Isis, Israel, Torture, Pittsburgh

THE ABSURD TIMES

The World of Late, or the Late World

by

Zarathustra

Illustration: sent by one of you.  Well-known journalist banned in Pittsburgh.

            There hasn't been much reason or interest enough to put out another of these for some time.  Once you know the pattern, why need more examples?  I am more and more convinced by what Thoreau meant by that so many years ago.

            I suppose what has most intrigued me is recent stupidity.  A few days ago, and African-American [already suspicious, no?] Moslem [well, that clinches it] was killed outside a CVS by the FBI.  Surprisingly, the video seemed to support the FBI's version of the incident.  There was discussions about beheading the woman who goes around trying to irritate Moslems by blocking building of Mosques and staging contests to draw Mohammed.  I understand that no one know what he looked like anyway, so a caricature is a rather foolish idea.  So is paying attention to this moron, but religion has its own logic.  Maybe logic isn't the right word.

            One of the proofs that they were planning a beheading (and we are opposed to beheadings, btw) is that someone said "I'm thinking with my head on my chest."  I was reminded of Gertrude Stein's remark to Hemingway "Earnest, you are always wearing a wig on your chest."  Code is cryptic, I guess.

            In a recent issue, we talking about a Ukrainian/Russian pianist who was uninvited by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra after some trollish moron complained about her anti-fascist remarks about current Kiev.  It was a bit of a revelation here that she was one of the premier classical pianists of the day as we were aware only of the Ukrainian remarks.

            Now, Chris Hedges has been uninvited from a panel at the University of Pittsburgh for likening ISIS to Israel.  It seem much like that same thing.  To those overseas who hear about our first amendment and freedom of speech, it is important to realize that only government agencies, or officially nominal government agencies, are bound by that.  Since huge amounts of money run this country, and government is only an organ of capitalism, the first amendment really isn't that much of a force.  The University would loose a lot of money if it allowed such unpopular truths be told. 

           

            Below is something quite unrelated on its surface.  Medical Doctors took part in the torture during Bush whose brother is running for President.  We were told the AMA was against this sort of thing, but money is money.

            We wonder if the International court could make war crimes stick and some country could arrest Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, et. al if they were in their country?

THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2015

"These are War Crimes": Shocking Details Emerge of U.S. Resident Majid Khan’s Torture by CIA

Shocking new details have emerged about how the CIA tortured a former resident of Baltimore, Maryland, who has been in U.S. detention since 2003, first at a CIA black site, then at Guantánamo. Majid Khan is the only known legal resident of the United States to be held at Guantánamo. Over the years, Khan has detailed U.S. torture practices to his attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights, but until recently much of the information remained classified. According to the declassified notes, Khan was waterboarded on two separate occasions, he was hung on a wooden beam for days on end, he spent much of 2003 in total darkness, and he experienced repeated beatings and threats to beat him with tools, including a hammer. Khan also faced rectal feeding, which his lawyers described as a form of rape. Part of Khan’s torture was outlined in last year’s Senate torture report, but the declassified information provides new details on the abuse. We are joined by Majid Khan’s lawyer, J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Shocking new details have emerged about how the CIAtortured a former resident of Baltimore, Maryland, who has been in U.S. detention since 2003, first at a CIA black site, then at Guantánamo. Majid Khan is the only known legal resident of the United States to be held at Guantánamo. Over the years, Khan has detailed U.S. torture practices to his attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights, but until recently much of the information remained classified. According to the declassified notes, Khan was waterboarded on two separate occasions, he was hung on a wooden beam for days on end, he spent much of 2003 in total darkness, and he experienced repeated beatings and threats to beat him with tools, including a hammer. Majid Khan also faced rectal feeding, which his lawyers described as a form of rape. Part of Khan’s torture was outlined in last year’s Senate torture report, but the declassified information provides new details on the abuse.

