07/26/07 – Joshua Frank – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 92.7 and 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, KAOS959.com.
It's the 26th of July, and introducing today's guest, Joshua Frank.
He's the co-editor of DissidentVoice.com and is the author of Left Out, How Liberals Helped Re-elect George W. Bush.
He's got a new book, that's coming out next year called Red State Rebels, and you can also find what he writes at CounterPunch.org.
Welcome back to the show, Joshua.
Hey, thanks for having me back, Scott.
Oh, yeah, it's, well, always good to read your articles and good to talk to you again, and specifically you have one here on CounterPunch called Hillary's Neocon, the Imperial Vision of Richard Holbrooke.
And for those with long-term memory capability, Richard Holbrooke was an aide and a shuttle diplomat type in the Clinton presidency, and you report here that it's very likely that he would be Secretary of State in a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Is that right?
Right, I mean, and he was going to be, he was rumored to be tapped for Secretary of State if Kerry had won in 2004 as well.
I mean, he's a DLC Democrat with neoconservative ideals.
He's kind of just definitely in line with even, you know, old conservatives like Henry Kissinger.
And we've seen his influence in Democratic parties pretty strong.
He's really helped be an architect for what the Democrats are calling the sort of new vision, but really it's just the old vision of the neoconservative agenda.
And he has the same sort of game plan for reshaping the Middle East to serve U.S. interests.
And we've seen his influence in Hillary's campaign.
Her foreign policy is definitely influenced by the Holbrooke philosophy.
Now, what exactly is a DLC Democrat?
Well, he's a member of the, he's not a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, but he's definitely in line with their sort of ideals, their strong sort of military presence, and they're also very pro-corporate wing of the Democratic party.
They're basically the centrist wing of the Democratic party, except their foreign policy is very right wing, definitely in line with the Republican party, especially under Bush.
Well, it's interesting, you know, because the neocons are considered to be centrists as well.
You know, they're not very radical in terms of domestic policy and undoing the New Deal and that kind of thing, like some conservatives would want.
They're considered more centrist.
It makes me think that maybe the centrists aren't the moderates, but they're the extremists, really.
Right.
Well, and that's how they play it up, and that's how they've been accepted in mainstream politics today.
But if you look at their foreign policy agenda and their overuse of military, and I would say any, you know, use of military forces abroad is overuse, but they really want, they think a strong, you know, homeland policy is having a strong military presence overseas.
So of course, they want to expand our military operations in the Middle East.
They want to make more bases all over the globe.
And, you know, and of course, they support Israel's agenda to occupy Palestine and prop up their nuclear arsenal as well.
And so we've seen them take a hard line with Iran.
We've seen them take a hard line with Iraq before the invasion, the second invasion.
And, you know, they want to push this sort of agenda down the road.
So if we see a Clinton presidency in 2008, we can definitely expect a continuation of what Bush has done these last eight years.
Now in the 1990s, Richard Holbrooke and Clinton and friends, we call them the neoliberals back then, right?
Right.
Well, that was more to do with their foreign policy.
And I'm sorry, not their foreign policy, but their economic trade policy.
So they pushed through NAFTA, and they were supporting the WTO.
And so it was sort of like this agenda to corporatize North America.
And they're still pushing for that.
And there's obviously been a backlash within the Democratic Party for that, and there's been a definite backlash as part of the Republican Party as well.
So the neoliberal sort of view has changed somewhat.
But, of course, the neoliberals are also, in some ways, neoconservatives as well.
I mean, these are new ideologies, at least new to the American political system that we've seen.
And they're pushing these radical agendas.
And the military component of both the neoconservatives and the neoliberals is very prominent.
I love this in your article, this high praise for Hillary Clinton from Richard Holbrooke, quote, she is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband.
She's a classic national security Democrat.
Right.
And look how excited he is to boast that Hillary has these credentials, that she's going to be quick to pull the trigger, that she's going to be quick to, you know, and I think that you could read into that, that she's going to be taking a hard stance with Iran.
