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The Last Magazine: One Year After Death, Michael Hastings' Lost Novel Satirizes Corporate Media
June 17 marks the first anniversary of the death of investigative journalist Michael Hastings. Just 33 years old, Hastings died in a car crash at a time when he was considered of one of the country’s most daring young reporters. His dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan unveiled the hidden realities of war. His 2010 Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, sparked a political controversy after McChrystal and his aides were quoted making disparaging remarks about top administration officials. The article exposed longstanding government discord over the Afghan War’s direction and led to McChrystal’s firing. One year after his death, Hastings’ reporting has made waves once again. In 2012, Hastings wrote a major investigation for Rolling Stone on the American prisoner of war, Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. At the time, Hastings thought it was the most important story of his career. But it only recently earned widespread attention after Bergdahl’s release for five Taliban members sparked a political firestorm. In his report, Hastings revealed Bergdahl was profoundly disillusioned with the Afghan War and may have walked away from his base as a result. With Bergdahl still silent as he recovers from five years in Taliban captivity, Hastings’ article remains the definitive account of the young soldier’s story. Today, another major work from Hastings is upon us: "The Last Magazine," a posthumous novel and scathing satire of the corporate news media based on Hastings’ time at Newsweek. We are joined by Hastings’ widow, Elise Jordan, who brought the book to life after coming across the manuscript following her husband’s death.TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: This week marks the first anniversary of the death of investigative journalist Michael Hastings. Just 33 years old, Hastings died in a car crash that ended the life of one of the country’s most daring young reporters. His dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan unveiled the hidden realities of war. A 2010 Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, sparked a political controversy after McChrystal and his aides were quoted making disparaging remarks about top administration officials. The article exposed longstanding government discord over the Afghan War’s direction and led to McChrystal’s firing.
AMY GOODMAN: One year after his death, Michael Hastings’ reporting has made waves once again. In 2012, Hastings wrote a major piece for Rolling Stone on the American prisoner of war, Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. At the time, Hastings thought it was the most important story of his career. In 2012, Hastings spoke to Russia Today about Bowe Bergdahl’s case.
MICHAEL HASTINGS: I think this is the most significant and undercovered story about the war in Afghanistan from an American perspective. It’s a story about the only prisoner of war who’s left in these two wars. And under normal circumstances, he would be a cause célèbre everywhere. But because of the nature of why he was left and why he got—and how he got captured, he has been sort of buried. The Pentagon has intentionally sort of buried his case, for a variety of reasons.
OK, so, and as to what drove—excuse me—as to what drove Bowe Bergdahl to leave, first you have to look at—he was a 23-year-old kid who joined the Army, and he expected that he was going to go over to Afghanistan and help people and be involved in this nation building and essentially humanitarian activity. What he found when he got there was completely different. He thought that he had been sold a lie. He thought that he was not being treated with respect by the superior officers. There was a serious command problem within his unit in Afghanistan. There was a serious breakdown in command. One officer died, another got fired. Three of his—the people he respected were kicked out. And so, that created this sort of perfect storm. You have this sort of disillusionment happening, plus all these sort of horrible things he’s seeing with war, that drove him to the decision to leave.
AARON MATÉ: The late Michael Hastings speaking in 2012. His article on Bowe Bergdahl only recently earned widespread attention after Bergdahl’s release for five Taliban members sparked a political firestorm. In his report, Hastings was first to quote from emails sent by Bergdahl to his parents just before he went missing. In one email, Bergdahl wrote, quote, "I am sorry for everything here. ... These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. The horror that is america is disgusting." His father responded, quote, "Obey your conscience." Today, with Bergdahl still silent as he recovers from five years in Taliban captivity, Hastings’ article remains the definitive account of the young soldier’s story.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, to mark the first anniversary of Michael Hastings’ death, which is actually tomorrow, another major work from Michael Hastings is upon us. It’s not an investigative report but a posthumous novel, a satire Hastings wrote of the corporate news media based on his time at Newsweek. The book is called The Last Magazine. Michael Hastings’ widow, Elise Jordan, helped bring the book to life after coming across the manuscript following her husband’s death. Elise Jordan is a journalist, political commentator. She served as a director for communications in the National Security Council from 2008 to ’09 and was a speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice. In fact, you met Michael when you were a speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice?
ELISE JORDAN: Yes, and then we knew each other for a couple years, and then we started dating actually when we were both in Afghanistan. I was doing a story on female marines in Helmand, and he was doing the McChrystal story. So it was right before—it was during the process he was interviewing and embedded with the team.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you met this young, crusading journalist, who never thought his piece on McChrystal would actually take him down.
ELISE JORDAN: No, I mean, he thought that it might cause waves for a day or two, but he didn’t—you know, the message of the piece, for him, was the story of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and of General McChrystal’s really strict rules of engagement, which—courageous restraint, which means the troops weren’t allowed the same force protection measures and were very upset about these rules of engagement.
AMY GOODMAN: And he went on to write the Bowe Bergdahl story, thinking, "My god, if the McChrystal story had this response, Bowe Bergdahl is going to blow everyone out of the water."
