Anti-Semitic is Circular, but an Argument?

Illustration:  Completely unrelated, from www.whatnowtoons.com, about the Tennessee nonsense.

Here is a letter to the PBS station in San Francisco.  It also gives a bit of perspective on how far away from reality our entire media is:


Our local and otherwise great public tv station which used to show a lot of Alan Watts back
in the 50's remember? KQED showed a ridiculous documentary excusing Israel for just about
anything it ever did wrong.

Here's what I wrote the president of KQED.


"Dear Mr. or Ms. President of KQED,

I was dismayed to find a program entitled "Anti-Semitism" aired tonight October 12th 2010 on KQED.

For years I have asked KQED and in particular Michael Krasny of "Forum" why John Pilger's documentaries are never
shown on your station, "Palestine is Still the Issue" for example.

Pilger is an Australian who exposes the unfairness of the occupation of Palestinian lands by israeli troops,
land that does not belong to Israel but which was overrun and conquered by the Israeli Army back in 1967 and is still kept
in poverty and isolation for some 43 years now, making it one of the longest run and largest outdoor prisons in the
world.

The program shown tonight on your station blames 'AntiSemitism' for hatred of Israel and Jews, implying that a long lasting evil tradition
is still going strong because...?  Because people hate Jews, a rather circular argument.

Large money contributors who support KQED may prefer this kind of distorted reasoning, but I cancelled my membership to your
station because of this refusal to see and report the truth.

What is the truth?  Israel has earned the enmity of many countries precisely because it has for decades now hung on to land gained
through war, and visited apartheid and other indignities on its Palestinian captives.  Why did the US veto over 80 UN resolutions against
Israel for this kind of behavior.  Is the UN anti-Semitic?  Why can not an organization concerned with world justice censure a government
that does such things to a trapped vulnerable powerless
people, in Gaza for instance, without being considered prejudiced?

Why not air a program about what REALLY goes on in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank instead of an excuse of such
actions based on a charge of "Anti-Semitism"?  Really, the whole idea of blaming centuries old hatred of Jews is preposterous and KQED is only betraying its bias and refusal
to face the plain facts involving Israel's Zionist extremists.

Shame on you KQED, and you too Michael Krasny, you are all guilty of kow-towing to special interests and money, trying to blame Anti-Semitism for the
anger much of the world feels towards Israel for its inhumane treatment of Palestinians.  Ask yourselves this, how many Gaza Flotilla survivors have been
interviewed on US tv?  I personally know such an individual, beaten and tortured in an Israel prison after being arrested on a boat in international waters.
Is saying that the State of Israel is guilty of beating and torturing people 'Anti-Semitic'?  Think about it, and let me know when you'll show a better documentary about
this vital subject, our relationship with Israel.

The unconditional support of Israel no matter how heinous it's crimes must end.  You, KQED, are simply prolonging the support of a rogue state,  I am
sorry to say.  Again, I am deeply disappointed in your failure of nerve.  A public station should represent facts fairly and not be swayed by contributors,
or else how do you explain yourselves on this matter?

Sincerely but regretfully yours,

Dr. Barry M. Wright
Gilroy CA"

John Le Carre -- The truth is always ugly

I wanted to share this as quickly as possible, so no intro.  I'll let it stand:

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour with world-renowned British novelist John le Carré, the pen name of David Cornwell. Le Carré’s writing career spans half a century, during which he established himself as a master spy writer. His latest novel, his twenty-second, is out this week. It’s called Our Kind of Traitor.
David Cornwell worked in the British Secret Services from the late '50s to the early ’60s, at the height of the Cold War. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became an international bestseller. Le Carré's gritty depiction of the realities of the spy world contrasted sharply with the characters in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.
This is a clip from the film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an alcoholic cynical British spy.

ALEC LEAMAS: [played by Richard Burton] What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong? Yesterday I would have killed Mundt, because I thought him evil and an enemy. But not todaiy. Today he’s evil, and my friend. London needs him.

AMY GOODMAN: John le Carré continued writing, expanding with a series featuring his British spy master George Smiley, including the hit novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. As the Cold War ended, le Carré continued to write prolifically, shifting focus to the inequities of globalization, unchecked multinational corporate power, and the role national spy services play in protecting corporate interests.
Perhaps best known among his many post-Cold War novels is The Constant Gardener, depicting a pharmaceutical company’s exploitation of unwitting Kenyans for dangerous, sometimes fatal, drug tests. In this clip, from the film adaptation of The Constant Gardener, an activist, who is later killed by the pharmaceutical corporation, played by Rachel Weisz, confronts a government official, played by Ralph Fiennes, about war.

TESSA QUAYLE: [played by Rachel Weisz] Excuse me? Excuse me?

JUSTIN QUAYLE: [played by Ralph Fiennes] Yeah?

TESSA QUAYLE: Excuse me.

JUSTIN QUAYLE: Yeah, sorry.

TESSA QUAYLE: Sir, I’ve just got one question. I just wondered, whose map is Britain using when it completely ignores the United Nations and decides to invade Iraq? Or do you think it’s more diplomatic to bend the will of a superpower and politely take part in Vietnam the sequel?

JUSTIN QUAYLE: Well, I can’t speak for Sir Bernard.

TESSA QUAYLE: Oh, I thought that’s why you were here.

JUSTIN QUAYLE: I mean, diplomats have to go where they’re sent.

TESSA QUAYLE: So do Labradors.

