Democracy Now!

Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America

Amy Goodman, David Goodman, Denis Moynihan

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501123603
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A celebration of the revolutionary change Amy and David Goodman have witnessed during the two decades of their acclaimed television and radio news program Democracy Now! —and how small individual acts from progressive heroes have produced lasting results. In 1996 Amy Goodman began hosting a show called Democracy Now! to focus on the issues and movements that are too often ignored by the corporate media. Today it is the largest public media collaboration in the US. This important book looks back over the past twenty years of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Goodman takes us along as she goes to where the silence is, bringing out voices from the streets of Ferguson to Staten Island, Wall Street, and South Carolina to East Timor—and other places where people are rising up to demand justice.Giving voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful, Democracy Now! pays tribute to those progressive heroes—the whistleblowers, the organizers, the protestors—who have brought about remarkable, often invisible change over the last couple of decades in seismic ways. This is "an impassioned book aiming to fuel informed participation, outrage, and dissent" ( Kirkus Reviews ).

CHAPTER 1

THE WAR AND PEACE REPORT

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

—From “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967

The United States is engaged in what can only be called endless war. The war in Afghanistan is the longest in US history. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, launched in 2003 based on lies that are far too often described politely as “faulty intelligence,” killed hundreds of thousands of people, if not over a million, and displaced many millions more. Despite the US troop withdrawal in 2011, Iraq is still consumed by violence, which has spilled over to further inflame the massively destructive Syrian civil war. Elsewhere, US special forces wage clandestine operations in the dark of night, killing and kidnapping. Guantánamo Bay’s notorious prison complex exists outside the reach of courts, the press, or any sense of due process, as men arbitrarily swept off the dusty roads of distant countries and held without charge continue to engage in hunger strikes to protest their imprisonment.

The coverage of war is critical to our mission at Democracy Now! Our first broadcast was on Monday, February 19, 1996. It was the day before the New Hampshire primary. When we looked into that primary, into that state, we found a striking intersection of issues that would come to be central to our journalism at Democracy Now!: war, race, and the power of the media.

So much of US presidential electoral politics is shaped by two of the whitest states in the nation: Iowa, with its caucus vote taking place first in the nation every four years, followed by the New Hampshire primary. Presidential campaigns have now become, essentially, permanent, with presidential hopefuls visiting Iowa and New Hampshire years in advance, “testing the waters.” As the primary elections near, the campaigns and their Super PAC supporters pour millions of dollars into organizing and advertising in these two states, setting the tone for the entire national election.

By 1996, New Hampshire was the last holdout against designating an official holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., ten years after it first went into effect in the majority of states. It also had just one statewide newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader (now called the New Hampshire Union Leader). It was considered one of the most conservative papers in the country, thanks to the vicious editorials penned by its owner and publisher, William Loeb III. Loeb had long railed against the civil rights movement, and against King in particular. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, prompted a flurry of invective from Loeb, splashed across his signed editorials on the paper’s front page. “Dr. King was a brave man, a determined man, but also—in our carefully considered opinion—a clever demagogue,” Loeb declared just two weeks after King’s death, adding that he was “sick and tired of sentimental slop” about King. Loeb was the racist before whom every Republican presidential hopeful would prostrate himself in pursuit of his coveted endorsement.

Loeb died in 1981, as the fight for a day honoring King was beginning in New Hampshire. His widow, Nackey Scripps Loeb, continued his policy at the paper, inveighing against adoption of the holiday. The Manchester Union-Leader offered this odd rationale: King shouldn’t be honored, its reasoning went, because he was opposed to the war in Vietnam, and thus unpatriotic. This rhetorical contortion failed to mask the publisher’s racism, which was only amplified when, on Monday, January 15, 1996 (that year’s federally recognized Martin Luther King Jr. Day), a racist group from Mississippi rallied at the New Hampshire state capitol, thanking the state for its stalwart stand against MLK Day.

The Manchester Union-Leader endorsed Republican candidate Patrick Buchanan that year, helping to propel him to victory in the critical New Hampshire primary. Buchanan had never held elective office, but he’d worked as an advisor in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and was an outspoken pundit on the far right of American politics, with regular appearances on PBS, CNN, and his own syndicated radio show. He was a principal architect of the “southern strategy,” which he’d laid out in a 1971 memo to President Nixon, whereby the Republican Party captured white Democratic voters in the South by appealing to their racism. In a 1993 column, Buchanan wrote, “How long is this endless groveling before every cry of ‘racism’ going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?”¹

Buchanan’s inflammatory rhetoric served him well when campaigning in New Hampshire. He pledged, “I promise you that I will tear out this whole diversity program root and branch: Affirmative Action, discrimination, and all racial set asides, they will all be gone.”²

Among our guests on that first episode of Democracy Now! was Reverend Bertha Perkins, pastor at the New Fellowship Baptist Church and a board member of Southern New Hampshire Outreach for Black Unity, who explained, “When you talk about racism in New Hampshire, they have a very unique way of doing it. And they do it by—basically, just excluding us, a denial that we exist.”

