04/18/07 – Ivan Eland – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, KAOS959.com, and welcoming back to the show Ivan Eland from the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute.
He's the author of The Empire Wears No Clothes.
Ivan Eland, welcome to the show, sir.
Thanks for having me back.
Good to have you on.
Now, I don't know if I've ever seen you write on this topic, but I'm sure that you're informed and have an opinion worth evaluating.
The subject is Jose Padilla, the American citizen born, I believe, in Chicago and raised in New York, arrested on American soil, unarmed, an American citizen who was labeled an enemy combatant and thrown into a naval brig for a few years.
And then, apparently, right before the Supreme Court was going to hear his case, the administration decided they didn't want to test it, and they would go ahead and indict him.
And his trial is starting just today.
Is that about to sum up the case right there, Ivan?
Yes, well, they're doing jury selection on the trial, and of course, you left out one important thing.
Well, first of all, the reason that they decided not to try him in the military system was because they were afraid the Supreme Court was going to say that Bush didn't have the right to declare people enemy combatants and hold them indefinitely, so they switched him to the civil system.
And of course, his trial is starting, but there's one important thing.
Apparently when they, in 2002, when they announced that they had him and that they were holding him as a military prisoner, they said that he was guilty of trying to disperse, or there was some sort of a plot to release a dirty bomb, which is merely radioactive waste around a conventional bomb that blows up.
It's not a nuclear explosion per se that can kill millions of people, but it's a more minor type nuclear type thing, but it's not, it's atomic waste, et cetera.
And he was also supposed to be plotting to blow up apartment buildings, but of course, the charges that he's now charged with, none of that is included.
He's merely charged with giving material assistance to terrorists, which is a much lower charge.
And of course, they've had him in the brig for a long time in the military jail, and now they've transferred him to this civilian detention.
And of course, the charges are sort of evaporating, and it'll be interesting to see if they can convict him even on these lesser charges.
Well, and that's funny, it kind of brings up the idea that the only reason they turned him over to the military in the first place was because they knew they had no case for all the accusations they were making, and they said, uh-oh, here, turn him over to the Navy.
Well, I think that's happened with a lot of the people in military custody, including the ones in Guantanamo, because they've allowed a lot of them to eventually be repatriated back to their country very quietly.
Right, hundreds of them, right?
Yes, yes, and that shows you precisely why you need to have some sort of challenge to these detentions, because what happened in the case of Guantanamo, at least, was that they picked up a lot of people in Afghanistan, because the U.S. had declared a bounty on these people.
And of course, it's a poor country, so people were turning in their enemies instead of them being al-Qaeda.
They were just somebody's enemies as they turned them over to the Americans.
So Guantanamo is still stocked with people that probably aren't guilty, but the problem is everybody needs to have a right to challenge their detention, no matter how heinous the crime, because it's possible that you could get the wrong person.
And if you don't, on an unrelated case, as an example, we saw the Duke Lacrosse team, it turns out that they were accused of rape and they weren't.
So even in heinous crimes, sometimes they get the wrong person, and that's why you need people to bring up evidence and challenge their detention if they can.
They should at least have an opportunity to do that.
Right.
And I think that really is the argument that's oftentimes made, is that, but this is such a terrible thing to be a terrorist, is that somehow the seriousness of the crime scores some ratio on a graph where the less right to a fair trial you have, the worse the crime you're accused of is.
Yeah, well, I think there are people in the common, in the common area of people thinking that's what, you don't see that with lawyers, but you do see it in the common populace because they figure some crimes are just so heinous that we've really got to treat these people, you know, in a stringent manner.
And that's okay if they're convicted.
But you know, the problem is the government, you're assuming that the government gets it right and the government gets it wrong a lot of the time.
And I think, you know, every time you have a high profile case of the Duke, like the Duke lacrosse team, it does reinforce, it makes common people, just your average citizen think, oh yeah, well, I guess, you know, some people are wrongly accused and isn't that awful.
Another example that was very famous is of course the Olympic bomber.
Richard Jewell.
Right.
Right.
Because they got the wrong guy.
They later got somebody else for it.
And of course, his honor was sullied and everything else.
But in the Duke case, you get a rare, it was a rare event that the government actually said these people are innocent.
Usually they don't want to appear to look foolish about having, you know, apprehended and persecuted an innocent person.
So they just say, you know, something like, well, we didn't have insufficient, we had insufficient evidence to prosecute him.
But in this case, the attorney general of North Carolina handled the situation very well.
He said these people are innocent and they should have never been prosecuted.
And you know, they are basically exonerated in the public eye.
So hopefully those young guys can turn their lives around now because of that.
