02/23/09 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Introducing Jacob Hornberger.
He's a former attorney in recovery and the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, available at fff.org online.
Welcome to the show, Jacob.
How are you?
Thank you for having me back, Scott.
Well, it's great to talk to you again, and there's so much important stuff going on, and I really appreciate the fact that you have all that legal training and whatever.
You can tell me what all these hieroglyphics mean when we're talking about all these complicated legal issues.
I need a helping hand, and I know, well, I appreciate the fact you're always there to help me out.
Let's talk about this guy, Al-Mahri.
Well, it's Ali Saleh Al-Mahri.
There you go.
Okay, now this guy was arrested back in 2001, I guess, right, or 2002, and he is a foreigner, but he was arrested on American soil, and he's basically been given the Padilla treatment in terms of the law, at least, that he's been declared an enemy combatant, or was by the Bush administration, and has been turned over and has been in the custody of the Navy in South Carolina.
And so I wonder if you can just tell us basically what you know about this guy's story, the legal process of how he ended up there, and then where we're at in terms of the Obama administration and what they're going to do about reversing or not reversing these Bush administration policies.
Yeah, Al-Mahri was actually charged as a federal criminal defendant.
I mean, he was getting ready to go to trial.
He had been indicted, prosecutors were getting their cases ready, and all of a sudden the Justice Department and the Pentagon stepped in right before the trial was supposed to begin and said, we have decided to treat him as an enemy combatant instead of as a criminal defendant.
And it's a power that they assumed after 9-11, the power to treat people either as criminal defendants or as enemy combatants.
And so the judge dismissed the charges, and they whisked him over to a military dungeon, and they said, well, now we can hold him for the rest of his life.
We don't have to give him a trial.
He's a war criminal, they said, but one that is entitled to no rights, and that's where they've been holding him ever since.
And that's essentially what they did with Padilla.
What was unusual about Al-Mahri, though, was that they actually had him in federal court and getting ready to try him.
So the case has gone through the appellate courts, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld this enemy combatant doctrine.
Where the government essentially converted a crime into a regular criminal offense into an act of war.
And the reason the case is so important is because it applies to Americans too.
I mean the government now – we live in a country now where the government can pick up anybody it wants and whisk them away to a prison camp simply by labeling him an enemy combatant.
And so now the case is before the Supreme Court.
The courts agreed to hear it, and the Obama administration has said that they're reviewing the case to see if they're going to take the same position.
Nobody knows what they're going to do, but so far things don't look too good.
The Obama administration, despite its much-valued change, has approved the so-called State Secrets Doctrine, where they prohibit people that they've kidnapped and tortured from suing the federal government for what they did to them.
So nobody really knows what the Obama administration is going to do, but this case is one of the most important cases that has ever reached the Supreme Court as far as freedom is concerned.
Well is it basically, as far as the legal issues in contention at the Supreme Court, is it basically the same case that was the Padilla case when it was headed toward the Supreme Court?
Because the first time they ducked that I think on a technical issue, and then the second time the administration, the previous administration, went ahead and indicted him rather than take a risk that the Supreme Court would rule against them.
Well that's right, that when the case reached the Fourth Circuit, the government won it.
And in a very clever piece of legal maneuvering, the government said, Aha, well now that we have this decision under our belt which entitles us, empowers us, to pick up any American and treat him as a quote, enemy combatant, lock him away, never have to give him due process or a trial or so forth, we don't want to take the chance that that case could be reversed.
We want to have that decision in hand in case there's another emergency where we have to use it.
So at that moment, after telling the courts and the world and the American people that Padilla was one of the most dangerous enemy combatants they've ever seen and that the courts are ill-equipped to handle terrorism cases and so forth, they switched gears.
They converted him into a criminal defendant, told the court that he was now a criminal defendant, which meant that the case was now moot.
The Supreme Court couldn't decide it.
They've now got that Fourth Circuit decision under their belt.
Now they're faced with the exact same issue in Al-Mahri, even if Al-Mahri is a foreigner and the principles apply to Americans.
And there's no question but that they probably, many people in the Justice Department would like to work the same little trickery in order to keep that decision under their belt.
We all know that the Fourth Circuit, probably the most conservative circuit in the country, which is probably one reason why they put these guys in South Carolina, because they knew that they'd ultimately be taking it before the Fourth Circuit.
