 I first was following Dave's eloquence on the question when he was organizing a thing called After Downing Street, right, on the Downing Street memos and trying to get into people's heads, the revelation, of course, that at a time when our President George W. Bush was saying that he was heading, he was not heading toward war, he wanted to negotiate that in fact the decision had long been made to go to war and to fix the facts around that and we learned that from a leak in Britain about a conversation between Blair I guess it was and no no actually it was a it was a briefing of Blair if I recall you correct me here by conversations that were held in Washington from Richard dear love was it the head of intelligence sir and some of our people here saying that the decision had been made for war the point is I was just about to make these were this is a description a memo to the British secret of conversations in the US obviously there were corresponding memoranda of conversation in the US these were conversations that were in the US we have never gotten a line of those am I mistaken no one has leaked those isn't that right yeah that's right and and for the US newspapers were saying that dear love had probably picked up what he reported to Blair and his cabinet at you know cocktail parties in Washington DC in fact he had a lengthy private meeting with George Tennant and it was on that meeting with Tennant the head of US so-called intelligence that the head of British so-called intelligence was reporting to Blair that the US had decided to go to war and was going to fudge the facts to fit going to war which we now know from numerous sources even more authoritative that kept coming out for months and months and the British have done endless you know committees and reports and investigations their latest you know Chilcott inquiry is going to be published July 6th unless they delay it again why they couldn't make July 4th I don't know that would have been you know perfect but but they were bit players they were accomplices and the chief architects of that crime are playing golf teaching college retiring you know they're roaming the world free well I'm just drawing attention to the fact that Britain with its official secrets act by the way which we don't have officially Obama has been using the espionage act as was first done by Richard Nixon against me some years ago Obama has used that unconstitutionally I would say more often than any other president in fact three times more than all of our presidents together but despite that the British official secrets act which is explicit criminalizing any revelation of secret up they had not only got a leak on the Downing Street memos but have had these investigations which have brought out a lot of classified information there has been no comparable hearing of any kind about the decision-making that got us into Iraq and in other words we do not have the Pentagon papers of Iraq yet and if we ever will so at any rate David was very very good at publicizing that and then he got very involved I was following him on the impeachment issue of Bush and Cheney certainly no officials in our government have ever deserved impeachment as much as or more than more than in any case Bush or Cheney I I had reservations at the time about focusing only on Bush I'm not can't remember if you did that or not if we had an argument about that I said you know he does have impeachment insurance here you know in the form of Cheney that we would get and surely you have to go against both of them together to puzzle you worked for Cassinage and I was with Cassinage when he announced in Washington at his press conference his resolution to impeach Cheney which I thought was very clever not that because who could be against that I'm teaching well I'll tell you who was against it we had a meeting with the Congress members who were most on board and Maxine Waters from California said let's do Cheney first we'll do Cheney first it's nonsensical but it's what the public will go for let's do Cheney first and Barbara Lee also from California said nope let's ask John Conyers well when you go ask John Conyers you flush everything down the drain and that was the end of that and it was you know years later that Dennis Kucinich said well I'm gonna introduce it anyway you know so okay since you've raised that let me ask you here Dave when when exactly would that conversation have gone when Barbara Lee said that you think I have a memory that I don't um well let me let me remember first you would it have been after or before 2006 I think it was 2005 it was certainly 2005 because there's something funny about that I'll just say Conyers it doesn't in the end reflect well on the Democrats on Congress specifically but Conyers wrote a book and I think this would be a problem I think 2005 anyway he wrote a book for the impeachment of Bush or with the articles of impeachment for Bush and he said well if I get to be if I get to be a chairman of you know I remember now well if I get to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee the first thing I will do is impeach Bush and he had a whole whole book on that and then my understanding and I was in the position of well let's say berating Conyers about this you know the file later in front of a lot of others it was a tense moment really but his aides told me that what had happened was that he didn't tend to impeach Bush and that when he got and it really I must say that I was very much had very great hopes for a change in Congress in favor of the Democrats in 2006 because it would make John Conyers head of the Judiciary Committee with this in mind and and other things and my understanding is that right after that election Nancy Pelosi came to Conyers and this was from an eyewitness one of Conyers aides who was in the room who said that our Nancy Pelosi here in San Francisco fixed a Conyers with what this aide described as the most steely gaze I have ever seen on someone said there will be no impeachment proceeding and I said what did Conyers say he said he didn't say anything he just you know he took that and the the point of it was it turned out was that I thought we'd get a lot out of out of a Democratic Congress in 2006 I mean I had hopes at that point and I was disillusioned because they said okay if we make an impeachment issue in 2006 that will bring Republicans to the polls in 2008 on the impeachment issue that will motivate them you know and mobilize them and we won't get a Democratic president in 2008 and Conyers was in particular under the gun there I think this was I was hearing this conversation later it was a conversation about what had happened at the time but I was hearing it really just before the election and Obama was I'm not sure had become a candidate yet but he was a strong competitor at that point and Conyers was not about to be accused of having ruined it for the first black candidate you know on this so he laid back on the issue no question and obviously the argument you know on him was not trivial it was it was a significant argument but that was the time to impeach and it was a mess was bad not to and against your understanding of things and not for the most part if I could just add I I think that there was an enormous public demand for impeachment that was generated by activism and in part generated by the 2005 pretense of the Democrats that if they had the majority they would end the war and impeach the people who started it and it even got to the point where you had a majority in US polls in favor of impeachment without Congress having said one word about impeaching anybody which was unheard of is unprecedented for that support to proceed any action but what happened in 06 when the Democrats won the majority and every exit poll not a single one of which asked about impeachment every exit poll found the number one reason why people voted to give the Democrats the majorities in Congress was to end the Iraq war and the Washington Post went and talked to Rahm Emanuel who was running the Democrats in the House in January after the election and said so are you going to end the Iraq war and Rahm Emanuel said no we're going to keep it around so that we can run against it again in 2008 it worked so well right so this is I mean if you it's all this news now about the party platform and how important it is to get progressive writing the party platform for the Democrats if you go back and read the 08 platform and the and the the the 12th platform 2012 platform you know the the things that they never bothered to try and are given up on and have forsaken disappeared but the stuff that they were going to try and they still want to pretend they're going to try just gets carried over to the next platform well this is what the Democrats wanted to do for 08 so it's not only that they went against the public and their own political interests by and their constitutional duties by refusing to impeach they also went against the mandate of the 06 election and law and morality in escalating a war rather than ending it and you know most of us you know I can't say everyone and this is why that movement grew so energetically and rapidly but most of us didn't want to impeach George W. Bush because we hated him or disliked him or wanted vengeance and retribution against him or disliked the Republicans and wanted to run a campaign ad for the Democrats we wanted to deny the next person the powers that Bush had accumulated along with his predecessors in the office and we knew that if there were no consequences for all of those abuses of power they would be continued by the next person of whatever race gender party creed ideology and they have been so that yes Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors but when it comes to people in power committing crimes and abuses he has taken the policy of looking forward which means ignoring crime which he has now applied to Harry Truman as well we will look forward I won't mention what was actually involved in