For Antiwar.com, Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Introducing our guest today, former Senator Mike Gravel.
He represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate from 1969 to 1981.
He was instrumental in ending conscription in this country in the early 1970s, and also helped Dan Ellsberg publish the Pentagon Papers by inserting them into the congressional record, helping to end the war in Vietnam.
He is currently a candidate for President of the United States.
Welcome to the show, Senator Gravel.
Thank you very much for having me, Scott.
Well, it's great to have you here on Antiwar Radio, and I know from watching your performance in the debate a couple of weeks back that you're a good fit for Antiwar Radio, sounds like.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
Could we talk about tactics and strategies to try and bring about the end of the war?
Absolutely.
That sounds like a great place to start.
Go right ahead.
Okay.
Well, first off, I'm in disagreement with the way Pelosi and Reid have handled the situation.
We're now four months into the year going on five, and we're nowhere.
We knew that Bush was going to veto this.
We knew this a year ago, two years ago, in case anything were to happen.
But that's not the way it was played.
They're going through the normal charade.
Well, we're the Congress, and we're going to send the President a resolution.
Of course, if he looks at the resolution, he could drive a Mack truck through it because one paragraph said, well, if things change, the President has the authority to just keep everybody there.
That's the kind of silliness that they were playing.
And then they were at the same time saying that, well, we're going to be able to have a say on the training of the troops, the disposition of the troops.
Well, first off, they can't.
That's some people wanting to act like Commander in Chief.
Well, you can't.
The Constitution is very clear on that.
Commander in Chief needs to run the operation.
And I don't dispute that.
I mean, that's why you've got a Commander in Chief.
The buck stops there, a la Harry Truman.
But with respect to the Democrats, by taking that as part of what they're doing, they were giving cover to the Republicans.
You see, because now the Republicans could make the argument that, well, this is not constitutional.
So they can vote against whatever we're putting up and have a very sound argument that I agree with.
And so now you can see where we've been doing it wrong, the strategy was wrong and not tough enough.
So what you're saying is the timetable bill, as it's written, actually does interfere.
It's too specific in terms of what's supposed to happen on the ground rather than just being a financial thing.
You can either have money for the war or you can't.
Is that it?
Yeah, very much so.
In fact, most people don't realize, but during the Vietnam stuff, when they were fighting that battle, surely fought over the appropriations.
But you can't turn around and pass a bill saying that you're going to cut off the money.
You're going to lead yourself into a position where the president can demagogue you.
He'll go to the American people and say, look at these people, they're being irresponsible.
And so it gets caught up in something that's totally irrelevant from a tactical or a strategic point of view.
Well, we need to focus on it.
Then, of course, you get the whole effort.
Well, let's impeach Bush, OK?
Well, let's impeach Cheney.
You recall when Kucinich talked about his impeach Cheney, I didn't raise my hand.
I think it's a waste of time.
I think it's a distraction.
An impeachment effort now is a distraction from ending the war.
And the most important thing is ending the war, not impeaching.
People are dying today as we speak because we do not end the war.
So what should Reid and Pelosi do?
Pardon me?
What should Reid and Pelosi do then?
I have drafted a piece of legislation, and it's a law, and it's very clear, and it's a one-pager.
And essentially what it says is that the Congress directs, by law, the chief executive to get the troops out within 60 days.
We did the math.
The military, we're always going to leave the worn-out equipment there.
But if you do the math, we can get everybody out in 60 days.
During that 60-day period, you turn around, and I'll come back to the details of the law and that part of it.
But let me jump to the more germane part of your question, and that was, okay, they've got a law.
What should Reid and Pelosi do?
Real simple.
You introduce the law in both chambers, and I could get people to do that, and then Pelosi then brings it up for a vote.
You can have it go to a committee on a fast-track system, but you could have that thing up for a vote in a week's time, okay?
And now here's where the law gets really interesting.
You get the troops out in 60 days, you certify that, and if you don't have them out in 60 days, and you've got to certify, and what happens is that you certify every few months that you've kept them out, and the penalty for not doing that is five years in jail and a million-dollar fine, and in jail with no possibility of parole.
This is a tough law.
Well, but if he breaks it, they'd have to impeach and remove him first before they could prosecute him anyway, right?
No, you're jumping ahead.
Now, the question is getting him to break it, okay?
I think push from the show you won't break it, but that's my view.
So let's now look at the tactics of how the Congress does.
The Congress has just one power in this regard.
It can declare war, or it can end the war.
This law is ending the war, and they pass it.
In the House, the Democrats have the votes to pass it.
In the Senate, they'll be a filibuster.
That's fine.
Let the Republicans filibuster this.
In fact, they encouraged them to filibuster it.
So what happens is you now have Speaker Reid bring up at noon on every day.
Not bring up a cloture vote one day and then a week later or let it die.
No, you have a cloture vote every single day at noon, and then if you don't get clotured, next day, next day.
What will happen?
