01/21/10 – Rep. Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio, and I'm happy to welcome our next guest, it's Dr. Ron Paul, representative from District 14 down there on Texas' Gulf Coast, and the only decent congressman in American history, and of course you all know him from the run for president in 2007 and 8.
Welcome back to the show, Ron, how are you doing?
Thank you, doing well.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Good.
All right, so most important thing here to start with, I think, is a story in Harper's Magazine by the other Scott Horton, renowned international human rights lawyer and anti-torture hero, about three men who quite apparently were murdered on the night of June 9, 2006, and apparently there's a massive cover-up involving the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, the Justice Department, the FBI, and perhaps even parts of the Congress in trying to kill this story, and I just wonder whether there's anything that you can do about this.
As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, would you have any jurisdiction to hold some kind of hearings or do anything to further investigate this?
Well, it's probably judiciary, I don't think they would touch it, probably even the committees that are responsible, they're not likely to touch it, but it's just another tragedy.
There are so many of those tragedies around, so I'm not predicting that much will happen, but I know international relations wouldn't touch it.
And I mean, how troubling is that?
Did you have a chance to read the article?
You know, I read it, it was a rather long article, I did not get the whole thing read, but I just got the gist of it, it just got me so upset, you know, because of just, you know, another cover-up, another atrocious act by our government, so it's a real shame.
Well, and you know, I learned when I was a kid that what brought Nixon down wasn't the crime, it was the cover-up, that that's really the big deal in Washington, D.C., is, you know, a few CIA agents torture a guy to death, we're used to that, that happens all the time, but the problem here is the FBI and the Justice Department and all these other people making sure that the investigation doesn't go anywhere.
Yeah, you know, and I think that principle must be the same thing that helped me on getting the audit of the Fed bill along, because we were often talking about transparency, we weren't talking about exactly what the Fed was doing, but it's the transparency, the hidden activities that they have, or the cover-ups.
So I think good people, left or right or center, always say, you know, that's wrong, you know, that is wrong, the cover-up is bad, and the hiding, the hiding of government is so bad.
I've always argued that we have things turned upside down here.
If the government is to have a function, they ought to be protecting and guaranteeing our privacy.
But what do they do?
They protect their secrecy, and they go and they do tricks like this to hide what they do, at the same time they undermine our privacy.
So I think our government is absolutely on the wrong track.
Well now, if you were the president after September 11th, how would you have set this up?
Because it seems like now that Obama has come into power, not too much has changed.
They say they're going to give trials to some of these men, but then they say, well, if they're acquitted, we'll go ahead and hold them anyway, and some of these people are going to get military trials, others aren't going to get trials at all, they'll just be held by the military indefinitely.
So I'm not sure how much of a change Obama's making to the Bush policy, but what should be done with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the rest of these guys?
Just put them on trial in New York, Dr. Paul?
Well, you know, long-term, what you have to change is the foreign policy so we get ourselves out of this business, but yes, I would try them in our courts.
You know, the individuals that committed the bombing, I believe it was 1993, they were arrested, brought to trial, they committed a crime in this country, and they're in prison for life.
I mean, what is so horrible about that?
I mean, it's this whole idea of secret rendition and secret prisons and torture, the assumption that if somebody declares you an enemy combatant, one individual, that that is equal to being a terrorist.
You know, they're suspects, but that means you can be tried by one individual and held you know, forever, and American citizens are subject to that as well if you're declared an enemy combatant, and I think the conditions are just horrible if we have a breakdown of law and order here, if our economy, you know, really tanks and there's more violence, you can see where they could declare martial law and start holding people like this.
So I think these are key issues, although for the average guy on the street, this is rather esoteric.
You know, oh, well, they haven't come after me, this sort of thing, and they pass it off, but I think what they're doing is setting the precedent for being able to handle domestic violence here because, you know, what happens if they get careless with the definition of enemy combatant?
You know, almost anybody who talks sympathetically or even not sympathetically, but just trying to explain the situation, and it sounds like, oh, you're one of those guys that blame America first, and you could be declared an enemy combatant, so I consider it very dangerous.
Well, in fact, at least in one case, Jose Padilla was arrested on American soil by FBI agents and then ended up being turned over to the military and the CIA to be tortured, and in fact, the FBI agent who arrested him said he didn't think he was dangerous.
He was trying to flip him and make him an informant, and because he wouldn't go along with becoming an informant, that was why they declared him an enemy combatant.
