12/14/15 – Todd E. Pierce – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton, welcome back to the show.
Sorry about the technical difficulties, but these things happen.
And sorry for losing my patience with the stupid skipping audio.
It sounded like a skipping CD, right?
Dang thing.
Anyway, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And you know who I like reading is Todd Pierce.
He writes pretty regularly at ConsortiumNews.com and we run them at AntiWar.com as well.
This one is called Chicago Police Adopt Israeli Tactics.
It's running today.
You can find it in the highlights right there at the top of the page or down in the viewpoint section.
Welcome back to the show, Todd.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Thanks.
I should give you a better introduction.
You are a JAG, defense, wait, I forgot.
You're a former JAG, but you're still representing as a lawyer the Guantanamo defendant or two, is that right?
That's correct.
I'm a retired JAG officer from the Army where I represented Guantanamo prisoners and I was still on a case before the appellate.
Okay.
So that's very important for people to understand.
So that means, I guess you have your regular lawyer and civilian life too then, huh?
Is that how that works?
I'm pretty much just doing research, more research and helping as a consultant on a case.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
I'm one of those prisoners trying to get compensation for, as accountability, so I'm staying busy that way.
I see.
Okay.
Good deal.
And definitely the right man for them to go to for that.
All right.
So there you have it, folks.
The man, he knows of what he speaks.
He's a former JAG defending Guantanamo defendants down there.
And he's written a lot in the past about the corruption of the very foundations of the rule of law in America under really old German and now new neocon theories of executive power.
And I do hope that you'll just type in Todd E. Pearson, read them all day one day, just take off a work and catch up.
And now this is just huge and it's something that's very rarely reported and even more rarely elaborated on as you do here.
And that is American police traveling to Israel to learn from the military, from the IDF, how to treat all Americans like Palestinians.
It almost sounds unreal.
Well, it should strike people that way, because, again, we need to recognize that what Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza remain under is military occupation by the Israeli defense forces.
Gaza, in spite of Israel's claims that they've now been, you know, they're now self-governing, of course, is such a fallacy.
What they've done is they've allowed, you know, withdrawing the forces, the IDF forces from within Gaza, but they still control all the ingress and egress.
They control everything, every product that comes into Gaza.
So it's even under a higher level of military occupation, you can say now.
It's at a level of an open air prison camp.
And let me throw in here very quickly, you know, part of my defense work was extensive research into military law, occupation law, martial law.
The terms used to be synonymous.
Now they've split off.
Martial law would be for domestic use in the United States, for example, and occupation law would be for when we go overseas, like in Iraq or some other place, where we then exercise occupation law.
Israel has been exercising occupation law, I could say, an even harsher form of martial law in Palestinian territory since 1967.
Before that, they'd exercised martial law within Israel itself, the pre-1967 borders, because that was a holdover from the mandate when Britain ruled that territory.
But Israel took it to a higher level and a harsher level to the internal Arabs.
But then in 1967, in the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, they took that into the occupied territories, and that's what they've been exercising ever since.
What has to be understood is that occupation law, and now after almost 50 years in Palestine, Palestinian territory, achieves almost the highest, purest form of totalitarianism.
And, you know, everything within the West Bank, as you know, in Gaza, or Waldorf, the whole thing with the settlements, but we know with the surveillance that's available to the United States, that everything is readily available to be seen of the people, by what's being done in the people, within the occupied territory.
So right now, I'm looking at Military Order 101, or at least a summation of it, by the group Adamir, which represents Palestinian prisoners, and it's the order regarding prohibition of incitement and hostile propaganda.
And that's the point, is that what the Israeli Defense Forces, or, you know, might be designated as police, but they're all exercising occupational authority, are enforcing laws such as prohibitions on organizing and participating in protests, taking part in assemblies, or vigils, waving flags or other political symbols.
That's what we're learning when we send our police over to Israel, to supposedly learn these, you know, higher sophisticated police techniques, is how to exercise totalitarian law.
Well, let me ask you this.
Is this, I mean, there's a lot of damn things wrong with the police in America right now.
And you know, as many as can be attributed to Israel, I'm interested to know, but I wonder whether you would include just the entire kind of turning upside down of the theory that cops are supposed to use the absolute minimum amount of force necessary in order to protect the rights of suspects, as opposed to this sort of Weinberger Pal doctrine of overwhelming force, like the Waco Masker doctrine of sending so many armed paramilitary pseudo-soldiers that you know, presumably everyone will just give up so quickly, that that's the way to avoid conflict, is to just completely crush your enemy before they even have a chance to resist.
And it seems like that is the training in every last, you know, sheriff's department and city police department in America right now.
And I wonder if that is a big part of this, or, you know.
Oh, absolutely.
