MediaBloodhound

The MediaBloodhound Interview: Greg Mitchell, Editor of 'Editor & Publisher' Magazine

Greg Mitchell, award-winning author and editor of the news industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher, brings four decades of journalism experience to his incisive media analyses in his E&P column “Pressing Issues” and on The Huffington Post. He was on the ground covering the bloody 1968 Democratic National Convention and, in the 1970s, became the senior editor of the legendary rock/political magazine Crawdaddy, where he helped write and publish the first magazine article about Bruce Springsteen.

Mitchell went on to author nine non-fiction books, on topics ranging from classic American campaigns (The Campaign of the Century and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady) to how the U.S. government molded public opinion after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hiroshima in America) to an exploration of capital punishment in America (Who Owns Death?). More recently, Mitchell’s book So Wrong for So Long -- hailed by Bill Moyers, Arianna Huffington and Glenn Greenwald -- explored the media’s failure to ask the right questions in the lead-up and first years of the Iraq War. (Springsteen, his friend now of 36 years, wrote the preface.)

His new book, Why Obama Won, is culled from his near daily analysis of the historic 2008 campaign and its aftermath while writing for E&P, The Huffington Post and Daily Kos. In Mitchell’s words: “[It] focuses on new media vs. old media, grassroots vs. mainstream, and all of the controversies, from Jeremiah the Preacher to Joe the Plumber. It’s also a window on the future.” Commenting on the book, Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the excellent news blog Attytood, wrote: "It really raises the question of how the 2008 campaign might have played out in an earlier era, before private citizens and small publications had the ability to get video and sound bites out to millions of people.”

Greg recently spoke with MediaBloodhound from his Lower East Side Manhattan office at E&P. In addition to the 2008 campaign, topics ranged from the dire state of the newspaper industry and its “dirty secret” to the impact of the U.S. media's censorship of graphic war images to whether Twitter and Sarah Palin will go the way of the pet rock.

The following is an edited transcript of our interview.

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MediaBloodhound: A recent Pew Research Center survey seems to prove the thesis of your new book Why Obama Won. It found that more than half of American voters used the Internet for election news and that the Internet is now equal to newspapers and roughly twice as important as radio as a source of election news and information. What was your reaction when you read this?

Greg Mitchell: [laughs] Well, I wasn’t surprised of course. I follow things very carefully on the web and have for years. And I would imagine that even since the Pew survey, which I think was conducted at the end of last year, the trend has only increased and will increase. The details of the Pew survey breaks it down how Obama’s backers used the web two times as much or more than McCain’s people in all sorts of ways, from just texting for a rally to donating money to posting videos to using Facebook, MySpace and so forth. It’s just straight down the line. Every possible way that the web could’ve been used, the Obama backers did. So I think during the campaign there was a lot of attention to the more public and grandiose uses of the web -- celebrity use of YouTube videos, regular reports of Obama’s fundraising. So people certainly got the idea that this was going on. But I think the Pew survey and other things showed that, just on a day-to-day basis, what you didn’t see in the big stories in the press were these millions or tens of millions of people involved in the campaign who every day were texting and Facebooking and Twittering and everything else. And it’s good to see that being recognized now.

MediaBloodhound: Why do you think the McCain camp appeared to be so out of touch with this technology? It seemed like it was more than just a generational thing.

Greg Mitchell: Well, you know, McCain made national news when he went on Twitter. This was like a shot heard round the world -- a Tweet heard round the world -- McCain actually doing something like that. So it shows how out of it they were.

But to be fair, they did try. They had their websites and they had their videos and everything else. It’s just that they were very late to the game. They were kind of lame to the game. You know, their audience just is not too hip to all these things. In some ways there wasn’t that much they could do. A lot of the McCain backers would not be so comfortable with some of these things. But as we saw after the election, before the Republicans sort of went totally bonkers against Obama once he became president. There was a period after the election when there was some honest self-reflection among Republican leaders and activists. Before it turned into non-stop Obama bashing, they did have a few weeks after their embarrassing defeat in the congressional elections and the White House where the really did honestly say, “OK, we want to win. Forget about politics or ideology or how bad Obama is. Let’s just look at how we’re going to come back to power.”

They did have a few weeks where they were looking at these things and over and over different people would say, “We have to take better advantage of the web tools or we’re never going to make it if we don’t use them in a better way.” And, in fact, it’s way overblown. But there was talk that at least in the “Teabagging” [anti-tax protests] they did for local events, they did make use of Twitter. And there was a sense that, maybe even because it’s short and simple, I don’t know, that Twitter was going to be the GOP tool, just like blogs and Facebook became Democrat tools. That Twitter was going to be a kind of a GOP, far-right organizing tool. But I think that does come from a certain determination to make use of these things.

MediaBloodhound: What did you think of the media coverage of the anti-tax tea parties?

Greg Mitchell: Most amazing was that they tended to treat it like protests in the past. There have been national abortion rights protests and immigration rights protests and of course anti-war protests and everything spread out around the country. But never, that I’m aware of, has there ever been protests like this that were essentially promoted by a major news organization, that is Fox, who were actually promoting it, not just saying we’re going to cover this. And so it was almost like the mainstream media was afraid to sort of say, “Look, this is not just grassrootsy or even sponsored by a national organization.” It was also promoted by talk radio and promoted by the leading cable news network, which makes it a completely different thing than local activists who want to speak out. They’re going to a rally to see Glenn Beck. It’s a whole different thing. So I just thought the coverage should have noted that this was not your average grassrootsy thing in any way.

MediaBloodhound: Speaking of Twitter, you recently joined. What’s your view of it so far? And do you see it as more than a passing fad?

Greg Mitchell: I think Twitter is probably here to stay. For myself, I find it just useful for news tips and making use of scoops and things that I see out there, links that people have, and the ability to put new E&P links up there that people follow. So it’s partly publicity for E&P, getting my own work out there and getting quickly the newsbreaks from others. Now if it was just a matter of people talking about what movies they liked or, you know, best restaurants in Brooklyn...you know, how about those Yankees? There are too many other things to do. But, for example, I don’t do anything with Facebook. I’m enrolled in Facebook and LinkedIn and MySpace but I do absolutely nothing with them because I’m just not interested in networking so much. But with Twitter, I see a real news function to it. So that’s why I’m a fan at the present time.

MediaBloodhound: Your book has so many examples of Beltway talking heads and reporters who got the campaign completely wrong or floated the most embarrassingly absurd observations. In your previous book, “So Wrong for So Long,” you detail the mainstream media’s failure to ask the right questions in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Aside from Judy Miller, I can’t think of another mainstream reporter or pundit whose reputation suffered as a consequence. And the same could be said about those who flubbed the 2008 election. Why do you think there’s always a seat back at the table for these people?

Greg Mitchell: I don’t take the election as seriously as the war because the news coverage of the war led to a terrible six years of war for the country. With the election, a lot of people were wrong, but the end result was Obama got elected. But I think in any election there’s plenty of punditry that’s wrong. It’s just a matter of whether the outcome of the election was in some ways a reflection of the declining value and respect that these people in general are held. Even the people who kind of got it right, as a class, the Beltway pundits and campaign reporters have been deplanted now by online commentators and online coverage or even just viral things that people see and read about. So I think it’s more of that. I suppose a positive result is that kind of insidey Washington coverage and those people have vastly declined in the respect that they’re given now by people as a whole. People make up their minds based on other things and not so much what these pundits and editorial pages say.

MediaBloodhound: In your book, you also touch on the ABC News primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous were roundly and rightfully panned, even by some old media journalists. What impact, if any, do you think that had on the remainder of the debates or old media journalists’ coverage of the rest of the campaign season? 

Greg Mitchell: Well, I thought the debates were pretty bad in the fall, too. So it wasn’t like there was a sense at the end of the primaries that the media had not done a good job so in the fall they really got their act together. It is quite the opposite. But again, I think that the mockery that many people felt or expressed for some of these mainstream journalists who were handling the debates in the fall…again, it’s another nail in the coffin. These people have millions of dollars and weeks to prepare for these debates. When Tom Brokaw was handling the final debate, there was all this hype about, “We’ve got 100,000 questions we’re sending to our panel of experts and we’re picking the twelve best questions.” And then the questions were not only mainly weak but some of them were even repeats from previous debates. I just sort of shook my head and said, “This is the best they can do?” We’re supposed to have this deep respect for the networks and all the venerable people who work there, when it seems like the staff of The Daily Show might’ve been able to put together better questions in a week.

MediaBloodhound: Or a day. 

Greg Mitchell: I think that all feeds into it. It was a disastrous year for mainstream coverage and TV coverage of the election because they have such a high profile around the debates and the debates were so weak. I mentioned in the book that you could almost boil down the year to this one factor. In the fall debates, including the Vice Presidential Debate…normally these debates are very influential. They’re held and the mainstream pundits would weigh in for a few days or a week and they’d kick around who’s got the momentum and who did well and who exceeded expectations and who flubbed and whose makeup looked bad and who sighed and everything else. And then after a week or two, there might be a poll confirming. But the punditry for a solid week or more would hold sway and help push the polls that eventually came out.

This year, you had the same thing happen. The debates ended, all the pundits came on TV and nine times out of ten they would say, “Well, you know, McCain did better than expectations,” or, “It was a draw and this wasn’t going to help either candidate,” or, “Palin did better than expected. It’s probably going to boost McCain.” Now in the old days, that line would’ve had its own momentum for another week or two. But what happened this year was you had online commentators coming on right away on the web not only pointing to errors and misstatements but talking about how their candidate actually won. But more than that, you had the focus groups that were set up and instant polls were taken that showed within half an hour of the end of the debate that in all four cases the Democrat actually won easily, overwhelmingly. So the pundits were kind of left with egg on their face.

And that’s an incredible shift from past years, a total, what you might call, emasculation of the pundits because not only were they unable to exert their usual influence but in fact their statements were shown to be laughable within half an hour or hour of the end of the debates. And then, of course, those results were carried instantly in all forms of electronic media. So that by the time people went to bed that night or eight o’clock the following morning, most of them knew that something different had happened. That didn’t win the election for Obama. But in a normal year, the momentum that would’ve been asserted by the pundits for McCain’s and Palin’s performance would’ve boosted them in the polls no doubt and you might’ve come into Election Day in kind of a toss-up situation just from the fact of how the debates might’ve been spun.

MediaBloodhound: Without the Internet, the rise of the Internet, and how much influence it had in to the 2008 election, do you think that Obama would’ve won in the old days, pre-Internet?

Greg Mitchell: If he got the nomination, I think he probably would’ve won in November. But I don’t think he would’ve beaten Hillary Clinton. So if you want to say, “Would Obama have become elected president eight years ago or sixteen years ago?” I would say no because he wouldn’t have gotten past Hillary. So that was the key. Once he’d gotten past Hillary, it certainly was not determined that he would win, but McCain was a much easier opponent in many ways. And Obama’s web advantage was in place and it carried through to the end. But I don’t think he would’ve gotten past Hillary without the twelve solid months of web advantage he had over her.

MediaBloodhound: You also discussed in your book William Kristol’s Daily Show appearance during the presidential campaign, when Jon Stewart got him to admit that Obama wasn’t a radical and would probably be a “conventional president.” You point out that Stewart then asked Kristol why he and McCain continued to call Obama a dangerous radical if they didn’t mean it. Do you see the symbiosis between this conversation and the one Stewart had with Jim Cramer?