And she has said that at APEC conferences, the pro-Israel lobby, and she's also, you know, said that in her foreign policy papers and on the floor of the Senate.
So she's definitely prompting to, she's basically letting us know what she's going to do when she is elected, and that is to continue an aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East.
Yeah.
Well, she's been trying to outflank the Republicans on the right on foreign policy this whole time.
And I wonder whether the Democratic voters out there in America are going to be able to catch on to this in time for the primaries, that Hillary Clinton has blood dripping from her fangs.
She is an imperialist with the very worst of them.
Well, unfortunately, a lot of Democratic voters, mainstream Democratic voters, vote on social issues.
And they may be disgusted with the war, but their litmus test for Democratic candidates is pretty weak.
And so they put, you know, Roe v.
Wade up there as like a number one issue, and it definitely is an important issue.
However, I think, you know, imperial policies in the Middle East and our foreign policy platform is a much, you know, a much bigger issue that we have to grapple with.
See, you're just like me.
Unfortunately, and unfortunately, Hillary isn't going to change those things.
She's going to play off of those weaknesses.
And we saw that in the last debate on Monday here.
She's out there saying that she's now a progressive.
So she's co-opting almost every kind of idea that she can in order to sway voters to think that she is an alternative to the Bush doctrine.
Yeah, well, yeah, you're just like me.
I think foreign policy comes first no matter what.
America's relationship with the world is the number one most important thing, and everything else falls in line after that.
And I think, you know, I'd be more than happy, you know, some other time Josh would argue about what the order of the rest of those issues should be on the list.
But, you know, you and I are both exactly eye to eye that it's foreign policy that matters most.
Right.
And I think that a lot of the Democrats and, you know, people that, and I know libertarians and other people might be on the fence about global warming and those other issues.
But to me, even as an environmentalist, I see our military component as driving all of these other catastrophes, whether they be, you know, social, whether they're economic or, or environmental.
And I think our foreign policy and our militarism is at the heart of all that is really going on and a lot of the death and destruction, whether it's grizzly bears or, you know, children in Iraq.
And, you know, I think you're right, too.
Well, just, you know, my kind of thin observations of the Democratic left since, you know, the campaign season began, and I see that not uniformly by any means, but, well, it does seem like to a great degree, the people over at Daily Kos, for example, are not just supporting Hillary Clinton, but willing to defend her to the death already.
Like, you know, they really don't care.
It's because of this sort of key mentality that you see in American politics, where it's not about ideals.
It's not about purpose.
It's not about any ethic.
It's about winning at all costs.
If your team loses, you feel like you lose.
And for other people, activists, it's about issues, whatever, whatever side they're on, even right wing activists.
They're about issues.
So you see the Daily Kos and all those folks, they just want to take back.
They don't care about what change comes.
In fact, the only change that they're really worried about is the letter next to the president's name, whether it's a D or an R, and that's really what they're concerned with.
And, I mean, we can just look back at the last round of congressional elections and the Democrats promising to, you know, take a hard stand on the war, and we see nothing but capitulation.
And, of course, the folks at the Daily Kos overwhelmingly aren't going to really question those lies and how they were co-opted, because I would say a lot of them probably are anti-war at this point.
Right.
Yeah, well, it's a good thing we have counterpunch around.
I pulled up counterpunch this morning, and here's your article detailing how Richard Holbrooke, who, as you say, is slated to be a top foreign policy advisor of one kind or another, if not Secretary of State, in a Hillary Clinton administration.
He was in on one of the left's cause célèbrese, or however you say that in the plural, the mass murder in East Timor that Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford began.
You write in counterpunch today that Richard Holbrooke helped finish the job.
Sure, and we supposedly had an arms blockade to Indonesia, to Suharto's regime, and, you know, this death and destruction that was going on in East Timor during the Carter administration.
But Holbrooke, who was head of the East Asian division, he authorized illegal shipments of weaponry to his regime to continue these atrocities.
