Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales had a really terrific interview today with Eliot Spitzer on why Bernie Sanders is right and Ben Bernanke should not be confirmed for another term as Federal Reserve Chairman and that Tim Geithner should be replaced as Treasury Secretary. One question Amy Goodman asked I found particularly interesting was this one along with Spitzer's answer:

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think you were partly taken down by the very entities you were going after?

ELIOT SPITZER: I have been very careful in saying that I resigned because of what I did. And I have no doubt that there were many people whom I had—was on the—were opposed to me, very powerful forces, who were happy to see me go. Whether they participated, I’ll let others figure that out. I resigned because of what I did. And whatever they’re involved in doesn’t excuse what I did.

I'm sure a lot of others like myself were left wondering after the prostitution scandal broke if Spitzer was set up. He didn't say no.

Full transcript available here.

The interview is way too long to put on our servers, but way too good not to share all of it, so I'm using their embed player.

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Amy Goodman weighed in on Democracy Now about her detention at the Canadian border and what it might mean for assuring that there is still a free press in Canada and that journalists are not intimidated into not covering stories that the government thinks are harmful to corporate interests.

Full segment and transcript available at Democracy Now.

JUAN GONZALEZ: That report from Kathy Tomlinson of CBC. But, Amy—Thanksgiving—tell us more about exactly what happened when you were stopped.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Juan, it was really incredible. It was Wednesday, the evening before Thanksgiving, and we’re headed to the Vancouver Public Library, driving up from Seattle. When we got to the border, I thought it was just going to be routine. We handed in our passports. They stopped for a minute, and they flagged us. They told us to pull over, and it’s pouring rain outside. We pulled the vehicle over. We had to get out and go into the facility.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you were there with Dennis—

AMY GOODMAN: With Dennis Moynihan and with Chuck Scurich. We’re on our Breaking the Sound Barrier tour. And while folks here were eating turkey, we thought we’d go “talk turkey” in Vancouver and talk about the columns in Breaking the Sound Barrier with Canadian listeners to Democracy Now!. Three community radio stations in Vancouver run Democracy Now!

So, we pulled in, went into the border facility. It’s a large hangar-like space. And they start going through our car, but we’re now inside. And then the border patrol call me up to the counter. And the guard—

JUAN GONZALEZ: And obviously, to cross into Canada, people don’t need visas, they just—

AMY GOODMAN: No, that’s right.

JUAN GONZALEZ:—need to show identification.

AMY GOODMAN: You need your passport. And we were very surprised. It was almost empty, this whole hangar, so we were clearly singled out.

And I go up to the counter, and the guard says, “I want your notes.”

I said, “My notes?”

He said, “The notes for the talk tonight.”

I was completely taken aback. I went out to the car, and I brought in the copy of Breaking the Sound Barrier. And I came in, and I said, “Well, this is my new book, and it’s a book of columns. So I actually read from the columns.”

He said, “I want the notes.”

I said, “Well, these you can think of as my notes.”

And he said, “What are you talking about?”

And I said, “Well, I actually start with the last column, which is a column”—as I was saying in this report to Kathy Tomlinson—“about Tommy Douglas.”

Now, for people in the United States, he’s not as famous a name. But in Canada, he’s considered the greatest Canadian. Tommy Douglas is the Premier—was the Premier of Saskatchewan who brought, who pioneered the Canadian national health care system. And, interestingly, he’s the grandfather of the actor Kiefer Sutherland, right? Kiefer Sutherland’s mother is Shirley Douglas, the actress; his father, Donald Sutherland. But his grandfather was Tommy Douglas.

And, so I said, “I’ll be talking about Tommy Douglas.” Actually we were at the Douglas border crossing.

And he said, “What else?”

I said, “What else? Well, global warming.”

“What else?” he said.

I said, “The global economic meltdown.”

“What else?” he said.

I said, “Well, I’ll also be talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“What else are you talking about?” he said. And—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, is it your sense that this was some rogue customs agent or that he had basically been alerted—

AMY GOODMAN: There with another—

JUAN GONZALEZ:—and had gotten instructions to do this kind of questioning?

