11/04/10 – Becky Akers – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton, and our next guest is the best in TSA criticism in the society, especially at LewRockwell.com.
But she also writes for The New American and for the Campaign for Liberty.
It's Becky Akers.
Welcome back to the show.
Well, thank you, Scott.
I'll come on any time you want to build me up like that.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, you deserve it.
And if you just typed in Becky Akers, spelled just like it sounds and all that, and Google will correct you anyway if you screw up.
And TSA, it's a hoot, because you get to read about tyranny and learn a lot about the process of the airport tyranny, specifically.
And you also get to have a great time doing it, because it's great writing and always very humorous at the expense of bureaucrats, and I like that.
Thanks, Scott, that's very kind.
And I know other people do, too.
So I like recommending it.
Thanks.
All right, so now there's a couple articles I want to talk with you about.
The first one is The Railroading of Omar Khadr.
It's at the Campaign for Liberty.
That's campaignforliberty.com.
Published, what, yesterday, I guess, right?
Right.
And so now, go ahead.
Just tell them, Becky.
This is an abuse of a boy that should make every American furious, because it not only involves torture, it not only involves suspension of habeas corpus, it not only involves outright lying by the federal government and a number of people allied with the federal government, it also is completely undermining our Constitution.
Basically, what happened was that Omar was a 15-year-old boy, he's a Canadian citizen, he grew up in both Canada and Pakistan and Afghanistan.
His family is originally from Pakistan, and they would take him back and forth.
His father does seem to have been one of the world's genuine terrorists.
You know, the Feds just love to manufacture terrorists.
Basically, if you oppose federal policy in any way, you are a terrorist, either an international one or a domestic one, as we all found out when the DHS was releasing its reports a few years ago on Ron Paul followers and militia members and that sort of thing.
So at any rate, Mr. Khadr Sr. does seem to be a legitimate terrorist, in that he was a friend of and a financier to Osama bin Laden.
So he had a couple of different boys.
Omar is one of them.
Omar was 15.
He was over in Afghanistan, I believe, or maybe in Pakistan, with his father at this point.
And a friend of his dad said, I'm going around the country with a group of my friends.
Can I borrow Omar as a translator since he speaks English?
And his father agreed.
That had Omar with these guys on a farm near a little Afghani village when American troops attacked.
And they basically massacred the handful of men.
Over 100 troops attacked this farm.
They massacred the handful of men that were inside the farm house, except for Omar and another very badly wounded man.
Omar also was badly wounded.
He'd taken shrapnel to his eyes.
And I don't know if you've ever had anything in your eye.
I used to wear contact lenses.
And when I got something between the lens and my eye, the pain was so disabling, I couldn't focus on anything else.
And I can only imagine what shrapnel getting in your eye must be like, having experienced just an eyelash in my eye.
So we can assume that this severely wounded boy was writhing on the ground after the troops bombarded the farm and then invaded the premises.
Into the badly wounded man shot him and murdered him.
Came to Omar, shot him in the back twice.
He was facing away from them.
That testimony, however, was suppressed by the Pentagon until it inadvertently leaked it in 2008.
The guy, another soldier, claims he shot Omar.
He claims he shot him in the chest because Omar was brandishing a weapon at them.
And he also had just thrown a grenade that killed another American soldier.
It happened to be a medic named Christopher Speer.
Now, there are a couple of problems with this.
As I've already mentioned, Omar is severely wounded in the eyes.
And you can imagine that there were bombs dropping on this farm from helicopters.
At least two 500-pound bombs dropped on the farmhouse.
I mean, a 15-year-old boy crawling out of that, wounded in the eyes, is not going to be physically able to lob a grenade.
The other problem we have with this is that when the soldiers invaded the compound after the, quote, battle, the massacre, their comrades were lobbing grenades into the compound to cover them.
So there is absolutely no way we can ever be sure who threw the grenade that killed Christopher Speer.