JUSTIN QUAYLE: Ouch.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, as we turn now to our national broadcast exclusive hour with John le Carré about Constant Gardener, about his new novel Our Kind of Traitor, his antiwar activism and more.
When I sat down with him in London recently, I was joined in conversation by my Democracy Now! colleague Denis Moynihan.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We are on the road in London, just along the Thames, not far from Parliament, not far from MI5 and MI6, the international and domestic spy agencies here, so it is most relevant to bring you John le Carré. This hour, we spend with the foremost spy writer of our time.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Now, it might confuse our audience when I say, "Welcome to Democracy Now!, David Cornwell." Explain where John le Carré came from.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I’ve told a lot of lies about that in my time, I have to confess. I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. So the fact that I was in a secret department does not play a part. Then, I think I decided that I needed three pieces to a name, that they would arrest the "I" and put an accent on the last part. Then the word carré in French has a bunch of ambiguous meanings. A balle carrée, for example, is a dance where the ladies ask the men to dance. Carré at roulette, if you put a numéro carrée, you put a counter on each corner of a number. And so it goes on. And I think an homme carré is a little bit a dubious guy. That seemed to me to suit me perfectly at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, in the interests of transparency, we’ll just call you David Cornwell, if that’s OK.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Just David will do fine.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, we were interested because Channel 4 just said "the last interview" with John le Carré, and yet here we are. Why did you change your mind?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I didn’t change my mind. The full text with Channel 4 was that that was my last interview in the UK. And this is the last book about which I intend to give interviews. That isn’t because I’m in any sense retiring. I’ve found that, actually, I’ve said everything I really want to say, outside my books. I would just like—I’m in wonderful shape. I’m entering my eightieth year. I just want to devote myself entirely to writing and not to this particular art form of conversation.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re very thankful to be with you today. I want to bring Denis Moynihan into this conversation, my colleague, who invariably has a spy novel in his hand, and it is usually a novel by John le Carré. If he hasn’t read it once, he’s read it three times, and then he’s on to the fourth.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: David, the latest book, your twenty-second novel, Our Kind of Traitor, is about—well, I guess, to frame it for our audience, who may not be familiar with your half-century of writing, about half of that time you wrote during the Cold War, and since then you’ve been focusing less on that story and more on the multinational corporate malfeasance and the confluence of kind of corporate interests and government skullduggery. This story, you want to lay it out kind of in broad strokes, the money laundering, the importance of drug money and laundered money in propping up—

JOHN LE CARRÉ: This is really a—it’s a story, and it’s supposed to entertain, and if it doesn’t entertain, there’s no point in the message. The message has—message has got to be carried on the back of the beetle; otherwise, there is none.

So what we have is a young couple. They’re thinking of getting married. They go off and take a holiday in Antigua. They both love tennis. And they’re middle class. One’s a lawyer. The other is a tutor at Oxford. And they’re playing tennis. Somebody watches them. And all of a sudden, the fellow, Perry, is invited to play tennis with a Russian guy. And from then on—there is purpose behind the invitation. From then on, they are drawn into a world they didn’t know existed. They’re both intelligent, decent, moral people, and they’re faced with the anarchy, in fact, the kind of exported anarchy of post-Cold War Russia. So the Wild East has come to visit them in Antigua. And from then on, they are drawn into an intrigue.

Dima, my Russian character—I don’t spoil the story by telling you this—says he wishes to defect. He has a quarrel with his gang boss, who is the boss of bosses in Russia, and he’s going to get even with him. He’s going to betray him. He’s going to pour out all the secrets about how he launders money on a vast scale on behalf of a collection of Russian brotherhoods, or Vory. Russian crime has been integrated into the—first of all, into the Soviet Union, on a grand scale. It was developed—the crime families were developed in the camps of Siberia. And Dima emerges from that world. He was a bareknuckle gangster, spent a bit of time on Brighton Beach, learned the arts of money laundering, learned to wear suits, learned to speak half-decent English, and settled in Switzerland, and from there operated a vast money laundering scheme.

Now, this isn’t fiction. That part of it isn’t fiction. Money laundering is simply everywhere. On the grand scale, it’s endemic to banking. You have to bear in mind that when Lehman Brothers wasn’t going to function anymore and the big banks weren’t lending to one another, back at that terrible time, $352 billion of illegal money were then tacitly released upon the market, and that was about the only money people were lending to one another. So, money laundering is not some distant fantasy. It’s actually how you handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and huge quantities of drug money, how you get that into the white sector. And what we are gradually learning from these little exposés that come to light is that there is almost no way of denying people, in the end, the profits of their crime, which is a tragedy. And it’s also a frightful annoyance, because we pay vast sums of money across the way here to agencies that are supposed to stop money laundering. It doesn’t happen.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you’ve got a column right there, bringing this right up—

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I have a column, yeah. I wish I had the figures in my head. This is from the International Herald Tribune, and I guess that means it also comes from the New York Times of Monday, September the 13th, not so long ago. Barclays, a British bank, paid $298 million "for conducting transactions with Cuba, Iran, Libya, Myanmar and Sudan in violation of United [States] trade sanctions. Barclays was discovered to have systematically disguised the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars through wire transfers that were stripped of the critical information required by law. [...]

"Last May, when ABN Amro Bank (now largely part of the Royal Bank of Scotland) was caught funneling money for the benefit of Iran, Libya and Sudan, it was fined $500 million, and no one went to jail. Last December, Credit Suisse Group agreed to pay a $536 million fine for doing the same. In recent years, Union Bank of California, American Express Bank International, BankAtlantic and Wachovia have all been caught moving huge sums of drug money, but no one went to jail. The banks just admitted to criminal conduct and paid the government a cut of their profits."

The thing is, it is very undemocratic, because if you or I go to one of these banks along here somewhere with a few thousand dollars in a briefcase, if I’m a Brit and do it, I have to give a really thorough explanation. Bank manager may call in the police. I have to produce my passport. If I want to open an account, I have to produce a utilities bill and all of that. But, if Mr. Orloff comes to a bank here and says, "I am from Russia. I have millions and millions of dollars, please. And here is a letter from a reputable lawyer in Moscow. And here is evidence that I run hotels, casinos, whatnot," bank manager says, "What are you doing for lunch?" And we’re away. So, the bigger the sum, the easier the crime. Now, that is of course something that afflicts us through life. But it’s the case here.

AMY GOODMAN: And the critics—I know you don’t read reviews, but the critics who say, "Oh, come on. This is so exaggerated. The legitimate economy does not rest on the illegitimate one, the illegal one."

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, alas, those critics don’t read their own newspapers, and nor perhaps have they noticed that a former head of MI5, our security service, who was translated to the House of Lords, was recently denied the senior post on a security committee on account of her connections with oligarchs in the Ukraine. These oligarchs were supposedly connected with criminal conspiracy.

We also have a charming case, which we look back on with embarrassment, where a leading member of the Rothschild family and our present Chancellor of the Exchequer—that’s finance minister—and the éminence grise of the Labour Party at that time, Lord Mandelson, were all found holidaying together off the coast of Corfu, sitting on the boat of a man called Deripaska, who at that time, I believe, was wanted in the United States for—on money laundering charges. So we have a certain amount of evidence before us which you would think would silence critics who say we’re all in perfect shape.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you read the beginning of Our Kind of Traitor?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: "At seven o’clock of a Caribbean morning, on the island of Antigua, one Peregrine Makepiece, otherwise known as Perry, an all-around amateur athlete of distinction and until recently tutor in English literature at a distinguished Oxford college, played three sets of tennis against a muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle fifties called Dima. How this match came about was quickly the subject of intense examination by British agents professionally disposed against the workings of chance. Yet the events leading up to it were on Perry’s side blameless.

