Ah, Horton failed.
I'm scrambling to find the clip of Ike Eisenhower, the short version, about how if we're to be free, we must resist the influence of the people who make the weapons over the government that uses the weapons.
You know, it was his last day in office and it was way too little too late after he built thousands of hydrogen bombs and taken over half the world and overthrown legitimate governments in Guatemala and Iran and God knows where else.
And then this bloody handed monster said, by the way, I've left you a force in American life that you'll never be able to undo again.
Good luck, everybody.
And then turn it over to the, you know, Mr. Missile Gap and Mr. Escalation, right wing Democrat John F. Kennedy.
So here we are stuck with this madness.
It's not the military industrial complex anymore.
It's not even the military industrial congressional complex anymore, which is what Ike wanted to call it in the speech in the first place.
Now it's just the complex.
Now it's the American economy, the American way of life.
And our guest is Nick Terse, and he's the author of The Complex, How the Military Invades Every Bit of Our Society.
I'm sorry, I forgot the rest of the subtitle.
Welcome to the show, Nick.
How the hell are you?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Everybody, you can find Nick at Nick Terse dot com.
That's T-U-R-S-E, Nick Terse dot com.
You can read him at Tom Dispatch and at Alternet.
Right now he's in the middle of a book, right?
Kill Anything That Moves about Vietnam.
Yes, yes.
That book's in the works.
And then I have a new edit collection that's just come out.
Right on.
All right.
So tell us about this complex.
Draw a picture of this thing so that people can understand this quasi free market we have in this country.
Well, in the complex, you know, what I look at is something that I, you know, it's akin, I say in the book, to the matrix of the movies.
It's something that, you know, invades every facet of our our everyday lives.
And this is, you know, it's not the it's not the military industrial complex of Ike's era.
This is something much larger, much more insidious.
And it you know, it's tentacles are everywhere from, you know, the corporations that supply the food in our grocery store shelves to to the studios that that make the movies that everyone goes and watches.
Well, now, how can that be?
I mean, I guess.
Well, first of all, start with the movies there, if I remember right.
And it's it's been quite a long time.
But didn't Karl Rove take a trip out here to L.A. and say late 2001, early 2002, and remind them of the bad old days and how we don't want it to be like that anymore, do we?
Yeah, you know, the military's made a major effort when it when it comes to to movies.
You know, this used to be done on an ad hoc basis.
And I mean, their their their influence in in Hollywood goes back to the silent era.
But in recent years, you know, they've they've taken it up, not just one notch or many.
Right now, they they rent an entire floor of an office building in Los Angeles, where they have special media liaison offices for each of the service branches, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and the Department of Defense writ large.
And what they do is they they offer their services to Hollywood studios, if you want to make a big budget blockbuster, one of those big summer movies like Transformers or an Iron Man, and you want the latest military hardware, you submit your script to them, they'll look it over, if they see anything objectionable, they'll make the changes and tell you what needs to be done so that you can get a hold of this, this glitzy taxpayer funded hardware that isn't available anyplace else in the world.
Well, I know.
And then so give us a rough ballpark.
We talking about over say, I don't know, last 2030 years, are we talking about 10s of movies, dozens, hundreds, thousands of movies have been influenced this way by the Pentagon?
Yeah, it goes into the hundreds.
I mean, this is this is the way that business is done in Hollywood these days.
Yeah, well, um, you know, I'm glad that you mentioned Transformers specifically, because I went and saw Transformers with a young boy who's very important to me, in my family, who I won't identify any more specifically than that.
And I took him to see that.
And it started out with a giant army commercial.
And I said to him, but really loud, so the whole place could hear me.
Wow.
So if I joined the army, I get to stay in, I guess what looks like Tennessee the whole time.
And there's no Iraq or Afghanistan in the commercial at all.
Join the military, you get to ride around on the back of a C 130 goofing off all day.
It's great fun was what the commercial said.
And then we had a long talk after the movie was over about how every single thing in that movie is a Lockheed product.
And that is not an accident.
And this is not about defending us.
And why the hell does America have a base in Bahrain anyway, young man, you need to ask yourself that.
And you know what, I love Transformers, I grew up I was the biggest Transformers fan in the whole world when I was in fourth grade.
And I felt really betrayed by that personally, to be honest.
But anyway, so I don't know if you have anything more to say about that specific subject.
But I mean, that's really powerful propaganda about what fun f 22 fighters gotta be.
And you know, I used to Hey, I was I was what 10 or 11 when Top Gun came out.
And the first thing I did was go home and play at 14, man.
Sure, I think we're all there at one point.
So yeah, well, now talk about the the food on the grocery store shelves, because I think this is a good example.
You know, we could even be talking about shoes, we could be talking about anything, right?
