11/13/15 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line is Jim Bovard.
He wrote a bunch of books about how stupid and horrible the government is.
And, no, seriously, you should go look at even, it's on his website, but it's also, I think, on his Wikipedia page, where they got all the quotes of the leaders of the various government bureaucracies denouncing Jim and all of his works.
He is the scourge of the executive branch, author of The Fair Trade Fraud and the Farm Fiasco, Feeling Your Pain and Freedom in Chains, and, let's see, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and his latest is the memoir, Public Policy Hooligan, which you can get on Amazon, on your Kindle, or in, I guess, paperback and all that, too.
Public Policy Hooligan.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jim?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, listen, man, I got to screw up in a double booking type thing here, so I hope it wouldn't hurt your feelings too much if we keep this interview to one segment, and then I'll interview the other guy in the next segment.
That's fine, Scott.
Because neither of you were available to be bumped to the end of the show.
Cool.
So, yeah, let's do this here.
Local police officers should not be able to claim federal immunity from prosecution, and you may or may not have noticed that whenever I tweet out police abuse stories, I always use the hashtag Sovereign Immunity, and I learned that phrase from following the news after the execution of white separatist Randy Weaver's wife, Vicky, back in 1992 after the marshals had murdered his young son, Sammy, a couple of days before that.
But I remember when it was in the news that the federal court had basically taken the case out of state court and said, this is a civil rights case now.
We will decide, not you.
And then they dropped the charges because they said that the FBI sniper from the hostage rescue team, Lon Horiyuchi, had sovereign immunity from prosecution for the action he took when he blew that innocent, unarmed woman's head off her shoulders.
And so I never forgot that.
Oh, and I learned quickly after that, that this is what the kings of England used to claim.
I have sovereign immunity because I'm the king of England.
Except in England, hundreds of years ago, a couple hundred, at least a few, they cut off the head of their king, Charles I, and said, no, you don't have sovereign immunity.
You're just a man just like the rest of us, or we all have the same divine right as you.
And anyway, so that's the thing is, here we are in America at the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st, and the cops have a license to kill, a real live license to murder us if they feel like it, Jim.
Okay, are you done?
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, it's fascinating how this has evolved, because back at the time of the revolution, the founding fathers, there was nobody who was championing the idea of sovereign immunity.
But that was something which evolved from court cases and some of the Supreme Court kowtowing to the government, to the principle of government supremacy.
And it's become a Pandora's box, which is violating more of our rights all the time.
This is something which I discussed.
I had a piece in USA Today on Monday entitled, End Federal Agents Licensed to Kill, in which I talked about some of these ideas and talked about that case there in Austin where you live, the Larry Jackson case.
This is someone who was killed by a policeman.
And my understanding was that the local prosecutor wanted to prosecute the policeman that killed the guy without good reason.
And all of a sudden, you've got federal immunity because the local cop was on a federal task force.
And as the Washington Post warned, this is something which could give unlimited protection to thousands of state and local police officers who are on federal task force.
Yeah.
Well, huge lesson there for us non-government employees, for the white separatists and the Black Lives Matter movement and everybody else.
If they can kill them, they can kill you too.
That's the deal.
Rights are for everybody or they're for nobody.
Well, and part of their problem with many of these shooting cases is what the government does is throw a cloak over the entire situation.
And so it's not like there's going to be an independent investigation which finds the facts and then says, well, based on the facts, maybe it was justified.
You have government agencies, which as soon as the shooting goes down, often basically block any kind of outside fact finding.
And so we're supposed to take the government's word on the government's killings.
And that's very imprudent.
Yeah.
Well, OK, so now in this case, it's actually interesting.
The federal thing actually is a statute, but in the rest of it, it all seems to be basically de facto sovereign immunity.
Not exactly like the Horiyuchi case, but just kind of as you're saying, the opacity of all the procedure around it, all the benefits that cops get when it comes to investigations of their crimes compared to regular people serve as kind of a de facto, you know, in a de facto way as a license to kill.
It just never gets to court.
It just never does.
Right.
And for instance, going back to the Ruby Ridge case, a key factor there was Deval Patrick was the guy, I think, who did the investigation.
He's now or he was governor of Massachusetts.
Not sure if he still is, but he was a person who did the investigation and decided that the feds would not prosecute Horiyuchi because Horiyuchi had no intent to violate the civil rights of Vicky Weaver, who he blew the head off of.
And, you know, it was, you know, Lon Horiyuchi was using a 10 power scope from 200 yards, a 10 power scope as possible to see a person's wedding ring from that distance.
So it's a very, very powerful scope and a very powerful rifle.
And he's also, he was a very accurate shot.
But what happened was that the Justice Department did this so-called investigation, but at the same time, it basically ignored a lot of the key facts in the case, which is, which happens very often when there's a police shooting or a shooting by a federal agent.
I mean, something which has, which riled me up was the case a year or two back, shortly after, well, a while after the Boston bombing, there was a Chechen friend or acquaintance of one of the suspects in that bombing.
And the FBI went down to question him in Florida.
And something happened at the end of the questioning.
And the FBI guy killed, the FBI agent shot and killed the guy.
And the government's changed his story a couple times on that shooting.
But it's like, if something like that had happened to a dissident in the Soviet Union back in the 1980s, nobody in the US would have taken the government's word that, well, okay, it was necessary for the government agent to, you know, for the KGB agent to shoot and kill the dissident at the end of the questioning.
But that happened here.
And most Americans seem pretty docile on that.
And there's been far too little press investigation.
And the FBI has been able to bottle up the facts, as happens so often.
Yeah, well, and now, what about these task forces?
Because I guess we hear about them from time to time, a drug task force, a multi-jurisdictional task force.
But you're saying this outright immunity under federal law can be applied to now thousands more, maybe tens of thousands more local cops around the country?
Right.
This is based on a federal judge's ruling on the shooting there in Austin, Texas.
And it's not my words, this is from the Washington Post, which says that the Austin case could extend federal immunity to thousands of state and local police officers who sign up for these federal task force.
But the federal task force is very often driven by drugs.
And, you know, the war on drugs, you have an awful lot of government abuses.
And this is, I mean, this is the type of ruling which makes government far more perilous to people.
Because not only does it mean that the government agents are immune from prosecution, but it also makes it far less likely that we'll ever find out the truth about what happens when a government agent kills somebody.
Right.
Well, and thank goodness for social media now, the TV can no longer black out these stories.
Every local police murder story is now a national news story, and there is not a damn thing they can do to stop it.
And I hope that means that eventually there is something that Americans can do to stop what's happening to us at their hands.
It's so far out of control now.
This article, everybody, is by Jim Bovard.
It's in USA Today.
And thank goodness for that, too.
End federal agents licensed to kill.
End federal agents licensed to kill.
Jim Bovard, author of Public Policy Hooligan in USA Today.
Thanks very much, Jim.
Really appreciate it.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
And sorry for that massive rant at the beginning, but I'm so sick of this stuff.
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