"The dawning of his thirtieth birthday three months previously had triggered a life-change in him that had been building up for a year or more without his being aware of it. Seated head in hands at eight o’clock in the morning in his modest Oxford rooms, after a seven-mile run that had done nothing to ease his sense of calamity, he had searched his soul to know just what the first third of his natural life had achieved, apart from providing him with an excuse for not engaging in the world beyond the cities dreaming spires. [...]

"Last term he had delivered a series of lectures on George Orwell under the title ‘A Stifled Britain?’ and his rhetoric had alarmed him. Would Orwell have believed it possible that the same overfed voices which had haunted him in the 1930s, the same crippling incompetence, addiction to foreign wars and assumptions of entitlement, were happily in place in 2009?

"Receiving no response from the blank student faces staring up at him, he had supplied it for himself: no, Orwell would have emphatically not believed it. Or if he had, he would have taken to the streets. He would have smashed some serious glass."

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll be back with our exclusive hour with John le Carré in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: The theme from the BBC production of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, composed and conducted by Geoffrey Burgon. Burgon died September 21st, two days after we conducted our exclusive national broadcast hour with David Cornwell in London. I’m Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan.

AMY GOODMAN: We are not far from MI5 and MI6 right now, which takes us way back in time. For our audience who may not be so familiar with your history, in fact, you did work for the MI5 and MI6.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I worked for one and then for the other, yes. And I suppose that that was nearly half a century ago. So, to regard me as an expert on espionage is absurd, but—on modern espionage. But—

AMY GOODMAN: These are the spy agencies of Britain.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: These are the spy agencies of Britain, yes. MI5 is responsible for domestic security, but it has no executive powers, unlike your FBI. SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel. Unlike the CIA, it is not also in competition with twenty-one other intelligence agencies within your own country, or whatever the number is, something like that.

And I suppose that if I could generalize about my work in intelligence in those days, for better or worse, we counted ourselves an elite with a very considerable responsibility: to speak truth to power, like good journalists, that whatever we came upon, however offensive it was to those in power, we told it straight. And what I fear I have seen in the run-up to the Iraq war in this country is the politicization of intelligence to fit the political intentions of our masters. And to my mind, that was a terrible moment in the history, the visible history, of intelligence work in this country, where the intelligence service itself became effectively co-author and signatory to the so-called dodgy dossier, which—on the strength of which Colin Powell was able to present a dire picture of the threat from Iraq, which turned out to be untrue.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: January of 2003, one of the largest antiwar marches in world history happened just behind us here.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I took part in it, yeah.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: And what are your reflections now?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I think that my anger still stands. I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed. We’ve always got to be careful of that. I think that—I wasn’t speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it’s true that we’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.

One of the problems, surely, is that victims never forget, and the winners do. And they forget very quickly. If people knew basically, for example, what we had done in Iran when we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAC, if people understood the extent to which we had humiliated Iran, then they would understand the later developments in Iran and Iran’s posture now. If people would look at the map and see the extent to which Iran is encircled by nuclear powers, they wouldn’t take it perhaps quite so seriously that Iran is seeking to arm itself with—if it is—with nuclear weapons.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. Mussolini, I think, defined fascism as the moment when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between political and corporate power. He assumed, when he offered that definition, that media power was already his. But I worry terribly that the absence of serious critical argument is going to produce a new kind of fanaticism, the new simplicities that are as dangerous as the ones which caused us to march against Iraq and as misunderstood.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, about what’s happening with Tony Blair with his new book out, with event after event being canceled, eggs being thrown at him, the anger on the streets?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I don’t know what the level of protest was in the United States by the time you went to war in Iraq, but here I think an aggregate of about three million people marched in Britain. The first march in which I took part must have numbered something like a million. And so, the—and I remember we stopped, this huge crowd, which was being really very crudely manhandled by the police at the edges. We stopped. We were all wedged together and looking into Downing Street, where the Prime Minister’s residency is. And nobody seemed to speak, but a kind of feral roar of popular will rose. And I tried to imagine what is must have been like for Blair sitting inside that building and hearing that sound. It was like a huge cry that goes up at a football game or something like that, where you actually—it is no longer verbalized. It’s just this animal seething noise. And I think it will always be remembered of him that he took us to war, as most people perceive, on the strength of lies.

Now you have to bear in mind also that we are creating what American media are referring to as a deep state in this country. That is, I think I read, indeed, in the Washington Post, that 890,000-odd Americans who are not in government service are cleared for top secret and above. I don’t know to what extent that situation is replicated here, but more and more I have the feeling that the power of the counterterror market is expanding and creating a wider—an ever-widening circle of those who are initiated, indoctrinated, part of the security structure, whether directly or indirectly, and those who are not. So then it makes it possible, as at the time, for example, of the parliamentary vote on whether we should go to war in Iraq, it makes it possible for a senior MP to take a neophyte aside and say, "If you’d seen the papers that I’ve seen, you would know which lobby to go into when the vote comes up." And this suggestion that there are those in the know and those not in the know, and that those not in the know are second-class citizens, is extremely dangerous to society. And I think we have to address it all the time.

We have no idea. We don’t have a spokesman for these intelligence services, either one of them, either one of the three main intelligence services. We have inspired leaks. We have people who seem to speak with authority. But when somebody tells us suddenly that we’ve gone on to red alert, and there are tanks outside London Airport, or whatever it is, we don’t know by what process this definition reaches us. It’s very easy inside an intelligence service to develop a capsule mentality. You live inside the bubble. The one thing you begin to lose is common sense, a sense of balance. And particularly when it’s men, all together, men in a room. I always think that was the awful secret of the Bay of Pigs catastrophe. It was actually the guys telling each other who they were, and they were frightfully clever men, and they’d done amazing things, some of them horrible things, in Vietnam, and they were together, and they were conspiring, and there was nobody there to say, "Boys, just take it down a bit. Just step back. Is this sensible? Do we really believe the Cubans are going to rush down and embrace our troops when they land on the beach?"