But so far, the case is now before the Supreme Court.
We just don't know what the Obama administration is going to do with it.
Or what the court will do with it either way either.
But I guess they have a pretty good record, three major cases in a row where they've ruled in favor of habeas corpus and the Fifth Amendment, right?
Well, that's right.
And even with this, a lot of people say, well, people, Americans still have the right of habeas corpus.
Of course, we don't know how long that's going to last, but that's true.
But the problem is that that's not the core of the problem in Padilla and Al-Mahri, that simply because a person can test his detention, is irrelevant if the government can simply just come in and say, we have some evidence that he's engaged in terrorism, in which case the court would simply throw out the habeas corpus petition.
And now that's not just a George Bush lawyer argument David Addington came up with or something anymore because the Congress passed the Military Commissions Act that explicitly allows that in the law.
Right.
I mean, the core of the problem is the enemy combatant doctrine, where they've gotten away with converting a regular crime into an act of war, because then once they are able to do that, they say, oh, we can treat this as a wartime condition.
And since the whole world's a battlefield, including America, Americans can be warriors.
They can be joining the other side.
And so they've essentially circumvented the entire Bill of Rights with this thing.
So that even if you get, even if you're an American and you do get a hearing, a habeas corpus hearing in front of a civilian judge, if the prosecutors say, oh, well, no, we have these computer records that say his computer talks somebody else's computer or whatever, judge, then the judge at that point would say, OK, great.
I mean, basically, if they only have as much argument for, you know, maybe continued detention without bail until a civilian trial, that kind of thing, that's the same level of evidence to say this guy is, in fact, an enemy combatant, judge.
Let us continue to hold him.
That's exactly right.
And so even though a person may get his habeas petition heard, he may have it discarded.
He may have it thrown out because the government shows up with some hearsay or some tortured evidence or something that just says, oh, we know this guy's part of a terrorist gang.
And then so the habeas corpus petition gets denied, the guy gets returned.
And that's exactly what happened with al-Mahri and Padilla.
Both of them filed habeas corpus petitions.
They were denied.
And so habeas corpus is not the great protection that some people think it is in this area.
The core of the problem is that we've permitted government to assume this power to call suspected terrorists enemy combatants.
I mean, it would be no different than, for example, in the drug war.
If all of a sudden they said, well, we've decided to treat the drug war as a war.
And so every drug suspect from now on is going to be an enemy combatant.
He'll be entitled to file a petition for habeas corpus, but all we have to do is prove a little bit of evidence that he's involved in the drug trade.
That entitles us to return him to the prison camp.
Exactly what they did with the terrorism situation.
I've actually heard people recommend such measures.
I don't solve the drug problem once and for all.
Boy, I guess that's another topic.
Okay, so tell me this.
What about his lack of citizenship as compared to Jose Padilla?
Is that relevant at all here?
No, it's the principle still the same because...
It's where he was arrested, not where he's from.
Well, and really the thing is it goes to this core principle.
Is terrorism an act of war or is it a criminal offense?
And we all know it's a criminal offense because it's on the statute books as a criminal offense.
And the government has prosecuted many people for terrorism ever since 9-11.
They prosecuted Moussaoui.
They prosecuted Padilla.
They were prosecuting al-Mahri in federal court.
The real problem is that they've acquired the option to treat it as either way.
So it doesn't matter whether it's a foreigner.
It doesn't matter whether it's an American.
It doesn't matter where he's picked up.
It's this doctrine that they've adopted that says we have the option of treating a person as either an enemy combatant or as a criminal defendant.
That's really the core of the problem.
Well, wouldn't the Supreme Court see a distinction probably between if someone is arrested and the military says it was on the battlefield in Afghanistan versus in Peoria, Illinois?
Well, that's essentially the direction that they're moving in.
They're saying, well, on the battlefield we're not going to interfere, but here in America, since there's not active combat operations going on, that's something else.
Well, okay, that might be a valid distinction, but look at Afghanistan.
Is it really a battlefield?
They've established a government there, maybe a puppet government, but it's a government nonetheless.
The U.S. government is there at the behest, at the approval of the host government.
That makes the U.S. government just a police force in Afghanistan.
Where's the battlefield there?
The simple fact that the U.S. government is dropping bombs on people doesn't make it a battlefield.
They are essentially an agent or a guest of the Afghan government.
But you're right.
Technically anyway.
