10/04/13 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
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Enough of that.
First guest today is our friend Kelly Vlahos from the American conservative magazine and antiwar dot com.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Congratulations that you said three thousand interviews.
Yep.
That's fabulous.
Appreciate that.
That's wonderful.
You know, it's funny.
Once I got three thousand, I thought, you know, three is a pretty small number.
It should be more.
Hey, I'm still trying to get more than seven hundred and seventy eight connections on Twitter followers rather.
And it's like every single one I fight so hard for.
Well, you know, I lose as many as I gain.
I know.
I'm the same on Facebook, too.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the truth hurts.
That's what it is.
People don't like being told what's exactly right.
I know.
All right.
Anyway, so listen, let's talk about the cops executing this lady on the streets of D.C. yesterday.
And look, I know the cops shoot black people in Washington, D.C. all the time.
This was notable because it was in the white part of D.C., right?
Well, I'm I'm very I'm stymied by the whole thing, and it's very unsettling.
I mean, I can tell you what I know of the facts and I could tell you what I bet all all the questions that remain.
Well, first of all, let me let me tell the people you've got this blog entry at antiwar dot com slash blog.
D.C. shooting.
Shame on you.
New York Daily News.
So, first of all, you're right.
Let's start with the facts of the case the best you can rehearse them for us.
And then we'll get to the media criticism and the police criticism and the whatever other kind of criticism.
OK, well, we know for sure this is what we know for sure.
A woman driving a black Lexus, a black woman with a small child in the back had had gone down the wrong road.
A cordoned off area outside the White House and and hit smashed into a security barrier.
She had some sort of conversation with a plainclothes security agent.
A I guess it was a I don't know.
It was Secret Service.
She had some interaction with him.
She bangs the gas, hits him.
He goes over the hood of the car, rolls off.
A witness says that he popped up.
He was OK.
But at that point, she banged it in reverse, tried to turn around, in which all these other guards get involved and start shooting at her car.
She panics.
I mean, I'm trying not to be subjective here, but she bangs the car, turns around and then leads them on a chase.
There's a picture in The Post today of her car already riddled with bullet holes at that point.
She takes the car a couple of miles around and up to the one of the Senate office buildings in which there's varying degrees of blocked off roads there.
You don't know until you turn into them.
She apparently turned into one of those.
She couldn't go any further.
They had her blocked off.
What I heard on Fox just now, five minutes ago, was some indication that she never got out of the car.
There's pictures that Fox is showing on their channel right now of her windows all blown out to suggest that they just shot right into the car.
Miraculously, the small child that's in the backseat that they've determined it was her daughter was not her, and she was taken to social services.
So those are the facts as we know them.
Now, the police chief in D.C. says sort of cryptically that she knew it was no accident that this woman had hit the security barrier, but she doesn't give any detail.
So one would think that perhaps this woman, who was maybe in some sort of state we don't know, had turned down a wrong road outside that White House.
They're super, super sensitive.
There's tons of security there since 9-11.
She hit a security barrier.
The guard gets involved.
Maybe she was angry for some reason.
Maybe it sparked some sort of angry interaction.
She panicked and left.
We don't know.
But the suggestion in the media that there was a crazed woman that somehow was attacking the White House, was ramming the barriers trying to get in, I believe is very irresponsible and, as far as we know now, not truthful.
And that's why I wrote that blog post, because I find that in this rush to make, to sort of like fulfill this Washington under siege narrative that the media has fallen into the cop's first instinct or the first storyline that they're putting out there, that there was immensely a woman on the loose in Washington yesterday.
Yeah, I mean, to me, that's the first lesson of this thing, is what tiny cowards the Congress is.
Where they all stood up and cheered for this thing because, as you can just tell, their imagination is running wild.
Oh, I heard that the cops protected us from something.
Well, that something must have been really, really dangerous.
Well, yeah.
And I'm going to give, and I hate to do this, but I'll give the cops the benefit of the doubt.
I mean, the members of Congress, the benefit of the doubt.
They're held up in lockdown in the Capitol or their office buildings, whatever, under some idea or some fear that there is a terrorist attack outside, because they don't know any different.
