09/11/09 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio and our next guest is Anthony Gregory, he's the editor-in-chief at the Campaign for Liberty.
He's, man, I forget the title, at the Independent Institute, that's independent.org, writes for lewrockwell.com and the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
Welcome back to the show, kid.
Hey, Scott, it's great to be back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and I guess, well, the topic of this interview is lost liberty since September 11th.
Of course, George Bush said that we were attacked because of how good and free we are and so his mission, as he saw it, and he apparently did accept this mission, was to destroy our goodness and freedom by torturing people and repealing the Bill of Rights.
So I figured, you know, this would be a good opportunity, being the anniversary of the greatest excuse for an attack on our Bill of Rights since the days of World War I, that maybe it would be a good idea to go through and catalog just how much liberty we really have lost in the past eight years and, you know, how many different things we'd have to repeal just to get back to where we were when George Bush took power.
Let's start with, I guess, go ahead.
Repealing the 21st century, that's our new first step towards back to freedom, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
So basically, I guess the first thing that they did, before any new laws were passed or authorization to use force or anything else, was they used the existing material witness statute to just round up Muslims.
What is the material witness statute exactly, and how many Muslims did they round up, and how bad of a crime was this, really?
Well, the statute allows them to detain people if they think that there's a good chance they have important information about a crime, so they can, you know, compel them to assist investigation.
I'm against the whole thing, of course, but they stretched it.
There's supposed to be a time limit, but for months on end, a lot of these people were detained.
There were probably somewhere around a thousand, I believe, you know, Muslims.
They weren't all Muslims, but mostly Muslims of all sorts of descent.
They were mostly immigrants, and they went after them.
In some cases, they extended the detention, looking for visa violations and so forth, but they also ensnared a few American citizens in this hysteria right after 9-11, rounding people up.
It's kind of forgotten about now, but this was one of the first things that happened, and it kind of foreshadowed the future offenses against the Bill of Rights, because there was no real due process involved, and many people were detained at these makeshift facilities.
They were deprived their right to a lawyer, effectively.
In some cases, they were allowed to call a lawyer, but only at specific times, a short window of time every week, and lawyers weren't available at that time.
It was really a terrible thing for these people to have gone through.
Well, now, the first law that Congress passed was the authorization to use military force.
Now, it seemed like there was some pretty specific language in there, but I guess it's been interpreted to mean permanent war, or I guess Condi Rice's hit list of 60 nations up for regime change if we feel like it, etc., right?
Well, yeah, the authorization for the use of military force was the first real legislation they passed, and Bush used it to go into Afghanistan, and then later claimed that his government and his defenders claimed that this legislation empowered the President to go to war with other countries and to make decisions about tension and surveillance.
But at the same time, many of them argued that the authorization was unnecessary, because the President had this intrinsic power, going back to George Washington, to pretty much do anything.
But that legislation is still being used.
The Obama administration has referred to it in some of its legal actions.
So it was a dangerously broad interpretation, but given that legislation right away, we're still suffering.
Right, and I mean, I don't think that you're saying it would have been much of an improvement if they declared war on Afghanistan or something, but then again, at least that wouldn't be able to be interpreted to mean, ah, we can bomb inside Pakistan and force their government to create a civil war there, and the rest of whatever we can imagine, send troops to Georgia and the Philippines, and God knows what.
Well, sure, I certainly wouldn't have supported declaring war on Afghanistan, but it would have been more limited, I mean, what's the worst that could have happened from it?
We would have been at war with Afghanistan still.
We still are.
I don't think we've ever had a declared war nearly this long, too.
And so there is some legitimacy to holding the government to the constitutional process, even for substantive reasons, because it limits what they can do.
It's more than a procedural nicety, though, you know, again, I would be against declaring war on Afghanistan, certainly, Iraq, or any of these countries, some of our worst deportations of civil liberties in the past have happened during declared wars, so that doesn't make it better, but it probably would have limited the scope.
Well, and of course, Ron Paul tried to get them to go ahead and declare war against Iraq, even though he voted against it and said, Mr. Chairman, you better vote against this thing.
But still, if you guys want to have a war, step up to the plate and declare it.
And they wouldn't do it.
They didn't want to take the responsibility.
They wanted to be able to say, like Bob Barr and Hillary Clinton said, you know, yeah, I voted for the authorization, but it's Bush's fault that he misused the authorization.
It's not my responsibility.
That's right.
And they called it frivolous that he would discuss declarations of war, and I think it's anachronistic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's the guy on the Judiciary Committee, the guy that impeached Bill Clinton for breaking the law.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, but, you know, ever since World War II, as Glenn Greenwald recently pointed out, and has been pointing out for some time, the U.S. has been in nearly continual warfare with somebody, and it's true, there's no real declarations of war anymore.
And I don't know if we can expect that.
I mean, we'd have to see a major revolution where the government really transforms dramatically to be more in line with the Constitution before we could restore that, because it is true that in the context of everything else they do that violates the Constitution, which is virtually everything the federal government does, a declaration of war does seem, in that context, anachronistic.
