and the mood was just exhilarating, euphoria, you know, people celebrating on the streets, hugging each other, distributing sweets. And religion played no part in the struggle at all. It was a totally secular struggle. And the three big demands of the movement, social demands of the movement, were food, clothes and shelter for all.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You also talk about the enormous development of a feminist movement at that time, which most people, when you’re dealing with the Muslim world, would not even envision that. But as far back as ’68, there was a strong feminist movement there.

TARIQ ALI: There was a strong women’s organizations in both parts of Pakistan, as it was then. And one of the most moving things was when a student was killed in the western part of the country, in the eastern part of the country, which later became Bangladesh, women would just pour out onto the streets, very few with their heads covered, but barefooted in mourning and in solidarity with what was happening to students in West Pakistan.

But the feminist movement, you know, it’s often forgotten: why was it called the women’s “liberation” movement? The word “liberation” came from Vietnam. The National Liberation Front of Vietnam was fighting for its freedom; we should fight for our freedom. Gay liberation movement, women’s liberation movement, black liberation movement were inspired by all those struggles.

And I guess, of what survives from that, in terms of the legacy, the biggest gains were probably made on that front, social and sexual front. Women’s rights were won, the right of women to have abortions, the ending of illegalizing abortions, homosexuality, which was totally crushed. People now forget, because so much has changed on that front, that in countries like Britain, in the late ’50s and ’60s, early ‘60s, it was illegal to be gay. Illegal. You were arrested if you were found out. I have many friends who were locked up. Now, young people can hardly believe that. So the ’68 movement was a political, social, and movement for sexual liberation, which shouldn’t be forgotten. A lot of the rights being enjoyed by women and gay people today come from that movement.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet, as you say, religion played no part in that movement, and yet now religion plays such a huge part in the daily life and the political life of Pakistan today. What was the transformation that has occurred?

TARIQ ALI: You know, I challenge that, actually. I think what—the last general elections in Pakistan, the religious parties were virtually wiped out electorally. It is true that there is much more religiosity on Pakistan, but there is in virtually all parts of the world, including this country. But in terms of the religious parties actually dominating Pakistan, this is not true, or the notion that Pakistan is on the eve of a Jihadi takeover and the Jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger.

I’ve just written a long a book on Pakistan, which will be published in September, in which I actually challenge all these mythologies and ask why are they being created and what is the function of it. The bulk of the country isn’t attracted to either Jihadi or religious politics. These are a tiny, tiny minority in Pakistan. The real problems of people in that country are food, clothing, shelter, education. And no political party or the military are interested in solving them. The surprise is, for me, that more people don’t move towards religion. But they don’t.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So where has the rage gone, as you’ve asked in your article? And why there is so little of that kind of rage that erupted in a short period in the late ’60s and early ’70s?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I think it was a different period. That was an epoch of wars, of revolutions. Don’t forget, a lot of revolutions had taken place. I mean, the Cuban revolution had happened in 1959. So the mood was very different, whereas what we are witnessing now is essentially the attempts to revive a movement after massive defeats.

So the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003 were gigantic, much larger than anything that happened in the ’60s, both the United States and in Europe. Gigantic. But it was a spasm. It happened, and then it disappeared. And it was as if millions of ordinary citizens were coming out to tell their politicians, “You’re lying. We know you’re lying. Don’t force us into this war.” But once the war happened and Iraq was occupied, through demoralization, depression, a sense of powerlessness, they retreated. Whereas in ’68 the movement grew slowly and built up to a peak, here the movement peaked to try and stop a war, and then it disappeared.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention the massive protest in 2002, 2003. We also had, in this country, massive protests just a year or two ago of unprecedented protest of immigrants in the country—

TARIQ ALI: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —over attempts to recruit much more draconian laws against immigrants. Yet, again, that movement too rose and then dissipated, and there hasn’t been any significant continuity. Could it be that part of the problem is that there’s been much less emphasis on the need for strong radical and revolutionary organizations to move from one massive uprising to another to be able to provide some kind of accumulated strength to the progressive movement?

