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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.
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All right, next up is Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
It's an honor to be back.
Thank you, Scott.
Well, good deal.
Appreciate you joining us here.
And you wrote about Chile, and I think it's...
Yeah, among people who are interested in foreign policy stuff, it's a little bit of trivia that down in Chile, they had their own 9-11.
The U.S. supported coup back in 1973.
And, or maybe U.S. mandated coup, I don't know, back in 1973.
But this is a subject that you've taken a special interest in over the years.
And I'm sad to say it's not one that I've studied in depth.
It's one that I've known about since I was very young, I guess, but it's not something I ever really studied.
So anyway, I was really happy to see that you wrote about it on the 40th anniversary here a couple weeks ago.
And so I was hoping you could help kind of fill in people, especially the young, about what was America's business in Chile back in 1973.
Yeah, it's an absolutely fascinating story.
I mean, it's sort of a microcosm of the whole Cold War, anti-communist, foreign interventionist nonsense that was going on by the national security state.
And what the situation was is that, you know, the national security state had built up this whole thing about the communists.
They're coming to take over America, and the dominoes are going to fall, and we've got to sacrifice 58,000 American men in Vietnam and all this stuff.
So the Chilean people democratically elect a man named Salvador Allende to be their president.
And he is a socialist.
He's a communist, about communist.
He believes in the whole socialist economic paradigm.
And so President Nixon says, oh, we can't let this stand.
You know, the Chilean people, they've elected this guy, but we can't allow that.
This is a threat to our national security.
You know, even though, of course, the thought that the Chilean army was going to somehow another sweep into the United States and conquer the United States is so ridiculous.
But it's the same old national security nonsense.
So he sends a CIA in there to create – well, to add to the economic chaos.
Since Allende has had a socialist economic system, you would expect there would be chaos.
But Nixon sends a CIA with orders to make it worse.
And so the CIA is initiating a huge strike like of truckers that were delivering food.
They were paying them on the side so that they didn't have to worry about where their income was coming from during the strike.
So there's this massive chaos, all with the notion of getting a military coup to take over.
And so that happens on 9-11, 1973.
The Pinochet military coup takes place.
Pinochet is a military general.
They take over the national palace.
Allende commits suicide apparently.
And it starts this brutal, brutal reign of terror where they're torturing and raping people, killing people, all because they're socialists.
Not because they were taking up arms or resisting this coup or anything.
It's because they've committed the crime of being communists or socialists.
And so they kill 3,000 or 4,000 people.
They round up and torture about 60,000.
And in the midst of this, Scott, there's two Americans who are like leftists.
They believe in Franklin Roosevelt's philosophy and stuff.
And they're executed.
During the first few days of the coup, they're executed.
And, of course, the CIA and the military, the U.S. military is saying, oh, well, we don't have anything to do with this.
We're just bystanders.
Well, as it turned out, they were playing an active role in this coup.
And as it further turned out many years later, it looks like the CIA and the military helped kill these two Americans.
And that's why one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by it is that nobody's ever done anything about that.
Now, they've recently indicted a military official, a U.S. military official in Chile for participating in the murder of one of those two Americans or maybe both Americans.
But the Congress has never done anything about it.
The Justice Department has never done anything about it.
It's amazing.
So it's not even that the Americans helped cover it up or asked the Chileans to do it.
It sounds like the way you put it in the article, they were last seen hitching a ride with an Army official back to the base or something.
Yeah.
What it was, you got two separate murders.
One was Charles Horman and the other was Frank Tarugi.
And they were both, I don't know, about 30 years old.
And they were both leftists.
And Charles Horman's story is the subject of the movie Missing.
And so if your listeners have never watched that movie, it's really worth checking out.
Jack Lemmon's in it.
Sissy Spacek.
And it's the story of what happened here, that Charles Horman is over on the seacoast.
He lives in Santiago.
But he and a friend, who's a woman, a friend of the family, he was married.
He's taken her sightseeing in, I think it was Vina del Mar.
And lo and behold, that's where the coup starts.
And so he happens to witness a lot of the stuff.
He sees American battleships out in the waters.