Yeah.
But that's a rarity, I think, because the government has an incentive after they prosecuted somebody like this that may have not done it.
They don't want to have egg on their face so they don't apologize.
There's never any apology.
There's never any admission that, oh, well, this guy's innocent.
Right.
Yeah, it is.
In the Duke Lacrosse case, I guess there was just so much evidence about the malfeasance of the local prosecutor, the attorney general decided he could probably gain some political points by doing the right thing.
But if the equation had not balanced out that way, he probably wouldn't have come out and said these boys are innocent the way he did.
Right.
It's a rarity that you saw that happen.
It's good in that particular case, but the government usually doesn't apologize or say it's sorry.
Right.
And now in the Padilla case, I remember this came out, oh, I don't know, six months ago.
I should have pulled out the footnote this morning, but there was an FBI agent in Chicago who was the one who first arrested Padilla or was in charge of his arrest and interrogated him.
And he didn't even want to arrest Padilla.
He wanted to use him in a sting operation.
Guess what?
Dirty bomb plot.
And, you know, it seems to me like that's where they got the idea that he was going to be in a dirty bomb plot was the FBI tried to hire him to be in a dirty bomb plot and he refused to do it.
So they charged him with or accused him of that and turned him over to the Navy.
Yeah.
The other thing that we should bear in mind here, I think, is that I don't know whether, you know, Padilla is guilty of anything or not.
I think we, a lot of times, the press and various interest groups like to either declare people's innocence or guilt before the trial happens.
And I think they should look at the specific things in the trial and certainly the jury should and the coverage should be neutral until the person is convicted or acquitted.
But we've seen an abuse by the current administration of this material, you know, of contributing to the material assistance of terrorists.
They're really using this and I think they're going too far.
A lot of charities are nervous that they might be, if they're collecting money to send to Islamic countries, that they might be, you know, inadvertently give money to some group that was on the terrorism list or a person that's on the terrorism list and be branded materially assisting a terrorist.
So I think there's a lot of room for abuse of this provision that Padilla is charged under.
So I think we need to be very careful about what he actually did.
And it's very suspicious, of course, that this was a dirty bomb plot, very sensationalized when it first came out.
And that's why Padilla is so famous, even today, despite the reducing of these charges.
So I think the fact that the charges were reduced and that there are this provision of materially assisting terrorists is, you know, a broad brush thing that the government can use.
I think we need to be very careful on this case.
And you know, I don't think it should escape mention that John Ashcroft announced all these bogus charges are the ones that must have been bogus because they're not even included in the indictment anymore from Moscow.
This guy that was turned over to the military custody for, what, three years?
This announcement was made from Moscow with no hint of irony whatsoever, Ivan?
Yeah, well, you know, during war, we become a lot like our enemies is the old thing.
And I think it's really true that, you know, when we fight any sort of war, particularly if we're fighting against a terrorist group or, you know, in the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union, we saw a lot of techniques adopted by the U.S. government, which were, although not as bad as the Soviets, certainly tending toward that way, tending toward some of the – and we're certainly – we've certainly lost a lot of freedom in the war on terror.
And of course, you know, there doesn't need to be a war on terror.
There needs to be an apprehension of Al Qaeda members and people associated with 9-11 and other terrorist attacks against the U.S.
But that's not a broad war on terror.
It's not a war on Iraq.
It's not a war to nation-build in Afghanistan.
We've lost all conception of what we were originally trying to do in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I think this is an example of where the government's just, you know, gone berserk on something because they can get popular support, or at least they could at the time.
I think that popular support is now waning.
But – and of course, the biggest creator of big government at home, including increased domestic spending, reduced civil liberties, et cetera, is when we go to war overseas.
And most people – a lot of conservatives don't recognize that point.
Right.
And, well, and we've seen in this case an American citizen subjected apparently to some of the very same tortures that the military has been using against foreigners abducted overseas that this war has been brought home.
And these techniques were used on an American citizen, Jose Padilla, in naval custody.
Yeah, well, that's very troubling because, you know, all the people in Guantanamo are citizens of other countries, and they've deliberately kept them offshore so that they weren't under U.S. jurisdiction.
Now, that's bad enough, but when things start happening to U.S. citizens held without trial, without a lawyer, et cetera, that's even worse than citizens of other countries.
It's bad enough that the U.S. government can go anywhere, kidnap anyone, and detain them for as long as they like without any judicial oversight.
That to me is, you know, what totalitarians do.
But now, in the Padilla case – and there was another case as well where U.S. citizens – this happened to U.S. citizens, which is even more scary.
And I think, you know, people also have to realize when they say, well, a lot of these people are foreign people or resident aliens or whatever, they're not citizens.