The MB Interview: Larry Cox, Exec. Dir. of Amnesty International USA

A driven and highly accomplished humanitarian with his sense of humor intact, Larry Cox has dedicated his life to ending suffering. Thirty years ago, in 1976, he became Amnesty International USA’s first press officer. He went on to become the organization’s first Communications Director, first Deputy Executive Director and later the Deputy Security General at Amnesty International’s London headquarters. In 1990, he was named Executive Director of the Rainforest Foundation, an international organization that works to protect the rights of indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon. In 1995, Larry went to work for the Ford Foundation, where he traveled around the world to bolster human rights efforts in countries including Indonesia, China, India, Cambodia, Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. In January 2006, Larry’s life of humanitarian service came full circle when rejoined Amnesty International USA as Executive Director. Larry’s return was sparked by the Bush administration’s flagrant attack on basic human rights here at home in post-9/11 America and the grave influence this has on governments around the world.

After meeting Larry at the Darfur Peace Rally in Central Park in September, I sat down with him in his office on Election Day. As we spoke for over an hour, Americans were already beginning to rise up at voting precincts around the country, rejecting the war in Iraq, but also voicing their objections to (among other abuses) torture, secret prisons, cruel and inhumane treatment – both of our own citizens, as with, say, Katrina, and of foreign “enemy combatants” – and this White House’s abdication of America’s role as a human rights leader. I left our second meeting with a sense of hope for our country and even for our species. Flawed as they both are, they still managed to produce a man like Larry Cox.

MediaBloodhound: What is the current state of Darfur?

Larry Cox: It’s worse probably than it’s ever been. Since the rally that we had for Darfur, as you know, the Sudanese government has refused to allow U.N. troops and, in fact, has launched probably the largest military offensive in more than a year. That military offensive continues to result in the deaths of many civilians - men, women especially, and children. It’s also spilling over into Chad. So that we now have not just conflict in Sudan but increasingly a regional conflict, in which those groups which have allied themselves with the rebel forces are coming under attack in the same way. Which means that groups which are of the same ethnicity as the rebel forces are targeted. So the situation is extremely alarming. The African Union force has had its mandate extended, but only until the end of December. We’re now in November. In any case, it does not have the means to adequately protect anyone. It’s not protecting people who are displaced. It doesn’t do anything when people report to it that there have been rapes, that there have been killings. It’s a disgusting situation. And we have, like the whole world, watched as it’s gotten worse. We have tried, and continue to try, to mobilize as much pressure as we can on all governments to unite with the African Union in an effort to put the maximum amount of pressure on Sudan to allow U.N. troops. It’s the only way that we believe that lives can be saved – to have U.N. troops on the ground and have mandate which would allow them to adequately protect people and bring to justice the people who are carrying out what really can only be described as massive human rights violations. So it’s not a pretty picture.

MB: The United States declared more than two years ago that atrocities in Darfur amounted to genocide, yet, as Reuters reports, “has been unable to stop the violence or to persuade the [Sudanese] government to accept a U.N. peace-keeping force of up to 22,500 troops and police.” Especially in light of the Bush administration’s zeal to invade Iraq, why is it, in essence, negotiating now with the Sudanese leader, a war criminal, as to how it might intercede?

Larry Cox: Well, I think the inadequacy of the response to Darfur is not unrelated to the loss of U.S. moral authority and credibility, not to mention capability, as a result of its approach to fighting the so-called War on Terror. It’s one of the many consequences of that war. So that the United States, while on Darfur - and do I believe that enormous pressure has been brought to bear on the Bush administration - has issued statements, words, that are much better than any other governments - it must be said - it hasn’t backed up those words with the kind of forceful action that is necessary, the kind of leadership that is necessary. And it gives the impression often, to be honest, that it is content to be able to say we have called for this, we have called for that, we have backed the U.N. resolution, without really mobilizing the kind of pressure that needs to be mobilized on behalf of the Sudanese. Or without, and again this is not unrelated to its loss of moral credibility, playing the role in persuading other nations that we need much more aggressive intervention and pressure on the Sudanese government. So we of course have, and continue, to try to bring pressure to bear on the U.S. government, but at the same time we bring pressure to bear on other governments that also bear responsibility. It’s not simply the U.S. government. The Russians in particular, the Chinese in particular, have played a very, very negative role in blocking any kind of effective pressure on the Sudanese. But I do think the world is seeing one more terrible, horrible bit of evidence of the way that the United States has squandered its moral authority in the world and its inability to really mobilize effectively to do something meaningful for the people of Darfur. It’s good to issue statements, but not if they simply are hollow and people continue to be raped and killed.    

MB: The United Nations was created to stop horrors like what’s been going on in Darfur. Why hasn’t it been more effective? And what do you think is it’s biggest impediment in carrying out the promise of its charter?

Larry Cox: Yeah, it’s easy. The biggest impediment is its members. The United Nations has only ever been as strong as its members allow it to be. And, you know, I think there’s a need to strengthen the United Nations. There’s a need to give the United Nations some autonomy, some ability to act independently, give it some force. Because it has none. As we know, it has to rely on governments to provide it with armed force when it needs to intervene. Kofi Annan long ago recognized this and called for reforms that would allow the United Nations play a more aggressive role. But we have seen a campaign, certainly in the last six years, and earlier, to discredit the United Nations rather than strengthen the United Nations, to persuade, especially the American people, that the United Nations is either irrelevant or a bad idea because it somehow hampers the United States from doing what it wants to do. And the world has paid a terrible price for that. So that you have a body which, instead of being stronger and able to take effective action, serves as a kind of scapegoat that can be blamed when governments don’t really want to do anything. It’s interesting that, of course, the United States didn’t believe it needed the United Nations to invade Iraq, but it’s very happy to blame the United Nations for not doing more to stop the killings in Darfur. And, uh, what we need is to return to the original vision that gave birth to the United Nations, which is a world in which human rights has the primacy in values and all governments are held accountable for their failure to live up to human rights. But, at the moment, I’m afraid we have the opposite, which is, as I said, a body which grows weaker and weaker as the world’s need for some body that can take effective action grows stronger and stronger. 

MB: What are your thoughts on Kofi Annan’s replacement? Do you think he’s going to weaken it further?

Larry Cox: Well, you know, the United Nations is a lot like –

MB: It’s more a body than one person.

Larry Cox: Well, it is more than one person and also you can’t predict what will happen to people once they become…there are Secretary Generals that one thought to be very strong who then turned out to be very weak and vice versa. It’s like Supreme Court Justices. You can’t always tell. In any case, and this is really the point that needs to be made, any Secretary General needs to be pushed by public opinion and by world opinion. And that’s what Amnesty’s role has always been. You know, you can’t rely…there’s no savior that’s going to come in. It really belongs to the people of the planet, if they want to enough, to take the kind of action that would give backbone to the United Nations, that would fight against the kind of propaganda that’s been very shamelessly issued to weaken the United Nations. The United Nations has many, many faults. There’s no doubt about that. The question is, do you try to weaken it more or do you actually try to strengthen it so that it can play the role it was once meant to be?

MB: Members of the United Nations and Kofi Annan have spoken out when they’ve been assailed by the Bush administration for the reasons you were just saying. But you don’t hear very much about that in the mainstream media. You hear more probably from human rights groups and their quotes in response to such attacks than you do from members of the U.N.

Larry Cox: Yeah. I think if I wanted to make a list of the stories that I think have been badly handled, the issues that have been underreported or badly reported, I would put the United Nations very close to the top. Especially in the U.S. media. It differs when you go around the world. In much of the world, people actually look to the United Nations as a source of hope. But in this country, in particular, the government has gotten away with this campaign, I would call it, against the United Nations. And the mainstream media has more or less been complicit in that, has gone along with it or has helped it. And it’s an easy target. It’s an easy target because it’s made up of governments. But there’s been very little adequate coverage with what’s really wrong…you know, if you don’t like the United Nations, what could take its place? Because there’s no doubt, as you look around the world, that the need is tremendous there. You know, related to this, of course, is the campaign against something like the International Criminal Court, where the United States has again really led the fight to weaken it to make sure it can’t work effectively. And the U.S. media again I think has all to often simply repeated what really can only be described in all honesty as falsehoods – about what that body can and can’t do, what kind of threat it represents. And we all pay a huge price for this because if you don’t have a strong United Nations, if you don’t have an International Criminal Court, the kinds of horrors that lead to the kinds of conflicts that we’ve seen over and over and over again will continue. And the United States then will feel either it will have on its hands the blood of innocent people because it does nothing or it will be further encouraged to take unilateral actions, which often, as I think the whole world has seen, can make things worse.

MB: In the movie Hotel Rwanda, Colonel Oliver, a fictitious amalgam of then U.N. peacekeeping officials, is brutally honest with Paul Rusesbagina, the hotel owner on whom the real-life story is based. At one point, he says, “We think you’re dirt, Paul….You're black. You're not even a nigger. You're an African. They’re not going to stay, Paul. They’re not going to stop this slaughter.” How much of a part do you think race has played in the international community’s slow reaction to stop the genocide in Darfur?

Larry Cox: Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt that if this kind of conflict were going on, if this kind of repression, this kind of massive violation of human rights, were going on in Europe, there would be much greater response. I think this is related both to race and it’s also related to which countries are regarded as strategically important because they’re sitting on important natural resources. I think the positive aspect of this story, which was also underreported, is that I think the people of this country – and especially young people – have not responded in a racist way to the conflict. On the contrary, they have really seen that this is for them the moral test of their generation and have been the leaders in - we saw this at the rally in Central Park - the leaders in the fight to say that this should not happen again. So I think one has to make some distinctions between who’s responding. There’s no doubt in my mind – this is more of a personal opinion than an official Amnesty opinion – that were, you know, the victims in Darfur of European descent that the U.S. response would be infinitely stronger. And I think we’ve seen that time and time again in other situations as well. I mean I think it’s inconceivable that we would have stood back and watched the kind of genocide that took place in Rwanda take place in Europe. You don’t want to overstate it because we were very slow as well in the former Yugoslavia. But still, I think it does make a difference.

MB: To date, over 400,000 men, women and children have been slaughtered and over 2 million displaced. What are the further consequences for Darfur if an international force is not sent in?

Larry Cox: It’s hard to even imagine what could happen. I mean it will certainly continue. I think it could make even those figures look small in comparison. That’s the real danger. I mean we ran out of language to describe it. You know, we started talking about a human rights catastrophe. Well, if those numbers, if hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions of people displaced doesn’t already constitute a human rights catastrophe, then I don’t know what does. So you run out of language to describe what will happen. I think, uh, apart from the continued killings and rapes and burnings of villages, the real threat is it will continue to widen. As I said, it’s already now in Chad. You would think that if nations can’t respond on a humanitarian basis, they would at least see that we threaten to have a whole region go up in flames. But there’s no doubt that the situation will greatly worsen if we don’t get U.N. troops.

MB: It’s very easy for people to become desensitized to descriptions of genocide or the word “genocide” itself. Is it a constant struggle to find the right language that will not initially push people away rather than get them to listen?