AMY GOODMAN: Majid Khan is a 35-year-old Pakistani citizen who graduated from Owings Mills High School in Baltimore. He was captured in Pakistan in 2003, then reportedly held at an unidentified CIA black site from 2003 to 2006. In the newly released documents about his interrogations at the CIA black site, Khan says agents told him, quote, "Son, we are going to take care of you. ... We are going to send you to a place you cannot imagine." He later confessed to delivering $50,000 to al-Qaeda operatives in Indonesia and to plotting with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to serve as a sleeper agent for al-Qaeda in the United States.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In 2012, Khan pleaded guilty to conspiracy, material support, murder and spying charges in exchange for serving as a government witness.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Majid Khan’s lawyer, Wells Dixon. He’s a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Wells Dixon. Could you talk about how you came to represent Majid Khan?

J. WELLS DIXON: Sure. So, in March of 2003, Majid Khan disappeared. His family had no idea where he was, and he wasn’t heard from until he appeared in Guantánamo in September of 2006. But shortly before he arrived in Guantánamo, during the course of a criminal case that was being tried here in New York, his name came up. And the government introduced at that trial a stipulation, a written document that acknowledged that they had him in custody. And the document purported to describe things that he would say about what was going on in the trial. So that was the first time that his family knew that he was in U.S. custody. And after that, we were in contact with his family, and they asked us to file a case to challenge the legality of his detention.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And it was in 2012 that Khan signed a plea agreement? Could you explain what it means to sign a plea agreement and what the impact of that has been on his case?

J. WELLS DIXON: Sure. So, for many years, we represented—that we were representing Majid, he was challenging the legality of his detention. But in early 2012, he was charged by a military commission with various offenses. And he ultimately signed an agreement in which he agreed to plead guilty and to cooperate with the government. He became a cooperating witness for the government. And he did that for—really, for one central reason, and that is that he was sorry for the things that he had done, and he really wanted to make up for the things that he had done. And this was a way for him to accept responsibility, to really move forward with his life and to hopefully have some chance at a life after Guantánamo. You know, he didn’t want hisCIA torture and his time at Guantánamo to be the last chapter written in his life.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, and can you talk about this—the information now that’s been declassified, what Majid Khan alleges was done to him by CIAinterrogators? I mean, some of this material is quite stunning.

J. WELLS DIXON: Well, it’s horrifying. As you mentioned earlier, he was waterboarded twice in 2003. He was subjected to sexual abuse. He was subjected to extreme sensory deprivation. And he suffered tremendously as a result of this. I mean, it’s absolutely horrifying what was done to him.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to turn to a comment by former U.S. Justice Department attorney John Yoo, who played a key role in drafting the Bush administration torture memos. In December, he appeared on CNN after the release of the Senate committee report on the CIA’s use of torture. He was asked about the allegations of torture, which include—about Majid Khan, such as forced rectal feeding. This was Yoo’s response.

JOHN YOO: I agree with you. If these things happened as they’re described in the report, as you describe them, those were not authorized by the Justice Department. They were not supposed to be done, and those people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was John Yoo speaking on CNN. Could you comment on what he said?

J. WELLS DIXON: Yeah, so there you have it. I mean, in the Senate report, there was a disclosure, the fact that Majid had been raped. And you have there the legal architect of the CIA torture program, the lawyer who literally wrote the memos that allowed the torture to occur, saying that’s not something that he authorized and that that’s something that would violate the anti-torture statute.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what about the fact that he—you said earlier that he regretted, he wanted to compensate for what he had done. How do we take his claims of admission, given the fact that they claim—for whatever it is that he’s admitted to, they all came after he was subjected to this torture, is that correct?

J. WELLS DIXON: Yes, he agreed to plead guilty and to cooperate after being tortured. And what’s important to understand about that is that he agreed to plead guilty despite what had happened to him, not because of what had happened to him. You know, as you might imagine, the decision to trust the government, to take a leap of faith, to use the words that he used at his guilty plea, was very difficult, given the fact the he had been waterboarded and raped and subjected to all of these other horrors. But he really, truly believes that that was—that that’s something that’s necessary for him to do to put his prior life behind him and to move on with his life.