bombing your city people of Hiroshima and that has been disastrous so that now the things that Bush did that were illicit and abusive and criminal and high crimes and misdemeanors are acceptable policy right torture instead of being a felony to be prosecuted is a policy choice and we now have a guy running on I will escalate torture wars you don't go and lie to Congress and get some sort of permission you just do them and tell Congress after the fact and the UN as well lawless imprisonment official policy executive order understood acceptable US behavior but you don't lock most people up in prison you blow them up with missiles along with whoever's driving them or sitting next to them and 90% of those people are not even the people you're targeting and the people you're targeting are as you know largely based on who's got their telephone at the moment and you know that sort of stuff is because there was no accountability last time right and when there's no accountability this time somebody next January is going to have more power than any human being has ever had before in the history of the world and their power to spy their power to abuse their power to deny rights their power to murder is going to be completely unchecked barring some new popular movement of resistance and you know this is this is because of who we are as a society right if if Obama's drone victims had been white he would have been impeached in 2010 but if Obama had been a Republican we would have had an Arab spring in Washington DC by now if we learned that a Republican went through a list of men women and children on Tuesdays picking which ones to have murdered there would have been outrage beyond belief but when I go and talk to Democratic Party organizations they don't even know it right this is what Orwell said people will not only excuse whatever their nation does they will show an incredible ability never to find out about it right so when you see a headline in the New York Times Obama has great moral angst over you know his kill list or something of that sort and the article has goes into stuff about Thomas Aquinas before it ever gets to what Obama is doing on Tuesdays right well you see that headline and you don't like it it's uncomfortable you flip to the sports section and you never find out about we in 2014 we used to go to Obama's 2012 we used to go to Obama's reelection events to try to protest things that we disagreed with and we started out protesting the kill list which he had just advertised in the New York Times and it was like we were talking about UFOs people had never heard of it I mean the chair of the DNC you can watch an interview with Debbie Wasserman Schiltz who clearly never heard of it you know and so we protested the war in Afghanistan because people had heard about it they didn't know it was still going on but but you could communicate that you know but they had heard about it so that's what we would protest in 2012 you know you really gave me when I heard you say what could arouse an Arab spring in DC such as the knowledge of the Tuesday the Tuesday assassination list under Obama it did start me thinking right away interesting thought is that maybe that's true my first thought was yes maybe that's true let me pose to you though that George W Bush did invade a country under absolute false pretenses and by the time of his second election campaign that was pretty well known even even though you know you hadn't gotten the Downing Street memos around that much it was pretty well understood how we'd been lied into the war and that there were no WMDs to start with and whatnot and that wasn't getting there was no Arab spring in DC in other words I'm not I'm not confident he was a Republican president doing that and I wonder whether whether you're right in saying that there would something would it really rouse them I haven't seen what it takes to arouse the public to the kind of thing we saw during Vietnam why do you think that is I'll tell you why because it would have been building on the movement that had grown under the George W Bush administration and been shut down in in 2007 but was there waiting to be revived and it was worse in the minds of many people who found out about it and didn't have partisan blinders to be murdering individuals including American citizens who are that 4% of individuals on earth you're supposed to care about it looks worse to many people what is being done with the drones than what was being done with the wars and you know there's this whole myth that the resistance to George W Bush's wars was futile and totally ineffective and a failure and the war went ahead even though we wanted to prevent it and so forth I think that's that that's a slanted view right I mean in 2003 public pressure motivated many nations to motivate the United Nations to say no to that war which made it illegal we then had the ability to protest a criminal enterprise rather than a humanitarian operation but they didn't work it didn't work those years that followed pardon me it didn't happen I'm not I'm not trying to be a naysayer to cast cold water on the kind of thing I spent my life doing and you know lose no opportunity to do to protest these things but and I certainly don't want to discourage people from the protest on the contrary I think it's essential and I don't know what other hope there is I'm just I'm just wondering though whether it's enough to to get a Republican in which is almost what you're saying if I hear you just get a Republican in then we'd have a movement when they do these things I actually I don't think that will help well I'll tell you what I'll try to finish telling you what I think the value was you know three which which making the war illegal did in fact that was worthwhile absolutely making the war illegal worthwhile but it didn't have the effect I would hoped it had well it didn't have the effect anybody in this room would have hoped it would have but it had a significant effect and I'm trying to tell you what it was if you'll give me like eight more seconds I'll tell you what it was in 2013 there was a concerted effort by our current president and his secretary of state and those in power to launch what was going to be a massive bombing campaign of Syria and our current president admits in the Atlantic magazine some weeks back what the last thing they ever want to admit that it was largely public pressure that led him to reverse that decision that he had made and promised to the warmongers in the Senate and so forth and the way that that public pressure worked and the words of numerous Congress members was I don't want to be that jerk who votes for another Iraq and the reason that the CIA director coming to Obama and using these exact words your claim is not a slam dunk quoting George Tenet's statement in the opposite direction on the WMD's for Iraq that this is a slam dunk the reason that was effective the reason that Obama couldn't go into a new big war on the basis of lies even though he was already in that war and numerous other ones and would continue it by other means was because it was too close to Iraq it was too similar to Iraq to be starting a war on the basis of shaky claims about particular weapons chemical weapons in this case and to have the public flooding Congress with more disruption of events emails phone calls letters than anything before in history the banker bailout or anything else around the question of should we go into another war on the basis of these claims about weapons it was too close to Iraq and the memory was still there the memory was still there in 2012 when Hillary couldn't win a primary this is why we have to keep the memory of war lies alive because they're not in any textbooks they're not in any news broadcasts it's only us to do it and as they fade people may win primaries who couldn't four years earlier right and but the memory in 2013 was huge and it was all about let's not have another wreck this is why the people of of England were able to get the House of Commons to say no to a prime minister on war for the first time since Yorktown because it was another Iraq it was it had this big marquee Iraq Part 2 on it and we had spent a decade making that a badge of shame rather than a badge of honor and so to say that we didn't accomplish what we wanted of course not but to say that we accomplished nothing right I mean is just to get the facts dangerously wrong because it discourages people who rely on knowing about their impact to keep doing what they're doing they shouldn't it shouldn't be relevant we should do what we have a moral responsibility to do you know but people rely on that and so we have to tell them you know because the White House won't tell them you know even even though you know Obama blurts it out in the Atlantic you know people will look away peace activists who risked jail over that and other things and put endless effort and energy into preventing that war and prevented it then started telling each other oh no Raytheon didn't want to make any money that week it was all it was the Russians idea even though that had been on the table forever and they all admit including Obama that that was a second decision after the decision not to do the bombing to do the chemical weapons out of Syria deal you know even peace activists because it's been beaten into our heads will say it must have been something else it couldn't have been me right so it's important for us when it actually is the case not when we're unsure not when we're exaggerating not when we're bragging about what somebody else did but when it really is the case to tell each other okay now thank you let's you had suggested we break this something of a conversation though I'd suggested just letting you talk no please if you want to speak to that please do let me comment yeah first I agree with everything you just said of course as I would hope you you understood that I did and you're absolutely right to bring up the 2013 case and that was a marvelous case of pressure