And a lot of scholars say at that point in history is actually when it reached genocidal levels.
So he, like Hillary Clinton, has bled on his fangs as well.
And to not call him out on this, I mean, he really is a Kissinger light.
He just hasn't been in as many prominent roles as Kissinger.
But we see, if Hillary is to win and he is in that prominent role, I think we only have scary things to come.
Well, but Joshua Frank of Dissident Voice, that was way back in the 1970s.
Isn't the statute of limitations on mass murder of men, women, and children expired by now?
Yeah, that's what they want us to think.
But I'd venture to say that, especially after the quote that you read that I ran in that article, I think it shows that he wants to continue to carry out these atrocities.
I mean, these people are essentially, you know, psychopaths.
They don't have remorse for their actions.
They don't see the connection between their decisions in Washington and the blood on the ground in East Timor or Iraq or wherever it may be.
There's this disconnect.
There's this lack of any sort of emotion.
And it's about power.
It's about wealth.
It's about capitalizing on the poor, or in this case, capitalizing on military prowess and exploiting whatever we can to dominate.
And you know, these guys aren't going to stop unless we stop them.
And at this point, unfortunately, Hillary's up in the polls, and it looks like it's her election to lose unless some scandal comes out.
And unfortunately, it's going to be a ridiculous kind of scandal that will take her down and not something that is much more obvious, like her complacency in Iraq and her foreign policy agenda in the future.
It's just incredible to me to think that Hillary Clinton, with her record, could be posing as anything like some sort of peace candidate.
I mean, I forget the name of the woman who wrote the kind of ghost written autobiography type thing about Hillary who talked about her bragging that it was Hillary Clinton who called up Bill on the phone, apparently they weren't staying together at the time, but it was Hillary that called up Bill and said, you better start bombing Serbia.
I'm sick and tired of waiting around for you to start bombing Serbia, Bill.
Do it now.
And he said, Okay, honey, okay, whatever you say.
And that was when the war against Serbia began in 1999.
Right.
And I like going back to Holbrooke's quote, he goes on to say something to the effect that she actually is going to be more apt to use military force compared to her husband.
So I mean, he thinks she's more of a hawk than Clinton was her husband.
Can you imagine?
I mean, Bill Clinton killed a lot of people.
He's proud of this.
Yeah.
I mean, Bill was the mad bomber before Dick Cheney was in power.
I mean, Bill Clinton killed, you know, untold thousands of people all across the world.
Right.
And not to mention, you know, supporting the UN sanctions on Iraq.
And I mean, if you want to even look at the tallies, the peer numbers, he's probably at this point responsible for more deaths in Iraq than Bush is.
Yeah, well, why don't you explain that table for the war in Iraq as well?
Wait, hang on.
Hang on a second.
Explain that to the to the listeners.
How could it possibly be that Bill Clinton is even in the running for killing more people in Iraq than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney?
Well, during the 90s, there was a blockade, UN embargo on Iraq.
And there was no allowance of medical supplies to reach people.
There was a blockade on all kinds of other goods that researchers in the UN have said was responsible if they had had those medications and the food supplies would have offset the deaths of literally millions of children and elderly people and all to try to force Saddam Hussein to relinquish his weapons of mass destruction, which at that point is debatable whether they even existed.
Most researchers say they didn't even exist then.
I mean, this was just, you know, in Clinton, of course, the UN was responsible for this, but this was pushed by the Clinton administration.
And Clinton propped this up and he supported this foreign policy and was responsible literally for millions of deaths.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
In fact, let's go ahead and play the clip of Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, explaining to Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes how this was all perfectly okay.
We have heard that a half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
And now that's a clip that most Americans have never heard, but if I remember right from what I've read, this is a clip that every Arab and every Muslim in the entire world has seen probably 500 times.
Madeleine Albright saying that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children was a price that was worth it.
And as you said, they were ready, or you didn't say this specifically, but to back up what you said, they were ready to certify Iraq as weapons of mass destruction free in 1997.
