Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyers Journal

Bill Moyers interviews Glenn Greenwald, the Constitutional lawyer and blogger who has relentlessly researched and exposed the assault on the rule of law undertaken by the Bush administration.

The video of the interview, along with a complete transcript, can be viewed here. For convenience and emphasis, I've selected a few key excerpts below:

GLENN GREENWALD: ...But rather than announce that they intended to indict him [suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla] and bring charges against him, as the Constitution requires, the Bush administration instead announced that it has the power to arrest and detain American citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely based solely on the say so of the president without having to charge that person with a crime and without even having them have access to a lawyer.

[snip]

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean when you call President Bush a Manichean warrior? I mean, most people don't know what Manichean is and don't care. What do you mean by it?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, the idea of being a Manichean comes from this third century BC philosophy that - or religion really that basically understood the world, a never-ending battle between the forces of pure good and the forces of pure evil. And all human events could be understood said adherence to this religion through that prism.

And it was a very simplistic idea that even early Christianity rejected as not appreciating the complexities of how the world actually is and the ambiguities, the moral ambiguities that characterize who most of us are in most situations. George Bush views the world and his followers viewed the world through this lens of pure good versus pure evil.

And it's not me saying that. He said that in virtually all of his speeches. And when you see the world that way what it means is that if you're on the side of pure good, as he asserted that he was and we are, it means that anything that you do, no matter how limitless, no matter how brutal and immoral, is inherently justifiable because it's being enlisted for service of the good.

And by contrast, anything that you do to those on the other side is inherently justified as well because they're pure evil. And from the war in Iraq to the torture camps and secret prisons that we set up all of the things that have done so much damage, I think that's the mentality that lies at the heart of it.

[snip]

What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them. But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.