Yeah, and then they beat him to death, and they, you know, they might not have any information, and they pretend they know information just to stop the beating, and, you know, it just goes on and on, and how many people have been arrested, you know, picked up over these foreign countries just because they've been squealed on by somebody else?
We pay them money to turn somebody over, then we assume, oh, yeah, they said he was a bad guy, oh, he's an enemy combatant, so we throw him in prison.
I think there are examples of teenagers being put down in Guantanamo, like 14 and 15 years old, and they've still been there, so yes, they should be, I mean, something has to be done.
The whole process has to change, but to change the whole process, you have to change the foreign policy.
You have to release the ones you have absolutely no evidence on and try the rest, and it will, you know, there will always be one example of one guy got out, you know, and committed another crime, but once again, what should you do, endorse a system where they can arrest 100 people, and one guy might know something, and you torture all 100 because there's some vital information in there?
I mean, what if we turn ourselves into...it's just really, really a dangerous situation.
Well, and this goes to my next topic here, which is your really great interview on The Rachel Maddow Show, I guess about two weeks ago now, and one of the things that she said to you there was, from her position, of course, being a liberal progressive, she has an interest in faction fights on the right and that kind of thing, but still, I think there was a lot of truth when she said that the Republican Party has a severe lack of intellectual leadership here and it's really come down to you on one side and Dick Cheney on the other as far as who's leading the philosophy of the Republican Party, and like you, I kind of have a problem with that, I'm sure you kind of have a problem with that, you didn't just run for president and give all those great speeches about liberty and you don't go on all these TV shows and teach people about Austrian economics and all the peacemongering you do and the rest of this in order that all your Ron Paulian fans might all line up and vote for the Republican Party, right?
No, I, matter of fact, it came up yesterday on CNN, Rick Sanchez's show, he was asking me about that, and I'm essentially, you know, I'm totally uninterested in parties, libertarians get upset with me because I'm not interested in setting my goal as building the Libertarian Party, but it certainly isn't the goal of mine to build the Republican Party, I live in a real world and the real world is if you want a political soapbox, you have to participate in one of the two parties, but I have no criticism about people doing it other ways, but the last thing I'm interested in is, you know, promoting a party, but it is true that I want to influence the party, but I've frequently said, you probably have heard me say that if we have a true revolution, the revolution is pervasive and it affects both parties, and I referred to the old statement of Nixon back in the 70s when he declared we were all Keynesians now, which means that the Keynesian revolution infiltrated both parties and Norman Thomas said he didn't run the last time for president as a socialist because the major parties have accepted their platform, so if we are successful in promoting once again the cause of liberty, it's not going to be a single party, it's not going to be the Libertarian Party or the Republican Party, it will be in acceptance by the majority of the American people and say, yeah, they bankrupt us, they ruin us, they can't help us and they fight too many wars and we only want people in Washington that will fight for those values, Republican or Democrat, and certainly on economic terms, we would want to have both sides have an understanding of Austrian free market economics.
Well, you know, on the Cheney side of that debate, the National Review published a thing by Andrew McCarthy the other day saying that the reason this guy Brown won in Massachusetts was because the American people know that we have to torture people and this is what the American people demand and so this is the, it's, you know, never mind because I agree with you and I'm completely uninterested in the party politics and that kind of thing as well, but in terms of the philosophical debate, this is a major rift on the right, whether we're warmongers and torture mongers or peacemongers and constitution mongers, if it's fair to call the Libertarian movement part of the right at all, which I think is actually questionable.
But, you know, still in spite of all the shortcomings and the problems we've had over the last several decades, the individual of the top two, because they always figure we don't want to waste our vote for anybody else, so we have to pick one of the top two, of the top two, the one that offers the strongest case for peace usually wins.
Bush represented that, you know, that position because he was critical of Clinton's, all his activities.
And then Obama, of course, criticized Bush and McCain for this.
So the people seem to lean in our directions for this issue as well as, you know, back when Nixon was elected, he was supposed to stop, you know, the Vietnam War.
But the problem is, is the people might lean in that direction, and then we put somebody in and nothing changes, but right now, the people are catching on.
And I think that's why not only are they catching on that you can't trust the politicians, but they're also aware of the fact that the economic system is so friable and the jobs are disappearing that the status quo cannot be maintained.
Well, and you know, this is not a banana republic, not completely yet anyway, and it is possible, and we've seen examples of the American people actually getting their way on some things when they really demand it.
