Marjorie Cohn Transcript

January 19, 2008

Announcer: You’ve been listening to Sound Authors, where authors sound off. If you’d like more information about Sound Authors and Dr. Kent’s guests, visit soundauthors.com, now, back to Dr. Kent and friends.

Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to the show this beautiful, sunny day out in New York. My next guest on the show is a professor of law.Her new book is called “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.” And I’d like to start out with a little quote that tops her website, which says, “So, was there a need for yet another anti-Bush book? Well, it turns out there was.” That was written by William Fisher.Welcome to the show, Marjorie.

Marjorie Cohn: My pleasure, Kent.

Kent: And give me a little nutshell about your book before we start.

Marjorie: Well, I thought it was important to have a volume that people could carry around with them that would lay out, in very readable terms, how the Bush administration is breaking the law.And many people say, “Well, why did you just limit it to six ways?” Of course, there are many more than six, but I wanted it to be something that was affordable and didn’t look like Webster’s unabridged dictionary.

Kent: [laughs]

Marjorie: So I identified what I thought were the six most egregious examples of lawbreaking: the war of aggression in Iraq, the torture of prisoners, summary execution and willful killing, the Guantanamo gulag, spying on Americans, and refusing to execute the law.

Kent: Wow. That’s quite a list. And I’m sure, in your head, it took a long time to compile that to just six reasons.

Marjorie: It did. And I write almost weekly articles on my blog that you just mentioned, and so I’ve really been studying this all along, ever since Bush became president.And it wasn’t so hard to write the book, because I just continued to chronicle what I had already been…I mean, the news comes out on almost a daily basis that demonstrates this lawbreaking.And as soon as I wrote the book, it was out of date, because then we had the US attorney firing scandal, the new attorney general who says he doesn’t know whether water-boarding is torture even though everyone else does know that it is, and the torture tape cover-up scandal now, which is being investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice. And the list goes on and on and on.

Kent: So, if this presidency has been such a debacle in so many ways–and all the American people even read about this in the daily paper–how was nothing done, and why?

Marjorie: Well, I think the primary problem is that, since 9/11–and I don’t believe that Bush planned 9/11, although I think he’s taken advantage of it to ram through Congress a number of things, such as the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq war, the Military Commissions Act, the so-called Protect America Act.But every time he wants something done, he waves the 9/11 flag, I think, in an insult to the victims and the families 9/11, and says, “We need this so I can keep you safe.”And in fact, the things that he’s doing don’t keep us safe; they make us less safe, by incurring more wraths against the United States.When people in other countries see the Iraq war, which has claimed not just almost 4, 000 Americans but, by some accounts, more than a million Iraqis, when they see the torture taking place, they hate America even more.

Kent: Absolutely.

Marjorie: But what Bush has done is to succeed in keeping Congress terrorized, so that if Congress does not go along with what he wants and give him all these things, then they’re soft on terror. And I think that’s the problem.

Kent: So, one thing. I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about politics. I lived in the Middle East for a time, in Jerusalem. And it’s so sad for me to hear: a million people. Where does that figure come from, and is it valid, in your opinion?

Marjorie: Well, it comes from a group… The British journal, “The Lancet” said, I believe it was almost two years ago, that there were more than 650, 000 excess Iraqi deaths.That is, above and beyond the Iraqis who died from the punishing sanctions of the Clinton administration actually was responsible for, since the beginning of this so-called Operation Iraqi freedom?

Kent: Wow.

Marjorie: And recently, the organization called Just Foreign Policy has estimated that more than one million Iraqis have been killed since this Operation Iraqi Freedom began.In fact, the Australian-born journalist John Pilger wrote: “The scale of death caused by the British and US governments may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the single biggest act of mass murder of the late-20th century and the 21st century.” Those are pretty strong words.

Kent: That’s certainly true. I’m getting the chills here. I had one of my friends killed brutally. He was an Arab-Israeli and was killed because he went the wrong way in a demonstration.And I think of that one person, and I see his face. It’s amazing to think that a million people, and that the American people wouldn’t know about that. Maybe it is coming through the media. I read the German newspaper and things like that, and it does come through there. But why doesn’t it come through mainstream media?

Marjorie: That’s a great question. Also, we don’t see the caskets coming back of American soldiers. I think that the Bush administration learned a lesson during Vietnam, which is that if you put on television what’s really happening that the American people are not going to stand for it.So, not only don’t we see the caskets of American soldiers–and Bush does not go to funerals of American servicemen and women, because he doesn’t want the press coverage…

Kent: Wow.

Marjorie: He doesn’t want people to know about that. But we don’t see the images that they see in the Arab and Muslim world, they see on Al Jazeera: pictures of Iraqi children blown apart by American bombs.

