All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog ProLibertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com and he's the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing great.
It's always an honor to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and I wonder what you know about this new AP piece.
What you got to say about this?
With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas.
Actually, before you answer that, let me remind the audience maybe they haven't met you before.
Will is the foremost critic of local police brutality and abuse of power in this country and at his blog freedominourtime.blogspot.com, he documents just about every case, you know, possible to document there and, of course, has a very long history of criticizing federal police power and their wars as well.
But, you know, this is why I think it's so important to talk with you, Will, actually, is because you understand all of these different subjects very well and then when they all merge together, the federal and the local police power, seems like you'd be the one to really clue us in on what's the most important parts of this, you know?
That's very kind of you.
I appreciate that.
What's going on here with this case in NYPD and the merger with the CIA, I think, is an analog to what's happened with nominally local police and the military by way of the war on drugs.
Because of the war on drugs, suddenly we have all these exceptions carved out to the posse comitatus law, which is dead letter and to be blunt, it's been dead letter or nearly morbid letter for most of its existence.
In the name of fighting the war on drugs, suddenly you have these local police agencies developing federally funded SWAT teams and narcotics task forces that are, for all intents and purposes, military or paramilitary units funded by the federal government and trained and equipped by the Pentagon.
And so you've got a workaround here that essentially nullifies not only the local role of what should be peace officers, but what are commonly called law enforcement officers, on the one hand, but also the posse comitatus act.
The third amendment, you could say the troops are being quartered among us in the sense that these police are being turned into soldiers for all intents and purposes.
With the NYPD's relationship with the CIA, you've got a literal mini CIA run by a fellow who failed upward through the CIA bureaucracy during the worst period in the CIA's history for both analysis and operational activities overseas.
Everybody in the CIA basically had to resign or was driven out in disgrace during the 1980s and 1990s when Mr. Cohen, who's now the Commissar for Intelligence for the NYPD, rose to the ranks.
He's somebody who has never been esteemed within the CIA from what I've been able to glean from the news readings that I've done on this.
People in the operations directorate used a colorful Anglo-Saxon vulgarism for the act of insemination to describe this guy, typically.
That was his nickname in the CIA.
So he failed upward through the bureaucracy, he was eased out as a pensioner in 2000, then 9-11 happened and he was appointed in 2002 to be the counter or the intelligence czar, the so-called civilian intel chief of the NYPD, and he started to replicate the CIA's operations director within the NYPD, taking advantage of the fact that there were tens of thousands of line officers from different ethnic groups that spoke the languages of all these various ethnic communities in New York who could be recruited to be what one described as walking cameras for the police department, simply trolling along ethnic neighborhoods in Pakistani and Bangladeshi enclaves in New York City, gathering whatever they could by way of rumor or innuendo, visiting internet cafes, visiting hookah bars, simply being present to surveil people from these various backgrounds, and then to report what they had found into some central location where it would be collated for what were called hot coals of potential radicalism.
These are the people called rakers.
The folks were just sent out basically to rake whatever they could out of the various ethnic enclaves in New York City.
Then you had mosque crawlers.
Some of these people were recruited by the rakers as seeded informants in local bodegas or local convenience stores or wherever you could find merchants or people who had street-level contacts, people who may be vulnerable in terms of licensing violations or code violations.
The police agencies or the police agents who were sent out to do this, by the way, were instructed to take advantage of every interaction they had to find something they could use as leverage to recruit seeded informants.
These people, along with people from the NYPD, this CIA directorate within the NYPD, were sent into houses of worship as what were called mosque crawlers.
They were there to take notes on sermons and to keep an eye out for people who might seem to be radicalized or capable of being radicalized.
My suspicion is that if you found people who were capable of being radicalized rather than being rounded up as potential criminal suspects, they were probably fed into the machinery of potential provocateurs, which is what the FBI has been doing for the last 10 years.
There are a number of reports that have come out recently that have validated something I have long contended, which is that, for all intents and purposes, the so-called domestic terrorism threat here in the United States is almost entirely the result of the FBI's orchestration of bogus plots through the Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
You've got parallel tracks going on here, quite frankly.
You've got the FBI in charge of running 15,000 informants, and heavenly knows how many of those are actual agent provocateurs, and tuning up these bogus terrorism plots using their own surveillance methods to identify socially isolated and compromisable people.
On the other hand, you've got the CIA and the NYPD, and the NYPD, of course, is probably the most significant bellwether institutionally of law enforcement in this country in terms of setting trends, not only for the United States, but as we've seen recently for Great Britain.
Great Britain is turning to the NYPD for expertise in dealing with its own problem of potential urban insurrection in the wake of the riots.