I mean, we all know better, but that's their theory, right?
That's right.
At the time that the government was fighting the Taliban, that they were fighting the Afghan government, that was a true arena of war.
But this business where you've got an established government and the U.S. government goes into a country where there's an established government and starts bombing people, I mean, what is that?
I mean, where's the war?
Again, their concept is they're not fighting the Afghan government.
They're fighting, quote, terrorists.
Well, whether you fight terrorists with a police force, a valid constituted police force, or you fight it with Army weapons, it's still a criminal offense.
The fact that you're fighting drug dealers, I mean, like the Mexican government's fighting drug dealers along the border.
They're fighting them with high-powered weapons.
They're fighting them with Army troops.
That doesn't make it a war.
So basically Afghanistan is, we're not at war against them because we'd have to be at war against their state.
Basically they're under martial law and they have foreign troops, American troops, doing the enforcing of it is basically it.
That's exactly it.
But what you're saying is right.
That's the position the government is taking, like where they're trying to file habeas corpus petitions for people that are held at Bagram and these other institutions that the CIA has overseas and so forth.
But primarily at Bagram right now, the government's taking the position that no, no, no, this is a situation of war.
You can't be second-guessing us and so forth.
What they're doing is applying that principle here in the United States.
I mean, they were opposing habeas corpus for people except for Americans, foreigners here, because they were saying you can't interfere with our war operations either.
I mean, when you think about it from their mind… Well, hang on one second there, because you have the same problem as me from probably some people in the audience's point of view, is the U.S. government is just the U.S. government.
But I think a lot of people would make a distinction between the Obama government and the Bush one.
Well, that remains to be seen.
I mean, Obama promised change.
He promised to abandon a lot of these horrible infringements on civil liberties, attacks on the Bill of Rights.
I haven't seen anything except for a couple of orders ordering the closure of Guantanamo and so forth, anything really significant happening yet.
He's approved the state secrets doctrine, which prohibits people from suing the government when they've been tortured and kidnapped and held for years.
I mean, what's that all about?
I mean, I don't see much change there.
But what I was saying is that from the government's standpoint, what they're doing in Afghanistan, what they call a wartime situation, is really no different from the way they see things here in the United States.
It's all the same battlefield in their minds.
It's a worldwide battlefield against the terrorists.
Well, as you said, that was clearly the doctrine of the Bush administration.
But it remains to be seen whether the Obama government is going to try to claim that, as the Bush lawyer said, a little old lady in Switzerland who accidentally donates to a charity that is tied somehow to some terrorist group, that that's considered a battlefield.
They haven't really been put to the test and had to take a stand one way or another on that yet, have they?
Well, except for the fact that I understand that the Obama administration has just approved the government's position denying habeas corpus to people that are held in prison camps in Afghanistan, claiming that this is an arena of war, and therefore those people are not entitled to habeas corpus.
And that was the Bush administration's position.
Well, and that does contradict the whole theory, again, that there's a government in Afghanistan that Karzai's anything but a guy wearing a costume, the mayor of Kabul, pretending to be the government there, because they're not even stopping by the pretension, it doesn't sound like, that there's a rule of law in Afghanistan that those people at Bagram would be prosecuted and dealt with by the government there.
Maybe they need help arresting these bad guys, or even killing them, from the American soldiers, but then they ought to be turned over to whatever legal process exists in Afghanistan, if there is one, right?
Well, and there's a distinction between a civil war in a country where one faction's trying to take over the reins of power, and somebody that's just doing bad things to American troops that happen to be occupying the country.
I mean, we got involved in the middle of a civil war there, where the U.S. started assisting the Northern Alliance and ousted the Taliban regime.
Well, that's just a fight between two factions in a country.
The U.S. government, despite the fact that it promised to show evidence of complicity of the Afghan government in the 9-11 attacks, it never did that, which would cause me to believe that they never had any evidence to that effect.
But really what the invasion was about was the Afghan government's refusal to turn Osama bin Laden over to the U.S. in response to their demand that he do so.
Well, and it was reported, in fact, that the Taliban had tried to warn that there was an attack, that these crazies that live in our country are going to do something, look out, and that they were turned away, and not allowed to give the warning that they came all the way to the United States to give.
Well, there was certainly the offer to negotiate about turning bin Laden over to a third regime, an independent regime, an independent court or whatever, and the U.S. would have nothing to do with it.
