IRAN

THE ABSURD TIMES

By now, the fascination (or pick a word) with Trump seems to be dead, so we can go on to other things.

This is despite all the reporters going out and digging up people that still support him, even people of color.  All it really indicates is how degenerate the human species is.  I am often reminded of what is supposedly a quote from Mark Twain as delivered by Hal Holbrook in that Twainish voice: "Man, we are told, is the reasoning animal.  Now I wonder who found that out." 

So, Israel is claiming that one of it's jets was shot down over Israeli airspace: in other words, the Golan Heights.  Actually, that is actually Syrian airspace, but repetition serves for truth these days and so it is.

This interview, below, is over a speech Nikki Haley made, not at the UN where she would have been laughed off the platform, but at a U.S. Military base.  See, the military is happy to see here because, if they are nice enough, they may get to march in a parade and salute the Donald.

We can forget about all the vets who are homeless, suffering from PTSD, missing limbs, and so on.  Some vets, believe it or not, after being welcomed into the military, are in danger of being deported.  Since they came here without being born here, but instead snuck over the border at the age of 3 or 4 years old, the evil and illegal aliens, we have no further use for them.  We want a parade.  Maybe a wall and a parade? 

Anyway, it takes a bit of history to follow this interview with Colin Powell's assistant, the guy who helped him write the speech that got us into Iraq in the first place.  Even this guy has taken to using Gore Vidal's phrase "The United States of Amnesia." 

So, how did it happen?  Well, we wanted to get "communists" out of Afghanistan.  (Never mind that the USSR was never really Marxist.  We needed an enemy and they supplied one for us).    So, we subsidized an bunch of crazy Jihadists (Hey, they believed in God and we Believed in God and the USSR was officially atheist, despite all the Russian Orthodox Churches) to attack them.  Our star player was Bin Laden, a fact so conveniently forgotten.)   He managed to get some place to crash into some building in New York and that gave the Chicken Hawks a chance to attack Afghanistan, and from there to Iraq.

Then there was Saddam Hussein, very valuable in waging war against Iran.  However, he had an uncomfortable way of helping Palestinians, so he had to go.  We started out by claiming that he had nuclear weapons, but we knew that was not true.  We do not attack countries with nuclear weapons.  We finally settled on weapons of mass destruction.  Actually, Bin Laden thought of Saddam as an infidel.

Well, we decided that Saddam had to go.  The rest is explained in the interview:

Fifteen years ago this week, Secretary of State General Colin Powell gave a speech to the United Nations arguing for war with Iraq, saying the evidence was clear: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It was a speech Powell would later call a blot on his career. Is President Trump doing the same thing now with Iran? We speak to Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. He recently wrote a piece titled "I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It's Happening Again."

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Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to look at the growing threat of war against Iran. In recent weeks, senior members of the Trump administration have repeatedly tried to churn up U.S. support for a war against Iran, while President Trump has reiterated his threats to pull the U.S. out of the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Last month, President Trump issued a waiver to prevent the reimposition of U.S. sanctions against Iran, but warned he would not do so again unless the nuclear deal is renegotiated. The waiver must be reissued every 120 days to avoid the sanctions from kicking back in.

His warning came after U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley spoke at the Anacostia-Bolling military base in Washington, D.C., in front of pieces of metal she claimed were parts of an Iranian-made missile supplied to the Houthis in Yemen, which the Houthis allegedly fired into Saudi Arabia. This is Ambassador Haley speaking December 14th.

NIKKI HALEY: Behind me is an example of one of these attacks. These are the recovered pieces of a missile fired by Houthi militants from Yemen into Saudi Arabia. The missile's intended target was the civilian airport in Riyadh, through which tens of thousands of passengers travel each day. I repeat, the missile was used to attack an international civilian airport in a G20 country. Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK or the airports in Paris, London or Berlin. That's what we're talking about here. That's what Iran is actively supporting.