of public pressure quite spontaneous I'm not aware of much organization going behind it certainly I can't claim credit I happen to know in 2013 I didn't foresee that that public pressure arising it was in between no what was it it was it was Congress was out of session as I recall and people were back home and they were hearing their their people talk and saying as you said we don't want war in Syria now I do want to just put a couple footnotes into what you said as you'll agree that hadn't happened earlier it didn't happen under a Republican for eight years it did happen under a Democrat as it so happened and it was a Democratic president who yielded to it and who responded to it next question so it didn't require a Republican either to rise the resistance but when it comes to responding to it would if if Romney had been in wasn't it Romney or was it if it had been Romney at that point would we be at war in Syria or not I would say with 100% confidence we would be at war with with Syria and we are well with Syria to some extent right now we are a war we don't have ground troops in I think we would have ground troops in with Syria we do what we do we have special forces I know all about that I mean there is a difference the the military want a lot of ground troops in it a lot in Iraq and a lot in Afghanistan more than we have and and we would have them I think with the Republican and I have to say I'll leap right ahead here I'm not at all confident we won't have them we wouldn't have them with Hillary Clinton that's why I think it's of urgent importance to make Bernie Sanders the candidate of our party and and possibly in contrast to you I don't know we'll go into this is not the subject I think either of us had planned to get into but we we seem to have gotten into it because it does bear on war which is your subject for sure and your book and does it make all the difference to have a Democrat in as a Republican obviously not absolutely right that he's continued not only the civil liberties depredations here in the violations of the Constitution here under George W. Bush and we are at war in a number of countries in terms of special forces and drones all that absolutely right does it make any difference at all I'll put to you that the 2013 example you're given I really feel quite strongly and let's think about it we would not have had that phenomenon had Romney been in we might or might not have had the public protests we might have indeed can you let's just say I'll concede that I do not believe it would have stopped him from either bombing Syria on a massive scale or putting large numbers of ground combat troops into Syria I think that has made a difference I think there would be a big difference between a Bernie Sanders and a Hillary Clinton let alone a Trump and I even have to say on on the issue I have to say the issue of foreign policy is least clear when it comes to foreign policy between Hillary and Trump but I would still feel it very important to keep Trump out of office so I I do like to see you're getting into this now and I think you'll disagree so that that I would like to see Bernie Sanders make a strong a showing in California as possible I even I even having having for the first time in my life D registered as a Democrat I got tired of being a self-hating Democrat and I finally finally changed my registration to no party preference and then when I was told by somebody I'm not sure whether it was right or not that to vote for Bernie in the primary I had to be a Democrat I quickly now have some people saying no I've heard of both ways I re-registered as a Democrat temporarily at least so that I can vote for Bernie because I would like to see him have a strong and influence on the campaign platform as possible in full recognition that a campaign platform is does not mean much but the different and there will be a difference between the Democrats and the Republican it doesn't mean what they say it doesn't mean as much as they should I have to say I absolutely do not want to see Trump as as president on the issue of war as we're talking about let alone all the other issues that we know about so if we want to have an argument trying to focus it if I may though I think we should in your benefit and for the benefit of the people here focus it as much on the war issue as possible because that's what your book is about and I want to encourage you to buy this book it's a terrific book I find that I reread my copy what I thought was my copy marked it all up in the last week in preparation for this and just learned from David I had the old edition not the not the new edition and he he got me from the back here the second edition which I haven't seen and he nicely said you can give it back to them when you're finished here actually I'm not going to do that I'm going to keep this and even ask you to sign it for me before the end but so I haven't read the new editions and I'm going to ask you what the difference is and in general what your book is about but having read even the old edition and I have every expectation of the new one this is a terrific book everyone here will want to read this book and have a copy so if you want to tell us by the way I don't know if you want to shift or not you can you can go back to answering what I the controversial and provocative things I just said or you can answer the question what is your book have to tell the world so the yeah I weren't doing this in reverse order I thought we're gonna start with the book and then get to everything else the the the book is is supposed to be a guidebook to aid people in spotting war lies more quickly right so in 01 and in 03 by some polls you had a majority of Americans wanting war and in both cases within a year and a half and ever since you've had a good majority of Americans as seen as many pulses have been done say we never should have started that war right so there's a chunk of the population that you know would like to be able to spot the problems with wars more quickly right instead of waiting for Freedom of Information Act requests decades later to expose the conscious manipulation by the war mongers and the propagandists what if we could spot the problem with their case for war immediately and say no what if we didn't have to wait to you know investigate with the latest technology the USS Maine in the bottom of Havana Harbor but we could spot the problem of Spain saying let's take this to a third-party arbitration and settle it non-violently and we'll comply with whatever the ruling is and the United States saying hell no we want a war right now this is a good excuse for a war we could spot the problem immediately if we didn't have to wait until decades later to say well the the Gulf of Tonkin incident wasn't exactly what they said it was but we could understand that when US ships are bombing a foreign country if that country were to shoot back it's not actually an attack on the United States just as today when a Russian plane flies near a US plane or a US ship in the Baltic we could look at a globe and say where is the Baltic and find out you know which coast of the United States it's on and and and say here's a problem right so you know you can you go back you go back through every one I wrote the book because people in 2003 were telling me there was something unique and scandalous that just happened the US government had lied us into a war and I knew enough to doubt that I looked at every past US war every war I could find abroad I mean the book is very US centric and it's targeting the US government but it includes all kinds of wars from other times and places and I couldn't find a war that didn't involve similar lies similar packages of lies to get it going to keep it going to escalate it to beautify it after the fact right and the people in Washington know the value of this they're building a world war one monument now of all outrages they've to Obama has declared the Korean War of victory of all stupidities they they got a 20-some million dollar program to celebrate and lie about the Vietnam War they understand the value of this and we don't have a big institution pushing back not the media not the textbooks not the school boards not the not academia you know our you are politics ethics philosophy departments are now behind the Catholic Church which has decided to get rid of the idea that there can be a just war right the Pope who by the way is always right there cannot be a just war you know they the Catholic Church is now ahead of US academia US schools US politics US news shows right on this question and and so we need the ability so the book doesn't go through each war which would be endless and repetitive it goes through types of lies is this the type of lie they're using that the war is defensive here's why it isn't here's why you can know it isn't is it is are they lying that it's a war against some sort of infinite evil that can't be dealt with by any other means here's why that's nonsense is it a is it a war for is it you know it's become increasingly popular now it's a humanitarian war it's a philanthropic war it's a rescue war is this picks up a sliver of the population that had otherwise fallen off even why they're still using the same lies for the rest of the population right I mean you got just people who want to go you know kill every human being in Libya and people who want to bomb Libya because we care about them and you know and and and yet it's always it's always the humanitarian war that didn't happen right it's always we must bomb Libya because Rwanda where a lot of different things should have been done even in the preceding years in which militarism created that but not bombing and then they get to Syria and they say well now we must bomb Syria not because Libya I mean Samantha Power wrote an essay on how why you should ignore Libya as part of your duty as a citizen to be properly prepared for bombing Syria it's we must bomb Syria because Rwanda right so they every nation building