AMY GOODMAN: It’s seven years after the invasion of Iraq. You’ve moved from Blair in this country, and in the United States it’s gone from Bush to Obama, who then expanded the war in Afghanistan. What is your assessment of the United States?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media. I don’t know what the percentage now is, but I believe it’s still something like 65 or 70 percent of Americans believe that Saddam was involved in the Twin Towers. Am I right in that? Something like that. Well, we haven’t gone as far down that road yet, but we do have pretty horrendous manipulation of the media by our various press barons, and we have enormous intrusions into our domestic affairs by the Rupert Murdoch empire. I find that very scary—you know, former Australian, now an American, dictating to Brits what they should be thinking. I find that very, very, very unsettling, and I oppose it wherever I can. Therefore, as I say, I share the frustration, I think, of very many Americans, that when something is clear common sense, when there’s a great humanitarian need, somehow or another, it’s the conservative voice, the orthodox voice, the chauvinistic or the patriotic voice, that outshouts other people’s decent thinking processes. I thinks it’s crudely put, but it’s a very crude situation, that it’s—the feeling, I think, that many of us have of Obama is that the good things he would really like to do are being frustrated, and now his own Democratic Party is not helping or supporting him and that the corporate and other lobbies are tying his hands. I think that’s the most charitable perception that one can make.

AMY GOODMAN: David, would you go to one of Tony Blair’s events?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: No, I wouldn’t, nor would I buy the book. At the last election in which he stood, I was invited by The Guardian newspaper to interview him. And after much thought, I declined, because I did not see how I could lay a glove on him. And I’ve asked some pretty heavy-hitting journalists what questions they would have asked, in retrospect, that might have unseated him a little, that might have thrown him. And they said, almost with one voice, there’s nothing you can get passed him, there’s no way of doing it.

I think I would have asked him one question, perhaps, and I’d have asked it repeatedly. I’d have asked him about his faith, because we were told, when journalists asked about Blair’s faith, the reply was, "We don’t do God here." Well, of course, he does do God, and he reports that his actions have been put before God and confirmed, as if somehow God has signed a chit for him. I think that the question of somebody’s religious faith is absolutely central to what we think of them, if we are members of the electorate. We have to know. If it is, for example, somebody’s conviction, widely held among Christians in the United States, that the second coming of Christ is not possible 'til the Greater Israel is established, we need to know that. That's an important political perception. In Blair’s case, I would have asked him that question, and I’d have pressed him on it. I’d have asked him whether God had ever restrained him. I find it very strange that we elect a politician who then claims to serve a higher deity who guides him: "I did what I believe is right." Well, will you tell us, please, how that relates to the Christian ethic? Do you believe in war first and negotiation afterwards? Exactly how does this work?

And the second question I would ask him is the really painful one, which I could not have asked if I hadn’t gone on my own journey. Have you ever seen what happens when a grenade goes off in a school? Do you really know what you’re doing when you order shock and awe? Are you prepared to kneel beside a dying soldier and tell him why he went to Iraq, or why he went to any war? I think that if anything has happened to Europe since 1945 that defines it, it is collectively Europeans do not believe in war anymore, until it comes as an absolute last resort, and then they’re going to do it rather badly. The United States, I think, still sees war as a necessary part of its existence. It’s impossible to maintain the military on that scale, a Pentagon on that scale, without turning it over. You’ve got to have officers who are experienced in command and control. You’ve got to have troops who have been bloodied. So, we were, in that sense, at odds. I was, as a European. I was at odds with the whole notion of a preemptive strike. And I think many Europeans have that in common, of course with very many Americans, too, feel the same. So I would have tried to challenge him in that area.

And as I think I said earlier in the interview, for me, there are very few absolutes about human behavior. But I think a leader who does take his country to war under false pretenses is simply not an acceptable person. I don’t think that we should be weighing the rights and wrongs of that. It seems to me to be quite simply wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: John le Carré, the British spy novelist. We’ll continue our exclusive national broadcast hour with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: The theme music from The Deadly Affair, composed by Quincy Jones. The film was an adaptation of John le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead. Now John le Carré has written his twenty-second. It’s called Our Kind of Traitor.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Denis Moynihan, as we go back to our national broadcast exclusive hour in London with John le Carré.

AMY GOODMAN: Can we talk about corporations, because it’s an issue you have taken on in your later books in a huge way? And interestingly, particularly corporate power in Africa—

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN:—whether we’re talking The Constant Gardener, which took place in Kenya, or we’re talking The Mission Song, which took place in Congo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s where I have seen globalization at work on the ground. It’s a pretty ugly sight. It’s a boardroom fantasy. What it actually means is the exploitation of very cheap labor, very often the ecological disaster that comes with it, the creation of mega-cities, the depletion of agrarian cultures and tribal cultures. It’s about—the effect of globalization, again, where I have seen it, has been negative, as far as the local population is concerned. It’s enriched the very few in the country where it takes place. And it has totally dismayed the inhabitants otherwise. So, ask me what corporate power means to me, it means the ability of the individual to sacrifice his own instincts, his own decent instincts, in the name of the corporation, that people will do things to—on behalf of the corporation, to a group of people, which they would never do to their next-door neighbor, so that all the decent humanity seems to be set aside the moment they walk through the corporate doors.

In The Constant Gardener, in particular, it was quite extraordinary to go to Basel, to get among the young pharmaceutical executives in a private way, promise them that I would never tell—divulge their names, and listen to them pouring out their rage against the work they were doing, at the people who were making them do it. But they were still taking the penny, and they were still doing what they were doing. They were still contributing to the invention of diseases. They were fiddling with compounds, turn them into new patents, when they actually had no greater effect than the previous patent. They were joining the lie that every new compound put on the market cost six or eight hundred million dollars, which is pretty good nonsense when you think that many of the main health life-saving drugs that go on the market have been developed, for instance, in your own federal laboratories and then sold by some strange method to the pharmaceutical company, so they didn’t do the hard work themselves very often.