ELISE JORDAN: Exactly, and I love how in the piece he predicted that it would become hugely politicized and that bringing Bowe Bergdahl home would start to signal the end of the Afghan War. He thought that there would be a firestorm immediately after publication two years ago. That firestorm came now—and, I think, is exactly the message of his book, The Last Magazine, in terms of what the establishment media seizes on as to make a story. The country didn’t care, the media didn’t care, overall, that this lone sergeant was in captivity for five years, but then, suddenly, when there’s the opportunity to politicize it and to re-victimize someone who has been tortured for five years, everyone’s all over it. And then, that’s disgusting and something that would have really angered Michael.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is a rocking satire. So, Michael Hastings was an intern at Newsweek, and Michael M. Hastings is sort of the star of this book, this, quote, "novel." But talk about who we’re talking about here, who the characters are. You’ve got Nishant Patel, the international editor; Sanders Berman, the managing editor; sort of thinly veiled Fareed Zakaria and, as well, Jon Meacham?
ELISE JORDAN: Well, they’re composites. I would say that Michael was certainly influenced by his time at Newsweek, but he had a vivid imagination, and it’s a talented work of fiction. That said, I think what he wanted to show was establishment media and how—cheerleading the Iraq War for career advancement, and how quickly that cheerleading turned as soon as the war turned. Instead of looking at what they had chosen to support and trying to find a solution, you know, they wanted to forget as quickly as possible that they had ever been the one, you know, beating the drumbeat to war.
AARON MATÉ: So the first anniversary of his death is tomorrow. After he died, there was all sorts of theories. People were analyzing the scene of the wreckage. I remember there was a YouTube videos of the crash, people looking at the engine. Before he died, Hastings had sent an email to colleagues saying his reporting was under investigation. You’ve been very clear, though, to basically reject all these conspiracy theories.
ELISE JORDAN: Correct. Unfortunately, it was a tragic accident. I think that sometimes things are so horrible and tragic that we want to have an explanation that seems to make a little more sense, just that—just then, you know, we lost one of the greatest journalists ever in American history, at least in my humble opinion. So—
AMY GOODMAN: We actually had the person who helped work on that piece with Bowe Bergdahl, Matt Farwell, who said, though, on the issue of the FBI investigating, that Michael was so concerned about, in fact that they were.
ELISE JORDAN: Oh, they were.
AMY GOODMAN: They were investigating, right, Michael for his piece on Bowe Bergdahl, even though, in a very rare move, the FBI said they weren’t conducting an investigation after Hastings’ death.
ELISE JORDAN: Well, and Matt Farwell is a wonderful friend and collaborator, and I’m so happy that he and Michael were able to work together on that story, which wouldn’t have happened without Matt, Michael always said. Such a well-researched story. They—it really is just an example of the Obama administration’s crackdown on journalism. They, Michael and Matt, were able to find out more information about what actually happened and Bowe’s motivations than the U.S. government. And that apparently is scary and threatening and causes us to investigate Michael Hastings and Matt Farwell, which I really don’t understand.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Michael. He was on Democracy Now! in 2012. He said the Afghan War, like the invasion of Iraq, was based on a false premise.
MICHAEL HASTINGS: If WMDs were the big lie of the Iraq War, the safe haven myth is the big lie of the Afghan War. And what I mean by that—and this was true in Iraq, as well—but 99 percent of the people, maybe even higher, honestly, the people we’re fighting, whether it was Sunni insurgents in Iraq or Shiite militias in Iraq or in Afghanistan, the Taliban never actually posed a threat to the United States homeland. So the question one has to ask oneself is that if everything we’re doing and everyone we’re fighting is not actually a threat to the United States—certainly not a direct threat, by any means, by any means—then why are we expending so many resources, $120 billion a year, you know, with all the lives lost, to do it? And that’s—and again, this is the big lie of counterinsurgency, which I know we’ve discussed on your show. To justify this tremendous outlay of resources, they have to say, "Oh, no, we’re killing terrorists." But everybody knows that that’s not true.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hastings in 2012 talking about the Iraq and as well as Afghan War. He reported from Iraq as well as Afghanistan. Elise Jordan, this, again, the anniversary of his death. You had written a letter to The New York Times objecting to their obituary of your husband, of Michael.
ELISE JORDAN: Yes, it was factually inaccurate. It was shameful. I can’t believe The New York Times has reported erroneously on my husband’s reporting basically every time they decided to write anything about his reporting. But I really didn’t think that they would go that low in someone’s obituary. It was just tasteless.
AMY GOODMAN: What was wrong?
ELISE JORDAN: They cited the Pentagon report that "cleared" McChrystal and his aides of any wrongdoing.
AMY GOODMAN: For our radio listeners, you put little air quotes around "cleared."
ELISE JORDAN: Yeah, because the Pentagon—Michael did not participate in the investigation. He didn’t believe that the role of the reporter was to turn over your notebooks to the government. But of course the Pentagon is going to clear—it’s all—and if you actually read the report, it’s pure speculation. "Oh, well, we don’t remember exactly. We don’t"—it’s so vague, and that’s what upset me. You can’t—if you print a paragraph about a report, the journalist should actually read the report and then have some context and decide, oh, well, maybe this report doesn’t actually clear McChrystal and aides. So—
AMY GOODMAN: So they did this in life, and they did this in death.
