David Swanson: And it's incredibly well done and it hits all the major pieces of evidence, but does so in this entertaining way, because on this web site www.afterdowningstreet.org , we have this list of all the evidence, but how many people are going to read through all this dry stuff? Ed Asner and some other actors did record a recreation of the Downing Street minutes as The Meeting, you know, and people listened to that and people actually went out and performed the Downing Street Meeting, but that's one piece of evidence. It would be great to see this play in every city around the country. Where has it been performed and where might it be coming?
Craig Barnes: We've done readings in Santa Fe, we're going to do a reading on Los Angeles with Ed Asner again on the night before the election....
David Swanson: Great.
Craig Barnes: ....and then we'll do all the hype and publicity we can before that in Los Angeles because it's really going to be the newspaper coverage that does the most for us in that large metropolitan area, small theater can't accomplish it, but talking about the event in a small theater could very well help us, so we'll be doing it there and then we're getting feelers from around the country and we'll follow every one we can, do everything we can. The web site, as you may have noticed, offers a couple of possibilities: One is that people can get hold of the DVD, which I should have in my hands today, and which should be available for distribution within a couple of weeks, and people can invite people into he or homes to watch the DVD and see ED Asner play the old country lawyer versus the Washington establishment, or they can just draw down the script themselves as you have done and read it, invite friends in, and we have had quite a number of places from Connecticut to Colorado to New Mexico pulling down the script and just having fun having people come in for wine and cheese and read and play the parts, and then, of course, the third thing is that small theater groups can use this script and we have had some feelers about that, the small theater groups saying , can we do it, and, of course, my response is absolutely. There is no royalty, there is no copyright problem, bring it down, do it with your own people.
David Swanson: That's wonderful. So people should go to www.anationdeceived.org and print out the script and let you know what they're doing and perform it, and the DVD will soon be on that same site as well.
Craig Barnes: The way to get the DVD will be on that site and we'll make copies. We'll charge people for the shipping. We're trying to raise donations to make them up ourselves so that people don't have to pay for it, so we'll get as much distribution as we can.
David Swanson: Terrific. So, you're from Colorado. This country lawyer from Colorado with all his horse and hay metaphors, there's some autobiography in here?
Craig Barnes: (Laughing).....well I practiced law for many years in Colorado, that's true.....
David Swanson: (Laughing).... I see....
Craig Barnes I have some property in western Colorado with horses, so yeah you got me.
David Swanson: (Laughing)....when did you write this; is it just within the past months?
Craig Barnes: No, no, it's been going on, as I mentioned earlier, for a whole year. I'm not good enough to just whip it out, so we have been working on it, we have had readings in homes and on stages and all kinds of places until we finally got in good enough shape for Ed Asner to come and do a real job with it.
David Swanson: It's very much up to date, and it starts out with talk of something that happened in 1215 and rights that we have just recently lost, and with the Military Commissions Act having been signed now, it seems very appropriate. What was this event in 1215?
Craig Barnes: That was a Magna Carta. That was the signing of the Magna Carta, which is the foundation of Western democracy, and at the time at which these rights were fought and battled over and had been for some years prior to 1215, and King John was finally forced with his back to the trees to allow these rights to the English barons and they came and went for the next 300 or 400 years off and on and then finally enshrined in our US Constitution, and now here we are after all those battles and all those efforts to obtain a democracy, to obtain some rights for freeman against the King, here we've got a king-like president who has probably: a) No knowledge of the source of these rights, b) No affection for the source of these rights or the continuation of them, and C) He has the mentality of the tyrant who would just do whatever he needs to do and make up the facts after he's done it, so this is a dangerous time for a long history, a history which has never been repeated in any of the society, nothing like the evolution of Western law has occurred anywhere else, and the law about the King is an absolutely remarkable thing historically, but now this "King" is making yet another attempt, he and Dick Cheney primarily to make another attempt to say this history doesn't matter. Well he doesn't know enough about it to know that it matters, but it is the source of American economic successes, the source of our cultural successes, the source of our creativity. This kind of freedom is what makes this country a lot of culturally in the schools and in the art galleries, and without that, this country adds up to nothing.
David Swanson: Very well said. The list of rights that have been taken away from us under this president is quite long and this drama that you have written focuses on the lives that justified the war, the fraudulent case for the war, and a felony of misleading Congress, and, of course, it is an unimpeachable offense to mislead the public, but I haven't finished reading the play, but I don't think your prosecutor is going after the detentions and the torture and chemical weapons and attacks on civilians and illegal spying programs and illegal propaganda and secrecy and leaks of classified information and the stolen elections and on and on and on, the list of possible articles of impeachment is enormous. Do you think, while one question is, do you plan to write any more plays on other issues, and another is, do you think that the fraudulent case for war is the most important article of impeachment, and if so, why?
Craig Barnes: I would not say is the most important article of impeachment; I think the litany that you have just spelled out is there for articles of impeachment, but it is for high crimes and misdemeanors; that his impeachment has to be based on high crimes and misdemeanors, and so we're looking for violations of the law; what seemed to me to be important was anchored this case in real code section, Section 371, Title 18, which makes it a felony to lie to the Congress in the performance of its constitutional duties, so I tried to, and I think that the strongest case, is for not just lying to the American people, for which probably there is such an endless catalog of material that nobody could single out of president, but lying to a Congress in the performance of its constitutional duty to declare or not declare war, I think, could be the core of a case, so that was one reason. Elizabeth de la Vega has written nicely in The Nation magazine last year of how 371 had been violated, and I took heart from that talk to her, and she was a former federal prosecutor in San Jose, California, and I think she made the case that we are not just talking about blowing smoke or saying the president is a bad guy, the president lies; we are talking about violations of a real code section, for which case law, upon which a lawyer could rely, and we have to give these people in Congress and the confidence to do that, so that was one reason for narrowing the case. Another was simply the limits of what you can do in a two-hour trauma, and a third is that people are overwhelmed with this litany that you have recited...