Larry Cox: Yeah, I would say in our work it’s the constant struggle. It’s the center. And people have become desensitized to death. I, and this may be just my memory, but I can’t remember a time in my lifetime when I felt the world has gotten more used to massive horrors and killings, at least since World War – well, in my lifetime – which would be post-World War II. The very things that the human rights framework and the United Nations were set up to prevent are now happening. People are once again…you know, we read it in the paper, we see it on television. It just doesn’t seem to register. And if it does register, it’s hard for people to know what to do. I mean that’s the real problem. You have all of these people. You saw. People have rallied all over the world in massive numbers on Darfur. And yet governments seem to be able just to carry on. So people give up, people get discouraged. We have from the beginning believed in the power of the individual story because people have a hard time grasping, you know, two to four hundred thousand dead or millions of people displaced. They have a much easier time empathizing with and feeling the pain of a story. That’s why films like Hotel Rwanda and other films are so powerful. They tell the story of an individual and everyone can see for themselves, can imagine themselves in that situation. And that’s what we try to do. We try to lift up individual stories not only because each individual story deserves to be told but because I don’t know any other way to get across to people the horror of what’s going on. I mean most people if you tell them, you know, two hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, a million people are dead, they go, “Well, O.K., we all die.” You tell them a story about a woman who goes out to get firewood to cook and is caught and is brutally tortured and then raped in front of her children and most people will respond.

And here the media has a hard time as well because it doesn’t – I notice it in Darfur and I also notice it, of course, in the reporting on the war in Iraq – these kinds of euphemisms that are used. You know, six troops were killed. It doesn’t mean anything. If you think about a nineteen-year-old kid, you can’t bear it. And there have been studies done on the way people live with knowledge. So that the mechanism of denial is actually very important for people to be able to carry on their lives as if everything is just fine. People have these mechanisms and we all use them and the media becomes part of the mechanism. It reports things in a way that we read about it and then either we come to the conclusion that nothing can be done – that helps us to justify doing nothing – or it just doesn’t even register because what’s being reported is not the story of an individual but a statistic.   

MB: Along those lines, we’re all familiar with the saying, “Never again,” which is often associated with the Holocaust but is a common reaction, in hindsight, to genocides throughout history. Yet we’re just six years into this new century and genocide continues without abatement. What do you think drives human beings to commit genocide? And what do you think causes so many others to become complicit through inaction and silence?

Larry Cox: Wow. [Laughing.] That’s a small question. Well, what we know is that all human beings are capable of incredible atrocities to each other. I’m not sure I know exactly why, but I know the sort of conditions that facilitate it. The demonization of the other. Fear. The feeling that these people that we’re killing would kill us. And, you know, you watch this over and over again, starting with the Holocaust, Cambodia – you have to be able to describe the people you’re doing these things to as less than human. That’s why human rights is such a threat to all of this. Because human rights insists that nobody is less than human. The whole basis of all this stuff is that the person who’s being the victim of these horrors is always described as both less than human and also a threat. So, in the case of Darfur, you have the rebels and you have, by association, anybody who looks like the rebels as seen as people that want to take our land or keep us from getting the land that we need. You add to it the fact that the Janjiweed are probably given other kinds of inducements and help to get in a kind of state that allows them to do it. And we saw this in Rwanda as well. You know, in Rwanda the language, long before the first killing you knew it was going to happen because when you start referring to people as cockroaches, you’re preparing the way. And we’re no different than this. I mean we now refer to people as the worst of the worst, monsters, killers, enemy combatants, whatever we want to call them, as a way to prepare ourselves for being able to torture people. We don’t want to think of them as people.

I don’t know what the answer is to the philosophical question of why human beings do it. I know what it takes to stop human beings from doing it. And that is to have real strong both standards and then enforcement of those standards. We know that human beings will do it unless there are effective mechanisms for stopping it. The U.N. was created as a way of creating those mechanisms. It hasn’t ever been given what was needed to do it. So it goes on and it will continue to go on until we get really effective mechanisms. There is a small set of incremental steps towards this. The International Criminal Court is one. At least on paper now there exists something which can bring people to justice for these acts. For decades, Stalin’s line – I think it was Stalin but it might have been somebody else, who said if you kill one person you’re a murderer, if you kill thousands of people you’re a hero – was true. And people could get away with mass genocide and no one was tried. Pol Pot never was tried. It took forever before we were able to finally get some action against Pinochet.

So, yeah, I don’t know the answer to why we do it as human beings. We are really a very flawed species. But I do know that it takes really enforceable laws and protections and mechanisms to make sure those laws are protected, to protect us from ourselves. What we worry about here at Amnesty International is that when people get away with the open violation of those laws and standards, it further weakens the idea that they exist at all. It gives encouragement to people all over the globe. If we feel threatened, if we feel grieved, we can do whatever we want to do because there are no laws and there are no standards.

MB: For people who are on the fence about getting more involved in human right causes, like ending the genocide in Darfur, what would you say to them?

Larry Cox: Well, here’s what we say. We have tried - and this is the glory of this organization that I’m a part of – to give people a way to do something. Most people are not going to devote their entire lives. People have lives. They want to have families. They have jobs. They want to go for a walk in the park. They don’t want to spend every…you would go out of your mind if you thought really about the fact that there are people starving to death, there are people in prisons who don’t belong there. If you tried to do everything to end that, you’d go out of your mind. Amnesty’s goal is to persuade people they can do something. And that if enough of us just do something, together we can have an impact. And you can make a difference. You don’t have to give up everything else that you want to do in life. You don’t have to give up every dream. You don’t have to give up every pleasure. You just have to be willing to do something. And we try to offer people a way to do that. Whether it’s writing letters, whether it’s going to a demonstration, we try to identify for people what they can do and then we try to show them that it can make a difference. It’s easier to do that in the case of individuals. Every week, we participate in the freeing of people from jails and from torture chambers and from execution chambers. We know that that works. We know that people can make a difference. We have a harder time with things like Darfur. And that’s the real challenge for us. How do we demonstrate that if enough of us come together that we’ll make a difference? And that’s what’s in question right now because - you know, you saw it, you saw the rally in Central Park, you’ve seen a lot rallies probably and demonstrations - every time you do that and then nothing happens, you’re sending, in effect, a message that nothing can happen. And that makes it easier for us to just dismiss it. Our goal is to send just the opposite message. Our goal is to make it impossible for people to say no. I got into this business of human rights because I met people who could say and who believed, and who made me believe, that they were alive and they were back with their loved ones because of something that people like me did. And once you have that experience, you go like, “Well, how can I refuse to do that? How can I turn my back on somebody?” You know, what if it was my brother or sister or mother? Would I just say, “Sorry, I’m a little busy”? I’d do something. I might not do everything, but I’d do something. And that’s what I tell people, that there is something they can do. But, right now, that’s really the battle: Can we succeed in continuing to convince people that there’s an effective way to end the kind of suffering that we see in Darfur. If you don’t have that, if you just show people the suffering but you don’t give them a way to do anything about it, I think you’re actually probably doing the opposite of what you want to do. You’re actually persuading people that they should just turn their eyes away because they can’t stand to look at it and there’s nothing they can do. If you can show them that there’s an effective way to take an action, then you can build a kind of movement we need in this world. In the past, Amnesty has done that. It hasn’t always succeeded. There are gross failures. Rwanda would be one. But there are plenty of other situations where people thought it was hopeless and where enough people acted and it changed things. I’ve seen it in my lifetime, so I have a hard time believing that we’re now at a point in history where that’s no longer the case. But I have to be honest and say that it’s really difficult - it’s become really difficult - to persuade people they can make a difference.

MB: A recent report estimated that 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion in 2003, what some might well now consider another genocide. On the day this news broke, just one member of the White House press corps asked President Bush to comment on these findings. Though these numbers were carefully calculated based on sound scientific methodology, Bush said the report had been “largely discredited” while giving no evidence to back up his assertion and no one in the press corps called him on it. The topic was then summarily dropped and has since fallen off the mainstream media’s radar. How much have members of the mainstream media abdicated their responsibility to hold this administration accountable for its actions?

Larry Cox: Well, I think the question is how much have all of us abdicated our responsibility? I’ve never been a great believer that the media is a leader in anything. I think the media follows where the people go. I’ve been around a long time on the planet, so I was around during the Vietnam War. And it’s sort of deju vu all over again, as Yogi Berra said. I mean you see back then the media also began thinking this is really a great war, we have to do this. People who dissented were seen as marginal, people that were irresponsible, un-American, blah blah blah. And only after hundreds of thousands, millions of people were dead, if you include the Vietnamese, did the media begin to question.

MB: What do you think has kept them from doing a better job?

Larry Cox: I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the media wants access, if the media just wants to present a view of the world in which the U.S. government is seen as the good guys, if it doesn’t want to be accused. I mean there are always exceptions. There are media, usually marginal media, who do raise the hard questions.

MB: Sure, well, I’m talking more about mainstream media.

Larry Cox: But I think the mainstream media looks around and they see whether there seems to be a majority, a consensus.

MB: [Raises finger in the air.]

Larry Cox: Yeah, they put their finger to see which way the wind is blowing. If it seems it’s something most American believe, they don’t want to be the ones…they want people to buy their newspapers and buy their magazines and think that they’re good. It takes a lot of guts to stand up against majority opinion. And it takes a lot of guts to stand up against a government which has an enormous amount of power to control access, to control who gets the interview and who doesn’t get the interview. I think the media only begins to demonstrate that kind of courage either when the situation has gotten so horrendous that the American people themselves have turned off or when there are movements that challenge it. If you look at the media in the South during the civil rights era, I mean all of those horrors were known. They were all there. But it was only when people began to march and people began to risk their lives and people began to force that you began to get the kind of drumbeat in the media that this was something intolerable. I think the same thing is happening now. I think we have to build the kind of public opinion that the media will respond to. I don’t have any faith that the media itself will take the first step. We have to, as citizens, have to begin to demand that our government be held accountable and then the media I think will begin to follow. There are journalists I’ve seen who have taken courageous stands, who have been in the vanguard, as it were. But, for the most part, I think the media follows where they think the American people are at. And they take risks directly in proportion to what they think the American people want, the majority of the American people.

MB: I agree with that, but then also, in the sense of how much they do shape opinion, many people cannot imagine a Democratic presidency even a fiftieth as incompetent as this administration and having not been impeached, having not all of their incompetencies been front-page news every day. So that liberal media bias myth does seem to also play into this as well.

Larry Cox: Well, I think you do have a new phenomena in the media, which is you have had the development…you know, this is not unrelated to what I’m talking about. It’s also not unrelated to how people who are sort of on the right side, or what we would consider to be the right side, understand how to use the media. I think there is development of a media which has seen itself I think quite openly as shilling for the U.S. government and has done it extremely well. And it goes back to what you were talking about earlier. What are the elements that lead people to commit these kinds of mass human rights violations? Fear is a huge factor. Nationalism is a huge factor. And if you have a media which knows how to push those buttons in a really effective way and does it and has the power of course, gets the airwaves. And we’ve weakened over time regulations on balance and forcing the media to give voices that aren’t heard a chance at least to be heard. So if you combine all of that, you create the situation where, yeah, people are not getting the information they need to make intelligent decisions. They’re just being manipulated in the sense of their fears and their deepest worries are being sort of taken and then handed back to them in the form of propaganda. But that’s not new.

MB: They’re just better at it.