The media will focus on the various Republicans who are up for election who are voting against cloture.
They won't last.
They won't last 15 days.
They'll wither on the vine with the proper media attention, then plus all the peace groups focusing on this, these individuals, and then reporting how many votes were picking up every day towards cloture, and then the number of people that died that day, both with the Iraqis and Americans.
Now, that would overcome, in my best guess, we'd overcome getting it passed in the Senate within 15, 20 days.
But the tactic has to be every day you have a cloture vote.
None of this stuff, you know, we're nice guys and we're not going to come.
Every day you have a cloture vote and there's no travel days.
I mean, it's the same power and guts that I used with respect to the filibuster and ending the draft.
You just get tough and you hang right in there.
Now, it goes to the president's desk.
He obviously will veto it.
That's his right as president to do that, and now it comes back to the Congress.
So now the Congress has got a simple choice.
They're going to do what I was just suggesting is how we get over the two-thirds vote, and what you do is the same thing every single day in the House of Representatives and in the Congress.
The people, they have an up and down vote on the override.
Now, generally what happens in a historical fashion is that they have a vote on overriding the veto.
You fail to do it, and it ends there.
That's not good enough.
That's not tough enough.
What you do is you do the same thing.
Every day at noon, you have a vote to override the veto in the House, and every day at noon in the Senate, you have a vote to override the veto in the Senate.
And then let the American people focus on this.
What this is doing is creating a constitutional confrontation between the president of the United States, the Congress of the United States, and the American people, who will now understand clearly one of these phony deals about budget and funds and all of that.
This is a simple law that says you get out in 60 days.
You don't obey the law, you're guilty of a felony.
Now, I think that the Republicans cannot withstand this kind of an attack against them, because it will happen.
Every day there's a vote, you'll see some will peel off because they'll be getting pressured.
The peace movement now will have a chance to focus on these people in their home districts.
One thing about politicians that people should know, push comes to shove, generally they're wimpy.
And so what you want to do is you want to go after them.
Now, what it means for them is survival, because if we keep this up, they know they cannot get reelected if they're targeted with continuing the war until George Bush wants to end it, be at the end of his term.
So you begin to see the pressure that's building and staying away from all of this silliness of impeachment and what have you.
Impeachment or the Gonzales, that takes the focus of the Congress off of the most important thing of all, end the war.
Make that the issue.
It's a yes or no issue, very clear.
Now, what will happen from the impeachment side?
The president, I would guess, will cave in.
And if he doesn't, I don't care.
He'll cave in because the law and committing a felony and going to jail, because you see, he will not be absolved of that even after he leaves office.
He will have been committed a crime.
And that now takes on a whole different aura.
Now, what we should do after that, OK, if he does cave in or if he doesn't, makes no never mind, then you see the Supreme Court will get involved.
Can you prosecute a president for committing a felony?
That's an issue that's proved.
Nobody knows the answer to that.
And the Supreme Court will get involved.
But once that happens, you turn around and then you begin impeachment proceedings.
And then once you begin impeachment proceedings, you get that through the House and leave it alone in the Senate because they've got enough Republicans to stop the impeachment proceedings.
But that's not what's important.
What's important is after the impeachment comes out of the House is a resolution from the House that says that all of the bill of particulars, now they can do all the hearings and bring forth all the malfeasance and the corruption and all that has happened.
And that's part of the articles of impeachment.
And then you pass a resolution saying that the president cannot pardon anybody who was associated anyway with the elements that brought about his impeachment or the or committing a felony.
You see what's happened there.
We've now set this thing up to a fairly well where you can go after everybody and any prosecutors know you get the small fish.
This is exactly what John Sirica did with the break in people.
He put a ball in jail for 30 years.
And boy, they started weakening and starting writing letters.
And that's when it became unraveled.
But what you want to do, two things.
You want to push this thing so that we concentrate on stop killing people now.
And that takes a certain toughness that has not been exhibited by the Congress thus far.
Then secondly, you bring the American people in so they can see clearly, see very clearly what is the yes or no on this issue and let them put pressure and then get the peace groups to then do it from a political fashion.
And then after that, you can begin the impeachment.
And then once the bill of impeachment is over there in the Senate, let them do what they want to do.
And then what is key is now that you take away the power of the president to pardon.
And I'll tell you, the rats will leave the ship.
Does that help understand all this?
Yeah, well, it's all very interesting.
A couple things there.
I guess the first thing that jumps out at me, well, toward the end there anyway, is the power of pardon.
Does Congress have the authority to restrict the president's pardon power?
Yes, because if they can impeach, they have to put up.
And I went over the language with this with John Conyers.
He was not aware of it.
It's an interpretive issue.
And so when it's left to the interpretation, then the Supreme Court comes in.
And that's what I was talking about with the felony.
Sure, so it would be worth a try anyway.
Congress specifically acts.
You see, you can see the logic of it.