However, the government has acted as though this is an established fact that Omar was able to and did, in fact, throw this grenade.
And they charged this child with murder for defending himself on a battlefield.
Now again, remember, he didn't throw the grenade.
Let's pretend he did.
Why is it a crime to defend yourself from soldiers who are coming at you to kill you?
So again, this should have every American citizen up in arms.
Outraged, protesting, because if they can do it to this poor little kid, they can do it to us.
Now, I'm going to have follow-up questions.
But continue the story with what happened after they grabbed this eyeball-wounded, shot twice in the back, 15-year-old kid off of the ground.
He was shipped over to Gitmo.
He's been there since the fight, actually not since.
Right afterwards, they did do triage and surgery on him, initial surgery.
Then they shipped him over to Gitmo.
He's been there as a prisoner since 2002.
So they have also, during his time at Gitmo, just tortured him, as they have so many other men.
By the way, the international community is very upset about all this, too, though, for the wrong reasons.
They're not outraged at how the government has destroyed our Constitution and how everything they've done to this boy is illegal.
They're rather upset, or rather, they are upset, because Omar was a child, and he was imprisoned with adults, which violates some international convention, I forget which.
And they're upset because he is a Canadian citizen, and he should have been sent back to them.
They have a bunch of different reasons they're upset, and not to mention all the abuse that he's taken.
So there is an international outcry about this.
Omar was kept at Gitmo, not segregated from the adults, as I mentioned, tortured, just horrendous things they did to him, threatened him with gang rape, would tell him stories of other people who had not cooperated with them and how they had shipped them off to countries like Jordan that torture people with blood oozing out of the tortured places instead of our nice, clean way of doing it, where we just bombard you with rock music at top volume and never turn off the fluorescent lights overhead, keep you awake for a couple of months at a time, that sort of thing.
So eventually, they slated Omar for one of their infamous military commissions.
And he was supposed to have finally faced trial.
I think we all are aware of the rocky road these commissions have rightfully had to tread since many people here in the US and abroad recognize them as kangaroo courts.
Omar basically has kept maintaining his innocence this entire time until last week.
And then the feds, I shouldn't say until last week.
I don't know precisely when the feds offered him a plea deal.
But they eventually did.
And it became public last week.
Omar has had a very good Canadian lawyer representing him, good in that he is a feisty man.
He doesn't take crap from the US government.
And he stands up and he calls this abuse and torture of Omar what it is.
His name is Dennis Edney.
And Mr. Edney advised Omar to take the plea deal because he said, you will never receive justice here in the US.
You will not receive.
The paramount thing is to get you out of Gitmo.
And the plea deal involved that.
Basically, what it said was that in addition to the eight years that Omar had already served in Gitmo, he would be liable for another eight years tops from a military panel, not a commission.
This is like a panel of military officers who review the case and come to what I'm sure we can all realize is a very unbiased decision.
And so they basically gave Omar a 40-year sentence.
It didn't matter.
It has to be capped at eight.
So he'll serve another eight years.
All right, we have a lot to go over there.
It's Becky Akers from the campaign for liberty, lourockwell.com, the New American.
And we're talking about Omar Khadr, the child soldier, recently took a cop to a plea in a quote unquote court down there in communist Cuba.
More anti-war radio after this.
All right, child, it's anti-war radio.
Wrapping up the show for the day.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Becky Akers from the campaign for liberty, lourockwell.com, and the New American.
And we're talking about the case of Omar Khadr.
Now, I think what we've covered so far is he was 15.
He was borrowed from his father by a guy to be a translator, obviously not in control of his own destiny whatsoever.
He's brought to a place that is then attacked by more than 100 American soldiers.
There's grenades going off everywhere.
The kid is wounded in the eye.
Then he's shot twice in the back.
And then apparently, a medic got blown up by a grenade.
And they decided they were going to blame it on this kid, even though if Matlock was here, he'd be able to, sounds like, show pretty quickly that this was a friendly fire accident.