war has not built a nation every humanitarian war has not benefited humanity you know and and if you start there's I mean there's only a half dozen themes and the types of lies are very repetitive and you know and they're from the very blatant you know Kuwait paying a PR firm to train the the ambassador's daughter to tell Congress that Iraqis took babies out of incubators and left them on the floor and this sort of thing too too much more subtle assumptions that are built in to everything that's fed to us but the lies are fit a pattern I mean there's nothing new under the Sun and they're using the same types of lies Bush use the same types of lies that each of his predecessors used the the lies that Wilson told about ships being innocently attacked even though they were helping the British were the same lies that FDR told about other ships you know that Obama's lies about the chemical weapons in Syria that we touched on but also about the the looming massacre in Libya and handing out Viagra to the troops for mass rape and all of that about Gaddafi because he'd fallen out of favor the the other lies about Syria the rescue on the mountain top with with ISIS the lies about the success of the Iraq surge that Obama immediately carried over to Afghanistan to triple the number of troops in Afghanistan you know that they all follow a pattern so what if we were prepared what if we had studied the types of lies and examples of each type and looked at the sort of activism that can be done about it and we had this in our heads so that the next time they pitched a war we could say hell no immediately not when it was too late because even when you got a majority saying never should have started that war it's not a majority saying you should end it once you got the war going you must continue it for the benefit of the troops right you must support the troops by killing more troops that you know you did not have a majority saying end it you had you sometimes a majority saying I wish it would end in the next couple years you know but you didn't have even had the troops themselves saying we wanted ended this year but you didn't have to support that you know you had to support killing more troops so what if we could it's much easier to prevent it but to prevent it it has to be made a public question and put before us and this is part of what was different about Syria 2013 it was made into a public question put before the public put before the Congress put before the media war or no war this is also the advantage we had on the Iran nuclear agreement where people's work also succeeded and where we actually had a section of the government on our side I mean the better model for us to study is 2013 where both big political parties were against us but you know with the drone wars with the quiet wars with the special forces wars when it's when we're never asked we never have the initiative and the communications ability to say and so you know we can say the special forces are different and they're very very special they're bigger than the entire military of most other nations they're in some 75 nations there are 130 by some counts they you know and we have if you watch the the Golden State Warriors game tonight they may thank the troops for watching in 175 nations which is you know where they admit us troops are and look at which ones are not in that list they are the looming dangers to the world but we now have we now have seven significant us wars underway almost nobody can I'm sure somebody in this room can but almost nobody in this country can name all seven everybody thinks some of them are justified some of them aren't but they can't even name them and five of them now have ground troops I don't care if you how special you call them they're ground troops killing and dying on the ground and this is in Afghanistan in Libya in Iraq and Syria and in Yemen and all of those are perfectly primed for massive escalation by perhaps the next administration perhaps this one and Congress has just put through a military funding bill where they have intentionally planned on taking the money from the war the slush fund for wars and dumping it into some of their favorite weapons for some of their favorite campaign bribers with the plan that the money for wars will run out in April and there will be a new bill for a lot more money for wars you know you can't you can't have more wars than you can keep track of you can't have drone wars that you celebrate because they're better than ground wars and in drone wars nobody gets killed and so forth and then escalate it predictably into a ground war and leave that waiting to be escalated while antagonizing Russia in a manner we haven't seen in decades and China and so forth and make a nice speech in Hiroshima where you tell everybody war is permanent war is unavoidable we won't get rid of it for decades while escalating the creation of new nuclear weapons and making small ones that you call more usable and putting more nukes into Europe and fear mongering around Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program and antagonizing Russia and China and eliminating fewer nukes than Bush did or any previous president you know this this has the potential for further disaster under this president or whoever is the next one and I will just say briefly on the election topic I agree with the late great Howard Zinn that it matters a lot less who is sitting in the White House than is who is doing the sit-ins about what is happening in the White House and which is which is not the same as saying it doesn't matter at all it is that it is saying what I said that it matters less that it matters more that we educate that we organize that we mobilize that we bring public pressure that we change our culture that we that as the as the gay rights movement has made it possible for corporations to boycott states that are discriminating against gay people it wouldn't have been possible ten years ago make it possible for organizations and corporations to turn against war to turn against war profiteering make that possible in our culture I mean this is what's going to be needed regardless of of who is the president and yes compared to Hillary or Trump Bernie is the coming of the age of Aquarius but on a global standard of political leaders I mean he is a crazed warmonger right I mean it's relative to where you're where you're looking from and I think what Bernie has accomplished which is absolutely tremendous and is is going to be more important than whether he wins the White House or not is that he has mobilized millions of people to tell the corporate media to go to hell and to refuse their instructions and I predicted this would not happen and it happened I was completely wrong and this is absolutely unprecedented never before has the corporate media whited out and slandered and libeled a candidate and had this kind of support for that candidate anyway right now Bernie's accomplishment is not getting Hillary to pretend she agrees with half his platform you know who cares this is his accomplishment and our ability to resist the media on other matters on war lies on every issue under the sun is going to matter a heck of a lot more but I think you know part of what Bernie has had up against him from the start has been this unprecedented lumping of the so-called super delegates in with the other delegates to pretend Hillary was winning before anything began and now to pretend that she's already won if this were compressed into a day if it were election night and they were saying it's over when it wasn't so in Californians weren't going to turn out to vote people would be spinning mad because they've stretched it out over months and pretended super delegates are real delegates they're telling Californians not to bother voting it's a blatant lie but every media outlet is in on it every single media outlet tells you that you know Hillary has won or it's impossible for Hillary not to win or she's virtually won and so forth you know the more they keep saying it the more true it is because despite this unprecedented resistance people still do obey their televisions they do you know if I if I were you know if I were to tell you that Oklahoma City has beaten Golden State you know people might get mad because they thought I was making the wrong prediction but it wouldn't be influencing an important public process or even a sporting event because the basketball players do whatever the hell they want anyway they're not going to obey what I say on television but with voters you can't do that it's toxic it's it's abusive and it is not just the media it is the Democratic Party and the completely unprofessional bought-off and paid-for biased fraudulent criminal chair woman of the Democratic Party how how what am I going to learn now from your new edition that I missed in your excellent old edition well we may have hit on some of it but the new edition looks at the past five or six years and you know I could take the old edition to a Democratic Party Club and talk about Bush's Wars and they all agree with me the new edition unfortunately the wars have continued and the lies have continued and the normalization of war has expanded so that we now have a candidate in a debate asked will you kill thousands of innocent children as part of your basic duties and there's no scandal I don't know of any other country now or in the past where that could have been part of a public debate for elected office we have more wars than we can count we have wars without any pretense of involving Congress or the UN we have assassinations out in the open we have coups out in the open Honduras Ukraine Brazil I would include we have we have more money into the Department of so-called defense under this president than any previous president which doesn't count a whole lot of other departments we have more bases opening more troops in more countries in 2013 after Obama had you know as he says in his speeches you know moved to putting war behind us