The NYPD is a consequential organization, and when they've gone into this type of a mode where they have such an improper intimate relationship with the CIA, chances are that's something which is going to have institutional consequences for just about every law enforcement agency in this country, and the CIA is doing something quite similar in broad outline and very complementary to what the FBI has been doing in terms of recruiting its own stable of informants and provocateurs, and quite possibly, although what we've seen in the press the last couple of days doesn't support this suspicion, but on the basis of history I think we are entitled to entertain the suspicion, quite possibly recruiting people who could be provocateurs as well.
Historically, the division of labor has been this.
The CIA has been in charge of generating blowback overseas through its operations directorate, and the FBI has been in charge of capitalizing on that by expanding federal jurisdiction here at home in the name of fighting domestic terrorism.
These two agencies, of course, have had a historic rivalry.
Now they're starting to mess with each other's bailiwick.
The FBI has gotten involved in generating domestic blowback, and now the CIA is involved in consolidating its power through the NYPD, and quite possibly through other agencies we've yet to hear about.
Right, I mean, if they're using the NYPD this way, why not the Austin Police Department and all the rest of them too?
Well, if they're not yet, they're going to is the thing.
That's the way these things historically happen, and the NYPD has...
Is this illegal anymore?
Of course it is, as if that matters.
I mean, you could round up to everything when describing the number of illegal activities the government's involved in.
I really can't find anything the government's doing that actually fits its constitutional description of assigned responsibilities.
Oh, another really good example of this is what just happened in Las Vegas yesterday when the Air Force led a SWAT raid against a gun dealer and a safe dealer.
We've not heard details about this, but you actually had people from the OSI from the...
I believe that's the Office of Special Investigations from an Air Force base take the point when they had a multi-agency gangbang, if you will, this SWAT raid against a gun dealer where they frog-marched the guy out of the shop and confiscated a number of weapons that were supposedly stolen from an Air Force base.
But this is a really good example, once again, of the utter casualness with which these things are proceeding now that even as recently as, say, 10 years ago would have struck people as just screaming violations of posse comitatus and separation of powers.
The OSI does have a role if you're investigating crimes within the Air Force, but they weren't advising this raid.
They were the guys who took the point of the spear when they raided this gun shop yesterday.
Like I said, just about everything the government does right now is illegal in terms of the constitutional assignment of responsibility.
All right, well, we'll have to hold it right there.
It's Will Grigg, Pro Libertate is the blog, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the line with Will Grigg.
We're talking about the American police state.
He writes about it all day long at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Wouldn't that be nice?
But it sure looks like we're headed the other way here, Will.
And I'll tell you what, I interviewed Francis Boyle on the show yesterday, the famous lawyer, and the FBI and the CIA.
On American soil, came to him and said, you better flip and you better start informing on your clients for us.
And he refused.
And then he described the inordinate amount of pressure they put him under, put him on all kinds of terrorism watch lists and harass him, let him on the plane, but harass him every time list, et cetera, et cetera.
And then, you know, one point is that he said, you know, the next time there's a red alert, people like him and people like me, and I guess this means people like you too, are going to all be rounded up and taken away.
The precedents already set for what's to become of us.
But also another point from that, I think that's really important is when you talk about the CIA, the NYPD, the FBI going to such lengths to recruit so many informants, how do they recruit them?
They put them under incredible pressure like this and who knows what kind of ways that they have a blackmailing people and intimidating them into serving their interests.
And then, as you said, they can turn someone who's got nothing to do with nothing into an agent provocateur.
That's exactly right.
There are countless potential vulnerabilities given the fact that practically everything we do is considered a crime if we don't have explicit government permission, which can be repealed at any time without advance notice.
That's one of the things that Harvey Silverglade has pointed out in his terrifying masterpiece, Three Felonies a Day.
I mean, we exercise our rights only by the grace of the state.
And when that grace is withdrawn, we can find ourselves before a tribunal, not even necessarily a court, a jury anymore, the way things work, and find ourselves being criminalized as people, not because of anything we've done, but simply because of the nature of the system that's being clamped down on us.
It's interesting in this AP story, what they reported with respect to the CIA unit within the NYPD, the so-called demographic unit.
Actually, it was sort of a multi-layered apparatus.
You had a demographic unit, you have a so-called terrorist interdiction unit, and then they have extraterritorial investigations and intelligence gathering by the NYPD in eight countries overseas.
So they've, once again, essentially replicated the mechanism within the CIA, and retrofitted that into the NYPD as if there were a retrovirus rewriting its institutional DNA.
But this is to be expected, once again, because this is the same thing that's happened through the war on drugs with the militarization of the local law enforcement.
Now you're having the CIA, I think, field test in New York City, probably, once again, the most consequential jurisdiction in the known universe, field test the use of their methods in incorporating them into so-called local law enforcement.