Though, of course, I agreed with Ron Paul that that's no excuse to keep violating the Constitution.
Right.
All right.
So now, speaking of that, let's talk about the Patriot Act.
What, do you hate America?
You're not a patriot?
What's your problem with the Patriot Act, Anthony?
Well, I remember that was the attitude back then.
I think that now...
It says patriot on it.
How could you possibly be against that?
Well, you know, pretty much anything that sounds good with the word act after it is going to be terrible.
But, well, you know, the Patriot Act has been called by many people, you know, one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history.
They rammed it through.
Nobody read it.
This is all well known.
The original form was even worse than the form we're living under now, but it, you know, it greatly expanded the power of the executive to effectively search people without real warrants or without telling people that they're being searched.
Well, and they don't need any cause at all to search our financial records anymore, right?
Well, that's true, too.
There was a big, big erosion of financial privacy.
And unfortunately, a lot of the critics of the Patriot Act on the left defended some parts of the Patriot Act and said, you know, we just need to reform it.
But the whole thing was an abomination.
Talk to me about national security letters, isn't that where a cop can ask another cop or even ask himself if he can have a warrant and basically go ahead and exercise judicial power?
Well, a national security letter is where you get this letter and the most ominous thing about it is you're not allowed to tell anybody that you got it and you're enlisted.
Now, that gag order has been struck down as unconstitutional.
It does violate your freedom of speech.
You can't even tell your lawyer or your spouse or anyone.
But yeah, there's a definite angle, and of course, with the FISA, the FISA court was also freed of some of its constraints.
I mean, even under the 1978 standards, FISA basically was the Justice Department's way of giving itself warrants.
And out of the, I think, thousands of FISA warrants up until 9-11, there were only, you know, a small handful, like two or three that were rejected.
And even the rejection, in most cases, were procedural.
And yet this wasn't, this was supposedly not good enough, so they broadened it and then years later they broadened it again.
Right, and of course, at a time when Bush could have told the Congress, listen, just amend FISA every which way from Sunday, where we can do anything we want without any restriction or you hate America, and they would have passed it.
He instead didn't ask for those revisions and just decided to break the law.
The FISA statute from 78 you referred to is a felony statute that makes it a felony to violate it.
And they went ahead and did that, what, millions of times, and started this massive illegal wiretapping program and data mining, too.
They took the total information awareness, and this is all combined into one big big brother machine in NSA headquarters there, I think.
Yeah, that's true, and in April of 04, I remember Bush specifically telling everyone, the reporters, that we're still operating with search warrants, so anytime you worry about Patriot Act and everything like that, you've got to keep in mind that we still have the Fourth Amendment, we still require warrants, we just need a little more leeway.
But then it turned out that they weren't doing that at all, they just had the military spying on people.
And it's kind of sad, because I remember when that news broke in December of 05 over the National Security Agency program of warrantless wiretapping, it was a big deal.
And a lot of people were, you know, it was a big controversy, it was one of these civil liberties issues that actually became a news story.
But then, you know, a few years later, it was still seen as egregious, and Obama ran a, he promised that he would vote against legalizing it if it involved immunity for the telecommunications companies that were involved.
Now, I think that the worst thing about it was legalizing it and giving immunity to the government.
But...
Yeah, immunity for the government employees who broke the law on this goes without saying.
The only question is whether there could be any accountability for the telecommunications companies.
And about that, you were saying?
Yeah, the telecommunications companies that were in some cases, I mean, I'm not defending what they did, but they were pressured by the executives.
So there was always agreement among respectable democratic circles that we need to let George Bush do this, get away with it.
It's just a question of whether we're going to go after the companies.
And Obama said that if it has immunity in the bill, he won't vote for it.
But then he did.
So in the FISA, the new, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the, you know, he voted for closure, and now this is just part of the fabric of American life, you know?
Federal government can warrantlessly wiretap.
I got this headline from McClatchy today, September 11th attacks helped forge bonds between FBI and local police.
Oh, isn't that sweet?
Yeah, because you remember in the 1990s, in the good old days, you'd watch these crime TV shows, and there was always friction between the FBI and the cops.
And depending on the circumstance, it was hard for me to know who to root against more.
But this is one of the unfortunate general trends after 9-11, has been the rapid nationalization and militarization of police and the incorporation of domestic law enforcement to national law enforcement.
I mean, when you have the whole Homeland Security and the, I mean, the TSA, as annoying as it is in our daily lives, it's the DHS that is much more threatening to us long term, don't you think?
Oh, well, yeah, DHS is, it's a monstrosity.
And I don't mean threat to us because we're terrorists, I mean, threat to us because they are a national police force, like we're never supposed to have in this country, you can't have freedom and a national police force.
Yeah, and of course, we had national before 9-11, but it has gotten much worse.
You know, it was amusing, I guess, it's a sad thing to find amusement in any of this.
But you know, we're human, what are we going to do?
There's some black comedy involved.