Because the language is there in the Constitution, but it's not all that clear, because it's never been done.
What I released, depending on papers, that had never been done.
And the Supreme Court ruled properly in my case.
So now, let's look at this again.
I'm not an attorney, but I'm a constitutional scholar.
And what I've always been guided by, what is common sense?
So if the president is impeached, the House impeaches him.
The trial of impeachment takes place in the Senate.
And that's fine.
I'm not concerned about that.
What I'm concerned about is once the bill of impeachment is done, it's not just a felony.
They've got to hold hearings and go through a whole bunch of other things the president has done.
The signing statements, the fraud with respect to the cooking the books on intelligence, what have you.
That all has to come out.
And that all becomes part of the elements of impeachment.
Now, it could be ten elements.
It's like a grand jury.
They have ten things you're charged with.
And that's the way this works.
So whatever is charged of what the president has done, warranting impeachment, whatever is charged, if now he can pardon anybody who's party to that, then you defeat the whole process of impeachment.
So what you have to do is now say, come follow that with a resolution or a law, whatever you want, in that regard.
But you put the president on notice that he will not be able to pardon anybody who's been involved in the crimes that he's committed that warrant the impeachment.
Right.
And now, theoretically, it wouldn't even get that far anyway, because he would probably capitulate before then.
Oh, yeah, because he will know, here, we're making it public right now, this tactic.
Yeah.
I spoke six months ago with John Conyer privately about this, and nothing's happening.
So I'm prepared to go public on it, and I'm going to have a press conference next Monday releasing this specific legislation and a specific document outlining a tactic that I just outlined with you.
For people who think that this is absolutely politically impossible, the polls at least show that this is what the people want, not specifically necessarily, but more than half of the American people want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq right now, and 56% of registered Republicans want out within six months.
That's right.
And also, the U.S. Senate election in 2008, there's an inordinate number of Republicans up for reelection in this coming election.
And everybody's up for election in the House.
Right.
So the people who don't understand this really don't have any legislative experience, tactical experience, as to how to get this done.
They're playing tiddlywakes, unfortunately.
Do you have any hope for Harry Reid?
I don't know.
All I can do is make this public, and if the peace community will get behind what I am suggesting be done, my God, I've got access to the floor as a former senator.
You know, if Harry Reid needs me to whisper next to him and to give him some spine in this regard, I'd be happy to do that.
And now again, why not- I'm not just joking about that, Scott.
You know, I have access to the floor.
Nobody's ever, you know, and there's been times in the past, people who have access have made speeches on the floor.
So I'm not afraid of any of these people, and they could do their Washington two-step.
It's not going to cut what you need to do.
And the rules are interesting on this, you know, because it's never been done.
Where you take an override of the President's legislation and continually have votes after every day until you get enough votes to override the President's veto.
And all you've got to do is want to make some history and tough enough to step out there and do it.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm speaking with former Senator Mike Gravel.
He's running for President of the United States in the Democratic primaries.
And I guess I wanted to ask you to reiterate one more time why it is that you don't advise that Pelosi and Reid simply just vote to cut off the funds.
Tell the American people, look, the war's already lost.
Bush is the one who lost it.
We're bringing our troops home right now.
You can only spend money on getting the troops out.
And that's it.
That's a positive act.
And therefore the President can veto it every time.
And he can veto it by saying that, hey, you know, they're putting these people at risk by cutting off the funds.
We never succeeded doing that against the Vietnam.
What happened was when they tried to, once you get the troops out, then what's his name, President Ford, tried to get some more money to go back in and do some things.
And it's easy.
Now, we can just stop.
It's easy to do nothing when you're trying – it's easy to stop legislation.
And it's more difficult to – well, yeah, I'm not saying it properly.
When somebody introduces legislation, you can filibuster it and stop it.
And so you can go ahead and fight this battle over funds, but it's a lot easier to just fight the battle over a law that goes far beyond playing around with the funds and the dates.
This playing around the Democrats, oh, let's start withdrawing then, and then by the end of next year we'll have them all withdrawing.
People are dying.
There's people that just don't take it to heart that people are dying right now, Scott, as you and I are talking.
And we can stop that if we've got enough leadership.
And all these presidential candidates – here, Hillary introduces a bill to withdraw the resolution that they passed giving him authority.
Oh, big deal.
You're going to fight over that, and you'll waste another five, six months over that.
And you'll fight over something else.
And by the time Bush's term is over, we will still be exactly where we are today.
And Hillary's just playing games with that, isn't she?
Of course, they're all playing games.
I don't single out Hillary.
They're playing games.
They're playing games.
And, of course, we now know, which we did not know before – are you familiar with what happened with a senator from Illinois who's the whip and not in the Senate making a statement?
That he was conflicted because he could observe the fact that the president was saying one statement to the people and that the members of Congress were briefed on something else.
Oh, right, Dick Durbin.
You're talking about in the run-up to Warren.
