Austin Cop's got a new rule.
If they shoot somebody, they get to watch the video of them shooting somebody before they have to give a statement to anyone.
Make sure they know exactly what's on that video that would contradict their statement before they give it.
I love it.
That's called the rule of law.
And I'm sure that'll be part of this discussion too, but we're going to start with opposition to the war in Afghanistan.
Everybody's for the war in Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan is wonderful.
The war in Afghanistan is great.
Hillary Clinton says, you know, this war in Iraq is not going well.
We need to quadruple our forces in Afghanistan.
And everybody now who admits, even the ones who admit they were wrong, they supported the war in Iraq and they wish they hadn't.
The people who oppose the war in Iraq all along say, well, obviously you've got to support the war in Afghanistan.
It's just, you know, the war in Iraq is the diversion from the real war, which is the war in Afghanistan.
My buddy, Jacob Hornberger, he's the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, and he's not buying that for one minute.
Welcome to the show, Jacob.
Hey, thank you, Scott.
Nice to be back.
What a great title, this article.
I saw it posted up on antiwar.com the other day.
The war in Afghanistan was wrong too.
Still is.
And I thought, hey, all right.
And then, of course, you know, it's Jacob Hornberger's name under a title like that.
I'm not a real expert.
I don't really know it.
But all the very, really best I can tell, Ramzi bin al-Shib and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in association with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri based out of Afghanistan and then running the operation out of Germany.
They attacked the United States on September 11th, killed over almost 3,000 people, I guess, within just a few of 3,000 Americans killed.
And somebody had to pay for that.
And you're telling me that war in Afghanistan wasn't the proper solution?
What would the proper solution have been?
Well, we said from the very beginning that the situation should have been treated as a criminal justice problem, which terrorism has always been.
It's been a criminal offense.
It still is a criminal offense.
It's on the federal statute books.
That's why the feds indicted Ramzi Yousef, who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, Zacharias Moussaoui, who conspired to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 on 9-11.
They've got terrorist prosecutions all across the country.
And, you know, if we go back to that time right after 9-11, it's hard to remember that because the world is so angry and vengeful against the United States at this point.
But at that time, we had the whole world on our side.
I mean, everybody was sympathetic with the United States.
It was almost a sense that we're all Americans now in this horrible tragedy.
I think that was the headline in Le Monde, right, in France.
Yes.
Yes, we're all Americans now.
And, you know, the Iranian people were demonstrating against terrorism and so forth.
So then what did Bush do?
I mean, he engages in a policy of attacking a country, indiscriminate bombing, killing.
We don't even know how many Afghan people who had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11, satisfying a sense of vengeance and revenge and so forth, doesn't even accomplish capturing the guy that he says was behind it, Osama bin Laden, and ends up serving as the primary recruiting agent for Osama bin Laden.
I mean, this was bin Laden's greatest dream because then much of the world, especially the Muslim world, started turning against the United States.
So it had a terrible boomerang effect, this war in Afghanistan.
Okay.
Now, Jacob, I know the war party would say, yes, you're right, the whole world was on our side.
The governments, the national police forces of every government on earth would have done whatever we said, with one exception, the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Well, you know, remember that Bush was claiming that the Taliban was involved in this thing in 9-11.
The suggestion was that there was some kind of overt conspiracy between bin Laden and the Taliban.
Yet, Bush never provided any evidence of that complicity.
As a matter of fact, there was even foreign aid that was going into Afghanistan immediately prior to 9-11.
I mean, if so, if there was this overt conspiracy that they knew about, do you really think that U.S. taxpayer money would be funneled into Afghanistan?
Well, I'll go you one better than that.
I remember reading in The Independent in London that the Taliban had actually sent an emissary to the United States just two or three weeks before the attack, who came to give warning that there's a terrorist attack that's going to take place and that they ran him off.
You wouldn't hear a word he had to say.
Well, I haven't heard that one, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.
I know that there was a Taliban delegation visiting Texas to try to work out the deal on an oil pipeline across Afghanistan, and the Taliban finally rejected the negotiations, rejected the deal that was being offered to them, which, of course, could not have endeared them to the Bush administration.
But the fact is that after 9-11, the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over and said, look, we don't have an extradition agreement with your country.
However, if you will furnish us some evidence here, we can start talking about at least turning him over to an independent third country to put him on trial and so forth.
Bush's response was, we don't need to give you anything.
You are ordered to turn over bin Laden to us.
Well, now imagine if the tables were turned and a country told the United States you were ordered to turn over to us, a suspected terrorist.
Well, we know what the response would be because we've seen it in the case of Venezuela.
And I put this in my article that Venezuela is demanding the extradition of Jose Posada Cáziles, a guy who is accused of having blown up a Cuban civilian airliner that killed almost 100 civilians.
He's ensconced in Florida.
There is an extradition agreement between the two countries.
And Bush said, no, we're not going to extradite him despite this agreement because you people might torture him.
Well, that was exactly the Taliban.
Are you kidding?
That's the excuse?
Jan, they use a straight face when they say this.
They actually are able to keep a straight face.
Not me.
Let's not forget that this guy Posada, he has ties to the CIA.
He used to work for the CIA.
