>> tom engelhardt, i just wanted to say that i am a very proud supporter of hay market books. that old saying that the press is only free if you own one. and when hay market was created, it really was like the people

had a press to do stories, to tell stories and to produce books that had a social justice focus that were not interested in a trickle-down telling of history, but a rising-up telling of history. and i think it's very fitting that someone like tom engelhardt would be publishing with hay market books because it really is a match made in rebellion. [laughter] for years i, actually, thought tom engelhardt's name was tomdispatch -- [laughter] because i subscribed to this wonderful newsletter that was, it was covering the issues of the day, but covering them in a way that was totally anathema to the way the corporate media functions in this society, getting in-depth, tapping experts, highlighting whistleblowers, analyzing u.s. policy, and i think that tomdispatch is some of the deaths we have to offer in this country in terms of citizen journalism and journalism that challenges not only a sort of

duopoly, but also challenges corporate media outlets on their own turf. and i think if you haven't heard of tomdispatch or have signed up for that newsletter, you most certainly should. but, of course, his name is not tom dispatch, his name is tom engelhardt, and the book we're here to celebrate tonight is "the united states of fear." i had the honor of helping tom launch his last book, "the american way of war," and, you know, i generally don't like it when authors read from their books. i would rather just hear them talk. i was so just taken with the passion of tom engelhardt when he was reading from his last book, i'm very excited to hear him read a couple of excerpts from his current book. beyond being a great writer, tom is an incredible editor, and he's edited books that probably many of you in this room have read through the american empire series of metropolitan books. he's edited noam chomsky, andrew

bacevich, some of the leading, dissident minds in the united states. if we lived in a more sane reality, the mind of tom engelhardt would be tapped by the national security apparatus to actually help analyze what u.s. policy should be around the world. and let's be clear about this, we live in a very dark moment in history. where the united states is simultaneously waging covert wars, overt wars, air wars, drone wars, economic wars on multiple continents and in scores of countries around the world. the u.s. announced, and there was much fanfare about the end of the iraq war. and yet we see iraq descending further and further into chaos, and the united states has this massive embassy there, and it's actually increasing the number of private contractors that are going to be operating in iraq as the official u.s. military withdraws. in afghanistan the united states is increasingly moving toward a front and centering of the most

lethal forces in the u.s. arsenal, those from the special operations command, the joint special operations command. all of america heard about the joint special operations command and seal team six because of the targeted assassination of osama bin laden. but, actually, the joint special operations command has been around for a long time and has been at the heart of some of the most lethal operations that the u.s. has carried out in declared battlefields and in undeclared battlefields, and we're going to be hearing a lot more from them in afghanistan because they're the lead force in doing the night raids, and that is the premier policy right now around the world, believing that there are a finite number of bad guys that simply need to be killed, and this problem is going to be softed. i just returned from a two week reporting trip in yemen where the united states has been increasing its bombing in that country not just through drones, but also through tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs. and i assure you that the civilians that are being killed in these bombings are fueling a

rage that will be very, very difficult to stamp out later down the line. in somalia where i was a few months ago, the united states is backing ruthless warlords, including some of them who were key al-qaeda allies at another point in their life and those that helped to destroy somalia in the first place in the early 1990s. the united states continues to be involved with secret prisons, including in somalia, in mogadishu. in pakistan, u.s. raids into pakistan continue, relations are deteriorating between the u.s. and pakistan because of these raids, and terrorism or the perceived threat of terrorism seems to be expanding in countries where the u.s. claims to be try trying to stamp it out. those two realities cannot be seen as separate from each other. we have to come to grips with the possibility, i would say the reality, that u.s. policy is actually fueling terrorism but also giving people a justifiable reason to be angry at the united states. and many all of the countries i've been traveling to in the

past two years, i've seen that in a very, very clear way. and one of the sources that i go to for serious analysis for people who are going to think outside of the box of conventional washington thinking -- i sound like mitt romney -- [laughter] but outside of the box of convention, i am definitely not a washington insider. [laughter] one of the, one of the places that i go regularly to read serious analysis and to be provoked in a very good way, um, is tomdispatch and the work of tom engelhardt. so, please, join me in giving a hearty welcome to the author of "the united states of fear," tom engelhardt. [applause] >> well, jeremy's kind of a stand-up guy, and i'm kind of a stand-down guy. i'm an editor. and it's rare in my life that i'm in front of any group of people like this, so i'm a

little relieved that i have something to read before we get to spontaneity. i'm assuming since i'm here in the arthur l. carter journalism institute that some of you are actually young journalists or journalists to be, and, of course, i'm about to have a conversation with an investigative journalist who regularly comes back with the goods. i'm impressed. i'm always impressed with great reporters. i've been a news jockey since i was a kid, and while i spend time endlessly online, i still read my hometown newspaper daily or nightly in print. i love the generosity of journalists, their willingness to go places i wouldn't or couldn't go and bring back experiences and worlds i couldn't otherwise -- i would otherwise have no way of entering. and when i speak about reporter generosity for the best of journalists anyway, i'm also referring to their skill and entering the world i live in every day and wresting from it stories i hadn't even imagined were there.

in my life i've known journalists as a book editor, and now as the guy who does tomdispatch.com. i publish their work, and for years i taught journalism graduate students every spring at the university of california berkeley. for a few years in my life, long, long, long ago, i even worked at a small west coast news service. but just to be clear, these days when someone refers to me as a journalist, i always deny it. i usually say that professionally speaking i'm a guy in a room which is, of course, a literal description of the essence of many i life. and by the way, i don't mean it as a putdown. i say it with some pride. i mean, if you think about it, jon stewart is also just a guy in a room. admittedly, he's got one heck of a room, and he's an awful lot funnier than i am, but still the fact is in our world -- which is often remarkably stifling when it comes to thinking about writing, about our politics, about the national security state, about what used to be called foreign policy but is now

more accurately thought of as global military policy -- we definitely need some guys in rooms even when, as with me, the rooms are very, very small. we need people willing to try to step back, ready to try to make their way out of the mass of trees and actually take in the woods we're largely lost in. my book, "the united states of fear," is really what one guy in such a room could produce in a year of reading, writing, talking and doing my best to consider our american world and the absurdities in it that are accepted as ordinary reality. as those of you who read tomdispatch know, i write long myself, and i like to run long, framework-style pieces at site -- by others, that is -- despite what everyone thinks about brevity, attention spans and the internet. before jeremy and i talk, i'm going to read you two pieces from the book. both, however, on the shorter side. the first, as you'll see, is really my thoughts about guys in rooms. i wrote it back in march 2010

well before our military was out of iraq and just after the supreme court issued its citizens united decision, but before it was utterly clear that the flood gates had been opened so wide that what might be called the politics of the rich in america would soon become simply american politics. i called it on being a critic, all the world's a stage for us. in march 2010 i wrote about a group of pundits and warrior journalists eager not to see the u.s. military leave iraq. that piece appeared on the op-ed page of the los angeles times, and in a longer version at tomdispatch.com. and then began wandering the media world. one of its stops, curiously enough, was the military newspaper "stars and stripes." from a military man came this e-mailed response: read your article in "stars and stripes." when was the last time you visited iraq? a critique in 15 well-chosen

words, so much more effective than the usual long, angry e-mails i get. and his point was interesting. at least it interested me. after all, as i wrote back, i was then a 65-year-old guy who had never been anywhere near iraq and undoubtedly never would be. i have to assume that my e-mailer had spent time there, possibly more than once, and disagreed with my assessments. firsthand experience is not to be taken lightly. what, after all, do i know about iraq? only the reporting i've been able to read from thousands of miles away or analysis found on the blogs of experts like juan cole. on the other hand, even from thousands of miles away i was one of many who could see enough by early 2003 to go into the streets and demonstrate against an onrushing disaster of an invasion that a lot of people theoretically far more knowledgeable on iraq than any of us considered just the cat's me you, the cake walk of the new century. it's true that i've never

strolled down a street in baghdad or ramadi or basra, armed or not, and that's a deficit. if you want to write about the american experience in iraq. it's also true that i haven't spent hours sipping tea with iraqi tribal leaders or been inside the green zone or set foot on even one of the vast american bases that the pentagon's private contractors built in that country. nor did that stop me from writing regularly about what i called and still call america's zigerots, when most of the people who visited those bases didn't consider places with 20-mile perimeters,pxst, ugandan mercenary guards to be particularly noteworthy structures on the iraqi landscape. and so, with rare exceptions, worth commenting on. i'm certainly no expert on shiites and sunnis, i'm probably a little foggy on my iraqi geography, and i've never seen the tigris or euphrates rivers. on the other hand, it does occur to me me that a whole raft of

military types who have spent time up close and personal in iraq or at least in the american version of the same couldn't have arrived at dumber conclusions over these last many years. so firsthand experience, valuable as it may be for great reporters like anthony shah deed of "the new york times" or patrick coburn of the british independent can't be the be-all and end-all either. sometimes being far away, not just from iraq, but from washington and all the cloistered thinking that goes on there from the visibly claustrophobic world of american policy making has its advantages. sometimes being out of it, experiencially speaking, allows you to take in the larger shape of things which is often the obvious, even if little noted. i can't help thinking about a friend of mine whose up close and personal take on u.s. military commanders in afghanistan was that they were trapped in an american-made box, incapable of seeing beyond its

boundaries of, that is, seeing afghanistan. i had no doubt that being there is generally something to be desired. but if you take your personal blinders with you, it often hardly matters where you are. thinking about my "stars and stripes" reader's question, the conclusion i've come to is this: it's not just where you go, it's also how you see what's there, and no less important, who you see that matters. which means that sometimes you can actually see more by going nowhere at all. an iraqi tragedy. when american officials, civilian or military, open their eyes and check out the local landscape no matter where they've landed, all evidence indicates that the first thing they tend to see is themselves. that is, they see the world as an american stage, and those native actors in countries we've invaded and occupied or where, as in pakistan, somalia and yemen, we conduct what might be called semi-war as so many bit players in an american drama.