ELISE JORDAN: Yes, I think Michael’s reporting was really threatening to the establishment, and I think that’s what he really gets out in this book. When he was talking about what he called the lies of counterinsurgency, what he wanted to do with this book was to talk about how the lies are aided along by the news media and the complicity of so many journalists and so many status quo journalists in promoting this.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hastings’ book, The Last Magazine, is out today. Elise Jordan, thanks so much for being with us.
Juan Cole: Mass Sunni Uprising Forces Iraq to Confront Sectarian Blowback of 2003 U.S. Invasion
As the United States briefly holds talks with Iran over the crisis in Iraq, President Obama has announced the deployment of 275 U.S. military personnel to protect U.S. personnel and facilities in Baghdad. The Obama administration is reportedly weighing other options in Iraq, including drone strikes and the deployment of special forces to train Iraqi troops. This comes as Sunni militants have launched a new offensive against the city of Baquba less than 40 miles from Baghdad. We speak to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, author of several books, including the forthcoming "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East."Image Credit: Reuters
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: President Obama has announced plans to deploy about 275 U.S. military forces back to Iraq. In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama wrote, quote, "This force is deploying for the purpose of protecting U.S. citizens and property, if necessary, and is equipped for combat." The White House is also reportedly considering sending a contingent of special forces to train and advise Iraqi troops. This comes as it also weighs airstrikes, possibly drone strikes, inside Iraq to attack the Sunni militants who have seized large parts of the country.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Obama met with nearly 20 top advisers, including Secretary of State Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, CIA Director John Brennan and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Iran have briefly discussed the crisis in Iraq on the sidelines of the nuclear talks in Vienna. Speaking to Katie Couric of Yahoo News, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. is open to working with Iran to confront Sunni militants in Iraq. Kerry did not rule out the possibility of military cooperation.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: We’re open to discussions if there is something constructive that can be contributed by Iran, if Iran is prepared to do something that is going to respect the integrity and sovereignty of Iraq and the ability of the government to reform.
KATIE COURIC: Can you see cooperating with Iran militarily?
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: At this moment, I think we need to go step by step and see what in fact might be a reality, but I wouldn’t rule out anything that would be constructive to providing real stability, a respect for the constitution, a respect for the election process and a respect for the ability of the Iraqi people to form a government that represents all of the interests of Iraq.
AARON MATÉ: On the ground in Iraq, militants attacked and briefly took control of parts of the Iraqi city of Baquba, less than 40 miles from Baghdad. There are also reports 44 Sunni prisoners have died at a police station northeast of Baghdad. According to the Associated Press, Shiite militiamen killed the prisoners at close range after Sunni fighters attempted to overrun the jail. Operations at the country’s largest oil refinery in Baiji have been shut down after Sunni rebels advanced into the town and surrounded the refinery.
AMY GOODMAN: In political developments, Iraq’s former vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, said the recent offensive by Sunni fighters is part of a broader revolt. Al-Hashemi, who is Sunni, told Reuters, quote, "What happened in my country ... is desperate people revolted. Simple as that. Arab Sunni communities over 11 years faced discrimination, injustice, corruption." Meanwhile, the prime minister of the Kurdistan region in Iraq has warned it will be "almost impossible" for Iraq to return to how it was before Sunni militants seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.
To talk more about Iraq, we’re joined by Juan Cole, professor of history at University of Michigan. His blog, "Informed Comment" is online at JuanCole.com. He’s the author of many books, including Engaging the Muslim World. His latest book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East, will soon be out. His latest article is headlined "Don’t Trust the Bombers on Iraq: 'Shock and Awe' Never Works."
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Cole. Can you start off by talking about President Obama saying he is deploying 275 U.S. military personnel back to Iraq? What about what is happening there today and what you feel the U.S. role should be?
JUAN COLE: Well, the way in which the Iraqi security forces collapsed in Mosul and elsewhere in the north of Iraq has clearly raised concerns in the U.S. government as to the safety of the personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, given the long history of crises in the modern Middle East from the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran to the attack on the consulate at Benghazi. There is real concern that the U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone in Baghdad may not be secure. It’s the responsibility of the local government to provide that security, but obviously there are some questions about whether it can and will.
AARON MATÉ: And, Juan Cole, how would you characterize this conflict right now? When we talk about ISIS, it’s generally referred to as this monolithic force, but of course there are many militant groups that comprise this pushback against the Iraqi government. So, your assessment of the overall picture right now?
JUAN COLE: I don’t believe that we can think about the—what has happened in Iraq as a series of military conquests. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a small group, a few thousand fighters. It doesn’t have formations or brigades. And I think what really happened was that they have cells on the ground in the Sunni Arab cities, and they coordinated with other groups, including secular and socialist groups, like ex-Baathists, to stage urban uprisings against the al-Maliki regime and its security forces. So, I think that this is a very complex phenomenon and an expression of popular discontent, and not just a series of military advances.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain, Professor Cole, who the forces are. Who is ISIS? Who is ISIL? Where does al-Qaeda fit into all of this?