and the age of peace arrived and made the United States respected again in 2013 December there was a poll by Gallup in 65 countries that included this question what country is the greatest threat to peace on earth overwhelmingly in most of the countries but in the United States among people in the United States answering that question who won Russia Russia Russia who else Iran Iran is the correct answer and Iran spends less than 1% what the United States does on militarism Iran does not have a drone assassination program Iran does not have a prison in Guantanamo Iran has literally not attacked another nation in centuries Iran is the only nation attacked that I know of with major chemical weapons attacks that refused as a matter of principle not ability but principle to respond in kind and in the minds of people with television sets in the United States Iran is the greatest threat to peace on earth this is a weakness so I touch on some of the encouraging bits but I find perhaps more encouraging than others 2013 Syria 2015 nuclear agreement but those videos in 2014 of white people who spoke English having their next cut with a knife which is far more dangerous to peace on earth than nuclear weapons or tanks or missiles or anything you know a knife the irrationality of that fear that drove millions of people to say okay go ahead start a war start a war on the opposite side of where we had the moral responsibility to start the war last year in fact go ahead and started on both sides in fact let's have armed and trained CIA troops fighting armed and trained Pentagon troops which we now have in Syria let me just do what you want because there were videos of white people being killed with knives that fear right there are more Americans by far killed by toddlers with guns then by foreign terrorists with any weapons right and we don't think of toddlers as inherently backwardly evil because they have the wrong religion and the wrong skin color but where do you think the majority of weapons in the Middle East the region that we call the Middle East where do you think the majority of the weapons are made right most people don't know that right and so I think the lies about the entire enterprise of being the weapons seller to the world and waving restrictions on selling weapons to brutal dictatorships if they've donated to your and your husband's family foundation in the millions and you happen to be secretary of state at the time this level of corruption has grown and the basic underlying lies have grown and so the reason that that I've been part of starting a new organization called world beyond war and I want to actually ask David Hartzoh who started this organization with me to pass around this clipboard asked if you could pass around that clipboard with something to write up people tens of thousands of people in 130 maybe 140 countries now not the Pentagon's 175 but approaching it have signed a short statement that's at the top of this clipboard that says I want to help eliminate all war and the reason that we've started this up is because even when we have fewer deaths or fewer wars or we eliminate one weapon or we have a movement that pushes back against a bombing campaign and they have to go with the arming and training of proxies instead which we were even more against in the polls but we didn't have the activism and the big public question against you know even with you know some of these positive things you still have a president who gave the first ever pro-war Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech go to Hiroshima and tell us I'd like to eliminate nuclear weapons but war has been with us since the arising of the first man and I in the statement he said he has on the White House that he made in some other location in Japan I'd like to see a world in which it weren't necessary to build nuclear weapons here it is Mr. President this is it this world right here is not some other world it's not some world your grandkids might see if you don't kill us all first it's here right now war has not been with us since the first man woman or child it I mean the the anthropology I mean there's still a controversy as on climate change but the anthropologists who look at the matter in a serious way war did not exist in a serious way among hunter-gatherers who could run away who didn't have to fight wars and didn't right and when I jogged through the park up by the Golden Gate Bridge it said this morning it said if you see a coyote make a loud noise and it'll run away this what people used to do right I mean those that went man the warrior in the Natural History Museum in the 1950s with the marks on the bones those were not wounds of war though we're those were wounds of teeth we were dinner we weren't man the warrior and war has been sporadic through human history since the big concentration in cities you've had entire civilizations without it you've had entire civilizations do away with it for centuries you have countries now with no military with their military in museums you have 90% of humanity at least represented by governments putting dramatically less into militarism than the United States does you have 99% of people in the war making country of the world not participating in the US military 44% of Americans say to pollsters I would participate in a war if there were one we have more wars we can keep track of they don't want to participate in a war they want to think of themselves as participating in a war and by the way a lot of other countries are down to 10% on that which is wonderful but the number one killer of four of participants US participants in this inevitable natural human nature exercise is suicide the number of cases thus far discovered of PTSD from war deprivation is zero right it's not natural it's not inevitable it's not in our genes as President Obama even came around to saying after telling this this misleading story it's not in our genes we can choose to do away with it and we can choose to talk about ending particular wars as steps toward dramatic de-escalation down to actual defense down to what Smedley Butler said keep the US military within 200 miles of the US there goes the majority of the US military there goes weapons systems that have no defensive purpose right and then watch the arms race go in the right direction among the other nations and then see what we can do about eliminating the entire enterprise and doing something better because what weapon what weapon kills the most now today yeah somebody said cars in which in fact you know kills more Americans than foreign terrorists but the US military kills primarily by taking the money from useful places and when you have an air force official tell the Smithsonian magazine last month we could we have technology to drop food in Syria accurately where people would actually find it and not go on starving but it cost $60,000 we would never use it for a merely humanitarian operation and each missile is $1.4 million right and we could end starvation and give clean drinking water to everyone in green energy and medicine and education we could transform this country and the world we don't have to choose which for a fraction of what we're dumping into this criminal enterprise on the suspicion that there might be a good war next year that there might be a justifiable necessary war next next time when the wars are counterproductive when the wars are creating the danger when you know it would take years for Canada or some other country to create anti-Canadian terrorist networks on a US scale I mean it would take occupation after bombing after occupation to do it well then we need to move the money where it's where it's useful and out of this criminal enterprise and we can't do that just by saying we should have smart wars instead of dumb wars we should have drone wars instead of human wars we have to say we're not gonna have wars sure okay those who have a question for David or or Dan if Dan wants to absolutely be care to answer some from the audience that I would be glad to bring you a microphone what do you do about ISIS that wasn't mentioned and it's the unorganized threat that I'm more concerned about than the organized national ones yeah what do you do about ISIS the two answers one involves owning a time machine you don't create it in the first place you don't destroy Iraq you don't destroy Libya you don't arm the region to the teeth you don't give Iraq and Libya weapons that end up in the hands of ISIS you don't arm terrorists and and so-called moderate mass murdering groups in Syria that then prep pass the weapons along to ISIS you don't intentionally and accidentally drop weapons on ISIS itself you you you you stop everything that created the problem in the first place and when ISIS comes into it and you don't as Hillary Clinton still says Obama was wrong not to bomb every inch of Syria in 2013 which probably would have put ISIS in charge you don't do that and you don't ask for a no-fly zone on the theory that someday ISIS might develop the airplane right you you know which is a criminal mass murderous military operation a no-fly zone you can call it a safety zone you can call it a women's right to be president zone it's it's a murderous operation of war to bomb major facilities in Syria and bomb anything that's in the sky and you don't give anti-aircraft weaponry to fighters on the ground ISIS or otherwise and wait and see which Western airplane or Russian airplane civilian or otherwise gets shot down who remembers and I'll give you the second part which is what you really want in one second but the the who remembers what George W. Bush told Tony Blair on January 31st 2003 in the White House before they walked out and did a press conference about how they were hoping to avoid war with Iraq he said one of the ways we could start a war with Iraq would be to paint some planes with United Nations colors and fly them low and try to get them shot at what do you think is going to happen if they're if they give more they've