But notice that this is exactly what the Taliban was saying.
Look, let us just see some evidence here.
I mean, it was even their position was even better than the United States because, I mean, they were concerned that if they turned bin Laden over, he would get tortured and executed by the CIA instead of brought back for a trial in federal district court.
So they said, well, let's get some guarantees here.
Bush says, nonsense on the guarantees, nonsense on the talks.
Do as we say or we will start bombing.
And so and what Bush ends up doing, and I think this is what some people are mystified that why Bush gave up the fight for bin Laden and immediately moved his attention to Iraq.
Well, if you understand foreign policy and the reason behind U.S. foreign policy, it wouldn't surprise you at all.
The whole idea of U.S. foreign policy is regime change.
It's getting their people in public office, whether it's domestically at a governorship or overseas in a foreign regime.
Once they accomplish regime change in Afghanistan, their mission was accomplished.
You know, bin Laden was secondary.
They got their puppet in Afghanistan.
They moved to Iraq and said, now we're going to use 9-11 as an excuse to do what we've been trying to do for some 11 years with the sanctions.
Well, and it was only just the best of fortune to continue to have their boogeyman on the loose, even though he's in exile out there on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He's everywhere all the time in a way to Osama bin Laden.
Well, they always need that enemy.
I mean, we saw it after the Berlin Wall fell.
They were desperately in search of the enemy.
How else can they justify this big empire, this Cold War empire, the Cold War military industrial complex if it's not drug lords or some drug kingpin?
It's going to be bin Laden.
It's going to be Saddam.
It's going to be Sadr.
It's going to be the Ayatollah.
It's going to be, you know, whoever.
Alright, well, Jacob, let me play a Chinese advocate here as best I can.
You're looking at massive casualties.
You're looking at a situation where even Jacob Hornberger, libertarian president of the United States, is surrounded by neo-con war hawks screaming that this is not a criminal act.
This is an act of war, and as long as we continue to treat it like a criminal act, we're going to be on the defensive and we're going to keep being attacked and so forth, and that, you know, these people need to be obliterated and so forth.
Now, aside from having Osama bin Laden perpetually on the run and serving as an excuse to do regime changes here and there and all the ulterior motives of empire, could it not be said that the United States had the right to tell the Taliban, no, look, we don't have to provide you proof.
We say Osama did it and that ought to be good enough for you and you better not find yourself between us and him because we're coming for him?
No, for one thing, we have a constitution in this country, unlike other countries, which is the supreme law of the land.
Now, people may not like this law, and the neo-cons don't like the constitution.
They actually hate it because it provides restrictions on the power of the president.
But the law is the law, and the law says if you think you have a right to declare war against another country, then you go to Congress and you provide your evidence and you get that declaration of war.
That's the process that has to be followed under our law.
The reason that Bush did not do that with respect to Afghanistan is I think he knew he didn't have the evidence, so he says we're just going to attack anyway.
Now, if this is a principle that's going to be applied, that whenever there's a suspected terrorist living in some country, that you have a right to go in there and attack, invade, and kill countless citizens of that country, then why shouldn't that principle apply to every country?
If Venezuela believes that the United States is harboring this guy, Posada, why doesn't it have the right to invade the United States?
And those people who subscribe to this principle, which side are they going to fight on?
Venezuela or the United States?
I mean, this is a prescription for international chaos, violence, conflict.
This is why there are extradition agreements.
Now, let me give you the best example of this.
Ramzi Yousef, one of the guys that conspired to commit the terrorist attack in 1993 against the World Trade Center, which in principle was no different from the 9-11 attack, he goes back to Pakistan.
There was no bombing of Pakistan.
There was no invasion of Pakistan.
Instead, the FBI and the CIA and the other law enforcement agencies just bided their time until they found this guy.
It took some time.
I think it was a couple of years.
They finally found him.
They arrested him in Pakistan.
They bring him back to the United States.
They put him on trial.
They convict him.
They send him.
He's in jail.
Now, notice the difference between that.
What if we had gone into Pakistan and killed 100,000 people with American bombs?
I mean, what good would that do?
Where's the morality in that?
Where is the justice in that?
And notice that there would have been a continuous stream of Pakistani terrorists that would have been angry in response to the killing of those 100,000 Pakistanis.
And you're right.
When you look at the real situation in Afghanistan, do you know the death toll?
How many civilians have died in the war since America invaded there?
Nobody knows because the Pentagon takes the same position as it does in Iraq.
They don't keep count of Afghanis dead because Afghanis don't count.
They're only Afghanis.
That's the rationale of the Pentagon.
I mean, they treat these people like just animals, like they don't count at all.
That's actually kind of the same philosophy that Osama bin Laden had when he sent these guys to crash their planes into office towers full of civilians.
That's the same thing, right?
Well, there's a target.
This is a target.
And if there's people in it, well, tough.
Yeah, it's a sense of, oh, well, war, collateral damage, tough luck.
Well, you've got to ask yourself, not only is it a legitimate target, but is it legitimate to invade a country knowing you're going to have to kill a lot of people in order to try to capture a guy that's probably not subject to being captured anyway because it's so easy to escape through the mountains?
