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ElsewheresDaughter (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat May-28-05 06:28 PM Original message |
Thom Hartmann 5/26 interview with Galloway...mp3 link & transcript |
Edited on Sat May-28-05 07:02 PM by ElsewheresDaughter
http://www.thomhartmann.com/
And then there's very clear evidence of systematic torture. There's the desecration of the Koran which may or may not have happened, depending on which edition of Newsweek you are prepared to believe. This is a big scar on the face of the United States. And it seems to me that too few citizens of the United States have fastened on to the fact that the protestations by your president and your government of being interested in human rights and democracy and freedom are quite negated by the very existence of Guantanamo Bay. But of course, that's not the end of it. Bagram Air Base is exactly the same kind of place. Abu Ghraib prison, well we perhaps, on a family show, shouldn't probe too deeply into the disgusting obscenities that were going on there. And, it turns out, that where the United States itself is not prepared to physically torture people, it merely subcontracts out the task; sending people to the likes of Uzbekistan and Egypt and other prison states where less squeamish governments will torture people for the United States and give the U.S. the testimony they get as a result. Which, of course, it goes without saying, is almost never of any use because anyone will say anything under torture. I wish I knew the answer to your first question, why did Tony Blair join it? Certainly, it's been utterly ruinous to his political reputation. He will, he will be followed into the history books and into the grave with this mark of Cain on his forehead. He will be remembered for nothing other than that he followed George W. Bush over a cliff; took the rest of us with them, and we haven't yet reached the bottom, I'm afraid. All I can say from my own conversations with Mr. Blair, man to man, are that I think that both him and George W. Bush are possessed of a kind of messianic belief that somebody, God perhaps, gave them the job of shouldering the white man's burden, which is the world. That someone gave them the right to step outside of international law; go anywhere, do anything, pay any price in other people's blood, to reshape the world in their image; in the image that they want to see. And I think that both men will be damned in history. Both men have made their respective countries the two most hated countries in the world. They have endangered the lives and safety of our citizens. They have damaged our economic and cultural and social interests, and they should face prosecution, but never will. Your president stole the presidency in Florida using his brother and his brother's close friends to cheat the people of the United States out of their freely elected president who was undoubtedly Al Gore. Even if you only counted the votes that actually made it through the hoops in order to be cast, the president was really Al Gore. And in Ohio, and I've read the stuff that Congressman Conyers is doing and I commend it, it's clear enough on the face of it that there was substantial fraud in that state and thus delivering the Electoral College vote for president Bush. In our country, the government have vastly inflated the number of people voting by post which, as the courts have found, is wide open to electoral fraud, and electoral fraud there has been. I don't need to deal with the allegations, which are in their thousands. I can just deal with the cases that have already been dealt with. Six new Labour councillors were struck off and thrown out of the council in Birmingham, which is Britain's second city, having been caught red-handed in a room around a table at the dead of night, at midnight, with thousands, and I mean thousands, of other people's ballot papers that they were happily filling in, and they are now facing criminal prosecution as a result. Another new Labour councillor in the town of Blackburn, where the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw represents, and he was a close associate of Jack Straw, and he was a 65 or 67 year old man, has just been sent to prison for three and a half years for having been caught red-handed doing exactly the same thing. When you add the thousands of allegations that there now are of voter fraud in the last election then I've called for the police to move in en masse, because we are heading down the road towards a kind of corruption that we never thought we'd see. Perhaps it's an innate sense of democratic superiority on our part. We use to think that that kind of ballot-rigging and voter fraud was something that happened in other countries, not in the mother of democracies, Great Britain. Now, just like an equally deadly privatization, though it doesn't sound like it, it might sound banal, when we privatized the cleaning services in hospitals, we immediately passed on to companies a duty not primarily to keep the hospitals clean, but primarily to make a profit for their shareholders. The result has been an explosion, a veritable explosion, in re-infection rates; so-called MRSA which is a kind of super bug mutant, which is actually killing 10,000 people a year in Britain. And there are many hospitals, including the one in my own constituency, miscalled the Royal London Hospital, though you'd never find a member of the royal family in it, I can assure you, where you're as likely to come out sick as you are to come out cured because of the state of the cleaning services in the hospitals. And that's directly linked to the privatization of that service. So I say to the people of the United States that the rest of the world is falling out of love with privatization. Some things are too important to be left to the private sector. And just as some things are too important or specialized to be left to the public sector, nobody's saying that every cafe or fish and chip shop on the corner should be owned by the state - that would be absurd. But there are some things like Air Traffic Control, like national railway networks, like the cleaning of hospitals, like the teaching of our children in schools which are too important to be left to people who are doing it for profit. And that's what I think this Patriot Act is all about. It's about fooling the American people into believing that if you just arm the state with enough fly swats you'll be able to whack away all the beasts that are coming your way. But the truth is, these mosquitoes are coming out of a swamp; a very real swamp of grievance, of bitterness and hatred at our injustice and at the policies that we are following. And unless we drain that swamp by reversing the policies of injustice that have germinated this threat then it doesn't matter how many Patriot Acts you pass, it doesn't matter how many fly swats you hand out, how many mosquito nets you wrap yourself in, you're not going to be able to stop them hurting us again. |
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Rainscents (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat May-28-05 06:31 PM Response to Original message |
1. I've listen to on Tom Hartmann... it was great!!! |
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malaise (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat May-28-05 06:37 PM Response to Original message |
2. Brilliant |
that was refreshing - thanks.
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AP (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat May-28-05 06:50 PM Response to Original message |
3. Where's the mp3 link? |
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ElsewheresDaughter (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat May-28-05 07:01 PM Response to Reply #3 |
4. sorry...here is the link..... |
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