In the run-up to Warren, he was on the Intelligence Committee and knew that what they were telling us was lies.
Okay, now, here, let's analyze that for a minute.
You'll see something very interesting.
First off, Dick Durbin making that statement right now, in my mind, is very courageous.
There's a guy who's now got his conscience and is reacting to it and made it public because what he's doing, he's destroying the arguments of Hillary by Dodd, Edwards, all of the people who voted for the war.
At the same time, when he knew that a shell game was going on, and when Hillary or any of the others say, well, if I knew now what I knew then, I wouldn't have voted for it, they knew then.
That's what Durbin's statement says.
They knew then.
And what, unfortunately, Durbin did not know was that the Supreme Court ruled in my case, Gravel versus the U.S. government, about the Pentagon Papers, that a member of Congress cannot be held responsible for the secrecy of the administration.
And so any member of Congress can release all kinds of stuff if they want to in conscience that they think that the people should know.
So his excuse that he would have gone to prison if he had told us is no.
It's just the opposite.
And of course, he said this statement, he says, you know, I thought that if I released this secret information that people would die.
But by not releasing it, people have died.
By not releasing it, and he was not at risk for anything that he would have revealed.
And none of them would be because the operative law is what the Supreme Court ruled in my case.
Problem is, is nobody, nobody has dared do anything about this since I was in office.
And even after the court case, I released stuff.
Missums and other things.
It's just very sad that the level of timidity and the lack of conscience.
Now, I say lack of conscience because this is exactly what we had during the Vietnam era, is that people detach themselves from the loss of life.
They don't appreciate the fact that, you know, when Mertha came out and was saying that, you know, these people are dying, this is not right.
Now, this was quite a change of heart for him because he's been one of the major forces in the Congress supporting the military industrial complex, which has brought about the Iraq war.
So, you know, it's the timidity, it's the lack of getting your moral sights up until you realize what you're doing with the power that you have as a senator.
And so the game playing is on.
And that's what I'm trying to cut through.
Now, I'll be able to cut through it.
But Scott, I'll tell you, if after, if at my press conference next Monday, the peace groups get organized and make a showing at the press conference and then turn around and make this the cause, I'll have the details all lined out what the leadership is supposed to do.
I'll tell you what, they'll respond.
I was in San Francisco for the Democratic convention there, and when Pelosi was all hearts and flowers, and that's nice, you know, I'm delighted we got a woman as speaker, just delighted.
But I'm not delighted with the fact that there's no leadership.
And so what she's attacked on, and they had a group of peacemakes in the back of the room who were attacking her about get out of Iraq, get out of Iraq.
And that's exactly what the mantra should be.
But the mantra gets mixed up because there's a whole bunch of people saying, well, let's impeach.
You know, and I know where Kucinich got his advice on impeaching, he got it from Gore Vidal, impeach Cheney because he's the bright one of the two.
I mean, this is a game that's being played, and it's not being played very well.
But I need people to support what I've just outlined to you, and I'd be happy to outline it again later on this week if you want to bring the groups together.
But if the peace groups could recognize that there is a way to force the end of the war, and I think, I really think, if we're lucky, it will be all over by the end of this year before even the primaries take place.
And that's because of the threat of the felony and the over and the ability to impeach after he's committed the felony.
What people don't realize, in order to impeach now, you have to have the Judiciary Committee at the House begin a major investigation.
That takes time.
And I hope that Conyers is hiring the investigators to do this.
That takes time.
Waxman has been holding some hearings showing a lot of the malfeasance.
That takes time to get geared up.
But in the meantime, while that's going on, and I know they're doing that, what we need to do is to attack frontally in another part of the war.
And that is to go after getting the troops out now and not let anything get in the way of that, because human beings are dying and we can't afford the luxury of making these silly mistakes, which is where we're at right now, where the Democrats talk about, well, we're going to sit down with the president and compromise.
What the hell is there to compromise?
There's nothing to compromise.
He's a commander in chief, and he'll box you in.
Do we not remember how Bill Clinton made a fool out of Gingrich over the shutdown of the government?
The power of the president is awesome, and he's prepared to wield it regardless if there's only two votes in the Congress supporting him.
But that's not what's supporting him.
The Republicans are in trouble with him.
I'll tell you, this played very well.
He'll destroy the ability of the Republicans to have any major chance of taking over the Congress for the next generation.
They'll go down in flames on this issue, and they won't, because they're not that stupid.
It's survival for them, and they'll be the ones that will cut and run, not the president.
All right.
Now, let me switch gears and ask you about Iran here real quick.
If it's all right, I'd like to play this clip from the Democratic debate a couple of weeks ago.
We've sanctioned them for 26 years.
We've scared the bejesus out of them when the president says they're evil.
Well, you know something?
These things don't work.
They don't work.
We need to recognize them.
And you know something?
Who is the greatest violator of the nonproliferation treaty?
The United States of America.
We signed a pledge that we would begin to disarm, and we're not doing it.