And then they hear that the suspect has been put down.
They're probably imagining some real bad guy who was about to bomb them has been taken out by the cops, and they immediately start applauding.
I'm not saying that that was a good reaction or not.
I hate to think that they were clapping because a 34-year-old black woman with a child in the backseat got shot, killed, dead.
But the fear in this town is palpable, and rumors fly.
And that's the thing.
It's not that there are real threats.
It's that their consciences are that guilty.
They know that, well, geez, if fair was fair, we would all be in a world of hurt.
Somebody be coming for us.
Well, and think of it, Scott.
You spend like 70 percent of your time on Capitol Hill preparing for the next terrorist attack, the next war, and you're constantly funding money for a war that's either not happening or has already ended or could happen.
And then the other percent of the time you're holding hearings about Al-Shabaab and their threat to Americans and homegrown threats and lone gunmen and lone wolf threats, and security and cameras.
And so it's almost like, what do you call it, wish fulfillment.
When something like this happens, you immediately go, well, it's happening for real now.
Everybody duck, cover, shelter in place a week or two right after what happened at the Navy yard.
Shelter in place, shelter in place.
People, you know, honestly, if I had been on the Hill yesterday, I literally got on the Metro a few moments before this happened.
But if I had been at the Capitol a few more minutes later, I would have been scared.
I mean, I would have immediately thought of the Navy yard and ducked for cover.
So, I mean, I can understand that.
I guess, see, I don't live in D.C.
I live here where whenever I hear something like this, I assume it's just that the cops are killing somebody and then they're making up an excuse about what a giant, terrible danger the person was that they felt like killing.
Which is how, I mean, on my Facebook feed, this is all I get every day.
Where every local news story of a cop, masker, and somebody, or, you know, blowing someone away for no good reason becomes a national news story on my Facebook feed.
All day, every day.
You know?
So that's always my assumption is they're just killing somebody and then they're crying, oh, boo-hoo, I had to do it, because that's what they always cry.
Well, you know, and I'm concerned that this narrative coming out that this woman was mentally disturbed is going to take precedence over any demands for questions about the actual details.
So, I've been watching on and off, you know, cable news, unfortunately, all morning.
And, you know, MSNBC already is, you know, they've been interviewing all these so-called, you know, crime experts who are going on there assuming this woman had a mental illness.
And they're doing these long segments about mental illness and how it leads to, you know, would-be presidential assassination.
Oh, God.
And so, it's already forming in our minds.
But meanwhile, all the evidence, as you, at least the way I understand it, too, and as you rehearsed it for us here, all the evidence is that this lady accidentally made a wrong turn.
She was confronted by a plainclothes officer who freaked out on her in full Nazi drill sergeant mode.
And so, she panicked and backed up or tried to turn around.
You know, when I watched a clip of this yesterday on LiveLeak of her being chased around and whatever, when the clip was over, LiveLeak suggested that three or four more videos of woman driver, you know, being terrible.
And I just thought, you know, that's the LiveLeak algorithm or whatever.
It makes perfect sense.
Like, you know what?
There are men who are bad drivers, too.
But I think this started out as a bad case of woman driver, which the cops then escalated, where, as you said, when she's pulling away from the initial incident, the pictures in the Washington Post show they were already shooting at her.
And then now, oh, stop resisting, stop resisting, when they're shooting at her and her car with a baby in it.
So then, everything from that point on is her frantically trying to get away from these killers, these insane madmen and their firearms, which are going off.
I mean, damn.
There's no evidence to the contrary.
We don't know anything right now.
And I try to make that clear in my post, because who knows what's going to come out ten minutes from now.
Yeah, sure, but they're willing to speculate all they want, assuming some guilt on her part, when clearly, well, so far, all indications are she simply made a wrong turn, and then they completely freaked out on her, and she completely freaked out in response, right?
Yeah.
You know what?
And I have to say this.
After 9-11, you know, and I'm sure you felt the same, you know, wherever you are, especially in places like New York and Washington, you know, the police are a lot less patient with people.
And if you take a wrong turn or you say the right thing or you cross the street at the wrong time, they're very aggressive and very gruff.