They said, no, you turn him over to us unconditionally, or else, even though there was no extradition agreement.
The irony of this is that the U.S. government is holding this guy, Jose Posada Carriles, who is a suspected terrorist in the bombing of a Cuban airliner, and Venezuela, with whom we do have an extradition agreement, has tried to extradite him, and the U.S. government harbors him, and says, no, we don't want to turn him over.
Possibly one reason is because it's pretty clear that he may have been a member of the CIA at some time or another.
Possibly even during the...
It's very nebulous.
I mean, most of the 9-11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
There were no bombs dropped on Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, and why would people from a country that's an allied country of ours come here and attack us?
I guess, no, wait a minute, that's a whole different thing.
Let's not do that.
Let me stay on the legal issues here, if I can.
Or, in fact, on the al-Mahri case, and al-Mahri specifically, Jacob, can you address this guy's treatment?
What I've read sounds similar, although I haven't seen the detail, but they say he's been held on a cell block all by himself at this brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and that's apparently what they also did to Jose Padilla, and I wonder if you can... do you know anything more about this guy's treatment in the military's custody there, whether he's been tortured the way that Jose Padilla apparently was?
I haven't read a whole lot about his treatment, but we've got to assume that it's almost exactly the same as Padilla's.
And what exactly did they do to Padilla?
Because they didn't waterboard him and hang him upside down and electrocute him and sit dogs on him and stuff like that, right?
No, I think they were very concerned about treating this terror, suspected terrorist, in a way different than they treat the suspected terrorist that they have in their overseas prison camps.
I think they were truly concerned that they had an American on their hands, and that they would be doing it here on American soil, which of course makes no sense, because a terrorist is a terrorist, and if it's a worldwide battlefield, what difference does it make what prison camp you're doing the waterboarding and the torturing in?
But for some political reasons they were obviously concerned.
But what they did is what this guy Offred McCoy, an author who's written at least one great book on torture, they do what the CIA has been trained to do since at least the time of the Korean War, where they learned this from the communists, is this concept of sensory deprivation and isolation.
It's called touchless torture, where you drive a person crazy by isolating him and not letting him talk to anyone for years at a time.
He's all alone in a dark room, no light, for months at a time.
And what they've learned is that this type of thing drives a person crazy.
So even though he may not have the kick marks and the bruises and the cuts and the electric stuff from shocking him and so forth, he's got all the mental damage.
And that's what they were doing with Padilla.
You'll remember the famous photograph where they had the goggles over him while they were taking him to the dentist.
This is so that he would not be able to see anybody, he would not be able to perceive light.
I mean, they wanted to keep the torture going, but then they wanted to be in a position of saying, we didn't do anything to him.
What are you talking about?
We never laid a hand on him.
Yeah, plausible deniability.
And, in fact, in that picture, they're even pulling him by his chains, not even so much as a hand on his shoulder to guide him down the hall blind.
Yeah.
Now, what's important to remember about all this is that this is the power they now have over every American.
I mean, this is why a lot of people couldn't understand, why are you guys defending Padilla?
Why are you guys defending Padilla?
Because we understood that what they were claiming, the power they were claiming to do whatever this, that they did to Padilla, is the power that they now have over every American.
It is not just, hey, Padilla, they could only do it to Padilla and no one else.
No, they can now do to Padilla what they did to every single American.
This is why we've been fighting so hard on this case.
Didn't Obama vote against the Military Commissions Act or skip the vote but condemn it or something like that back when they passed it?
You got me.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
I, you know, I want to try my very best because especially I just, I'm so happy that the Republicans are not in power right now, Jacob.
I just can't tell you.
And obviously there's no other choice.
It isn't like I voted for the Democrats or anything.
But this is who we're stuck with.
And I want to try very hard to separate out things that he hasn't done right yet that he needs to do versus things that he's already specifically done wrong, such as invoke the state secret's privilege to prevent torture victims from suing in civil court, taking the stand that the people at Bagram are outside the law, et cetera, and try to keep these categories real straight in my head so that I can try to be fair and, in fact, so I can provide support for the President on the things that he's doing right.
Like, for example, his conflict with the generals in how fast to get out of Iraq.
He wants to get out faster than they do apparently.
And so I want to support that, not oppose it.
You see what I mean?
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, libertarians all had high hopes for this guy, not economically.