AMY GOODMAN: Wells Dixon, can you talk about how you, as an attorney representing him, knowing what has happened to him over the years, how you work these deals with the government about what you can and cannot reveal or say?

J. WELLS DIXON: Right, well, the Center for Constitutional Rights has long been on record opposing Guantánamo, opposing the CIA torture program and raising serious objections to the military commissions system. Having said that, our first interest always is the best interest of our clients. And so I, as counsel for Majid Khan, have to do what’s in his best legal interest, and ultimately what he directs me to do. And he made a decision that he wanted to plead guilty and cooperate, that he really wanted to try to atone for what he had done. And this is the way that he can do that. He is committed to fulfilling—to his obligation to cooperate in the commissions system. But, you know, if the government were to decide, for example, that it wanted to transfer his cooperation here to a criminal court in the United States, he would certainly be receptive to that. And, you know, I, as his counsel, think that there are policy reasons why that might be a good thing to do, notwithstanding the flaws, you know, even in our criminal justice system. But it’s up to the government. It’s really up to the government whether that happens.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to read from a Reuters report about the newly released details of Majid Khan’s treatment in a CIA black site: quote, "In a July 2003 session, Khan said, CIA guards hooded and hung him from a metal pole for several days and repeatedly poured ice water on his mouth, nose and genitals. At one point, he said, they forced him to sit naked on a wooden box during a 15-minute videotaped interrogation. After that, Khan said, he was shackled to a wall, which prevented him from sleeping.

"When a doctor arrived to check his condition, [Majid] Khan begged for help, he said. Instead, Khan said, the doctor instructed the guards to again hang him from the metal bar. After hanging from the pole for 24 hours, Khan was forced to write a 'confession' while being videotaped naked."

That’s an excerpt from a report by Reuters. Can you comment on this, overall, Wells, but also talk about the role of doctors, the role of psychologists, or what you heard about what happened in this CIA black site?

J. WELLS DIXON: Well, one of the things that we got declassified was Majid’s commentary on what had happened to him, how it felt and what he was experiencing as these things occurred. And one of the things that he has said is that doctors were among the worst torturers that he had. And I think, you know, you’ve given that one example as a perfect illustration, where you have a medical professional who is not only monitoring him, but monitoring him for the purpose of deciding when he can go back and be tortured even more. It’s horrifying. It’s a betrayal of the medical profession. And it’s unlawful. I mean, I think that’s the bottom line here, is that what happened to Majid Khan was unlawful. If you accept the notion that the United States is at war, which is of course debatable, if you accept that notion, these are very clear war crimes. Torture, rape, these are war crimes, and they need to be prosecuted. There needs to be a new DOJ investigation into this.

AMY GOODMAN: How did he know the person was a doctor?

J. WELLS DIXON: I don’t know the answer to that question.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And he’s the only—Majid Khan is the only high-value detainee who has legal representation, is that right, in Guantánamo?

J. WELLS DIXON: No, actually, there are several who have legal representation. There are some, like Abu Zubaydah, for example, who has counsel. And then there are a number of men who have been charged by military commission—the alleged 9/11 plotters; the alleged Cole bomber, Nashiri. So there are several counsel who are representing these men.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what is it that you are calling for? What should be done now in his case?

J. WELLS DIXON: Well, we’re calling for greater transparency and accountability for what happened in the torture program. You know, every time there is a public disclosure about what has happened, we see more and more evidence of the savagery that occurred and sort of the treachery that’s occurred at the CIA. And it just gets worse. You know, once we get to—we think we’ve gotten to the bottom of it, there is a new and horrifying revelation. So there needs to be more accountability. We need to see the entire Senate report. And there need to be Justice Department prosecutions, as I said. That’s the only way to get to the bottom of what really happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about the release of the Senate intelligence report, I wanted to ask you about an interesting interaction I had with the former CIA director, Porter Goss. It was in March. I was participating at Hofstra University in Long Island in a review of the George W. Bush presidency. It was called "The Bush Doctrine and Combating Terrorism." This is a clip of my exchange with the former CIA director, Porter Goss, about the bipartisan Senate committee report on the CIA’s use of torture.