AMY GOODMAN: Weapons experts widely criticized Ambassador Haley's speech, saying the evidence was inconclusive and fell far short of proving her allegations that Iran had violated a U.N. Security Council resolution. But to our next guest, Haley's claims were not only inconclusive, they were also oddly reminiscent of the false claims about weapons of mass destruction the George W. Bush administration used to sell the public on the war with Iraq.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, during which time he helped prepare Powell's infamous speech to the U.N. claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Powell's speech was given 15 years ago this week, February 5th, 2003.

SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.

AMY GOODMAN: That was then-Secretary of State General Colin Powell speaking February 5th, 2003, before the U.N. Security Council. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, his chief of staff, has since renounced the speech, which he helped write. Well, his new op-ed for The New York Times is headlined "I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It's Happening Again."

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about what—how you felt at the time, how you came to understand the evidence that General Colin Powell, who himself said—called this speech, later, a blot on his career—how you put this speech together, and the echoes of it, what you hear today, in Ambassador Haley's speech.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Amy, we put the speech together with, arguably, the entire U.S. intelligence community, led by George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, literally at Powell's right hand all the time, seven days, seven nights, at Langley and then in New York, before we presented.

When I saw Nikki Haley give her presentation, certainly there was not the gravitas of a Powell, not the statesmanship of a Powell, not the popularity of a Powell. What I saw was a John Bolton. And remember, John Bolton was her predecessor, in terms of being a neoconservative at the United Nations representing the United States. I saw a very amateurish attempt.

But nonetheless, these kinds of things, when they're made visual and the statements are made so dramatically, have an impact on the American people. I saw her doing essentially the same thing with regard to Iran that Powell had done, and I had done, and others, with regard to Iraq. So it alarms me. I don't think the American people have a memory for these sorts of things. Gore Vidal called this the "United States of Amnesia," with some reason.

So, we need to be reminded of how the intelligence was politicized, how it was cherry-picked, how we moved towards a war that has been an absolute catastrophe for the region, and even, long-term, for Israel's security and the United States' perhaps, with a deftness and with a fluidity that alarmed me then. It really alarms me now that we might be ready to repeat that process.

And your previous speaker, on North Korea, there's another target. This president has so many targets out there that he could avail himself of at almost any moment, that we have to shudder at the prospects for war and destruction over the next three years of Donald Trump's term.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the pieces of metal she was talking about?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I can't imagine how anyone could haul some metal in front of the TV cameras and assert, the way she did, with the details she did—some of which was false, just flat false—and expect anyone within any expertise, at least, to believe it. Open parenthesis, (The American people don't necessarily have that expertise), close parenthesis.

Look at her statement about "this could have been shot at Dulles, or it could have been shot at Berlin." Had it been shot at Dulles or Berlin, it would have stopped well short, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean or even shorter. These missiles are not long-range missiles. These missiles are very inaccurate missiles. They have a CEP of miles. That means that, unlike a U.S. nuclear weapon, which would hit within a 10-meter circle or less, it would hit within a mile or two circle. They don't know where it's going to hit when they shoot it. It's not very accurate, in other words.

So the things that she was presenting there, she was presenting with a drama, that even if what she was saying fundamentally was true, that the Houthis got it from Iran and shot it at Saudi Arabia, it simply was so exaggerated that one just looks at it and says, "I can't believe that the United States is represented by that woman."

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, it's very interesting that you have this moment now in U.S. history where the Republicans—some of them—are joining with President Trump in trying to discredit the intelligence agencies. And yet you go back to 2003, when you have a fierce criticism of the intelligence agencies, saying they were being used to politicize information, which, oddly, is what President Trump is saying, in a very different context.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: You would have a lot of sympathy if you asked me if I have some doubts about the U.S. intelligence agencies, all 17 of them now, definitely. But let me tell you what I've done over the last 11 or 12 years, on two university campuses with really brilliant students, in terms of enlightening myself, gaining new insights into what happened not only in 2002 and '03, but what's been happening ever since and, for that matter, what happened ever since Richard Nixon, with regard to the intelligence communities.

