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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome Jacob Hornberger back to the show.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, one of the most productive and effective members of the libertarian community movement, whatever you call it, in the United States and most eloquent too, I'd say.
He features some of my very favorite writers, of course, my very good friend Anthony Gregory, also Sheldon Richman and James Bovard and Richard Elling and Bart Frazier and Andy Worthington.
I'm leaving a couple out, but it's just an incredible stable of excellent writers on all the most important issues and has been from way back, proof that the man really knows his business.
It's Jacob Hornberger, the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
How are you doing?
Oh, fine.
Always an honor and a pleasure to be with you, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and I'm so glad to see this article, Standing Army Gun Controls and Middle East Tyranny, because, you know, I didn't really get a chance to complain about this very much on the radio, but I wanted to and now's my chance.
Again, Chris Matthews, as soon as he finally gave up his, oh, Hosni Mubarak's not a dictator.
He's a friend of ours.
We like him.
Why are we why are they protesting line?
He said, oh, well, of course, everyone has always been on site on the side of the people of Egypt in this, you know, never mind what I said yesterday.
And by the way, the lesson here is, see, we don't need a Second Amendment.
The American people don't need the right to bear arms.
The people of Egypt went out and overthrew their government without guns.
And so we don't need guns in America.
Well, that's the standard pitch that the left has been making, of course, you know, this they often just tie it in with respect to private criminals, that private criminals, murderers will they may not obey gun, I mean, murder laws, but boy, they will obey gun control laws.
I mean, that's always been the pitch of the left, which is inane.
But as libertarians, we always bring up that the ultimate idea behind, you know, gun ownership is is, of course, the right to own private property, but but that it serves as a check to tyranny.
It's like an insurance policy that, hey, if you ever get subjected to a tyrannical regime where the government goons are murdering people like they are in these Middle East countries, murdering people in the back, shooting them in the back and while they're sleeping, that at least here in the United States, we have we have the ability to defend ourselves.
And I think that this what's going on in the Middle East is just fascinating because it holds so many valuable lessons with respect to our own heritage of liberty, the importance of standing armies to support a tyrannical regime, the importance of gun ownership to defend yourself against tyrants.
Yeah.
You know, Americans are just sort of like, you know, rooting for the demonstrators, you know, is is sort of a knee jerk response.
But there are some real profound lessons here, Scott.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, a big part of the right to bear arms and all that, at least, you know, regardless of the debate over the amendment when they ratified it and all that.
But, you know, in effect, it's just a deterrent, really.
It's the same reason that Chris Matthews would support Barack Obama's arm full of hydrogen bombs, more than 4000 of them.
Well, of course, Barack Obama needs hydrogen bombs.
And so nobody really messes with us with theirs.
You know what he would argue?
Well, that's why, you know, the average guy's got to be able to own a high powered rifle, too, so that if it comes down to it, they wouldn't really dare try to put Petraeus in charge of this country, no matter how bad the crisis, because the army attempting to implement any kind of martial law on our street wouldn't be safe from us.
They would lose in a war with the people of America.
Well, and you also see, I mean, there's two factors here.
There's the standing army factor in our founding fathers, as you know, were totally against standing armies.
They were totally against militarism.
And the primary reason was they said, look, standing armies are the means by which tyrannical governments are able to enforce their rule.
That's the reason why Egypt, the dictator there, has a strong military.
Then Tunisia, Yemen, all these big standing military force trained by the Pentagon and so forth.
It's to maintain order and stability, which means keeping dissidents shut up, incarcerated, tortured or executed.
And so our founding father said there ain't going to be a standing army in America because America is going to be a free society.
But on the flip side of that is the right to keep and bear arms to protect yourself against what Judge Alex Kosinski wrote in his great opinion.
I mean, I recommend this for everybody.
His opinion in the case of Silveira versus Lockyer, S-I-L-V-E-I-R-A versus L-O-C-K-Y-E-R.
He says, look, it's a doomsday device, the right to keep and bear arms.