Larry Cox: They’re just very good at it. You know, there are other regimes that have been very good at it, too. Hitler was very good at it. Various demagogues on the left have been good at it. But, at the moment, the folks who have been on the side of justifying what is unjustifiable have been better at it than the people who are opposed to it. I think we all have to begin to try to figure out how do we respond to people’s fears and after 9/11 that was not so easy. How do we respond to people’s fears in a way that helps them overcome their fear rather than exploits their fear and deepens their fear so that they can be led down the road to support things they ordinarily wouldn’t support. That’s how you create mass human rights violations. That’s how you get people to support torture. And the difference is that we always thought about it happening in other countries. How did so many people in Chile support Pinochet disappearing and torturing and killing people? Well, they were told that those people were a threat and they were fearful and they were happy to have somebody strong say I’ll take care of it. Now we see, in the light of 9/11, people saying, “Well, you know, let the government protect us by doing whatever it has to do.” And the president openly says if you don’t agree with me that torture is OK, if you don’t agree with me that I can use these kind of alternative techniques, then people are going to die, people are going to be attacked. And the media has, as you have just said, has not been aggressively challenging them. It’s gone along with it because it doesn’t want to be accused of being on the side of terror. Human rights groups, we’ve been accused. We get accused all the time.

MB: I was going to ask you about that.

Larry Cox: We get accused all the time.

MB: That you guys must be under attack.

Larry Cox: Yeah. If we report that people have been, you know, have been held in Guantanamo for years, four years without legal recourse…and we campaign on it, as we’re campaigning on it, and people say, “Well, you know, you’re on the side of the terrorists, you’re pro terror.” And we have to find a way to more effectively than we have convince people that, on the contrary, this approach of violating human rights - as it always does – has led to greater dangers for us, greater insecurity, greater threat, is destroying the very values that make this society worth living in and worth fighting for. And that we’re not on the side of terror; we’re on the side of decency and values that, without which, why do we want to live? So I think we have to get better at doing that. We’ve launched a campaign right now in which we’re trying to take back from the people who have used patriotism, love of country, to justify the betrayal of the best of this country and have instead used it to continue the worst traditions of this country, which there are no shortage. We call it the “America We Believe In” campaign. And we’re saying the America we believe in doesn’t torture. The America we believe in doesn’t run secret prisons. It’s not the America that’s existed. I mean we know that the America we live is an America that falls short. But we’re trying to remind people that there is an America that people aspire to see, that people have fought to see, and to reject the notion that if you’re patriotic you accept the people who actually betray the most basic values that this society holds up as the ideal. That’s what we ought to aspire to. Sorry.

MB: No, no.

Larry Cox: I get carried away.

MB: No, no, no. I do, too.

Larry Cox: [Laughs.]

MB: Just ask my friends and my girlfriend. Same thing. And my family.

Larry Cox: [Laughing.]

MB: [Laughing.] OK…when Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law, he legalized torture, nullified habeas corpus and made all American citizens fair game to be jailed without legal recourse if deemed, by him alone, to be aiding the enemy. Did you ever imagine that this could happen in the United States of America?

Larry Cox: I imagined that torture could happen. I know that it has happened. I didn’t imagine that I would see a U.S. government openly defend it. That’s the difference. This country has always had a record of falling short on human rights standards. What’s different is I didn’t imagine an administration that would be openly saying this is OK. That we intend to hold people indefinitely without charges or trial. That we intend to subject people to torture and cruel and inhuman treatment. In fact, we’ll fight against anyone who wants to affirm that torture and cruel and inhuman treatment should never be applied. Which they did with the McCain amendment. They openly fought against it. That I never imagined that I would see in my lifetime. And it’s really scary that they’ve been able to do that and that they’ve been able to get away with it. And, again, it goes back to knowing how to manipulate people’s fear. The reason I came to work at Amnesty International – because I had left it for a while – was because I think this is one of the gravest threats to human rights I’ve ever seen. You have the world’s most powerful democracy, a country which has long talked about the value of human rights, openly now violating human rights. It’s a threat to human rights everywhere in the world. So we have to change that.

MB: Three weeks have now passed since Bush signed this into law. One of the biggest blows to our Constitution, to the bedrock of our country, and yet the mainstream media has completely dropped the topic. It’s as though it never happened. What do you feel is the mainstream media’s complicity in allowing our freedoms to be stripped away?

Larry Cox: Well, there are some voices in the mainstream media, mostly columnists, who have continued to try to raise this issue.

MB: Right.

Larry Cox: I think this requires, and I’m sure what’s going to happen, is there will be new cases of abuses under this new regime that’s been created. The problem is the mainstream media treats all this stuff as if it’s simply kind of a political game – who wins, who loses. Once you win, then we drop it. Well, they won. They won the Military Commissions Act. And it was a great victory for them. Everything is a sporting event. Who wins, who loses. And what you would like to see is real investigative journalism, in the best sense, of people trying to find out what the hell this means. What about the cases of people that we know, we’ve documented, who are being held who have been found to be completely innocent of any crime whatsoever. Why isn’t the mainstream media sort of holding this is up and saying, you know…there are some. But, again, it’s going to take pushing from the American people and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create the conditions where the media begins to ask these questions and hold the administration accountable. I have no doubt that if you liked Abu Ghraib, you’re gonna love what’s going to come from secret detention sites and no habeas corpus. Because these are the conditions that – we know, I mean we documented this all over the world for decades – you hold people in secret, you deny people access to the courts, it doesn’t matter what you say about the fact that you’re not going to torture. You know torture is going to take place. That’s why you hold people in secret conditions. [Laughing.] There’s no other reason. So I think we haven’t seen anything yet in terms of the horrors that are going to come out of this new policy. And when that does, maybe the mainstream media will want – as it did with Abu Ghraib at least for a while – it will highlight them.

MB: According to journalist Sidney Blumenthal, Retired U.S. Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, estimates that 35,000 detainees are being held in U.S.-run secret prisons around the world and that only about 5% of these detainees have anything to do with terrorism. What do you know about this?

Larry Cox: Well, we know that a lot of people have been held in secret prisons that had nothing to do with terrorism. That’s one of the first things that we have to begin to get across. Even if they were the worst terrorists in the world, they wouldn’t deserve to be tortured or treated in inhuman ways. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of these people are totally innocent. You know, there are cases that we all know about: this guy who was just changing planes at JFK was taken in and he was sent off to Syria where he was tortured. Or there are cases of people who’ve been picked up and taken to secret prisons - God knows where, we’re not exactly sure where – where they were tortured for months and months until it was discovered that they had somebody with the wrong name. We know that there are shepherds who were simply seized by warlords in Afghanistan or in Pakistan because there was a bounty. You could get a $1,000 for turning over an al Qaeda member. So what do they think? I mean people are going to - desperately poor, and they got some enemy, some guy they never liked - say this is an al Qaeda guy. And that’s enough to get the whole process started. Since there’s no way to examine the truth of this, there’s no court that looks into it, these people can be held for years. So I have no idea the exact number. That’s the problem. I think those estimates could quite well be true. They could quite well be low. We don’t know. That’s the problem.

MB: That’s the scary part.

Larry Cox: That’s the scary part. The secrecy. It’s hard to comprehend how the President of the United States can announce that there are secret prisons and the Congress and the American people say, “Oh, fine. There are people being held in secret.” It’s outrageous.

MB: Upon the signing of this law, you said, “Amnesty International will to continue to push the administration and Congress to provide clarification. We're not giving up. We're fighting back and we're fighting back hard.” What actions has Amnesty International taken since then? And what can average Americans do to help reverse this tyrannical law?

Larry Cox: Well, we have launched this campaign that I’ve talked about. And it’s only the beginning. And there will be specific legislation that we’ll be pushing. We’ll be pushing legislation to end renditions. That’s the practice of sending people to countries that torture. We’ll be pushing legislation to require that all prisoners held by the United States are registered with the International Red Cross, so at least we know where they are. We will be pushing hard to persuade members of Congress that they should be begin slowly but surely to repeal the act that was passed. It’s not going to be easy because of the fear factor, which this administration has - more blatantly than any other administration that I’ve ever seen - exploited. But the response to the act that passed on our side was strong. A lot of people worked very, very hard to oppose it and in numbers that were significant. And we think it’s only the beginning. We think there’s evidence that the American people – and not just liberals, not just progressives, not just people on the left, but all Americans - are beginning to see that it’s wrong what we’re doing, that we made the world hate us in a way that they’ve never hated us, that we’re helping people who do want to do harm recruit, that we’re the best friend they ever had. We’re like doing recruitment videos for them. So we’re not safer. And that this is a betrayal of everything we were ever taught. You know, even if we’re…whoever we are, you know, we all grew up sort of having to pledge allegiance to a flag that said we were for liberty and justice for all. We didn’t grow up saying, you know, for the flag for the republic that stands for torture and disappearances and kidnappings. And I think – it’s slow because people want to believe in their government, in the people they elect – but I think people are beginning to open their eyes. So we are fighting back hard. We’re going to continue to mobilize people. And beginning in January when Congress comes back, we’ll be there. We’ll be in the halls. We’ll be in every district in the country trying to persuade our members of Congress that this is un-American.

MB: Both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have said repeatedly that the U.S. does not torture prisoners. Do you think this is merely rhetorical sleight of hand since the torture is predominantly taking place in overseas prisons to which we are sending and holding detainees?

Larry Cox: Well, first of all, I’m not sure it only takes place in overseas prisons.

MB: Predominantly.   

Larry Cox: Yeah, predominantly. Because I think we haven’t yet made the connection that when you do this stuff overseas, it’s also…you know, there are maximum security prisons in this country that if, again, the mainstream media was really doing investigations, looking into how those people are being treated, they would discover that most of the stuff that we did Abu Ghraib, we’ve been doing here. So that’s the first problem.

MB: I actually just wrote about something a few weeks ago - I don’t remember if I first saw it on your site or if it was Human Rights Watch – but it was on those prisons in our country that are using attack dogs to get prisoners out of their cells.

Larry Cox: Yeah. Many of the tactics that we’re so shocked to see –

MB: Which no one…when I told people about this, no one could believe it. They were beyond shocked.

Larry Cox: You know, again, it goes back to deciding there are certain people that we don’t care very much about. And that’s often conflated with class and race in this country.

MB: Because they’re in prison, they deserve to be there, so whatever happens to them…it shouldn’t be a picnic.

Larry Cox: Yeah, yeah. Uh…but I think the reason that the president and vice president have learned to say that we are against torture is because of the response of people to their battle, for example, under the McCain amendment to hold on to the ability to torture. They have at least got it clear that people don’t want to live in a country that openly tortures. So now they say, “Well, what we’re doing is” – they’re redefining torture – “what we’re doing is not torture.” And the challenge for us goes back to the challenge you asked actually about how do you communicate what’s really going on in Darfur. You know, torture is a word that’s beginning to lose its meaning, lose its context. Once you begin to banter it around, once you begin to debate it as if it’s an issue you can debate. You know, is it a little torture? Can we torture a little?

MB: Torture light.

Larry Cox: Torture light. Is this really torture? And people don’t understand anymore what torture really is and what is does. And one of the things we’re trying to do is to elevate the voices of people who have experienced torture. Because anyone who’s seen it – it’s like an execution – anyone who’s seen or talked with somebody who’s experienced it knows that it really is the greatest evil you’ve ever seen. And doesn’t have to be a certain kind of torture. You know, I was just hearing somebody testify the other day who was a woman who was talking about her husband who had been forced to stand in an uncomfortable position for days. Most people think, “Well, they’re just standing in an uncomfortable position. Is that really torture?” Well, do it. Do it for a while. And have to defecate on yourself and you begin to lose any sense that you’re a human being and that’s the real point of it.