And I'm thinking of a great article I read at Glenn Greenwald's blog, I guess about a month back or so, maybe a little more than that, where he talked about how the reason that your audit the Fed bill with Alan Grayson was able to get out of committee was because liberal bloggers had, I mean, obviously, you'd already gotten all the Republicans in Congress on board.
They're in the minority.
They're not risking much.
But liberal bloggers had set up a campaign over there at Fire Dog Lake, which is one of the prominent liberal blogs there, where they said, look, here's all their names and here's all their phone numbers, call your Democrats and tell them that you support this.
And that apparently Alan Grayson actually, I don't know, had printouts or something and showed these other Democratic politicians, look, it's safe.
Your base is telling you, please do this.
And so it was this coalition of us versus them rather than left versus right that really came together to be able to get that audit the Fed bill out of committee and then eventually attached to a bill that passed.
And I wonder whether you think that we can follow that model in really bringing together a left right, us versus them coalition to defund these wars.
Isn't that the next step?
You know, let's hope so.
But immediately after Obama was in our left right coalition against the war, there were a few Republicans with a bunch of Democrats.
As soon as it was Obama's war, most of them faded, except for a person like Dennis Kucinich and a few others and Jim McGovern.
They stuck with us.
But the Democrats are just like the Republicans.
They have this obedience to the king and they have to abide and they won't buck them.
And I think the example you described there is relatively close to the truth because the person that introduced my bill over in the Senate was Bernie Sanders, and he called himself a progressive socialist.
And yet another person, and Grayson would be in that camp too.
But if you look at all the Republicans or the Democratic supporters of the bill, there were a lot who were in swing districts and they were first and second-termers, and they were worried about re-election, and they were influenced by the people back at home.
And I don't wanna diminish this idea of a right to left coalition on some of these issues because that's what I work for all the time.
But it's not like some of these Democrats that are in and they're called conservatives.
We can still call that a coalition.
But it is true that people like Grayson and Bernie Sanders are certainly very solidly in that camp.
Well, and, you know, speaking of the wars here, we have an occupation of Iraq, a state which we'll be talking with Michael Hastings later in the show about how the so-called success of the surge is all unraveling in front of us.
We have an escalation in Afghanistan, the CIA bombing in Pakistan, and now, to some degree or another, we have the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA at work in Yemen and in Somalia, major calls from movie stars and other important people calling for the spreading of the war into Sunni Arab Darfur in Sudan.
Something's gotta be done to put an end to this or we're gonna be in real big trouble here.
This is too many fronts for even America to fight on.
Wouldn't you agree, Dr. Paul?
Yes, but we're not going to wise up.
I mean, you'd think with this election that just happened up in Massachusetts that all of a sudden there'd be, you know, maybe backing off from spending bills.
They're not going to do it.
But that doesn't mean it's not gonna end.
I just don't believe it's gonna end by us coming to our senses, from my experience here.
But it's going to end with the economic crisis.
Right now, we're in an economic financial crisis, but we're not in a dollar crisis.
We're still printing money and the world's still taking our dollars, but one of these days they're gonna quit.
I just came up with a figure today that we have to borrow or to roll over and borrow new money of $67 billion every week this fiscal year.
And one of these days, one of those auctions won't go so well.
And that's when, if there's a panic, that's when the empire falls apart.
That's what happened to the Soviets.
It was as much of an economic issue as anything.
They just run out of steam.
And I think that is what's gonna happen to us, and it can't be all that bad.
Well, and so I guess what you're referring to there is that there's so much debt that they'll just have to print money to pay it down, and then our $50 bills will be like nickels in our pocket.
Is that it?
Well, that gets liquidated, but only because they pay off the debt with money that has no value, and you have runaway inflation.
And I think that is what's coming.
You just can't keep printing money like this.
As the productivity goes down, the good jobs are leaving us, unemployment rates stay up, and even those who claim there's a recovery say, well, this is a jobless recovery.
What kind of recovery is that if somebody can't get a job?
Are they supposed to feel better because there's a recovery going on, and they're unable to feed their family?
Well, I guess it's a recovery for people with lots of stock.
Or Goldman Sachs.
Yeah.
They had a good recovery.
Their bonus was gigantic, and their profits are huge today.
Right, yeah, I just saw a line graph above that where their bonuses are more than ever before.
I guess it's okay for rich people to be on the dole, just not poor people.
And the people who were fiscally prudent are the ones who will be taxed one way or the other to take care of the people who got the bailout.