this is why in both iraq and afghanistan military commanders and top officials like secretary of defense robert gates or national security adviser james jones continue to call so utterly unself-consciously for putting an iraqi or afghan face on whichever war was being discussed. that is, to follow the image to its logical conclusion, putting an iraqi or afghan mask over a face that they recognize, however inconveniently or embarrassingly as american. this is why american officials regularly say that afghans are in the lead when they aren't. this is why when you read newspaper descriptions of how the united states is giving afghan president hamid karzai the leading role in deciding about the latest military offensive or pushing such and such an official with his u.s. or western member to haves in the wings to take the lead in some action that seems ton of largely planned by americans, the afghans sound like so many puppets which doesn't actually mean that they are, and this

doesn't embarrass americans in the least. generally speaking, the american post-9/11 language of power, ostensibly aimed at building up the forces washington supports in muslim lands, invariably sounds condescending. they are always prefederal to us even when they are urged or prodded to be at the center of the action. this is why their civilians are referred to as collateral damage, an inconceivable way to describe american civilians in harm's way. this is why from the vietnam era to today in the movies that are made about our wars, even the anti-war ones, americans invariably hog center stage while you usually have to keep a careful watch to find passing evidence of those we are fighting against or for. this was why 40 years ago the vietnam war was regularly referred to here whether by hawks or doves as an american tragedy. not a vietnamese one. and why the same thinking applies to afghanistan and iraq today. this is why using imagery that

might have come out of the mouths of 19th century colonialists american officials long talk patronizingly about teaching the iraqi child to pedal the bike of democracy with us as global parents holding on to the bike's seat. donald rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, did this very vividly. it just stays in my mind. this is the context within which even a president -- and this was president bush -- wondered when to take off the training wheels. this is evidently why today the introduction of democracy to iraq is considered an american gift so precious that it somehow makes up for anything that's happened in the past eight years. this is why, for instance, pundit tom friedman could write this sentence about the u.s. prospect -- project in iraq: former president george w. bush's gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. like afghanistan before it, iraq is now largely the forgotten war -- here, that is -- and

here's a little of what's been forgotten in the process of what friedman suggests he'd prefer to leave to future historians to sort out; that the american invasion led to possibly hundreds of thousands of iraqi deaths, that literally millions of iraqis had to flee into exile abroad and millions more were turned into refugees in their own country, that the capital, baghdad, was ethnically cleanse inside a brutal conflict, that the country was littered with new killing fields, that a devastating insurgency roiled the land and still brings enough death and terror to baghdad to make it one of the more dangerous places on the planet, that a soaring unemployment rate and the lack of delivery of the most basic services -- including reliable electricity and potable water -- created nightmarish conditions for a vast class of impoverished iraqis, that the u.s. government for all its nation building boasts proved remarkably incapable of reconstructing the country or its oil industry even though american private contractors profited enormously from work on

both. that a full-scale, foreign military occupation left americans on 500 bases nationwide and in the largest embassy on the planet. the pride of us. in other words, as bad as saddam hussein was -- and he was a megalama knew call monster -- what followed him was a staggering catastrophe for iraq. even if americans no longer care to give it much thought. against the house that friedman would prefer to leave to history, however, stands one counterbalancing factor; the gift of democracy. even many who never supported george w. bush's democracy agenda now seem to take some pride in this. let's leave aside for a moment the fact that the bush administration arrived in iraq with remarkably undemocratic plans for the country and was thwarted only by the unwavering insistence of the revered shiite cleric on a one-person, one-vote election. in all of this there are staggering levels of hypocrisy;

in the fact that we were for saddam before we were against him, in the fact as well that the u.s. government has in instance after instance regularly fostered strongmen and dictators while overthrowing democracies not to our taste or not in what washington defined as our interests. perhaps stranger yet, the democracy that we actually have in the united states and so can offer as our ultimate apology for invading and occupying other countries is rarely subjected to analysis in the context of the glorious urge to export the same. so let's stop for a moment and think a little about the american urge to be thrilled that, despite every disaster, against all odds our grand accomplishment lies in bringing american democracy to iraq. the rectification of names. democracy, like terrorism, is a method, a means to an end. not an end in itself. nobody is ruled by elections any more than any organization is run by terror or as terror as

its ultimate goal. if this obvious point had been accepted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the absurdity of the idea of a global war on terror would have been self-evident as would a global-worded, delivered democracy to faraway peoples. democracy, after all, is a way to determine and then express the majoritarian will of a people, a way to deliver power to the people or, more important, for those people to take possession of it themselves. it's the sort of thing that by its nature is hard to import from great distances, especially when as in our case the delivery system to be exported seems strikingly deficient. and keep in mind that the people exporting that system to iraq were largely incapable of seeing the iraqis as actors in their own democratic drama. they were incapable, that is, of imagining the nature of the lives they wanted to shape and change. in a sense, that was hardly less true when they looked homeward. after all, the glorious democracy they trumpeted to the

world bore little relation to the packs of republicans headed by an imperial presidency complete with a cult of executive power that they dreamed of installing in washington for generations to come. given the nature of american democracy today, the first billion dollar presidential election, the staggering levels of lobbying and influence peddling that go with it, the stunning barrages of bizarre advertising, the increasingly corporate-owned and financed campaigns, a half-broken congressional system, a national security state with unparalleled powers and money, and so on, why all the effort to take it to iraq? why measure iraqis against it and find them lacking? after all, in 2000 our presidential election went to the non-majoritarian candidate thanks to the decisions made -- thanks to decisions made by supreme court justices appointed by his father. if this had happened in nigeria, afghanistan or perhaps iraq, we would know just what we were dealing with. the fact is, we have no word to adequately describe what at the

national level we still persist in calling democracy. what we regularly ask others to admire or bow down before. imperial china, when a new dynasty arrived on the scene, the emperor performed a ritual called the rectification of names in the belief that the previous dynasty had fallen in part because reality in the names we have for it -- the names they had for it had ceased to correspond. we in the united states undoubtedly now need such a ceremony. we certainly need a new term for our own democracy before we're so quick to hold it up as the paragon for others to match. we also need to rethink our language when it comes to the u.s. military undertaking nation building in distant lands as if countries could be constructed to our taste in just the way that kbr or dyncorp construct military bases in this them. so, no, i have never been to iraq. but, yes, i've been here for years watching, and i can see --

among other things -- that the american mirror on the wall which shows us ourselves in such beautiful detail has a few cracks in it. it looks fragile. i'd think twice about sending it abroad too often. now, for my second reading tonight i chose a personal piece about a summit that's been in the news repeatedly in recent years but only in the strangest and most limited of ways. one of the bizarre spectacles of our american moment has been this: nuclear weapons and nuclear politics only manifest themselves in the one fashion in our news and what passes for popular discussion, punditry and political debate. i'm talking, of course, about the iranian bomb, the one that we can't stop yakking about, writing about, beating the war drums over, learning about or fretting over almost daily. the one that doesn't exist. it's the nuclear weapon that isn't. there's no evidence that the iranians are moving to build

nuclear weapons at the moment. at worst, our intelligence services suggest that they are moving toward what's called breakout capacity, the ability to build a weapon relatively quickly if a decision to do so were made. nonetheless, this is the only nuclear weapon in the world other than in brief moments the perfectly real north korean ones that get any significant attention. the united states at last count possesses 5,113 nuclear warheads. russia, similar thousands. about ourselves, as about the russians or the israelis who probably have a couple of hundred in their all-too-real arsenal, we evidently have no doubts or worries. we certainly trust ourselves implicitly though we are, of course, the only country ever to use such weapons. the recent pentagon budget cuts -- and you'd have to put that word "cuts" in quotes -- as of now involve no cuts to our arsenal. and about it no one demands