What happens is you get people like Tenet, you get people like John Brennan, you get people like John McLaughlin, you get people like Chris Mudd, for example—Phil Mudd, who was head of counterterrorism for George Tenet and who tried at the last minute to get me to put even more stuff into his presentation about the connections between Baghdad and al-Qaeda. You get people like that who are at the top. That screens all the many dedicated, high-moral, high-character professionals down in the bowels of the DIA, the CIA, the NSA and elsewhere. That screens their views, which are often accurate—I'd say probably 80 percent of the time very accurate—from the decision makers. So what you get is you get people like Tenet and McLaughlin and Brennan, who shape whatever they can to fit the policies that the president wishes to carry out. The intelligence, therefore, gets corrupted. So, in that sense, I am still down on the, quote, "U.S. intelligence community," unquote.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it's really interesting, because a number of the people you mention from the past are the current commentators on television.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes, yes. John McLaughlin—John McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state of the United States on more than one occasion during the preparation for the 5 February, 2003, U.N. Security Council.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to President Trump speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in September.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don't think you've heard the last of it. Believe me. It is time for the entire world to join us in demanding that Iran's government end its pursuit of death and destruction. It is time for the regime to free all Americans and citizens of other nations that they have unjustly detained. And above all, Iran's government must stop supporting terrorists, begin serving its own people and respect the sovereign rights of its neighbors.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, respond to President Trump, and talk about the clock being put ever closer to midnight.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: That agreement, the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement between the U.N. Security Council permanent members, Germany, Iran, that agreement is probably the most insidious and likely way to war with Iran. The Obama regime, in a very, very difficult diplomatic situation, achieved the best it could. That best is a nuclear agreement that keeps Iran from a nuclear weapon and gives us over a year of time, should they try to secretly break out of it, to inspect and find and to stop, even if we had to bomb. So it is an agreement unparalleled in regard to stopping Iran's search for, if it ever had the desire to, a nuclear weapon.

If Trump undermines that, if this administration undermines that, then there is no—and they are moving fast to do that—there is no other alternative, if you look at it. Now, my colleagues and some of my opponents in this will say, "Oh, no, that doesn't necessarily mean war." It certainly does, if you continue this march towards Iran's—unacceptability of Iran's having a nuclear weapon, because then we will have intelligence telling us that Iran is—I know the Foundation for Defense of Democracy and others will never let this rest. We will have everyone telling us that Iran, whether they are or not, is going after a nuclear weapon, once the agreement is abrogated. That means the only way you assure the American people and the international community, the region—Saudi Arabia is salivating for a war with Iran, with American lives at the front—that means the only way you stop Iran, under those circumstances, is to invade—500,000 soldiers and troops, you better have some allies, 10 years, $4 [trillion] or $5 trillion. And at the end of that 10 years, it looks worse than Iraq did at the end of its 10.

That's what you're looking at over the long haul, if you say this agreement is no good and abrogate it, because if it's still unacceptable, that Iran not get a nuclear weapon, the only way that you assure that is by invasion. Bombing won't do it. All bombing will do is drive them underground. They will develop a weapon. They'll work with the North Koreans and so forth. We know they have worked with the North Koreans in the past. And they will develop one. And then they'll be like Kim Jong-un: They'll present us with the fait accompli.

Nuclear proliferation is a real threat right now. And I agree with the Bulletin of Atomic—the Atomic Scientists Bulletin that the hands on the Doomsday Clock are now at two, two-and-a-half minutes or so from midnight. We are more in danger of a nuclear exchange on the face of the Earth than we were in probably any time since 1945. And that includes the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the Berlin crisis that more or less preceded it. This is a dangerous time, and we have a man in the White House who is a dangerous president.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, on Wednesday, Defense Secretary James Mattis defended a Pentagon request to develop new so-called low-yield nuclear weapons, telling reporters the U.S. needed a more complete range of nuclear options. And this comes as the Trump administration has unveiled its new nuclear weapons strategy, which involves spending at least $1.2 trillion to upgrade, they say, the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Your response?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Make that about two to three, maybe even four, trillion dollars, because that's what the cost overruns will be, and that's what we'll spend over the next 10 to 15 years to do this. And we do not need it. Just look at some of the components of this. We're looking at a B-21 bomber for the Air Force, for example, that's going to be so expensive the Air Force won't even tell the Congress how much it's going to cost. We're looking at a nuclear-tipped cruise missile for that bomber, which negates the need for the bomber. It's redundant, but we're going to do it anyway.