Well, traditionally, things happen in the civil liberties area, restrictions on civil liberties happen to non-citizens first, and then they get around to the citizens later because the non-citizens are the easiest to do it against because they don't have any political power.
There's nobody to stand up for them.
But those violations of civil liberties always migrate historically to U.S. citizens.
So we can't be satisfied that, well, this is happening to people in Guantanamo who are from other countries and stuff.
And I think the Padilla case really brings it home that this can happen to Americans because Padilla was born in Brooklyn and is a U.S. citizen.
Oh, right.
Yeah, I got that wrong.
I said he was from Chicago originally, didn't I?
He was apprehended at the Chicago Airport, O'Hare Airport, but he is born in Brooklyn.
Right.
Right.
And now the Bill of Rights doesn't say anything about citizens at all in any one of the first 10 amendments.
It says persons, people, et cetera.
And they do distinguish between, in the Constitution, between provisions that have the word citizen and the word persons and all the rights.
Well, I'll have to put out my Constitution, but you're absolutely right.
It has persons and not citizens.
Right.
And now this indictment, have you read the indictment of Padilla?
I haven't read the indictment specifically, no.
OK, well, and I have to admit, I'm not as prepared for this show as I would have liked to have been.
And last time I read it was when they originally published it.
But my best recollection is that he's charged with knowing a guy who knew a guy who sent some money to some Chechen fighters or something.
And yet we all know America backed the Chechen fighters against Russia.
Give me a break.
Well, that's the problem with these material assistance statutes.
Like I said, charities are also nervous about this because their money goes through several stages.
And at some point, somebody in an organization can either not know or knows, but the charitable organization doesn't know that this is going to some cause.
And so a lot of the charities that send money to Islamic places are nervous because they don't want to inadvertently be charged with, well, I don't want to say inadvertently, but charged with material assistance to terrorism when that wasn't their goal.
The other problem that you have with a lot of Islamic charities is some of these groups live to Islamic peoples and charities, but they also conduct attacks.
And so there's a gray area there on what some of these organizations do, these overseas groups.
So it gets much more complicated than it would seem with this material assistance to terrorism.
And as you mentioned, there can be indirect chains, two or three removed, and all of a sudden, you know, the guy's up on charges for material assisting terrorists.
Right.
And now I read the most disturbing thing.
This is something that Jacob Hornberger has brought up on this show in talking about Jose Padilla before.
And I read this in the paper the other day, I guess yesterday, that the expectation is if Jose Padilla is acquitted, that the military will again abduct him.
He cannot win.
Yeah, that's the problem.
You know, and that the same applies to Guantanamo detainees, even if they win their military commission hearing, that the military can still hold them.
So I mean, that's like a total kangaroo justice system.
You know, if you are acquitted, either by the military commission or by a civilian jury in the case of Padilla, you ought to be able to freely go about your business.
Even if you're probably guilty, if there's not enough evidence to convict you, the American justice system requires that.
And that's the foundation of our system.
And you know, this is sort of, like I say, this kind of thing happens in totalitarian countries.
But it's even embarrassing in a totalitarian country to get an acquittal and keep the person in jail.
So I would think this would cause some sort of a furor here, although after the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo things, you wonder if the population of the United States continues to slumber along.
Maybe not, but certainly if they acquit Padilla and he's still kept in jail and goes back into the military system, then you ask yourself, well, why did we have a trial in the first place then?
Let me ask you this.
There's been some talk about the war czar position, and these three different four-star generals have declined this new job, which I guess would be like an Uber national security adviser, would have more authority than the national security adviser to actually order the secretary of defense and the secretary of state to do what he says or some such thing.
And I wonder, in your eyes, I know that you spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. as an aide in Congress and all kinds of things, Congressional Budget Office, right?
What does this mean in terms of the revolution within the form, in terms of the actual change in the way America is set up?
It kind of reminds me of the pooch of 1934 when they tried to make General Smedley Butler the co-president and overthrow FDR.
Well, I think they're desperately seeking somebody to bail them out of this situation.
If I were one of those generals, I would certainly decline it as well, because it's a thankless job.
Everybody's lost and everybody knows that it's just that they haven't awakened to that fact.
I'm not sure that this person would try to usurp Bush's authority, but it's an example and we've already seen the results if they do this.
We've already seen similar results that have been disastrous.
We created the Homeland Security Department.
We had so many bureaucracies that we had to create another Uber bureaucracy to rein in all the other bureaucracies, like herding cats.
The problem is it just created another layer of bureaucracy, you know, surprise, surprise.