The state’s position on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and the Manchester Union-Leader’s disingenuous opposition to it, though, affords an opportunity to revisit that remarkable antiwar speech that King gave on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated. That landmark speech clearly marks the moment that King publicly embraced the antiwar movement, and eloquently expresses the importance of coalition building, of organizing across issues, of uniting disparate sectors. This type of organizing has become standard in recent years. Back then it was groundbreaking.

The “Beyond Vietnam” speech clearly struck a chord with William Loeb. Shortly after King’s death, Loeb denigrated his memory: “King charged in a vicious address, sponsored by the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, that American GIs were killing innocent civilians,” Loeb wrote, referencing the speech directly. In “Beyond Vietnam,” King detailed the history of how the US role escalated in Vietnam. Then he linked the expense of the war to poverty at home, saying, “A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

Over three thousand people had gathered to hear King speak that day, in the sanctuary of the Riverside Church in New York City. In his speech, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and committed to oppose “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Borrowing a phrase from John F. Kennedy, he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” King’s speech advanced the antiwar movement to a new level. Almost a year later, feeling the pressure from that movement, President Lyndon Johnson would announce his decision not to seek a second term—four days before King’s assassination.

The mainstream backlash against King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech was immediate. Life magazine, in an editorial in its April 21 issue, accused King of “betraying the cause for which he worked so long,” adding that “much of his speech was a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The establishment editorial page of the Washington Post opined, “Dr. King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies . . . He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people.” Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) weighed in. Its sixty-member board unanimously approved a statement that read in part, “to attempt to merge the civil rights movement with the peace movement . . . is, in our judgment, a serious tactical mistake.”

OBAMA’S WARS

From King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, jump ahead to the next African American leader to win it: Barack Obama. The first-term senator from Illinois ran for president as the antiwar candidate, first in the Democratic primaries against Senator Hillary Clinton of New York. She refused to admit that her 2002 vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, giving Obama a vital edge throughout the primaries. Then Obama, maintaining his antiwar position, ran in the general election against Senator John McCain, a Vietnam veteran and POW, and won. Nine months into his administration, Obama was named the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Reuters reported that the news “was greeted with gasps from the audience at the announcement ceremony in Oslo.” Obama had no major foreign policy accomplishments at that time, and even he admitted, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize.” Many accepted that the award for Obama was simply the Nobel committee’s tacit repudiation of President George W. Bush and his administration.

On December 10, 2009, Obama went to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Prize. This was just over a week after he announced a troop surge in Afghanistan. In his thirty-six-minute acceptance speech, he invoked Martin Luther King’s name six times. “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence,” Obama said. Unlike King, though, Obama then made the case for war: “I am the commander in chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars . . . the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.” Obama went on to defend militarism: “We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” He added, “To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

In an indirect reference to King, President Obama said, “Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.” He was paraphrasing King, who said in his last speech before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, entitled “Where Do We Go From Here?,” on August 16, 1967, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

A Washington Post headline in late 2015 read, “After Vowing to End Two Wars, Obama May Leave Three Behind,” pointing to his about-face on sending ground troops into Syria to fight against the so-called Islamic State, along with the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add to these other conflicts where US forces play a role, often clandestinely, in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, central African nations such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in Colombia.

DRONES, DEATH, AND DEMONSTRATIONS

The aspect of Obama’s wars that perhaps most distinguishes him from his predecessors is his unprecedented reliance on drones. In a remarkable series of articles published by the Intercept, the online news organization founded by Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald, Scahill wrote, “From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill.” Scahill and colleagues obtained a trove of leaked secret documents detailing the Obama administration’s assassination and targeted killing program. Intercept journalist Ryan Devereaux reported on a US military campaign in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountain range, from 2011 to 2013, called Operation Haymaker. Devereaux wrote, “The documents show that during a five-month stretch of the campaign, nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets.” Another analyst he interviewed found that, despite government assurances that drone strikes afford precise targeting, they were “10 times more likely to kill civilians than conventional aircraft.”