This is to assuage the military-industrial complex in America that deals with nuclear weapons. This is to spend lots of money and keep lots of nuclear scientists and others in their jobs. I understand that, but I don't condone this kind of money being spent. This is to respond to the Russians, whose military doctrine now includes using small-yield nuclear weapons, should they be invaded by NATO. It's written in their doctrine. This is to further perturbate the situation with the Chinese, who are taking Mao Zedong's nuclear philosophy and throwing it out the window and thinking, "Oh, maybe we better build lots more nuclear weapons so we can ride out a first strike and retaliate." This is all because of the United States. It's all because of what's happening in the world post-Cold War, that we all thought was going to be more peaceful and is turning out to be more catastrophically dangerous.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, Trump just tweeted, "Just signed Bill"—he's talking about the spending bill. "Our Military will now be stronger than ever before. We love and need our Military and gave them everything — and more. First time this has happened in a long time." Your last 10-second response?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yeah, not the first time. Ronald Reagan did it, '82, '83, '84. And he did it on politicized intelligence about the Soviet Union. We knew it was falling apart at that time, but that didn't go along with his arms buildup. That's exactly what Trump is doing. And he's using the military to gain more votes.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as the secretary—as the chief of staff of the secretary of state, of Colin Powell, from 2002 to 2005.

That does it for our show. A very happy birthday Mohamed Taguine!

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

TRUMP FAKES MEDIA, SCREWS YOU

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration 1: Trump in a Fake News version of Time magazine cover that he had hanging of the wall of at least five of his gold courses.  Fake news is ok so long as it makes him look good.

Illustration 2: This is Mika, recent target of Trump attacks.  He co-host, the right-wing Joe Scarborough have found Trump "strange" lately and said so.  So Trump attacked her (she was bleeding – women Trump dislikes tend to be bleeding) and tried to blackmail the show with a National Enquirer story. 

The coverage recently has been all about Trump's Tweets, and frankly this is what he wants and it also distracts from what is really going on.   His talk about "fake news" become rampant and his followers, like zombies, attack any and all of his "enemies" on Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and so on.  The knuckle-draggers still think that Trump speaks for them.  Meanwhile, his proposals to cut Medicaid and other services will hit them the hardest, but "there are none so blind as those who will not see". 

This is much like the campaign when all that was followed was the "horse-race" or polls showing who was ahead or not.  Nothing much was said about news with the exception of murders, rapes, or terrorist attacks.  Now the focus is on Trump's Tweets (WHICH ARE OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL STATEMENTS that will be stored in the Library of Congress).  People need to look back a bit and know that Jimmie Carter (not a great President, but at least sane) wrote his White House Diary entirely in the East wing of the White House so there would be no question as to the publication rights and censorship of the diary.  The world now sees us spur of the moment tweets of Trump.

International trust and positive attitude towards the United States has dropped in EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY IN THE WORLD except for Russia and Israel.  Putin's attitude towards Trump is quite straightforward: Trump is an illiterate or at least unknowledgeable person who can easily be manipulated or outmaneuvered.   The one positive development of Trump's idiocy is to finally bring Germany and France together, unified against a common enemy: Trump. 

While all the stupidity is going on and covered in great detail by the corporate and profit driven Main Stream Media which gets called "fake news" for its trouble, little attention is given to the real issues that affect the lives of over 280 Million Americans in favor of the interests of the remainder.

Author Naomi Klein (since she is female, Trump will hate that and since her name sounds Jewish (the word is German) many of the knuckle-dragging white nationalist Trumpians will also hate her), and that is one reason I reprint her analysis of the situation.  Trump hardly knows enough to devise such a clever scheme, but his wealthy backers do.

I reprint it in its entirety, and then hope to focus on more important issues once I deal with a great deal of crap elsewhere in other venues:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we wrap up today's show with Part 2 of our conversation with best-selling author and journalist Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Her new book is called No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. To accompany the book, The Intercept recently made this video.