TARIQ ALI: Well. I think that is a part of the problem, is that there is no political organization, radical or otherwise, which can actually take these movements forward, except in Latin America, Juan, where country after country, you have giant social movements in Latin America. And then the result in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador and now in Paraguay, of all places, is victories for people attached to these movements. So, Latin America, I argue, is one of the few places where there is hope. But in the rest of the world, movements rise and fall.

I mean, we could say, in a way, that an unusual development in Western politics is the size of audiences which Barack Obama is getting. He has energized youth in a way that they weren’t energized before. And it’s foolish and sectarian to say, but it’s the Democrats. Yeah, it is, but that’s not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is that a young generation has become attracted to politics again. The question is, will it remain so if the Democrats win? But it’s an interesting phenomenon.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Or—but then the issue is, are they attached to normal Democratic party politics, or are they attached to some kind of a real—a potential social movement? That’s the big issue is, in terms of the presidential race.

TARIQ ALI: Well, it’s—you know, the strength of this campaign for Obama has been that people think he is offering something different, that this will mark a break. And, of course, on one level, his race, it will mark a phenomenal break if he’s elected. But whether it will on other things, of course, remains to be seen. If he wins, my advice to everyone here is to be at the celebrations in Washington with banners saying "Pull out of Iraq now,” is to make it a big antiwar moment, because since he’s used his opposition to the war in Iraq in this campaign, one shouldn’t stay aloof from this movement, but find ways of intervening in it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in Europe today and in Britain, what are the expectations of these presidential elections?

TARIQ ALI: In Europe, well, it varies from place to place. I mean, I think, for instance, in Italy, which has just had a big victory of the right, they will find it awkward, because it’s a very racist government now in Italy. Juan, I don’t know whether people here follow it, but 68 percent of Italians want all the gypsies, the traveling people, expelled from the country, forgetting that they too were victims of the Third Reich and were wiped out in the Second World War. So if America elects a black president, I think a lot of Italian right-wingers will be slightly disconcerted, saying “Oh, but these are the sort of people we are trying to get rid of from our country.”

In Britain, they are prepared to go along with anyone Washington elects, both political parties, New Labour and Conservative. So they are not bothered. Their position will be support the White House, whoever’s there. If Obama changes some things, they’ll go along with that. They are not going to fight.

But Europe, of course, is watching this quite keenly, because in Germany, for instance, and other places, you have politicians who have been incredibly upset by the Iraq business and now Afghanistan, where they see no hope at all. So they are hoping that there will be a change of regime, which will pull out and allow the Western world to breathe again without occupying countries. But, you know, that may be a hope which might not be fulfilled, but we’ll see.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Tariq Ali. You’re going to be speaking tomorrow night, May 30th, at 7:30 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in a public forum on “The New Imperialism: Old Problems and New Challenges.” Thanks again for being with us.

TARIQ ALI: Thank you very much.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Tariq Ali, political activist, novelist and historian. An Autobiography of the Sixties is his book. He’s speaking tomorrow at the Baruch Performing Arts Center here in New York.

Interview with George Monbiot

Ellie Keen — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:54:25 +0000

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AMY GOODMAN: John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, escaped a citizen’s arrest Wednesday night as he addressed an audience gathered at the Hay Festival in Wales. Security guards blocked the path of columnist and activist George Monbiot, who tried to make the arrest as Bolton left the stage. Monbiot planned the action, because he says Bolton is a war criminal for his role in helping to initiate the invasion of Iraq in 2003 while he served as US undersecretary of state for arms control.