He sees American soldier types being able to get to the checkpoints without any problems.
So he's mentally recording this or writing it down and so forth.
He's a journalist.
And so all of a sudden there's a U.S. military guy that takes him back to Santiago to get him to the checkpoints and stuff.
But that military guy figures out that this guy is a leftist and that he has seen things that shouldn't be seen.
Because the U.S. government was saying, we play no role in this.
So all of a sudden Horman has all this information that says, that's just not true.
And many years later, a document was released by the State Department.
Mrs. Horman, his wife, filed a lawsuit and gets nowhere.
The courts throw her out for lack of evidence.
And they won't let her take depositions of anybody.
And many years later, a State Department releases a document.
I don't know if it was inadvertent or what, that says, well, yeah, the CIA played a role in this execution.
And then like I said, the Chilean officials have recently, like in the past couple of years, indicted that military guy that gave him the ride.
He was an American military guy.
And that extradition request has not yet been processed here in the United States.
But there's no question that the U.S. government is going to resist it, at least that's my opinion.
And then Frank Tarugi, he was murdered separately.
And we don't really know what the circumstances of his murder are.
But his sister just a few days ago published an op-ed saying, what role did U.S. intelligence play in my brother's murder?
And what she says is that all the evidence indicates that U.S. intelligence was monitoring Frank Tarugi's mail that he was sending home to his family in the States.
And he was telling his family, don't let anybody know where I live because it's dangerous down here in Chile.
And yet the Chilean officials found out where he lived, and that Frank Tarugi's family has evidence indicating that they were monitoring his mail, just much like the NSA is doing to people today.
And that's how the Chilean officials found out where Frank Tarugi was.
Now again, we don't know the exact role that the U.S. has played in these two executions.
They are still keeping many of the documents and many of the records secret.
And Congress has never held a hearing in which they could subpoena officials to find out exactly how these two Americans died and what role the U.S. had in it.
That's in 40 years, no accountability whatsoever.
None, none.
I mean, this is the CIA we're talking about.
You really think that Congress is going to jack with the CIA and start subpoenaing people saying who were the agents that killed them?
And more important, or equally important I should say, did the President of the United States authorize the hits?
That's what's so fascinating is nobody wants to know.
We're not supposed to ask these questions of how high did this go?
Did they participate in the execution of these two Americans just on their own?
Or did they clear it up with higher-ups and say, do we need to – should we go ahead and get rid of these guys?
All right, now first of all, at the Pirate Bay, they've got Missing.
I'm downloading it now just so people know.
I've never seen that, so thanks for the recommendation.
But then – now here's the thing of it.
I remember after 9-11, maybe even a few years after 9-11, hearing people say that, yeah, well, they had a 9-11 down in Chile.
That was the coup against Allende, which I had known about the coup, but I didn't know about the significance of the date and all that.
Someone put the two and two together for me there.
And I remember thinking, and you know me, I'm not much for American foreign policy or Nixon and Kissinger or anything like that.
But I remember thinking, not even really in words, but just sort of having the very vague feeling like, yeah, right, your 9-11 was nothing compared to what happened to us sort of a thing, right?
But then the truth of it is, no, that's not right at all.
That's only right because I'm from here, not there.
Actually, what happened there, as you said, thousands were killed in the fascist dirty war.
It wasn't even a counterinsurgency or anything.
Their victims weren't even fighting back violently, right?
It was just a Stalin-style roundup of these people.
That's absolutely right.
They were just stopping them on the streets and putting them in a car, carrying them away to a dungeon.
And they would tell them, your life has come to an end.
No one will ever hear from you again.
And they proceeded to torture them, to rape them.
And then the ones they killed, they would drop them off in the ocean and drug them up a little bit and then just drop them in the ocean.
And so some people disappeared.
They call them the Zapatistas, where you're never heard from again.
You don't even know.
There's no accountability at all to some of the people they killed.
And there's still stories.
Anybody that wants to just get up-to-date, just Google Pinochet.
And there's still stories of where people are suffering from the effects of the torture that they underwent.
And oh, by the way, it may very well have been the model for the Bush-Obama war on terrorism.