So, when we think, supposedly with pride, that many corporations have the budgets, which are larger—have budgets which are larger than the many small nations, I find that most alarming. And, of course, in our country, we’re up against the fact that huge corporations are effective here, control the super markets, whatever they do, and they pay virtually no tax. We’re back to how they launder their money, or, if it’s a more polite way of saying it, how they apply sophisticated taxation arrangements so that they don’t pay tax.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of The Constant Gardener?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: It’s a young fellow in the Foreign Office, born into the clover, Eton-educated, a sense of political responsibility, a little bit of a frozen child, stiff parents, no love in his early life, falls in love with a beautiful, idealistic young woman, and she marries him. It’s almost she who does it. And they go off to Kenya, and she engages in charitable work and comes upon evidence that a big pharmaceutical company is using a bunch of people in a village in Africa, in Kenya, as human guinea pigs. They sign the consent forms. They don’t know what they’re signing. They’re bullied into it by the local representatives of the pharmaceutical company. Everything is outsourced. Everything is given away to other people, so that the company itself is never directly responsible. And she becomes very involved in this. She takes a stand, and she is murdered. He, who adores her, comes to the conclusion that he must take up her message and take up her fight, and carries it on. And in the end, romantically—I’m nothing, if not a romantic, in some respects—in the end he dies, as part of the mission, and you may say that he joins her, makes a similar sacrifice. And so, they, both of them, did the decent thing against the most anonymous and horrific kind of threat, which is one of sort of untouchable corporate power.

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done—dare I say it—in the name of God. Montesquieu said, "There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of God." And I begin to feel that’s true. The shareholder is the excuse for everything. And, to me—I’m not suggesting we make some sudden lurch into socialism, that isn’t the case at all. I think it’s more to do with the exercise of individual conscience.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s play a clip of Constant Gardener.

UNIDENTIFIED: Big pharmaceuticals, they’re right up there with the arms dealers.

JUSTIN QUAYLE: [played by Ralph Fiennes] Payoffs, cover-ups, unmarked graves.

UNIDENTIFIED: Are you crazy?

UNIDENTIFIED: These people, they kill anybody.

UNIDENTIFIED: Poor man seems to have convinced himself there was a conspiracy in which we are all complicit.

UNIDENTIFIED: There’s a contract out on you. You’ll never know who ordered the hit. That’s the way it works. It’s a corporate matter.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip of Constant Gardener. We mentioned Congo and The Mission Song earlier, and you just mentioned it again, but I do want to ask if you’d simply describe the nut of that story, because the story of Congo and Eastern Congo is one that is rarely told, yet millions of people have died.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And the devastation of the environment has been just horrifying. You did choose to go there and write a novel about it.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I did choose to go there, and I was escorted by a wonderful American man, Jason Stearns, who is a dedicated student of Africa and a lover of Africa, and also Michela Wrong, who had written nonfiction books about Africa. And we agreed we would make a three, and we would go—we went, first of all, to Rwanda, and from Rwanda we went by jeep then into Eastern Congo, and we stayed in Bukavu. I think we were in Bukavu for about, I don’t know, eight or nine days, and I think there were two or three riots there while we were there.

And the tragedy of Congo is almost—it is appalling. It isn’t really—it isn’t the Congo’s fault even. Congo has become the battleground for other people’s wars, repeatedly. Congo is cursed with amazing mineral resources—diamonds, coltan, now, I believe, up in the northeast of Congo, oil even. God help them, because without any civil society to function, they have been exploited, not simply in terms of boy soldiers, awful gang wars that sweep through the jungle, mass rape as a military weapon, they’ve been subjected to every hell on earth, these poor people.

And meanwhile, don’t think that Africans are disposed to corruption where we are not, so to speak. Actually, most of the corruption that has taken place in Congo on a vast scale is Western-driven. So there are something like eighty or ninety “airlines”—in quotes—registered in Congo, and these simply belong to tiny exploitative companies that harness boy soldiers and kids to dig out the diamonds or the coltan, whatever it may be, and ship it out of Congo without paying duty or anything of that sort. Without paying royalties to anyone is theft. And Congo is being exploited by everybody on account of these reasons, in addition to providing the battleground for other people’s wars.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about the writing process and why writing is so important to you.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, it’s—I think the first process, for me, of writing is making—making order out of chaos, out of such a convergence of experiences and so many insoluble things that I’ve seen in my life, to be able to draw a line, to tell a fable which illustrates them, which entertains, and which delivers, even if it’s a sad one, some kind of resolution, is for me, if you will, a catharsis, a therapy. I think also, in the making of character, I feel completely happy. It always seems to me that the excitement of people is the possibilities of their character—who are you? We don’t know each other, but I could imagine you could be this person, you could be that person. And in my book, you’re that person. I don’t plot. I don’t make what you’re supposed to do in writing schools, the flow charts on how I will proceed. I try to get—as in this case, I get two innocent people into a Hitchcockian model and make them fight their way out. But from scene to scene, they have to lead me. And that’s—it’s like asking somebody whether they’re musical or why they’re musical. To me, that is the whole of life. I can’t put it differently.

I just want to—I want to leave the public stage, insofar as I’ve ever been on it, and I would now—I’m fit and resolved, and I’ve got a wonderful family, and I just want to spend the rest of my time doing what I do best, which is writing. I love being an entertainer. I love being a storyteller. I don’t think there is a story unless it provokes a little, unless it engages. I don’t think there’s such a thing as entertaining escapism. Not for me. I think there is entertaining involvement, and that’s what I try to do.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: And do you write with a pen?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I do write with a pen. I’m not advertising this one, because the cap flies off all the time, and actually I’m reduced to pasting them together. I write only with a pen. I’ve learned to operate a computer to communicate with my children, because they won’t communicate with me in any other medium, but otherwise I write entirely with a pen. And I have an immensely attentive, gifted, tactful wife, who loves to type the stuff out, gives it back to me, and watches bemused as I rip it up again and give it back to her. And that goes on. That’s our relationship.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: I think we approached you first for an interview, perhaps about eight or nine months ago, when you were in the midst of writing Our Kind of Traitor.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: And your agent said he absolutely doesn’t communicate with people like us while you’re writing.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I’m sure it was a mistake.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: So the cloistering yourself on the cliffs of Cornwall, or wherever you happen to be writing, is that an important part of your process?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Yes. I mean, for some books, I’ve traveled a lot, and I was very much driven by Graham Greene’s dictum that if you’re reporting on human misery—Amy, you know this far better than I. If you’re reporting on human misery, you do well to share it. And that was a principle that came to me late. I started writing books that were set abroad, like The Honourable Schoolboy and so on. I really thought that although the thought horrified me and I have no natural courage whatever, I should see war, so I went off to Cambodia, and I went off and actually I became the protected child of the war correspondents, and I was very fortunate about that. So, by travel, by talking, by listening, above all, in the places where I go to—or as it was, East Congo, or wherever the books take me—then I fill up my rucksack, my backpack. And then I like to take everything, all my scraps of paper and my memories, down to Cornwall and sort them out there. So, it’s engagement, escape, engagement, escape. I think, again, it’s very similar to a journalist’s life, except nobody checks my story out. I don’t have to tell—I don’t have to tell the small truth. I just have to—I have to be looking for the big truth.