George Monbiot joins us now on the phone from England. He is a widely read columnist for the Guardian of London and the author of numerous books. His latest is Bring On the Apocalypse: Collected Writing. Actually, he joins us now from Wales.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, George Monbiot.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Thanks very much, Amy. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us exactly what happened.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, I made my intention clear to perform a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton. I wrote a charge sheet detailing exactly the role that he had played in launching a war of aggression in violation of international treaties, which is a clear violation of the Nuremberg Principles. And I took a dossier of evidence down to the local police station. I asked them to act on it. But when they failed to arrest Mr. Bolton, I tried to arrest him myself, and I tried to get up onto the stage as he was leaving it. And I called out, “John Robert Bolton, I am arresting you for the charge of aggression, the crime of aggression, as defined by the Nuremberg Principles.” But I was caught by two very large security guards and pulled out of the venue very quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: How does a citizen’s arrest work?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, under an act of Parliament here, the Serious Organised [Crime and Police] Act, a citizen has the right to arrest anyone that they suspect to be guilty of a crime who would otherwise get away from the scene or escape without being arrested, and to hand that person over to the police. Now, there is a proviso which says that if—you can only act in this way if the police are unable to act to arrest this person. In this particular case, the police were able to act and had chosen not to do so. So, had I succeeded in arresting Mr. Bolton, I would have put myself on the wrong side of the law.

AMY GOODMAN: John Bolton has also been criticized for calling for US strikes on Iran. Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article, based solely on unnamed sources, suggesting the Lebanese group Hezbollah is training Iraqi militants inside Iran. Hours after the article was published, this is what John Bolton had to say on Fox News.

JOHN BOLTON: I think this is a case where the use of military force against a training camp or to show the Iranians we’re simply not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do, and then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.

JAIME COLBY: Ambassador John Bolton, a good message to end on. Thank you very much.

JOHN BOLTON: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, George Monbiot?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes. Well, John Bolton has the position that any and every country of which he disapproves should be attacked, and then we work out the justification for that attack later. He was one of the signatories of the letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to Bill Clinton in 1998, saying that we should attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. And he had one justification then, he had a different justification in 2003, he has a different justification today. It’s very clear that with Bolton, as with Bush, as with Cheney, as with Rumsfeld, the urge to go to war came first, and the justification came second.

Now, when you look at the main instruments of international law, you see very clearly that waging a preemptive war where you are not in an immediate crisis of self-defense is a crime against international law. In fact, the Nuremberg tribunals described it as the supreme international crime. And it was for that crime that most of the Nazi war criminals were convicted. And that is exactly the crime that Bolton has conspired in committing.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened to Jose Bustani?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, Jose Bustani is a Brazilian diplomat who was head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And in 2002, Bustani offered a way out of the impasse between Iraq in the United States. He said, OK, Saddam Hussein won’t allow the UNMOVIC inspectors in, primarily because UNSCOM turned out to have been infiltrated by the CIA, and so the successor organization UNMOVIC was viewed with intense suspicion in Iraq. Bustani said, “I can solve this problem for you by bringing Saddam Hussein into the Chemical Weapons Convention and then launching inspections of my own in Iraq, and therefore we could have a peaceful resolution to this crisis.”

Immediately, the United States swung into action against him—the delegation led by John Bolton—and demanded his dismissal as director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, failed at first and then threatened to withhold all its dues and to destroy the organization altogether, whereupon the other nations, led by the United Kingdom, went along with the US delegation and agreed to sack Bustani.

Bustani later took his case to an international labor organization tribunal and was completely exonerated of all the complaints which the US had leveled against him. And the only one which seemed to remain was that he had tried to prevent war from being waged with Iraq. And so, far from seeking a negotiated settlement to the issue of the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, John Bolton ensured that anyone—Bustani’s attempt to ensure there was a negotiated settlement was, in Bolton’s word, “tanked.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, George Monbiot, where you go from here? You didn’t—were not able to arrest John Bolton in Wales. Did he know what you were attempting to do?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes, he does. And he’s actually made a public statement concerning it. I would urge anyone who is in a position to do so to try to exercise a citizen’s arrest of any of the primary authors of the Iraq War. And I’m talking about Bush—that makes it very, very difficult, but it’s—there’s a higher chance obviously when he ceases to be president—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, and over here in the United Kingdom, Tony Blair and some of his cabinet ministers. And I certainly intend to try to carry out a citizen’s arrest of either Blair or one of the other senior architects of the war here in the United Kingdom.