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From Democracy Now--Judge Rejects Blackwater Attempt to Dismiss Cases Filed by Iraqi Victims:

A federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. We speak to award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about Sudan in a minute, but right now we turn to a major decision here in the United States. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, a federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. At the same time, the judge ruled that lawyers for the Iraqi plaintiffs need to amend and re-file their cases to provide more specific details on the alleged crimes before a decision can be made on whether the lawsuits will proceed.

Susan Burke, the lead attorney for the Iraqi victims, told The Nation magazine she was “very pleased with the ruling.” While Blackwater’s spokesperson, Stacy DeLuke said, quote, “We are confident that [the plaintiffs] will not be able to meet the high standard specified in [the judge’s] opinion.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Democracy Now! video stream by award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His article on the ruling is available online at TheNation.com.

Jeremy, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s being played by the mainstream media as a huge defeat for those who are taking on Blackwater, but you have a very different take. Explain.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, when I got up yesterday morning and saw all these headlines from the Associated Press and other media outlets saying that a federal judge had tossed out all of the lawsuits against Blackwater, I was actually quite stunned. I mean, that would have been a devastating development for the Iraqi victims of the company.

But then I actually got the fifty-six-page ruling from Judge T.S. Ellis, who, by the way, is a Reagan appointee, and I read it. And actually, what you see in this document is that it’s a very well-thought-out legal argument by Judge Ellis, where he’s essentially saying to Blackwater, “Your argument that you can’t be sued as a private company under the Alien Tort Statute is false. Your argument that private individuals or companies cannot commit war crimes is false.”

AMY GOODMAN: Whoops. Looks like we just lost Jeremy. Jeremy is speaking to us by video stream. We’re going to try to get him back on, and we’ll try to get him on the phone. But right now—we’ll do that for the end of the show—we will turn to our next guest. That, consider just a tease for the rest of that subject.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back right now to Jeremy Scahill to try to complete that conversation on the issue of a federal judge rejecting a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater, who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince.

Jeremy, we’ve got you back on the Democracy Now! video stream. Very quickly, explain the significance of the case.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, basically, these are five cases brought by Iraqi civilians that were allegedly wounded by Blackwater and the families of Iraqis that were killed by Blackwater. These are very high-stakes cases. Blackwater is fighting passionately to have them thrown out. They’ve made arguments that they, as a company, can’t be sued, that it would violate the rights of the President of United States to make battlefield decisions, and if Blackwater was prosecuted, that would infringe upon the President’s rights. They’ve said that they, as a company, can’t be sued for war crimes, because war crimes can only be committed by state actors or nations. And what we saw here is that this conservative Judge Ellis said to Blackwater, “No, none of that is valid.”

What he did do, though, is he referenced a Supreme Court decision in May, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which really reversed decades of case law and made it very, very difficult, more difficult, for plaintiffs to have their cases moved to the trial phase. In other words, the bar was set much higher to proceed to trial. So what the judge said to Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the lawyers representing these Iraqis, “You need to re-file your cases with more evidence, and then we’ll take it from there.”

So, while it’s being portrayed by the corporate media as a judge tossing out these cases, that quite clearly is not the case. This was actually a pretty significant defeat for Blackwater and a victory not only for the Iraqis in this case, but also for those lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights that have spent decades trying to apply US laws to crimes committed abroad.

Blackwater remains in very, very hot water, not only because of this case, but also the US Justice Department is going to begin its prosecution of five Blackwater operatives for manslaughter charges relating to the Nisoor Square massacre in September of ’07. This is very high-stakes stuff, and the corporate media got it basically absolutely wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, we’ll leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist.