I mean, that's the ultimate irony of this.
They've killed countless people in Afghanistan.
They didn't even bring to justice the guy that they were after.
And they're still there killing people.
There's a whole scandal about that, too, because even the New York Times did this article, Lost at Tora Bora, and this guy, Jawbreaker, the former CIA guy, wrote a book and did all these interviews where they said that the Northern Alliance and the CIA, and I guess some Special Forces guys, at least the Northern Alliance and the CIA, they knew where Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora.
They were right there near him, and they radioed for the Marines.
There were 4,000 Marines and a general who were like just 10 miles away or 50 miles away or something, could have been there in a couple hours at the longest.
And they radioed back to Tampa, Florida, to get permission from Tommy Franks, who radioed, I guess, called up Donald Rumsfeld or the White House or whoever, and the general, the Marine general who was itching to get into this fight.
They got bin Laden cornered.
Let's go get him, boys.
The general was turned down, quote the New York Times, and he was forbidden to go help the CIA and the Northern Alliance who had him cornered.
The whole thing makes absolutely no sense at all.
My hunch is that once they accomplished the regime change, that was all that mattered to them.
They knew that they had bin Laden isolated anyway, and so he couldn't do much damage.
Well, that was our position, that if you had treated this as a criminal justice problem, you'd have had the sympathy of the entire world, including the Muslim world, that were repelled against this terrorist attack on 9-11.
Bin Laden would have been isolated, even if he had never been brought to justice.
He would have been very isolated in the world.
He certainly couldn't travel anywhere and so forth.
By virtue of what they've done with this military response to this terrorist act, they have actually increased his stature, his prestige, and his recruiting abilities.
It has made absolutely no sense.
It's been something that has actually terribly damaged our country, not to mention the people who have been the victims of this.
Notice that still they're fighting, and they conflate the Taliban with the Al Qaeda people.
Now, notice that this is just a civil war in Afghanistan.
You've got the Taliban trying to recover their range of power.
That is a totally different conflict than it is with Al Qaeda, and yet you've got American troops that are killing and dying because of that civil war, because of that quest for power in Afghanistan that has absolutely nothing to do with the United States.
At this rate, we'll be there forever, too.
It's funny, I remember I got in an argument, I think before the invasion even began, after September 11th, but before the bombing had started.
They basically waited around for a month or so to make sure Bin Laden had a chance to get to the border or whatever they were waiting for.
But I got in this argument with this guy where I said, you know, the Russians had a mighty empire and they weren't able to conquer Afghanistan.
He said, well, you know, we're the Americans, and we're the red, white, and blue, and we can do anything.
And I said, well, you know, the Soviets succeeded in installing a puppet government in Kabul.
They had bases there, they occupied the place, but did they ever really control it?
No, they didn't, and they ended up leaving.
And that's the same as us.
We've been able to conquer Kabul, just like the Soviets put girls in school and set up some electricity lines and what have you, but does the United States of America really control Afghanistan?
I doubt if we control it any more than the Soviets did, really.
Well, no, and you've got all these provinces that are held by brutal dictatorial warlords that the United States is actually supporting.
And I'm glad you brought up the Soviet Union, because, you know, Americans could see the wrongfulness of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
And, of course, the United States' position was that they were going to support Osama bin Laden at that time, because they considered him a freedom fighter when he was trying to oust the Soviet Union from its occupation of Afghanistan.
And yet Americans cannot understand why the rest of the world would now look at the United States and say, well, no wonder there's insurgents that are trying to oust the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The principle is just the same.
Nobody likes an invader and an occupier, whether it's the Soviet Union or the United States.
And we all know the United States is the attacking, invading, occupying force in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan.
All right, well, more Cheney's advocate for you here, Jacob Hornberger, Future Freedom Foundation.
You just mis-underestimate the enemy.
You just don't understand, like Mike Huckabee said in the debate the other night, America in radical Islamist terrorism is facing the gravest threat to our existence that we've ever faced.
Well, every advocate of big government has to take that position.
I mean, that's the greatest excuse for big government in history.
It's time-tested.
Americans aren't taught that in the government schools they're attending, for obvious reasons.
But if you were interested in establishing a big government, and we all know that that's what Mr. Cheney's all about, the best thing you can do is terrify people with, oh, the barbarians are at the gates, oh, they're about to come over, oh, they're going to take over the IRS and the public schools.
And then, best of all, you establish a foreign policy that is designed and intended to produce an endless stream of terrorists.
Well, then, boy, then you've got the best of all worlds.
You've got the foreign policy producing the stream of terrorists.
You use that threat of terrorism to take away people's freedom, like due process of law, trial by jury, torture, indefinite detention, enemy combatant doctrine, military commissions act, on and on and on.
It's the perfect recipe for big, tyrannical government.
But if people want to free society, harmonious society, a peaceful society, the kind of society our founding fathers intended, then there's only one choice.
And that's a limited government republic, which entails dismantling this military industrial empire that the U.S. government has established overseas.
There's no other solution.
And that's what we keep telling people.
It's time for Americans to confront this choice.
Do you like what's going on to your country, or do you not?
And if you don't, there's only one way to go, and that's a limited government republic.