I've had similar, not serious encounters, but where I felt like if I had just stepped one foot in the wrong direction or said the wrong thing at that very moment, that I might be turned around and had handcuffs on me.
I am very careful how I tread around the police in Washington, D.C., because they, after 9-11, there's a sense of fear, and there's a sense of, you know, everyone is a criminal until proven innocent.
And, you know, you don't fool around with that.
And so I would not be surprised if somebody, a tourist, an out-of-towner comes in and they go down a wrong road.
There are so many wrong ways and closed-off roads in that area around the White House that, I mean, you have to tread lightly.
And if you're already, you know, maybe she was in a state.
We don't know why she was even there.
Her family didn't even know she went to Washington.
So if she was already in a sensitive, maybe agitated state, and then some guy, like you said, starts banging on her car and screaming at her, and she might have had a bad reaction, that sets off.
And you read it all the time.
You said you get these feeds about cops killing people.
It sets out a reaction that you can't stop.
And clearly this one didn't only stop when she was dead.
Well, and the thing is, too, I guess I'm just old enough now to remember the discrepancy between at least the theory that a cop's job is to protect the rights of the suspect on the theory that if they're really guilty, for doing something so bad that you would have to arrest them for it.
And then the cop's job is actually simply protecting the rights of the accused until they can get their fair trial.
That's why we keep them in a cage is to keep everybody else away kind of thing.
And maybe that's sort of mythical.
But at least the theory being that these public servants, their job is protecting the rights of the accused and having a minimal approach to force.
Only as much as is absolutely necessary.
And yet it's in my lifetime that the big change came, starting with Waco.
And it's really the Colin Powell doctrine, which is you win your war within a week.
You shock and awe and you bomb all of their ports and their airports and their water and their food and their command and control and their palaces and their everything.
And you win the war.
You don't get bogged down into a Vietnam.
You blast the hell out of them and win fast.
Overwhelming force where they dare not even try to resist.
And they take that same Powell doctrine and they use it for every SWAT raid now.
And every warrant is a SWAT raid now.
And, of course, it's the same thing for enforcing traffic laws in Washington, D.C., right?
The assumption is not, hey, this confused lady needs a helping hand.
It's, now's my chance to act like a screaming Nazi drill sergeant and force someone to obey me.
Because that's their whole attitude.
That overwhelming force and intimidation is their entire attitude from beginning to end.
And then, lo and behold, they're shocked when it doesn't work.
And they end up killing the lady and then call themselves heroes.
I mean, that's the quote in the Washington Post.
All these cops acted heroically for shooting this woman in front of her tiny child.
Well, you know, one of the best examples that I like to give, and it's somewhat humorous, is last year I went to a Christmas play with my daughter's first grade class, the majority of which are little girls.
And there was, like, three, you know, suburban mom vans and a convoy with all these little girls.
And we were on a campus at a university here.
And we took a wrong turn.
And all of a sudden, this campus police officer comes out of nowhere yelling at us, like we were about to storm the gate and wreak havoc all over this campus.
You can imagine.
Three, you know, vans filled with women and children.
And this guy comes out blazing.
And we're like, dude, we just don't know where to park.
Yeah, well, and you're lucky he didn't kill anybody.
I know.
Seriously.
It's a culture.
You have just described a militarized culture of the police in the United States.
And it trickles all the way down to your local Mayberry police department and your campus police department, especially the campus police department, because, as you remember, the pepper spray incident of a couple years ago where they just, you know, the overactive steroidal cops on campus who wish to be in a New York City police department but never made the cut are like terrorizing college students.
Well, and they know there's no accountability, so they can do whatever they want.
I mean, that guy got fired just because he became globally famous or whatever.
But for most of them, you kill somebody and unarm somebody, shoot them in the back even.
You get two weeks paid vacation and then probably a promotion after that, you know?
Well, you know, and the sad thing is...
They're all saying he's a jolly good fellow.
Yeah, and the sad thing is that, you know, like you said, that you get these feeds every day about this.
And I follow this website, copblock.com, and they constantly feed all of the incidents daily of police brutality and shootings.
And the majority of Americans don't pay attention.
You know, they put their head down.