MB: To say the least, you don’t have a light job. You deal with the life and death of geo-political human rights issues every day. But you are only human. There must be some days, some moments, when it’s all just too much to bear. What keeps you going? What keeps you coming in to work every day?

Larry Cox: Well, you know, my job even on the hardest days is nothing compared to the people that we’re trying to help. And, uh, I’m not threatened. I haven’t been tortured. I haven’t been threatened with execution. I haven’t been locked up. And what keeps me going is the fact that I have seen the people who have experienced that be helped by people like me. And, you know, there’s the usual stuff in any organization where you get discouraged, where, especially in the current political climate, you start to think, “Well, maybe we’re not really making a difference.” And then you meet somebody who says to you, “The only thing that kept me sane was knowing that there were people out there who were working to end what was happening to me.” And everything else sort of pales after that. 

MB: Also, I have to ask: Are you the guy at every party who is always cornering someone and speaking about politics?

Larry Cox: No.

MB: OK.

Larry Cox: [Laughs.]

MB: [Laughs.] Why not? You’re able to keep it at the office?

Larry Cox: Because one of the things that I believe is really important in terms of building activism is to convince people that you don’t have to be less than human or some kind of guy who’s in love with suffering or whatever, that you can enjoy life and still be a human rights activist. If I had to convince people that if you care about human rights, you have to be the guy who ruins every party, how many people are going to choose human rights? I want to convince people that affirming life is what I do for a living. I’m trying to affirm life. And then, you know…

MB: A party’s a party.

Larry Cox: A party’s a party. A party’s an affirmation of life. That’s what I do.
[Laughing.] Have fun.

MB: You have worked for human rights organizations for three decades. As a kid, did you want to play center field for the New York Yankees or were you advocating even then – protecting your classmates from the school bully?

Larry Cox: Yeah, I wanted to do lots of things. I was an actor when I was a kid. I wanted to be in the arts. My kid is now in the arts and says that’s what he wants to do. I, uh, you know, I came out of a family that was poor, and I saw my parents suffer from things that they shouldn’t have had to suffer from. So I guess I got sort of the bug about ending suffering from that experience. And a sense that it’s really about your inability to tolerate unnecessary suffering. Life is hard. People die. People get diseases. Lots of suffering in life. But to see somebody suffer for no reason, unnecessarily, the worst kind of suffering imaginable, I just from a very young age decided I was not going to allow that to continue and I would do everything I could to stop it. And the trick has been what we just talked about earlier, which is that you actually don’t help people who suffer by suffering yourself. They don’t need your suffering. [Laughing.] They need help. They need your help. They need your energy. They need your vision. They need hope. But you don’t help them by suffering yourself. So I had to learn, as we were just talking about, that one can both enjoy life and fight to end suffering. That took me a lot longer to learn that than it did to make the decision that I would spend my life trying to reduce suffering.

MB: Having your vote count is a human right in any democratic society. On this Election Day, with so much at stake, what are your thoughts on our current system’s ability to accurately count our citizens’ votes?

Larry Cox: Oh, well, I think one of the big issues we face is the ability of people to escape accountability. There’s no doubt that they way the system has been constructed that it’s much harder now than it ever was to hold people accountable. The odds are stacked so much in favor of incumbency and power and the ability of people to manipulate the system to stay in power no matter what, that one of the things - we don’t work on it – but one the things people have to work on is how to make democracy work in the sense of making it easier for citizens to hold people accountable when they have done stuff which is incredibly wrong.

MB: What other human rights crisis is happening in the world that we are not hearing anything about right now in the U.S. mainstream media?

Larry Cox: Oh God, it would be an enormous list. I would say Sri Lanka, for example, where there’s an incredible conflict that’s been going on forever. Congo where there’s an incredible war that has resulted in, you know, millions of people dead. Occasionally, it peaks its head into the, you know, you’ll get a little, you’ll get one article.

MB: A14 in The New York Times.

Larry Cox: Nobody really cares. And you could go on and on – you know, Burma, where it’s a human rights horror. You know, you hear more now about North Korea’s human rights violations than Burma’s because North Korea has the possibility of getting a nuclear weapon. So, yeah, there’s an endless number of cases. And one of the things that Amnesty was created to do was to keep what we call “forgotten prisoners” from being forgotten and we have to do now the same thing with countries.

MB: So it’s always a busy day for you.

Larry: Yeah. I gotta run.

MB: Thanks so much.

Larry: Yeah, yeah. Sure. And, you know, don’t ruin parties when you go. [Laughs.]

MB: [Laughing.] I won’t.

The MediaBloodhound Interview: Dr. Ben Marble of "Go F**k Yourself, Mr. Cheney" Fame

Ben Marble, the man who gained national attention last year when he told Dick Cheney to go f**k himself in the middle of his televised post-Katrina photo-op in Gulfport, Miss., is a big, gregarious Southerner with the kind of boyish charm and rebellious glint in his eye reminiscent of Randall P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. An average guy thrust into a crazy, unjust circumstance, who felt compelled to raise his voice and say enough is enough. Marble spoke for millions of Americans when he implored our Vice President to conjugate with himself. Yet, though he filled the role of Everyman that day, he, like McMurphy, is no ordinary man. His message to Dick Cheney was no mere stunt, a goof to capture on video for fifteen minutes of fame. Rather, it was a pointed comment on the hypocrisy and tragic disregard that has guided this White House, and a jumping off point to raise more awareness of the ongoing plight of post-Katrina victims in the Gulf Coast, to which Marble has dedicated himself ever since. ER physician, front man of the rock band dR. O, proprietor of over a dozen websites, self-described computer geek, artist, husband and father, Ben Marble still manages to find time to speak out against injustice and hypocrisy, whether someone is listening or not.

I sat down with Ben on the eve of the fifth anniversary of September 11th, after he happened to run across a couple of op-eds I’d written on Katrina and contacted me out of the blue. Over lunch, we spoke for more than two hours. When the interview came to a close, we hopped in a cab downtown to protest George W. Bush’s visit to Ground Zero. There we stood together with other fellow citizens disgusted by Bush’s relentless exploitation of 9/11. All in all, it was quite a day. The following is the edited transcript of our discussion.

MediaBloodhound: To set the scene for people who don’t know, what led to your now famous encounter with our cuddly Vice President?

Dr. Ben Marble: Well, it’s a bit of a story. You know, of course, the hurricane destroyed my whole neighborhood. We had fled, running for our lives. Or driving for our lives in the car. My wife, she was thirty-nine weeks pregnant. She was having contractions every fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. My son was a year and a half at the time. He had a hundred three, hundred four fever. My fifteen-year-old daughter was with us as well. And we’re driving through this torrential rain, trying to get away.

We left Gulfport at three o’clock in the afternoon. The first hotel we could find was in a place called Lake Park, Georgia, which was about an hour and a half northeast of Tallahassee [Florida] – that’s how far we had to drive. We got there at 7 a.m. We checked in, went to bed. That was the day the storm hit, which also happened to be our wedding anniversary. Little bit of irony there. Slept for about two hours. Got a phone call from one of our friends. He was in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, at his grandfather’s house. He thought the house would be safe ’cause it was three stories. The water was up to the second story and almost up to the third and he was afraid they were all going to die. He called me back forty-five minutes later, said the water was finally going down. They were still alive. Their car floated away. Stuff like that.

We backtracked that night. Stayed in Niceville, Florida. Kinda watched the storm on TV. Then the next morning we stocked up on supplies – generators, gas, chainsaws, water, food. I bought a bicycle. All things we thought we would need. Drove back home. Went and saw my parents. They were still alive. My wife’s parents’ house was OK. We went to our house. We saw it was destroyed. Our whole neighborhood was gone. My wife kinda freaked out, of course, but that’s natural. She’s still having contractions.

That night we spent at her mom’s house. The next day we were just trying to do what we could to start the recovery process. It was ninety-five to a hundred degrees outside. No power. No water. No nothing. It was like living in a military zone. There’s helicopters and military planes flying over all day. It was virtual martial law. After dark they could shoot you on sight if they saw you out. I, in fact, dared go to my friend’s house, literally two hundred yards over one night about an hour after dark, and I had two police come up and draw their guns on me and threaten to shoot me. It was pretty crazy.

Late Wednesday afternoon, my wife was feeling really bad, having more contractions. I’m an ER doctor, so I went ahead and checked her and she was four centimeters. So we started off to the hospital. We got stopped probably three times on the way to the first hospital by military, wondering what we were doing out after dark, pointing their guns at us. So we’re like, well, we’re going to this hospital, we gotta go have this baby, so they let us go. We’d go another half mile and somebody else would pull us over.

We finally made it to that hospital. They had no doctor, no baby doctor. They said if the baby was coming out, they could deliver her outside in a tent. But I wanted her at least to get some sort of pain control to help out there. So we said, “OK, no thanks. We appreciate it, but we’re going somewhere else.” We went to another hospital. We got stopped again, like twice more on the way. Same routine. We finally got there. They had just gotten their generators up. Some water going. They had a nurse midwife. They gave my wife one shot of Nubain Phenergan and after about four hours she had the baby, and the baby was healthy luckily.

She’s in the hospital maybe twelve hours, they said, “You gotta go.” So we went home to her mom’s house. We spent several days there. Over the next several days it was just, you know, dealing with various…mainly volunteers. It wasn’t the government that brought help. It was volunteers from all over the country. Just people driving down with truckloads of stuff. “Here, we’re gonna drop this off here. Y’all need this? We’ll bring you food and water, clothes, different things.” The trick was finding out where stuff was at because you didn’t have much communication to do that. But you did what you could.

So I’d been going to our house here and there, trying to salvage stuff. I managed to talk to my friend Jay into helping me try to get some stuff out of the rubble. We had a rental truck. An eighth of a tank of gas. Gas lines at that point were three-to-four hours long. So that day we got to the train tracks, which were literally about 150 feet or so from my house, they wouldn’t let me cross. They’re telling me I gotta go this extra fifteen-minute route when I know I’m low on gas already and had crossed there every day before. They’re like, “You gotta turn around.” Finally, I put it in reverse – luckily Jay had the camera rolling – and just as I did, I see this long convoy of black cars coming through, ten, fifteen, twenty. They just told me no one can pass here, and ten seconds later they’re waving this caravan of cars through. I was infuriated. I flipped off the convoy. But, uh, we took the long way around. We had no other choice. I mean what are you going to do when the guys got machine guns, you know?

We made it to the house eventually. There are police out front, talking to this woman. That’s another story – this insane woman squatted in our house and started looting the neighborhood, putting it in our house. So I asked the police officer, “What’s going on there?” [Referring to the convoy.] And he said, “Well, the vice president’s down there.” And I said, “Really? Well, you think they’d let us go down there?” He said, “Yeah, they’d really like to talk to some of the locals – that’s why they’re here.” I said, “Oh, OK, great.” So we took off. Jay had the camcorder and I had the camera, and we walked down there. And the whole time we were walking, I thought, you know, I would really like to tell Cheney to go f**k himself. He said that on the senate floor to Senator Leahy, so if I get a chance I’m gonna say it. I told Jay. He said, “Ah, you’re asking for trouble.”

MB: So it was premeditated?

Marble: Yes, it was premeditated. It was very much premeditated. I was kind of like the ultimate Punk’d!