NAOMI KLEIN: Shock.

MEGYN KELLY: Shocking.

STEPHEN COLBERT: I don't think I could sit down right now.

ALISYN CAMEROTA: You mean—

WILLIE GEIST: Historic, astounding, shocking.

NAOMI KLEIN: It's a word that's come up a lot since November, for obvious reasons.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: He's going to inject a shock to the system.

NAOMI KLEIN: Now, I've spent a lot of time thinking about shock. Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine, an investigation that spanned four decades, from Pinochet's U.S.-backed coup in 1970s Chile to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I noticed a brutal and recurring tactic by right-wing governments. After a shocking event—a war, a coup, a terrorist attack, market crash or natural disaster—exploit the public's disorientation, suspend democracy, push through radical policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This is a repeal and a replace of Obamacare.

GARY COHN: We're going to cut taxes and simplify the tax code.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

NAOMI KLEIN: Now, some people have said that's exactly what Trump has been trying to do. Is it true? Well, sort of. But in all likelihood, the worst is yet to come, and we better be ready. The administration is creating chaos, daily.

JUJU CHANG: Breaking news: Donald Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has resigned tonight.

ANDERSON COOPER: All of a sudden, the White House is concerned about James Comey's handling of Hillary Clinton's email?

CBS NEWS ANCHOR: A Senate committee will question President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner about his meeting with officials from a Russian bank.

NAOMI KLEIN: Now, of course many of the scandals are the result of the president's ignorance and blunders, not some nefarious strategy. But there's also no doubt that some savvy people around Trump are using the daily shocks as cover to advance wildly pro-corporate policies that bear little resemblance to what Trump pledged on the campaign trail.

DONALD TRUMP: Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

MSNBC ANCHOR: The White House released its budget for 2018, and among the $4 trillion in cuts it proposes are billions upon billions of dollars slashed from both Medicaid and Social Security.

NAOMI KLEIN: And the worst part, this is likely just the warm-up. We need to focus on what this administration will do when it has a major external shock to exploit. Maybe it will be an economic crash like 2008, maybe a natural disaster like Sandy, or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist event like Manchester or Paris in 2015. Any one such crisis could redraw the political map overnight. And it could give Trump and his crew free rein to ram through their most extreme ideas.

But here is one thing I've learned over two decades of reporting from dozens of crises around the world: These tactics can be resisted. And, for your convenience, I've tried to boil it down to a five-step plan.

Step one: Know what's coming. What would happen if a horror like the one in Manchester took place on U.S. soil? Based on Trump's obvious fondness for authoritarianism, we can expect him to impose some sort of state of exception or emergency where the usual rules of democracy no longer apply. Protests and strikes that block roads and airports, like the ones that sprung up to resist the Muslim travel ban, would likely be declared a threat to national security. Protest organizers would be targeted under anti-terror legislation, with surveillance, arrests and imprisonment. With public signs of dissent suppressed, the truly toxic to-do list would quickly bubble up: bring in the feds to pacify the streets, muzzle investigative journalism—you know he's itching to.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You weren't called. Sit down!

NAOMI KLEIN: The courts, who Trump would inevitably blame for the attacks, might well lose their courage. And the most lethal shock we need to prepare for: a push for a full-blown foreign war. And, no, it won't matter if the target has no connection to the attacks used to justify it.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

REPORTER: The attack on the World Trade Center.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Nothing.

NAOMI KLEIN: Preparing for all this is crucial. If we know what to expect, we won't be that shocked. We'll just be pissed.

And that's important for step two: Get out of your home and defy the bans. When governments tell people to stay in their homes or show their patriotism by going shopping, they inevitably claim it's for public safety, that protests and rallies could become targets for more attacks. What we know from other countries is that there is only one way to respond.

EURONEWS ANCHOR: Hundreds of Tunisians have been defying the curfew in the capital, Tunis.

NAOMI KLEIN: Disobey en masse. That's what happened in Argentina in 2001. With the country in economic free fall, the president at the time declared a state of siege, giving himself the power to suspend the constitution.