anything. no one panics, no one thinks about going to war, nor do we fret about, say, the indian nuclear arsenal whose further development washington has aided and abetted even though the south asian subcontinent is probably the place on the planet where nuclear weapons are most likely to be used. in any case, with all that in mind and given the fact that from childhood i've had what we used to call the bomb -- and we put it in caps deny -- on the brain, i thought i would read this piece tonight as another hi hiroshima anniversary rolled around. it's called "the nuclear story that refuses to go away." even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in new york ground zero -- once a term reserved for an atomic blast -- americans have never really come to grips either with the atomic bombings or hiroshima and nagasaki, or with the nuclear age they ushered in. as the big bang that might end it all, the atomic bomb haunted

cold war america. in those years while the young -- myself included -- watched endless versions of nuclear disaster transmuted into b horror films, the grown-ups who ran our world went on a vast shopper spree for world-ending weaponry, building nuclear arsenals that came to number in the tens of thousands. when the cold war quietly ended, however, a nuclear peace dividend never quite arrived. the arsenals of the former superpower adversaries remain choirfully in place, drawn down but strangely untouched, awaiting a new mission while just beyond sight the knowledge of the making of such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own threatening mini-cold wars. even 50 years after that first bomb went off over hiroshima, it still proved impossible in the united states to agree upon a nuclear creation tale. it was august 6, 1945, the heroic ending to a global war or the horrific beginning of a new

age? the e knoll la bay, the plane who shattered lunchboxes could not yet, it turned out, inhabit the same exhibit space of the smithsonian in washington d.c. still, for people of a certain age -- like me -- hiroshima is where it all began. so i would like to try once again to lay out the pieces of a nuclear story that none of us, it seems, can yet quite tell. in my story there are three characters and no dialogue. there's my father who volunteered at age 35 for the army air corps, immediately after the japanese attack on pearl harbor. he fought in burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences and died on pearl harbor day in 1983. then there's me, growing up in a world in which my father's war was glorified everywhere and which my play fantasies in any work included mowing down japanese soldiers but whose nightmares were of nuclear

destruction. finally, a japanese boy whose name and fate are unknown to me. this is a story of multiple silences, the first of those the silence of my father, was once no barrier to the stories i told myself. if anything, his silence enhanced them since in the 1950s male silence seemed a heroic attribute. and perhaps it was, though hardly in the way i imagined at the time. sitting in the dark with him then at any world war ii movie was enough for me. as it turned out, though, the only part of his war i possessed was its final act, and around this, too, there grew a puzzling silence. the very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. like other school children, i went through nuclear drills with sirens howling outside while, i had no doubt, he continued to work unfazed in his office. it was i who watched the irradiated ants, the nuclearized monsters of our teenage screen

lights stomp the earth. it was i who went to the french film where i was shocked by my first sight of the human casualties and to catch a glimpse of how the world might actually end. it was i who saw the mushroom cloud rise in my dreams before i awoke. of all this i said not a word to him, nor he to me. on his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. he hated the japanese with a war-bred passion. they had, he told me, done things that could not be discussed to boys he had known. subsequent history, the american occupation of japan or the emergence of that defeated land as an ally, did not seem to touch him. his hatred of all things japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood, but only because japan was so absent from our lives. there was nothing japanese in our house, one did not buy their products. we avoided the only japanese restaurant in our part of town, and no japanese ever came to visit. in the end, i followed my own

path to hiroshima, drawn perhaps to the world my father had so vehemently rejected. in 1979 as an editor i published "unforgettable fire: the drawings of hiroshima residents who had lived through that day." the first time any sizable number of images of the human damage there made it into american mainstream culture. i visited japan in 1982 thanks to the book's japanese editor who took me to hiroshima, an experience i found myself unable to talk about on return. this, too, became part of the silence as -- silences my father and i shared. to make a story thus far would seem relatively simple. two generations face each other across the chasm of a war and an act that divided them. it is the story we all know, and yet there is my third character and third silence, the japanese boy who drifted back into my con scienceness only a few years ago. i no longer remember how he and

i were put into contact sometime in the mid 1950s. like me, my japanese pen pal must have been 11 or 12 years old. i have no memory of his face, nor does a name come to mind. if i can remember writing my own address at that age, new york city, new york, usa, planet earth, solar system, galaxy, the universe. i can't remember writing his. i already knew by then that a place called albany was the capital of new york state, but new york city still seemed to me the center of the world, and in many ways i wasn't wrong. even if he lived in tokyo, my japanese pen pal could have had no such illusions. like me, he had undoubtedly been born during world war ii, perhaps in his first year of life he had been evacuated from one of japan's charred cities. for him that disastrous war would not have been a memory. if he had gone to the movies with his father in the 1950s,

he might have seen godzilla, and he might have hardly remembered those economically-difficult first years of american occupation. but he could not at that time have imagined himself at the center of the universe. i have a faint memory of the feel of his letters, a cinkly thinness undoubtedly to save money. we wrote, of course, in english for much of the planet, if not the solar system, galaxy, universe was beginning to operate in that universal language that seemed to radiate like the rays of the sun. but what i most remember are the exotic-looking stamps that arrived on or in the his letters, for i was with my father an avid stamp collector. on sunday afternoons my father and i prepared and mounted our stamps and pasted them in. in this way, the japanese section of our album was filled with that boy's offerings without comment, but also without protest from my father. we exchanged letters, none of which remain, for a year or two

and then, who knows? what interest of mine or his overcame us. perhaps only the resistance boys can have to writing letters. in any case, he too entered a realm of silence. only now remembering those quiet moments of closeness when my father and i worked on our albums do i note that he existed briefly and without discussion in our lives. he existed for both of us perhaps in the ambiguous space that silence can create. and now i wonder sometimes what kinds of nuclear dreams my father may have had. for all of us the earth was knocked off its axis on august 6, 1945. in that one moment, my father's war ended, and my war -- the cold war -- began. but in my terms it seems so much messier than that. for we and that boy continue to live in the same world together for a long time accepting and embroidering each other's silences. when i think of him now, when i realize that he, my father and i still can't inhabit the same

story except in silence, a strange kind of emotion rushes up in me which is hard to explain. the bomb still runs like a fissure, but also like an attracting current, a secret unity through our lives. the torn history was deep, and the generational divide kevin the experiences of those growing up on either side of it profound, but either story would have to hold the waves in which we lived through it all together in pain, hatred, love and, most of all, silence. so now to -- [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> give us one moment to set up the mic here.

[inaudible conversations] >> okay. well, thank you very much, tom. i, you know, tom was reading his, the second essay at a part, i both read it and i've heard you read it before, i was sort of drifting off into other war scenes that we've all experienced collectively over these years. not just under the bush administration, but also now the reality that we're living in. and if you think about it, we remain a world on fire. you started off by talking about the fire of the nuclear bomb, but we truly are in a world on fire. the uprisings throughout the arab world, the uprising in the united states, the occupy movement here, the situation in syria which deteriorates by the

moment, the reality from libya that united states still believes in regime change by force. you have an expanding air war in pakistan, in yemen, in somalia. you have night raids, you have an expansion of the use of special operations forces. and yet we remember the pledges that president obama made when he was candidate obama, how he was going to dismantle the bush doctrine, and he was going to reengage the world. and, indeed, the first several executive orders that he issued dealt with dismantling parts, key parts of the torture apparatus in the united states. pledges to close guantanamo. the united states doesn't torture, bottom line. in fact, he gave that speech at the national archives. and yet if we fast forward to where we are now and we look at it, how big of a break have we

seen from the bush doctrine when it comes to foreign policy? >> well, i think up until recently there was relatively little break. i mean, that is -- i would put it this way, in the bush administration we already saw a break from the bush doctrine. that is, you have the first bush years, and then you have what i would call the gates doctrine which was kind of a management doctrine for the disaster of the bush doctrine -- >> referring to defense secretary robert gates. >> defense secretary robert gates. and, and, of course, when obama came in, the first signal of what was going to happen was he kept gates, and he took as his national security adviser someone who was a friend of john mccain's. so in a sense we knew. i mean, the one thing i can proudly say is that within two weeks after obama had taken over, i wrote a piece called "don't let barack obama break your heart," because i could already see at least in what we used to call foreign policy where he was going. and what you had for those first few years was you really had a

continuation of the latter period of the latter bush years, you know, the ongoing two wars, the -- a ratcheting up of counterterror and so on and so forth. i think we have gotten to a point something is changing now. that's what i think. i think it's almost a tectonic moment. partially because, first of all, it's a word nobody likes in this country generally, but let's say it: defeat. you know? we were defeated in iraq. you know? the greatest army on earth was the greatest military, i mean, this was, this was -- the bush people were romantics about the american military. they thought it could do anything. and it turned out it could destroy a lot, it just couldn't build a damn thing. and in the end it had to leave. it left iraq, and we've seen just the other day the embassy staff is now being slashed maybe by half. we can see that iraq is fading and that the iraq that's left -- while a total mess, is also closer to iran than it ever would have been under any

