Listen to 30-minute mp3.
David Swanson: Dennis Loo, it's good to talk to you.
Dennis Loo: Thank you for having me, David.
David Swanson: Sure. So, just to start at the beginning, where did the idea come from to do a book about impeachment, and when did you decide impeachment was the way to go?
David Swanson: So you see an impeachment as appropriate for the past six years, but after Katrina, you saw a movement as possible.
Dennis Loo: Exactly.
David Swanson: Huh, interesting. When you put the book together, were people eager to be part of a book about impeachment? Did you ask any authors who were scared off by the "I" word or how did that go?
Dennis Loo: Well, my first act was to contact Peter Phillips, who I had gotten to know last year through Project Censored. They ran a piece of mine called No Paper Trail Left Behind: The Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election, so that's how I got to know him, and I contacted him, I pitched the idea to him, and we talked about it for a while, and then we decided to do it, and then we talked about different people to approach, and nobody was put off by the idea. Many people were very enthusiastic. Some people turned us down because they just were too busy, but otherwise there has been a lot of enthusiasm.
David Swanson: Well it's quite a great collection of authors and essays in the book.
Dennis Loo: Thank you, I'm very proud of what we have turned out.
David Swanson: Have you been doing a lot of media since the book has come out? Have you been on talk shows, friendly or hostile?
Dennis Loo: I've been on a few so far, Peter has been on some, we have been on some together. We haven't been invited to be on TV yet, we're hoping for that. Let me step back here. You asked friendly and then hostile; both, mostly friendly. I was on an AM station this morning out of Michigan, and it went pretty well, although most of the callers into the station were people who clearly mostly listen to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, so they were unfortunately badly misinformed about what has been going on on a number of issues, and were kind of shockingly misinformed, but it's actually one of the things that we talked about in the book; that most of Americans, the minority that continue to support this administration, they only do so because they are badly misinformed and they have been lied to systematically by this administration and the right-wing media, and to the extent that mainstream media has also parroted that line, them as well.
David Swanson: Where do you think the American public would be if we were reasonably well-informed on important issues such as the illegal spying, the detentions, the tortures, the launching of the war and arguments for the war; if we were well-informed on all of these sorts of issues, where would we be?
Dennis Loo: We would be in a very dramatically different place. The number of Americans who are willing to knowingly torture other people and are willing to, without provocation, murder people on a scale that we are murdering people in Iraq, 655,000 at latest count; that number of Americans who would be willing to do those kinds of things is very small; most Americans would recoil at the idea of the kinds of things that are actually going on if they really understood what was going on, so as I wrote in our book, in our preface, if Americans truly knew what was going on, they would mass outside the White House and scale the fences and drag these perpetrators of crimes against humanity out of the White House and put them on trial immediately, and that would be if they were in a good mood!!
David Swanson: Exactly (laughing).
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
