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GLENN GREENWALD: There’s a great irony, because every time President Ahmadinejad comes to the United States, the same media commentary decrees him as some kind of crazy, threatening figure. The same set of two or three comments that he made that are of dubious translation are continuously repeated, much the way that Saddam Hussein, the fear mongering around him, was based on two or three assertions repeated over and over. And yet, what you have is evidence about what real aggression is, which is the President of the United States is always insinuating that we reserve the right, at any moment, at any time, at our will, to go on to military attack on Iran, even if they don’t attack us. Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham was at a luncheon at the American Enterprise Institute and said that we need to start finalizing plans for an attack on Iran that would not just be about striking at their nuclear facilities, but removing the regime, as well, though he said we shouldn’t do that with ground troops, but only with air and sea strikes, which would entail massive devastation of that country, huge numbers of civilian deaths. The very idea is monstrous. And you see these proposals talked about on an almost daily basis in leading American, and obviously Israeli, journals, as well. So when it comes to who threatens whom and crazy and deranged ideas, it is true that parties to this dispute are engaging in those kinds of actions, and sometimes Iran does, but far more often it’s not Iran who’s doing it.
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GLENN GREENWALD: I think the significance, principally, of the tea party for the Democrat Party is that they don’t really have much to talk about in terms of why voters and supporters ought to go out and keep the Democrats in power. And so, what you see from the Democratic Party is this fixation on the tea party as a means of ratcheting up fear levels among Democrats and others, in order to encourage them to go to the polls. I mean, every pollster has said that the huge threat to the Democratic—the Democrats maintaining their power is this enthusiasm gap, the fact that Democratic supporters don’t perceive any reason to go to the polls. And so, in the absence of any reason to give them, all that you hear is a lot of focus on individual candidates like Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, these tea party candidates, to try and highlight their extremism, make people afraid of who they are, all as a means of encouraging people who don’t see any reason to go vote for the Democrats to do so. And I think that’s extremely telling, that two years into this administration, that that’s all the Democrats have is a fear campaign.
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GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, if you were a Martian who came down from—to Planet Earth in the last week and just turned on television news and watched, you would think that Christine O’Donnell was by far the most powerful person in the world, because, especially on stations devoted to maintaining Democratic power, like MSNBC and other cable shows, it’s twenty-four hours nonstop about Christine O’Donnell, because that way, if you’re on one of these stations, you don’t have to talk about the things that Tariq Ali was here just talking about, about what we’re doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the continuation of Bush-Cheney terrorism policies. You get to talk about Christine O’Donnell and comments she made fifteen years ago on some late night television show as a way of mocking her and deriding her and distracting people’s attention from what a failure this administration has been. That’s why she serves such an important role. It’s a way of manipulating and distracting the voting base.
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GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there’s this scene in Alice in Wonderland in which the Red Queen is sitting with the King, and Alice is in front of them, and they are condemning one convict after the next. And the King keeps saying, “Call in the accused. Let’s have the verdict and then the sentence.” And then, at one point, the Red Queen says, “No! I don’t want it that way. I want first the sentence and then the verdict.” And Alice objects, and the Queen threatens to execute her. Well, if you look at what the President is doing with presidential assassinations, it’s almost exactly the same thing. Eight months ago, we learned that there’s a list that President Obama maintains with at least four Americans on it, one of whom is Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric in Yemen, of individuals who President Obama, with no criminal charges, no trial, no due process, has ordered assassinated, to be killed anywhere they’re found, far away from a battlefield, no matter what they’re doing at the time, on the grounds—the accusation, unproven accusation—that they’re involved in terrorism. Well, that’s the sentence. The President has imposed the death penalty on these individuals. But two weeks ago, it was reported in the New York Times that the administration is now considering bringing an indictment against Awlaki in response to a lawsuit brought on his behalf and other—for other considerations, in order to bring him into a court and charge him with a crime, finally, in order to prove that he’s guilty—not in lieu of trying to kill him. They’re still trying to kill him, but just in case we don’t find him to kill him, at least we want to indict him. And the equivalence, how identical that was, was so striking. This was essentially Obama saying, “I, the President, hereby impose the death penalty on this American citizen with no trial,” and then eight months later he says, “Well, now it’s time to get around to charging him with a crime.” It’s sentence first, verdict after, just like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland decreed.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/21/glenn_greenwald_on_iran_tea_party
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