Well, I think the problem, one of the major problems is, it's just like football.
You know, people talk about the Dallas Cowboys and they say, we this and we that, when, you know, they weren't even at the game.
They were even, you know, in their living room, much less never played on a team or anything like that.
And you have that same kind of mentality, that self-identification with the USA, where if you're disagreeing with whatever the policy is, basically you're against our team.
You're on the side of the other team.
And, you know, you haven't really used this language.
I'd have to really kind of put words in your mouth, but if I could extrapolate from what you're saying when you describe this empire and this imperial policy and slaughter of civilians, you're basically saying that Washington, D.C. is the center of evil on earth.
You're talking about mass murder on a scale of hundreds of thousands of people at this point.
And are you calling me a mass murderer, Jacob Hornberger?
I think that I would prefer to believe that the Islamofascists have it coming, rather than, you know, follow your chain of logic, which means that I really have to, figuratively speaking, go to war against my own government now.
Well, I think it's really important that we persuade the American people to stop conflating the federal government and America.
I mean, these are two completely separate and distinct entities.
You've got the federal government and you've got the country.
That principle is best exemplified by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the country and the people of the United States from the federal government.
I mean, if they were one and the same, you wouldn't need a Bill of Rights to protect the people from the government.
So we're talking about two separate and distinct groups of people.
Now, we've got a government that is engaged in wrongdoing.
And what is the duty of the citizen when his government is engaged in wrongdoing?
Well, the duty of the citizen, and this is where we get into the area of patriotism, the genuine patriotism means standing up and stopping the wrongdoing of your government.
I mean, when our government massacred people at Waco, you know, the libertarians took the lead on this, but over time, the conscience and the consciousness of the American people was raised to a point where they finally said, you know, it was wrong what the government did at Waco.
And so they learned, they were distinguishing between the government and the people.
It was wrong for the government to do this to the people at Waco.
Well, what happened at Waco pales in insignificance compared to what this government has done to the people of Iraq.
Hundreds of thousands of people killed, tortured, maimed, their country destroyed, and guess what?
Not one single one of those people had anything to do with 9-11.
Not one of them.
And their government had nothing to do with 9-11.
The United States has just invaded and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
That's on top of the hundreds of thousands killed by the sanctions.
Well, that's wrong.
And it's wrong not because the U.S. hasn't succeeded in conquering this country.
It's wrong because it's morally wrong to kill people for the sake of democracy spreading, WMD resolutions, or any of that other kind of nonsense.
That's what we're doing here at the Future of Freedom Foundation is what you're doing, Scott.
We're trying to raise people's conscience and consciousness to a higher level here and saying, it's time to dismantle this empire.
America is not about empire.
It's not about invading countries.
It's not about killing people that never have done any attacking against the United States.
To bring these troops home from all over the world and restore the principles of a limited government republic on which our nation was founded.
I love the analogy to Waco because it's perfect in so many ways.
Particularly, look at the Iraq war here.
He's a bad guy, a charismatic cult leader.
He's bad to his own people.
And he's in violation of gun control laws.
And so we have him surrounded in this siege and then we're going to send in the Delta Force to set the place on fire.
It's perfect, Iraq and Waco.
It's the perfect analogy.
And in this case, the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army are serving as the international ATF.
Well, that's right.
And it can be extended even further because, as you know, when Timothy McVeigh attacked the federal building at Oklahoma City, the federal response was, and Clinton said, we can't talk about motive.
Now libertarians were saying, let's see what motivated McVeigh.
What did they say?
They said, don't get into motive.
That'll justify what he did.
We can't talk about motive.
Well, the reason they didn't want to talk about motive is because it would focus people's attention on what the federal government had done to people at Waco.
But notice that when we finally broke through that and people started realizing, hey, what they did at Waco was wrong, what they did at Ruby Ridge was wrong, there had been no more Wacos or Ruby Ridges and there had been no more terrorist blowback as a result of those kind of policies.
The same thing with Iraq.
This is what we've been arguing for since our inception in 1989.
It is U.S. foreign policy overseas that causes this terrorist blowback.
2001 wasn't the first terrorist attack on American soil.
In 1993 at the World Trade Center by Ramsey, Youssef, and the others, you've got the terrorist attack that Timothy McVeigh did.
You've got the terrorist attacks on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on the USS Cole.
This is what we were saying.
U.S. foreign policy, just like what they did at Waco, produces the anger and the rage that results in the terrorist blowback.
If you can dismantle the wrongdoing that the government's engaged in, whether it's Waco, Afghanistan, Iraq, anywhere in the world, a drug war, for example, then you diminish that anger and the hatred and you restore that sense of harmony and peace to a society.
Well, but one of the things that we confront here, it's the same thing with Waco and with Iraq, is after the Oklahoma City bombing happened, that kind of became the excuse for Waco after the fact.
In the media, it became, you know, if you're the kind of person who's concerned about what happened at Waco, you're the kind of guy who would blow up a federal building full of little kids.
And, yeah, you know, Waco might have been wrong, but look at the Oklahoma City bombing and that kind of thing, and it's the same sort of deal with Iraq, too.