In this article, however, we read the following that I think illustrates the predatory opportunism of the people we're talking about.
They, meaning the CIA unit within the NYPD, came up with a makeshift solution.
They dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods, and according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars, speeding, broken taillights, running stop signs, whatever.
The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior.
Suspicious, of course, could be just about anything.
An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.
And, of course, by persuade, you're talking about blackmailing people.
You're talking about extorting cooperation from people under threat of imprisonment or probation or financial ruin or simply the ruin of one's reputation.
And that, of course, is tradecraft of the sort you find in intelligence agencies.
The KGB did it, the Mossad, of course, has done it and continues to do it, and the CIA does it, and now we're seeing that local police are doing that as well.
This is, once again, not surprising.
If you take a look at the history of the commingling of law enforcement domestically with the military and intelligence functions of the federal government going all the way back over a hundred years ago, over 110 years ago, to the invasion and occupation of the Philippines, you can find, as has been documented in a number of books by the professor from the University of Wisconsin, whose name eludes my memory right now, wrote about police in the empire, McCoy, Alfred McCoy's book on that.
He talks about the way that for domestic consumption, a lot of what would become intelligence gathering methods used in the early 20th century were field tested in the Philippines, then imported here.
And the whole war on drugs, the whole effort of prohibition, beginning with alcohol prohibition, and then the prohibition of marijuana and other controlled substances, that was all field tested in the Philippines as well as part of that imperial thrust 110 years ago.
And now in the late era of the empire, late imperial America, you're seeing the same kind of thing happen, but on sort of an accelerated track, where you've got police agencies now behaving like, oh, betray us as death squads, quite frankly, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the way that multi-jurisdictional narcotics task forces operate.
The Jose Guarania murder in Tucson is a perfect example of that.
I don't know that there's any more of a material distinction that could be drawn between people kicking in a door at 930 in the morning and gunning down a disoriented and confused husband in his living room, and doing that in Tucson, and doing the same thing in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Yeah, well, I think you and I joked about this a couple of years back about how the Marine Corps was going to the LAPD in order to learn counter insurgency training, because the LAPD learned it from the Marines after Vietnam, but the Marines had forgotten, so they went back to the LAPD for training.
Yeah, you end up with first cousins marrying, and of course the result is retarded offspring, but the same principle applies now with respect to the use of unmanned drones.
Just yesterday, there was a piece about a contract picked up by a law enforcement agency in Warehouse, Texas, for the use of a new, hyper-modern drone that can emit a taser pulse from an airborne location.
You can actually fly these into an area and taser people remotely by use of the airborne drone.
You've got drones plying the skies over Texas and Arizona in the name of counter-narcotics and border enforcement, and you've got police agencies across the country lining up to get the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon to underwrite their purchase of this same technology, so they're gearing up in terms of the technology aspect of what's going on to import all these methods field-tested in the distant, far-flung provinces of the empire here in the imperial homeland, and at the same time, you've got the CIA running the same kinds of operations through the NYPD that they had been running overseas, and who's in charge of the CIA right now?
It's, of course, His Exalted Imperial Majesty David Petraeus, or forgive me, Petraeus is the fellow, I want to say General Grievous.
That's the nickname that's been assigned to him by a number of people I think who've got a very perceptive sense of humor, but the same guy who was setting up the El Salvador option overseas with US-created death squads in Iraq and elsewhere, he's in charge of the intelligence apparatus now, and now the intelligence apparatus that supposedly is forbidden by law to be operating here at home is operating here at home, simply by inserting itself by way of supposedly seconded or retired personnel into these police agencies and then setting up little satellite replicants of itself.
So, this is becoming a vertically integrated structure of surveillance, regimentation, provocation, enforcement, and perhaps summary execution.
Well, the legal precedents have all been set that, you know, the law doesn't matter.
They can integrate the police agencies, I guess, as much as they want now.
I don't know why the president just doesn't start appointing all the governors and whatever at this point, but I'm sure he's working on something like that.
Well, I wonder what you think about Francis Boyle's point about the next time there's a major terrorist attack in this country.
Lord knows our government's been making us millions of enemies around the world for the last 10 years, even if you forget all the madness and, you know, criminality that took place before that.
If there is another September 11th-sized attack in this country, another red alert, or I guess would be the first red alert since they started color-coding it, what do you think could happen?
You think that they'd come around and start rounding us up?
I don't know how deep and expansive the roundup would be, but if you take a look at what happened after World War I with the original Red Scare, I think that you could probably extrapolate from that a useful model to anticipate just how badly things would go for those of us who are conspicuous dissidents here in the post-9-11 era.