From Democracy Now, this reporting should make anyone think twice before they pick up that next bottle of imported water. “Spin the Bottle”–Expose Raises Alarming Questions About Fiji Water’s Ties to Military Junta, Environmental Record and Impact on Fijians:

Fiji Water is America’s leading imported water and the bottled water of choice among the rich and famous. President Obama was photographed drinking Fiji on election night, and Mary J. Blige demands ten bottles before concerts. But a new expose in Mother Jones magazine raises alarming questions about Fiji Water’s ties to Fiji’s military dictatorship, the company’s environmental record and its impact on the residents of Fiji. We speak with reporter Anna Lenzer about “Spin the Bottle.”

Transcript below the fold.

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Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales on Democracy Now talked to independent filmmaker and journalist Kouross Esmaeli about the attacks coming from Republicans and John McCain against the President for not speaking out more forcefully on Iran.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about the statement—President Obama is now under fire from the right for not speaking out more forcefully on behalf of the Iranian protesters. He responded to this charge in an interview on CBS News Friday.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States. That’s what they do. That’s what we’re already seeing. We shouldn’t be playing into that. There should be no distractions from the fact that the Iranian people are seeking to let their voices be heard. What we can do is bear witness and say to the world that the incredible demonstrations that we’ve seen is a testimony to, I think, what Dr. King called the “arc of the moral universe.” It’s long, but it bends towards justice.

JUAN GONZALEZ: That was President Obama on Sunday. Kouross Esmaeli, Iranian American journalist and filmmaker, your response to the criticism of President Obama from the right, in terms of his inaction on the issue of the election in Iran?

KOUROSS ESMAELI: What is interesting about the criticisms that are coming from the right is that it’s been coming primarily from Senator John McCain. The Iranians know Senator John McCain as the man who sang “Bomb, bomb Iran” during the elections of last year. The man holds no credibility as far as supporting Iranians or seeming like he’s got the best interests of the Iranians at heart. And that, for Iranians and for this issue, that discredits him altogether and discredits this whole attack on President Obama.

President Obama’s stand, I think, has been the most sensible, and it’s amazing that the President of the United States is taking such a sensible stand. And that—everyone I’ve talked to in Iran has said the same thing, that we do not need any symbol of Western, especially American, interference in Iran’s internal politics. And the fact that America does not have diplomatic relations with Iran really ties its hand, as far as how far he can go in really supporting Iran. So the only thing they can do is to just scream as loud as they can, which will be immediately used by the Iranian authorities.

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From Democracy Now April 24, 2009.

The Department of Homeland Security released a report last week that warned right-wing extremist groups are gaining new recruits by exploiting fears about the economy and the election of the nation’s first black president. We speak with Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is facing calls for her ouster from a number of House Republicans in the wake of a department memo that warned of right-wing political extremism in the United States.

The report, which was released last week, warns that right-wing extremist groups are gaining new recruits by exploiting fears about the economy and the election of the nation’s first black president. The report predicts a worsening economy will to lead more people joining militias and skinhead groups and carrying out individual acts modeled after Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

A handful of Republicans in the House are calling for Napolitano to step down in the wake of the report. House Minority Leader John Boehner said the report includes, quote, “about two-thirds of Americans who might go to church, who may have served in the military, who may be involved in community activities…I just don’t understand how our government can look at the American people and say, ‘You’re all potential terrorist threats.’”

Idaho has long been the center of white supremacist groups in the United States. Mark Potok is the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. They recently released a report that finds the number of violent hate groups in the US has skyrocketed since 2000. He joins us via Democracy Now! stream from Alabama. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK POTOK: Well, thank you so much for having me.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Mark, your reaction to the controversy now and the calls for Janet Napolitano’s ouster?

MARK POTOK: I think it is completely a tempest in a teacup. You know, the things that Boehner and others have said are very hard to square with actually reading the report. You know, basically, the report has been accused of saying that all conservatives and all veterans are this huge suspect class, people who may, you know, take up arms and start blowing up federal buildings.

The reality is, is when you read the report, it doesn’t say anything remotely like that. You know, the reference to veterans is—what it really says is that white supremacists are interested in attempting to recruit returning veterans because of their skills. It does not say, in any sense, that these people are prone to joining the groups, that we should look at all veterans with a wary eye. And it certainly doesn’t make any suggestion like that with regard to conservatives.

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