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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Max Blumenthal.
He's the author of Republican Gomorrah.
He's written for every important newspaper and magazine in the world.
He's a writing fellow at the Nation Institute.
You find his website, his blog, at maxblumenthal.com.
And his latest piece at Alternet is how law enforcement and media covered up the plan to burn Christopher Dorner alive.
Welcome back to the show, Max.
How's it going?
Good.
Great to be back on.
Well, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Kind of crazy circumstances, but anyway.
So I was watching TV, well, not really TV, but the stream of the CBS news channel, and I saw they claimed they had Christopher Dorner, the wanted cop, killer, fugitive guy, holed up in this cabin and that they were tear-gassing him.
And then the white smoke turned to black.
And wow, simple as that.
And I had missed the clip that was rerun later from that same channel.
But you were paying much better attention.
You had found, I guess, the police scanner online, and so you were listening to the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department from New York and tweeting live what you heard.
So I guess take us through, you know, first-person account, because I think that's really the best narrative for the story here.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
The night before, I downloaded an app on my iPhone called 5-0 Radio and was just kind of listening to the police scanner, seeing if I could pick up anything.
And then the following day, I went to hang out with some friends in downtown New York at a music studio, and they have this lounge there, and I had heard that there was some hearings about Chuck Hagel.
So I put on CNN, and what I found instead was that the Dorner standoff and finally the manhunt had kind of ended, and it was now a standoff at a cabin in Big Bear.
And so I immediately turned to the police scanner and managed to pick up the San Bernardino County Sheriff's as they were determining what course of action to take at the base of the cabin, and I, you know, started live-tweeting.
And one of my first tweets was that this is indecipherable, but they've just said, let's go ahead with the burners like we talked about.
And my next tweet, based on an exact transcription of what I heard, was burners have been deployed, we have a fire.
And then for the next 20 minutes or so, I listened as they carefully managed the fire that they had intentionally started in order to burn Dorner alive.
And the reason I think or am fairly sure that they were trying to burn Dorner alive is that they were wondering whether Dorner was in the basement, discussing what material the basement ceiling was made out of, and hoping it was wood so that he would be burned.
They deployed SWAT teams all around the cabin too, so if he had run out, I suspect they would have shot him.
Of course, we'll never know, but the point is they didn't seem to make any – I mean, I had enough lead time to listen before they went ahead with the burners, which are pyrotechnic rounds that can heat a large structure up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit and always start fires, started fires before.
But I had enough lead time to hear them kind of before they made this plan, and there was no attempt to make contact with Dorner that I could hear.
There was no attempt to try to take him alive.
I think it was basically an extrajudicial execution, kind of like the kind we see delivered by drones in Pakistan, but this time through a fire, really a tragic ending.
And what upset me the most, I mean, I guess you'll probably ask about this next, but, I mean, if you read my – if you storify my tweets, you can tell that I'm pointing out that local media in L.A. had agreed with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's request to stop tweeting details about the standoff and that the cameras, the helicopter cameras, had agreed to zoom out to not show what the Sheriff's deputies were doing.
So there was sort of a self-censorship on the part of the local media, which contributed to a total blackout around the circumstances of Dorner's death.
All right, now, well, let's save the media thing here for a minute, because there's still lots to go over about just the circumstances themselves, although the media blackout is a part of what happened and how they got away with it, of course.
And that CBS live stream that I was talking about that I was watching, I guess it was embedded on a page at rawstory.com, and I noticed that, boy, that sure is a pretty far zoom out.
You don't have a better lens than that, helicopter man, or what?
But we know what the explanation for that was.
But so anyway, the first thing I wanted to ask you was, and everybody's got to be thinking this, too, right?
Why burners as a code word, and why all this talk on an open channel?
I mean, I know that the LAPD has impunity and they must be used to it, but come on.
They're sitting there on an open channel saying, yeah, deploy the burner.
The burner?
Yeah.
First of all, what is the burner?
They have said that they used the sheriff's San Bernardino County gave a press conference, and while lying, just lying to the entire LAPD and saying we didn't intentionally set the fire, they admitted to using pyrotechnic tear gas rounds.