Again, it's a distinction between domestic policing, in my article I point out that some other police chiefs had gone to Scotland and learned, was learning from some non-militaristic police on how to maintain, you know, and protect people, versus the training that they would receive from a nation exercising occupation laws.
All right, I'm sorry.
Hold it right there, Todd.
I'm sorry I asked you a question right before the break here.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Todd Pierce.
Read him at Antiwar.com today.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Pretty soon, we'll have Reaper drones over every major American city and 300 million people will still have no idea their connection between their wars and their lost liberty.
And here we are now importing the Israeli system of occupation, literally importing the Israeli system of occupation of the poor, rightless helots of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and sending our governments, our state and local governments are sending our police to be trained by the IDF and the Shin Bet on how to treat us like Gazans.
Really, they are.
And you got to check out this great piece today by Todd Pierce, defense attorney, former defense attorney for Guantanamo Bay, a JAG lawyer in the army.
And he's written this very important article here, Chicago Police Adopt Israeli Tactics.
And I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly where we left off, but I wanted to ask you something you said about, you know, the surveillance system that's deployed as part of the occupation law in the West Bank.
And I was reminded not just of, you know, obviously all the Edward Snowden revelations and all that kind of stuff without any limit, but also Max Blumenthal has said on this show numerous times that the West Bank is just absolutely riddled with spies, where basically nothing happens, that they don't know what happened.
And in fact, he said that in the context of when the three Jewish teens were kidnapped and murdered and how obviously the government of Israel knew that they had been murdered all along, even as they pretended to search for them in vain for two weeks in the, you know, run up to, I think it was the latest Gaza slaughter.
So, you know, that's something that I'm sure kind of plays in to where you're going with this as well, is, you know, blackmailing civilians into betraying each other all day long.
Well, that's exactly it.
And let me just step back for a second.
I think your last question was you're presenting the dichotomy of peacetime domestic policing and occupation law.
Oh, right.
Minimum force versus overwhelming force under, you know, in arrest procedures and stuff.
And that's the difference between domestic traditional policing, which is meant to protect the citizenry of the country, versus a state of war, where violence is used to suppress any possible resistance.
And that violence goes up and down on a spectrum.
So all-out war, of course, is nuclear war.
But on the low end of that spectrum would be just pure enforcement of occupation.
The war continues, and there's Israelis and historians who argue in Israel that the war never ended from 1948 against the Arabs.
And certainly they're saying that, you know, some would say since 1967.
But the principle would be that the fact that there's even military occupation is evidence of the fact that the war is continuing.
That's, you know, the IDF still occupies, still waging a war-like, not war-like, still waging state of war tactics against the population to keep them suppressed from any resistance such as even hostile acts such as speech.
And so when we import that, we're putting our own system, we're putting our own people under, you know, domestically, it would be martial law.
How long has this been going on where the Americans send their cops over there to learn from the Israelis?
Well, since I wrote the article, I mean, I know it's gone on before.
We've accepted, we sort of accepted the normative state of Israel when in fact it's not.
I'm going to get to that in just a second.
But I've talked, you know, immediately I was told by somebody who used to be in the FBI, immediately after 9-11, it became, the Israeli model was immediately adopted.
I've been told by others, and I think the little more research we'd find, that there's always been, or a long time has been, an exchange between Israeli national security professionals, and I'm putting that in quotation marks, and our own domestic policing forces.
But obviously with 9-11, both with the military and with our domestic police forces, that rose incredibly high, that exchange between the Israeli occupying authorities, and I'll say that, use that term to mean both our police forces, non-military, and the military, because they're interchangeable.
It's just, you know, you delegate certain powers.
I want to refer to a book that was written, I maybe mentioned it before, by Ernst Frankel, who was a German-Jewish lawyer in the 1930s, and he got out of Germany in 1939 or 1940, and wrote a book, The Dual State, and the first sentence of the book is that the Constitution of Germany, National Socialist Germany, is martial law, a word, as a matter of fact, that I don't have in front of me.
What he was saying is, basically, the normative state then was in existence, which allowed, you know, the discretion of still having some regular courts, but the prerogative state was the Gestapo, which again, that was a domestic police force.
That wasn't the military.
It was the SS and all the military forces, and it went into it.
So between those combined, the domestic police force and the Gestapo, which is how they, you know, it just meant state police, and then the military all suppressed any resistance within or without Germany, both within and without, once it went out to occupy other countries.
And that's the point.
Occupation law is, military occupation is the highest form of totalitarianism.
It was, for the day of 1940s, World War II, but now, today, it would have to be occupied Palestine, because it's been developed for almost 50 years, with all the tools available that we have, you know, the electronic surveillance and, as you say, spies and informants within the population, and that's what we're borrowing and importing into our own domestic system, when we send our police forces for training over there.
All right, now, so what about the state laws?