All right, well, now, to stick with the terror war concept here for a minute, there was a video of you from a speech that you gave, I guess over the weekend, that's gone kind of viral, where you talk about the CIA and their war in Pakistan.
And you, I think, really go so far as to say that the CIA runs American foreign policy basically from top to bottom, and I wondered exactly what you were talking about.
If you meant something that's happened just in the Obama administration, that the CIA has risen in power compared to the Pentagon, or whether you're just talking about the national security state in general since World War II, or what exactly did you mean there?
More general, what's been happening and increasing, and they're in the driver's seat.
And I'm doing a little more writing on this issue, I'm working on another book, and I was doing some reviewing of the CIA, and it was on my mind, and when I was giving my speeches, I generally don't have notes or anything, and I was just really talking about the issues that I thought were important, and that came up, and I came out with a rather strong statement against the CIA, and the real shocker...
You said, take them out, which is what they call killing people.
Yeah, and of course everybody knows that I'm non-violent, and I want to take somebody out by denying them all their funds and revealing what they're doing, like remove them from office.
So, but the surprise to me, to me it wasn't a surprise that those were my views, because they've been my views all along, it wasn't anything brand new, but my shocker was, it drew the loudest applause.
I mean, they stood up, and I thought, wow, somebody else has been thinking about the FBI and the CIA and all these security agencies a lot more than I have, I've never anticipated that type of reaction, but it got some people's attention.
The Fox News guys would say, well, that's just not realistic, you want the American government to be blind to everything that's going on in the world?
Well, we're acting blindly now, we spend $75 billion on 16 agencies, then they get a hot lead by the phone call of a father, and they can't handle it.
I mean, that's blindness, so I think we become blind because there are too many trees and we can't even see anything when it's laid on a platter, so I think that's the real problem.
No, I believe in intelligence gathering, I think good common sense, and just reading the news and talking to people and looking at people who want to give you information is a good way to go.
But all that money spent, the $75 billion is spent to try to compensate for the anger we create by a flawed foreign policy.
You could spend $150 billion if your foreign policy is flawed and invites this type of hatred toward us, that money's not going to save us, it just won't work.
The more money you spend and the more agencies you have, the more complex it gets, and the more information is lost.
And I think that is a lot of what happened after 9-11, or for the 9-11 is, they probably had a ton of information in there.
Some people believe it was deliberately ignored, but it's easy for me to understand how they could have so much information in so many agencies, the government is just so inept, so I think it's not serving us well.
I don't think the CIA is necessary, I think they are a culprit, I think they're the ones involved in the bombing right now, I think they're involved with torture and rendition and assassinations, rigging of elections, and there's no reason for us to have an organization like that in a free society.
But then again, you still could have collection of information by people who claim they're your enemies and deal with it, and I think you'd probably have every bit as much information and maybe be able to react more sensibly with it, but nothing will improve our chances of avoiding these crises unless we change foreign policy.
This is Anti-War Radio, I'm talking with Dr. Ron Paul, Republican Congressman from the Gulf Coast of Texas, and I'm always impressed, Dr. Paul, by the fact that, well, when you're on these cable news shows, regardless of what they ask you, you really know all about it, you don't just have a talking point to go over, you really know all about it.
When they ask you about Iran, you can explain to them, and sometimes I wish Peter Schiff was watching, when you explain that the Iranians, at least as far as anyone knows, are not even making nuclear weapons.
The entire basis, the entire premise of our policy of confrontation against them, could you please explain to the people what it is that you know about Iran?
I see here at original.antiwar.com, slash Paul, your last article that we published here is called, Iran's Sanctions are Precursor to War.
So this is not just an academic issue, this is something very important.
Well, if we go by our CIA, the CIA, you know, in their reports have never, they said they haven't been working on, they have no evidence they worked on a bomb since 2003.
That doesn't mean that I believe that they don't have a secret desire or incentive, but we don't have any evidence.
And what we do is we violate the NPT by telling them they're not allowed to have any enrichment, but here they're permitted under the NPT to enrich, you know, for peaceful purposes and for nuclear energy, but we violate it by saying you can't even do that.
So we are the violators of international law, and then we close, you know, we close our eyes to other countries, there are other countries in that region that don't belong to the international community for nuclear power and nuclear bombs, and, you know, Israel and Pakistan and India, they all have them, and we cozy up to them, and they become our allies, and we give them, actually give money.