circumstances. so iraq is kind of a goner in that sense. afghanistan, you can feel their urge to get those troops out of afghanistan. not the special forces people and so on and so forth, but afghanistan is going too. we had this week this lieutenant colonel, this truth teller -- >> daniel. >> daniel davis writing a piece, and it got a lot of attention. he wrote a piece saying everything that the military people were saying in iraq -- in afghanistan was a lie. you know? and he said i have been on the ground for a year, and i have seen nothing of success, not a bit of it. okay, so that was interesting, that got a lot of attention. what didn't get attention and i thought was truly interesting was that his piece -- which was like a whistleblower piece -- appeared in armed forces journals. and that tells me that there are a lot of people in the military who know that afghanistan is an utter disaster too. so you've got two war disasters. the answer is we're now heading into a new period, and it's really your period, jeremy, where we're heading what i call

offshore. literally offshore, i mean, in the sense that, you know, it's going to be the navy offshore in terms of the air force and drones, skies, but also as i wrote recently we're heading offshore of national sovereignty. we're trying to create a new american way of war, i would say -- i mean, it's been coming for a long while, and you've been reporting on it, but a new way of american war in which from wherever we are we can bust into any country, and only one country on earth has sovereignty. that's us, of course. >> one of, i think, the key moments in the history of the obama administration's foreign policy that it's gotten almost no media attention is when david petraeus was the commander of centcom, u.s. central command, and the area for central command extends to the entire middle and for a period -- now it's under -- [inaudible] but for a period it also included east africa, so it was somalia and the u.s. had a base

in jabuti that they took over from the french and reformed into a cia and special operations forces base that was used to strike inside of somalia. but when pray cruz was the centcom commander, he issued, he authorized something called the aqn execute order in september of 2009. and it was a limited-view, paper-only order that was, that authorized commanders in the field to have far greater latitude, u.s. military commanders in the field, to conduct lethal operations outside of the stated battlefields of iraq and afghanistan. and what it represented was an obama administration co-signing of an earlier order that was issued under bush at the end of '03-'04. but that piece of paper was a key moment in september 2009 when the obama administration said we, we believe in the supreme right of the united states to militarily attack in

any country anywhere in the world where we determine there to be a authorrist threat. and -- terrorist threat. and it's part of the military justification, and it's the justification given to congress also, when the military strikes in yemen -- because, remember, there were cruise missile attacks in yemen in december of 2009 just after that order was issued that killed tremendous numbers of civilians. they missed their so-called targets. those were military operations. they were not briefed to the intelligence committee. it's a circumvention of any effective oversight. and you move toward where we are now, president obama signed a lethal authorization, a lethal finding to conduct a targeted assassination of a united states citizen, anwar al-awlaki, in yemen. he also killed an#ó

. >> would not be a pariah. he would be a guy where people were saying, oh, let's listen to

glenn greenwald, how it's glenn greenwald -- he's the salon.com columnist and a wonderful mind -- he would be viewed as, you know, the serious person that he is, and as he was taken by those same people under bush, and now he's become a symbol of, well, those people are irreconcilables, and they must want mitt romney to be president or newt gingrich to be president. he's normalized these policies for a huge number of liberals including killing our own citizens with no trial. >> well, there was a recent washington post/abc poll which showed that, i mean, among some figures that were a lot better, it showed that 83% of americans including, like, significant 50-odd percent of liberal democrats were in favor of drone strikes wherever -- i mean, it was actually a higher figure than that. it was 83% for killing awlaki, it was maybe in the 50s. 65%, actually.

so those were striking figures. i mean, along with that when 78% of americans who if not weren't for withdrawal from afghanistan, they were definitely for major drawdown. so this, i think, to a lot of americans looks like the easier, cleaner, you know, less casualty-filled, less expensive path. and i think in a way it looks that way to the obama administration too. conceptually, what it's done and what it's doing is to turn the glow into, you know, in vietnam there were certain areas of vietnam during the vietnam war that were called free-fire zones were you could just -- where you could just, in essence, fire at anything if you were an american soldier, whatever. ..

but he got more publicity than any american general since my car there may be or ike. he then was made partially public on obama's part in terms of the american politics that he was made the cia director, and he has -- so you have not a civilian but a military man being made the cia director ian he wedged himself into the shadow. so there are no profiles. he's hardly written about. he goes up and testify as at the same time what you now have increasingly behind the scene in the 60's to use to call in the

shadows. we see the american war going into the shadows and petraeus is part of that. he is a man who relied in iraq and afghanistan on the special operations forces, killer teams, my grades and drones the he's now running the cia which specializes in, you know, drones, guillotines and so on and so forth and he's coordinated with the military. so you have those rules melted. and to add to that one thing and this is an area you are deeply into. when we talk about osama bin laden and the elite 16, we think of it as some little group, but the special operations forces are now part-time and full-time 60,000. the secret army, the cia developing within the military itself in the coming into the shadows and this is an ominous

development. >> you have different tiers of operators in the special operations committee. you have whether sort of the vanilla special operations and then you have people that essentially effectively operate as a private army under the direct orders of the president, the commander in chief, the somali pirates for instance were taken down in april, 2009 and three guys down. that was obama on the phone with the commanders authorizing that kill in progress and what happened is we've taken people that in the 1980's when the u.s. was engaged in the war in central america, the contra war and guatemalans and elsewhere these were the guys that existed in the shadows and no one in the military wanted much to do with them and they were not going to elevate in the u.s. chain of

command. when general christa, the commander of the obligations command from 2003 to 2008 was appointed the commander of the u.s. operations in afghanistan president obama took someone who was generally regarded as a shadow figure and put them in charge of the entire war and saw the dramatic expansion in the number of night raids and the number of targeted kill operations the were going on in the ground in afghanistan. that made them the premier part of the machine rather than the sort of last resort where the guys we dare not speak of are now met the vanguard of the whole thing and let's remember that the beginning of the bush administration, bush and rumsfeld and cheney came in and bush and rumsfeld in particular view of the cia as a liberal institution that needed to be put in the corner and so they dismantled the cooperation between the cia and the special operations forces, and they create a beat out of the stock in doing about from the special

operations. petraeus brought the whole thing full circle in the cia, so obama now has the full spectrum dominance going on with the forces that bush and cheney spent several years trying to decide and that's the reality that we are in right now. >> i also want to point something out and ask you about this, and it might be a little outside of your lane but i know you cover this on dispatch. the discussion right now about israel possibly attacking iran and the fact that we are seeing all of these iranian scientists being assassinated with very sophisticated explosive devices, motorcycles, they put them on the car that scientist is then killed and it's a story that hasn't gotten as much attention as it should but it's happening at the time when there's a lot of discussion about whether or not israel will attack iran.

>> i simply to quote we've done our israel has done in iran and reverse it and simply think just imagine for a minute imagined aircraft because the iranians of the aircraft so it is impossible to do these reversals because we are all still on a one-way planet but imagine the aircraft carried off the florida coast and the drones flying over the united states and some kinds of kilcher teams in the capitol or in los alamos slobbering, assassinating u.s. scientists and the virus is being sent into our nuclear system by four nuclear computer systems. if you start to imagine this of course for us there was one recent story in which was claimed that a texas car salesman had gone to the mexican

cartels and with money from an official iranian group had called for the assassination in washington this may or may not be an accurate story. >> if it is accurate we don't have -- >> [inaudible] >> exactly. but when this hit here we simply salvi's to the u.n., there was a resolution would. it was headlined. we said it was beyond human bounds of this stuff in iran nobody says anything. the program against iran is startling. on the other hand, i have never felt -- the left has been talking about what happened in iran in 2003 and i ran with one of those pieces in 2003 or 2004. evin cheney couldn't pull the

trigger. the obama administration doesn't want to pull the trigger on iran. the u.s. military as it, and i think that for everything that the israelis say that for them to go into a war without a green light from the united states that could make them the least popular country on earth and would be very dangerous thing for them to do, so i think that there are restraints. this is a very dangerous situation and the danger i think is not that somebody will immediately decide to go into the war but that there will be a miscalculation on one side or another people on iran, iran is free factionalism and it is a weak regional power, the people in iran run in iran right now are the hard line the part of the fundamental regime partially thanks to the policies the we've carried out over the years. so if you go back, if you were in washington today and you are a reasonable person and thinking about this, you wouldn't touch iran. everything we do has gone back.