And what I found from this instance was that even if you don’t succeed in carrying out the citizen’s arrest, you are able to focus a great deal of attention on the issue and to ensure that people do not forget. This is not an ordinary political mistake which was committed in Iraq. This was the supreme international crime, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Those people were not killed in the ordinary sense; they were murdered. And they were murdered by the authors of that war, who are the greatest mass murderers of the twenty-first century so far.

AMY GOODMAN: George Monbiot, I want to thank you very much for being with us, a columnist for the Guardian of London. His latest book is called Bring On the Apocalypse: Collected Writing.

Torture Team

Ellie Keen — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:30:07 +0000

The US House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold a series of hearings examining the Bush administration’s role in authorizing the illegal torture of prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere. We speak to British attorney and author, Philippe Sands, author of the new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. On Tuesday, Sands testified before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

AMY GOODMAN: The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold a series of hearings examining the Bush administration’s role in authorizing the illegal torture of prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere. On Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers subpoenaed Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, to testify at a hearing scheduled for June 26th.

Three other former Bush administration officials have already agreed to testify: former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo and former Pentagon official Douglas Feith. Over the past month, more evidence has emerged tying high-ranking Bush administration officials to the use of torture.

In April, ABC News reported Vice President Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft all discussed and approved how top al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.

President Bush has also confirmed he was aware of these meetings. In an interview with ABC News, Bush said, “We started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people. And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

Today, we’re joined by British attorney and author, Philippe Sands. He is the author of the new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. On Tuesday, Philippe Sands testified before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

PHILIPPE SANDS: It’s great to be back, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Talk about the Conyers subpoena of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington.

PHILIPPE SANDS: Sure. Well, if you remember, we talked about a month ago, after a piece I had written for Vanity Fair came out. That piece, I’m told by Congressman Conyers, catalyzed his committee into focusing on the role of the lawyers, and they began the process of setting up hearings. Yesterday was the first hearing. They’ve issued letters of invitation to all of the lawyers that I’ve written about and several other individuals. All, I understand, have agreed to come voluntarily, with one exception, and that’s Mr. Addington, who was the Vice President’s lawyer at the time, now his chief of staff. He has indicated, however, in a letter of the 1st of May, that if subpoenaed, he would attend, and it is likely that he will now attend next month.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you raise in your testimony before the congressional subcommittee?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I think—I raised a number of issues, but the heart of this story is that the administration has spun a narrative that this was a bottom-up thing, they were simply reacting to requests from people on the ground. And what I’ve discovered, and what was the center of the gravity of what I said to the subcommittee, is that’s a false narrative. It came from the top down. A crime was committed in relation to the detainee that I’m looking at. The Geneva Conventions were violated. He was abused. He was probably, almost certainly, tortured in violation of international law. But the biggest story may well be the cover-up, the spin, that this came from the bottom up, when in fact it was top-down. And that seemed to have resonated with the committee.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this ABC News revelation about this Principals Committee, all the names that I just gave—you know, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft—first time senior White House officials linked to an explicit group authorizing the CIA interrogation program, one top official recounting Ashcroft was the lone cabinet member to raise doubts? The official quoted Ashcroft as saying, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

PHILIPPE SANDS: I think it’s a very important revelation. Of course, it deals not with the military interrogations that I focused on, but with the CIA interrogations, but they went hand-in-hand, and it’s plain that they were all part and parcel of a decision taken at the top. It confirms my investigation, as a consequence; it’s namely that this came straight from the top.

The significance, of course, of this is that there seems to be a question as to whether the people immediately below the principals knew about this. I was in conversation, for example, a couple of days ago with Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, who expressed—

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Wilkerson?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Larry Wilkerson, who—I asked him, “Were you aware of this?” He said, “Absolutely not.” I asked him, “Did you have any inkling that this was going on? Do you think it could have happened?” And he expressed some considerable surprise. But if the President of the United States says a meeting happened, he knew about it, he approved it, it becomes, I think, a very, very big story, because you’ve got confirmation from the main man, so to speak.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the missing records of Mohammed al-Qahtani.