And the policy was announced at that time that, look, it's no longer about weapons of mass destruction.
The sanctions are staying as long as Saddam Hussein is in power, period.
And they admitted that in the 1990s.
They said that outright to the cameras.
Right.
And they knew all along that Saddam didn't have weapons-grade uranium, that he did not have weapons of mass destruction, that most of his supplies were destroyed after the initial Bush war in the early 90s in Iraq.
I mean, they knew it all along, and the CIA knew it, the Pentagon knew it, the Clinton administration knew it, but they continued to look for an excuse to take out Saddam purely, I think, because, I mean, there's definitely a lot of reasons behind our invasion, and I don't need to go into that or venture to guess what a lot of those motivations were.
But we know for a fact that Clinton wanted to take out Saddam, and I think a lot of it had to do with our embarrassing sort of defeat in the early 90s.
Saddam wasn't taken out.
Bush, Sr. had the opportunity, opted not to do it.
And Clinton, you know, was going to take back what had happened.
And, of course, after 9-11, the Bush administration saw it as an opening to go into Iraq, and it saw it as an excuse, so they made up all the ridiculous lies that we all know about now.
But they'll continue to do the same lies, and we're seeing the same lies being played out with Iran.
The New York Times is, again, complicit in these lies.
And we're going to see the same round again, and who's to stop them?
They are in power, and it's us that needs to stop them, and whether it's Hillary or Barack Obama or Mitt Romney or Giuliani, we're going to continue to see these same policies played out with bloody consequences.
Yeah, well, there's no question about all of the Republicans except Dr. Ron Paul, of course, who called this the moral crisis of our time, but all the rest of the Republicans were just, you know, piling all over each other, trying to be the first one to say, yeah, I'll nuke them, I'll start a war with Iran and use nuclear weapons in an aggressive war, and as you've reported, among many other people as well, all of the leading contenders on the Democratic side have basically raced to say all options are on the table, including the use of nuclear weapons against Iran that has none.
And how can the American public not see the hypocrisy?
Here we are trying to say that they don't have a right to have nuclear weapons, and yet we're saying that we'll use them against them.
It's such a ridiculous, shallow, hollow argument that I just can't believe more people don't see it, but again, they do not want to relinquish any sort of power, and they want to dominate the Middle East for their own interests, be they economic or oil or what have you.
And that's exactly why we continue to prop up Israel, to continue to be a military force in Iraq, and they don't listen to reason, they don't listen to rational arguments, they don't listen to the facts or the truth.
We knew long ago what the consequences of the raid in Iraq would have been.
You didn't need to be a Middle East scholar to know that Iraq was a fragmented country and that there was definitely many factors that were going to play into it after the fall of Saddam's regime that the US military or any military could handle.
And people knew this, the Pentagon knew it, everyone knew it, but yes, no one stopped it.
It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what the facts are, it doesn't matter what the truth is, they make up their own rules and they will do whatever they can to get away with it.
Right.
And you know, I think it's so important that, well, I mean, it just sounds silly to, you know, it's not like you and I are covering any, you know, groundbreaking truth with this, but, you know, I guess some giant number of the American people out there have no idea.
So I figure, you know, it's worth reiterating.
Hillary Clinton knew that George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
She was the first lady.
She and I don't think anyone will dispute that she was a hands-on policy person.
They called Bill Clinton billary because of their partnership and how closely she worked with Bill Clinton on, especially on foreign policy, as we just talked about.
She's the one who really pushed him to start the war against Serbia.
How could Hillary Clinton in 2002 pretend to believe the Republicans who were saying that Iraq went from having nada to all of a sudden having an advanced nuclear weapons program that they were reconstituting nuclear weapons and could, you know, give a hydrogen bomb to Al Qaeda and our proof would be a mushroom cloud and the rest of this.
She knew that they were lying and she was lying too.
Absolutely.
And if you look back into the latter 90s, all the leading Democrats were starting the same round of lies that the neocons and others were after 9-11 about Iraq and about the weapons of mass destruction.