Because what Pinochet was doing was exercising the same kind of powers that Bush and Obama claim is part of the war on terrorism.
The power to go round people up, use the military to indefinitely incarcerate them, torture them, and execute them.
Now Obama and Bush say, well, we would use a kangaroo tribunal.
And Pinochet's position is, we don't need any tribunal.
These are communists, and we've got a war on communism, and we can just kill them.
And U.S. officials loved this.
I mean, to them it was like fantastic, because here Vietnam was wrapping up.
We had lost 58,000 American men fighting the communists.
And they looked at Pinochet killing all these, quote, communists and not losing any troops at all to speak of.
They thought he was just a fantastic hero.
In fact, many conservatives still consider him a hero.
The Wall Street Journal just recently said, we hope Egypt finds its own Pinochet.
Yeah.
You know, I was going to ask you about that.
But first, real quick, before we get to the conservatives, did Allende even have a deal with the Kremlin?
I mean, you say that he was a communist.
And, you know, again, I'm no scholar on this subject, maybe a self-avowed one.
But was he making – was he really making the country a communist country?
Or he was just raising taxes through the roof in a socialist kind of way?
Or he was really seizing all the means of production?
And then secondarily then, or I guess, you know, yeah, a secondary question to that, was he really straight aligning himself with the Kremlin and against the United States in the Cold War?
Or is this just a matter of a nation declaring independence from the U.S.?
And that's what's really not tolerable here in this hemisphere.
It was the last.
This is a country that had no alliances or agreements or treaties or whatever with the Soviet Union.
Nothing of that was going on.
It was part of this nationalist movement, you know, across the world in Latin America, Asia, and so forth, where they're not aligned with anybody.
But here's a guy that wins.
He had run for president before.
He was an avowed socialist.
In a sense, he was no different from Franklin Roosevelt.
I mean, he just had that liberal, in the corruptest sense of the term, socialist interventionist mindset.
Now, but he was more than that.
He was also a person of a communist philosophy.
Now, of course, what does that mean?
But in economic terms, yeah, he believed in everything the communists believed in.
And there was a very strong communist party in Chile.
But I saw a film recently on the events leading up to the Pinochet coup.
And it was absolutely fascinating, Scott, because they have – and this is a recent documentary that was done.
But I was watching the speeches that were being given.
There was all this democratic vibrancy.
And of course, it focused on the communist-type speeches of people talking about, we need to do this, and we need to do that.
And it was the type of things you were talking about.
We need to nationalize this, and we need to do this.
The things you would think a communist socialist would advocate.
But from what I can tell, and I've never been able to find any source to the contrary, there was no roundups that were taking place like you found in East Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia.
There were no dungeons.
At the end, it wasn't rounding people up.
They were dissenting against his rule.
Now, I could be mistaken on that.
But every time somebody has raised that with me, I said, give me a source.
And nobody has ever given me a source.
So there was all this democratic vibrancy taking place.
But there was no alliance.
Now, was he adopting socialist principles economically?
Absolutely.
And there was certainly chaos, but it's hard to distinguish how much of that chaos is due to his socialist policies versus what the CIA was doing because the CIA was adding to it.
But the paranoia was coming about from Washington because they saw, whenever they saw somebody like this, an independent country electing a socialist or a communist or whatever, that this was like a major threat to the United States because they saw this as one giant, communist, monolithic, Soviet-driven movement or Chinese-driven movement.
It wasn't anything like that.
There was never a threat to, quote, national security.
Nothing like that.
Yeah, and to their advantage to believe that ridiculousness.
I mean, come on.
They could tell the difference between whether Chile is now a satellite of the USSR or not.
That's just a convenient excuse.
Exactly.
He's so pink he looks red from here.
It was a justification to maintain the national security state that had come into existence after World War II.
And remember, they had had successes.
They had knocked out the elected prime minister, the parliamentary elected prime minister of Iran in 1953.
They had knocked out Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.
And then in 1973, you've got this.
You've got all the regime change operations against Cuba, Castro.
In fact, there's a great new book on this.