We're expanding our nukes.
Who the hell are we going to nuke?
Tell me, Barack.
Who are you going to nuke?
I'm not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike.
I promise you.
Good.
Good.
We're safe, then, for a while.
Oh, good, Barack.
We're safe, then, for a while, you said there at the end.
I know that.
He's not planning to nuke anyone right now, he says.
Right.
That's right.
And that's the crime of it all.
Okay, what's your question about Iran, then?
Well, why is it, do you think, you accused correctly in the debate the three top-tier candidates of using the phrase, all options are on the table for dealing with Iran.
Is there a problem with Iran, and what options should be on the table for dealing with that problem, if there is one?
Well, the options that they see is that Iran is the basic threat to our importance in the Middle East in influence, no question about it.
The major beneficiary of the Iraq debacle, the crazy thing we've done, is Iran.
Because, you see, Iran is Shiite, and they make common cause with the Shiites in Iraq.
And then, of course, in Saudi Arabia, that's Sunni.
So, you've got these other Sunni factions that are being oppressed inside of Iraq, and so you've got these people jockeying for position.
Then you've got Maktada, who is a young kid, a cleric, whose father and brothers were killed by Saddam, and now he has an army, and has more power than anybody else in Iraq, thanks to us.
What we need to do with Iran, because they don't want Maktada any more than we do, unless he really becomes an extreme cleric.
But you've got to look a little bit at history.
In Iran, we were the ones that destroyed their democracy.
They had a democracy in 1952 with Mossadegh, and our CIA destroyed their democracy and put a king in.
And a generation later, the oppression of the king resulted in the oppression of the religious extremists.
What we need is some diplomacy, some patience.
I would seek to do away with the sanctions immediately.
No quid pro quo.
Just stop the sanctions in Iran.
It hasn't done any good.
Just like the sanctions we had in Iraq for ten years under Clinton.
500,000 innocent children died as a result of that.
It's just unbelievable, and that's what the good government was doing.
Look at what Bush was doing.
You've got to understand, the people in Iran, the leadership in Iran, they know about the neocon plan, which was to one, and this is on paper, they know it, which was one, to invade Iraq.
And we did.
Regardless of what Saddam Hussein said or did, we invaded.
He did not have any weapons of mass destruction, and anybody who could reason this out would realize that also.
So the next on the plan was to invade Iraq.
And then after that was to invade Syria, and was to invade Lebanon, and then, believe it or not, invade Saudi Arabia.
And then that would make the United States of America a great empire.
We control the oil of the world, except for Nigeria and for Russia, and then we have the military might to back up that control, and then we have this American imperialism.
I mean, it doesn't get any sicker in the head.
And these neocons, they brought off the first element of it, which was to invade Iraq when there was no reason to invade Iran.
And they're still talking about why we've got to stay there so we can control the oil.
Well, now, there's been so much talk about the Cheney cabal, the neocons and Dick Cheney's little group that have done all these end runs around everyone else in the government in order to push this agenda.
Why do you think John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama's foreign policy would be anything like Dick Cheney's?
Well, if you listen to what they're saying, they're saying that they would withdraw the combat troops.
And that would leave 100,000 troops there to guard, God knows what, to make sure that the agreement that was signed for us to control the oil would stay in place.
But you think that they also plan to aggress against Iran if they take power in 2009?
I don't know.
Wait a second.
I don't know that.
All I know is what the words they said.
Now, these are not children.
These are senators.
These are people with power in this country right today.
And when they say that nothing is off the table, what they're saying is, Iran, you better knuckle under to us or we could nuke you.
That's what they're saying.
That's their communication.
And Iran knows this.
And the people of Iran are scared stiff.
And when you look at the head of the government, which is Ahmadinejad, at one point, he was six votes.
Had it been for six additional votes that he might have lost, he would no longer be the prime minister.
And there's great friction between Ahmadinejad and the religious leaders.
And that country is not all that solid in its opposition to us.
If you probe deeply, the people of Iran love Americans.
What we're stuck with is we're dealing with leaders, whether it's in Iran or within Israel or in the United States, who just are more intent on violence and retribution than on solving problems, or Gemini in power.
That's the reason why, when I turned and said, these people scare me.
They do.
Because it's politics as usual, and that's what's ruining the world and ruining our country.
Politics as usual.
Stephen thinks about what I'm advocating.
I'm advocating bringing the American people into the operation of government as lawmakers, because that's what the real power is, if we had.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on one second.
I want to ask you about the direct democracy push for a second.
But on Iran still, Barack Obama said in that debate that it was not in dispute that Iran is making nuclear weapons.
And now someone objected.
I'm not certain if it was you or Kucinich, because the camera didn't show.
Kucinich objected, and that's when I jumped on him over who he's prepared to nuke.
Because, so what?
Iran gets, here, you got Pakistan.
But for a bullet, you've got a country that's a lot more irresponsible than Iran is.