We hope that that doomsday would never happen where there's a military takeover, height of emergency.
They won't stand for elections.
They're oppressing people, raping people, you know, Abu Ghrabs all over the United States and so forth, that we would hope that would never happen.
And the likelihood is it will never happen.
But if it happens, if you've disarmed people, that's the mistake that you only make once, because at that point you're in the same position as these people in the Middle East are, where you just submit or you die.
And let's not forget that more than 300 Egyptians died in this revolution so far, and those are 300 Egyptians that perhaps if they had had even just a glock, they may very well have taken the life of the secret police thug that took theirs instead.
They may be alive today if they had had the right to bear arms and defend themselves then.
Well, right, and you can see some of these goons in Bahrain and Yemen and stuff shooting defenseless people.
So the idea is you have the right and the ability to defend yourself against these cowardly murderers.
And again, you know, we'd like to think that would never happen, but it's a deterrent.
Yes, it's an insurance policy.
Yes, it deters them from doing these things when they know that there's millions of Americans that are well armed and well trained.
But it's much more than that.
It's in the worst case scenario, if that were to happen, Americans don't have to permit their wives and their spouses and their daughters and sort of be raped or people to be incarcerated and so forth.
They can defend themselves against this type of thing.
And that's what Europeans and people in the Middle East just miss out.
Now, you've got an interesting situation in Libya, because you've got part of the army, the military that is defecting over to the side of the people.
And so, you know, you often hear, oh, well, you know, gun ownership doesn't matter because you couldn't with you couldn't really fight against the military forces are too powerful.
Well, except for the fact that sometimes there is a crisis of conscience within the military itself.
And they're saying, hey, what we're doing here is wrong.
We're going to go over to the right side to the to the people side.
And that's exactly what's happening in Libya, which all of a sudden multiplies the ability to defend yourself against these jerks.
Right.
Well, and we can see it from, you know, Morocco to China.
Now there's uprisings all over the place.
And, you know, of course, I know you just like me would prefer to see, you know, Egypt style, you know, peaceful civil disobedience and general strike and refusal.
And this kind of velvet revolution that we're seeing in most of these countries is a beautiful thing.
It's obviously the way to go if you can do it.
But then again, look at the Libyans.
They're up against Muammar Gaddafi and he's not going to go until he gets one in the head.
And so what are they supposed to do?
Just sit there and sing Kumbaya.
They got to fight.
Well, it's right.
And the jury is still out on the Egyptian thing.
I mean, you know, they've got a huge standing military whose role in society is about as dominant as the U.S. military, the Pentagon's in the United States.
You know, they've run businesses and they run industries and they have a very privileged position in society, you know, nice salaries, nice accommodations and so forth.
Over here, our military industrial complex doesn't own businesses and industries.
But, you know, there's some eighty five thousand businesses that depend on the military in the military industrial complex.
So in both countries, you have this dominant role of the military and the jury is still out.
I mean, they were not willing to to take on the citizenry for the sake of this 80 something year old dictator.
You know, they ditched him, but it's still a military dictatorship that's ruling there.
They certainly won't lift the anti-terrorism terrorist legislation that the Egyptian people have been suffering under for 30 years.
And so the jury is still out as to what's going to happen here.
Suppose that, you know, a democratic system brings in the threatens to bring in the people in the power that are going to dismantle this military.
Then all of a sudden, then what happens?
What does this military do?
Yeah, well, you're certainly right about that.
I was talking with Ahmad Elassi, who's a local activist there, an Egyptian-American activist who's been living back in Egypt for 10 years now, about just that very thing a few days ago.
And that battle certainly is not won yet.
Hold it there.
It's Jacob Hornberger, FFF.org.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jacob Hornberger from the Future Freedom Foundation, which is a treasure trove.
Go dig through that site and read the brilliant stuff that people wrote that got posted there.
All right.
So now it seems like all this kind of ties together to me what we're talking about here with the Egyptian revolution and the right to bear arms and all these things, Jacob.