JUAN COLE: Well, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is also called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in English. It’s just a matter of how you translate one of the words. So they’re the same organization. Their genealogy is in the Islamic State of Iraq, which was the main al-Qaeda vehicle, initially founded by a Jordanian named Zarqawi. And it has been active in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq and in bombing the Shiite areas all along, since 2005 or so, in a big way. And so, you know, when we hear news reports of it advancing in Baquba, well, you could have gone back six or seven years, and the same thing would have been sure.
So, it is an al-Qaeda affiliate, although recently the core al-Qaeda has displayed discomfort with it because it attacks other al-Qaeda affiliates—it doesn’t play well with other children. It’s an extremely nasty organization. It blows up soft targets, children at ice cream shops. It’ll blow up a marriage and then come back and blow up the funeral that evening. It’s ruthless. And it’s the worst of the Sunni resistance groups. But it does represent a set of discontents within the Sunni Arab areas of northern Iraq, where the Sunnis are something like 20 percent of the Iraqi population. They were in power before the U.S. invaded in 2003, and they’ve been dethroned and made unemployed and marginalized, and so there is various kinds of discontent, civil and demonstrations, but also a turn to terrorism.
AARON MATÉ: Well, Juan Cole, on the issue of Sunni grievances, can you explain what the government of Nouri al-Maliki has done to fuel sectarianism, and now, of course, as it’s called upon to form a more inclusive government, what it could do now?
JUAN COLE: Well, al-Maliki, you know, was a conspirator. For 20 years, he was the bureau chief of the covert Dawa, or Islamic Call Party, which is a Shiite fundamentalist group aiming for a Shiite government, a Muslim fundamentalist government, in Iraq. And so, when he became prime minister, you know, he just continued to be a conspirator and doesn’t trust the Sunni Arabs, who were disproportionately powerful in the Baath Party that he was trying to overthrow. He doesn’t meet with his Sunni Arab political partners, when he had any. And his government doesn’t provide much in the way of services to the Sunni Arab cities. They don’t share in the oil wealth. They don’t have regular electricity. They don’t have services. And they were fired from their government jobs in favor of Shiite cronies of the ruling Shiite parties, with something called de-Baathification on the model of de-Nazification in postwar Germany. But it went way beyond even what de-Nazification did in Germany, so that even high school teachers were fired and so forth. You have unemployment. You have a lack of investment. You have a lack of services. And the Sunni Arabs in Parliament are given the message that, you know, they are a minority in Parliament, and they’re always going to be a minority in Parliament, and they’re always going to lose every vote in Parliament from here on into eternity. So they’re just not going to put up with that anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry on the crisis unfolding in Iraq. He was speaking to Katie Couric on Yahoo News.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: This is a challenge to the stability of the region. It is obviously an existential challenge to Iraq itself. This is a terrorist group. It has grown out of, frankly, illicit support that it has received from various places in the region, in the conflict in Syria. But there’s a much larger—a much larger design at play in their efforts. They want to establish a Sunni caliphate, fundamentally, but they also are trying to redress what happened a number of years ago when the balance flipped in Iraq between Shia and Sunni. So you have people who have a Sunni interest. You have people who have an extreme interest. You have people who have anti-Maliki interest. You have people who have anti-Iran, pro—I mean, there’s a whole lot of forces at play here. And that’s what makes it much more complicated than just "Gee, these are bad guys," and, you know, you react.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, can you respond to Secretary of State John Kerry and also talk about the Bush role in this, in fueling this kind of sectarianism, if you feel he did?
JUAN COLE: Well, the Bush administration very explicitly sided with the Shiites and wanted to create a Shiite-dominated government and enthusiastically cooperated in the de-Baathification or the firing of thousands and thousands of Sunni bureaucrats and teachers from their jobs. So this—this was a policy of the Bush administration, and it is, in some large part, responsible for the current crisis.
Mr. Kerry’s remarks show an understanding of the complexity of the situation on the ground and the way in which some of what’s going on in northern Iraq really has nothing to do with the advance of a terrorist organization but is a matter of civil protest against discrimination and marginalization. So I think they’re very judicious comments, and it’s wonderful to see, at the top of the U.S. government, officials who do have an understanding of international affairs. That wasn’t always the case in the previous administration.
But, you know, the question of what to do about all this is the one that weighs heavy on the U.S. government. And I just would urge an abundance of caution here. I think, you know, U.S. airstrikes that have been proposed on ISIS, or ISIL, targets would inevitably hit civilians. It’s a guerrilla group, so it doesn’t have formations or lines that would be easily targeted, and so you’ll end up with bombing urban areas. And it should be remembered that the United States intensively bombed Iraq all the time that it was there. Something on the order of 10 to 15 percent of the people who were killed in Iraq during the American occupation were killed by U.S. airstrikes, so this is an enormous number of people. And I think we should be very careful about thinking of starting that back up.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the talks the U.S. is having now with Iran? And can you talk about whether its interests, the U.S. government now, is—are allied when it comes to Iraq with Bashar al-Assad of Syria?