And do you know, do you believe that Iran is making nuclear weapons, or do you know whether or not that's in dispute?
I don't think it's in dispute.
I think that, one, they're saying that, and they lie, their leaders lie like our leaders.
Now, why should it be a surprise to us that they may be lying to us?
George Bush lies to us.
Only because Mohamed ElBaradei says they're a decade away.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says.
That's right.
Well, I think that they're five, ten years away.
I don't know, precise.
But I would be, I'd have a lot more confidence in Baradei than I would in the president giving us intelligence.
See, when he's speaking, when the president makes statements like that, you don't know if they're true or not.
And all you get is this track record where he cooks the books all the time.
Now, so, but what is the big deal of them acquiring nuclear devices?
We have nuclear devices.
The reason why we have them is to defend ourselves.
Now, you do not think that Iran has a problem with Russia on the north with nuclear devices, with Pakistan on the east with nuclear devices, and Israel with nuclear devices.
You don't think Pakistan feels, I mean, you don't think Iran feels a little insecure?
You may not be aware that when Pakistan detonated their bomb, they detonated it right on the border with Iran.
A message in that is, don't mess with us, boy.
We now have the Islamic bomb.
You know, and if you're a Shiite or a Sunni, you better be careful.
This is, the only way you can stop, there's a way to stop Iran from going for nukes, is pull away the fear of their survival.
And how do you do that?
You do that by recognizing them as a normal country, doing away with all of the devices, all of the threats that we've been making, and start trading with them, and treating them like human beings.
But that's not the way we've been doing it, nor have we been doing that.
We have had sanctions against North Korea for 56 years.
These sanctions do nothing, do nothing, but hurt the innocent and strengthen the tyranny of the leaders, because they do not address their domestic problems, they point the finger at us and say, see, hate Americans, they're the ones that are sanctioning you and causing you economic difficulties.
Ah, I guess politicians are the same everywhere, aren't they?
Oh, they are.
They have a tough time, and they want to manipulate the people.
That's the reason why I've come to the conclusion in my career that the only answer is not the leadership, it's the people you have to go to.
And I've told a group of Jewish people here in Washington that I will bring peace to the land of Abraham if I'm elected.
And I'll do it by bringing the moderates together, and not by permitting the violence to go forward.
But that's business as usual.
What they want to do is they want to give the power of the presidency to somebody else.
I don't.
I don't trust the leaders in this country, and I don't trust the leaders in any other country.
They're politicians, and they're all used to politics as usual, and that's what we need to change, and we can start right here in the United States, empowering the American people so that they can make laws.
Stop and think, Scott, for a second.
Had what I'm recommending been in place right now, the American people would have got us out in last fall.
They would have got us out last summer.
Well, but wouldn't they have already, back in 2002, made Bush president for life and given away their power over him?
Hell no.
Hell no.
We were being brainwashed by the White House.
The American media was laying down like a carpet.
But now, if you have proper procedures, which is what the national mission is all about, it won't make any difference what the media says.
What does the special interest say?
The people will identify their enlightened self-interest and will vote that in a majoritarian way within the entire constituency.
And now you're talking about they would have the power to override Congress?
Oh, God.
They have the power to wipe out the Congress that they wanted to.
The minute you bring the people into government, the people are the sovereigns.
Here, let me give you a little piece of logic.
You read the Constitution of the United States.
The most important part of the Constitution is the preamble.
In the preamble, it says, we, the people, do ordain.
That means we hereby create this Constitution.
We're the creator.
Now, if we have to get permission from the Congress, the createe, to do something, then we are not the creators.
We're not the sovereigns of the nation.
Yeah, but if we, it sounds like basically what you're talking about is going ahead and throwing the Constitution out where the rule of law is suborn to the will of the mob.
No, Scott, the mob you've got is in Congress right now.
Well, no doubt about that.
Did you not see how they passed the Patriot Act?
Honestly, I live in Texas, and I'm not certain that my neighbors love liberty any more than the Congressmen do.
Oh, wait a second.
Now, what you're saying, you're pointing to the guy down the street.
I know that guy from that case.
We can't let him vote to make laws.
Here, you've got a simple choice.
You either have to trust the people, and it's not trusting individuals.
It is the constituency of the whole.
Right.
See, that's my thing, is I do trust individuals.
It's the whole that I don't trust.
Well, first off, you don't have any experience with the whole.
None at all.
None at all.
But we do have experience with the whole in the various states of this country, and the people in the various states have passed over a thousand pieces of legislation.
And none of that legislation was any different than what would have been passed by a legislative body, except that when it comes to fiscal matters, the people are so much better than their elected officials.
Yeah, because it's their money.
So your foundation, your fears are based upon representative government.
You haven't experienced what I'm talking about, Scott, and there's only one country in the world that has anything close to what I'm talking about.
That's Switzerland.
And they brought the people into their government in partnership with their elected officials in 1848, after a three-year religious civil war.