Well, that's what they said they used.
But burners can also mean kind of a hand grenade that's a thermite mixture that's designed to burn through steel plates and engine blocks and, as I said, heats up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why if you listen to the audio clips which are on YouTube that I was listening to, actually, I don't know if these clips show it, but I heard the sheriff's repeatedly referred to ammo popping inside the cabin, that ammo was exploding, and that's because it had just gotten so hot.
And that means that, you know, it was too hot for Dorner to kind of be alive or to come out alive, and that happened immediately.
So what the sheriffs are claiming is that the burners were actually designed to flush him out.
That's a complete lie.
It was just designed to kill him.
Yeah, that was even sort of his Clintonian answer was, hey, any suggestion that we set a fire in order to drive him out of the house?
It's just not true.
Yeah, yeah.
So the burners, I just see it as a lethal weapon now.
Well, and hang on one second.
Let me say here real quick that I learned from Michael McNulty from all his work on the Waco story about the difference between a pyrotechnic round and an incendiary round, where an incendiary, whether it's a grenade or a shell or, you know, something you shoot out of a grenade launcher or just throw or whatever, either way, pyrotechnic means it creates heat in order to make its tear gas smoke.
Incendiary means it's made to set fires with.
And I guess McNulty's point was that at Waco the evidence, the best evidence, was that the fires were set by pyrotechnic rounds, not that they were specifically designed to set fires, just that they can.
And so in this case, I guess we don't know, but there is a difference between the two different things there.
Yeah, at Waco they used 40 millimeter pyrotechnic rounds, and the FBI denied that for six years and claimed that the Branch Davidian, the members of the Branch Davidian cult had set the fire themselves.
And so we see a similar kind of, I mean, it was a cover-up by the FBI.
McNulty helped expose it, and we see a similar kind of cover-up at play.
Here, I mean, Dorner wasn't innocent by all accounts.
He killed innocent people, so he's not a hero, but I just consider the real villains here to be the people who are justifying roasting him and just thereby saying that no American deserves due process.
Now, I put a lot of pressure on the L.A. Times and on the media through the tweeting.
This alternate piece I think has gone viral beyond my wildest imaginations.
There's just a lot of anger and indignation out there, and I think this is a vehicle for people to spread to show that they're being lied to and that they're sick of police impunity.
And I went on HuffPost Live with one of the L.A. Times reporters who's leading, who's on the team assigned to the Dorner story, and I said, you know, where the hell is the story on who burned the cabin down and what were the burners and whether this was a proper use of force?
And they finally put one up today in wake of Dorner standoff questions about the use of burners, and they went to two experts who justified it, two university experts who justified it by saying falsely that Dorner was firing at the deputies.
Now, he had been in a firefight with the deputies earlier in the day, but when he was in the cabin, there was no firing.
There was only a report of a single gunshot from inside the cabin over the police scanners, which I believe was Dorner killing himself right when the burners were deployed.
And the sheriff sources have lied to the L.A. Times and said there was a constant barrage of gunfire which necessitated the use of the burners.
So, again, I mean, I see no evidence that the police were left with no other option, and this is another aspect of the story that hasn't been investigated.
We didn't do it on purpose, but he left us no choice but to do it on purpose.
And, you know, they added, when they took the time out to tell that lie to the CBS channel that I was watching, the local CBS channel, they took time to say, well, all of his weapons are suppressed, and that's why you can only hear gunfire from one side, because he has a magical silencer.
Yeah, he's a tactical expert who's got special silencers.
I don't think so.
And the other thing is, you know, what was Dorner going to do with Twitter?
I mean, the police were imposing a blackout, and the media zealously followed along, as though Dorner were inside checking his iPhone to monitor police formations so that he could mount an effective resistance.
Was Dorner watching TV in this cabin after the owner of the cabin had already gone to L.A. media and said there's no electricity in the cabin, there's no Internet in the cabin, it's just an empty space with a bunch of mattresses?
And beyond that, I heard this on the scanners, the deputies had guided a demolition vehicle with some kind of, you know, reconnaissance devices, like cameras on it, to tear down the walls of the cabin and peer inside, and they saw what was in there.