JUAN COLE: Well, I think the U.S. interests are in fighting this kind of extremist group. After all, it was this kind of hyper-Sunni extremism that hit the United States on 9/11. And so, the U.S. does have an interest in repressing it and working with others who are alarmed by it. The al-Qaeda kind of organizations in the Middle East typically despise Shiites as wretched heretics, and there have been many massacres of Shiites by the Taliban in Afghanistan, by al-Qaeda groups and their affiliates.
And so, you know, as a matter of statecraft, obviously, if you wanted to fight these groups, which have taken over parts of northern Syria and now northern Iraq, a Shiite power like Iran would be a natural ally. And so, I think it’s likely that the United States will develop some relationships with Iran in this regard on this issue. And I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s crazy that in 2001, when the Iranians were having candlelight vigils for the United States and sympathized with the U.S. as victims of this kind of terrorism that Iran had also suffered from, that suddenly the Bush administration and David Frum, the speechwriter for Bush, put Iran in an "axis of evil" with a country like North Korea and alienated Iran. I think there’s an opportunity now to repair some of that.
AARON MATÉ: I wanted to turn to comments made by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair over the weekend suggesting the current crisis is not linked to the 2003 U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. Blair was speaking to the BBC.
TONY BLAIR: So my point is very simple: Even if you left Saddam in place in 2003, then, when 2011 happened and you had the Arab revolutions going through Tunisia and Libya and Yemen and Bahrain and Egypt and Syria, you would have still had a major problem in Iraq. Indeed, you can see what happens when you leave the dictator in place, as has happened with Assad now. But if you say to me, would I prefer a situation where we’d left Saddam in place in 2003—do I think the region would be safer, more stable, if we’d done that—my answer to that is unhesitatingly no.
AARON MATÉ: Blair’s comments coincided with an essay on his website, where he writes, quote, "We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven’t." Blair’s comments drew widespread criticism, including from London Mayor Boris Johnson.
MAYOR BORIS JOHNSON: I think, you know, I can understand that he feels very, very shattered and guilty about the whole thing, but I think my general message would be just to put a sock in it, really, and in a paper-bag-on-head time.
AARON MATÉ: Juan Cole, as we wrap, your response to Tony Blair?
JUAN COLE: Well, Mr. Blair—you know, it would take hours and hours to refute everything that he said, all of which is false, but you should be—remember that he was perfectly willing to leave dictators in power. He took the British Petroleum officials to Libya to meet with Gaddafi, so it’s simply not true that he went around overthrowing dictators in the Middle East.
He did help to invade Iraq. And there, I mean, I think the outcomes are less of an indictment of him than the methods. Mr. Blair repeatedly lied to the public about this enterprise. He was advised by his attorney general that the whole thing was illegal in international law initially. He didn’t share that memo with his own Cabinet. He hid it from the British public. He said it wasn’t about oil, but we now know he was cooperating with BP officials to make sure that they got bids after the war was over. He just violated international law repeatedly, and British domestic law, in pursuing this war of aggression.
So, you know, it’s very unfortunate for him that the war of aggression turned into a quagmire and a disaster of various sorts, so that it’s very obvious that it was a bad idea, but I think the real problem here is that the United Nations Charter was enacted to stop aggressive warfare. We don’t want any more Germanys invading Poland. And there were no legitimate international legal grounds for a British invasion of Iraq in 2003. And that’s the real problem here: It’s illegal.
AMY GOODMAN: His question, if it would be better if Saddam Hussein was still in place, Juan Cole?
JUAN COLE: I mean, this is a purely hypothetical question, but one could imagine a scenario in which there was a no-fly zone, remember, over the Kurdish areas and over southern Iraq, and Saddam was still in power, and the Arab Spring comes along, and the Shiites and the Kurds would have risen up, and the no-fly zones would have prevented Saddam from deploying his armor, and it might well have been a Libya kind of situation in which the no-fly zone helped the population of Iraq overthrow their dictator, and things might have turned out very differently. Obviously, it would be a very fragile situation, but we wouldn’t have had this aggressive foreign intervention and years-long occupation in which a particular ethnic group, the Sunni Arabs, were targeted for reprisals. And so, I don’t agree with the hypothetical in the first place, but I don’t think that’s really the issue.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of history at University of Michigan. His blog, "Informed Comment," at JuanCole.com. He’s written many books. His most recent one is The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East; it’ll be out July 1st.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we turn to Ben Jealous talking about voting through the South. Stay with us.