It was amusing to see so many conservatives outraged about the DHS, looking at, you know, right wing extremists and stuff, and it outraged me too.
But that all began under Bush.
I mean, even, even all of this stuff, the fusion centers, the DHS reports on the right, so called right wing extremists, and left wing extremists, it all began under Bush.
And it's all continuing.
Well, look, I got an article right here about how Senator Lautenberg, now echoing the Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, is talking about anybody whose name is on the terrorist watch list.
Well, we can't let these people, because of course, it's up to them to allow us or not, have guns.
And now the right wingers are saying, what?
You're going to take our rights away based on the idea that just some cop put our name on a list and we had no way to know about it, and he had no standard of evidence required, and that can't possibly be right.
Well, welcome to your own police state you made, right wingers.
Thanks a lot.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
I mean, there's over a million people on this list, and conservatives, they're outraged about the move to disarm Americans using the list, but it's true that they didn't really complain much about the list as it was being used under Bush.
On the other hand, a lot of progressive have jumped on board with this idea, even though a few years ago, some of them might have understood that just because the government says, you might be a terrorist or something, doesn't mean we shouldn't let you on a plane.
We shouldn't inconvenience these people, they thought.
But now all these same people on the list, plus a few hundred thousand more or whatever, there's a real risk that this will be used against them in even more invasive ways, and to a large extent, things have flipped around in terms of who's ethical and who's supportive, with the exception of those who've been either bad on it the whole time, because there are people who favor the police state no matter who's in charge.
And then there are some people who've been critical of it the whole time.
I'd be very, very surprised if the ACLU, which is not known for being the most hardcore pro-gun rights group, but I'd be very surprised if they would endorse anything like that.
Boy, I'd hope not.
Now, we've got to move on here because we're running out of time and there's more issues to cover.
Most importantly, I think, is Dick Cheney and David Addington and George Bush's decision that they can determine in a finding that there's no law in the world that can bind the president.
He can kidnap and torture and murder anyone completely and totally outside the law.
He can hold them in detention forever.
He can make up a brand new process for trying them with a two-thirds majority for the firing squad and hearsay evidence in every kangaroo star chamber atrocity.
The Supreme Court struck him down three different times in Hamdan, Rasool, and Bomediene, and yet the Military Commissions Act, passed by the Congress, signed by the president, so far upheld in the most part by the Supreme Court, I believe, or at least they've only struck down very small parts of it, still allows the president of the United States to order the military to kidnap any American even.
I know, to most people, foreigners aren't human at all, so we'll just deal with Americans here.
He can have us kidnapped and held by the military, and then still, I think at best, according to the Supreme Court, we get one shot before a federal judge at a habeas hearing to say we're innocent.
Other than that, back to enemy combatant status, we go, just like during George Bush years, only instead of made up by him and Addington, it's made up by the U.S. Congress.
Yeah, and you know, the thing is, the parts that Bomediene struck down in the Military Commissions Act were significant, because they involved the question of habeas corpus, but it wasn't narrow, like pretty much all these decisions, it was relatively narrow in the scheme of things, because the debate kept getting pushed.
You know, the big debate for the first five, six years after 9-11, over detention, was who has the authority to determine whether we can break the law, or who can determine how much of international law we can violate, how much of the Bill of Rights we can violate when we detain people lawlessly.
And of course, the Bush administration and its proponents had such a radically totalitarian view on this, that even with all of the judicial victories, things have still been only pushed to the point where it's still considerably more despotic than it was after 9-11.
We, you know, we have Obama, you know, give his big talk in May, where he outlined how some of these people were going to get trials, some of these people were going to get military commissions, and some people were just going to have to detain forever, or something, because there's nothing to do with them.
Yeah, he implied he wanted to have Congress pass a new law that would, instead of the David Addington way, where we just make it up, we'll have Congress come up with a brand new way to, and we'll just ignore the Fourth and Fifth Amendment, and whatever other prohibitions on the government doing this, and we'll have indefinite detention for people that we don't think we can prosecute, for whatever reason, either because we already tortured them, or because they're not guilty, or whatever.
Right, and then, you know, there are, and then there's still people who've been cleared for release, and we don't know, this government doesn't know exactly what to put them, but it is true that Obama has really kind of flipped on this, because even more so than on surveillance, when Obama was running, he was pretty consistent in saying, look, this is the way it is.
The habeas corpus is your one shot.
You're not supposed to have this legal black hole, where some people fall through the cracks between being criminal suspects, and prisoners of war.
Yeah, well, that was when he was a candidate, now he's a president, and so all that is completely meaningless, as anyone could have predicted back then, and so here we are.
We gotta go, I want to recommend everybody go check out anti-, well, yes, antiwar.com in the Viewpoint section today, you'll find the link to Anthony's article at Campaign for Liberty.com, The Causes, Aftermath, and Lessons of 9-11.
You can find him at Independent.org, at FFF.org, at LewRockwell.com, at Antiwar.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Anthony.
Okay, thank you, thank you.