You go back to 1997, I believe, when the Iraq Liberation Act was passed during the Clinton administration and it was basically the preemptive legislation prior to the legislation in 2001 that said we can use military force to oust Saddam.
So it's just the systemic lies, it's systemic in the fact and the real issue here is we don't have any honesty in government, no accountability, and it's a sad state of affairs when we know that they were lying, yet there's nothing that we can do to hold them accountable.
Yeah, abject liars and bloodthirsty warmongers, all front-runners.
Right.
And here we are, you know, spinning, trying to figure out why she lied, knew she lied, but the reality is that she's going to continue to lie when she knows that there is going to be horrible consequences because she is about maintaining power.
She really, really wants to be the first woman president and it's going to take a lot of grassroots effort on all sides of the political spectrum to stop her or whoever comes out of these nominations, if it isn't Mike Grable or Ron Paul, unfortunately.
I'd love to see those guys come out, but the reality is it's about big money, it's about media attention, and it's about celebrityism and Hillary Clinton is at the top of that pyramid.
Yep, no doubt about it.
Hey, let's get back here a little bit to the sickness that is Richard Holbrooke.
Oh, no offense, Mr. Holbrooke, sorry.
Anyway, so it was, let's see, 2002, I think early 2002, not long after the September 11th attacks.
I could be wrong about the timing here, but I'm pretty sure it was after September 11th, but before Iraq, and I think it was early 2002.
I'm sitting at home and I'm watching, flipping through the channels, and I find the Charlie Rose interview show on PBS, only Charlie Rose is off, he's at home sick or on vacation or something like that.
And so instead of Charlie Rose interviewing anybody, it's Richard Holbrooke, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Haass, who is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
And I'm sorry, I always forget who the fourth one was.
And, you know, of course, to my chagrin, I did not record it.
But basically it was the Democratic foreign policy leading lights, or at least the realists.
You know, Richard Haass was a power guy in the State Department there in the first Bush term.
But these are the realist types, you know, and they're sitting around talking about our plans for Africa.
And what they were talking about amounted to a full scale invasion of that continent in the name of anything.
And it was even funny, like watching, there were a couple of times where, you know, the cameras pick up everything and you can see these guys giving each other looks like, hey, you know, don't let out too much.
You know, remember, we are on camera here as we're having this discussion.
But basically what they were saying was, we'll call it AIDS, we'll call it civil war, we'll call it whatever we want in order to justify an American military presence in Africa.
There are resources there that we want to steal and those darkies be damned, was basically the conversation they had.
And you mark my words right now, Joshua Frank, Hillary Clinton becomes president of the United States.
There will be military forces in Sudan within a year, probably less.
These are the Wolfowitz, these are the brains behind the foreign policy of the Democrats, just as influential as Cheney and the rest of the neocons were with Republicans.
These are the core guys behind the Democratic initiative that is now the prominent foreign policy of the party there.
And if we are only going to see continuation of this, I mean, these guys are absolutely even friends.
As I noted in the Holbrooke piece, he's friends with Paul Wolfowitz.
I mean, these guys sit around and talk about this stuff.
They agree on more than they disagree on.
And that's a very scary precedent considering that they're supposed to be opposing views.
Well, and now, let's see, I saw a poll the other day that said only 57% of people who are still willing to admit that they are Republicans support the war in Iraq.
Do you know the numbers on the Democratic side?
What percentage of Democrats want out of the Iraq war, want to end to America's imperialist foreign policy in the Middle East?
I mean, it's got to be 90%.
I don't know about the institutional foreign policy because that would be, they'd have to challenge a little bit more of our doctrine.
But I think the Iraq war within the Democratic party is somewhere hovering.
At least I know that 2004 was in the 70s, and I'm sure it's even higher now.
So, I mean, the majority of Democrats don't approve of the war and didn't before it started.
Yeah, well, it's like, it's about 69%.
They're not going to hold the Democrats accountable for it.