You know, you get, you know, stuck on the side of your pro-Saddam or your pro Osama bin Laden or whatever it is if you take the opposite point of view.
Well, that goes back to that mindset that both Bush and Clinton and the mainstream media have adopted, that you're either with us or against us, and you'll recall that Clinton said essentially the same thing when he said, you cannot claim to love your country and hate your government.
Well, this is just nonsense.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, they were not great Americans who signed that Declaration of Independence.
They were great British citizens.
They were as much British citizens as you and I are Americans.
They took a stand against wrongdoing by their own government, and it's the same thing with, for example, Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Organization in the middle of World War II when these German college students stood up against their own government, said, this is wrong what our government is doing, and they started passing out leaflets and pamphlets urging people to oppose the wrongdoing of their government.
And that's exactly what we need to do, is just break through this nonsense of, oh, you can't love your country and hate federal wrongdoing, government wrongdoing.
That's the very essence of genuine patriotism, having the courage to take a stand against wrongdoing.
It doesn't take any courage to stand with your government when it's in the wrong.
I mean, that takes no courage at all.
It takes the courage to stand up and say, enough's enough, no more.
Hey, I have a great example of that from just this week.
Dr. Ron Paul, a congressman from District 14 on the Gulf Coast here in Texas and a presidential candidate introduced a bill in the House of Representatives called the, what the hell is it called, the American Freedom Agenda Act.
And I don't have the whole list in front of me, Jacob.
Maybe you're more familiar with the text of the actual bill than I am.
But I know that basically it repeals the Military Commissions Act, forbids the government from ever labeling an American an enemy combatant.
It gives habeas corpus to anyone except a military commission on the battlefield in the middle of a battle kind of situation.
It gives the Congress the ability to sue the executive in court over the signing statements.
This is the reinstate the Bill of Rights and reinstate the Separations of Powers and Checks and Balances Act, isn't it?
Yes, it really is.
I mean, it's a fantastic thing.
I mean, as you know, Congressman Paul has been at the forefront of opposing all of these attacks and infringements and cancellations of our freedoms.
I mean, he understands, as we understand it, this is the time-honored way that governments take away people's freedom.
They don't just stand up there and say, well, we hate freedom, we're going to take it away from you.
They're addicted to power, and power is always in conflict with the liberty of the people and the well-being of the people.
Well, you've got to figure out ways to get people to support the removal of their own freedoms, especially in a democracy where you can vote people out of office.
Well, what better way to do that than to produce a policy that scares people to death, that threatens people with, for example, terrorist blowback, and then you pass the Patriot Act, you make these ridiculous names that say, oh, well, I got to support it because I'm a patriot, you know, and the Military Commissions Act.
Well, here comes Ron Paul who says, you know, no, you're not going to take away our freedoms.
We're not going to take away the freedoms of the American people.
For one thing, your own policies are producing the excuses to take away their freedoms.
Now we're going to talk about restoring these freedoms, including habeas corpus and the removal of this ridiculous but tyrannical enemy combatant doctrine and the spying and the recording of telephone calls and so forth.
I mean, it's really refreshing that there are still people standing up for these rights and freedoms.
They go all the way back to Magna Carta.
Imagine that.
Americans have traded rights to go all the way back to Magna Carta just because they got a little bit scared of the terrorists.
Well, for people who don't know the story, tell us about King John and the Magna Carta.
What's that and what year?
What are we talking about?
Well, we're talking about 1215, and we're talking about a mindset that exactly epitomizes George W. Bush, along, by the way, with his Attorney General-designate, Mukasey.
King John took the position that his powers were omnipotent, that he could do whatever he needed to do for the good of the country and to protect the country and the well-being of the country.
That's exactly the position that Bush and Mukasey take.
That Bush can do anything to protect the country.
He's not bound by any constitutional restrictions, any statutory restrictions.
He's essentially got dictatorial powers because he says, I'm at war.
I mean, it's like Napoleon or Santa Anna.
Well, along come these barons in England and say, uh-uh, your powers are not limited.
You're not just going to come out in our lands and here and seize citizens and put them away in jail without according them due process, required according them trials and so forth, which is what the king was doing.
The king was doing the same thing that Bush is doing with his enemy combatant doctrine.
So they got King George essentially at the point of a sword and said, if you want to survive, you will admit to us and to the citizenry of this country that your powers are limited.
And King John said, okay, I exceed.
I agree through the execution of Magna Carta that my powers are indeed limited.
And that in fact is the origin of the term due process of law.
The phrasing in there is that no person shall be seized in violation of the law of the land, something like that.
But it's the predecessor, the roots of due process of law.
It was the first time that a king would say, my powers are not omnipotent.
I am limited in my powers.
I cannot transcend fundamental rights of the people.
This is something George W. Bush still doesn't recognize and neither does his attorney general designate, McCasie.
Okay, now I'm really bad about my British history, but wasn't there a king named Charles I that came after King John and tried to ignore the Magna Carta and they cut his head off?
Well, I confess that I'm not well versed in English history, too, but I know that it's been a struggle throughout English history that even though King John admitted that, there were subsequent kings, I think even King John himself, that said, we're not going to be bound by that doctrine.
Our powers are limited.