They say, you know, if I'm doing everything right and I'm not committing any crime, I have nothing to worry about, you know?
But, you know, it's getting to the point where everybody knows somebody who came up on the wrong side of a police officer at some point in the last few years.
Yeah.
Well, I know a guy who, you know, years ago now had the full-scale, you know, ninja armor machine gun SWAT raid over a little bit of pot at his house.
And this guy still has nightmares and is, you know, PTSD or whatever.
I mean, it's really bad, right?
They're screaming and cussing.
And I couldn't, you know, recreate it on the radio the way they screamed or whatever without blowing your ears out.
But they terrorize the hell out of this guy over just, you know.
And this goes on as Balco, Radley Balco, has documented.
This goes on 200 times a day in America.
There's a SWAT raid like this.
So, you know, you can imagine the losers on the D.C., you know, park police, traffic cops or whatever standing around wishing they were SWAT soldiers.
You know, now's their chance when a lady makes a wrong turn.
They get to act like a hero now, too.
Look at how heroic we are executing this woman.
Yeah.
And I, you know what, Scott?
You know what, Scott?
I get it.
I get it if the first thing they thought of was, you know, oh, my goodness, this is a woman or this is a driver that's about to try to cream in with a trunk full of explosives.
It happens.
You know, and it's in their minds.
It's why they have those barriers up in the first place.
And after what happened at the Navy Yard, yeah, I'm sure that was in their minds, too.
But then there's the other question.
Why didn't they blow out her tires?
Why did they have to shoot inside the car like that?
Why didn't they wait for her to get out and then clearly see that she was unarmed?
Why didn't they call the bomb squad to clear out and make sure her trunk was okay to open when they were searching it?
I saw pictures of just plain clothes cops standing around.
They weren't afraid of her car, that it might have been a bomb.
Certainly not after they were done killing her.
I guess at least at that point they realized that this is just some lady.
Yeah.
You know?
We don't know.
Maybe she did go down there to have a chat with the president.
We don't know yet.
We don't know yet.
My beef is this narrative that's being created that she was a mentally ill woman out to attack the White House.
It's bothersome to me because it shrouds the pursuit of the truth in this case.
Right.
Well, as always, officials say instead of officials claim.
You know?
And so then the theory is that it must be right.
Oh, yeah, because there's a story on NBC News this morning that officials, law enforcement sources say, that she thought Obama was stalking her.
Now, why haven't I seen that anywhere else on the news?
I mean, even Fox wasn't reporting that this morning.
So what it's telling me is somebody was floating something around.
Now, whether and until I could see some proof of that, I'm thinking that was just part of a maybe part of some cover story.
And who are these law enforcement sources?
Anyway, you know what?
Yeah, the media operates on this sort of like real time.
I got to get the scoop.
I got to put it up on Twitter.
I got to put it up.
You know, I got to get it out there on the graphic on MSNBC or Fox immediately and then check the facts later.
Right.
And got to always take the state side, no matter what, ever.
Yeah.
Sources say.
Sources say.
I mean, it happened with the Boston bombing as well.
All right.
Now, we really spent too much time on this one.
I want to let you talk about the prescription drug story and at least, you know, give it a good recommendation for.
Well, we still got eight minutes, seven and a half minutes or so for you to talk about the story in the American conservative magazines called the military's prescription drug addiction.
This is a really important story here, Kelly.
Yeah.
And it's a real sad one, too.
And, you know, I had been watching this since about 2009, 2010 when the first story started coming out that indicated that a large percentage.
And I think at the time it was like one in six of active duty troops, many of them deployed, were on some psychotropic, you know, prescription drug for whether it be, you know, sleeplessness because of nightmares, depression, you know.
So they're, you know, depression, antipsychotics, bipolar.
So one in six.
Now, they're active duty.
And now we're getting a sense that they come home, they continue to be medicated.
We have a veteran's population that's heavily medicated whether it be, you know, a lot of these guys come home and they have both PTSD.
They might also have traumatic brain injury.
They might also have some other sort of chronic pain, bad back or whatever.
They go to the VA and they're given like a handful of pills, not even a handful.