They still are rather scapegoating to blame Bush and all of the Bush administration instead of saying, well, Bush could not carry this out had it not been for the continued rubber stamping of funding or legislation to allow Bush to do this or propping up the same line as Bush was.
Of course, the Democrats were just as complicit.
In fact, maybe even more complicit because they were supposed to be the opposing party and, in fact, controlled the Senate when this legislation was first introduced.
Absolutely right.
Tom Daschle helped shepherd it right through, didn't he?
Right.
Exactly.
And that's something that I think Democrats are quick to forget.
It's this short-term memory lapse that we have.
I think it's the result of our 24-hour news channel addictions, but we tend to forget just how complicit the Democrats, liberals are in our imperial foreign policy.
And there's no, again, there's no accountability and there's no self-awareness.
And it goes back to the daily cost sort of talk that we were having about how it's more about winning and not about issues.
And it doesn't matter what side they're on.
It just matters if they win.
And it's the horse race that we see every four years.
We'll see it again in four years.
And again, it's never about issues, real issues.
It's always about fluff.
It's all about celebrity.
It's all about what's going to get you on the judge report.
It's about stupid issues and not the real issues.
And how do we make those issues real?
I mean, and the people that are out there in those parties making these issues prominent, like Ron Paul, for example, have this outpouring of grassroots support.
And, of course, they don't want a guy like Ron Paul in the debate.
They don't want a guy like Ralph Nader in the presidential debate.
They don't want Pat Buchanan even in these debates because a lot of Americans will listen and say, man, that guy's right.
What are we doing?
And they don't want that.
They want to consolidate their power.
They do not want a democracy.
And I think anyone out there that really thinks they live in a democracy has been lied to for far too long.
We do not live in a democracy.
It's not representative.
It's only representative of the people that have access and the corporations that have power and control over the information that we receive and the policies that our elected officials propped up and represent.
Well, I don't think that could be any clearer than it is when you look at the fact that people like Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich actually represent the views of the Democratic base.
And Ron Paul, not necessarily on foreign policy, because a lot of Republican or a lot of conservatives are such nationalists that they can't get over the war there.
But for, you know, absolutely every bit of the rest of what Ron Paul has to say, you know, that's exactly the point of view of the conservative Republican base.
And yet these people are considered the fringe candidates.
There's just no question at all.
At all.
I don't think in the mind of anybody, if you really sat him down and asked him if there was any question that some powerful billionaire somewhere picked our frontrunner candidates for us.
I mean, if, as you say, Ron Paul is the grassroots phenomenon, then how come he's not in first place?
Because no one would assert that there's a grassroots phenomenon for Rudy Giuliani or John McCain or Mitt Romney, they have to pay people to like them, and yet they're all the front runners.
Right.
Well, it goes back to access and it goes back to we got to understand, too, that we have almost 50 percent of our, you know, voting age citizens in the United States do not vote.
And there's an enormous amount of power if those people were registered and came out to vote.
Of course, no one's exciting them to come out to vote, and I think that there's a lot to be said for apathy and laziness when it comes to our electoral system because it's a total fraud.
However, there can be some major power in voting, and if someone like Ron Paul or whoever were able to sort of bring those voters out, that's when you would be a real challenge to the establishment.
As it is now, you're just going to have hereditary voters that are Republican or Democrat consistently vote for their party line, rarely cross over, unless, of course, there's just no other option.
Like, well, I think right now, I mean, Bush is, I mean, who cannot say how horrible this administration has been in the war and all the lies and the corruption and the arrests?
And, I mean, the list goes on, and to think that people still would be voting Republican is outlandish, but a lot of people still are, and I think that's a huge problem.
And we don't see any alternatives at this point, or at least American citizenry do not see alternatives because the media is not going to cover Ron Paul.
They don't want him in the debates.
They don't want Mike Grable out there, you know, talking like he is about issues and being straight and frank with people.
Because that's just not what CNN would like to cover.
That's not what Fox News wants to cover.