AMY GOODMAN: John Le Carré, the pen name for David Cornwell, from Cornwall. That does it for our broadcast. The great spy novelist has just published his twenty-second book. It’s called Our Kind of Traitor. It’s out this week. If you’d like a copy of this national broadcast hour exclusive, you can get a DVD at our website at democracynow.org. We did that interview in London. Special thanks to my colleague Denis Moynihan.

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Miss Bush? Vote?

Illustration: It is almost impossible for me to post a blog critical of Obama without some
moron affirming that I must miss Bush.  This is now my answer as such people are incapable of reason.

Obama has recently made speeches saying that if we do not turn out this midterm, it means we were not serious about change.  Mr. President, if we do not turn out it is because you were not serious about change.


I do not say this without having made clear my points during the last year and a half. 


We can start with the stimulus:  You now argue that the Republicans blocked the amounts needed, yet at the time you went out of your way to praise the bill.  I posted articles by three Nobel Prize winners in Economics that pointed out that it was not large enough.  I also said you should put the blame of the Republican obstructionists.

The Healthcare bill was very important.  You needed to start with single payer and perhaps compromise down to the public option.  You feared a filibuster.  Bull.  You used that as an excuse.  Why just recently a R leader said he would be glad to use reconciliation processes to pass all sorts of things.

I have also mentioned that, if they want to filibuster, make them.  Make these corporate whores get up and continue talking over CSPAN 24/7 until the public sees them for what they are.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad that McCain did not get elected as I could not tolerate his Supreme Court nominees, but that's about all.

Look at the interview below and FBI spying that YOU sanction.  Tell us how it is different from Bush.

You made a nice speech in Cairo.  Why are you still sending aid to Israel as it commits crimes, especially in Gaza?  Why do you tolerate the resumption of settlement building?  You can stop it -- do it.

You are following Bush's timetable in Iraq and merely imitating his mentality in Afghanistan and added Pakistan to the wars.  That's at least three you have going on.  You had to fire McChrystal (sp) and you may well have to fire the whole military.  Well, do it.  I know you mentioned, and the media mentions, your "base."  Well, I am not part of your "base".  Even in the last election, I voted against McCain, not for you.  The last time I voted for a Presidential candidate, and the first time I ever voted, was for the peace candidate -- LBJ.  Within a year, I knew I had been snookered. 

Years later, Walter Cronkite interviewed him and confronted him with his statement.  Johnson replied, "Now listen carefully, I said shouldn't, not won't."

Actually, he was right.  Obama's case is different.  Johnson was playing old time politics and I can actually understand that.  Obama campaigned on a change from that.  We did not get it.  Perhaps with the departure of Rahmbo, things will get better.  And I will vote against whatever mouthpiece the Republicans put up, but only because of the possibility of another Supreme Court nomination.

I also have difficulty taking this election seriously.  One Senatorial candidate believes that evolution is a myth because monkeys aren't evolving into humans, clearly misunderstanding the whole idea in the first place.  She also used to be a witch, or dated one (males can be witches -- warlocks are a different rank, as I understand it). 

The ex-half Alaskan Governor is making a fortune and influencing many morons.  Actually, the whole thing is an argument for improving public schools, and not through multiple choice tests. 

In Nevada, a woman is close to defeating the Leader of the Senate as God chose her.  (Funny, she doesn't LOOK Jewish.) 

In New York some punch drunk buffoon may well be elected.  "Plaidino, Palidino, where do you roam?/Palidino, Palidino, far, afar from home."  He watches too many reruns of "Have Gun Will Travel. 

Some billionaire bitch in California could well defeat one of the most intelligent politicians we have, Barbara Boxer.  It is a very weird state -- the Terminator actually made a great speech recently attacking greedy billionaires, and that Governor is a Republican!  Another one is trying to take down Jerry Brown.

Sanctions again against Iran?  Why not a fourth war to add to the collection, Mr. President?  After all, nuclear weapons are a danger in the Middle-East -- that's why Israel won't sell theirs, isn't it?  After all, war is the "Macho" thing to do.

Rahmbo did leave to run for Mayer of Chicago.  I watched the press conference just to make sure.

Lot of these morons campaign against the theory of evolution.  As the late Bill Hicks asked, Did you ever notice that the more someone is against the theory of evolution the less evolved they look?  It will take more than the Bible to keep viruses from evolving.

Privatize Social Security?  Sure, but make sure you get a bailout if things don't work out.

One wants to privatize the VA.  Actually, she took it back.  (For now).

Anyway, Mr. President, if you and your fellow Democrats can not stop acting spineless and instead call these people on these things, how can we take you seriously?

Here is what your FBI is doing:

FBI Raids Homes of Antiwar and Pro-Palestinian Activists in Chicago and Minneapolis

Antiwar activists are gearing up for protests outside FBI offices in cities across the country today and Tuesday after the FBI raided eight homes and offices of antiwar activists in Chicago and Minneapolis Friday. The FBI’s search warrants indicate agents were looking for connections between local antiwar activists and groups in Colombia and the Middle East. We speak to the targets of two of the raids and former FBI officer Coleen Rowley. [includes rush transcript]

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Guests:

Jess Sundin, longtime antiwar activist in Minneapolis. Her home was raided by the FBI early Friday morning. She’s a member of the Anti-War Committee, whose offices were also raided.

Joe Iosbaker, employee of the University of Illinois in Chicago and a steward for SEIU Local 73. He helped coordinate buses from Chicago to the protests at the Republican National Convention in 2008. His home was one of two raided in Chicago Friday.

Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and whistleblower based in Minnesota. She was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2002.

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Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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AMY GOODMAN: Antiwar activists are gearing up for protests outside FBI offices in cities across the country today and tomorrow after the FBI raided eight homes and offices of antiwar activists in Chicago and Minneapolis Friday.