And they decided to blame it on the kid whose eye they'd already destroyed and who they'd already shot in the back and yet had somehow refused to die.
So make it his fault.
And then they declared him an enemy combatant instead of treating him like a prisoner of war, like in the law, or treating him like a suspect and indicting him and prosecuting him for something like in the law.
And so then they took him to communist Cuba.
And now you say, Becky, that they tortured him.
Tell us more about this torture that Omar Khadr allegedly suffered.
And then we'll get back to the court.
Also, if I paraphrased you wrong on any of those points, please correct me.
No, I think you did an excellent job.
And I'm quite humbled that Matlock would be able to solve this.
And even I, with my limited capabilities, was able to see right away something's really fishy here.
So at Gitmo, Omar was subjected to the tortures most of the inmates have endured, things like short shackling, which means your hands and feet are bound by a very short chain.
To a bolt, usually in the floor, so that you are left in a very painful position for hours on end.
He was not able to hold his bladder at one point and went all over himself.
The guards left him in those clothes for days after sprinkling him with pine salt and using him to mop up the floor that he had soiled.
He was denied all contact with his family except for two phone calls.
He was denied simple comforts, such as sunglasses for his wounded eyes.
Canadian government, that's the only thing they've done for Omar in the time he's been there.
They've pretty much rolled over and cooperated with the Fed's abuse of him, refusing to request that he be sent back to Canada and that sort of thing.
I should say parenthetically, too, that Canada is deeply divided on this.
Most Canadians, from my reading of their comments on news stories about him in Canada, and this is very unofficial.
I haven't done a tally of anything, but most of them seem to be swallowing the US government's line on this boy.
He's a dangerous terrorist.
We have to lock him up for the good of Western civilization.
But at any rate, the Canadian government did send him a pair of sunglasses for his wounded eyes.
Those were taken away from him.
So he has suffered a lot of ridicule from the guards.
He suffered threats such as, we're going to turn dogs on you.
We're going to send you to Jordan, where they really know how to torture people.
So I'm weary of Americans who really have no greater discomfort in their lives than the TSA's abuse saying this isn't torture.
Yes, it is torture.
It is abusing a human being, stripping his dignity and humanity from him, inflicting physical pain on him when you short shackle him to a bolt.
Omar was also hung in front of the door to his cell.
It just goes on and on and on.
And this is being done in our name by our rulers that we finance.
So why aren't we out in the streets trying to overthrow these people?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Is it possible that America is an evil empire, even though I'm from here?
Yes.
America is about as evil an empire as has ever cursed this world.
So far, I think Americans don't realize that, because in contrast to other evil empires like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, many Muslim countries, although they're not really empires as we're using it right now.
But in contrast to Hitler, Stalin, those kinds of tyrants, the United States has pretty much focused its abuse on other countries.
We're not abusing our own citizens as much as we are those of other countries.
That's an anomaly in world history.
You can still count the dead since World War II in the millions, though, Becky.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
In the millions.
But our primary targets have been foreigners.
And I don't know if this makes our tyrants just incredibly stupid, because what is the point of abusing people but to tyrannize them and control them?
And of course, the people you most want to control are your own subjects.
So I can't figure out why they're wasting all this effort on foreigners, although now with the TSA and some of the other agencies that are growing bolder with the TSA's abuses, they are getting the lesson and coming home here to abuse us.
Yeah, well, we just talked with Matthew Rothschild from the Progressive about the 3rd Infantry Division under the Northern Command that's on active duty right now, battle-hardened Iraq War veterans.
And I think we're only one or two red alerts away from, as Tommy Frank said, a military form of government where the Department of Homeland Security takes over all the local police forces, puts someone in charge higher than the captain of all the police forces.
And the military takes a much greater role in domestic policing and whatever.