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I discovered in the course of meeting—I went around America, was treated with great hospitality and friendship. I spoke to everyone in the decision-making process, from the lawyers down at the bottom, Major General Dunlavey, who was the combatant commander at Guantanamo at the time, and his lawyer Diane Beaver, right up to Jim Haynes, who wrote the memorandum, the famous memorandum in which Mr. Rumsfeld scrolled, “Why is standing limited to four hours? I stand for eight to ten hours a day.”

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, explain that memo. It’s also the cover of your book.

PHILIPPE SANDS: It is the cover.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve got the handwritten note of Donald Rumsfeld. First you see his signature, and then you see this note, “I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why four hours?”

PHILIPPE SANDS: It’s become iconic. What Mr. Rumsfeld did was he authorized fifteen techniques of interrogation, but he wrote at the bottom of the document, “I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”

That’s been interpreted a number of ways. Was he signaling to the interrogators that the Secretary of Defense was willing for them to go further? Or was it just a jocular comment? I discussed that with a lot of people.

One of the people I met with on a couple of occasions, lengthy conversations, was Mike Dunlavey, the head of interrogations. And right at the end of one of the conversations, he mentioned to me that he had made efforts to go back to get hold of all the documentation to check the computers, to check the record of what had happened, and that there had been, he discovered, what he called a SNAFU, and everything had been lost.

And I think it will be for others now to follow up as to whether the interrogation materials relating to al-Qahtani have suffered the same fate as the interrogation materials of the CIA that, as we now know, were destroyed.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers?

PHILIPPE SANDS: I had one lengthy and fascinating conversation with General Myers. I thought he was a decent man of integrity, but out of his depth. And on two issues, I was staggered, so staggered, in fact, that when I came home to London from my trip to the United States, I told my wife what I discovered in conversation with him, which I’m about to share with you, and she was disbelieving—she listened to the tapes—and said absolutely.

There were two points. Firstly, as everyone knows, the President took a decision that none of the detainees at Guantanamo would have any rights under the Geneva Conventions. It seems that General Myers was unaware of that. He was under the impression they had decided that Geneva would apply. So that was a fairly staggering discovery. But it was as nothing compared to the discovery, as we went through the techniques of interrogation one by one, that he had thought that these came out of the US Field Manual guide for interrogations. They were all prohibited. And as we went down the list, his jaw literally dropped. So I got the sense that the most powerful military man in the United States, indeed probably in the world, was blissfully unaware of what had been decided.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Philippe Sands. His book is Torture Team—it is just out this week—Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.

I want to ask you about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent statement that the torture of prisoners does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Scalia’s comment came during an interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: I don’t like torture. I’m—although defining it is going to be a nice trick. But, I mean, who’s in favor of it? Nobody. And we have a law against torture. But if the—everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution.

LESLEY STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression, “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: No, no.

LESLEY STAHL: Cruel and unusual punishment?

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: To the contrary. You think—you think that you would—has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.

LESLEY STAHL: Well, I think if you’re in custody and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody—

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you?

LESLEY STAHL: Sure.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: What’s he punishing you for? You punish somebody—

LESLEY STAHL: Well, because he assumes you, one, either committed a crime—

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: No, no.

LESLEY STAHL: —or that you know something that he wants to know.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: Ah, it’s the latter. And when he’s—when he’s—when he’s hurting you in order to get information from you—

LESLEY STAHL: Yeah?

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: —you don’t say he’s punishing you. What’s he punishing you for? He’s trying to extract—

LESLEY STAHL: Because he thinks you’re a terrorist, and he’s going to beat the you-know-what out of you.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: Anyway, that’s my view. And it happens to be correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, being questioned by 60 Minutes’s Lesley Stahl. Philippe Sands?

PHILIPPE SANDS: I’m not an expert on US constitutional law. I’ll talk about what I know, which is international law. The US is a party to all of those conventions that prohibit torture. That is a shocking statement by a serving justice, who I know is very partial to the television program 24, along with his colleague Clarence Thomas. It’s—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain 24.

PHILIPPE SANDS: 24 is a television program in which the use of torture is essentially rejoiced in as a technique for producing meaningful information. It had an effect down at Guantanamo. One of the things I discovered in my conversations was that people watched it, people were influenced by it, probably apparently as Antonin Scalia is.