Kent: Not even. I saw that one…

Marjorie: We don’t see that. We’re shielded from that by the corporate media.

Kent: One of the most formative experiences of my life was being in Jerusalem, actually lived in Bethlehem behind the Palestinian lines of course.I speak Arabic and all that, and I was living in a happy little world, and then all of a sudden when I watched the TV, it wasn’t the Olympics anymore. It was pictures of people being shot, and it is a horrible thing to see that on television, but at the same time, at least you see it.

Marjorie Cohn: Right. Speaking of Bethlehem and the Palestinians, I just want to say one thing, and that is that after 9/11, the tragedy on 9/11 where we were attacked by 19 men who blew themselves up, 15 of whom came from Saudi Arabia. None of them came from Iraq or Iran by the way.The 9/11 commission did an exhaustive study about why we were attacked and why we didn’t know about it, but they really didn’t ask the primary question.Which is, why did these men all sacrificed their lives? Why did they hate the United States so much?So, I did a little research, and I thought, “Well, I’d go right to the horse’s mouth, ” and so I read what Osama Bin Laden had written, and of course, I’m no fan of Osama Bin Laden, but I thought maybe that would give me a clue to why 9/11 happened?Sure enough, the three main gripes of Osama Bin laden were number one, the presence of US troops, foreign troops in the holy land, Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Where Mecca and Medina, the two holy Muslim sites are.The second was the punishing sanctions, the deaths of more than a million Iraqis during the 90s from these punishing sanctions.The third pet peeve of Osama Bin Laden was Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Of course, Bush has given lip service to that conflict, he has no intention of really helping to honestly broker any kind of peace, and Congress has been complicit in that.When Israel invaded Lebanon, not last summer, but the summer before, the senate unanimously passed a resolution praising Israel for its restraint in not hurting Palestinian civilians and yet condemning the Hezbollah rather, and yet condemning Hezbollah.In fact, the majority of civilians that were killed were killed by Israel.So, you have the very strong Israel lobby, the APAC, which Joe Lieberman is very close to, and Joe Lieberman wants to attack Iran, because for some reason Israel thinks that Iran poses a threat to it, even though Iran has not invaded not any other country or threatened to invade Israel or the United States. Iran hasn’t invaded any other country for hundreds of years.Yet, if you see all the major candidates, they talk about Israel’s foreign policy uncritically and they criticize the Palestinians, so I think that there is - and Israel is kind of a sacred cow in that sense, but what’s happening is that, that uncritical support of Israel and the lack of criticism is really hurting the Jewish people I think more than helping them, because it makes them more vulnerable.What its doing is, it’s also making us less safe and more vulnerable to terrorism, because they aren’t really getting at the real reason why people resent the fact that there are foreign troops in their lands killing their people.

Kent Gustavson: Wow. Professor Marjorie Cohn’s new book is called ‘Cowboy Republic - Six Ways the Bush Gang has defied the Law’. In closing here, let’s talk a little bit about - in such a time of change — but we have another year of the presidency.I think today or yesterday, the new president inaugurated. Why are we focused on the new person, and we just give our president free reign, and how you call them the Bush gang?

Marjorie Cohn: Well, that’s a really good question, because the media has just seized upon the campaign like it’s a horse race. Who’s ahead today? It’s like a basketball game.It keeps everybody all excited, but really what’s going on behind the scenes is that Bush has no intention of ever leaving Iraq, and that was clear, because he is building his mega military bases.He’s negotiating an agreement for a permanent US military presence there to encourage the flow of foreign investments to Iraq and preferential treatment for US investments. That’s what operation Iraqi freedom is all about.Meanwhile, I fear that he is going to invade Iran, even though at the unanimous consensus of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies in the national intelligence estimate recently said that Iran is not pursuing any program of nuclear weapons, and the UN has said that there is no evidence they ever have.Yet, there is this incident in the Straits of Hormuz, where the U.S. was saying that the Iranians were threatening the U.S. ships, and now it turns out they weren’t, and that became very close to a provocation for war between Iran and the U.S., but Dick Cheney really, really wants to go into Iran and change its regime and go after its so called nuclear sites.I fear that even though we have this national intelligence estimate, where our intelligence agencies say Iran is not a threat that Bush is going to do that, when everybody is focusing their attention on these presidential candidates.

Kent Gustavson: Well, we will hope for the best and do what we can as individuals here. I really appreciated speaking with you. My guest is Professor Marjorie Cohn; her new book is called ‘Cowboy Republic - Six Ways the Bush Gang has defied the Law’. You can check out her wonderful blog at www.marjoriecohn.com. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Marjorie Cohn: My pleasure Kent.

Kent Gustavson: My next guest is Susan Jones, a health expert to give us some tips here in January. How can we keep our New Years resolutions? Come on back.

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