we overthrew the government and installed the sharnak. that led to hammami. late 1960's we sold the first nuclear reactor to iran to create the problem we are now dealing with. we that saddam hussein and his invasion and you can run through all of this every single thing it was a catastrophe. it's crazy that we are doing this and the blow back from this year on the u.s. economy if something goes on, though below back on the u.s. economy, to be staggering. this is unbelievable. i find it amazing. >> something i want to add that i see that you mentioned earlier, i was just in yemen and one of the things that sort of stunned me when i was in yemen was the degree to which people spoke positively about al qaeda and the arabian peninsula but simultaneously dismissed them as

anything, sort of perplexed as to why the united states would take a threat seriously and numerous important tribal leaders said to me don't you realize that when you bomb and hit a village full of people that you are pushing people to support their agenda? i have a piece in the nation about this on my trip, it's not that people want to bring down american aircraft over the trip or that they want to send parcel wants to jewish community centers in chicago, it's that the united states has supported the dictatorship in yemen were, they gave them weapons, military aid, they built units that were supposed to be for counterterrorism that for then turned against the yen in people and used against them when they rose up and even when they were not rising up, and the government ceased to provide services, you have people that

are in some way or another affiliated with al qaeda that for years say the united states is keen to treat yemen as the next iraq, afghanistan, pakistan. anwar al-awlaki said the same thing, that the united states wants to turn yemen into the next afghanistan. what can we do? we start bombing yemen and in the eyes of a lot of people they are saying you've backed the dictator. we don't have the collection and the community. there's no such thing as a court of law in much of yemen. poverty is rising and the regime family members are all by the united states some going to go by the people that say sharia law is the only way to bring law and order to our community, and what i saw there and in somalia was not people flocking to al qaeda but people's own indigenous belief system starting to emerge closer and closer to that of the al qaeda political message so the united states is creating the very

reality that didn't exist but they claim to be fighting and they are making it real. >> you have to extend that to the world. that is the one thing i was going to say when you start to talk about what we are doing militarily it can sound awesome. i think the new version of our military first policy from the offshore version is going to turn out to be another disaster and i think it is worth remembering for history to go back to the demonstrations you talked about for a little part of history of the world in 1990's we set out you could call them our economic jihadis. they helped create the 1% -- there were many disparities in the world to help increase the disparities 1% and 99%. and in the next decade, the bush decade you could call that we set out our military first people who blew a hole directly through the middle east, the greater middle east.

these two created the stage -- they created -- with a globalized was protest. they created a plan at a much anybody had in a way whether it was yemen or egypt torricelli or anybody had a 1% in the 99% and the worst one they had 20 years before. so we are now on the planet in which it's true you're in moscow and occupied washington you have different issues but it's for the same reason, and the obama doctrine when it turns out to be will only increase this. it will do what you're talking about in yemen and will be in pakistan. wherever it turns this is what is going to do, and partially because tom just mentioned it's

the earliest site, the only place i think on this planet that has counted up the number of wedding parties. here we are we talk about this country is obsessed with the terrorism. there was a study in the times yesterday, 14,000 murders in the united states and none of them are the islamic extremists, zero. but the dispatch counted up through about 2,009 the number of wedding party is blown away by the air force, seven of them. it's absolutely startling those are just the ones we know of. >> one of the great reporters who has done much to expose what happened in afghanistan, sure -- because of talk about him she would attest this, too but we probably only know a tiny fraction of the killing that has happened and that's just talking about the u.s. killing that's happened or civilian deaths that

have been caused by night raids, you may have been able to compile the ones we know about. >> these are just the ones that were reported. absolutely. we probably should open this up to questions. >> i just want to say one other thing briefly. i remember i spent a lot of time in iraq starting in i guess it was late 1997i first went to iraq and i was there consistently from then through the beginning of the so-called shock and awe coming and i remember the day that the statute was pulled down by the people in the united states military but sort of portrayed as the iraqi scud endowment taking the statue down of saddam hussein in the square. i got all these e-mails from people saying look, you were wrong about everything and but how the iraqis are celebrating come exactly what will the bullets and others said was then to happen, and i invite them to them to take a look at iraq today and the horrifying reality

that exists for so many. people are probably digging for saddam hussein to be back which says a lot. i was told a story by those whose children who said someone comes to the hone am i and cuts the father's tongue out this was real stuff under saddam hussein. i was there when abu ghraib prison was empty in october of 2002 and some people cannot chanting because who ruled iraq before saddam and the party took over half a century earlier they haven't been in prison for so long they didn't know, so there was no doubt about it was brutal. and so for people to say that was better under saddam hussein is saying something. but i say that because the u.s.-libya bombing was -- fecund spent four hours analyzing what happened in libya. there is a convergence of popular uprising and then the might of empire military which

is the nato coming in and however you view the internal dynamic would overthrow market coffee was the bombing campaign far more than any domestic insurrection. but the converged without that air power he probable wouldn't have fallen as he did. there's a lot of people pushing for the united states. the friends of mine two years ago are saying we want the united states to come in and bomb and a good point that the u.s. bases, the homes and elsewhere. but who is asking the question of what comes after, what is being dismantled as an arab nationalism that really keeps in check some of the forces we are seeing rise up, some of the islamic forces, the movements and other countries, people have been so thoroughly punished by some of these u.s. dictatorships that the turn of deeper and deeper towards religion, and i don't get the sense, and i don't -- i'm curious on what you think, the u.s. policy makers

are thinking much further than the news cycle and with public pressure seems to be brought on the large media outlets or by the influential prominent think tankers. so much of what we think of is policies actually driven by what is going on here. i mean, just to give you -- to go back to iran, we have an odd political situation here where normally a democrat would rule on the issue of jobs and the republicans would rule on the issue of national security. now, this is kind of reverse the this point. obama rules on the national security, i mean the polls show that people back the national secure policy. he killed osama bin laden et cetera, et cetera. so, the republicans are forced into this strange and almost mad a position of demanding and the one thing they can demand is for the attack on tomorrow. money answer by the way on the

war on iran is if one of the republicans get and we are really probably in trouble on that. but, so -- >> rick santorum got a bad rap. >> in the same way, by what the republicans are doing, obama is forced to take a stronger policy and he himself is being pushed on iran to an ever stronger policy come and this is domestic policy, domestic politics playing into, and these on the whole first of all the things i would say about the obama administration generally is the visionaries, they were mad visionaries, but they had a vision of how would work and how it should work. they were completely wrong. the obama people are kind of

managers and i think that your managers just as you say by the moment, by the weak coming you know, i don't think they have any vision of what's happening. they are almost just trying to keep up with events. >> now that we've uplifted everybody in this room -- we will open it up, and if we can have some gender equity in the questioning there would be great. >> this gentleman here. >> i would like to ask if you have heard about and believe that sufficient attention has been made in terms of the press to the following to be offensive to drive last year, christopher ed gray, the dean of the california law school, who was also on the obama transition team, he was at the conference they were discussing law and

order, and he was in his tenure again in the university and what came up is the question about the obama administration prosecuting those people who committed crimes in the previous administration and he said he voted along with six or seven of the people and to recommend that they don't prosecute the offenders in the previous administration. and he said i guess it was unanimous and he gave his reason. he gave the reason that if he did he felt the cia and the military would manage the coo. later understand when he was questioned further and responded with an e-mail and so forth because the president was asking and mentioned something about justice and she says sometimes

justice has to give way to politics and that was his statement and he tried to defend that. have you heard about that? as far as i know it hasn't made much. >> i haven't heard about that but first of all i would say that i find it a little hard to believe. i actually don't think -- the military would have no reason in the united states to launch the coup. they've got what they want. that -- i would say that v -- obama made a decision from the second he came in. he said early to become very early on we are going to look forward, not backward. and i think actually the striking thing about this moment, and i don't think it is just a matter of the cia and the military, but that whole national, but i would call the whole national city complex is simply out of the legal system totally.

if you were in the national security complex, you would never be accountable for it. if there's only one crime as far as i can see in the post lead america in terms of the national security state and that crime is whistleblowing in the the obama administration has time and time again and tom dispatch covered this as well going after anybody the would tell americans what is going on inside. >> i think another important part of this is the united states if you go and look at the various features by secretary of state hillary clinton has been consistently calling for or supporting the process these of accountability and other countries in kenya and elsewhere of the world saying for has to the accounting for these, and the logic is brilliant in that they are saying the only way to prevent this from happening again is to expose what happened, and then hold those responsible and accountable.