It's the fact that we can't control a few independent thugs, and that makes us furious, so therefore then we have to concoct these stories that they're going to have nuclear weapons.
I think, see, I was in the service during the Cold War, Soviets had like 30,000 nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting us if they really wanted to, and we dealt with them, we talked to them, we remained strong, and we won that by, you know, without a nuclear war, but here we have these third world countries, they don't have an army or navy or air force or intercontinental ballistics and no nuclear weapons, and we're generating all this hysteria, but it serves the interest of the military-industrial complex, it serves the interest of saying that, you know, our national security requires it, we have to invade another country, and that hopefully someday will change, the only thing I can tell you as an encouragement is when I go to the college campuses, they don't boo me for those kind of statements as they did at the Republican debates.
Well, you know, I read an interesting quote the other day from Dick Cheney, former Vice President, only this is when he was the CEO of Halliburton, and he had taken a trip to Australia in 1998, and he was criticizing Bill Clinton's administration and all the sanctions on Iran, and was saying, I think we could do a lot better if we were to expand and grow these relationships so that we can end up normalizing our relations and doing business.
Isn't that strange, that Dick Cheney would be the one to sound like you, saying something like that?
Well, I guess they have to pretend there's partisanship, and they fight and fume, and there is a partisanship over who controls the power, but ultimately the policies don't ever seem to change.
But it seems like, you know, Halliburton actually really just preferred to make money doing business with Iran, rather than waiting and, you know, just making all their money off the Iraq war like they were going to do with Iran.
Yeah, now I'm sure they're lining up for some contracts at present.
They did get some contracts in the invasion process and the contractor monies that were spent over there.
All right, now, I just saw a YouTube of you introducing legislation to legalize competing currencies, and this is sort of your other way around, rather than just outright repealing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
This is how to make the Federal Reserve obsolete, isn't it?
That's right.
And I've always tried to figure out a transition.
Some people say, no, you just close the doors and bomb them and open it up, but you ought to have a transition.
Like, for instance, in post offices, you have FedEx and UPS, and hopefully they're allowed to deliver first-class mail someday.
You don't have to close the post office down in one day.
Fortunately, we still have competition in schooling.
You can still homeschool in private school, so that helps neutralize a little bit, you know, the public school system.
So in medicine, if they would just, you know, legalize a private option is what I would like, where you could just get out of the system and get all your, you know, get a tax credit for everything you spend.
That would be a private option.
But then in money, you can have a competing currency.
Hayek actually wrote about this, and it's not so extreme.
It's just legalizing a constitution because it was never repealed that a gold and silver had to be legal tender.
So you have to repeal the legal tender laws so that the Fed does not have a monopoly.
You should legalize the right of a private company to mint a gold coin.
They would be held in check by the fraud laws and the counterfeit laws.
Today, there are no fraud and counterfeit laws that apply to the Federal Reserve.
And then the last thing you would have to do is make sure you have no taxes on money.
You don't tax dollars when you buy dollars or pay capital gains tax because the value of the dollar goes up.
If gold goes up in value, you pay sales tax when you buy a coin, and then you pay a capital gains tax when you spend the coin, it would be ridiculous.
It can't be money.
So you'd have to do these three things to allow people to use a currency different than the paper money.
Well, some opponent of yours on MSNBC would say, yeah, but that would be inflationary to have every bank and every private company introducing their own currency.
No, I didn't say that.
No, I'm saying that that's what they would say to you.
Yeah, I would say that they misunderstand because all I'm doing is legalizing the Constitution that says gold and silver can be legal tender.
I'm not doing anything else.
So it wouldn't be inflationary unless you could turn lead into gold.
Yeah, that's it.
There would be no inflation and the value of the gold currency goes up as the value of the paper currency goes down.
So no, and sometimes the populace who are sympathetic with what I say like the idea of everybody printing their own money, you know, even the states, but that's prohibited.
They're not allowed to emit bills of credit.
We're not allowed to print money because they did have horrendous inflation in colonial times.
So I don't think that would be a good idea, at least to take that on now.
This would be strictly the gold and silver, which you can't inflate with.
You get gold and silver by hard work and effort, and that's why it maintains its value.
Right on.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Okay, Scott.
Good to be with you.
All right, Shaw.
That's Dr. Ron Paul.
He's the author of A Foreign Policy of Freedom, The Revolution, A Manifesto, and End the Fed.
He represents District 14 on Texas Gulf Coast, and you can find his antiwar.com articles at original.antiwar.com.