But that is a shocking statement. And I put it in these terms. If he’s going to express that view, that the United States president is free to authorize torture, then why isn’t the Iranian president free to authorize torture against American nationals? Why isn’t the Egyptian president free to organize—authorize torture? The logic of the argument is really surprising and, frankly, outrageous.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Philippe Sands, about the possibility of US officials being charged with war crimes. You were quoted in a New York Times piece on Tuesday: “Mr. Sands, a British law professor, said two foreign prosecutors, whom he did not name, asked him for the materials on which his book Torture Team was based. ‘If the US doesn’t address this,’ he said, ‘other countries will.’"

PHILIPPE SANDS: That’s an accurate account, and I describe, in one of the concluding chapters of the book, conversations I had with a European prosecutor and a European judge. And the committee was very interested in that, in relation to a question they asked me and the other witnesses giving testimony: “What should this committee do?” And the answer that I gave was, “Look, it’s not for me to make recommendations on precisely what you do and don’t do, but what needs to happen is the United States needs to get involved in an accounting process. The committee needs to establish the facts. And if the United States doesn’t, others will do it.” And I have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that investigations will take place, if they’re not already taking place, and that some of these individuals, if they travel outside the United States, will face a very real threat of investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: And the legality of what President Bush said, or the implications of it, when he said to ABC News, “We started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people. Yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue, and I approved”?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, it appears to be an admission that the President of the United States authorized torture, that he authorized waterboarding. The convention prohibiting torture, the Geneva Conventions are absolutely clear: there are no circumstances in which torture is permitted. And if the account is accurate, the President is, in effect, owning up to the fact that he has committed a war crime. And under the torture convention, there is an obligation to investigate any person who has committed a war crime. So it was a very surprising admission. I wonder if it was fully thought through. If it’s accurate, it is deeply disturbing.

AMY GOODMAN: Philippe Sands, you talked in your testimony before Congress about torture and what Britain learned in its fight with the IRA, with the Irish Republican Army.

PHILIPPE SANDS: In many ways, that was actually the most interesting exchange that I had, because I had it with some seemingly very sensible Republican congressmen, who were very interested and came up and talked to me about that afterwards. What I shared was that the experience of Brits across the political spectrum—it’s not a left-right issue, as I explained—derives from the experience we had in the early 1970s, in which the United Kingdom moved to aggressive interrogation. And they used pretty much the same techniques of interrogation: hooding, stress, humiliation. And it backfired terribly. On all military accounts, it extended the conflict by between fifteen and twenty years, because it creates such resentment in the community that is associated with the people who are being abused that it served to generate further opposition and people moving to violence. So basically the message is: it doesn’t work. And no one in the United Kingdom, literally no one from any of the main political parties or across the political spectrum will in any circumstances support what has been apparently authorized by the President in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Philippe Sands, I wanted to ask you about a report out of Associated Press. A Kuwaiti freed from Guantanamo Bay carried out a suicide car bombing recently in Iraq—the US military said this on Wednesday, confirming what’s believed to be the first such attack by a former detainee at Guantanamo. Tom Wilner, al-Ajmi’s American lawyer, said incarceration at Guantanamo may have turned the Kuwaiti into a terrorist. Wilner said, quote, “I don’t know whether the experience of being kept down there in isolation radicalized him.”

PHILIPPE SANDS: I read that report, and I was—this morning—and I was disturbed by that report. I mean, I find that the whole system that has been created at Guantanamo is abhorrent. It doesn’t meet minimum international standards. It sends out a terrible signal to the rest of the world. Most of the people, I think, being held at Guantanamo are really not seriously problematic people. But undoubtedly, there are some problematic people, and steps do need to be taken in order to protect countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.

<P.That said, I immediately, reading the article, asked myself the question: is this individual someone who fell into that small category of persons who was, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, a seriously bad person? We don’t know that. And there is the possibility that the treatment that he was subjected to gave rise to an IRA type of situation, that it so enraged him, that it so enraged his community, that it essentially politicized him and energized him. Of course, we don’t know the facts, and I think we need to find out a lot more about the facts before expressing a final view.