And I think that the fact that you have, once again, the same NYPD starting to troll Facebook and other social networking sites in order to find so-called potential precursors of insurrectionary or terrorist activity illustrates that they are compiling little lists.
I mean, the lists have been around for decades.
But do these people really believe their own nonsense or what?
You know, we talked yesterday with Boyle about Garden Plot and Cable Splicer from back in the 80s, and you know what?
I think that even if they had done a full-scale invasion in Nicaragua, there still wouldn't have been enough protests and disorder over that that would have justified any kind of martial law.
And as you already said, all the terrorism cases they've been able to come up with in the last 10 years have been fake because it's not about Islam, and American Muslims aren't terrorists, and there's nobody to round up.
There's no enemies to fear.
Yeah, they go after the dissidents, not after the so-called foreign agents.
Yeah, well, I guess they'll just have to call you, you know, Will Gregg Muhammad or whatever in order to justify locking you up.
It's been done before, Scott.
I mean, how are they supposed to convince the American people that, you know, the people that run antiwar.com and a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of people like that ought to be, you know, that it's tolerable for us to be arrested?
Well, Scott, as you like to say, it doesn't have to make sense.
That's one of the luxuries that power always has in its competition with what is right, good, and true, is that it doesn't have to make sense.
All it has to do is compel people through the application or the threat of lethal force.
It's one of the reasons why written laws mean absolutely nothing if you're dealing with people who act with impunity and can exercise a monopoly on power.
And I've found that in talking with people about their perception of what's going on right now, there's this dawning awareness on the part of people who are not all that well-informed or haven't been well-informed that the enemy abroad is not really what scares them so much.
They're more afraid of what the enemy at home can do to them.
In other words, people are understanding that we're not threatened by supposedly omnipotent troglodytes and caves in Afghanistan, but they understand that the people who can actually do harm to them are willing to invoke that threat and in doing so dominate whatever conversation might occur when they do something that is manifestly unjust to somebody who's innocent.
In other words, it's the same kind of thing that you get with fears over tax audits by the IRS.
Yes, they're wrong.
Yes, what they're doing is bestial and indefensible, but they have the guns and they have preponderant power within the given jurisdiction.
And so people allow their fears to define how they're going to react and, more importantly, what they will say about what's going on.
And so one of our most important battles we have to fight is to get people to free themselves to the point where at least they can call things by their right names, at least tell the truth, you know, pay whatever minimal source of cost is involved now in describing what the government does as criminal, as wrong, as illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, or reproach to our traditions.
If you can't even speak it, how are you going to be able to act on it?
You know, these are thoughts that people aren't willing to think, and these are things that people aren't willing to say because they're afraid, and they're not afraid, in my opinion, for the most part, of these supposedly pitiless agents of jihad that were afraid of what our supposed protectors are going to do to defend us against that purported menace.
So we have to speak in defiance of those fears, and when we have an opportunity to help people understand that, when we recognize a glimmer of understanding on the part of somebody we're talking about about this, we have to encourage them, at least tell them, at least to speak these thoughts out loud, let themselves be heard.
Well, and you know, I'm 99% sure it was something that I read of yours right after September 11th that said, in a nutshell, look, I've been reading what communists write for a long, long time now, and let me explain terrorism to you.
The action is in the reaction.
We're supposed to be smart and calm and adult and prudent and do the smart thing here, not take advantage, not overreact.
That's what they're trying to get us to do, and bin Laden said in an interview in late in 2001 or early 2002, yes, the American people will lead a choking life as the police state clamps down upon them.
This is exactly what he wanted us to do to ourselves.
Yeah, and darn it if we didn't live down to everybody's worst expectations.
There's always hope, because at least if people understand who the real threat is, you know, once the real threat comes, if they at least understand that, at least some of these people are going to be shamed into admitting it out loud.
You know, they can be individually the snowflakes that start the avalanche.
Yeah, well, and you know, again, it seems like every one of these interviews ends up on the subject of Ron Paul, but he's just changing, as Rick at the Bumper Sticker would say, he's changing the political conversation in America.
He's making it the kind of thing where you could never, ever say that in polite company in American politics, and he's just saying, yeah, oh, no, we ought to get rid of Homeland Security and we ought to get rid of the Patriot Act, and we don't need to have all this vertical integration of all our police power and all these things.
No, no, no, we just don't need it, and there's no other way that that argument ever gets on TV other than through him, and it's having an effect, I think.
If he does nothing else, if he had done nothing else, that alone would ensure him a very prominent and blessed place in history, I contend.
Absolutely.
All right, well, listen, we're way over time already, but I want to thank you very much for your time, Will.
Appreciate it.
Well, thank you.
Wonderful to talk with you again, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com, and get his book, Liberty in Eclipse.
It's available at all your book-getting websites.