They were thinking the same thing that Bush does today.
I can do whatever I want to do, tough luck.
And so people had to struggle again.
So these rights that Americans sometimes scoff at and they ridicule, like trial by jury and right to counsel, due process of law, these are rights that the English people struggled with over centuries to establish as part of their common law and part of their system and part of their constitutional order.
And that's why these English citizens, you know, Thomas Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and so forth, that's why they were so intent on embracing these rights in the Bill of Rights.
These are rights that come to us as Englishmen and as just human beings.
And you will not take these away.
You will honor these rights.
And it is these rights, trial by jury, due process, right to counsel, that have been denigrated at Guantanamo Bay and that have been denigrated as part of this war on terrorism and this Military Commissions Act.
It is an absolute disgrace.
And in the American system, really, we had it better than the British really ever had it in terms of the basic premises because I think in England to this day, they still don't have a constitution and it's basically understood that they'll have this government, that it exists naturally somehow or something.
In America, the premise was, no, the only thing that exists naturally is human liberty and human dignity and there's a constitution recognizing that the state is artificial and temporary and created by human beings to protect their liberty and the Bill of Rights.
I know Hamilton complained, no, no, no, a Bill of Rights is all wrong.
Then it'll be like Magna Carta and King John telling you that, okay, I will give you this right, this right and that right.
When really, since the constitution has enumerated powers and they haven't been empowered to violate these rights, they never could.
And it's up to you to tell the government what your rights are rather than the other way around and that's why the language of the Bill of Rights is really a list of restrictions written by Horton and Hornberger against federal power, telling them the lines they may not cross rather than a list of rights that they are promising to us.
Well, you're absolutely right.
In fact, one time I shocked a great big class of high school students.
There was about several hundred high school students and I said, the Constitution does not give anybody the right of free speech and some kid raised up, yes, don't you know about the First Amendment?
And I said, the First Amendment doesn't give you the right of free speech.
And I had 899 kids screaming at me and finally one kid raised her hand and she said, Mr. Hornberger is right.
The First Amendment does not give you the right of free speech.
Free speech is the fundamental right that pre-exists government.
The First Amendment prohibits interference with that fundamental right.
And that's what everybody understood at the time.
You're right, it should have been called a list, a Bill of Prohibitions, not a Bill of Rights.
It's saying you will not interfere, you federal officials will not interfere with these fundamental inherent rights that we have as human beings.
And they're not privileges.
They cannot be taken away.
They are fundamental rights.
Hey, I have a victory in the trial by jury system.
I actually had a job driving my truck up to Dallas to deliver some package.
I was a courier and I think it was 2002 and I was listening to Dallas talk radio and they said, federal officials descended today on the Muslim charity organization and seized all their bank accounts and arrested a bunch of people and all these things.
And now here it is, Jacob Hornberger, in the news, the trial by jury system refused to put these people in prison.
Yeah, I blogged on that yesterday.
It's a tremendous victory for trial by jury because if the Pentagon had tried these people, there is absolutely no doubt they would have been tortured and convicted.
I mean, no doubt at all.
This is an organization that was giving money to charities in the Middle East, helping the poor, educate the poor, and so forth, but because it was controlled by Hamas, the Fed said, and they brought a bunch of Israeli agents to testify to this theory, their theory was, well, Hamas is a terrorist organization and so by helping the poor and educate the poor and give food to the poor, they're gaining members and they're gaining prestige.
So they indicted this group of people here in the United States based on that theory.
Now again, if the Pentagon had been trying these people, they'd been long gone.
A jury came in and said this is a crock.
Now this is a jury of regular Americans who heard this case, heard all the thousands of exhibits that the government had, and said this is all a crock.
These people have given their money to a charity.
That's all they've done.
They are not guilty of terrorism.
They deadlocked on a few of the charges, but they acquitted them on most of the charges.
This is a real testament to America's system.
Now I've noticed, though, something important here.
The Pentagon and the Justice Department did not have to go that route.
Post-9-11, they have assumed the power with no constitutional amendment to send people down the enemy combatant route to Guantanamo Bay for torture, for indefinite detention.
For some reason, and I'm sure these people in federal district court are counting their lucky stars, they went the federal district court route this time and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges.
They deadlocked on others.
The prosecutors are so mad they're promising to re-prosecute them on the deadlocked charges.
Now, I have a question for you.
I know that they've passed all this legislation.
Bush assumed all this power himself, but he's been, at least in a couple of situations, put in check by the courts who have said, no, if you want to kidnap and torture and murder people, you have to get Congress to pass a law saying it's okay first, and he's done that with the Military Commissions Act and so forth.
But wasn't there a Supreme Court decision from the days after the Civil War that said that you cannot have military courts in operation where the civilian courts are open for business or some kind of phraseology like that?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, I think it was Ex parte McCardle where they said that once the civilian courts are operating, if you take somebody into custody that had previously been taken into custody under martial law, you've got to bring them up before the federal court.
It's a little bit different what they're saying here.
What they're saying here with this military commissions and enemy combatant doctrine is that we are at war.
They're saying this is like World War II, and this time it's against terrorism, which is like a war against communism or a war against crime or a war against the mafia, and the whole world's a battlefield.