I mean, we all knew he was going to be a disaster there.
But we had high hopes in terms of restoring the principles of honor and integrity and civil liberties that this country has always stood for, the Bill of Rights and everything.
And at first he did some very positive things, not only issuing the order for the closure of Guantanamo, which unfortunately he said would take a year.
Well, that's nonsense.
You could close it immediately.
But more importantly, he's appointed people in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is a critically important part of the Justice Department.
He's appointed people who were very publicly critical of the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties.
They had published articles.
They were very out there.
And so that has encouraged a lot of people that really believe civil liberties are important.
Unfortunately, though, and of course we're all kind of hoping maybe just he hasn't had time to make a really good evaluation here.
I mean, he's taking these horrible steps, like the state secrets doctrine.
I mean, what they're really saying with that doctrine is, look, we can kidnap and torture anyone we want.
And it's an enemy combatant.
And oh, by the way, you can't sue us even if you're totally innocent, because to do so would disclose secrets about how we torture and kidnap people.
I mean, this is horrible.
I mean, if the government does something bad to someone, why shouldn't he be able to sue?
And then they wonder, Scott, why some of these people after Guantanamo go and join the terrorists?
Well, they're always assuming they're going back to the battlefield as if they were guilty in the first place.
Well, hello, what about an innocent man that's tortured and sexually abused and held in jail for seven years?
Don't you think he might just be a little bit angry about how he's been treated, especially since he can't even sue the people that did it to him?
Well, and two of the most famous terrorists of the last generation are Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of whom were basically nobodies until after they were tortured by the American puppet regimes in Jordan and in Egypt.
And now they're the terrorists who not just get people killed – well, al-Zarqawi is now dead, but anyway – send others to kill people, create giant terrorist organizations to kill people.
Well, this is what unfortunately so many Americans just can't see, that it's U.S. foreign policy that produces so much of this blowback.
We saw domestically the domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh.
They go and massacre those people in Waco, and that produces the anger and rage in this guy that goes out and blows the federal building.
This is what we keep telling people.
If you stop the feds from massacring people, both domestically and in foreign affairs, that reduces the anger and rage that exists in people that don't know how to control that anger and rage.
I mean, it's just wrong for our government to be doing these kind of things.
The sanctions against Iraq, the Persian Gulf intervention, the no-fly zones, the unconditional support to the Israeli regime, the stationing of troops on Islamic holy lands – I mean, how could they not know that all this was going to produce a lot of anger and hatred?
Well, and it kind of goes back – or I guess it really goes back to the question of law and accountability.
I mean, the whole theory here is that we don't have a king.
The highest office we have is merely the president.
He's not the leader of the country.
He's the leader of the executive branch of the national government, and he's accountable to the law just like everybody else, and they've got this thing called impeachment, and it says right there in the Constitution how to prosecute these people.
It's right there.
We all learned this as little kids.
It seems to me – and perhaps it's always been this way, perhaps there's a major change going on – it seems to me that the very theory that there really is a rule of law that binds the power of the government at this point, it's really just kind of a sham.
It's cover for they get to do whatever they want to whoever they want.
Well, that's right, but I just keep hoping that Americans are going to figure this out.
I mean, we see it domestically with the economy.
People just cannot conceive of the possibility that it's the federal government that is at the root of these economic problems.
The same thing in foreign affairs.
They just cannot conceive that it's the federal government that's at the root of the terrorist blowback.
But if people can all of a sudden start figuring out, hey, maybe it's the socialism and interventionism domestically that have caused our problems, and therefore maybe more socialism and interventionism is not the cure, it's only going to make the problem worse.
And maybe if they say, and overseas, if it's imperialism and interventionism that's the problem, maybe there's a solution to it that doesn't involve more invasions, more occupations, more foreign aid, and so forth.
I mean, that's all we can hope for is that people start smelling a rat here.
Well, what about all this talk about creating some kind of 9-11 type commission to look into the torture, I guess?
I mean, we all know.
There's ten books about it that we all know that it was all the principals and all their lawyers who were in on it.
It's pretty easy to name them if you want to take the time.
That basically give at least some of these guys immunity and get them out, get all the documents out.
And it seems like pressure is building.
The Gallup poll had 70-something percent in favor of either a commission or prosecutions or both, right?
Well, that's right.
I think that you're much better off doing it with an independent prosecutor and just let him have subpoena power.