PORTER GOSS: In the interests of fairness, would respond a little bit on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study on rendition, detention and interrogation—was a partisan political study. It was not two-sided. And there are further facts that need to come out from those who are able to, I think, correct some of the misstatements in the Senate study. That has not happened yet. I hope it will happen, because I do believe the American public needs to know the truth of all of this. The Senate study is not the full truth.

AMY GOODMAN: Was there any truth in it?

MODERATOR: Could you say again?

PORTER GOSS: What?

AMY GOODMAN: Was there any truth in it?

PORTER GOSS: Of course there was some truth in it. It was a cherry-picked, selective presentation of information to support a narrative that was made before this report actually even was started. The announced purpose of the report, of the study, if I’m correcting Chairman Feinstein—if I’m quoting Chairman Feinstein properly, was to make sure this never happens again. I’m not sure what the "this" was, or neither are a lot of people. But apparently, as you go through the report, as you go through this study, there are a series of observations that involved information that the decision makers could have provided to the people doing the report and would have given a fairer and more complete understanding of what happened and why. If you want to know why something happened, it’s a good idea to go back to the people who made the decision and ask them. They calculatedly and determinedly avoided going back to anybody that they thought might spoil their narrative. So, consequently, yes, there is some information that is cherry-picked, some out of context and some actually factually correct, as far as I know. I have not read a word of the report. I have not read a word of any of this stuff, because, to me, it is purely partisan political. And a politicization of intelligence in this country is going to hurt only one person, and that’s every citizen in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to quote Senator McCain, who—

PORTER GOSS: I love Senator McCain, and I would certainly agree with you that Senator McCain is the icon of prisoner of war conduct. He has suffered greatly for our country and made great sacrifices and deserves to be listened to. But he does not have all of the information either.

AMY GOODMAN: He said, "It is a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose—to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies—but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world."

PORTER GOSS: He is welcome to his opinion. I doubt he’s read the report. And in any event, he has certainly not asked the people who were involved in this activity what they think, because they have all indicated that he has not asked them. So, even he is dealing with less than a full deck.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Porter Goss, the former director of the CIA. Wells Dixon, you’re a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. His response?

J. WELLS DIXON: Well, I also have a lot of questions I’d like to ask people who were involved in the torture program. One of those questions is: Why was Majid Khan raped? Now, in response to the Senate report, the CIA offers no justification. And we heard earlier that the legal architect of the torture program said that wasn’t authorized. So, why did it happen? I do want to know the answer to that.

But, look, the notion that the report was incomplete or that it’s a partisan hack job, that it wasn’t well done, those are—those are talking points. And the only people who are making those talking points are people who are actually implicated by the report.

One of the really important aspects of the information that we got declassified concerning Majid Khan is that it corroborates a lot of what’s in the report. Not only does it discuss his torture that exceeded what’s disclosed in that report, but it also corroborates a lot of things in there—the sexual assault, for example, detainees being subjected to torture methods that are indistinguishable from waterboarding. So, you know, I am all in favor of the public release of the entire report, as well as the CIA’s own Panetta review. I think that’s a starting point for accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: Leon Panetta.

J. WELLS DIXON: Correct, right.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Wells Dixon, senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he represents Guantánamo prisoner Majid Khan. He specializes in challenging unlawful detentions.

This is Democracy Now! 

-->

Death of Liberalism: Obama as a Sell-Out

 
 
 

Illustration: from www.whatnowtoons.com

The illustration pretty well shows reality.  The problem is that the
corporate media has pretty much got them thinking that tax-cuts
for the rich will feed their families.

This is a very important interview that pretty much sums up what is happening in our country and the people who call themselves "Liberal".  The very idea of a right-wing press complaining about the "liberal media" is a complete absurdity and there are very few exceptions.