I'm only about a third of the way through, but it is absolutely fantastic.
In fact, he'd be a good guest on your show.
And that's Stephen Kinzer's book called The Brothers.
And it's about Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles, who were behind these early coups, the Guatemala coup and the Iranian coup.
And I presume he's going to get into all the Castro stuff.
Yeah, I want that book.
Definitely.
So this thing with Chile is just a continuation of this national security state.
The Rockefeller lawyers, that's who they are, the Dulles brothers.
Yeah.
The Rockefeller lawyers.
And then after World War II, one of them becomes the head of the CIA and the other one becomes the secretary of state.
And they rule everything for eight years straight, nine years straight.
Yeah, they fundamentally altered the course of American history with what they were doing.
And then you've got to love that Ike Eisenhower on the last day.
He goes, by the way, everything I just did screwed you real bad.
Good luck protecting yourselves from the military-industrial complex that I just created for you.
Yeah, that's a fascinating deal.
I mean, it was like he saw the light there at the end and had a crisis of conscience where he felt like he had to issue this warning to us.
And it is kind of cynical that he waits to the end, but at least he did it.
I mean, at least we can point to that, that here's Ike Eisenhower saying, this is a bad news thing that we brought into existence here.
And it's a threat to our democratic processes.
It's a threat to our economic well-being.
And look where we are today.
Now, here's something.
Conservatives, some of them, as you said, like in the Wall Street Journal, openly praise Pinochet.
And progressive types would love to pretend that Jacob Hornberger and the libertarians love Pinochet, too.
Because, after all, the Chicago school and the Milton Friedmanites associated themselves with Pinochet and helped give him economic advice and such like that.
What do you say?
Yeah, that's kind of a fascinating aspect to this because – and I get criticized sometimes.
I get emails from people in Chile that were Pinochet supporters.
And they said, don't you know how bad Allende was?
And he was a socialist and a communist.
Well, yeah, I mean – but from the U.S. standpoint, there's no question that the U.S. had no business intervening.
I mean, the U.S. didn't have to take sides.
The Chilean people might want to take sides, a communist versus a fascist.
But there is absolutely no issue as to whether the U.S. should have been butting into this thing.
But when we argue against this thing, we're not saying that Allende was this fantastic president.
I mean, we're libertarians.
We oppose socialism.
We oppose communism.
But this wasn't a revolution.
This was a military coup.
And it was a fascist coup which ended up killing 3,000 people or so and rounding up, arresting, and torturing some 50,000 or 60,000 people, including the major poet of the country.
I mean, it was incredible the people that they were killing.
And so conservatives would look at this and say, oh, well, they were killing communists.
And oh, by the way, they also established a free market economic system because he was using a lot of Milton Friedman's protégés from the University of Chicago to establish a, quote, free market system.
It really wasn't free market at all.
And so conservatives look at this as like, well, Pinochet's our hero.
Well, how can you ever portray somebody as a hero that is out torturing and murdering and raping innocent people?
And I say that a person that holds a communist view is an innocent person, Scott.
I mean, why aren't people free to have whatever view they want?
They're not initiating force against the state.
They're not rebelling.
They're not revolting or anything like this.
It's just their mindsets.
And that's what they were being killed for.
And that's what I've never been able to understand about conservatives is how they can portray a murderer, a rapist, a goon like this as a hero.
Well, you know, conservatives call the George W. Bush era free market capitalism, too, because that's what free market capitalism is to a conservative.
It's them collecting welfare checks from the national government.
Excellent point.
Excellent point.
Absolutely excellent point.
So they look at Chile and they're like, yeah, exactly.
That's how we do it.
And we call it freedom.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, they consider our current system to be free enterprise.
And that's why they're over there.
Thank God I'm an American because at least I know I'm free.
And let's praise the giant military industrial complex and the national security state for defending my freedom and stuff.
Yeah, Barack Obama, he's not all bad.
He's a bit like Pinochet.
We like him.
Right, right.
I mean, and you do see that with conservatives supporting a lot of what Obama does, not necessarily on his Obamacare, but certainly on his assassinations and his invasions and occupations and torture and indefinite incarceration and Guantanamo.