50 Years Later, How a New Freedom Summer Could Mobilize the South's Disenfranchised People of Color
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. In June 1964, more than 1,000 out-of-state volunteers traveled to Mississippi to help register African-American voters and set up "freedom schools." Activists risked their lives to help actualize the promise of America’s democracy: the right for everyone to vote. Out of Freedom Summer grew the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the legitimacy of the white-only Mississippi Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Half a century after Freedom Summer, a new report suggests much work remains to be done. According to the report, people of color continue to be locked out of statewide politics, and people of color candidates rarely get elected to statewide office. The report features state-by-state graphics that demonstrate how a targeted wave of voter registration among people of color voters could shift the balance of power in key Southern states. The report, "True South: Voters of Color in the Black Belt 50 Years After Freedom Summer," was just released by the Southern Elections Foundation and the Center for American Progress. We are joined by the report’s author, Benjamin Jealous, a partner at Kapor Capital and a senior fellow the Center for American Progress.TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: This month marks the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. In June 1964, over a thousand out-of-state volunteers traveled to Mississippi to help register voters and set up "freedom schools." Activists risked their lives to help actualize the promise of America’s democracy: the right for everyone to vote. Out of Freedom Summer grew the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the legitimacy of the white-only Mississippi Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
This is a clip from the Stanley Nelson documentary, Freedom Summer. It features civil rights activists Bob Moses and Julian Bond discussing the plan for Freedom Summer.
BOB MOSES: What really is important is that they get down and kind of just melt away into the black population. If we could just get everybody through the entry point and into the community, the black community will house them and also harbor them.
JULIAN BOND: The genius of the Freedom Summer is that these volunteers were spread all over the state. The Freedom Summer workers are everywhere. They’re in almost every little big town. Almost every place where you can go, they are there.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, half a century after Freedom Summer, a new report suggests much work remains to be done. According to the report, minority voters continue to be locked out of statewide politics, minority candidates rarely get elected to statewide office. It features state-by-state graphics that demonstrate how a targeted wave of voter registration could shift the balance of power in key Southern states. The report is called "True South: Voters of Color in the Black Belt 50 Years After Freedom Summer," and it was just released by Southern Elections Foundation and the Center for American Progress.
For more, we go to Baltimore, Maryland, where we’re joined by the report’s author, Ben Jealous, partner at Kapor Capital, senior fellow at Center for American Progress. He’s the former NAACP president and CEO.
Ben Jealous, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about "True South." What’s happening today?
BEN JEALOUS: You know, look, when we talk about the South—which is a region that if you’re from it, you love—we typically, these days, when you get into politics, come back quickly to the topic of vote suppression. I mean, here we are again, a hundred years after the rise of Jim Crow, seeing new laws pushed through to suppress the vote. The problem if we’d stop there is we don’t get to the fact that for the past 50 years we have known how to deal with massive vote suppression, which is massive voter registration.
And the purpose of this report is to show people that, state by state, we can actually unleash democracy and get to a place where that—if you will, that dormant moral majority of working-class whites and voters of color, who really, at the end of the day, when you listen, are concerned about the same basic kitchen-table issues—about making sure their kids can get a good education, making sure that people, you know, their neighbors, have access to good jobs—we actually now can unleash that majority throughout the South by knitting together voters of color and working-class whites, if we choose. And all we have to do is just get out there and do what we did 50 years ago in Freedom Summer and the years after in the black community, but do it not just in—you know, do it in today’s South, which isn’t just black and white, but is black and white and brown and yellow and red, and sign up folks with the intention of, quite frankly, empowering them so that our politics truly represent our region and the people of it.
AARON MATÉ: Ben Jealous, your report says that such a drive could have a major impact on elections in several key states that are traditionally Republican. Can you explain?
BEN JEALOUS: Sure. I mean, you know, look, look at Georgia right now, right? There are 830,000 unregistered people of color right now. There are 600,000 unregistered blacks. If we signed up 45 percent of the unregistered people of color there, the new voters that would yield—so, if you take that 45 percent, about 400,000, and then you reduce it, if you will, by the percentage of newly signed-up voters who tend not to show up to vote, you would still exceed the margin of victory in the past several statewide races. So, you know, Governor Deal won by 258,000 votes. This would yield, you know, more than 300,000 new voters.
Similarly, you know, in states like Virginia, where my family hails from, you’re talking about signing up maybe 10 percent of the black voters who have yet to sign up to vote in that state or currently not signed up to vote. So, depending on the state, it could be 10 percent of the black voters, it could be 45 percent of the voters of color. At the end of the day, these are things that are very doable. It costs, depending on who does it, between $8 and $20 to sign up a new voter. So at the end of the day, you’re talking about an investment, given the state, of maybe $3 million in a state like Virginia, maybe $12 million in a state like Georgia, to really get to a place, again, where this dormant majority, this dormant moral majority of working-class whites and voters of color, could finally have their say in statewide politics.
AMY GOODMAN: South Carolina, Ben?
BEN JEALOUS: Yeah, I mean, in South Carolina—which, quite frankly, as somebody who cut their teeth organizing in Mississippi, was probably the one state that we considered sort of harder to crack than Mississippi—it’s the home of the Citadel, and it, in many ways, has been a violently repressive state, where they still fly the Confederate battle flag in front of their state capitol every day. There are 350,000 unregistered black voters, and the tea party governor won by 60,000 votes. It is very doable to finally unleash, you know, the vote at the statewide level, even in a tough state like that.