He does not say it directly, but we are really in a condition of Neo-Fascism.  (See a definition of "fascism at the bottom of this blog.) 
Norman Mailer complained a couple decades ago about "nascent Fascism," and he was right, only now it is reborn, a veritable Renaissance of fascism mixed with mass stupidity. 

Fascism, after all, is a ruling system wherein the governmental, military, and corporate forces are merged so closely that it is difficult to tell where one leaves of and the other begins.  How can we expect, for example, the media, owned by the corporate powers, to criticize the government, owned by the corporate powers?  Or how expect the government to regulate the use of public airwaves for the "good of the people" when the government is owned by the same people who own the broadcast stations? 

Now, why is there then so much criticism of Obama when corporate Amerika has benefited so much from him?  Well, he has served his purpose and is being encouraged to be even more servile. 

For example, are we really expected to believe that 95% of voters are in favor of massive tax cuts for people who make, individually, over a quarter of a million dollars?  Well, the answer is "Yes, you bloody well believe it or 'steps will be taken'".  After all, whose side do you think the major media is on?

**********************************************************************************************************************

Chris Hedges: Obama is a "Poster Child for the Death of the Liberal Class"

The compromise tax-cut deal that President Obama signed into law on Friday has angered many of his supporters. In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges argues that the failure of President Obama to represent the interests of his supporters is just another example of a quickly dying liberal class. In the book, Hedges explains how the five pillars of the liberal class—the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party—have become corrupt. [includes rush transcript]

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Guest:

Chris Hedges, fellow at the Nation Institute. He is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and was part of a team of reporters that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of a number of books; his latest is called Death of the Liberal Class.