FERNANDO DE LA RÚA: [translated] I declared a state of siege across the entire country.

NAOMI KLEIN: He told the public to stay in their houses. Here's what they did instead.

PROTESTER: Argentina!

NAOMI KLEIN: The president resigned that night. And eventually new elections were held.

Three years later, in Madrid, a horrifying series of coordinated attacks on trains killed more than 200 people. The prime minister, José María Aznar, falsely pointed the finger at Basque separatists and also used the attacks to justify his decision to send troops to Iraq. His rhetoric was classic shock doctrine: division, war, fear—Daddy will protect you. This is how Spaniards responded.

PROTESTERS: [translated] Resignation! Resignation!

NAOMI KLEIN: They voted out Aznar a few days later. Many people said they did it because he reminded them of Franco, Spain's former dictator.

Which brings us to step three: Know your history. Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed. In the midst of the pain and panic of the Great Depression, as many as 2 million people of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States. After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day. And the good folks of Manchester recently showed us how to respond to that.

PROTESTER: The people of Manchester don't stand with your xenophobia and racism!

NAOMI KLEIN: Something else we know from history, step four: Always follow the money. While everyone is focused on security and civil liberties, Trump's Cabinet of billionaires will try to quietly push through even more extreme measures to enrich themselves and their class, like dismantling Social Security or auctioning off major pieces of government for profit.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Today we're proposing to take American air travel into the future.

NAOMI KLEIN: It's in those moments when fear and chaos are sucking up all the oxygen when we most have to ask: Whose interests are being served by the chaos? What is being slipped through while we're distracted? Who's getting richer, and who's getting even poorer?

WENDELL PIERCE: When the floodwaters were still rising in New Orleans, one of the first official acts that the governor did was to fire all the teachers. What's happening is a raid of the money set aside for public education to be given to private companies. It wasn't by happenstance. It was by design. You saw the political manipulations and taking advantage of the crisis.

NAOMI KLEIN: But if we learn from this history, we could actually make history, with step five: Advance a bold counterplan. At their best, all the previous steps can only slow down attempts to exploit crisis. If we actually want to defeat this tactic, opponents of the shock doctrine need to move quickly to put forward a credible alternate plan. It needs to get at the root of why these sorts of crises are hitting us with ever greater frequency. And that means we have to talk about militarism, climate change and deregulated markets. More than that, we need to advance and fight for different models, ones grounded in racial, economic and gender justice, ones that hold out the credible promise of a tangibly better and fairer life in the here and now and a safer planet for all of us in the long term. Defensive actions alone won't cut it. There has to be a different vision, and it needs to be bold. Saying no to the shock doctrine is vitally important. But when the [bleep] hits the fan, no is not enough.

AMY GOODMAN: That video, produced by The Intercept. Their senior correspondent, Naomi Klein, author of the new book, released this week, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Yes, a shock. You're a specialist in analyzing what happens next, Naomi.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. And, you know, the reason why I wrote this book very quickly, for me—you know, it usually takes me five years to write a book; I did this in less than five months—is because I really wanted it to come out before any kind of major crisis hits the United States. I mean, lots of people out there see Trump himself as a crisis, and, you know, I would tend to agree, but what really has me scared is what this configuration of characters in the Trump administration—Pence, Bannon, Betsy DeVos, Steve Mnuchin, all these Goldman Sachs alum who are in the Cabinet—how they would respond to a large-scale crisis that they themselves are not creating. I mean, the chaos is chaos they're generating themselves, either deliberately or out of incompetence and avarice, but what happens if there's a 2008-like financial crisis? What happens, you know, heaven forbid, if there is a Manchester-like attack in the United States?

The actions of this administration make these types of shocks more likely, not less, right? They're deregulating the banks, creating the conditions for another crash. They are antagonizing the world, particularly the Muslim world. You know, ISISapparently called Trump's Muslim travel ban a "blessed ban," because it was so good for recruitment. They are—you know, they are making climate disasters more likely with everything they're doing to deregulate industry, deregulate for polluters. You know, there's a lag time between that and when the climate shocks hit, but the truth is, we've already warmed the planet enough that no U.S. president can get through a year, let alone a term, without some sort of major climate-related disaster.