already given some but give more anti-aircraft weaponry to fighters on the ground in Syria anyway you you what you do about ISIS you know you don't do what they want when they put out videos saying please attack us you don't you don't then attack them only from the air I mean Rachel Maddow was was you know just ecstatic about the wisdom and goodness of giving ISIS only their second choice in the world you know they they really wanted a US ground war we'll just attack them from the air and see if their recruitment soars with that and it did so you don't do that the first thing you do is extend the ceasefire and begin accepting negotiations with people who don't all swear that Assad must leave by Tuesday before they start the negotiations the United States has been tearing apart peace efforts from the UN and Africa and the region and Russia for years and years and Russia now the former Nobel laureate from Finland says that in 2012 Russia offered a peace settlement that would have involved Assad stepping down and the US waived it off because they were so sure Assad was about to be violently overthrown now we all know that violent overthrows have worse results than nonviolent ones and any success lasts much less of a time why would they have preferred a violent overthrow and deluded themselves it was imminent as they did year after year to a nonviolent offer of an actual guaranteed process that was going to involve him stepping down because they want Russia out of there because they want control of Syria and Iran's next right and so you open negotiations without preconditions and then you pursue disarmament and that includes cutting off arms and fighters for ISIS from US allies from vicious brutal US allies in the Gulf and from Turkey and elsewhere and and you start a campaign for disarmament you know three-quarters of the disarmament is done with one country on board the United States you then you use the considerable US pressure to get other countries on board you pursue disarmament and then you pursue actual aid actual humanitarian aid which it may cost $60,000 to do something but compared to tens of billions I think we can afford it and it makes this country loved in the process rather than hated you pursue actual humanitarian aid and do you talk to ISIS even though they're irrational subhuman monsters you can't talk to yes you do and and you talk to people who are living under their brutal rule who go along with them because of where they live you know this is when the United States went into Afghanistan and people who had supported the Taliban because they had to because of where they lived and then switched and supported the US because now they had to because of where they live the US said and you know anyone with a with a drop of blood of ever having supported the bad people you know is out there our enemy forever you know this is Iraq 2003 after the occupation anyone who was ever part of Hussein's government because they needed a job they're our enemy they're out we're disbanding the military and everybody else you know this is this is a sort of cartoonish thinking that doesn't work in the real world and so we we stop thinking of of ISIS as somehow worse than you know the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or attacks from Mars and we put it in context and you know deal with it in a serious way thank you what what you've talked about sounds a lot to me like the movement for economic conversion in the 70s which was a great movement until we declared that the peace dividend had been spent some other way so I have I have one question for you and one for Mr. Ellsberg how do we prevent the media from profiting by dramatizing con confrontations of any kind especially war I mean or if it's Trump versus whoever the media profits from from conflict so this is one big thing and consolidation of media have made it even worse although we have wonderful internet resources of all kind how do we prevent corporations from the entrenched corporations from continuing to profit from the war that they perpetuate and produce for and get money from the military budget for we try to do this with economic conversion to peacetime uses you know who's the we here and for Mr. Ellsberg I wonder if you think that the mass moving in the 60s was largely fed by the draft at the time the military draft and paradoxically is a draft what really makes people drop what they're doing stop worrying about their own problems and fight for their lives you want to go first or me I after Dan speaks on the draft I want to say something about the draft as well with he and I were talking about it earlier but okay well I'll go first and then Dan will give you the correct answer the the the media Dan will give you the the better informed answer I'm not kidding the media you know it is absolutely essential to these wars couldn't happen without the media and I think one thing we have to do and this is the point of my book is is sort of mental reform get our head straight so that we don't fall for what the media pushes on us and push back and push back hard and immediately and take our protests to the headquarters of the media as the promoters of the war I think the second thing we have to do is build independent media and use it throw your television out don't own it don't have anything to do with it but use independent media international media that means whatever country you live in get your news about that country from all the other countries and and online media and independent radio and good reliable investigative outlets new forms of which are arising you know beyond that we should be pushing for you know structural reforms to the corporate media but I think that comes at the bottom of the list you know war profiteering is something that we have to make shameful in our culture and it was almost done away with back in the 30s and almost nationalized you know but we need to we need to make it shameful and as the movement builds up for boycott divestment and sanctions around weapons for Israel and and Israeli war crimes and this is where young people are leading the way and then in the peace movement is against Israeli wars expand that to all wars including us wars and all weapons for all wars including us weapons I think I think that economic conversion is still where it's at it had you know it there was a bill that was doing very well right before they killed Kennedy and there was a bill that was doing very well right at the end of the so-called end of the Cold War that congressman Newt Gingrich Republican from Lockheed Martin led the fight that killed and and it did it viciously and and with attacks on the Democrats in the Congress at the time but it it still makes absolute perfect sense and the books that Seymour Melman used to write and the bills that used to be drafted are still sitting around to be reintroduced and it can be done at the at the national state or local level and it doesn't involve hurting anybody other than CEO salaries the savings are so immense that you can retool and retrain and create a safety net and nobody has to suffer the idea that wars are economically beneficial which you'll hear congress members say which sounds sociopathic to 96% of humanity that here's it isn't true it isn't true even on economic terms and when there was a scare a few years back that the military was going to be slashed which also wasn't true you had states and localities start to set up commissions to work on economic conversion you know and Connecticut set up a big commission with labor and environment and management are you from Connecticut yeah so but then the scare went away and everybody realized the military wasn't being cut and so how do we do it without the scare how do we do it just for the economic benefits or the moral and civil liberties and environmental and humanitarian benefits that continue to exist and you can do it at the local level and you can go to your city council and tell them they can get money from a federal government program to work on economic conversion and you can go to a think tank in the in Washington DC called the Institute for Policy Studies IPS and to a staffer there named Miriam Pemberton and say help us do this and go to your city council instead of saying we want money for something say here's money for you for something that you whether you can scare them into thinking they're gonna have to do it sooner or later I don't know but can you give them all the rationales that will move them and stay silent on the ones that won't and get them to act I don't know I I I'll turn it over to Dan but I just want to note on the draft you know that an amendment was just killed to add women to the Selective Service to require to mandate that any female now as well as male who turns 18 has to go register for the draft no option of conscientious objection or any alternative service or anything and it was killed not by every good progressive Democrat who were for it down to the man and woman I don't know of any exceptions I hope I'm wrong it was killed by right-wing Republicans who get their ideas on women's rights from the Bible and do not want women taking part in a man's business and they were right for the wrong reasons right and and and yet and all the good liberal progressives wanted to cut out what they called discrimination against women force women into any draft to stop discriminating against them this is the mindset among the progressive activists but among the peace activists we need a draft because then we can have a bigger peace movement well you know it didn't work for the Civil War it didn't work for World War one it didn't work for World War two and it worked for Vietnam after six million human beings in Southeast Asia lay dead and we haven't had a war that came close at least an immediate short-term impact to that since the ending of the draft and if we have a war in this day and age when they're against a draft and they're making robots that can kill that requires a draft oh my god