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Rush Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: President Obama signed the controversial $858 billion tax-cut legislation into law Friday. At least a quarter of the tax savings under the deal will go to the wealthiest one percent of the population. The only group that will see its taxes increase are the nation’s lowest-paid workers.
In the wake of the tax deal, the Washington Post reports the White House is, quote, "moving quickly to mend its strained relationship with the Democratic base, reassuring liberal groups, black leaders and labor union officials who opposed the tax compromise that Obama has not abandoned them." The Post goes on to say, quote, "Liberal groups were part of [the] broad coalition that helped elect Obama in 2008, and activists had high hopes [that] he would govern as a left-of-center president. But tensions with the White House increased as many liberals complained Obama took a more centrist view on issues," unquote.
Well, my next guest argues the failure of Obama to represent the interests of his supporters is just another example of a quickly dying liberal class. In his new book, journalist and author Chris Hedges explains how the five pillars of the liberal class—the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party—have become corrupt.
Chris Hedges is a fellow at the Nation Institute, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 as part of a team covering the issue of global terror. He’s author of a number of books; his latest, Death of the Liberal Class. On Thursday, Chris Hedges was one of the more than 130 people, mainly war veterans, arrested outside the White House in an antiwar protest led by the group Veterans for Peace.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened? It hardly got any coverage in the corporate media.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, well, that’s not much of a surprise, at this point. I think we’ve seen a kind of a withering of corporate media, including my own paper, the New York Times. As advertising rates decline and as circulation drops, they become even more craven in their service of the power elite and reportage that in no way offends the structures of power. So, you know, events like that one are nonentities for mainstream news organizations.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by the "death of the liberal class"?
CHRIS HEDGES: The collapse of the pillar, the primary pillars of the liberal establishment, those liberal institutions—the press, labor, public education and, in particular universities, culture, liberal religious institutions and the Democratic Party—that have been under assault.
And I speak a lot about World War I and the rise of the Committee for Public Information, the Creel Commission, which was the first system of modern mass propaganda, very closely studied by the Nazis, used to sell an unpopular war to an American public, but also used to crush populist, radical, progressive anarchist, Socialist, Communist movements that had frightened the power elite on the eve of World War I. And they employed for the first time the techniques of mass crowd psychology studied by figures like Le Bon, Trotter and Sigmund Freud. They understood that people were moved or manipulated not by fact or reason, but by what Walter Lippmann calls the "manufacturing of consent" in his 1922 book Public Opinion. And we’ve never recovered ever since.
So the assault and destruction of these populist or radical movements, which kept liberal institutions honest, and then the purges within liberal institutions, especially the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s. And many people who were expelled from these institutions were no way Communist, figures like I.F. Stone, arguably our greatest journalist of the 20th century, couldn’t even get a job at The Nation magazine and ends up a pariah. He’s not alone—thousands and thousands of people. So that with the rise of neoliberalism and the corporate state under Clinton, these—we lost the radical movements, and we lost the liberal institutions that normally make possible incremental or piecemeal reform within the formal mechanisms of power.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened within the universities.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, there was—of course, one of the most egregious examples occurred here in New York City when Rockefeller went after City University. What they did is they destroyed the capacity for people outside the power elite to get great education. City University at one time was one of the great universities in the country and educated, you know, a huge swath of mostly first-generation immigrants. The corporatization of universities is far advanced now. You have a withering of the humanities, destruction of philosophy departments. Departments must raise not only their own research and grant money, but often their own salaries. Well, you know, who’s going to pay for that?
And so, what we’ve turned our universities into are essentially vocational schools. If you go to a school like Princeton, then you will become a systems manager and go to Goldman Sachs. If you go to an inner-city dysfunctional public school in a place like Camden, you are trained vocationally to stock shelves in Walmart. It’s a kind of solidification of a very pernicious class system, and one that doesn’t train students anymore to think but to fill slots.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, you were a longtime correspondent for the New York Times. For two decades you worked there. You were one of the premier war correspondents. You wrote the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. You won the Pulitzer Prize about eight years ago. You talk in Death of the Liberal Class about your experience at the Times. Why don’t you go through it for us in detail and what you think it indicates?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I spent a lot of time in the book talking about those figures, like Sydney Schanberg and others, who were expelled from these liberal institutions—Richard Goldstone, who wrote the Goldstone Report on the 22-day Israeli assault on Gaza, would be another example—because there are clear parameters within these institutions that you don’t cross. The perfect example would be the buildup to the Iraq war. Here, the liberal, so-called self-identified liberal class—figures like David Remnick at The New Yorker; Bill Keller, who was a columnist at the New York Times, now the executive editor; George Packer; on and on, even people like Frank Rich, people forget—all backed the war. And they did it as sort of reluctant hawks. Probably the poster child for this was Michael Ignatieff of the Carr Center, at Harvard, for Human Rights, who’s now the head of the Liberal Party in Canada.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, that reluctance makes them the most convincing.