So, how does this group of—this Cabinet of disaster capitalists, is what I call them, Amy, because there is such a track record of taking advantage of crisis, whether we're looking at the Goldman Sachs—former Goldman Sachs executives and the way they profited from the subprime mortgage crisis to increase their own personal wealth, whether it's Mike Pence and the central role he played when New Orleans was still underwater to come up with a corporate wish list to push through. So, you know, as disastrous as Trump's policies have been so far, there's actually long, toxic to-do lists, things that people around Trump and Trump himself have been—have very openly said they would like to do, but they have actually not been able either to get through without a crisis or they haven't even tried, right? Think about Trump's threats to bring back torture. Think about his threats to bring the feds into Chicago. Think about his threats not just to have a Muslim travel ban from specific countries, but not to let Muslims into the country, period.

So I think we do need to prepare for this. And what I tried to do with this video is create a little toolkit of, you know, what I have seen work in other countries, because I have been reporting on shocks and large-scale disasters and how societies respond now for a couple of decades, and I've seen some amazing acts of resistance, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about those. We saw some images of them here.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. So, one of the things I think we could really count on Trump to do, particularly if there is any kind of terrorism-related shock—and let's be clear: There have been terrorism events, white supremacist terrorism, in the United States during the Trump era, but of course he doesn't treat those as a crisis. So, an event that they decided was a large-scale crisis, we already know from the way Trump responded to the London Bridge attacks—he immediately said, "This is why we need to bring back my travel ban." After the Manchester attacks, he immediately said, "This is about immigrants flooding across our borders." In fact, the person responsible for those attacks was born in the U.K. It doesn't matter. You know, we know this from 9/11, that the way—these crises are used as opportunities to push through policies that actually have very little to do with getting at root causes, and, in many cases, exacerbate—most notably, the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, but it was just that sheer opportunism.

So, you know, what I've seen is, I think, in all likelihood, they would declare a state of emergency, some sort of state of exception, where they're able to ban protests, like the protests we saw, the very inspiring protests in the face of the Muslim travel ban. They would say, "No, you can't block a road. You can't block an airport. This is—you could be a target of terrorism yourself. Stay in your homes."

So, you know, I give a few examples, like Argentina in 2001, when, as the president was declaring a state of siege and telling people to stay in their homes, people described not being able to hear him because the sound from the streets was so loud, the roar of pots and pans, and neighbors flooding out of their homes and going to the Plaza de Mayo and refusing this state of siege, was—that they drowned him out. They literally couldn't hear him. So other people left their houses. And, you know, in that moment, that's the moment to resist. You know, that is the moment to just not accept it. And it's really a question of strength in numbers, because if it is only the kind of hardcore activists that are out on the streets, it's really easy to crush small protests. It's harder to do it when it is hundreds of thousands of people. So I wanted to share some of these stories of societies that have just said, "We will not let you do it." Right?

I was in France, as were you, Amy, a week after the horrific terrorist attacks in 2015. We were there for the Paris climate summit. A week before, 200 people had been killed in Paris in coordinated attacks. The French government, under François Hollande, a Socialist government—Socialist in name only, but, you know, a left government—declared a state of emergency and banned political gatherings of more than five people. You know, if that can happen in France under a Socialist government, in a country with a very deep history of disruptive strikes, what do we expect Trump and Bannon and Pence to do at the earliest opportunity? So, I think it's important to strategize.