Pretty much any real successful business in this country.
Part of their business plan has to be sell things to the Pentagon.
Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a huge market.
And, you know, just about everyone's in it from, you know, it's almost impossible to walk down, you know, a grocery store aisle and not find, you know, the shelves just filled with products that are better, somehow wrapped up with the Pentagon.
You know, it's a great way for these these companies to make easy money.
Pentagon is, you know, a top dollar.
And, you know, without an anti war movement in this country without, without, you know, a popular discussion on what a military contractor really is, they're, they're able to, you know, get away with this without, without people really having any idea, the companies that they're supporting.
Mm hmm.
So, you know, it's, it's really the parallel or like the more specific case, I guess, it comes up in my mind is, you know, when Chalmers Johnson talks about, okay, so they make whatever B two bomber B 12, whatever, I forgot the column, that's the vitamin.
Anyway, they make these bombers, and they have a one part made in every single congressional district in a country if they can, in order to, you know, spread that the the demand for the jobs to keep the thing going out so that no regional collection of congressmen could ever agree to shut something down and cost them.
But the real where the rubber really meets the road, it seems like is, you know, the tube sock company lobbyists, they don't want an end of the war either, man, they're selling massive tube socks to this thing.
And if it came down to it, they're imperialists, they got to get those socks sold.
And this is the most important captive market of all.
And so that it just shows how the incentive structure, the whole society has been completely distorted by this.
Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely right.
I mean, this is this is the way it's been set up for a reason.
So it's amazing stuff.
I highly recommend everybody read the book.
It's called the complex, how the military invades our everyday lives.
And again, I'm talking with Nick terse, websites, Nick terse, calm, and a couple minutes here before we hit our break.
So I want to, I guess, just introduce your article here at alternate.
It's alternate.org, five jaw dropping stories in WikiLeaks archives begging for national attention.
And that taxi theme song means I was off by about a minute and a half.
And we had about 30 seconds left.
So this is the article we'll be discussing after the breakouts on alternate.org.
It's Nick terse.
It's anti war radio.
And we'll be back in a minute.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest Liberty oriented audio content 24 hours a day at lrn.fm.
Hi, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Santa war radio.
Wrapping up the show for the day in the week here.
With Nick terse, it's what it says.
Nick terse.com T. U. R. S. E. Nick terse.com.
The book is the complex and you can find his articles at Tom dispatch as well as alternate.org where he's got a new one called five jaw dropping stories in WikiLeaks archives begging for national attention.
And, you know, I don't know how to craft a perfect segue to this or anything, but the point is that America is a global empire and the military industrial complex and the associated distorted economy and the biggest parts of all of that have us on this crusade to take over the world.
Basically, not that it's working out very well and not that it's possible with giant powers like Russia and China refusing to give up their independence to us.
But anyway, they're going to try anyway.
And they have been.
And the way that they get away with the worst of their deeds, is secrecy.
And that's what it's all about.
Barack Obama continues to rack up victories defending George Bush's secrecy policies.
And and on we go.
It's like Bush's third term.
And so that's why WikiLeaks is so important, of course.
And I think it's great that Nick terse is one of the few people who actually decided to go and dig through that site and see what all's on there besides the collateral murder video, besides the Afghan war logs.
What did you find there?
Well, you know, I look at the site on a regular basis.
And I always note that one thing that WikiLeaks really offers a lot of our U.S. counterinsurgency manuals.
This is the war that we're fighting in Afghanistan is run right by the book.
And here's here's the inside story of exactly the type of war that's that's being waged there.
And WikiLeaks offers no fewer than eight core U.S. counterinsurgency manuals and handbooks, as well as a number of other supporting materials that have special bearing on counterinsurgency operations.
And it's it's all sitting there.
But very few people have have actually dug into these documents.
Well, and so what'd you learn in those counterinsurgency manuals?
Clear hold, build the way we could have won Vietnam if only the liberals hadn't sold us out.
Yeah, well, you know, it's, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned Vietnam, because what what I noted most about these manuals is that they're incredibly unsophisticated.
And they rehash a lot of well worn and not terribly effective material on guerrillas and conventional efforts to defeat guerrillas.
It's really like reading a Vietnam era manual, the thinking hasn't changed much.
And, you know, as we can see from the results of the ground, the results haven't changed much either.
You know, there's, there's a counterinsurgency related document there, the from 2008, the US Army's unconventional warfare guide, and that documents typified by acronyms and a lot of jargon and gibberish on everything from US national power, and how it's perceived around the world to some, you know, just just utterly false statements.
One of the most egregious in there, I'll just quote a line from it, the United States avoids resorting to military force preferring to wield all other instruments of power in pursuit of national objectives.
Now, this is quite obviously people from the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, I'm forgetting others.