And that is, you know, the basic kind of, I know you would say, libertarian premise of American government, which is, I mean, I don't know, popular sovereignty to me is pretty slippery.
But anyway, let's go with basically what they said at the founding of the American Constitution, the creation of this federal government, that the people are born free and they allow the government to exist to be their security force.
And it's up to the people to decide.
Their entire power rests on the consent of us, which is different than everywhere else in the old world and everything, where the king will allow you to have this or that much freedom, depending on how loud you scream or how easily he can get away with killing you and these kinds of things.
But this is exactly why it's so, you know, back ass words and crazy to see that it's America that's on the side of all these kings and sultans and emirs that won't let their people bear arms, that are doing everything they can to scramble and and stay in power.
These are our government's best friends across the old world now.
It's a complete upside down everything of how it's supposed to be.
Well, that's absolutely right.
And this is the U.S. empire's worst nightmare, because, as you know, for decades, the American people have had their mindsets inculcated, primarily in public schools, that they defer to authority when it comes to the federal government and foreign affairs, that the federal government knows best, that they're fighting for national security, whatever that term means.
The third, the troops are defending our rights and freedoms and so forth.
But as we libertarians have been pointing out for many, many years, there's this dark underside to U.S. foreign policy that Americans, with this deference to authority mindset, do not want to confront.
It's the last thing they want to confront.
And this crisis in the Middle East is causing people to confront it, like it or not.
Now, the U.S. officials are trying to gloss it over and publicize, oh, we're on the side of the demonstrators.
Oh, we're sending warships to help the Libyan people and all this.
But really what it's doing, all they're trying to do is gloss over what they've been doing for decades.
And that is, they have been, the U.S. government has been the enabler, the provider, the funder of these dictatorships, the partnership of these dictatorships.
That's one of the dark sides here, that the last thing they want the American people to figure out, that the reason Hosni Mubarak's been able to brutalize his people, terrorize his people, send his goons to rape and incarcerate people indefinitely, is because the U.S. government has been giving him $2 billion of U.S. taxpayer money every year.
They also have a torture agreement, which Mubarak did, where the CIA, which is a core element of the U.S. government, if not the core element, was able to send people there to be tortured, because Egypt is renowned not just for its pyramids, but because of its torture chambers.
And the same thing with respect to Yemen and Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet is based there.
Bahrain has this brutal dictatorship.
And these people that are demonstrating and risking their lives in these countries, they're not doing it because this tyranny just popped up three weeks ago or a month ago.
They've been suffering under this dictatorial tyranny for decades.
And the U.S. government has been a partner, a funder, a co-enabler, essentially a co-tyrant in all this.
And it's absolutely disgraceful.
And what's shocking to me, Scott, is that you don't see any anger or outrage among the American people.
No, you see them, oh, we're sympathizing with the demonstrators and stuff.
But where is the anger or outrage over the fact that our very own government has been one of the principal enablers of these dictatorial tyrannies and the rapes and the torture and the incarcerations, the executions?
I don't see it.
Well, and, you know, here's the thing, too.
I mean, well, and I guess they just this part never gets talked about on TV.
But, you know, maybe at least for the people who know about this part of the story, it could be, you know, somehow they could be made to care at least a little bit, if not try to do something about it.
And that is that Hosni Mubarak, when he came to power, had anybody who had the slightest thing to do with no one, you know, fathers, brothers, nephews, cousins, former roommate who's in the Muslim Brotherhood, round them up and torture anybody who knew anybody who knew anybody close to the assassination of Sadat.
And one of those guys was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the surgeon.
And there's footage of him in that movie, The Power of Nightmares, where they're all in the torture in the jail cell together.
And he starts talking.
And this whole riot of a jail just goes silent.
And he starts going off.
And this is after they tortured him.
And it's in the book, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which is, you know, presumed to be, and I really like, I think it's a really good piece of work, you know, a pretty definitive account of the run-up to the September 11th attack.