but that is for the rest of the world. for us it's, you know, we need to move forward. i want to try that if i get pulled over for speeding. look for were officer, not backward. [laughter] but i think the most serious ramification of that policy, which i really question seriously the wisdom of it is that you have the -- there is no incentive to think twice about doing those things if you are in the field you can justify it. and i think that there are a lot of republicans professionals in the united states the but absolutely be repulsed by what their colleagues did, and i know of people within the cia that quietly resigned and there was never a story done about them. those people i do think represent the vast majority of people that work in the u.s. intelligence apparatus. i do not believe that the support torture. and i think that there would be a lot of support for some process of accountability. they may not want the accountability many people in the room c has sufficient, but i

agree with tom there is no need for any kind of a coup d'etat. president obama has been so generous to the special operations community, not just on the level supporting them, but also supporting the agenda of some of the more aggressive commanders. admiral william mccray and he's been reported to the head of special operations command. crystal got taken down in a different way that he and obama were very close a level and could send to the ranks of the cia. the military industrial complex and those within the military for the power brokers are standing quite well under president obama accountability or not. thank you for speaking by the way. i really appreciate the

discussion about the japanese and what it actually reminded me about a score lots to become the united states that is the prevailing law. you can discriminate by race only if it is for the purpose of preserving the national security. as i was wondering with the passage of the international defense authorization act would that holds for the future will only of the american minorities but also of people, just people abroad because i know we were talking about how there is an -- is a mirror. >> i would almost just repeat what i've already said which is simply that -- i mean the thing that is striking in our moment is that whatever the government decides, it is going to do. we see this now over a decade. it then calls together a group of lawyers and the lawyers create a legal explanation for

it and justification often at length like we know of that haven't seen at the al-awlaki assassination there's a legal justification by the justice department lawyers. it hasn't been released but we know it's there. i don't think it's been released anyway. and once they've created this justification, it's called of legality and then they do it. so, at this point, the national security state, think of this like a mother ship that's left off, and it is creating its own reality and is creating on the one basis and that the system is terrorism. this is why i call my book the united states of year because it is the infusion of fear into the society that's created the national security state as we know it. that state is incredible. the cold war state is huge. there was released in the cold war a country that we call an enemy and it had a huge nuclear

arsenal that had an enormous military. it now we have around the world a couple of minority insurgencies, a few thousand jihadi people that want to do something to the united states, we have a couple of regional powers we declare enemies coming and in the national security state based on fear is so much bigger than anything in the cold war period. it's absolutely staggering. one thing you could say -- go ahead. >> adding directly to the best part of what you said there. when i flew into jfk from yemen a couple weeks ago, i have a nice little chat with the guy and customs. he said what are you doing? and told him i'm a journalist. he said welcome home, blood you're safe.

he's white high passport and said whoa! and i ended up in a place in jfk called area three am i counterterrorism interview they were asking about military experience, explosives training, do i have weapons training and they asked about previous trips that popped up and this has happened to be in number of times. you go to somalia and expect they will pull you in for questioning but the reason i bring it up is because i'm always the first one to leave, and i've seen people get taken into another room. i've seen people sitting there and sitting there and every time i leave i feel like i participated in something horrifying. >> in this particular case i was sitting in cairo across from

this couple with two little kids and i was watching them play. i was resigning out i was nsl qaeda controlled area in gemini and i was enjoying the zoning of watching these kids play with their parents and that family was in that room when they came there and they were there before it got there and they were there when i was leaving. we are a nation that is racially and religiously indefinitely profiling people regardless of who is in power. the hearings that representative peter king held about radicalization it is all meant to terrorize the american people. it's meant to make us afraid statistics.com cited are important for all americans to hear, who is killing people in the country on a regular basis, what kind of incidence threaten the national security and it's the secret cowal that no one wants to touch up in this arena is what kind of a foreign policy would make us safer because the

war of patrician isn't going to do it. there isn't a finite number of bad guys we can tell. it's creating terrorism, and i think that is the hardest debate people in the country have to have his first to alone in that and then say what do we do about it now. >> the bush administration discovered very quickly that year the very specific source was a kind of a gold mine. i have to see normally when you get to grips with the striking thing is before they manipulate anybody else they tend to manipulate themselves so if you look back at the early cold war document on the national security council people writing to 30, 40, 50 other people where nobody else was going to see it, the language is the kind of anti-communist language you expect them to be using to manipulate people out there but first they are convincing each other so ensure in their own way they are scared but they found very quickly that year it wasn't just a year it was a specific

sort and that was purely fear of terrorism. since 9/11 ai tichenor look at this and i think you can count somewhere between 25 to 30 deaths in the united states do to anything we might include in terrorism and that includes the gabriel giffords killings. >> she wasn't killed the others. >> and the pingree guide that plunged his plan into an irs building and killed himself and an irs i. this is worse than shop the tax and not worse than any other danger americans face. this is what -- unit, 33,000 people dead on the roads, 14,000 murders. it's unbelievable and then there are the dangers in the world. if he were to simply count up the number of people -- i know

this without doing, the number of people that have killed because they lost a job or lost their, or killed themselves in the process he would be in staggering figures by comparison , but this little thing the government has given 100% guarantee on things we really need and we don't get it on this we are supposed to and that's why airports and everywhere else we've gone crazy and they've built a structure filled with money that guarantees a small number of people a lifetime of jobs and everything else. they are never going to go under. i think it's a striking thing. >> i was quite pleased in yemen every time i got on a place i was always the most thoroughly searched of anyone to read whatever profile of this i fit. >> any questions here. >> yes. >> this is bill hartung.

>> you have to speak up, bill. >> jeremy, you talked sort of jokingly of lifting the conversation. which in a way of thinking this, but you talk about american culture, how we get traction in the times even liberals are saying assassination expense control nabors make sense as long as we don't get into the americans. the information doesn't seem to be enough. so when we get our footing and a retraction to more and more people and to inspire them to push for the present? i ask this because what we need this and therefore i want your answers -- >> which i don't have. >> i think a part of the problem of the last several years is that i think we were at the moment where most americans regardless of their political

views were sick of the war whether they supported them initially or the views on how you fight terrorism and all things and people were getting sick of the war and i do think that the economic crisis in the country created a moment where those people had been agitating against the war could also make an economic argument that wouldn't necessarily have been the predominant argument that they would have made in opposing the war but it would have resonance with a lot of people losing their jobs and the endless money still being spent on the war. i do think that the fact that you have a very popular president among liberals, president obama who has a social agenda that while some on the left side of the democratic party and certain people on the left of the democratic party are very disillusioned with he remains extremely popular among the base of the middle of the road or the mainstream democrats

and the fact that he has also perceive to be infinitely smarter than bush and i think it is a correct perception has pulled the rug out from people arguing against the war because in terms of the debate in the public i think it's what you see the poll numbers like we saw it's important for the drone strings and the killing of al-aulaqi because people tend to think he's smart and he's a constitutional expert he must know what he's doing. and i would say the obama administration are very sophisticated in trying to figure out what legalistic ways to carry bush's policy and to make them lawful, that is a very damaging aspect of this presidency for those in the antiwar camp that won the u.s. out of this place to stop the assassination. i do think if the president said in an indifferent discussion having said that i think you to preserve your. in a way i remember -- i am old

enough and i am great -- i'm gray in my bear i remember it was a dark, dark purple you were trying to mobilize against u.s. bombings, the bombing of sedan, the bombing of afghanistan, the 78 day bombing of yugoslavia over kosovo with no u.n. authorization. there's a per go like that when the pinnacle of the empire extended by democrats and normalized in the population in a one of the periods right now and an uphill battle and it's in large part because obama has expectedly in the portion of its base you can say i'm drawing down into iraq and afghanistan's people have the perception that it's sort of coming to an end. the reality is the shift of tactics. >> i wanted to say something to

read bill hartung who by the way has done a wonderful book about lockheed martin has been toiling in the fields of that information for a long time. and i want to say i think we have to take a long view and as i sit here and listen to you, i was remembering i was standing at the edge of the par clinical bunch of union people, it was an arch and the can and the simply appear and i was surrounded by these guys and they were -- there was a big guy next to me i forget which union he was from come and he was looking down from the 60's and my experience in the 60's this should have been a moment of hostility and he started off he said, you above, this 99%, we were talking about the 1% of the 99 and i thought my god, you know, he's

going to attack. he said is so great. they put this on the map. and i thought this is wonderful, you know. but i thought to myself as well, you know, it was true that parts of the labor movement had been talking about the 99% it just hadn't gotten traction yet. it hasn't got an attraction yet and i kind of know why. being against the drones' didn't have anything presented generally. it's like a sexy perfect weapon. they would be disasters, like all perfect weapons from the tank on, they never deliver the fabulous things they are supposed to deliver, but they settled and embedded themselves into our world and they become, you know, in the case of drones would become a lost everything in our world i'm afraid that i think there is. if we just keep at it we are not

on our old plan that anymore, we are to your and elsewhere we don't know where that is going to go or people will make the connection between the domestic issues and the foreign issues it hasn't been made yet, but it will be i think. that's just my thought. >> i was interested in the president kaput seem to have of the media and journalists and deutsch and if you would it to the news cycle mentality where it's just kind of feeding on itself rather than at the minimum reflecting the reality or kind of a pending the sustained analysis of what's going on to the degree to which policy is becoming more reactionary to the news cycle rather than a different time the news cycle what actually respond to the policy. so i wanted to know what you thought of this kind of media monster and then what your

advice is for journalists now to do the kind of work that needs to be done. >> that's a good question. >> i think that long predates my birth, the role of the media, the powerful media outlet that played in fueling the conflict and war and also had to do with the ownership in a different time in history, and he's a great columnist and the coast of democracy now wrote a brilliant book that is a history of the media owned by a small group of corporations going back a couple hundred years in the united states. the first creation of newspapers within the united states, and in telling the story, she describes how it was a relatively small group of people that have always been in control of the news dissemination and they are part of the same circle of people in

charge of the fighting u.s. policy documented in a very fascinating way to tel. but the cable news, the creation of the 24-hour cable news was the we crossed some sort of the line into a different reality. when, you know, you could turn on the tv and at any moment, c.a. pundit or talking head pushing their agenda. and the think tanks are not there, no offense, bill, the army of the former general's embedded in the newsroom of cnn and msnbc and fox news who were also getting briefings on the pentagon on what they should say when they go on these tv networks. it is a sort of attempt to manufacture consent that is a concerted effort. but i also think that we have the views and if it bleeds it leaves come and you have this

sort of rise of fabricators sites that are more curated. wendi least start over they started to do their own reporting and the huffingtonpost.com you know, they have really good reporters, capitol hill and white house on sam stein and both are great reporters and he's a good friend of mine and those reporting, but it's also an operation of sex cells, pop culture cells and its flashing at you on the screen, and i think that in a way we have a media culture now that wants to see the celebrity moments represented in every aspect of the obsession of the celebrity culture and all that stuff is now the coverage of libya and syria, and it has to be sexy and graphic and now, now, now, something has to be done about it and that is our sort of attention span society.