what a war it's gonna be it's gonna be a war that probably none of us survive an anti-war movement should take away tools of war not advance them to progressive gender balanced status and when people tell you when people tell you you must go hold your nose and vote for one of the lesser evil candidates I don't even know which it is at this point and lesser evilism has taken us you know you get to a pair of more evil candidates each cycle than the worst one the time before it's not sustainable at some point enough is enough but the people who tell you you must go and hold your nose and vote either for a lesser evil candidate or for somebody but you must vote because people suffered and bled and died for the right to vote well that's a reason to keep working to try to have an open fair verifiable election someday in the United States but people bled and died to end the draft and Bernie's hero got a million votes for president from a prison in Atlanta where he was sitting because he spoke against the draft if you're gonna honor noble causes because people bled and died for them well that's the draft we got to eliminate it and there is legislation in Congress to eliminate it which doesn't discriminate against anybody it eliminates it for everybody this is what we need and we need a treaty a global treaty no conscription of anybody that's what we need go ahead another question he said it he speaks for me on the draft here yeah next question Bernie inspires me Bernie Sanders inspires me because of his passion to improve the country for the mass for the majority of people one of the things he talks about is that the other side thinks is radical is free education in state and public universities well Governor Brown when he went to Cal Berkeley it was virtually free and most if not all advanced wealthy countries in the world offer virtually free education here where it costs 30 40 50 thousand dollars a year to go to school even in a public university you know how can we be globally competitive so Bernie's talking about free education everyone else is saying it's radical but it was it was part of this country and we brought that idea to other countries so Michael Moore just did a movie and I just thought at the Universalist Unitarian Church they had a screening of it's called where to invade next and he talks about all these ideas that started here and other countries ran with for example high-speed trains and and free education and and public health care for all so these are the countries in the world that are spending virtually nothing on it defense as we are they're putting it into high-speed trains so we've got a good infrastructure they're putting it into healthcare systems so it's a right not a privilege and they're putting it free education so their their population can be globally competitive if we simply did that you have a question so the question is what all the other candidates including Hillary are wanting to be in war Bernie says no war but it doesn't seem like he's fighting for it as much as I'd like him to should I take well I'll say something to that I think it is very relevant to the topic and Dan if you want to say something you should Bernie of course does not say no war I wish he did you know compared to Hillary and Trump he's wonderful on war on domestic issues he really is fantastically wonderful but to separate the two and to continue dumping a trillion dollars a year into preparations for war that make wars happen rather than preventing wars and expect to have money for everything else well this is what forces Bernie into you know these complicated explanations of how he's raising your taxes but not raising your taxes which absolutely make total sense once you look at them and we can take money from billionaires or from the military there's money aplenty in both reserves but if Bernie didn't want all of these accusations of raising taxes that have been hurting him all he would have had to say was we're gonna pinch a little fraction out of military spending to pay for this stuff he refused to say that he used to years ago he used to say cut it in half right and that was before it doubled you know he could you know but he won't see we won't say that um you know and again he's what he will say that the Pentagon can't stand that is you know feared worse than you know then the coming of of permanent peace by the Pentagon is free college because every effort by all these great counter recruitment groups to to get the tests out of the schools to stand next to the table of pro war veterans with your anti-war veterans all of this wonderful work doesn't begin to compare to what free college would do to military recruitment I mean it would just be devastated absolutely devastated and and the counter recruiters know this and they and they agree with this um and and it ought to be possible it you know where sits a work in progress but this idea that you can only motivate young people to oppose a war if you have a draft I don't know why you can't mobilize young people to oppose a war because then they wouldn't have to be forty thousand dollars in debt right and and they could go to cut this not just for college students this is for the young people who can't go to college because they don't choose to be forty thousand dollars in debt or don't have a way to make it happen you know that can mobilize young people if we work at it I I have no doubt whatsoever um so absolutely go and see Michael Moore's movie if you haven't it is all the things we could be doing if we weren't doing this with our money and and Noam Chomsky put out a new movie at the same time if you want to be really depressed about how we got here go watch that one but if you want to be like you know laugh out loud encouraged about all the things we don't dare dream of that we could do for a little fraction of the money we're dumping into this criminal enterprise which Michael Moore to his credit says in the movie you know requiem for the American dream thank you to those who have memories I didn't remember it oh did you want Dan did you want to say something to that is that the name of his new movie my uh no noam chomsky's not michael morphe's got no a footnote to the uh the michael moore movie I was thinking of just now I heard last week my granddaughter just uh graduated from smith and she had uh written a highest honors thesis on she's a film working on film on uh french treatment in media of the holocaust as a matter of fact she'd interviewed Marcel oh fools and others and so she had won uh she's had gotten admitted she was very happy to hear just last week to the Sorbonne for a year at the Sorbonne uh on a uh master's program on this so I said well did she get a scholarship no no I said well gee how are you going to pay for that I said well it's seventy dollars wow for a year save up euros um thank you mr swanson I'm looking forward to reading your book I haven't read it but uh in the definition of the war is a lie is it the big lie that all war is death and destruction and an annihilation and that it is always a noble cause where we're the soldier that god is with us and that might is right and to the victor along the spoils of war and that the annihilation of total victory is the true achievement and peace um will I find that working definition in your book and then I have a question for Dr Ellsberg um since you're with us today sir could you give a brief comment about your experience of the the lie of the Vietnam war I mean and as a Vietnam veteran I still ask why we were in Vietnam and as a former founding member of the Vietnam veterans against the war um I would ask that we remember the 58,000 that died in Vietnam so to thank you for your questions uh so he asked he asked me something about the idea that war is a lie and he asked you about your experience with lies about the Vietnam war he wants us to remember 58,000 dead and I want us to remember six million and 58,000 dead but I think you know this is this is Memorial Day weekend and this is a time to remember everyone who has died in these wars the majority of whom have been on the weaker side that's attacked the majority of whom have been civilians but many many of whom have been US soldiers and their families have suffered horribly and their kids are born with the deformities of the toxins they're exposed to and their lives are destroyed with the deformities of the war culture and the missing parents um thank you by the way for being part of Vietnam veterans against the war I just uh I I just did a series of events in cities in Florida and stayed at Scott Camille's house who was one of the Gainesville 8 and Winter Soldier testifiers and who has been working like many of these Vietnam veterans against war ever since uh which has been the core of our of our peace movement uh and has been absolutely tremendous uh I don't know what I I I suspect we're going to get uh yanked off uh stage fairly soon and I'm going to sign books and I want to give this to Dan but uh you know war the the the basic idea of war is a lie is is that everything the governments tell us about wars to get them started to keep them going to escalate them is a lie and it's not that wars don't exist it's not that there aren't lots of truths we can discuss about wars uh it's that our basic understanding that that a war can be good that some wars are bad that maybe every war I can think of for the past 71 years has been bad but there can be a good one and there might be another good one is out of place in a world that doesn't say there might be a just rape it doesn't come up with Geneva conventions for slavery for how to do it properly that there are that there are evil things we recognize as evil and the idea that they aren't the idea that they're good or justified or noble or glorious or heroic is actually a lie uh and war is the worst thing climate destruction in which war is the leading component is a close rival at this point if not passing it but war is at the top of the list of the worst things we