You know, they certainly dispute that assertion, the idea that the US doesn't like to and often doesn't resort to military force.
And that's what these manuals peddle a false version of US history and a sanitized version of war that doesn't bear any relationship to what's actually going on in the ground.
Well, I guess it is kind of fun in it to peek in the mind of what the people with the power tell each other.
This is one thing that's been tripping me out lately, actually, is I guess I kind of knew this all along, but it's kind of hit me harder since I read the good soldiers by David Finkel.
And you know, there was nobody in that entire platoon, including Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarek, who had any idea what in the hell they were doing there or who they were supposed to be shooting at or why or who was on whose side in the war that they were in the middle of, that they were perpetrating.
I mean, it was really it was like their orders were the same line of BS and Bush's speech, you know?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, this is what you find in a lot of the military documents.
They're confused and confusing.
Yeah, well, and so no wonder they do such a horrible job at even committing acts of violence that they try to commit, you know?
It's a disaster.
It is.
All right, so what else do you find in here?
Well, there's an interesting report called the Marine Corps Mid-Range Threat Estimate, 2005 to 2015.
And they look back and forward.
You know, it's the Marine Corps Intelligence Global Threats Branch that put this out.
And I mean, there's a lot of material on there on how the Marines are evolving, and they're adapting, developing agile strategies and new tactics for a new complex environment.
But the most interesting part of it is an appendix at the end, which lists as they put it, 20 states of interest that represent a range of potential future security challenges for the Marine Corps.
And basically what it is, is a list of countries where the Marines think that there's a good chance they'll be deployed and tell you a little bit about how they would go about it, what type of strategies they think would be used there.
So, you know, for people who are interested in keeping score over the next five years, you know, the Marine Corps report forecast that, you know, counterterrorism missions by U.S.
Marines are possible in places like Albania, Bangladesh, Colombia, Saudi Arabia.
And possible is the mid-range on a three-point scale of likelihood they use.
They rate, you know, also as possible counterinsurgency missions in Liberia, Syria, and Uzbekistan.
When you look at the things that are rated high on the scale, they list counterterrorism operations in Ethiopia, Georgia, Mauritania, Nigeria.
And they list, not surprisingly, Iran and North Korea as places where what they call major regional contingencies might occur, which is to say full-scale wars, like that being waged in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, and the thing is, it's fun to just, you can just sit and go forever just speculating about the mindset, the premises of men who would write up a list like that.
Albania, Bangladesh, for crying out loud.
Imagine counterinsurgency in Saudi Arabia.
And you know what?
This is the one that you didn't type it this way, but I read it in italics, Nick, and that's Nigeria.
America's going to Nigeria.
Well, I mean, the Marines certainly think it's a possibility there.
So, I mean, it deserves attention.
Yeah.
You know, when the show first started in the beginning of 2007, I interviewed Sebastian Younger about his piece for Vanity Fair about the conflict there.
And I've just kept my eye on that thing ever since.
And the problem has certainly not gone away.
The interests are still there and they have a major problem with the locals who are resisting the outright theft of all their resources right out from under their village.
Same time they put loot, the rivers, they can't even fish anymore where they live.
And these people got guns and they're not afraid.
And there was even an army recruitment ad that showed modern day special forces in a boat in a, what is that?
The Mekong Delta?
No.
Where are they?
Where are they going?
And it's there in a muddy jungle river headed somewhere to kill people.
And it looked like Nigeria to me.
And hey, I mean, I'm just speculating, but at somewhere in there, somebody came up with that scene.
What are we going to have in this commercial?
We want guys in a boat, in a jungle looking maybe two or three years in the future with their just barely futuristic equipment on their way to this war.
It looked like Nigeria to me, man.
Yeah.
I mean, well, that's, um, you know, it's part of the Marine Corps forecast there by 2015.
They see it as a possibility.
Man.
Amazing.
And boy, can you imagine you talk about a quagmire?
It's a giant swamp, man.
It's the Niger Delta for crying out loud.
And you imagine just nothing but a bunch of John Kerry's in their boats, killing people up and down those rivers, man.
It's a nightmare scenario.
Yeah.
Wow.
So, um, well, tell us a little bit about the form of WikiLeaks, William, what people can find there, the, the country designations and all the wide and varied states at interest.
Of course, some people even say, well, they must be CIA because they have so much about China and other countries that the Americans aren't down with.
Uh, well, you know, you know, that is, uh, it is a popular misconception about WikiLeaks.
You know, I've, I've read, uh, on some right-wing sites where they say that, you know, it's simply, um, you know, US government documents there.
But, uh, but, but as you say that on the other side, people say CIA, because there's plenty of, uh, foreign government material there.
And it's across the spectrum.