if you look at the obama administration, very slow response to the uprising of egypt and the sort of flirtation of keeping mubarak. i don't think -- had not been for al jazeera, i don't believe that the obama administration would have taken the position that it finally did on the bar when it. i think it would have taken a lot longer and maybe that is the case where the media outlet did something it had an end result was good. wolf bullets are has been pushing for the war against syria pivotal most overtly you can see he wants to make love to the war and syria. he's seven to it. it's like quote man, taking xanax or something. [laughter] so i think it's -- i do think it is the cable news, and it's sort of, you know, the news culture in the country combined with an industry of think tanks and pendants and drawing from their former government position and

advocating whatever the structure wants to happen. >> i would just say these are almost examples the landstuhl struck that in all of the period that you read about iraq, every couple of years there was an anniversary of something, the invasion, whatever, they were celebrated or whatever it was command always, they ask who had made the mistake on iraq. they wanted to invade iraq. they went out to protest the invasion of iraq. i think it was georgia tech and the kennedy johnson days who said about being on the side of an administration, he said you

can be wrong and you are kept. the only thing you can't be is a of and be right. and there was something about that in the media, too. particularly in the world of country its three striking. he's chosen to be on these shows you don't affect all dissidents in the united states that our -- we never call people that but there are dissidents in the united states that are very sharp people come and they are almost never allowed on the shows and the have to have something in front of you to be -- look at the republican debate sponsored by the american enterprise institute with david addington and paul wolfowitz allowed to ask questions as though they have any business being in the public without someone confronting them for what they did about iraq and yet here they are asking a question as though they are just ordinary americans with citizens the

quote concerns of foreign policy. you don't deserve to be there and actually cnn has the debate asking questions. [applause] was denied the thing i was struck by the other day, there is a journalism website that weekly offers a kind of rundown of what they call in journalistic terms the news poll. what was in the news this week and looked for january and was really striking news poll was 41% campaign 2012. the was the overall media news poll that included papers, tv, the internet, the on-line stuff and so forth. when you say 41% the ongoing republican debate story, and cable news it was 64%. that was the news hole. that's what was there and one of the striking things about that

is what ever people write about the don't seem to write the one thing that is most obvious which is the one thing that comes from this coverage if you make this the election of the century, the money that comes particularly to the cable news station owners it's the ads. if it's up there and it's big you get $20 million in florida and that comes mostly to the tv stations. this is one of the great conflicts of interest it could have been some other business somebody would notice but nobody says a word about. >> let's be honest the show mad man wasn't on during the republican debates some people needed something to watch. >> maybe we should call it quits. >> you're not allowed to leave. we have four more minutes. and then i'm going to ask a question. thank you both for being here.

i was wondering if you could address how perhaps one who cannot view the work up on iran that has already been started by the obama administration and i'm not talking about military strikes or sanctions. sanctions have been going on for a while now, but with the obama administration did in december. those sanctions are frightening and they can be considered a war and now we are reading reports the about being turned away from iran because there is a freeze on financial transactions. for my understanding has a central bank sanctions are entirely complete speaking to my father in iran i see that he's talking about a business is absolutely halting and shipments being turned around so to think of it a little bit if you could comment on sanctions not only people in the path to the war as we saw happen in iraq but you had bush, the clinton

administration that imposed the hardest sanctions in history and then continued with bush after him and then there was war to read we see the sanctioning of the bank is arguably a war, economic war on the people but also to take seriously that it's not just because people defend obama seeing he's doing this to not do that but also the operation for war. i'm sorry, i don't mean to -- just one thing secondarily, no surprise given the two of you to hear you speak with such an opposition to what was done to iraq, the u.s. invasion of iraq and simultaneously talk about the egregious of the saddam hussein government and i bring this up now because people are organizing against the war in iran slowly but it's happening. one thing that causes me great distress i was at a sanction on

the left many their small but significant, and i think the skirt on the entire war movement, sorry, international timothy r. iranian sar simultaneously taking people that are taking the position against the war on sanctions for the government if he could speak to that. >> let me just say this isn't something that is only being sent -- a but point out since we were talking about the republican debate that one striking bit of cognitive dissidence is that you have one guy in the republican debate standing there saying things that should send a republican to hell and that's ron paul who has been saying very directly that sanctions are an act of war. it is strange you will not find this among democrats right now but you will find he is the one person that is up there in any major way that is saying that and obviously they are not only

potentially acts of war but the strike against, they are not planned strike against the iranian leadership they will strike against ordinaries which is of course what happened in iraq as well in the who saddam hussein years and of course there's also the danger in our world as well because, i mean, the thing that is on the edit talked about in our world is if something really blows with iran and that all oil flows it's going to be worse than to libya and the situation and the global economy is going to suffer. this is one of the situations in which you could end up with the great recession or depression. the blow back from this could be enormous and so i think it is a dangerous situation and something that should be organized against. i don't know what else to say.

>> the only thing i will say closing on that is there are different kinds of sanctions and there are sanctions aimed at cutting off the regime weapons supply which is particularly ironic in the united states is profiting from the oil and than sanctioning them on a different level it gives you the clear sense of to get into the mechanics of the sanctions that the u.s. is all over the sanctions in iraq as well and encourage the oil smuggling with the u.s. the primary beneficiary when the sanctions were imposed on iraq and the people punished by the sanctions were of course the iraqi people, not the regime. so the sanctions can be a form of economic warfare and not all sanctions are created equal and people are conducting the administration a path to make an alternative to the war. they certainly were not in the case of iraq and the way that more people died as a result of

sanctions on iraq and died during the entire u.s. military campaign in iraq which is stunning to think about it and i saw it firsthand in the 1990's, and i think a lot of people around the world are right to be concerned with what is meant to happen in the arabian peninsula and in the middle east and north africa, to have been out of afghanistan. we are in the world on fire. now and some of those it's good that they are burning and i don't necessarily mean violent friars emineth resistance, too and some of them could rage to the point where it goes beyond control. >> one other thing to say about sanctions -- 30 seconds, it isn't clear. looks like sanctions and some kind of a global policy that everybody agrees on and in fact the united states agrees on a come israel agrees on that, the europeans have gone along with it because the europeans for the last 50 years have done nothing but go along with u.s. policy. they can't not do that at some

level. when they finally do you will know we are naturally different world with the rest of the world, asia, china, brazil, even turkey which isn't friendly with iran at this point, you run through the southern blot and the asian world and it is the world that is against the sanctions policy is it's a complicated situation. >> united states of fear. thank you to the carter center for journalism and everybody for coming tonight. [applause]

liberty university professor ron miller pda in your book sellout from tom's porch you write that you smile when you call them uncle tom. >> i smile because i know what uncle tom was meant to be the author harriet beecher stowe presented in her novel. i think that over the years both because of the way the character was portrayed in shows and other things that have become distorted that if you read the natural novel, she meant for tom to be an archetypal a christlike figure and this is a person with great mobility and a person who actually died because he refused to divulge the whereabouts of sleeves and help the state and forgave his assailant even as he was dying that is a noble character and one that i embrace. so when i hear the term i think it confounds people.

if they're interested in learning more than happy to tell them about the character. >> the subtitle -- the full title of your but you've probably got in some response to what you called your book. >> absolutely, absolutely. the idea came about because a lot of times when you are a person of color and you have a conservative political view you give certain names that your mother never intended for you, and rather than run away from that i used it as the title because it grassy and then a sort of highlights one of the themes in the look which is if we are going to have an honest discussion in america on the topic of race it means to be multifaceted. it cannot just be one-sided. the book in fact came about because of vara calder, the attorney general making the statement that we are in nation of cowards because of our inability to discuss race and at the time frankly i took exception to that comment because to me if we can't have an honest discussion even the black community about topic how

can we expect anyone else to speak candidly and then i listed the names of all of the individuals that have gotten in trouble and inherited some of those teams i talked about because they chose to be candid on the topic of recent personal responsibility, accountability and how we look to the future rather than the past. >> who are some of those people? >> bill cosby is the best example you will recall that the naacp black-tie affair he decided to use that opportunity to be critical of the current generation and their inability to take advantage of the gains from the civil rights movement and he took a lot of flak for that but he is unapologetic about it and continues to speak out. it's not act as fancy even set neighborhood churches and other venues across the country where he talks about the need for us not to let our circumstances define us but to take charge and be victors rather than victims and that is in the message that

resonates well in some circles. you have other people like condoleezza rice, clarence thomas, people like kenneth blackwell, niger ennis, the list goes on, of people that are willing to present an alternative view. because of the back-and-forth of name-calling and other things, i felt the need to write about it not just turn the perspective of policies and pet colleges and all that a personal perspective because i was raised by family where our beliefs and values and things we were taught, if you strip away the whole issue of race we would be considered conservative. that than our political allegiances didn't align in the values and when i went away to college and i started to examine that for myself, i didn't understand that the economy, and eventually i started to in mauney view show a little more integrity from within by aligning my values with the way that i practiced my politics.