CHRIS HEDGES: And it—yeah, of course it does, because it gives a kind of moral veneer to a crime. It’s heartfelt. "We don’t like war. We all opposed the Vietnam War." This is almost verbatim Ignatieff’s argument. And "But it’s something that has to be done. We have to face the hard, bitter truth of world politics and recognize that we are a force for good." Samantha Power does this, in essence, in her book on genocide. It’s the idea that the empire is sort of used to—it can abrogate for itself the right to use force to impose virtues. It’s an utter tautology and absurdity to those of us who have been at war. But it works. And the function of the liberal class and why it is traditionally tolerated by the power elite is because it disarms movements that should have stood up on the eve of the Iraq war and fought back.
And, of course, my own clash with the New York Times occurred over the war after I gave a commencement address, which you played on Democracy Now!, at Rockford College, my first and last invitation to give a commencement address. And if I had gotten up and said, "America is a great democracy that goes abroad to liberate and provide freedom and impose—or, you know, give its sort of virtues of Western civilization to the lesser people of the Middle East," well, nobody would have said anything. Indeed, John Burns was quite public in his support for the war. But to challenge the intentions and the virtues of the power elite, that’s the line that the liberal class—if you cross that line, which, of course, Goldstone did in his report—Schanberg did it when he started writing about real estate developers who were driving out low-income and medium-income New Yorkers from Manhattan and the homeless on the streets—then you’re out. Then you are pushed out of the institution.
So, oftentimes there are good people within these institutions, but if they hold fast to these moral imperatives, inevitably they are shunted aside. And the problem is, with the rise of the corporate state and power systems, especially financial systems, that by any definition or any criteria are criminal, you have liberal institutions like the New York Times paying deference to these institutions, when in fact they should be challenging them.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, if you had given a speech for the war at Rockford College, you hardly would have been reprimanded. But just for a moment, let’s go back in time. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org, this amazing moment, the speech that you gave, that you did not actually think was going to be that controversial.
CHRIS HEDGES: No.
AMY GOODMAN: After all, Rockford College was Jane Addams’ college.
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s all I knew about it. I thought they were just pacifist Socialists.
AMY GOODMAN: When the police were escorting you out, why don’t you just quickly explain what happened, and then what the Times did about this?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it was—I had my mike cut. And you can watch it on YouTube or on—link it to democracynow.org. And I was booed, and people stood up and started singing "God Bless America" and jeering and—
AMY GOODMAN: And you were saying?
CHRIS HEDGES: I was talking about the consequences of the war. I spent seven years in the Middle East, months of my life in Iraq. I speak Arabic. This wasn’t an opinion. This was based on a tremendous amount of time and energy in an area of the world I knew very well. And then I was finally escorted—they closed all the roads out of the campus, and the security escorted me out before the awarding of diplomas, because they didn’t want the students to come in close proximity. I had two young men try and climb up on the stage at the end and push me off the podium. And what happened was the trash talk. Fox and all these people got a hold of the home videos and ran it in these sort of endless loops. So I was lynched in the same way they lynched, you know, figures like my friend Jeremiah Wright. And—
AMY GOODMAN: You almost were a minister.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, I almost was. I finished but wasn’t ordained. And the Times had to respond. So they responded by giving me a formal written reprimand, and were Guild—they were Guild, which means that the next time I spoke out against the war, the next time I violated that warning, I would be fired. And that’s when I left the paper.
AMY GOODMAN: You were actually quite muted in criticism of the government when you were at the New York Times and you were being interviewed, like by us.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah. The Times wouldn’t consider it muted. Maybe for Democracy Now! listeners, it was muted. But yeah, the stance was—and I knew what I was doing. I had been there 15 years. It was a kind of career suicide. But I felt so strongly that this was a mistake, and there were so few of us that had that kind of experience, in particular, in the Arab world, that I had a kind of duty to speak out.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Chris Hedges. His new book is called Death of the Liberal Class. The incoming head of the House Committee on Homeland Security, New York Congressmember Peter King, says he’s going to hold hearings on what he calls the radicalization of American Muslims. What is your response to this?
CHRIS HEDGES: It’s racist. It’s racist garbage. And I speak to Muslim groups all over the country, and they’re terrified. And it’s—in the stories that I hear anecdotally of every time they fly, constant intrusions by state security into matters of privacy, when these people have done nothing wrong. They are being demonized, especially by the right wing, for the failings of the—as the state continues to unravel and collapse, they are being picked out as scapegoats. And should we suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, I’m very, very frightened for what’s going to happen to American Muslims, who are hardly radical. Every time I go to these groups, they fall all—the most radical person in the room is myself, or they fall all over themselves to talk about American democracy and how great it is and how they are so proud to be citizens. It’s heartbreaking to watch.