Again, it might cost $4 [million] or $5 million, which is big money to me and to you, but, you know, when the Democratic Party is running billion-dollar presidential campaigns, the fact that they don’t invest is just foolish. And really, I think it comes down, quite frankly, to, you know, people who don’t know the South being in power in these institutions and saying, "Well, nothing’s changed, so why should we invest?" Well, it turns out lack of investment is the surest form of historic preservation. Things haven’t changed because they haven’t invested. And if they do invest, things will change and could change very, very quickly.
AARON MATÉ: Ben Jealous, so on an organizing level, what would a voter drive look like on this mass scale that you’re proposing, and what are the main obstacles that it would face?
BEN JEALOUS: You know, it would look very much like folks are doing in Mississippi right now and sort of, in some ways, a Freedom Summer redux, which is less about people coming from outside the South into the South to actually sign up people to vote, as was needed at a time when it was so dangerous 50 years ago to really get the bravest people from wherever they would come, to just simply people working with the students who are there, with their neighbors, and deciding to just get it done, deciding, "Look, we have kind of inched up, you know, getting more and more people signed up to vote over the past 50 years. Well, let’s just push over the finish line and actually get our region and this great Western democracy up to where most Western democracies are, with virtually everyone signed up to vote." So it’s—you know, it’s about using big data, which makes it much easier, because you know exactly who isn’t signed up to vote, having a big vision, setting big goals, and then making a big change by simply empowering your neighbors to vote.
AMY GOODMAN: On June 25th, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on a long-stalled bill to repair the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Last year, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the legislation by weakening some of its key provisions. In April, President Obama said voter ID laws and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has undermined democracy.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The principle of "one person, one vote" is the single greatest tool we have to redress an unjust status quo. You would think there would not be an argument about this anymore. But the stark, simple truth is this: The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago. Across the country, Republicans have led efforts to pass laws making it harder, not easier, for people to vote.
AMY GOODMAN: I don’t know if you see this as a segue, Ben Jealous, but can you relate this to what happened in Virginia with the upset by David Brat against Eric Cantor, and where you see politics going now in 2014 with the midterm elections, and how it relates to voting rights?
BEN JEALOUS: Sure. I mean, look, I think what happened with Brat and Cantor, quite frankly, is, look, there is an angst that courses through this country, where people in both parties, people of all races, are concerned that our country is stuck and that the status quo really is not a good thing for our families, that, if you will, we are at a tipping point when it comes to our families’ access to the great dream that defines this country, and that our children are very likely to be worse off if we don’t change the status quo.
With that said, you know, the far-right wing, what they also get right is that every demographic trend is in the favor of progressives in the South for the foreseeable future, and that is why they are investing so much in suppressing the vote, because they want to—you know, even though they might be upset about the status quo when it comes to the financial future of our country, they very much seem to be invested in keeping the vote from changing much, because it ultimately favors far-right-wing conservatives to lock as many people of color out of the ballot box as possible.
And what we’re seeing is that because of black remigration, because of Latino and Asian immigration into the South, and, quite frankly, because their own wives and children have become—have come to depart, if you will, from being so rigidly attached to the Republican Party—when you look at white women swing voters, they’re swinging more and more towards Democrats because of these Cro-Magnon assaults on women’s rights, and at the same time young voters simply are so freaked out about what’s going on in the economy that they, too, are also tending in the South to—you know, young whites gravitate more and more towards the Democratic Party.
And so, at the end of the day, we’ve got to deal with the angst in our country, but we’ve got to do it honestly, and we’ve got to seek real reforms. And the best way for us to do that is to finally unleash democracy in our states. And in this report, "True South," what we say is, look, we can do that, but we’ve got to get back to understanding what our parents taught us, which is that when you’re facing massive voter suppression, you respond with massive voter registration.
AMY GOODMAN: And specifically, Ben Jealous, how you feel that voter registration should be done 50 years after Freedom Summer?
BEN JEALOUS: We’ve got to be smart. You know, we have to actually use the databases that we have to target the voters who have not been signed up to vote. We’ve got to be persistent. This is not something we can just do in a presidential year. We’ve got to be doing it now. We’ve got to, you know, be focused on the fact that Mississippi has a governor’s race coming up next year in 2015. This has to be an every year, year out, year out, you know, year in, thing.
And we’ve got to have a goal. And that’s what this report does. It says, "Look, this is the number you’ve got to register in your state to change the status quo, to be able to say to that person, when you shake their hand, and they say, 'Why should I sign up to vote? Nothing ever changes,' to be able to say to them, with conviction, 'If you sign up to vote, if you help me sign up your neighbors to vote, things will change.'"
AMY GOODMAN: Do we need another Freedom Summer?
BEN JEALOUS: Yes, and there’s one going on right now throughout the South, and people need to get involved. But then we’ve got to turn it into, you know, Freedom Fall. We’ve got to turn it into the Freedom Year, you know, and just keep going. I mean, if you go back to Freedom Summer, what we forget is it wasn’t just the summer. You know, you look at Julian Bond, right? 1964, there he is, Freedom Summer, Georgia, Mississippi, signing up folks to vote. 1966, he becomes the first black state representative in the South, certainly in Georgia, has to file a Supreme Court case to get seated. 1968, he is at the Democratic convention, actually, nominated for vice president, before having to turn it down because he was too young.