Somebody's got a lot of integrity, independent, and he's got a grand jury behind him, and let him determine whether any criminal offenses, nobody should be above the law, not the president, the vice president, anybody should be above the law.
And if criminal offense has been committed, then let the chips fall where they may.
But having said that, I also think it's critically important for the American people to know everything that's going on.
What happened with all this rendition program?
How many people were renditioned?
What happened to them?
Where are all these secret prison camps?
I mean it just befuddles me that people think, gosh, this is what America is all about now.
I think in order to get back on the right road, it's incumbent to find out what has been done in our name.
Well, and I don't know.
I mean it's pretty easy to see the argument that it would be very destructive and destabilizing in a sense to put at least 30 percent of people still love George Bush and Dick Cheney and think they're great, you put those men on trial as war criminals, basically turn it into a big partisan fight, and have all the talk radio Republicans calling it treason all day long every day.
And it could be a very divisive and destructive thing, I mean, to apply the rule of law to these people.
Do the benefits certainly outweigh the drawbacks of something like that?
Absolutely.
I mean, we're talking about the rule of law.
I mean, I don't know whether these people committed criminal offenses or not.
That's what a jury, that's what a grand jury is for, to determine whether there's probable cause to believe that.
But we are a nation of laws.
No one's above the law.
I don't care how much furor a trial produces on talk radio.
I mean, do we treat private citizens like this?
I mean, if – who was the football – O.J.
Simpson?
I mean, that created a big furor in talk radio.
That didn't exempt him from being prosecuted.
Why should it exempt anyone else?
Public officials have to obey the law, and no matter what the consequences are in terms of publicity and so forth, I mean, that's the idea of having an independent prosecutor, an independent federal judge, an independent jury if it comes to that.
Yeah.
Everyone that breaks the law is subject to paying the consequences.
We all do.
I mean, we may be little people, and they're going to prosecute us if we break their laws.
If they have broken our laws, then so be it.
They need to be tried for it.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, more and more, they'll lock you up for just about anything, and in harsh conditions, too.
I mean, in all the major studies, it's always the question of who's got a worse police state at this point.
Is it America or China?
Who has more people in prison, us or the Chinese communists?
Well, we've got the highest per capita incarceration rate in the country, and you see what they do with these poor people that are addicted to drugs.
I mean, they'll lock them up for 10, 20 years for doing nothing but ingesting drugs as part of their habit.
Well, if somebody breaks the law of the land, which, by the way, includes the treaties that this country has signed.
I mean, the treaties that we've signed on torture, they don't give any leeway.
The treaties say these have to be prosecuted.
There's no discretion here.
Glenn Greenwald has done a great job of pointing this out, that this is the law of the land.
There is no discretion here.
And if we're going to obey the law, which we're supposed to do, then no one's above it.
And that includes any public official that participated in a criminal offense, which includes torture.
But I would add to that the kidnapping, the renditioning to other countries, extraordinary renditions for the purpose of torture.
I don't care how well-motivated they are.
If they're that well-motivated, they could have gone to Congress and said, please change the law because we are well-motivated and we want the law to be changed to let us do this.
Instead they said, the law be damned, we're going to do it ourselves.
Or at least that's what they're accused of doing.
And if that's what they've done, fine, you pay the piper now.
Well, you know, they say that when the Hamdan decision came down, I forgot, I think it was the other Scott Horton that had this anecdote, that whoever it was that was eating lunch with David Addington said that, you know, the news came in to the restaurant where they were eating lunch and he turned white as a sheet.
And immediately, I mean, because what the Supreme Court had said was basically that every single kidnapping, torture and murder that had taken place up until that time had been completely outside the law, which in effect, they didn't say this in the opinion, but in effect what they were saying at the time, I believe, was that these guys are all guilty of however many counts of kidnapping, torture and murder.
Well, these are the things that I think if this country is going to ever be on a healthy basis, we just have to find out.
And if there were criminal offenses, then the people need to be prosecuted.
And they can argue in mitigation of punishment what they were doing, why they did it and so forth.
But if they broke the law and they did it intentionally, then the law ought to be enforced.
All right, everybody, that's Jacob Hornberger.
The website is www.fff.org.
And in fact, let me be a little bit more specific for you here.
The blog is www.fff.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
It's always a pleasure, Scott.
Thank you so much.