I mean, obviously, there's a de facto situation here, where government employees, especially cops, can get away with whatever they want.
There's no accountability.
But American law is not passed by the Knesset, and it's not the law of occupation.
There are state laws that say how cops are supposed to treat people in 50 different states, and under a tradition of our old constitutions, which, you know, we wouldn't have anything like a Bill of Rights if we wrote a new constitution now, nothing like the one we had, but don't we still have one, Todd, or what is going on here?
Well, you know, we have one in name only.
I mean, I think you just stated that.
But the article that I was...
Some of the articles I was drawing upon, what was, you know, again, there was a killing of the victim in Chicago, but what I saw was more ominous was the research that the Guardian newspaper had done on the detention center that the Chicago police had created, which I talk about in my article.
That is the real sign of both lawlessness...
I mean, that was a clear violation of the Constitution, but it was taken directly out of the provisions that would hold and occupy Palestine, and this again is discussed in, I'll say, the addadamir.org legal representation organization, which all can be found here.
It's spelled A-D-D-A-M-E-E-R dot org, and it describes the different military orders that the Palestinians are living under, and one of those is providing for administrative detention.
Now, in Israel, you can, just by somebody saying the wrong thing, the Israeli authorities can put a Palestinian into administrative detention for six months, and then they have to renew it.
It gives the appearance of legality, even though basically it becomes almost indefinite detention.
Well, it is indefinite detention, even though they have a six-month limit where it has to be renewed.
And you mean, there's no criminal charges whatsoever, it's just they feel like kidnapping someone and that's it?
Exactly.
And that's what the Chicago police were doing under, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel hadn't started under him, but it was taken to a higher level under him, where they would put people in, I forget the name of it, Holman Center, the secret interrogation center.
The police said, well, it's not a secret, it's in plain view, yeah, but nobody knew what it was, so it's a secret.
And they would put people in there, and like I quote a civil rights activist talking about how he had just been picked up, and it was being used to terrorize people.
They weren't holding people for six months, they weren't going through the administrative detention procedure that Israel has established in occupied territory, but they were using it to terrorize people, you could say.
Now, one person I knew coming out of Guantanamo said, when I talked to him about how badly he was tortured, pointed out that, in fact, he hadn't been tortured that bad, although he had been, but to a lesser degree than many, but he pointed out it's not necessary that everybody be tortured to the same level, because the purpose of torture and that type of treatment is to terrorize people, not just to punish them or give them ill treatment.
So with that purpose of terrorizing people, it's only necessary to terrorize, as an example, one person out of so many, rather than everyone, because again, just torturing one person enough terrorizes the rest of the population.
Well, that's what you're getting when you have a secret interrogation center where the police are allowed to go and pick up citizens and throw them into this without recourse to lawyers or any due process, and be terrorized, and then take that message back to the community that this is what can happen.
Well, it's just like this interview last week with, you know, there was this story with the cops getting away for years with planting evidence on black men in this town in Alabama.
And, you know, the huge question is, well, where are the judges?
Where are the other prosecutors?
Where are the other government officials who, because of their own personal avarice and ambition, would do the right thing to benefit themselves by disrupting this kind of system instead?
We're waiting around for Spencer Ackerman to figure it out and publish it in The Guardian.
But some, some ambitious lawyer should have been turning this whole thing upside down in Chicago a long time ago, or some judge, some prosecutor from some, you know, somewhat separate jurisdiction, something.
But our institutions do not work, at least as advertised, apparently at all anymore.
No, you're absolutely right, Scott.
And it means the breakdown of the rule of law.
We trumpet to the rest of the world that we're a rule of law society.
And I'll botch this pronunciation, but I believe the German term was a Rechstadt, meaning the difference between a system that lived under the rule of law and the system that, you know, the Nazis brought into existence.
You know, and let me just say really quickly, there's a...
People like to immediately dismiss somebody when you mention the Nazi example.
And I say that's an error.
It was brought in by Leo Strauss, who had his own sympathetic Nazi leanings to silence anybody who might point out that he was, you know, had a fascist ideology himself.
But it's been adopted.
Well, and when you use it, too, it's not hyperbole.
You're using specific examples and citing laws and all these jurists books that they've written and all this stuff.
This is important legal stuff.
This is not just, oh, yeah, you're a Nazi because I don't like you kind of talk.
And everybody can tell that.
I'm sorry I have to cut you off, but we got to go.
I got to interview Dan McAdams right this minute.
But thank you so much for doing the show again, Todd.
I'm sorry we never have enough time to have the full conversation here, but I wish everyone will please go and look at this really important article and help pass it around.
It's at antiwar.com today.
Chicago police adopt Israeli tactics.
Thanks very much, Todd.
Thank you.
Hey, all Scott here.
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