MB: Related to it being premeditated, it did have a polished comedic quality to it. Even your choice to use “Mr.” when you addressed him. I think that’s why your comment seemed to be coming from a sane man who’d simply had enough. Also, had those same words come from a screaming person who’d been dragged away, I think it would’ve been a one-day story for the mainstream media. Maybe not even a full day. I think that’s why it had so much impact. That it was measured, and there was a comical quality to it.

Marble: Well, the premeditated part was the “go f**k yourself.” The “Mr. Cheney,” that just, I don’t know why, I can’t say that was premeditated. I guess I’m used to addressing people respectfully. A lot of people told me that, though. So when we got down there they patted us down, check our I.D.’s. And Jay’s got the camera rolling. And there was such a mob of people covering it that I lost track of Jay. I didn’t know where he was. And Dick was going on and on, doing his little political spin routine. I was thinking to myself, “I better hurry up and say something because he may stop talking any second.” I knew when he did, it was going to be over. I started getting kind of nervous. I was like, I just need to go ahead and say it. I knew I was speaking for a lot of people because my sister-in-law was the first person who got power back who had a television and I’d gone to her house and we saw everything that was happening in the New Orleans area, with, you know, people having nothing to drink, nothing to eat and just being left in the streets to die, to fend for themselves. The basic simple things that they should’ve done and could’ve done were some airdrops of food and water and drop in some military to deliver them. I mean, common sense.

MB: Common sense.

Marble: These guys don’t have common sense. They gotta go check with their lawyers and all this other crap, and, you know, you got people dying – you don’t worry about that other stuff, you go save them. 

MB: And it kind of makes you wonder. How much of it is about common sense and how much of it is lack of care?

Marble: Right. Do we really care? These aren’t our people. Well, that was kind of half the reason he came to my neighborhood. Or probably the only reason. Because I lived in a pretty prominent part of Gulfport, which was a block off the beach in a neighborhood mostly of doctors and lawyers and such.

MB: When you told our Vice President to go f**k himself, could you tell if he made eye contact with you?

Marble: Oh, absolutely he did make eye contact with me. He was about twelve feet or so away at the time. And right as I said it, it was like one of those moments in time where everything stood still and you could just hear this total silence. He looked right up at me and had this grin on his face like, “Oh, you got me.” Like he knew. He thought it was funny. He had this little grin on his face. He looked me right in the eye and kind of rolled his eyes, and then he went on. And right at that moment I was like, I better say it again because I’m not sure they heard me. So I did, but I started walking away because they were running at me like they were about to tackle me. And I was like, “Go fuck yourself, you asshole” as I walked away. That’s why it kind of faded out.

MB: The matter-of-fact quality of how you said it was also pretty hilarious.

Marble: You know, there was something else that was funny about it, too. I had this old ratty Mr. T “I Pity the Fool” T-shirt I was wearing. I think that was a large part of why they let me in. [Laughs.] I was just wearing it because I knew I was going to be getting dirty and nasty with the house.

MB: Because if you had an “Impeach Bush” T-shirt, they never would’ve let you in.

Marble: Oh yeah. They never would’ve let me in.

MB: [Laughing.] But a Mr. T “I Pity the Fool” T-shirt. That gets you in.

Marble: Exactly. [Laughs.]

MB: That pretty much seems up the administration, doesn’t it?

Marble: Exactly. So I’m walking off. I wave at the guy who patted me down. I said to him, “Have a nice day,” and he was looking at me like he wanted to shoot me. I walked back to my house. And, you know, people ask me how I feel about it. Do I regret it? I say the same thing Dick Cheney said. It felt great.

MB: The same thing he said about saying it to Senator Leahy.

Marble: Yeah. I knew he needed to hear that. The country needed to hear that. It felt good, you know? That’s all I can say. It was a great feeling. One of the funniest things I’ve ever done in my life. So I, uh, walked back to the house. I called Jay. This is funny too. I went back to the house. He’s still filming down there. So his cell phone goes off and he interrupted it twice. And tell him to get back to the house before they saw him and took that camera away from him. So as soon as he gets back, the first thing I did was get that DVD and hid it in the bushes. Because I knew they were gonna come back. I just had that feeling.

MB: And they were going to go after that?

Marble: Oh yeah. So I put a blank one in its place. And, sure enough, ten minutes later two guys with machine guns pointed at us come jogging up.

MB: Were these military or Secret Service?

Marble: It was military. In a military uniform, fatigues. They said, “Excuse me, sir, you fit the description of a man that just cussed out the Vice President, wearing an orange shirt…”

MB: So, in effect, the military, with everything that’s going on, all the people in need of help, took time away from the job they were sent down there to do by this administration in order to find you.

Marble: Sure. Yup. So I said, “Well, I’m probably the guy you’re looking for.” And they said, “OK, sir, we’re going to have to handcuff you, we’re going to detain you for questioning. You are not under arrest. Do not run. And they emphasized the do not run part. [Laughs.] I was like, I just told you it was me. I’m not going to run – y’all have the machine guns.

MB: How did they justify those two things? We’re going to handcuff you, but you’re not under arrest?

Marble: I didn’t have the right to inquire about that.

MB: [Laughs.] Yes, you probably wanted to avoid getting shot.

Marble: There was a lot of stress going on at the time. And people, especially military or police in that type of situation, they get an itchy trigger finger. They were looking for an excuse. I just had police pull their guns on me a few days before that.

MB: Because you were out past the curfew.

Marble: Yeah, sure. So they handcuffed me. They put the one on the right extremely tight. I said, “Look, it’s really tight, you know – you don’t have to do that.” They ignored this. So I told Jay to turn the camera back on. He takes the camera with that new blank DVD in it and starts videoing again. They walk me from the house to the train tracks they wouldn’t let me cross beforehand, where a police car was parked. They put me in the backseat and began interrogating me. “Why did you do that, sir? Are you trying to hurt the Vice President?” Blah, blah, blah. I was like, “No, I don’t mean him any physical harm. But, you know, if he can say that on the floor of the senate, where people are supposed to be civil and courteous, then I think I can say it in the middle of the worst disaster in the history of our nation.” They had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to give them a history lesson. Most of them were pretty pissed off. There were a couple who thought it was funny, but most were pretty angry and wanted to take me to jail. 

MB: And these were all soldiers?

Marble: Well, at that point, there were maybe three or four soldiers in military uniforms, and a couple guys were Secret Service. They had the glasses, the little earpieces.

MB: But the guys who were first on the scene were military. Then the Secret Service came after?

Marble: Correct. And some type of uniform police officers. I don’t know if they were from the sheriff’s office. I don’t know who they were.

MB: But the people who asked you, “Did you intend to do any harm to the Vice President?” That was Secret Service?

Marble: That was Secret Service. So I explained all that to them. That was about it. Then, suddenly, they take Jay’s camera away from him. One of them got in the front seat with it and I could see him messing with it. All I know is that video Jay shot of me in handcuffs does not work. They finally said, “Well, apparently you didn’t break any laws. We have your social security number, your phone number, your place of employment.” Blah, blah, blah. Then they said, “If we need to get in touch with you, we will. Don’t get in touch with us.”

MB: Nice little intimidation factor at the end there.

Marble: Yeah, sure, sure. I actually got a call from an attorney a couple weeks ago about this. I’ve had a few people contact me. I’ve never thought about it seriously, but the attorney I talked to apparently seems to think they broke the law with what they did. So I’m kind of weighing my options there with that. Not for any kind of monetary reason, but to further expose their abuse of power. So if he’s willing to make a case out of it, I might be willing to do that. We’ll see.

MB: You’re just looking into that now?

Marble: I had never taken it too seriously, but the more I think about it, things just keep getting worse in this country. This upcoming election in November is going to be a huge election and the reason why is we have a, uh, American citizens have a chance to restore some sort of balance of power. Because we’re basically living under a de facto dictatorship. They control the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch, and it looks like Bush may get a third Supreme Court appointment. Because Kennedy’s talking about maybe going – how scary is that?

MB: Extremely.

Marble: If they maintain control of Congress, we will have a war with Iran. This is what I believe.

MB: I think you might be right.

Marble: And a war with Iran is essentially a war with Russia and China. Not a war that we want. Russia and China have already said don’t do it. That’s their number one supplier of oil, that’s their energy source. We can’t take away Russia’s and China’s energy source and expect them to sit idly by while we do it. China has the largest military on the planet. Plus they have the most people on the planet. They’re also basically our banker. If they call in their loans, we’re really in trouble. The bottom line is, you’re odds of dying in a war with Iran, Russia and China are a lot greater than dying from a random terrorist act. So are you voting to go to war with Iran, Russia and China or are you voting not to go to war with them? That’s how I see this election. I think this is one of the most important issues I’m trying to push with The Mission NOT Accomplished Tour. People need to vote for candidates that stand up and say they will impeach George Bush, or Dubya Gump, as I call him.

MB: Actually, that’s a good segue. The Mission NOT Accomplished Tour. What is it? What do you hope to accomplish with it? What’s the itinerary? I know you started in front of the White House on Friday.

Marble: Well, I’ll tell you what led up to this whole event being planned. Rockey Vaccarella taking a FEMA trailer, a fake FEMA trailer to Washington, D.C. to say that Bush needed another term in office…

MB: …to get the job done.

Marble: When I saw that on TV, I nearly shit my pants.

MB: Can I quote you on that?

Marble: [Laughing.] Sure…please do. This guy, you know, I kind of feel sorry for this guy.

MB: I kind of feel sorry for him, too. I was going to ask you a question related to that.

Marble: I feel like I owe him an apology. And if you’re listening Mr. Vaccarella, or if you read this, I’m sorry, sir.

MB: Well, I mean, my feeling about it is, on the one hand, the guy suffered greatly from Katrina – he lost his eldest son. But, at the same time, I was going to ask you what you think is going through his mind? To have suffered that, but still come out to support the president on his handling of both preparing for Katrina and the aftermath. To come out in defense of him…

Marble: Well, I think that’s just an example of a Bush sheep. They would jump off a cliff with him. I don’t mean that in a mean way, but these people will support him to the end. No matter what. They would…these are like people who would die in the bunker with Hitler, you know? Some people believe Bush can do no wrong. And the fact of the matter is, Rockey was there and he knows what happened. Now, granted the response was a failure on all levels of government – the city, state and federal – but how could he go to Washington and say he’s trying to raise awareness about that area so people won’t forget - which is certainly an admirable thing - and call for another term for the guy who let us down? The guy who dropped the ball, the guy who started a war based on lies, in the wrong country, wrong place, wrong time. The man who let people die in the streets for day after day after day. The man who wants to start another war with Iran. The man who’s taken the largest surplus in the history of our nation and turned it into the largest deficit in just a short three years. I mean this guy is so incompetent, and how anyone could say he deserves another term in office - I was like, are you insane? I don’t claim to grasp why those people think that way. Though I do think it has a lot to do with growing up in the South and being raised in the church and stuff like that. Being brought up to believe you’re supposed to support your President no matter what.

MB: Especially during a time of war.

Marble: Right, cannot criticize the president during a time of  war, which is total BS. If you want to win a war, you can’t expect someone to fix the problem when he won’t even admit he’s the cause of the problem. How is he going to get us out of it when he won’t even admit he got us into it? It’s ridiculous. So, anyway, that’s what inspired the trip. I actually went on MSNBC’s Hardball show and debated Mr. Vaccerella. With regards to The Mission NOT Accomplished idea, I wanted to be the anti-Rockey. Because the majority of people down in the post-Katrina area do not support this president. I know that for a fact. The overwhelming majority and I’m talking probably at least 80 to 90% of the people. So the first stop was at the White House. I did a speech to the president, asking him to realize the single best thing he could ever hope to do for our country is to go ahead and resign.