That's not what the New York Times is going to run on their front page.
So we have this big lapse between political reality and information that is accessible to people, and that's why I think places like antiwar.com and Counterpunch and these, at least for now, free enterprises on the internet that people can access all over the world is an enormous challenge to the corporate established media.
And, of course, I think that they'll probably want to lock that down eventually and control that as well.
But it's free access, free, and this radio shows an example of, I think, the power that can come from the media.
And hopefully more people will tune in and get out there and act, because that's what it's going to take before there's any sort of minimal revolution or even any sort of significant reform at the political level.
Well, you know, alternative media like antiwar.com and Counterpunch and Dissident Voice, we are slowly but surely overtaking the mass media and informing the American people.
It's still going to be a while before, you know, our voices count more than what they say on TV.
But, you know, something you brought up there when you spoke about Bush's abuses of power and the precedents that have been set in not just the violations of American liberty, but just in the form, really, the revolution that has taken place within the form of our government, where in the last six years, so much of the powers that were always reserved to the states, to the people, to the Congress have ended up in the hand of the president.
And, you know, an all-powerful Hillary Clinton, you know, a Hillary Clinton with an office twice as powerful as her husband's back in the 1990s scares the hell out of me.
You know, she seems like, well, you know the whole thing, it's just like that stupid show with Geena Davis as the woman president of the United States that they had on last year, where she's got to prove that she's got balls, so she sends the army into Virginia to kill people, you know, uses them here domestically, that kind of thing.
And that's exactly, you know, what I foresee in a Hillary Clinton presidency.
You know, you think, you know, they got Al-Marri and Padilla on American soil to be tortured by the military so far, but I think by the time Hillary Clinton's done, you know, we won't be able to count them on all our fingers and toes.
Well, and it's a continuation of things that have been going on for quite some time, whether we go back to Waco and Janet Reno and the Clinton administration's murder of people there, the Branch Davidians there, or you talk about Ruby Ridge, northern Idaho.
I mean, the crackdown on any sort of anti-government activity, be it even extremist, you know, racist or whatever, has been a part of our history for a very long time, since the birth of this nation.
And we're going to continue to see that sort of consolidation of power, use of military force, even on our own civilians, under a Clinton administration.
Of course we will.
I mean, and this is the kind of thing that the Clintons are popular for, and definitely with Waco and Clinton and even Wesley Clark, who was in charge of that whole mess.
And we're going to see a continuation of this, whether it's domestically or internationally, and it's all about power, about consolidation of power, it's about ripping away civil liberties and the right of citizens to act and to hold people or government responsible and accountable.
And of course Clinton's going to continue to consolidate that power, and that's exactly what the corporations want, because they continue to profit if that does occur.
Tell me all about DissidentVoice.com.
It's actually dissidentvoice.org, and we update the site six days a week, and we have a very diverse group of voices.
Sometimes we run voices that we don't necessarily agree with all their opinions, but I think it's a good forum for debate, and there's also a section to have comments.
And we have some great writers, and I think we're one of the few outlets that is willing to challenge the U.S. foreign policy agenda regarding Israel.
We had a lot of good articles on the Goldstein case at the Paul.
We have a lot of really grassroots reporting from Iraq, from Palestine, and it's really just a forum of all voices.
We have libertarians that contribute.
We have lefties that contribute.
We have anarchists that contribute.
We have all kinds of voices coming together, because you don't need to be a left-wing person to be a dissident in this country.
There's plenty of dissidence on all sides of the political sphere.
Absolutely.
All right, everybody.
Joshua Frank, he's the co-editor of DissidentVoice.org.
He's the author of Left Out, how liberals helped re-elect George W. Bush.
He's got a new one coming out next year called Red State Rebels that he's co-authored with Jeffrey St. Clair from Counterpunch, where he has an article up today, Hillary's Neocon.
Oh, what's the sub-headline?
The Imperial Vision of Richard Holbrooke.
Thanks very much for your time today, Joshua.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.