Hendrick Smith

If You’re Not Doing Anything Wrong: You do have something to worry about

Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award winning reporter and documentary filmmaker Hendrick Smith talks about his PBS special “Spying on the Homefront,” about the National Security Agency and FBI’s spying on the American people – far beyond the so-called “terrorist surveillance program” that the administration claims, the fact that the feds now have almost total access to private firms’ records, why innocent people do have something to worry about, the suitably of the FISA court in handling warrants for national security threats, the unanimity of the people involved in the program that the American people’s liberty is threatened, jerking tappers around for sport and how it’s only getting worse.

MP3 here. (16:55)

Hedrick Smith is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of several best-selling books. He has created and hosted twelve award-winning PBS prime-time specials and series on topics including Washington’s power game, Soviet perestroika, the global economy, education, and teen violence. For 26 years, Smith served as a correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. Hedrick Smith has published several national best-selling books, including The Russians (1976), The Power Game: How Washington Works (1988), The New Russians (1990) and Rethinking America (1995). Smith’s books and documentaries are frequently used for college and high school courses on government, sociology, and economics.

Ron Paul’s Radical Mix: Truth & Politics

Hats off to Ron Paul for another great performance in the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina last night.

For almost six years, politicians have acted as if it is federal crime to speak bluntly about 9/11.    On the day of the attacks, George Bush proclaimed that the hijackers attacked because they hate America for its freedom.  This has been treated as a revealed truth ever since.  (When I saw Bush on TV that day, I was perplexed how the US government could know the motive before it knew the identity of the hijackers).

Ron Paul has never kowtowed to this dogma, and last night he deftly debunked the 9/11 catechism: “They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.”

 As Justin noted, Giuliani sought to huff-and-puff Paul’s truth off the stage.  But the Republican establishment’s hot air isn’t going to succeed this time.

I have a long quote from the debate transcript over at my blog, where comments on Paul, Guiliani, et al. are welcome.

Ron Paul vs. Rudy “The Thug” Giuliani

In response to Ron Paul’s reasonable and informed contention that our interventionist foreign policy created the “blowback” that gave rise to Al Qaeda, and 9/11, Rudy Giuliani burbled “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that!”

Of course he hasn’t heard it: he’s so busy pandering to the worst instincts of red-state fascists Republicans, calling for a national ID card, and drooling at the thought of torture that he has no time for a reality-based assessment of American foreign policy. That bullying would-be Mafia don, who looks and acts like someone out of “The Sopranos,” demanded that Ron Paul “withdraw his remarks and tell us he didn’t mean it.” Paul’s answer,

“I believe the CIA is correct when it warns us about blowback. We overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and their taking the hostages was the reaction. This dynamic persists and we ignore it at our risk. They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there.”  

 In effect: screw you, Rudy!

As even the dumbos over at FreeRepublic.com acknowledge, Rep. Paul is factually correct. Bin Laden’s fatwa gave his reasons for the attack, and the savaging of Iraq — pre-invasion — is front-and -center..

They Hassle Who At the Border Crossings?!

Living just an hour and a half from the Canadian border, stories about border incidents are always of keen interest to me. To be sure, we get stories about the mistreatment of Muslim citizens at the northern border on a regular basis, so much so that it’s really old news at this point.

It’s troubling to me how uncontroversial this policy has become, and doubly so because I’m finding myself less and less surprised by stories of multi-hour detentions, long interrogation sessions, and shocking hostility towards American citizens attempting to re-enter the country at a border which I recall during my college days as being essentially open.

But these hassles apparently do not begin and end with people of Muslim faith or Middle Eastern ethnicities. I was listening to the Toronto Vegetarian Podcast while working this afternoon, and was surprised when the conversation, normally centered around cuisine, books, and dining locations, turned to border crossings.

The idea that they’re detaining (however briefly) vegetarians at the border is to me quite a surprise, and the questions they were asked are simply scandalous. What business is it of the US border patrol what reason a random Canadian citizen has chosen for not eating meat? What possible consideration should that be given in entering America and, perhaps most importantly, is there some “wrong answer” that would cause them to be denied entry?

Catching Up With Kanan Makiya

In an interview with The American Prospect, liberal interventionist darling and Ahmed Chalabi lackey Kanan Makiya lets slip just how much he knows about present-day Iraq:

“Of course I still support the war,” he says with a pained expression on his face. “How can I not? I don’t know an Iraqi who doesn’t.”

The whole swig of ipecac is here, behind the Prospect‘s registration firewall (an endearing feature Antiwar.com will have to consider if we don’t reach our quarterly fundraising goal). At least it ends on a hopeful – wildly, excessively hopeful – note:

Makiya has the courage of his convictions. Yet not all Iraqis, liberals, or European intellectuals share his view. In Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, Zbigniew Brzezinski said the Iraq War’s “only saving grace is that it made Iraq the cemetery of neocon dreams.” It raises the question of whether or not this also the final resting place for the dream of liberal-interventionism.