MB: And you made this speech just outside the White House.

Marble: Right in front of the White House. And I didn’t get too loud and boisterous. I kept it calm and civil. We are filming this whole trip. The first thing we shot was that. That’s how we kicked it off. And we interviewed a few people. I called on Bush to think about resigning. If he refuses to resign, then I think the only issue that has to be pushed by the opposition in the November election, if people pushed this single issue: “I will impeach Dubya Gump if you elect me. Then we can take back control of Congress and we could get rid of the guy.” I honestly believe that one issue is the only issue that anybody needs to promote for November.

MB: And there are a growing number of candidates nationally who are running on that.

Marble: Well –

MB: Not a lot, but some.

MB: Well, a lot of Democrats seem afraid to actually voice it.

MB: Absolutely.

Marble: They want to stick their finger in there and take a poll.

MB: Sure.

Marble: And that’s following. Being a leader means you got to lead. You take a stand. Set the initiative. You don’t follow polls. Polls are good for some things, not when it comes to this issue.

MB: I think the people who are running on that platform would be considered on the fringe by the Democratic leadership.

Marble: And that’s where I think they’re wrong.

MB: Yeah, they are wrong. But look at Paul Hackett. There’s no reason why Paul Hackett is not a star candidate in the Democratic Party. But the problem seems to be the Democratic leadership at the top.

Marble: Nancy Pelosi specifically said that if we win the majority we will not impeach George Bush. I think she should resign for saying that. I mean because that’s a lie. If they win, everybody knows they’re going to impeach him. So if they’re gonna do it, and we all know they are, then be honest about it.

MB: Sure. Paul Hackett made the Democratic leadership too nervous. He spoke the unvarnished truth.

Marble: And that’s what’s going to happen. They feel like if they can’t control, then they have to silence you.

MB: Right.

Marble: So the main goals of the Mission NOT Accomplished Tour are, one, to encourage people to vote for impeachment and the other goal is to continue to raise awareness of the ongoing problems in the Gulf Coast post-Katrina. There are a couple of big ones. There’s a huge healthcare crisis right now. Very huge. Trauma surgeon shortage. Somebody gets in a car wreck, gets shot, stabbed, they may bypass three or four hospitals before they get to a surgeon. And there’s that golden hour to get care initiated. People have died because of this. I know two people specifically who died directly because of this. I mean there are so many cases I could tell you about. The suicides rates are through the roof. Psychiatric illness rates are through the roof. Murder rates have tripled. Meanwhile, doctors are leaving in droves, nurses are leaving in droves, and no one’s coming in to replace them. So there’s a huge healthcare crisis going on right now.

MB: It’s kind of ironic that the guy who came up to support Bush’s actions regarding Katrina is from New Orleans and the guy who’s speaking out against his actions is from Mississippi. Because Mississippi received much more support, right?

Marble: True. Absolutely. Mississippi has gotten way more support. The recovery in Mississippi has been very different because we have a Washington fat cat lobbyist as our governor. Haley Barber. And what better time to have the fat cat lobbyist as your governor? If he couldn’t get things done, who could? The recovery in Mississippi has been going very well as far as clean up and starting to rebuild. Now there are still all of those things I mentioned that aren’t happening. But in the New Orleans area, they haven’t started doing anything. They haven’t started tearing the buildings down. You can’t rebuild until you get the rubble out of the way. They haven’t even started to get the rubble out of the way. I think they’re not capitalizing on a golden opportunity. New Orleans should be the new capital for making horror movies because there’s block after block after empty building that would be great sets for some horror movies. 

MB: All of which George Bush drove right by during his little anniversary tour there. If you were to parse articles covering his Katrina anniversary photo-ops, some papers had a line or two about this buried in their stories.

Marble: I guess part of the reason they haven’t even started tearing most of the buildings down is, by all people’s estimations, there are still many uncovered bodies in those buildings. They’ll mark a building as clear, but do they really search it? For example, in the movie with Spike [When the Levees Broke], they showed where they’d marked a building as clear and all the doors were locked. Nobody had been inside it. How do you mark a building as clear when nobody ever entered it? And so they’re going to find more bodies. They’re still finding bodies. But, at some point in time, those building are uninhabitable. They’re unusable. Might as well go and start tearing them down. The problem is, nobody wants to do that because the insurance scandal. The insurance industry’s got a multi-billion-dollar scam going on right now. They’re just ripping people off left and right, not wanting to pay claims. People don’t want to rebuild because the levee’s not restored. If a tropical storm, a little teeny tiny tropical storm, came and hit New Orleans, it would be under eight-to-ten feet of water again. They would be back where they started. So why rebuild when the levee’s not strong enough to even stop that? So that’s the big dilemma and I don’t have any good answer for it.

The other thing, there’s a huge shortage of low-income housing. All these people in FEMA trailers, after eighteen months, they’re gonna get evicted. And there’s no housing for them to get to, and the pricing on the houses and apartments that were there before, that survived, have doubled or tripled. The three specific public housing projects they have, you know, they’re selling to private companies who are going to bulldoze them and probably build condos or something.

MB: Sure. Well, there’s a great deal of a kind of Manifest Destiny going on there. I still believe the Bush administration’s inaction before, during and after the storm have something to do with that.

Marble: Oh yeah. They’re making sure they build those casinos real quick, though.

MB: Right.

Marble: And anything big money, you know, but they’re not concerned about the average Joe. So there’s a huge shortage of housing. A huge healthcare crisis. You never hear anything in the news about the healthcare crisis. And that’s coast wide, that’s Louisiana and Mississippi. The third issue, which is a big issue, is they won’t fund a category five levee in New Orleans. If you’re gonna rebuild it, it’s inevitable, sooner or later, maybe a hundred years from now, but a category five storm will hit New Orleans. I mean everyone knew for decades that New Orleans was going to flood if a major storm ever hit.

MB: Except Bush. He just couldn’t predict the breach of the levees.

Marble: Yeah, no one ever predicted the breach of the levees. What a great statement. You’re doing one heckuva job, Brownie. So we’re gonna fire you in a few days. So those are the things I’ve been talking about – the Katrina stuff, the stuff about impeaching him, those are the issues I’ve been trying to raise. I did the thing at the White House yesterday, then we went to Camp Democracy in DC. Then to Philadelphia before coming to New York City. We’ll be at the United Nations.

MB: Let me take you back to the Hardball appearance.

Marble: Sure.

MB: Unfortunately Mr. Vaccarella ate up most of the airtime. You were cut off at the end of the segment. To paraphrase Pink Floyd, your lips moved but nobody heard what you said. What were you trying to say at the end there? Because you were still speaking, but they cut your mike off.

Marble: I was actually trying to mention The Mission NOT Accomplished Tour.

MB: Oh, OK.

Marble: I was going to tell Chris I was thinking about doing my own tour, my own trip to the White House. I didn’t realize I’d been cut off. I had a hard time hearing them because I was down in Mississippi at the time. And he was, you know, in Washington or New York or wherever.

MB: Yet some media outlets automatically jumped on that saying you were ranting and raving at the end there and they cut you off because of it.

Marble: [Laughs.] No, I couldn’t hear what was going on. They just ran out of time.

MB: During the segment, you said to Rockey that President Bush met with you but he wouldn’t meet with Cindy Sheehan, and you asked him why he thought that was? In response, Rockey said Bush had met with Cindy Sheehan twice. First, that’s incorrect. He met with her only once and that was with a group of other parents right after her son Casey had been killed in Iraq, when she was still in shock, in an acute stage of grieving.

Marble: Exactly.

MB: But he never met with her again. And that’s the point. When she was well enough to have an actual conversation with the president, when she was no longer in a vulnerable position, he refused. Yet, not only did Chris Matthews let Rockey go on and on, chewing up the overwhelming majority of airtime, even speaking over you when you attempted to stop Rockey from monopolizing the segment, but Matthews also failed to correct him on that point.

Marble: I think everybody knew my point.

MB: But he didn’t even correct –

Marble: Chris didn’t call him on it.

MB: And that’s the kind of sloppiness I often call out on this site.

Marble: Well, I wouldn’t want to be a Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann, or in any of their shoes, where I’d have to pretend I’m unbiased. Because all human beings are biased.

MB: But I think, in a way, it’s more…it’s that, at this point in time, it’s more about being truthful. I mean Keith Olbermann has been getting a lot of buzz lately because he’s been truthful. If members of the Bush administration lie, he says they’re lying and points out what they’re lying about. If they shamelessly exploit 9/11, he calls them on it. He’s kept a running timeline he shares with his audience that tracks the overly coincidental, beneficial timing of this administration’s terrorist warnings. I don’t think that’s about being biased or unbiased. I think, journalistically speaking, it’s just doing your job.   

Marble: Oh, I love the guy. He’s great.

MB: I mean that statement he gave recently on Rumsfeld and the administration was brilliant. And he’s made a couple since then.

Marble: That speech was awesome. But he’ll probably get canned.

MB: And the only reason why he might not get canned is his ratings have been growing steadily.

Marble: And that’s, you know –

MB: That’s the only reason why he won’t get fired.

Marble: So you have to dance like a monkey to tell the truth.

MB: You do. And to that point, I think he has been able to do what he does on his show because he really only addresses serious issues for a portion of it. The rest of the time he’s doing an entertainment report, or he’s doing a report on Petey the Three-Eyed Goat.

Marble: [Laughing.] Yeah.

MB: And Zeppo the Juggling Cat. But I understand. Edward R. Murrow was forced to do the same thing. It’s the only way it seems they would allow him to do the other stuff. The serious stuff. And, you know, Fox has taken a huge slide.

Marble: Oh yeah. People are waking up.

MB: And that’s the only thing, at least for the moment, saving Keith Olbermann’s job.

Marble: But my concern is that people are going to wake up too late. To some degree, they already did wake up too late, ’cause we had the 2004 election and Bush is still in office.

MB: Certainly. OK, I know your Cheney quote was printed in scores of national magazines and obviously the video of your encounter with him was ubiquitous. But have you had much airtime on cable and network news? And what’s your feeling on how you’ve been handled by the mainstream media since you’ve come on the scene?

Marble: Well, other than MSNBC, they’ve wanted to avoid it I guess. You know?

MB: Yeah, in doing research for this interview, I couldn’t find another appearance.

Marble: Kinda sweep it under the rug.

MB: You think they’re frightened to have you on?

Marble: Possibly. You know, if they wanted to tape ahead of time if they’re scared I’m gonna say something, I mean they could always do that. So I don’t know. That’s a good question.

MB: I mean you haven’t been on the Today show.

Marble: No.

MB: You haven’t been on the CBS Early Show.

Marble: No.

MB: Or Good Morning America.

Marble: No.

MB: Yet they’ll gladly bring on Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly.

Marble: Oh, absolutely. I told the guys at MSNBC I would love to be on a show against Ann Coulter. That would be great. If they want some good ratings, put me on that show. It will be funny, and they’ll have good ratings. And I’ll rip ’em a new one. Seriously. I would love to get on a show with Anne Coulter.