do to ourselves and anything that leads you to think otherwise including most uh US movies and entertainment and so forth is a lie I want to talk about the war at home can you let Dan Ellsberg answer his question first go ahead is that good go ahead I want to talk about the war at home and the increased militarization of the police and the resulting and consequential killing of black and brown people in this country and how the US military contractors contribute to that could you make the the relationship between the US wars abroad and what is happening here with military grade technology being appropriated to the cities including san francisco the neighboring regions through urban shield yeah do you want to do that one or do you want to do the last one about vietnam okay we might need to make this the last question because we were told to to go an hour and a half and then we'll still be here and i'll sign books and we'll talk less formally but uh but to speak to this it is it is one of the many ways that the wars come home you know when the rights are stripped from foreigners they're stripped from americans when it becomes okay to assassinate other people it becomes okay to assassinate americans it's also part of the profit business of arms dealing in which the united states is the leader and most of which arms are not for the u.s military therefore all sorts of dictatorships and democracies abroad one way to get more money for more weapons is to give the old weapons to local police departments many are given free some are sold and then it also becomes possible to get jobs and to advance bureaucracies and so-called homeland so-called security departments by by training police departments to think of protesters as what they call low-grade terrorists i mean some of these police officers who were attacking citizens in baltimore for exercising their first amendment rights have been trained in israel by the israeli military in how to deal with palestinians and to think of baltimoreans in the way that the israeli military thinks about palestinians i mean this is an incredibly toxic effect on u.s culture that it comes you know you're going to have militarized cities as long as you have a militarized government and you're going to have weapons profiteers you know marketing their weapons everywhere as long as that's immensely profitable and tolerated i saw that california has now passed a bill waiting for a signature unless he signed it already that's going to criminalize boycott divestment and sanctioned by any business in california of any foreign government that the united states recognizes well you know this is this is i mean it makes no sense whatsoever if we were enforcing basic laws and treaties on weapons because it is already theoretically illegal for a weapons company in california to be doing business with numerous nations that the united states recognizes but it recognizes as gross human rights abusers and therefore not at the level that they can be given weapons for mass murder which you only give to nations that commit mass murder without abusing human rights if you can make any sense of that so you know i i think all of this infiltration of our culture with the idea that war is okay and that racism is okay and that if a good liberal peace laureate can bomb seven muslim countries there might be something wrong with the muslim down the street all of this is is toxic and it starts from the top and we can deal with it from all sorts of levels but a lot of them are going after the symptoms and the root cause is militarism and military spending and the war machine rolling on and on on a fraudulent basis constructed of lies thank you we need time for you to sign some books here are they we should give you that time sure i uh i i'm sorry dan do you want to speak about vietnam and i'll go sign books well okay i'll say where there's yeah go ahead that's fine um okay i've actually dave mentioned some of the very specific lies that i came in on in effect on tonkin gulf specifically you know that justified supposedly attack attack on our ship that supposedly justified an act of self-defense but the larger involvement which i think required a draft and so to get back to an earlier question here despite the fact that the draft did account for large rallies it also was essential to a large war and i think that if we got the draft back in other words if we started drafting people in addition we'd have a much larger military and i believe that we would dangerous and wrongful as it is for us to be operating with special forces in many many countries around the world if we were operating with brigades and divisions as i believe we will be under under a republican and hillary must be subjected to tremendous public pressure i think to keep her from from doing it but i think we would already be there with the republican over the last eight years then what will go with that is a hell of a lot more bombing than you've seen yet what the with the american troops will come bombing of the local country on a vastly greater scale and much more greater bad as the drones are killing perhaps 17 unidentified or innocent or non-combatant people for every so-called terrorist they get the fact is that the overall scale would be enormously greater if we do what in fact the republicans have promised to do and that is to send both heavy bombers that is bombing into syria and ground troops and iraq and afghanistan i think this we're going to have to work very hard to keep this from being in our future and a draft i'm afraid would would facilitate that that's one lesson from vietnam but the biggest one i think of general was it facilitated the lies that were told and the truths that were not told were lies to ourselves to a very large extent about our own self-image as a nation who we are as obama said in hiroshima yesterday who we are and who we might be who we have been for quite a while is an empire a country a major country that uses its covert operations in particular its finances in various ways but also many covert operations and when necessary overt operations as in vietnam and iraq where the covert operations didn't suffice to get us a government that would bend to our interests or our policies we then decide to regime change that regime by force either by covert means or by force i think we're in the whole we've been could be called a covert empire in the sense that we rely so much on assassination bribes paramilitary infiltration or influence of the armed forces for coups and so forth but again at times not so covert as in iraq and as in vietnam so we were acting in other words determined by force the who should govern and who should die in a foreign country as if it were a satrapi of some sort of ours a satellite of ours that where we had a right to determine who that was that prevented us from recognizing the motives it lied about the motives of the people who were fighting us the people we were killing to a large extent along with a lot of non-combatants and that remained true in afghanistan in iraq and in other countries namely these were people who were fighting foreign invaders and had done it before and were doing it to us as in vietnam they had done it to the french the japanese the chinese the motives were essentially the same and they weren't about to be beaten by us either we could they could prevent us from we couldn't beat them and they couldn't beat us militarily they could keep the war going but we were not about to beat them that was also true in afghanistan we were unable to see ourselves in the role of the soviet invaders of afghanistan or the british invaders the century before or alexander or jenghis khan or all the others we all we we prefer to think of ourselves as friends brothers kindly aiders of various people not as attempting to install proxy governments and it's time for us i think to take those blinders from our eyes in effect and see that on the one hand we have no right to determine by force and fire and by killing or dying in those countries who shall govern them and we have no prospect of doing it successfully without enormous devastation we do need a change when actually i've only read the first half of the excerpts of obama's speech in the new york times just before we came in and i was thinking that as rhetoric uh it's very very good what i read first that it could almost have been written by martin with a king seriously and yet of course the irony the irony that it's it's it's written or it's it's spoken by a man who is buying a trillion dollars worth of new nuclear arms is almost unbearable and you do have to say is it good for him to be saying these things when he's at all when he's doing the opposite uh hard for me to say so but he did say we need a moral revolution and that is one of the kinds of revolution we need they should be nonviolent and it does have to be he's right as uh as bernie is saying and that in ways means a revolution a nonviolent revolution against empire american empire against being an imperial country as we have been for a long time and are today we will have to change that we cannot ask a president man or woman who has been elected to run an empire as all of our presidents have been for a long time here and expect that person to uh lead a revolution against uh his or her own status and her own role so we're going to have to make totally different demands and going back to uh the other question about vietnam i would well okay that's the same point there that's what we should have learned and uh and haven't and we still think of ourselves as a universal force for good peace and democracy which has never been true in the third world at all that is a major delusion uh and is is not true now but if it doesn't become true then another thing that obama said uh yesterday is also true the other path lies universal extinction uh so uh leadership is needed he said uh american and others and it's not going to come from an american president it's got to be forced on them