So of course that was a failure, so then we get to the intelligence and they're talking about, well, what do we do with these 15 wayward intelligence agencies that are going in every which direction?
Well, let's make an Uber director of national intelligence to herd these bureaucracies.
Well, of course, the same thing is happening.
We have another added bureaucracy, and the same thing is true.
We have no bureaucratic coordination between the Department of Defense, State, Treasury, etc., on the war, and commanders want something and they can't get the bureaucracies to give it to them.
So this guy is supposed to have the presidential authority to cut through all the red tape, but I think what they'll find was this is just another bureaucratic player in the system and it will probably make the system worse than it is.
The other thing that we have to remember here is no bureaucratic fix here in Washington, no change in an organizational diagram is going to save this situation, and Bush keeps trying to spin it, he keeps trying to reorganize, he keeps trying to do everything, but the real problem is the Iraqis on the ground want the U.S. out and they're going to keep fighting until they get us out because they know they can.
So nothing is going to save the situation for Bush, and I think he's a bit in denial like Nixon was in Vietnam.
Nixon could have solved the thing when he first came into office in 1969, and of course he didn't do it until 1973, four years later, and how many thousands of U.S. soldiers were killed during that period, and I think the same thing is going to happen here.
It's just useless to continue this the more people are going to die and we're going to have the same outcome as we have if we would pull out now.
Well, you know, the national security state really came into being in the Truman administration and they reorganized the Department of Defense and they created the National Security Council and the National Security Advisor position, and all these things were supposed to take care of that way back then, and I guess I wonder if you think if they actually can even find anybody to fill this position, whether you think this is a position that will ever go away again, or will America always now have a new war czar even above the Secretary of Defense, or next to the President himself?
Well what will probably happen is, you know, if the wars do eventually go away, I'm not sure we can bet on that either, because the war seems to be, you know, Bush seems to be going to hand the bucket of you-know-what over to the next guy with the Iraq war, and of course Afghanistan is now deteriorating as well.
So we probably will, and if this office stays around because the wars stay on for a long time, then even if eventually the wars go away, they'll probably change his title and find something else for him to do, kind of like the NATO alliance after the Cold War, you know, the enemy's gone, but let's see what else we can do.
Right.
And that's the thing that really gets me, is it is just baby steps or something, but it seems like there's always, particularly in Bush-Cheney years, there's always something that they're doing to redefine what Article II really means.
They're always, whether it's a signing statement here, or torturing an American citizen there, or creating a new war czar, a new national intelligence director, they really seem intent on changing the form of the presidency and of the executive branch in as many ways as they possibly can.
Well, it's all to expand executive power.
The expansion of executive power, of course, didn't start with Bush, it probably started way back with William McKinley in the Spanish-American War, and even before that with Abraham Lincoln to some extent.
But so the imperial presidency has been, you know, building, but I do think that certainly Bush has pushed for a lot of executive power, and he is trying to expand the presidency, and I think Dick Cheney is behind it.
Now, real quickly, about out of time here, but the cost of war.
Joseph Stiglitz, I don't know, he's probably a Keynesian or something, but he's a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has recently calculated that the Iraq War, I think he's not even talking about Afghanistan and the whole overall war on terrorism, but just the Iraq War, I believe, he says, will end up costing this country $2.5 trillion by the time we're done paying for all the health care and that sort of thing.
And I know that, you know, when it comes to crunching these numbers and analyzing defense policy, that you really know your stuff, Ivan.
So what does that really mean for the American people, that this war that Iraqi oil was going to pay for, according to Paul Wolfowitz, is going to end up costing us $2.5 trillion?
Well, I think he's probably correct.
I mean, the numbers are so big there that even if he was off by a little bit, you know, it's still a lot of money.
But the veterans' costs of this war are going to be tremendous, because not as many people are dying as have died in previous wars, because combat medical care has improved.
So you have a lot of people with missing limbs or some that have been wounded but didn't die.
So the health care system is going to be taxed for years providing benefits and that sort of thing for these soldiers.
And that's only one portion of the cost.
So yes, the stated costs, you know, $400, $450 billion at the current time, don't reflect the whole thing.
And there's a stream of downstream costs that don't figure into the current estimates.
And so I think it's going to be a tremendous drag.
And we're going to have a basis entitlement crisis, where Social Security and Medicare and that sort of thing are going to be insolvent.
And so this just adds to the pile of, you know, outstanding future drains on U.S. taxpayer dollars.
All right, my friends, Ivan Elin, he's the author of The Empire Wears No Clothes.
The Empire Has No Clothes.
Oh, I'm sorry, The Empire Has No Clothes and directs the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute.
Thanks very much, Ivan.
Thank you.