I've heard of some cases where some guys are on 20 to 40 pills a day.
So they come home and they're addicted to prescription medication.
And so there's two issues stemming from that that I write about.
One are the suicides.
We know that the suicide rate has spiked among active duty as well as veterans.
Now, our first inclination is that these guys have PTSD from combat.
But more and more evidence is coming out that half of these guys never even saw combat.
But most of them are suffering from some sort of mental problem.
So the assumption is that most of these guys or a good percentage of them were on some sort of medication when they committed suicide.
So there's questions being raised now about the level of prescriptions they are, the kind of prescriptions, because we know that some antidepressants have, you know, been fingered for having side effects of suicidal thoughts and aggression and anger.
And so there's some question about whether that's causing these suicides.
There's a question about whether the other branch of my story are the untimely accidental deaths that are occurring both in the military and among veterans who are on these medications.
There's one medication, Teraquel, that is an antipsychotic that the military has been prescribing for sleeplessness, even though the FDA has only approved it for bipolar and schizophrenia.
So they, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of these guys were, I think it was 52,000 prescriptions in 2011 alone, were prescribed this very powerful antipsychotic for sleeplessness.
And I guess it was working because when they came home, the VA started, you know, prescribing it.
And so this has been known to cause cardiac arrest.
So you have a number, and the total number is elusive because the VA and the DOD are not free and easy with their numbers.
But an alarming number of these veterans and active-duty guys have been dying in their sleep.
It turns out they're on a cocktail of these drugs, and Teraquel is just one that's being blamed for it.
So it's a really important issue that we need to keep our eye on because it's affecting an entire generation of veterans who, you know, have flooded these VAs.
Many of them have multi-injuries, multi-wounds, head and body.
And the first instinct is to put them on pills.
And so this affects everybody.
It affects the taxpayer.
It affects our communities.
It affects our families.
They're calling it a crisis.
So I'm trying to keep on it because it's one of those stories that, you know, could kind of slip under the radar unless you're paying attention.
So I'm happy that you took a look at it on The American Conservative.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's a really important story.
And, you know, some of the statistics that you just cited there and elaborate on in the article are really mind-blowing.
Yeah.
And, of course, it makes perfect sense, right, if you had decided to sit around and predict this seven years ago or something like this, this is what you would have come up with.
Well, so what's the government to do when a bunch of guys come home and at least they're nervous wrecks or, you know, if they're not, they got one problem or another, anxiety or depression or guilt or post-traumatic stress or whatever, whatever, whatever.
What's the government going to do about that?
Here, eat this pill.
Of course, you know, what are they going to do?
Get them the cutting edge of talk therapy or whatever, you know, that's come up with.
And, you know, notably you have in your article, you know, people actually involved not in making the big paperwork decisions at the top, but actually involved in delivering the care to the patients.
You know what?
A lot of these guys don't need pills, especially a lot of them are very active guys.
They're athletic types and they want to go out hiking and whatever and you want to drug them into a stupor.
They're not going to even take the pills.
So they're going to go on with their problem as it is when what they really need is to talk with somebody about their feelings about what happened there.
This is one of the things that David Finkel was talking about on the Colbert report last night was that years later, these guys look back at some of the things that they did and who they were, how they acted, the attitudes that they had while they were in combat and they can't get their head around.
They can't reconcile how evil they became, basically kicking in people's doors, doing the job that Rumsfeld sent them on out there with who they really are, who they were before and who they are again now.
And that's part of what causes such problems.
But you can kind of work that out.
You don't have to eat your old service revolver over it.
You know what I mean?
Or your old gun, a pistol over it.
You can maybe get through it.
But if they just give you depressants, as you were saying, some of these guys are just dying in their sleep of the depressants that they're given to calm their anxiety.
It's a travesty is what it is.
It's just what you would have predicted.
They're heavily doped up and a lot of them don't want to be and that's why they're pursuing alternative medicine.
I mean it's a big problem and I want to write more about it.
Please do, Kelly.
And everyone, please go look at this great article at theamericanconservative.com.
Theamericanconservative.com.
The Military's Prescription Drug Addiction.
I really appreciate your time today.
Thank you.
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