And the Swiss have four languages, four cultures, four religions, have no resources.
They farm on the side of a hill.
And what happened?
Today, they have lived in peace all that time, and today, on a per capita basis, they are one of the wealthiest in the world.
And the only thing that they've done different than all these supposed democracies, which are not democracies, they're representative government.
And the only thing that they've done different is they brought the people into the government as lawmakers.
So your proposal then is to have basically petition and referendum on a national level?
Referendum is not so.
Understand the language, Scott.
A referendum, any legislative body can refer anything to the people.
A referendum is like voting on a bond issue that's referred to you by your leaders.
You got a yes or no vote.
You got no creative ability in writing the bond issue.
But now, what I'm talking about is only initiative, and only the people can do initiatives.
Now, I as president, I could get together with you and we could do an initiative, if the people want to.
And I would, as president, would only have one vote.
And you would only have one vote.
And so if the majority of the people bought into the initiative that we're putting forth, then it becomes the law of the land.
See, that's what happens.
The minute the people come in with the tools to make laws and amend the Constitution, they immediately become the senior partners.
And so the people can make laws, and I would suggest that they'll just make laws on policy issues.
They're not going to get involved in the minutiae of the day-to-day operation of government.
That will be your elected officials.
And then what they'll do, they'll do a better job, because they're going to reach down into bowels of the government, and all that power that's been pushed out there to the bureaucrats, they'll bring that back and be more responsive on the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.
So it's a win-win situation.
The people come in, they can make all the policy issues that affect their lives, and that the representative government can turn it around and better handle the day-to-day operations.
What happens to the people as they begin to do this?
They grow up.
They mature.
We have a structure of representative government that is designed to keep the people in civic adolescence.
And what they need to do is to become adults.
What do adults do?
They take responsibility.
And so if they want something, then they realize they've got to pay the taxes for it.
But the way it is right now, people want and want and want and don't want to pay taxes.
They've got to cut the taxes to satisfy these people.
That's childhood.
That's adolescence.
And that's what we're stuck in because of the structure of our government.
Everybody wants it both ways.
You can't.
But you've got to grow up and not get it both ways.
And the reason why the structure that we have is there is because of slavery.
And I could go into that, but let's not – I don't want to wage a filibuster here, which is not.
But I just want you to understand that the answer is not the government.
That's where the problem lies.
The answer is with the people.
I certainly agree with that.
All right, now – Well, but if the people had the tools, procedures – making laws is a very serious undertaking.
And you have to have procedures.
And so what I've copied is I've copied the procedures of the Congress and of my experience as a Speaker of the House in Alaska.
And so now the people can use these procedures in every government jurisdiction of the United States.
That's awesome power.
And the people can handle it.
They can handle it.
Here, you've got a simple choice, Scott.
And you've got concerns that you've expressed about the people in some places in Texas.
Let me tell you, you've got one of two choices.
You either have unreserved faith in the people of this country, or you have unreserved faith in the minority that is presently controlling and ruling this country.
That's your choice.
Or none.
I could just be faithless, right?
You could pull a Jeremiah John.
You go to the wilderness and live off the wilderness land.
But we're in the 21st century with a very complicated society that needs a new, updated form of human governance.
And what this national initiative and what I'm trying to accomplish is a paradigm shift in terms of human governance.
And now this is a constitutional amendment you're proposing, is that it?
The national initiative is a package of two pieces of legislation.
One is a constitutional amendment that asserts the people's implicit power to make laws and also approves the election, the national election that's being conducted by a private group, because the government will never do this.
And then also, by constitutional edict, limits the money that can be used in an initiative campaign to a natural person.
That means that all corporate monies, no corporate monies from any group can be used in an initiative campaign, but there's no cap on the money.
There's a couple of other points in there, but that sets up the electoral trust so that people have an independent agency that administers their procedures on their behalf.
And then the other part of the package, we call that the democracy amendment, and then we have the democracy act.
And what that does is it sets up the various procedures to make laws that are the copy of what the Congress and all legislative bodies do.
You have hearings, you have markups, you have communications, you have advisory votes.
That's all there.
That's all there in great detail.
But you don't put that in the Constitution because it clutters up the Constitution.
That's why it is a federal statute.
So when you vote, when you go to the site, nationalinmission.us, and you vote, you're voting on that package.
And you can change your vote a week from now if you want.
But we have to get 60 million Americans, because we have the threshold that we must have the majority of the people who voted in the last presidential election voting in the affirmative for the national initiative.
That's tough.
But there's no easy way to change the nature of our structure of our government.
It has to be done by the people, and people have to become aware and educated to the process.
And so that's one of the major reasons why I'm running for president.
The other is I want to end the war, and I don't think the others can do it.
I think I can.
And I promise you, I not only can, but I will.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with former Senator Mike Gravel.
He's running for president of the United States.
And I wanted to ask you just one more question to wrap up here, sir.