The FBI’s search warrants indicate agents were looking for connections between local antiwar activists and groups in Colombia and the Middle East. Eight people were issued subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago. Most of the people whose homes were searched or who were issued subpoenas had helped organize or attended protests at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, two years ago.

The federal law cited in the search warrants prohibits, quote, "providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations." In June, the Supreme Court rejected a free speech challenge to the material support law from humanitarian aid groups that said some of its provisions put them at risk of being prosecuted for talking to terrorist organizations about nonviolent activities. Some of groups listed by name in the warrants are Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The warrants also authorized agents to to seize items such as electronics, photographs, videos, address books and letters.

Friday’s raids come on the heels of a Justice Department probe that found the FBI improperly monitored activist groups and individuals from 2001 to 2006.

For more, I’m joined now by three guests.

Joining us from Minneapolis, longtime antiwar activist Jess Sundin, whose home was raided by the FBI early Friday morning. She’s a member of the Anti-War Committee, whose offices were also raided.

Joining us via Democracy Now! video stream from Chicago is Joe Iosbaker, whose home was one of two raided in Chicago Friday. He’s an employee of the University of Illinois in Chicago and a steward for SEIU Local 73. He helped coordinate buses from Chicago to the protests at the Republican National Convention in 2008.

Also in Minneapolis we’re joined by former FBI special agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley. Time named her Woman of the Year, Person of the Year in 2002.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Let’s begin in Minneapolis with Jess Sundin. Tell us what happened.

JESS SUNDIN: Friday morning, I awoke to a bang at the door, and by the time I was downstairs, there were six or seven federal agents already in my home, where my partner and my six-year-old daughter had already been awake. We were given the search warrant, and they went through the entire house. They spent probably about four hours going through all of our personal belongings, every book, paper, our clothes, and filled several boxes and crates with our computers, our phones, my passport. And when they were done, as I said, they had many crates full of my personal belongings, with which they left my house.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you the only one there that morning?

JESS SUNDIN: No, my partner and my first-grade daughter were also there.

AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly did they show you to get in?

JESS SUNDIN: Well, we have a porch where you can’t see exactly who’s outside. And so, they had already let themselves into the porch by the time my daughter—my wife opened the door. And when they came in, they showed us this four-page document that listed, as I said, all the kinds of things that they were entitled to look—to search for in my home, as well as a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. My name was listed on the search warrant, but both myself and my partner received subpoenas for the grand jury in Chicago.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Chicago, to Joe Iosbaker. Describe what happened to you on Friday morning.

JOE IOSBAKER: Well, it’s the exact same story. It was a nationally coordinated assault on all of these homes. Seven a.m., the pound on the door. I was getting ready for work, came down the stairs, and there were, I think, in the area of ten agents, you know, of the—they identified themselves as FBI, showed me the search warrant. And I turned to my wife and said, "Stephanie, it’s the thought police."

AMY GOODMAN: And they came in?

JOE IOSBAKER: They came in, and they proceeded to set up their operation in our living room, and they proceeded to photograph every room in our house. And over the next, I don’t know, thirty or forty-five minutes, they proceeded to label every room and then systematically go through every room, our basement, our attic, our children’s rooms, and pored through not just all of our papers, but our music collection, our children’s artwork, my son’s poetry journals from high school—everything.

AMY GOODMAN: And were they explaining to you what they were doing as they were raiding your house?

JOE IOSBAKER: There was—there were—some of the officers, you know, were telling us what they were doing. Most of them were not. But they gave us some explanation.

AMY GOODMAN: What exactly did they say to you?

JOE IOSBAKER: Well, they—all they said in terms of the content of what they were looking for is that they—you know, they showed us the search warrant, and I was—my wife and I were both subpoenaed, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: What organizations are you involved with, Joe? What do you think they’re looking for?

JOE IOSBAKER: Well, as you said at the start, I’m a trade unionist primarily. That’s how most people know me. I’m also the staff adviser at UIC for the Students for a Democratic Society chapter.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s University of Illinois, Chicago.

JOE IOSBAKER: Correct. And, you know, I’ve been a political activist for thirty-three years, so I’ve been a member of a lot of organizations and campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Coleen Rowley, you’re a former FBI agent, whistleblower, named Time Person of the Year in 2002. Can you explain what you think is happening here? And also, put it in the context of this very interesting Justice Department IG—Inspector General—report that has just come out on their surveillance of whistleblowers—rather, the surveillance of activists over the last almost decade.

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, I can’t really detail all of the legal factors that have changed since 9/11, but there simply has been a sea change. For instance, when I taught constitutional rights in the FBI, one of the main top priorities was First Amendment rights. And while this is not the first time that you’ve seen this Orwellian turn of the war on terror onto domestic peace groups and social justice groups—actually, we had that begin very quickly after 9/11, and there were legal opinions, Office of Legal Counsel opinions, that said the First Amendment no longer controls the war on terror—but even so, this is shocking and alarming that at this point we have the, you know, humanitarian advocacy now being treated as somehow material support to terrorists.

We’ve also just seen, ironically, four days before this national raid, we saw the Department of Justice Inspector General issue a report that soundly criticized the FBI for four years of targeting domestic groups such as Greenpeace, the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, different antiwar rallies, even involving a finding that the FBI director had given them a falsehood to Congress as to the justification for the FBI to monitor a peace group.

AMY GOODMAN: What about what’s happened in Iowa, Coleen Rowley?

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, that’s another instance. And that one is actually after the scope of the IG investigation. The IG investigation only went to 2006. There have been requests for that IG to go further. Obviously there’s been four more years. And in 2008, we found out through a Freedom of Information request that there’s 300 pages of—I think it was four or five, six agents trailing a group of students in Iowa City to parks, libraries, bars, restaurants. They even went through their trash. So, this is another reason why peace groups, and certainly law professors, have to be very concerned now about this misinterpretation that says advocacy for human-rights—I just have to mention, we have a famous Minnesotan who wrote Three Cups of Tea. And he obviously sets up schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. His name is Greg Mortenson. Obviously, people like him and Jimmy Carter are even at peril, given this wide discretion now to say that anyone who works in a foreign country, even for peace or humanitarian, anti-torture purposes, could somehow run afoul of the PATRIOT Act.

AMY GOODMAN: The Church Committee in the 1970s really blew the lid open on CIA spying at home, and also guidelines then, regulations, were passed afterwards. How do they apply today, when Americans are being surveilled, infiltrated, spied on at home?