I mean, I spoke at the Jerusalem Fund, and in the middle of the talk—you know, I can get away with it, because I’m not Muslim. The director got up and said, "You know, this is his own opinion. We totally disassociate. We have nothing to do with his stance." The fear—and legitimate fear—that has been driven by Neanderthals like this guy and others by demonizing American Muslims is really deeply frightening.
AMY GOODMAN: You were being arrested on Thursday in the snow in Washington, D.C. with over 130 others. Among them, who? Dan Ellsberg—
CHRIS HEDGES: Right.
AMY GOODMAN:—Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Ray McGovern, who was the briefer for George H.W. Bush for years, worked at the Central Intelligence Agency; many veterans. We played some clips last week, at the same time that this tax bill was passed, which will increase taxes on the working poor and decrease, of course, at the highest level, the wealthiest Americans. Link the war with—spending on the war with what we’re spending on people at home and dealing with poverty here.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, you know, this was—became a very prominent theme that Martin Luther King beat home, especially in the last years of his life during the Vietnam War, that—especially because we’re going into debt. I mean, we’re building a kind of debt peonage system, which is used then as an excuse to go after wage earners, to go after systems like Social Security. I mean, one of the most pernicious things that Obama did in this tax bill was reduce contributions to Social Security, because of course that’s next on the target, as well as raise the deficit by $900—$700 and $900 billion.
And what’s terrifying about movements like the Tea Party is that they provide a kind of emotional consistency. And, of course, that undercurrent of racism towards undocumented workers, towards Muslims, is very much a part of the language of that pernicious right wing. But it embraces all things military, as if somehow the military is not part of government. It’s an irrational political policy. You know, nobody—they want to get government off their backs, but nobody—everybody wants to extend unemployment benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and of course not touch the big—you know, the force that is draining the—hollowing the country out from the inside, which is the military-industrial complex—50 percent of all discretionary spending. And so, as these deficits—we’ve now racked up the largest deficits in human history, and as these deficits are ratcheted upwards, and there is an inability to question the self-destructive quality of the armament industry, then it’s taken out on the backs of the working class—and our working class is already in tremendous financial straits—and in the middle class.
AMY GOODMAN: The incoming House Banking Committee chair, Spencer Bachus, said, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that’s pretty much been the policy since Bill Clinton.
AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of President Obama?
CHRIS HEDGES: A disaster. A poster child for the bankruptcy of the liberal class. Somebody who, like Clinton, is a self-identified liberal, who speaks in the traditional language of liberalism but has made war against the core values of liberalism, which is a concern for those people outside the narrow power elite. And the tragedy, if tragedy is the right word, is that Obama, who made this Faustian bargain with corporate interests in order to gain power, has now been crumpled up and thrown away by these interests. They don’t need him anymore. He functioned as a brand after the disastrous eight years of George Bush.
And what we are watching is an even more craven attempt on the part of the White House to cater to the forces that are literally destroying the United States, have reconfigured, are reconfiguring this country into a form of neofeudalism. And all of the traditional—the pillars of the liberal establishment, that once provided some kind of protection and, more importantly, a kind of safety valve, a mechanism by which legitimate grievances and injustices in this country could be addressed, have shut tight. They no longer work. And so, we are getting these terrifying, proto-fascist movements that are leaping up around the fringes of American society and have as their anger not only a rage against government, but a rage against liberals, as well. And I would say that rage is not misplaced.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chris Hedges, you began your speech outside in the snow, outside the gates of the White House, by saying, "Hope, from now on, will look like this."
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s right. All we have left are acts of physical resistance. Of course, I’m deeply nonviolent. And if we don’t get out, then we’re finished. To trust in the normal mechanisms of power and those normal liberal institutions that once—and Democracy Now!, of course, is an exception to this—but, you know, once gave voice and a place to working men in this country is to be very naïve and essentially acquiesce to our own bondage.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, worked for the New York Times for more than two decades. His latest book is Death of the Liberal Class.

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Fascism (pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology.^[1][2][3][4] Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy.^[5][6] Fascism was originally founded by Italian national syndicalists in World War I who combined extreme Sorelian syndicalist political views along with nationalism.^[7][8][9] Though normally described as being on the far right, there is a scholarly consensus that fascism was influenced by both the left and the right.^{[10][11][12][7][13]}
Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong.^[14] They claim that culture is created by the collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism.^[14] Viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety.^[15][16]
They advocate the creation of a single-party state.^[17] Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement.^[18] They identify violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.^[19]