And so we can take prisoners of war in this deal, but because the enemy doesn't wear uniforms, sort of like Blackwater I guess, that they're illegal enemy combatant, so we can do whatever we want to them.
We're not bound by the Geneva Convention, and they're not criminals, so we don't have to follow due process restrictions.
We can torture them, even though we don't call it torture, we just redefine torture.
We detain them forever.
We don't have to give them any trials or any legitimate trials.
We can put them before kangaroo tribunals.
And we can do all this without even amending the Constitution.
Despite what the Congress has done, I mean the Congress can't amend the Constitution with a statute, that's not our system, that's what goes on in other countries, not in this country.
In this country we have fundamental principles, and it is absolutely amazing to me that they pretend that they can amend the Constitution, and they've thrown the entire criminal justice system upside down.
By giving the military the power to go out and seize Americans, cart them away, put them in a dungeon, torture them, and hold them forever, that is an upending of America's criminal justice system.
I heard you on Karen Katowski's new radio show the other day, and you were talking about this new pick, you mentioned him earlier, Mukasey, the new nominee to be the Attorney General to replace Alberto Gonzalez, and one of the things that you harped on in the interview with Karen Katowski was that this guy is a retired federal judge.
His character supposedly is, he's one of these guys who lives for the law, and all that kind of stuff, and yet here he is in front of the U.S. Senate saying, oh, can the President violate statutes?
Gee, no comment on that until later, and can the President torture people even if torture is against the law?
Well, you know, what exactly is torture?
And this guy's a, this is a federal judge.
It is an absolute disgrace, and it's really refreshing to see that some people are taking a very good principle stand against this guy for that reason.
In fact, in today's L.A.
Times, there's a fantastic article by Jonathan Turley, a law professor, I think, at George Washington on this, that this is a retired federal judge that claims that he doesn't know what waterboarding entails.
Now, as Turley points out, he says that this is either a very, very ignorant man, or he's just lying.
I mean, there's no in-between there.
How can somebody not know about waterboarding, especially when he's a former federal judge?
And my suggestion is, is that, look, if waterboarding isn't torture, then let them subject MacCathy to the treatment, and then let him decide whether he considers it torture.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
Yeah, if it's just, you know, playing with water or something, what's the big deal?
Now, this is a guy that also says that Bush is not bound by statutory and constitutional restrictions in his waging of the war on terror, that his powers are dictatorial and omnipotent in essence.
He was the original district judge in the whole Separia case, when he was up in that New York district up there.
He's the guy that has upheld the enemy combatant doctrine.
So, if anybody thinks that anything's going to change with this guy, they're engaging in nothing but wishful thinking.
Well, and you know what?
I remember his name from back in the trials of Ramzi Yosef and Sheikh Abdelrahman, the blind sheik, and the guys, I think it was Peter Lance, who said that all the prosecutions for the plot to blow up the UN building and the Holland Tunnel and all that was basically a mopping up exercise after the botched investigation into the World Trade Center before it happened.
And that's Ralph Blumenthal in the New York Times, all about how they had an informant inside the plot.
And he was to be the bomb maker.
His name was Salem, who was an Egyptian security officer and on the payroll of the FBI.
And he was going to make a bomb.
He had a whole plot worked out with his FBI handlers.
He was going to make a bomb with fake explosives.
And they were going to be caught red-handed and it was going to be wonderful.
And they called off the sting operation and instead the terrorists brought in Ramzi Yosef to cook the bomb.
And six people were killed and they almost succeeded in knocking over one World Trade Center tower into the other one, which would have made 9-11 pale.
I mean, if those towers had fallen over, both of them, anyway.
And this guy Mukasey was the judge in charge of helping the executive branch cover up the fact that they knew all about the World Trade Center plot before it happened in 1993.
They knew about it.
I didn't realize that.
Wow.
I'll send you the link.
It's Ralph Blumenthal in the New York Times wrote all about it and I know Peter Lance, who he's not perfect on everything, but he's written all about the FBI's botched investigations.
And this guy Mukasey's in on it with all these guys.
And covering this stuff up.
And see, this is the thing, and I'm just editorializing here all over your interview, Jacob Hornberger, but this is the story that Peter Lance portrays in his book, A Thousand Years for Revenge.
The FBI knew who these terrorists were, Ali Muhammad and the guys who, Sheikh Omar Abdelrahman and these guys.
Since 1989, they first observed them at a gun range.
And they were following them around.
They ended up killing a rabbi in New York.
They ended up blowing up the World Trade Center.
And then this same group of people, Ramzi Yousef and his posse, ended up merging with Bin Laden and Zawahiri and them in becoming Al Qaeda in the mid-90s.
And these guys went on to, of course, blow up the embassies and the coal and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
And the story that Peter Lance explains is that each time that there was an attack, the FBI had to cover up the fact that they could have prevented it if only they'd been doing their job.
Then the next time there was an attack, it succeeded because they hadn't followed all the leads that they could have followed because to do so would have revealed their incompetence from before.
And so each time, the FBI puts itself first and terrorism investigations second, and all through the 1990s, you have the FBI covering up for themselves rather than trying to stop the next attack.