Craig Barnes: We've done readings in Santa Fe, we're going to do a reading on Los Angeles with Ed Asner again on the night before the election....
David Swanson: Great.
Craig Barnes: ....and then we'll do all the hype and publicity we can before that in Los Angeles because it's really going to be the newspaper coverage that does the most for us in that large metropolitan area, small theater can't accomplish it, but talking about the event in a small theater could very well help us, so we'll be doing it there and then we're getting feelers from around the country and we'll follow every one we can, do everything we can. The web site, as you may have noticed, offers a couple of possibilities: One is that people can get hold of the DVD, which I should have in my hands today, and which should be available for distribution within a couple of weeks, and people can invite people into he or homes to watch the DVD and see ED Asner play the old country lawyer versus the Washington establishment, or they can just draw down the script themselves as you have done and read it, invite friends in, and we have had quite a number of places from Connecticut to Colorado to New Mexico pulling down the script and just having fun having people come in for wine and cheese and read and play the parts, and then, of course, the third thing is that small theater groups can use this script and we have had some feelers about that, the small theater groups saying , can we do it, and, of course, my response is absolutely. There is no royalty, there is no copyright problem, bring it down, do it with your own people.
Craig Barnes: The way to get the DVD will be on that site and we'll make copies. We'll charge people for the shipping. We're trying to raise donations to make them up ourselves so that people don't have to pay for it, so we'll get as much distribution as we can.
David Swanson: Terrific. So, you're from Colorado. This country lawyer from Colorado with all his horse and hay metaphors, there's some autobiography in here?
Craig Barnes: (Laughing).....well I practiced law for many years in Colorado, that's true.....
David Swanson: (Laughing).... I see....
Craig Barnes I have some property in western Colorado with horses, so yeah you got me.
David Swanson: (Laughing)....when did you write this; is it just within the past months?
Craig Barnes: No, no, it's been going on, as I mentioned earlier, for a whole year. I'm not good enough to just whip it out, so we have been working on it, we have had readings in homes and on stages and all kinds of places until we finally got in good enough shape for Ed Asner to come and do a real job with it.
David Swanson: It's very much up to date, and it starts out with talk of something that happened in 1215 and rights that we have just recently lost, and with the Military Commissions Act having been signed now, it seems very appropriate. What was this event in 1215?
Craig Barnes: That was a Magna Carta. That was the signing of the Magna Carta, which is the foundation of Western democracy, and at the time at which these rights were fought and battled over and had been for some years prior to 1215, and King John was finally forced with his back to the trees to allow these rights to the English barons and they came and went for the next 300 or 400 years off and on and then finally enshrined in our US Constitution, and now here we are after all those battles and all those efforts to obtain a democracy, to obtain some rights for freeman against the King, here we've got a king-like president who has probably: a) No knowledge of the source of these rights, b) No affection for the source of these rights or the continuation of them, and C) He has the mentality of the tyrant who would just do whatever he needs to do and make up the facts after he's done it, so this is a dangerous time for a long history, a history which has never been repeated in any of the society, nothing like the evolution of Western law has occurred anywhere else, and the law about the King is an absolutely remarkable thing historically, but now this "King" is making yet another attempt, he and Dick Cheney primarily to make another attempt to say this history doesn't matter. Well he doesn't know enough about it to know that it matters, but it is the source of American economic successes, the source of our cultural successes, the source of our creativity. This kind of freedom is what makes this country a lot of culturally in the schools and in the art galleries, and without that, this country adds up to nothing.
David Swanson: Very well said. The list of rights that have been taken away from us under this president is quite long and this drama that you have written focuses on the lives that justified the war, the fraudulent case for the war, and a felony of misleading Congress, and, of course, it is an unimpeachable offense to mislead the public, but I haven't finished reading the play, but I don't think your prosecutor is going after the detentions and the torture and chemical weapons and attacks on civilians and illegal spying programs and illegal propaganda and secrecy and leaks of classified information and the stolen elections and on and on and on, the list of possible articles of impeachment is enormous. Do you think, while one question is, do you plan to write any more plays on other issues, and another is, do you think that the fraudulent case for war is the most important article of impeachment, and if so, why?
Craig Barnes: I would not say is the most important article of impeachment; I think the litany that you have just spelled out is there for articles of impeachment, but it is for high crimes and misdemeanors; that his impeachment has to be based on high crimes and misdemeanors, and so we're looking for violations of the law; what seemed to me to be important was anchored this case in real code section, Section 371, Title 18, which makes it a felony to lie to the Congress in the performance of its constitutional duties, so I tried to, and I think that the strongest case, is for not just lying to the American people, for which probably there is such an endless catalog of material that nobody could single out of president, but lying to a Congress in the performance of its constitutional duty to declare or not declare war, I think, could be the core of a case, so that was one reason. Elizabeth de la Vega has written nicely in The Nation magazine last year of how 371 had been violated, and I took heart from that talk to her, and she was a former federal prosecutor in San Jose, California, and I think she made the case that we are not just talking about blowing smoke or saying the president is a bad guy, the president lies; we are talking about violations of a real code section, for which case law, upon which a lawyer could rely, and we have to give these people in Congress and the confidence to do that, so that was one reason for narrowing the case. Another was simply the limits of what you can do in a two-hour trauma, and a third is that people are overwhelmed with this litany that you have recited...
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