AMY GOODMAN: You live in Britain. Your book is Torture Team, though, about the United States and international law. The people involved that you’re talking about go across the gamut, now a number out of office. You have John Yoo, for example, who’s a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. You have Douglas Feith, who’s now teaching at Georgetown. What are your thoughts about this?

PHILIPPE SANDS: John Yoo’s dean at Berkeley has been subject to intense criticism for not firing him, and indeed there was even an op-ed, an opinion, an editorial, in the New York Times, saying he basically shouldn’t be teaching there anymore. Dean Edley wrote an interesting letter, in which he said, look, there’s freedom of expression, that includes freedom of views, and under the rules at Berkeley, you can only fire someone if they’ve been convicted in a court of law of committing a criminal offense. And John Yoo has not been convicted of committing a criminal offense. And in our system, you are innocent until proven guilty.

I’ve laid out the reasons why I believe John Yoo has participated in authorizing torture, and that exposes him to investigation. But I entirely accept that until he is actually condemned by a court of law, he is perfectly entitled to carry on peddling views, even if I violently and fundamentally disagree with those views.

As regards Doug Feith, I spent time with him. He’s an entertaining character, but he’s a scary character. I’ve read his book, 900 pages on war and decision, five pages devoted to the issue of interrogations. And you read that book, and you have no idea that this man was deeply involved in the decisions that I write about. It’s spin. It’s whitewash. There’s a failure to accept responsibility. And that, I think, is what is going to cause them in difficulty, because it’s essentially a cover-up.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited Douglas Feith on the show, but we didn’t get a response. Can you talk about the significance of the 1947 case, United States of America v. Josef Altstoetter?

PHILIPPE SANDS: It ‘s a delicate case. It’s one of the cases known as the Justice Cases, the only time that lawyers have ever been convicted of international crimes for carrying out their professional activities.

AMY GOODMAN: Lawyers?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Lawyers. The focus was on lawyers. I included reference to that case in my book, because I found it ironic that the theory that lawyers could cross a line and be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted for committing international crimes was a theory that was drawn up by the United States military itself, and then we come full-circle sixty years on, and we find that, with Mr. Rumsfeld’s hand, abuse is authorized and permitted by the US military in plain violation of international rules, but also in plain violation of President Lincoln’s disposition, going back to 1863, that the US doesn’t do cruelty.

But the case is an important one. It’s not a bang-on point, and I’m absolutely not drawing analogies. I’m not saying that these lawyers are equivalent to those lawyers or this regime is equivalent to that regime. What I’m interested in is the circumstance, in when does a lawyer cross a line into criminality?

And coming back to an earlier question that you raised, the European judge and the European prosecutor that I met, when I laid out all the materials for them, they came back with a most startling conclusion. They said, “Philippe, the bottom line of it is, there is no distinction between the man or woman who interrogates and the man or woman who authorizes by law an abusive interrogation. They are both subject to investigation. They are both subject to prosecution.” And I think that’s the way the law has gone, and it’s a law that is right, and it is a law that the United States has helped put in place.

AMY GOODMAN: What were you most surprised by in your research for Torture Team?

PHILIPPE SANDS: I was most surprised by the total failure of the upper echelons to accept responsibility for the errors that they have made. If I had met these people, if I had met Doug Feith and Jim Haynes, and they had said to me, “Look, we faced in September 2002 a situation in which we felt another attack was coming. We had someone who we felt had information. We authorized techniques of interrogation that were aggressive. They may or may not have crossed the line into torture. With the benefit of hindsight, we realize we fell into error. We made a mistake. We accept responsibility for that, and we need to learn not to do that again”—that shocked me, and it equally shocked me that they then sought to push the blame of responsibility onto people like Mike Dunlavey and Diane Beaver, people who were doing decent service for the US military and who were unfairly scapegoated. So at the end of the day, it’s not only the crime; it’s the abject failure of individual responsibility to take full account for what they have done. I find that really shocking.

AMY GOODMAN: Philippe Sands, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.