Years before cofounding the Intercept, Jeremy Scahill was a long-time producer and correspondent for Democracy Now! and Ryan Deveraux was a Democracy Now! fellow. The Intercept’s groundbreaking reporting adds to the work of others, like the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. BIJ carefully amasses data on drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and recently began gathering data in Afghanistan. Drawing from information “reported by US administration and intelligence officials, credible media, academics, and other sources,” BIJ has documented more than seven hundred strikes in these regions, starting from 2002 in Yemen, 2004 in Pakistan, 2007 in Somalia, and 2015 in Afghanistan. Between 3,600 and 5,800 people have been killed, most, according to BIJ, only “suspected” militants. At least 532 were civilians, including children, although the upper range of their estimate is likely closer to the truth, with 1,174 civilians killed.

Juxtapose these casualty figures with Obama’s stated policy on drones, which he delivered in a speech at the National Defense University on May 23, 2013, as Operation Haymaker was being waged: “Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.”

Behind the statistics are real people: children, families, thousands of them. On October 24, 2012, for example, the CIA launched a drone strike in North Waziristan, Pakistan. One person was confirmed killed. Between six and nine were injured. Killed: Mamana Bibi, a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother who was picking okra. Among the wounded: Bibi’s grandson, twelve-year-old Zubair Rehman, and his eight-year-old sister, Nabila. After multiple surgeries, Zubair and Nabila would come to the United States a year later, with their father, Rafiq, a schoolteacher, to testify before Congress. Their lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, was denied a visa to enter the United States. Akbar represents many drone strike victims in lawsuits against the United States and speaks fluent English. He would have helped this family navigate their way into the heart of the very nation that bombed them. No doubt, it was thought that denying Akbar a visa would discourage the family from coming as well. But they would not be deterred. They testified before Congress and then came to our studios in New York.

Rafiq Rehman told us, through an interpreter, “I had gone to Miranshah to buy some things from the bazaar. And so, then, when I returned, I noticed that in the graveyard on the outskirts of our village, they were preparing for a burial. I asked some little children who they were preparing the burial for. And they said, ‘Latif Rehman’s mother.’ And that’s my older brother. So I knew at that point that my mother had been killed by an American drone.”

Nabila recalled that the attack came just before Eid, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. “I was outside with my grandmother, and she was teaching me how to tell the difference between okra that was ripe and not ripe. We were going to prepare it for our Eid dinner the next day. And then I had heard a dum-dum noise. Everything became dark. And I had seen two fireballs come down from the sky.” Zubair added, “I had seen a drone, and two missiles hit down where my grandmother was standing in front of me. And she was blown into pieces, and I was injured in my left leg.” He went on, “My grandmother, there was no one else like her. She was full of love. And when she passed away, all my friends told me that ‘You weren’t the only one who lost a grandmother; we all lost a grandmother,’ because everyone knew her in the village.”

The BIJ provided a detailed summary of the strike, backed up with documentation and firsthand accounts. Mamana Bibi, the grandmother, was a midwife. At least five of her grandchildren were injured. There were no “militants” in the area.

“What I’d like to say to the American people is: Please tell your government to end these drones,” Zubair told us. In his testimony before Congress, Zubair said, “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray. And for a short period of time, the mental tension and fear eases. When the skies brighten, though, the drones return, and so, too, does the fear.”

Months before the Rehman family spoke before Congress, another young man testified about trying to survive at the target end of US foreign policy. Farea al-Muslimi is a writer and activist from Yemen, currently working at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He appeared before the US Senate on April 23, 2013, just six days after his home village was struck by a drone. His testimony was unforgettable:

I am from Wessab, a remote mountain village in Yemen. Just six days ago, my village was struck by an American drone in an attack that terrified the region’s poor farmers. Wessab is my village, but America has helped me grow up and become what I am today. I come from a family that lives off the fruit, vegetables and livestock we raise in our farms. My father’s income rarely exceeded two hundred dollars. He learned to read late in his life, and my mother never did.

My life, however, has been different. I am who I am today because the US ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: Going to Where the Silence Is
• 1. The War and Peace Report
• 2. The Whistleblowers
• 3. Undocumented and Unafraid
• 4. Stopping the Machinery of Death
• 5. The Rise of the 99 Percent
• 6. Climate Justice
• 7. The LGBTQ Revolution
• 8. When the Killer Wears a Badge
• 9. “This Flag Comes Down Today”
• 10. Disabling the Enablers
• Epilogue: The Sword and the Shield
• Acknowledgments
• About Amy Goodman, David Goodman and Denis Moynihan
• Notes
• Copyright