And as the economy gets worse, and as people believe this scaremongering nonsense about the danger of the internal Muslim fifth column inside this country working on behalf of the Islamo-fascist caliphate to destroy us and put burqas on all our daughters and whatever, things really could be getting that way, I think.
I don't know why the Feds just don't require all the Muslims to wear yellow bands with crescents on them.
They're green.
Whatever.
I guess if Hitler tried it and it didn't really work, maybe that's their hesitation.
Well, everybody's got their ID code anyway, so...
Yes, that's true, too.
It doesn't necessarily have to be right on the front of your shirt.
But, so now, tell me in the last couple of minutes here about this plea deal.
They gave him, how many years, this so-called court?
The military panel that handed down his sentence, which I don't understand the point of all this, except that it was to waste more of our taxes and make work for these bozos.
I mean, they're calling it a war crime, even if he did it.
They're saying it's a war crime to be a civilian and throw a grenade at a soldier attacking you from a foreign country in your country.
It's the same thing that's going on here with cops.
You don't dare fight back against a cop.
It doesn't matter what he's doing to you, or a TSA goon at the airport.
It doesn't matter how he is abusing you.
You dare not fight back.
It's the same thing, now we're just extending that overseas.
And basically what they said was the plea deal, Omar would receive no more than eight additional years.
He could get less.
But the panel of military officers that judged him, instead of civilians without a vested interest in all this, handed down a sentence of 40 years.
It doesn't mean anything because he'll still be out in eight.
He spends one more year at Gitmo according to his plea deal, and then the next seven will be spent in Canada in a Canadian prison.
And, again, I'm just very saddened to see the Canadian people accepting the U.S. government's assessment of this boy.
He's admitted he's a terrorist.
That's been in a bunch of the Canadian newspapers.
It's like, no, he didn't.
If somebody said to you, we're going to continue torturing you here unless you agree that you did what we say you did, even though we know you didn't, you're pretty much going to agree, too, just to get out.
Here they are in Reuters saying, I guess one of the testimony at the trial was, oh, now he's been brainwashed in radical jihadism.
Apparently Guantanamo Bay is Gladiator Academy down there for jihadists.
Innocent men rounded up and then recruited.
Oh, no, now that we've tortured this innocent boy, he doesn't like us anymore.
And if we set him free just because he's innocent, he could become an enemy of the United States one day and then, I don't know, command his Air Force to come over here and get us.
That's another thing that ought to outrage everybody about this, Scott.
The, quote, expert witnesses they called on this are basically saying what you just said.
He might launch another attack on us someday, and so we have to keep him in jail because of that.
So it's kind of like that.
And because we locked him up with a few actual dangerous people once they closed down the black sites or some of them and brought those actual terrorist dudes to Guantanamo Bay, then, oh, sorry, we kept this kid locked up with them, like in the complaint.
Yes, and, you know, again, blaming him for what he might do one day.
The other problem with these witnesses is they're all incredibly tainted, okay?
The chief one was a guy named Michael Wellner.
He is on record as being very biased against Muslims.
He's written articles against them, and he's quoted extensively from the work of a Danish psychologist who is even more rabidly anti-Muslim.
So, you know, this would be like putting, you know, Omar in charge of deciding whether a Jewish person is sane or not.
I mean, he might have some thoughts on that.
Would we listen to him knowing the history between Arabs and Jews?
Why then are we listening to these people that are on record as being totally opposed to Islam and wanting to eradicate its practitioners, and yet we're putting them in charge of what happens to Omar?
The people deciding his fate are listening to this guy, and our taxes, by the way, pay these expert witnesses.
The other one who spoke at length was Spears' widow, and she's got a very vested interest because she has a lawsuit against Omar's family for $102 million.
Unbelievable, right?
And yet, there it goes.
Just one more of the thousand outrages this week.
Thank you.
It's Becky Akers, Campaign for Liberty, lourockwell.com, The New American.
She writes great stuff.
Read it.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks.
See you all tomorrow.