It's important to know the history in the United States. You know, in all these countries, the examples I give—Argentina, why did they flood out of their houses? You ask people. They said, "It reminded us of the beginning of the dictatorship in 1976. That's how it started. They told us that we weren't safe and that it was going to be a temporary state of emergency. And it ended up turning into a dictatorship." So they saw the early signs, and they said, "No, not again. Nunca más." Right? You know, we talked to Americans about this. They say, "Well, we don't have that history." Really? What about the Japanese internment, you know? What about, as you've written, Amy, what about what happened to Mexican—Mexican Americans in the United States during the Great Depression and during that crisis and the mass deportations? There is this history in many communities, and those communities keep that history alive. You know, during Hurricane Katrina, so many African Americans talked about the history of how crises had been used to further oppress black people in this country. But these stories are offloaded into those communities, who hold them and keep that history alive. It isn't nationally metabolized, right? And so we have to share these stories. And I do think there is a memory now of what happened after September 11th and the rights that were lost and the ways in which people's grief was exploited by men in power who said, "Trust me." Don't make that mistake again.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the connection to war? I mean, you have what happened in Manchester, the horror there. You have the continued deaths in Yemen, the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing. Now the U.S. has expanded both in Somalia and in the Philippines with U.S. forces.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You have this horrific attack that took place in Kabul, where over 150 Afghans died. It hardly got any attention. But the rage that must be brewing at the grassroots when they don't get any media attention from the West?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, right, right. You know, people are being erased, you know, and this is a very, very old story. No, they're already expanding the battlefields, escalating on multiple, multiple fronts. And, you know, this is the most dangerous, most lethal way that shocking events are exploited, people's fear exploited.

And, you know, let's remember that this administration will have various motivations for changing the subject away from their domestic scandals. And Trump has never gotten better media coverage than in the wake of the—his Syrian missile strike, you know, called "beautiful" by Brian Williams. And it's—you know, suddenly, he was presidential—right?—ordering cruise missiles over delicious chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago. So, you know, we have to be very, very vigilant about this.

And, you know, the U.S. has had a strong antiwar movement in the past, but that antiwar movement hasn't been in the streets in the same way. And, you know, I think that this—these resistance movements are going to have to get ready for that kind of a shock, because once the wars begin, you know, it's very hard to stop them.

Another example, I think, of shock resistance, we just saw in the U.K. during Jeremy Corbyn's—during Jeremy Corbyn's campaign, where Theresa May was exploiting the Manchester attacks, the London Bridge attacks, to say, "We are going to, you know, have to get rid of your online privacy. You know, we need backdoors into all of your communication apps. We may need to suspend human rights law." And Jeremy Corbyn was talking about root causes, the failure of the war-on-terror paradigm and how this is leading to an increase in these types of attacks. And, you know, I think that a lot of people decided that that made more sense after these many years, like not to double down and give up rights in these moments, but to try to understand why this is happening and to do something about it.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, Theresa May lost her Conservative majority in the Parliament. On Saudi Arabia, the first country President Trump went to, the first foreign country, was Saudi Arabia. He does the orb with the Saudi Arabians. He does the sword dances, or tries, with the Saudi Arabians.

NAOMI KLEIN: The sword stumble.

AMY GOODMAN: He seals these deals, well over $110 billion, leaves there extolling the Saudi leadership and attacks the European leaders, and then comes home, and, despite the almost begging of the European leaders on the issue of the climate accord, he not only attacks them, but then comes home to the United States and announces he's withdrawing from the very accord they're pleading with him to remain in. What about this primacy of Saudi Arabia right now, both its connection to war, with the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing of Yemen, which is leading to a horrific cholera epidemic, not to mention just the number of deaths, and climate change?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know, one of the things that really worries me is how motivated these petrostates are to have more instability, because that sends the price of oil up, and, you know, their profits flow even more. It's something that the Saudis have in common with the Russians, have in common with Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon. You know, the way I think we should see that foreign trip of Trump's is basically as traveling weapons salesman, right? And he's sending this message: You buy enough American weapons, you're our friend. You know? Like this is the price. So he heaps praise on Saudi Arabia for, you know, having done that, having made that deal, and he goes to Europe, and he screams at them, you know, NATO members, for not pulling their weight, right? Which means not buying enough weapons. You know, I'm Canadian. I'm Canadian-American, dual citizen. But my government shamefully came home and announced a massive—sorry, a massive increase in weapons spending. So, you know, this is—this is Trump's foreign policy, is traveling weapons salesman.

AMY GOODMAN: Best-selling author Naomi Klein, senior correspondent for The Intercept. Her new book is titled No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. To see Part 1 of the interview, you can go to democracynow.org.