MB: You and me both. But what do you think it says about the mainstream media? That they would have someone on…in fact, right around the time you had your Rockey segment, Matthews had Coulter on Hardball to plug her book. And he praised her throughout interview. It was held outdoors, where they gathered a pre-selected crowd of Coulter fans who were cheering for her. It was nauseating. Matthews literally called her “a great writer.” His exact words. Never mind she’s also a confirmed plagiarist.

Marble: Well, I think there’s a lot of mainstream media whores. Seriously, the guys who were at that press conference with Cheney. One. One reporter spoke up and said something. None of them noted I was quoting Cheney’s own words back to him. Now what does that say about those reporters. Not one of them said, “Hey, Mr. Cheney, didn’t you say that same thing to Senator Leahy?”

MB: Exactly.

Marble: None of them. They had zero balls. And the reason why is they know they won’t have access if they actually say something and speak up. You know the guy who said, “You gettin’ a lot of that?” He probably hasn’t had a single interview since. I don’t know for a fact, but that would be my guess. If you speak up and ask a relevant question, they’re not gonna talk to you anymore. The media is a joke. And that’s why people have to go online. I probably get my information from as many sources as possible. I’m an Internet geek, a computer geek, so I visit numerous websites, international sites, et cetera. But I’ll also watch MSNBC, CNN, Fox. I love watching Fox – it’s really entertaining. I mean they claim to be fair and balanced. Well, why is a Fox correspondent now the White House press secretary? That’s absurd. How is it that Secret Service admitted that they were pretending to be Fox reporters, and it’s OK. That’s fair and balanced.

MB: But most people - and this informs my focus for MediaBloodhound – since most people realize Fox is basically just a mouthpiece for this government, I don’t go after them because I feel it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, I focus on those mainstream news outlets that are supposed to be doing their jobs, the ones people expect to do their jobs. The CNNs, the New York Times, the MSNBCs…

Marble: Yeah. Why did CNN give Rockey all that airtime? And they hyped up the story: Rockey goes to Washington. Like he’s Rocky Balboa. That was half the reason why I stopped by Philadelphia and ran up and down the stairs and held my arms up at the top.

MB: Did you see the Ed Henry segment? It was a particularly egregious segment on CNN that day.

Marble: No.

MB: He started it off by saying you couldn’t ask for a better script, how it was right out of the movies. Well, yeah. Exactly. You couldn’t ask for a better script. And the White House couldn’t ask for better marketing.

Marble: Sure.

MB: That goes to the point too - I’m sure it goes way back but it’s seems to have become much worse during Bush’s tenure – and that’s reporters in the mainstream media who are doing less journalism and more stenography. For example, with the anniversaries of Katrina and 9/11, the mainstream media reports on all of Bush’s speeches and the political strategy driving them, yet not his disastrous handling of, say, Katrina, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, the twisted intelligence that got us into this war of choice in Iraq, and his failure to capture Osama bin Laden.

Marble: This week is Katrina. Next week, forget Katrina. It’s 9/11.

MB: And that already started.

Marble: I got that directly from a media persona I talked to. I said, “You know I’m gonna be doing this Mission NOT Accomplished Tour.” And they’re like, “Well, we’re doing 9/11 stories that week.” So I said, “OK, well, maybe I should just show up with a sign that day that says never forget Katrina.” I think what happened on 9/11 was a terrible thing, just like everybody else does. But, basically, the administration is going to use this as a tool to get the focus off of Katrina, off of their failures, off of not catching Osama, and back on the fear mongering, the war on terror.

MB: Right. Which Gore Vidal aptly likens to the war on dandruff.

Marble: [Laughing] Sure. You can’t win a war on terror. I made this point to a man outside the White House who was arguing for Bush. Besides, they’re talking about fighting the war on terror and securing the homeland - secure our borders, secure our ports. I think most people want practical solutions. Practical solutions with the least amount of misery or death inflicted on people. You know, nobody wants to be at war. Nobody wants to be killing other people.

MB: Well…

Marble: Yeah, you got your warmongers.

MB: Yeah. But the average person, yes, I agree.

Marble: And your war profiteers.

MB: And they have profited greatly.

Marble: Now, you know, I guess you have to fight it. But you shouldn’t be destroying our way of life in the process, destroying our credibility around the globe, making the whole world hate us because you’re so obsessed with fighting the war on terror.

MB: And, of course, what they purport to be fighting this war for is the very thing they’re denying their own people.

Marble: Yeah, we’re fighting for freedom and liberty. Well, here’s a little irony - one of the first things they did after 9/11 was close the Statue of Liberty. Liberty has been shut down.

MB: Would’ve made a good headline. It’s a perfect metaphor for what’s happened since then.

Marble: It’s absurd, and it’s sad.

MB: So, speaking of fear mongering, if Cheney were here right now, sitting at this table, what would you say to him?

Marble: I would tell him he should be ashamed of himself. Seriously. He should be ashamed. It seems like, for some reason, power and money are the only things that matter to him. Instead of compassionate conservatism. What a crock of BS. Uh, what about doing what’s right for people, trying to help people. It seems like a totally selfish mentality…you know, I’m in charge and I’m gonna do what I want, make myself a lot of money and screw the rest of you. I think he should be ashamed of himself and I don’t know how else to put that. You know, I don’t wish the guy any harm or anything, but he’s probably been the most powerful vice president in the history of our country.

MB: Absolutely.

Marble: He’s the real president. Everybody knows that.

MB: Sure.

Marble: He, you know, he doesn’t have the best heart. He’s got bad heart disease, so if he believes in some sort of higher power and he really claims to be a Christian, which I’ve never actually seen him do, which is kind of ironic…

MB: It’s more Bush’s domain.

Marble: Yeah. Then, you know, he may seriously want to get his things in order before his next big heart attack happens because, uh…

MB: He’s had, what, 86 heart attacks already?

Marble: Yeah, if there’s really a hell, you know…

MB: [Laughing.] Yeah…

Marble: [Laughing.] It’s gonna be pretty hot for him.

MB: A reservation waiting for him in the front row.

Marble: He’s certainly got hell to pay. A lot of making up to do.

MB: Tell me a little about your how you were brought up, what informed your political views today, because you actually live in a very conservative area.

Marble: Well, I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. I’ve lived in every county on the Coast. From Pensacola, Florida to Slidell, Louisiana. Lived down there my whole life. Grew up in the church. We went to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and any other night they wanted to have a prayer meeting. My parents were holy rollers. I couldn’t listen to rock and roll. It was the devil’s music. You know, so when I see these politicians spouting their pseudo-Christian point of view…or someone like Ann Coulter. What’s her book? Godless? She claims she’s a Christian? Get real. C’mon.

MB: What about George Bush claiming he’s a Christian?

Marble: That whole war for peace concept, if you read the Bible, the scary thing about that is that’s what the Anti-Christ says.

MB: Which reminds me of something else Gore Vidal’s been pointing out for years now, this idea of perpetual war for perpetual peace. 

Marble: In the Revelations, it says the Anti-Christ will call for war for peace. I’m not saying…[Laughter.]

MB: [Laughing.] That Bush is the Anti-Christ.

Marble: I’m not a practicing Christian now, but I did read the Bible probably about ten times before I was ten years old. I had to memorize it and recite it. So, yeah.

MB: So can I get you on record as saying Bush is the Anti-Christ?

Marble: [Laughter.]

MB: Can I quote you on that?

Marble: [Laughing.] Yeah. But, apparently, he thinks he is.

MB: [Laughing.] But he’s an incompetent Anti-Christ. A bush-league Anti-Christ.

Marble: The diehard Bush supporters are looking forward to Armageddon because then they get to go to heaven. It’s just like the jihadis with the seventy virgins.

MB: Right. Different side of the same coin.

Marble: Yes.

MB: So I know you’ve had a lot of overwhelming support. But you’re a father, you’re a husband. You’re a doctor that works full-time?

Marble: Full-time ER doctor.

MB: Full-time ER doctor. You’re the lead singer in a band?

Marble: Uh, lead guitar and vocals.

MB: In a rock band?

Marble: Yes, an indie rock band

MB: And so, when this all hit, when you were suddenly thrust into the spotlight, how did you handle it? Which happened, of course, right in the middle of dealing with how the hurricane affected your own life.

Marble: Um, I don’t know, it’s kind of strange when you go…I go to places now and people just come up and say, “Hey, you’re the guy that was in that Spike Lee movie.” And the majority of them are like that man who walked up to me the other day in front of the White House. He shook my hand and said, “I really appreciate what you did.” I got probably 5,000 emails in the month or so after that. Ninety-five percent of them were supportive, and then were 5%, you know, “If I ever see you, I’m gonna beat you up.” You know, stuff like that.

It’s been kind of crazy. Mainly, you just have to stay busy. Stay busy and work a lot. ’Cause, uh, it’s almost…you tend to get overly emotional about things. And I do, so I’m aware of it. But when you see what other people have been dealt, what they’ve gone through. I mean I could tell you some horror stories. Last shift I worked. This is a crazy story, but it happens almost every day now. This psychiatric stuff, people going crazy. I had a man…police had a man who had knife in his hand for whatever reason. They were called to the scene. They started chasing him. He ran away, and as he’s running away he starts stabbing himself. He stabbed himself in his neck, in his chest, he stabbed himself in his leg three times, he cut both of his wrists, he stabbed his hands. And then he proceeded to run head-on into oncoming traffic and got hit by a car doing about fifty.

MB: God.

Marble: You know, stuff like that did not happen before Katrina. Well, every once in a while stuff like that would happen, but it’s just…the stress, the stress level is so high that people snap. A lot of people snapping and doing things they wouldn’t normally do. A lot of craziness. It’s kind of like, uh, the Wild West. And that’s more so in New Orleans, but even so on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There’s a lot of lawlessness going on.

MB: Still going on.

Marble: People doing what they want, when they want. And, uh, doing bad things to other people. I had one guy who got shot in the head because he wouldn’t give another guy a piece of chicken.

MB: Which, granted, could happen at any time.

Marble: At any time, but these things didn’t happen at nearly the frequency. Three, four times as much.

MB: And because you work in an ER, you’re witnessing the increase in these types of incidents firsthand.

Marble: I see it on a daily basis at work. All kinds of horror stories. I’m actually thinking of writing about them as more of a therapeutic thing for myself. Get the stories out. Because the things I’ve heard people tell me, it’s just amazing some of the stuff that’s going on. People living in, you know, houses in one room with five-to-eight kids. No running water. No electricity. Things that shouldn’t be happening. And they are happening, but nobody knows about ’em so nothing gets done. Now, I’ve got sisters working for international relief and development. My sister-in-law works for them. My wife’s best friend works for another relief agency. I have a lot of friends working with different relief organizations. My wife’s been going to shoot video. You know, there’s a lot of people trying to help out and do what they can, but there’s just so much need right now going on that, you know…that’s all you can do, is do what you can do…

MB: So coming back to the original question, there are so many people in great need of help that this being thrust on you is nothing. That compared to what these people are going through, you’re thinking, “I’m lucky.”

Marble: Oh yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Like this trip. I’m trying to get across a message that I believe in and get word out to a bunch of people of how much help is still needed. But, at the same time, getting away for a few days is a break for my wife. It’s a break for her. Just to have a little vacation.

MB: Even though you’re spending it getting the word out.

Marble: Yeah.

MB: Ben, thanks so much for your time.

Marble: My pleasure. Thank you.

Dr. Ben Marble can be seen in Spike Lee’s HBO documentary When the Levees Broke. You can find information about his many websites, his band dR. O and other projects at www.benmarblemd.com.