There's things on China.
There's secret Israeli government documents that are there on, uh, on settlement building.
There's, uh, Indian army documents there.
Uh, you name it.
And, and it's, it's easy to access.
I mean, um, you know, WikiLeaks is divided up by country.
You can search by, uh, keyword through there.
Uh, if it is, uh, if it is a CIA operation, uh, you know, they, they have CIA documents there too, which are, uh, extremely interesting.
You know, that's, um, there, there's one, uh, on the site that, uh, you know, came out this spring, uh, about, uh, manipulating public opinion in Europe.
It's, um, you know, extremely interesting.
And, uh, you know, elaborate on that one.
That is extremely interesting and extremely important.
In fact, I, uh, I came up in conversation just the other day, cause I think it's the kind of point that you can sort of jab people with a little bit.
So cynical that thing.
Yeah.
You know, um, it was, it was only a month after the Dutch government fell, uh, to Andy war sentiment, uh, at home and caused the, uh, you know, the, the pull out of Dutch troops that this, uh, the CIA analytic team called a red cell, uh, came up with a report, which they titled sustaining West European support for the NATO led mission in Afghanistan.
And basically the document, which was, um, produced in collaboration with, uh, an agency, public relations specialist and analysts from the state department, uh, outlined strategies for manipulating public opinion in France and Germany and other allied NATO countries.
Uh, the reports classified and not surprisingly, it's not to be shown to foreign nationals.
And basically what it does is it highlights the fact that, um, in France and Germany, there's been a great amount of public apathy about the war.
So while, uh, a large majority of the population, uh, is against troop increases, uh, they just haven't been paying attention and that's allowed the national governments to disregard, uh, popular sentiment and steadily increase their troop contributions to the U S effort in Afghanistan.
And, uh, well, what the CIA says is that, that there's a, you know, had a great fear that this summer with, um, increased, uh, NATO casualties and, uh, and this fall fears about, uh, more civilian casualties making into the press would begin to undermine the war effort.
And, uh, you know, that they can't be more blatant than, than, than the way they put it.
They say that the worst case scenario is that, uh, as European elections approach, the Dutch troop withdrawal might cause that this is a quote, politicians elsewhere to cite a precedent for listening to the voters.
So this is, um, this is their great fear that, uh, democracies of Europe will begin listening to the public.
I think it's kind of fun too, cause you're right.
I mean, it's just the most cynical thing in the world in plain English, like, like you just say, uh, uh, unescapable, but also it's revealing in how two-dimensional and stupid it is, right?
Well, all we got to do is tell the French that, oh, boo, who the women, the women, we're going to protect the women.
And all we got to do is tell the Germans stand tall, be a man and live up to your NATO obligations.
And that's how we'll keep it.
But I mean, come on, like, like Germany and France aren't nations full of human beings.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
Yeah.
I mean, this is, uh, again, it goes back to this, you know, as you call it two-dimensional, it's this, uh, you know, thinking that, that, you know, produces, uh, military manuals and then, and CIA documents.
So it's no, no surprise that, uh, you know, war efforts continue to go so poorly.
It's funny.
I always like to think back on the dystopias and, and, uh, how to combine them all together.
Like it's a little bit of we, the living and some 1984, and you definitely have some, lots of brave new world mixed in here.
And, uh, Brazil, that's what it's like.
It's like the movie Brazil, you know, a war being waged by these just nincompoops, man.
You know, Robert De Niro, our hero buried in paperwork.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, uh, it's exactly what's going on.
Crazy.
All right.
Well, it's going to come to an end one way or the other.
Ron Paul always says, Oh, it's not going to come to an end because you listen to me.
It's going to come to an end because we're broke.
You can only take over the world so much before you run out of steam.
And, and we're just bankrupting ourselves with this complex, with this mentality.
And, uh, you know, I guess it's better than the alternative.
You look at how the British and the Soviet union, uh, lost their empires.
You got to prefer that model to what happened to the Germans and the Japanese, you know, I guess sooner is better than later.
Sooner lessens the risk of a war with Russia or some madness.
Yeah.
But I mean, in any case, it's, it's, it won't be pretty.
It already isn't.
It's already a nightmare.
Uh, Nick, I really appreciate every bit of work that you do.
I urge everybody to go and read Nick terse.
Look at his website.
He's got links to all his articles there at the nation in these times, of course, Tom dispatch, the LA times, the village voice alternate.
And, uh, we feature, uh, much of what he writes at antiwar.com.
I really looking, I really look forward to reading your book about Vietnam.
Uh, something I haven't been reading about lately, but, uh, you seem like just the guy to write a book that I'd like to read about it.
So, uh, let me know when that comes out, would you?
I will Scott.
Thanks so much.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time.