What that reminds us is that when we invest in massive voter registration, things can change much faster than we think is possible. If the South—if politics in the South were a light, it would be pretty obvious it has no dimmer switch: Things are either on or off. And so, what we need to focus on is that even though things might feel dark right now, if you will, that people might feel like there’s not much reason for hope, as soon as that switch changes, it’s on, and the lights are on, and the possibilities are endless. That’s what we learned from Freedom Summer. That’s what we need to apply this summer. There is a second Freedom Summer, and we’ve got to keep pushing forward.
AMY GOODMAN: Ben Jealous, we want to thank you for being with us, partner at Kapor Capital, senior fellow at Center for American Progress. We’ll link to your report called "True South: Unleashing Democracy in the Black Belt 50 Years After Freedom Summer."
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Michael Hastings posthumously has a new novel out. It was his first, and it’s called The Last Magazine. We’ll speak with his widow, Elise Jordan. Stay with us.
Headlines:
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President Obama has announced plans to deploy about 275 U.S. military personnel back to Iraq amidst a widening crisis. In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama said the force will protect U.S. citizens and be equipped for combat. In their latest advance, Sunni militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have attacked and briefly taken control of parts of the city of Baquba, less than 40 miles from Baghdad. The Obama administration is reportedly weighing other options in Iraq, including drone strikes and the deployment of special forces to train Iraqi troops. The United States and Iran have spoken briefly about the crisis, but State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki ruled out any joint military action.
Jen Psaki: "I would remind you that we’ve had similar conversations in the past with Iran regarding Afghanistan. These consultations would be along those lines. We’re not talking about coordinating any military action in Iraq with Iran. We would encourage Iran to push the Iraqis to act to address problems in a nonsectarian way."
We’ll have more on Iraq after headlines.
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Georgia is set to execute a death row prisoner this evening using a single dose of pentobarbital from a secret source. On Monday, a federal judge rejected Marcus Wellons’ argument that the secrecy violates his rights and could cause undue suffering. Unless a court issues a reprieve, Wellons will become the first prisoner executed in the United States since the botched execution in Oklahoma of Clayton Lockett, who writhed, groaned and took 43 minutes to die. Initial findings from an independent autopsy released last week found the execution team failed to properly place Lockett’s IV. Two other executions are planned for Wednesday in Florida and Missouri — two states that also conceal the sources of their lethal drugs.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Argentina over its $1.5 billion debt in a ruling critics say validates predatory behavior by so-called "vulture funds." The case involves hedge funds that bought up Argentina’s debt at bargain rates after its financial crisis more than a decade ago. After Argentina defaulted on its debts, the vast majority of its creditors agreed to slash the value of their holdings. But NML Capital and other firms refused to accept the deal, instead seeking full repayment. Monday’s ruling leaves in place a lower court decision ordering Argentina to pay the companies. Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner addressed the nation after the ruling.
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: "I think that you need to distinguish between what is a business and what is an extortion. I think there are two concepts that are completely different. All the government, all the country, all the directors, in the areas of the environment and policies, need to be open to negotiating. What no president can do in a sovereign country is to subject its country, its people to extortion."
In a statement, the anti-poverty network Jubilee USA called the court ruling "a devastating blow," saying, "These hedge funds are equipped with an instrument that forces struggling economies into submission."
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In a decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled an anti-choice group can challenge an Ohio law banning false statements about political candidates. The case involves a 2010 attempt by the Susan B. Anthony List to put up billboards accusing an anti-choice congressmember of backing taxpayer funding for abortion, because he supported Obamacare. Federal law actually bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortions. The Supreme Court did not weigh in directly on the Ohio law, instead sending the case back to a lower court.
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In news from Egypt, the prosecutor general has ordered the release of Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Abdullah Elshamy, citing Elshamy’s failing health after 10 months in prison and nearly five months on hunger strike. Elshamy was arrested after covering a crackdown on a sit-in by supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi. He was one of 13 people ordered released Monday on medical grounds. His brother, Mohammed Elshamy, spoke to Democracy Now! on Monday after receiving the news.
Mohammed Elshamy: "My brother Abdullah started a hunger strike last January, demanding his freedom or being sent to trial, because he has not been on trial for 10 months. He lost more than 35 kilograms of his weight, and his health was deteriorating for the last month, and he had a blood test that said he had anemia and beginnings of kidney failure. He’s in jail since August 2013, and of course him being released after all this time and after going into hunger strike and all the problems he’s been through because of the hunger strike, like being transferred to solitary confinement, and him finally to be released in a few hours is an excitement for me, for the whole family, for everyone who knows him or even just heard about his case. It’s a wonderful day and time for everyone, and everyone is happy."
Abdullah Elshamy’s release papers have reportedly been signed, and he could be out later today. His brother Mohammed also voiced hope his release would help three Al Jazeera English journalists — Peter Greste, Baher Mohamed and Mohammed Fahmy — who remain behind bars following their arrest in December. An Egyptian judge said Monday he will announce the verdict in their case on June 23 — next Monday. Click here to see our full interview with Mohammed Elshamy.
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