and i think when people start understand the motivations and understanding the law is and things like that then you begin to have the basis for the dialogue rather than confrontation, and i spent a lot of time in the book not just talking about what i believed, and why i believe it but i also talked about why i think blacks in the community have certain views of the world, why they have a particular position on one issue or another, and in doing so, trying to increase the scope of understanding. i'm a very big believer that if you sit down with the intent to understand and you don't use language that is when to be shut down in the conversation i don't know if you are familiar with the tail that talks about how long before the discussion involves into someone calling someone a nazi. there's a certain thing that happens where a word gets thrown out there and all of a sudden there's no room for further

discussion. i'm trying to avoid that in the book and and the way that i approach people on a daily basis. having said that, if i sense that someone is being untruthful or deceitful, i come from that at least as i see it. >> you talk about the year you spent living in lake charles louisiana tech is one of the worst years of your life. why? >> as a military brat growing up in integrated schools and not being accustomed to school where you have predominantly black students and the attitudes that can affect come here i am a kid that just as certainly come spoke a certain way, had a certain level of respect for authority and he put me in an environment where those kind of things were not held in regard and i was ridiculed, i was harassed, teacher's pet, talking

like a white boy from all these kind of things and the only irony is the reason i didn't get beat up this these two white kids at the school took a liking to me and defended me. i said in the book they are much bigger than anybody else they might have been held back a couple of grades, but it was going through that experience and realizing that there was all this animosity when i came to not just race, but the whole architect of what it meant to be black. i talk about what it means to be authentically black and as someone who believes in the dignity and the work of every individual and how that individual was made in the image of god i take exception to the idea that was a standard out there that says this is what it means to be black and anyone that doesn't fit into this can't possibly be black you hear even today in the dates jesse jackson a couple of years ago saying that you can't be against the president's health care plan and

call yourself a black. why not? the last time i looked in the mirror i think i qualified xxx. since i had a net one year was a challenge to the notion of what it meant to be black. i couldn't wait to get out of there. >> when you hear the term post racial what does that mean to you? >> it doesn't mean a lot. i think it meant something when some of the more thoughtful writers i read shortly after the election of president obama discussed the possibility that now finally we can move forward because they recognized that this nation was capable of model the increasing blacks as americans but electing a black man to be the leader of the most powerful nation on the plan at. so i was hopeful, but it didn't last long and it's things like that that taught that it had a lot more pherae behind is an actual practical meaning.

>> in your view does the republican party have a responsibility to reach out to african-americans? >> yes, they do and i think the field to be quite honest. i was disappointed recently to hear that representative alan west from florida had a meeting on capitol hill with a group of black conservatives and invited representatives from the republican national committee and they didn't show up, and while the pragmatic side of me understands that the field if they're going to invest time and building an electoral coalition they probably are not going to get a lot of out of working in the black community. one of the things i learned both as a person that's been in the political arena and an office myself as that they are into the return on investment approach dealing with voters and they feel like they are not going to get a quick and substantial going after a particular demographic then they're just when to dismiss it and that is essentially what they've done

with the black community. these concluded that there is no fertile ground and that is a mistake. the need to take longer-term view. the need to remember why the republican party was created in the first place and reconnect with black voters not only publicly but philosophically because i do believe fundamentally that the black community is a conservative community. i just believe that there are emotional issues that have clouded that relationship and we talk about the racist fringe in the republican party. i tell them you have the racist fringe but then you have the soft bigotry of expectations that permeate a lot of the liberal views in the community. which one do you prefer. so in that regard i think that the republicans have a responsibility to get a thicker skin and at least at some level connect to try to build relationships not that they will see immediate returns in this election or the next one, but i

know for myself i feel a lot less lonely now than i did back in the 70's because i know that in a social media, for example, i encountered hundreds of black conservatives and i figure if i have 300 or 40500 black conservative friends on facebook that tells me there's a significant number of them out there in the general population and for whatever reason and maybe it is because of the election of president obama the feel compelled now to come out and speak and express their point of view and that is an incredible change from what i've seen over the years and the republican party at the track together they can use to their benefit. to meet the black community only benefits from having a comprehensive dialogue. to have it all one-sided isn't going to fit anyone because it means one side will take for granted from miller he also praised new gingrich. what is your connection?

>> well, i praised him because he seems to have an understanding of what i just where the republican party falls down when it comes to reaching out to people of color. i think interestingly enough on the south he seems to have a much more acute sensitivity to the relationship between black and white americans and others. i don't see that i agree with him on everything but i do know that when the republican party struggled to get candidates to appear on the form back in 2008 which was specifically geared towards the voters of minority issues he was one of the people that can out and was highly critical of the candidates and for whatever reason chose not to attend, ironically mitt romney was one of those candidates. but i feel that he has clearly been affected by a lot of what's happened in the south and civil rights and from just reading in his own background he is affected by the assassination of

dr. king. obviously he and herman cain are good friends supply feel that he has a pulse on to the conservative of reached the community and a lot of candidates don't have to this gimmick as far as racial relations in the u.s. do you believe that the election of barack obama as president was a step forward just on its face? >> on its face it was a step forward. i think what has disappointed me is that being in the position of leadership as he is, he has the opportunity to smooth things over to move us towards a different kind of race relations and i think that because of he chooses not to do that and i wonder sometimes given his background and whether he has the kind of leadership that we need to bring black and white

americans to get there is equal of the american dream. i think that there has been more polarization and affected is ironic a republican 2010 write about the time that the naacp came out with their resolution including the racism, and in doing that i thought let's start talking about this, let's get past the political superficies that meet us here and get deeper into things. it's sad to say the things i read about are still relevant today because i haven't really seen anything change in fact i've seen things get worse and i think racial tensions are as high now as they've been in my lifetime. >> we are currently in this country going through a potentially racial incident with the trayvon martin incident. would you think about that? >> just based on what i know, and i don't have all the information -- >> we are taking this in march by the way. >> i think that there was malice

on the part of the shooter and i think he did shoot this person because of his perception of the young black man walking in that neighborhood. i have never said that racism didn't exist and i wouldn't say that we are not going to have these kind of incidents. it's unfortunate that we have people that are willing to use these incidents for their agenda. i think it is appropriate to be indignant and to be angry, but i think that to go into the fray and stir up as reverend sharpton has done and to cause provocations that i think our and necessary we see both the federal government and the state of florida acting as they should to try to investigate. we have seen the police chief step down. all of things that are supposed to happen in the justice system are happening and i don't think that there is any need to try to stir up emotions but unfortunately i think a lot of what we call the black agenda in

america today is driven by emotions. an inability to let the scars heal and there are those out there that have no issue in the law. >> professor miller would you teach a child every the university? >> assistant professor of government, so i teach american exceptional which is a primary class, and i'm also the associate dean for the online program for all of the school of government so we are involved in criminal justice, politics and policy and the law programs as well as international relations. >> is america and exceptional mechem? >> yes, i believe it is and i don't believe it is exceptional for any other reason other than it is built on an ideal and it's an ideal that the nation's strives and strains to live up to but i believe at least in this point in history we will always come out of the conflict better than we were when we went into them. it's tragic sometimes as the civil war proved and sometimes it takes a long time, but i do

believe that as long as we are reported to that ideal that is expressed in the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, as long as we adhere to that that is what makes us exceptional, not that we are great but we strive to be good. >> why do you write about -- >> she is from france as dillinger estimate at texas tech university and was probably the most apolitical person in the world. i did have her read my book and get her seal of approval but you won't see her out there on the daily times. she is one of these people that i think likes to sit back and take in information and act in a quiet and confident manner. >> you talk about one of your first dates where friends invited you over to see guess who's coming to dinner.

>> yes a good friend of mine had guess who's coming to dinner as a movie so we went to his home and she was relatively new to the country she just arrived for her semester abroad as we watched the film and afterwards she approached me and wanted to know what all the fuss was about because obviously the movie talks about cindy as a young white girl and her family handles that and of course i use a quote from the character in that movie is a bill samford played the character how satellites is one thing that this is something entirely different and believe me you get a lot of, even today she didn't understand it and there was refreshing to me. not only did they give me a chance to act like i was an expert on american race relations that was just really great to know that from her perspective she wasn't looking