They didn't see Dorner, but they did see blood spatter, meaning Dorner had probably been wounded in the exchange of fire with the deputies earlier that day, if not dead.
So there was just absolutely no indication, and it's a major logical stretch to think that Dorner could have somehow used Twitter or the media to harm cops, and that this hasn't been questioned.
I mean, this is just another shameful episode in American mainstream media.
Yeah, you know, there's such tools, and they, you know what it is, they have no shame, too, because they don't even realize what tools they are, you know?
Like I saw one of the cops that they were interviewing, I guess he was kind of a reserve sheriff, recalled to duty kind of a guy, he was a former cop, a former LAPD, and a former state rep that they were interviewing, and he said that he was at the Quickie Mart, and he overheard people saying that they wish more cops would get shot, and that this guy Dorner would carry on, and all that.
And he's absolutely beside himself, and his conclusion was basically, who knew that even normal everyday people at the Quickie Mart are actually all inhuman monster criminals who want us heroes to all be shot to death, you know?
And he's absolutely astounded, and the reporter, it didn't even occur to the reporter, only in another dimension would this reporter have asked, why do you think regular people hate you so much, you know?
Like, it could have just, it would have never occurred to him, all these people might as well work for the police department, or the local mayor's office, in whatever town you're from, all across this country.
That's how all local news is.
They're just, they're the worst of stenographers.
They're worse than Chuck Todd and those goofballs.
Yeah, well, I mean, it goes to the top.
It's just a culture in mainstream media, deference to power and bootlicking.
They're bootlickers for back shooters, that's what I call them.
And, you know, I have, you know, I'm just a white guy, I'm a nice Jewish boy.
I've had so many stories of being abused and threatened by cops.
And insane stories I could tell for the rest of this broadcast.
I don't, I just, I don't think I've, you know, deliberately broken a law that I can think of, and somehow I manage to constantly get harassed by cops, like, just for leaving my house.
And everybody has a story like this.
None of my friends have had a positive experience with a police officer.
I know so many, most of my minority friends have been physically abused or assaulted by police officers.
So, Dorner, you know, as much of a nutcase as he might have been, struck a chord.
And this just exposed something very real.
And the fact that the media can't understand that, except for, you know, online, progressive, and maybe libertarian media seems to kind of get what's going on.
It's mind-boggling, and it shows the fear that they have of actually, you know, stepping into the abyss of American life.
And beyond that, the fear of kind of damaging their sources that they rely on for all their stories, which is law enforcement.
Now, yesterday I was on Mark Thompson's show on SiriusXM.
It's, you know, African-American liberal show, like an urban radio show.
And I got a call, came in from an LAPD officer, and he said, all those manifestos coming out by former officers or current officers agreeing with Dorner, those are my partners.
And everything that Dorner wrote in his manifesto, I agree with, although I don't agree with him killing.
So even cops are feeling this way.
Yeah, there was an opinion piece in the LA Times that said, well, the LAPD didn't like that anymore.
And then it gave 15 examples of how it's just like that, which was, I thought, a great little Jonathan Swift sort of a thing there.
I wish he did that.
I have another show from California.
That's fine.
I will let you go, and I'll make the last, most important point myself.
Thanks very much, Max.
I appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Great work here.
Everybody, that's the great Max Blumenthal.
Alternet.org for his piece, How Law Enforcement and Media Covered Up the Plan to Burn Christopher Dorner Alive.
And, of course, the big, most important point is that this guy, Dorner, had killed some guy's daughter and her husband or fiancé out of revenge.
He was a cop, the very worst kind of cop, a murderer cop.
Oh, yeah, recently they had fired him.
Anyway, he was just like them.
He was horrible.
And so the fact that people were taking his side, even though he had killed two completely, you know, I mean, even if you consider cops combatants, these people were not.
They're innocent bystanders.
And the fact that anybody would be taking a murderer of somebody's daughter's side is really, I think, goes to show just how bad the LAPD really is and the hard feelings that so many people really do have against cops.
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