I noticed in your bio that you are a former Army intelligence officer, and also that you have been active and outspoken on the issue of health care for returning veterans, and particularly the guys with the post-traumatic stress disorder.
And I wonder if I could get you to comment on that.
Well, I just want to comment that our government, and this was so during Vietnam, is so now, our government wages war against the veterans.
I don't understand psychologically why that happened.
I just am revolted by the hypocrisy of it all, where we say, support our troops, and we carry the ribbons and the flags and all that.
Support our troops.
This is the test of supporting our troops.
Keep in mind, you judge a civilization by how it treats its young, how it treats its elderly, and how it treats its guardians.
And the way we're treating our guardians is appalling, and the money's not right, the bureaucracy doesn't work properly.
I get my meds from the vets, and they do a better job, they do a good job, but they need to do a better job, and that will, and the Congress is there, but it's not effective properly.
You need automatic checks and balances.
We need veterans who are outside with the power to be the ombudsman for the individual veterans.
It's no secret that if I go to the hospital and my wife goes with me, or if she goes to the hospital, I go with her, because I'm her advocate right there.
I want to make sure what they're doing is what should be done.
I'm her advocate.
And we need a buddy system like that for all of the returning veterans.
And all I can say is that I know the problem up close and personal, and I have no room for playing politics with this issue, which is what they do.
Obviously, if they weren't doing that, we would have solved the problem a long time ago.
And now, something that's happening, there's a great article in The Nation called How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits, and it's about how the Army has thousands and thousands of times told wounded veterans returning from Iraq, oh, sorry, you have a personality disorder, which means that you don't get any benefits.
You're not really wounded.
You just have a personality problem, and so forget you.
But, Scott, do you know why they do that and how they do that?
It's they want to use the money in other parts of the defense budget, and so they don't want to get too much money going into the veterans because they can't get it back.
So what they do is they then put pressure on the bureaucracy, and this is the way the bureaucracy responds, and that has got to be reversed from the top down.
And here, when you talk about veterans in support of our troops, stop and think what kind of a general takes his troops into battle when they don't even have proper armored Humvees, don't even have proper armor.
Now, this is the nation that spends more on defense than all the rest of the world put together, and we can't even get our troops properly protected.
I mean, and that starts from the president down to the Department of Defense and down into the military itself, right down to the colonels and majors all the way down to the bottom.
Just look at what we've done.
Who is being punished for the torture?
The people at the bottom of the ladder, my God.
What about the people that made all this possible?
That was actually what I was going to ask you next, if I could get one more in, was as president, what would you do with the Military Commissions Act and all the special access programs and aggressive investigative techniques and so forth that have been used in the past six years?
What we would do is, here, we all know the way bureaucracies act.
We all know the way politicians act.
What we need to do is to find some automatic checks and balances.
Fine, I'll come into the presidency and I'll be president for four years, only four years.
I'll get all my work done in four years, I promise you that.
But the key thing is to have these checks and balances where the people have recourse.
Stop and think.
If you have an initiative process, if you don't see things working well for the veterans, what you can now do, Scott, and you and a group of veterans, and I'll join you, you can design a piece of legislation to correct these things, not wait on the Congress, and then this will get passed.
You want to know how fast it will get passed?
Stop and think.
The veterans in this country are a very cohesive group.
They've all suffered an experience directly, and so they would be a very large interest group that would vote for this initiative and get it passed into law.
We have the same benefits with the elderly, with the infirm.
These are all constituencies that would have more force than fighting the lobbyists.
There's no way you're going to have enough money, Scott, with your veterans groups, to fight the 30,000 lobbyists that exist in Washington who are fighting for, quote, the military-industrial complex because that is where the money is going.
It's going to the profit of corporations, and it's pulled right off the back of the injured soldier who comes back, and of the soldier who goes into battle who's not properly armored to take care of the problem.
This country invented the atomic bomb in four years, and that means that we can't even invent the proper armored vehicles to safeguard our troops.
It gets to be ridiculous.
Now, are you going to be allowed in the second Democratic presidential debate?
Yes, I am.
To my knowledge right now, I'm going to be in all the debates, and I've got to tell you, I will give an account of myself in that regard.
But what I need from the peace community that will look at this tactic that I was talking about at the beginning, I need the peace community to get behind what I'm trying to accomplish, and that is a law that dictates that we get out in 60 days.
See, if you have any other device, it takes the same amount of effort.
It takes the same...you might as well do it right.
Criminalize the war.
Make a fella out of the present.
Boy, I'll tell you, these people will shake in their boots when they see this coming.
All right, well, I thank you very much for your time today.
Scott, I thank you for giving me voice out there with some people that I feel very much bound to, and if I seem harsh in some criticisms, it's not because I enjoy being harsh, it's because I think that we're not doing it right, whether it's in the Congress or in the military or in the executive.
Thank you very much, Scott, for giving me voice.
Oh, well, you're welcome, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