They love it.
Well, there's even an article at LewRockwell.com today reminding us that conservatives invented Obamacare in the first place.
This is Heritage Foundation care.
This is Newt Gingrich care.
The alternative to Hillary care.
Remember?
Yeah, the thing about conservatives, you know, is that they just want their own little status reform playing in.
They may object with Obama's particular one.
But yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if conservatives had come up with their own variation of Obamacare.
I mean, this is what conservatives do.
They believe in socialism.
They portray themselves as free enterprise.
And they argue over which reform of Medicare and Medicaid and interventionism should be adopted.
While we libertarians, we truly believe in free markets.
We'd get rid of Medicare and Medicaid and occupational licensure and regulation.
But we believe in freedom, and we stand for freedom, unlike conservatives.
Yeah, and freedom always takes the rap for their errors.
You know, they celebrate Alan Greenspan for a generation and call him the maestro when all he did was set us up for the world's worst fall.
Well, right, and they don't ever challenge the existence of the Fed itself.
You know, they'll say, oh, well, we put a free market guy like Alan Greenspan.
You know, Ayn Rand, Ecolite here, and that makes us free enterprise.
Well, that's nonsense.
Free enterprise is ditching the Federal Reserve and having a free market monetary system.
Well, even Jon Stewart on The Daily Show recognized that and was like, well, hey, Alan Greenspan, how come we don't have free market interest rates?
And Alan Greenspan just goes da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Because I'm better at it than the market is.
That's why, son.
Yeah, he's a free market central planner.
Yeah, there we go.
And really, really bad at it, apparently.
Hey, tell me real quick.
I saw that you wrote this great review of Mike Swanson's book, The Worst State.
And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about it.
I'm going to get cracking and start interviewing him next week on it.
I can't say enough great things about this book.
I mean, this is a fantastic book.
I've been studying the origins of the national security state for many years now.
I mean, I am very interested in how this system came into existence that we're living under.
And here's a guy that has written a fantastic book on the Cold War origins of this whole system we're living under.
The national security state, the military, the standing army, the military empire, the CIA, the NSA.
And it's a very readable book.
I got through it in three evenings.
It's not an academic tome.
It's oriented toward regular people, the educated layman.
And I can't think of a better summary of how we got to where we are today and the disastrous consequences in this book.
It is absolutely fantastic.
You know, as of right now, I'm only just barely into it.
I've had a lot of other stuff on my plate here.
But I got the feeling immediately like this could maybe be the one that makes this no longer the alternative view, but that makes this really the mainstream view in America.
You know where we went wrong was after World War II.
We never abolished the army, you know?
And just kind of get it straight.
And he goes into that, that in every war, and there's been plenty of wars, that we always demobilized.
And the exception was after World War II.
And he shows how this whole Cold War mentality got started.
The Truman Doctrine, another big document that remained classified from the American people for some 30 years.
NSC-68 and the role that that played in the growth of the national security state and the big armaments industry.
How we ended up with the whole thing today, the consequences.
I'm telling you, I mean, there's plenty of books out there that give this story, but they're very, you know, like five-inch thick.
And they've got tons of details.
This book is the best encapsulation of where we are and how we got here that I've come across.
Awesome.
Well, cool.
I'm sure he'll appreciate you saying that, too.
I already quoted you in your article for the commercial for the book.
He's been a sponsor of the show, Mike Swanson.
He runs wallstreetwindow.com.
And so we're running ads for the book on the show, too.
And I'm going to start interviewing him in pieces about it.
Of course, this is just, I think, the first in a series of books, too, just through the Kennedy years.
So we're just getting started with that.
That's The War State by Michael Swanson.
Thank you very much for your time, Jacob.
It's always great to talk to you.
Appreciate it.
Oh, my pleasure.
Thank you, Scott.
That's Jacob Hornberger, FFF.org.
See you all tomorrow.
Hey, Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State, the Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
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Get Why Peace down at the bookshop or Amazon.com.
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Hey everybody, Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Now, you know they publish great articles at fff.org every day, but their best stuff goes in The Future of Freedom.
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