And this is what made Ayman al-Zawahiri go from a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a very conservative kind of thing, that turned him into this radical who broke from them and created Islamic Jihad, and then ended up teaming up with bin Laden and pushing this doctrine of attacking the far enemy, i.e. the civilians inside the World Trade Center.
You know, this is what brought on this entire terror war, was Hosni Mubarak's torture with our money.
I'm really glad you pointed that out, because there was an article just in the past several days in the New York Times that pointed out the same thing with respect to the blind sheik that got convicted of the conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center back in 1993.
Right, Omar Abdel-Rahman, that's Zawahiri's buddy.
Yeah, I think it was in that same book that you just cited.
I think that was cited in the article.
And what they were talking about was Mubarak and the U.S. government's support of this dictator.
And in fact, if you go back to Ramzi Youssef, he was another conspirator in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
At his sentencing hearing, he railed against U.S. foreign policy, including the brutal sanctions against Iraq that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
Now, why is all this important?
Well, it's because of what you're pointing out.
Since ever since 9-11, there's been this debate where one side has said, oh, they hate us for our freedom and values, and they really don't care that our government's been helping them torture people and kill people and kill their own people and so forth.
And there's the libertarians that have been saying, bull.
It's because of the U.S. government's support of these dictatorial regimes that have brutalized and terrorized and tortured and raped their own people.
It's because of things like the Iraq sanctions, the stationing of troops on Islamic holy land.
It's all that that has engendered this anger and hatred against the United States that not only goes back to the 93 attacks, it goes to the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, to the U.S. coal, and then 9-11.
And so, of course, when you look at all of the things that the U.S. government's been doing, enabling these dictators, partnering with them, torturing with them and so forth, why wouldn't people be angry over that?
Right.
And then we say, you know what, you guys are right.
Living under tyranny does cause terrorism in this very vague, undefined sense.
And that's why we have to invade Iraq, Iran and Syria.
You know, the three countries where none of the hijackers were from.
Mohammed Atta was from Cairo.
You know, most of those guys were from, the vast majority of them were from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The one guy who was from Lebanon, which they've had their own problems with the Israelis, but he was raised in Kuwait under American occupation.
And it's all traceable back to American occupation, every bit of it.
Yeah.
I mean, what they did after 9-11 is simply continue doing the types of things they were doing prior to 9-11.
You know, they tried to get rid of Saddam Hussein, who was their partner.
I mean, here's another dictator that they partnered with.
They gave him those weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s so that he could kill Iranians with.
And then they turned on him.
And so they couldn't get rid of him with the sanctions.
They killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
Madeleine Albright says, oh, it's worth it.
But they didn't work.
They didn't get rid of Saddam.
So they used 9-11 as the excuse to go over there and they concocted the WMD rationale to cover up the fact that it was just a regime change operation.
Of course.
Well, and that's why they were occupying Saudi Arabia was to blockade and bomb Iraq for a decade, which was, you know, the other primary factor, you know, cited by bin Laden.
That's why, in fact, the it was the declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places was his declaration of war in 1996.
And again, the same title, I think it was in 1998.
And a third of the whole rant is about Iraq and the bombing of it from Saudi Arabia.
Right.
And this is what Americans need to confront.
They need to confront two things.
What is the cause of all this terrorism, blowback, retaliation threat that we have to continue listening to day after day after day and having all our rights and freedoms infringed upon over here?
What is the cause of that?
That's the first thing Americans need to confront.
And, of course, we've been telling them the reason for that is because of the U.S. foreign policy.
But the second thing they have to confront is the morality that their government, the immorality that their government supported these brutal dictatorial regimes.
If even if there hadn't been a blowback that morally wrong, it's repugnant, it's offensive.
That's what people need to confront.
Scott.
Right on.
You're absolutely right about that.
Thanks, everybody.
You can see why I'm such a big fan.
That's Jacob Hornberger of force over at FFF dot org.
Thanks again.
Thank you, Scott.