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, that’s another one of the factors, besides this Supreme Court ruling. Right after 9/11, the Attorney General began to erode those guidelines. He basically said that FBI agents could go into mosques and places like that to monitor, so that was the beginning. The very—almost the last official act that Bush did in 2008 was that he totally erased those prior AG guidelines. There is really no need to even show factual justification now. The presumption is entirely reversed. And basically the FBI need only say that they were not targeting—that they were not targeting a group solely based on their exercise of First Amendment rights. So the presumption really did, again, a complete flip-flop.

And, of course, that’s why you see these various scandals now coming out. It should be no surprise to someone that if there’s no restraints, the green light is on, that you see, of course—I actually kind of sympathize with the FBI. I used to train these agents, and I can understand the enormous pressure they’re under. And, of course, this is why it’s so incredibly important to get the word to the officials who are in charge of using their discretion that they should use their discretion to look for real terrorists instead of to go after peace groups.

AMY GOODMAN: Jess Sundin, what are your plans now? I mean, over the weekend I saw online the video of your mass emergency meeting—many people came out for this, rallying around—and also talked about the RNC 8, the eight people who were preemptively arrested in the lead-up to the Republican convention, all charged on terror counts. All of those terror counts have been dropped now. But it certainly was a very frightening time. What are your plans now?

JESS SUNDIN: Well, as you mentioned, in the Twin Cities we had a meeting the night that the raids happened. There were more than 200 people who gathered, and really every organization in the Twin Cities. But I’d say countless organizations across the country have contacted us to ask us how they can help. There will be, today and tomorrow, as you mentioned earlier, demonstrations in at least twenty cities around the country. We’ve had word of plans for demonstrations at embassies in other countries, as well, at US embassies.

So, one of the things we’re doing is trying to call attention to what’s happened and really make it clear to people that we have done nothing wrong. There is no basis to the claim that we’ve in any way given support to terrorist organizations. But in fact, we are being—we are being—there is attention on us because of our work in the antiwar movement, and in particular, our perspective of solidarity with people in the countries where the US war and militarism are happening.

We, following up on these demonstrations, are going to be pulling together a network of people from many of these organizations that have expressed their concern. Folks who want to get tied into that can find us through the Anti-War Committee website, which is very outdated. We’re doing our best to get it up. Of course, as we explained, all of our computers were seized. So we’re doing a lot of catch up, trying to get ourselves organized.

And, of course, we’re also very concerned with making legal plans to protect ourselves. A number of people have been called before a grand jury in Chicago. And we, you know, don’t want to be—you know, a case to be framed up around us. All of us are quite confident that nothing that was found in our homes will give substantiation to the claims against us. And there’s, in fact, no charges against us. But we want to do everything we can to both protect ourselves legally while at the same time working with the movement to call attention to what’s happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Iosbaker, I wanted to ask you about the other house that was raided. Just looking at an AP piece, FBI agents in Chicago took a laptop and documents from the home of Palestinian American antiwar activist Hatem Abudayyeh, who is the executive director of the Arab American Action Network. His attorney, Jim Fennerty, said, The government’s trying to quiet activists. The case is really is scary," he said. Abudayyeh is an American citizen. Can you talk about your work on Israel-Palestine, who Hatem Abudayyeh is?

JOE IOSBAKER: Well, I actually have to talk about my wife’s work. My wife is a longtime solidarity activist in the Palestine solidarity movement. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Stephanie Weiner.

JOE IOSBAKER: Correct. She was also subpoenaed. And really everyone in the antiwar movement in Chicago knows Hatem. You know, if you look back online at video of the protests here of thousands of people marching when Israel assaulted Gaza two years ago, Hatem was the emcee at almost every major rally. And the Arab American Action Network was the first center of the Arab community in the city, founded back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So Hatem is the most prominent Palestinian activist in the city of Chicago. It’s no surprise that they targeted him.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re organizing, Joe Iosbaker, around Colombia. In a minute we’ll be joined by Ingrid Betancourt, who was, well, as you know, held captive—

JOE IOSBAKER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —for more than six years. But what about your work around Colombia, since it seems that Israel-Palestine and Colombia were major focuses of this FBI raid?

JOE IOSBAKER: Well, I actually think that I should defer that question to Jess, who has much more experience in Colombia solidarity work.

AMY GOODMAN: Jess Sundin in Minneapolis.

JESS SUNDIN: Yeah, the antiwar movement has long been concerned with places that the US funds wars abroad, and there’s a major civil war unfolding in Colombia, and it’s the third-largest recipient of US military aid, so Colombia is very much an issue for the antiwar movement. I have traveled to Colombia and understand that it’s the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. And, in fact, anyone involved in the social movement there is viewed by the government, as well as the paramilitary death squads, as a rebel and treated as such. And so, I know that the investigation is very interested in travel—I have traveled to Colombia—and [it] tried to establish some sort of organizational ties, which there aren’t. But that said, I do support the Colombian struggle and have been very involved in that.

AMY GOODMAN: Coleen Rowley, how do civil rights compare, what you’re seeing today under the Obama administration, to President Bush, someone you certainly blew the whistle on?

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, I can’t talk for another couple hours here, because that’s how long it would take me. I actually urged the FBI from early on—I even wrote a chapter, "Civil Liberties and Effective Investigation." And unfortunately, these warnings have just been largely—of myself and many others—have been largely ignored. Even the 9/11 Commission focused—three of their recommendations, out of forty-one, were on creating a privacy and civil liberties oversight board. And Bush pulled the rug from under that board early on. And Obama, two years later, has never appointed any people, any of the five seats to that board, which is just incredible in light of what’s gone on, even including the revelations of torture and warrantless monitoring.

What people need to do is to basically ask for more than just an IG investigation. They need to ask for Congress to actually take on something like a new Church Committee. And that’s actually been asked for. Barbara Lee, I think, actually had a proposal a year ago for something like that. So we should all contact our elected representatives and ask for Congress to take on greater oversight of this—what’s going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will certainly continue to follow this case as it unfolds. I want to thank you, Coleen Rowley, former FBI agent, whistleblower, named Time Person of the Year in 2002. Jess Sundin and Joe Iosbaker, thanks so much for being with us. I know this is a very difficult time for you. Both of their homes were raided, computers, notes, other things taken. That happened on Friday morning. And, of course, we’ll continue to follow both these cases.

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