And then this is the law enforcement mechanism for fighting terrorism that the War Party points to and says, we can't fight them like criminals because it doesn't work.
And yet they never did fight them like criminals.
The FBI always put themselves first and the terrorism second, all through the Clinton years.
Well, then you've got that lady who was an FBI agent up in Chicago that wanted to get a search warrant into Moussaoui's computer, and they blocked her at every turn as well prior to 9-11.
And then these are also the people that say, well, as a result of 9-11, you should give us bigger and bigger budgets because we've been so competent here.
And national security letters to search your house and tap your phone.
Right, as if it was a lack of power that resulted in their incompetence.
It was their own incompetence that produced the problem.
At first they produced the threat of terrorist blowback with their overseas policies, and then they had this massive incompetence protecting the American people from that blowback.
And they used that excuse to increase their budgets, their prestige, their medals, and so forth.
I nominate you.
There's something not right with this picture.
I nominate you, Jacob Hornberger, to be the Attorney General in a Ron Paul administration.
I think you'd do a hell of a job.
Well, we'd have a good time, wouldn't we, straightening things out.
Yeah, it would be fun to watch.
All right, everybody, that's Jacob Hornberger from the Future Freedom Foundation.
The website is fff.org, and also check out fff.org/blog.
You need a link on your site to your blog.
Yeah, can I mention one more thing?
Do we still have time?
Please, go on.
We've got this great big follow-up conference coming up in June of 2008.
Oh, really?
2007, we had what I consider the most spectacular conference in the history of the libertarian movement.
It's called Restoring the Republic, Foreign Policy, and Civil Liberties, where, by the way, Ron Paul's and Andrew Napolitano's talks electrified the audience.
They're on YouTube now.
But these were 24 of the greatest speeches I've ever heard, and we're putting them on YouTube right now.
They're linked from our email update that we send out every day.
The conference was such a success that we're doing a follow-up conference in June of 2008.
It's going to be on our website, but we just want to have people mark their calendars June 6th through 8th.
That includes people, the speakers will include people like Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, Bob Iggs, Karen Katowski, Glenn Greenwald.
I mean, Bruce Fine, the people that are really taking principle stance, courageous stance.
We'll have all the speakers listed on our website in January.
So I wanted to bring to the attention of your listeners.
I've had a great time watching the YouTube.
We ran a Sheldon Richman speech on Antiwar.com just the other day.
Oh, fantastic.
Well, like I said, these were the greatest speeches, and I think they're going to be even greater the next time.
In fact, we have a list of the testimonials on the website, too.
The conference website where, I mean, I've never seen people comment so favorably about a conference and how fantastic it is.
Yeah, well, I actually played Ron Paul's entire speech on the show here.
Oh, wow.
Well, be careful because we might have to use conscription to bring you over here, Scott.
Yeah, well, yeah, don't sue me in court for violating your copyrights and so forth.
No, no, just pull on your leg.
We want you here, though, and we want all your listeners to come to us.
So June 6 through 8, 2008, it'll be on our website, fff.org.
Also, we've got a free daily e-mail update that we strive to make the best libertarian op-ed page on the Internet.
Oh, by the way, can I mention that Sheldon Richman writes to you and Anthony Gregory and James Bovard?
Go on.
Absolutely, Bovard.
Sheldon, we have a number of just hardcore purists, no-compromise libertarian freedom advocates writing for us.
And we've been in existence now for 17 years.
We're fighting to restore the principles on which this country was founded.
And we need people's support to do this, and it's very exciting because, you know, we've been at the leading, the cutting edge on this foreign policy, civil liberties debate since our inception.
And we've been sort of like voices crying in the wilderness and people saying, oh, you're not patriots and all that nonsense.
Well, it's very exciting that now Ron Paul is bringing the same philosophy of non-interventionism in a republic to the political arena and that it's generating, I've never seen excitement like this in a political campaign.
And it's very exciting for us because he's raising this philosophy to the attention of the American people through the political process.
He's scaring the dickens out of the Washington establishment.
And these are exciting times for us.
Yeah, it really is cool seeing somebody in a republican debate say, listen, we have to give up our world empire.
Oh, wow.
Just to hear a little bit of truth injected into a debate between Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani, you know?
Oh, it's fantastic.
And if he breaks out, I mean, we all know he's leading in the internet polls.
If he breaks out of that internet and starts to do the same thing outside the internet in the regular polls, there are going to be a lot of scared people because they're not going to know how to handle it.
They don't have the intellectual depth that Ron Paul has in terms of talking about the foreign policy or the federal reserve system or the immorality of the drug war.
I mean, this could be a very exciting political season.
It's really put a charge in a lot of libertarians.
It's very exciting.
Hey, I've mentioned this a few times on the show, but I want to tell you a funny anecdote about that.
When Ron Paul got into that argument with Mike Huckabee about, Ron Paul said, more Americans and Iraqis have to die for us to save face.
That's all we're doing right now.
And Huckabee was left sputtering, we're one nation under God, indivisible.
And I read this blog the next day.
I was, of course, Googling Ron Paul blogs and looking around.
And I saw where this guy was a Huckabee supporter and was advising Huckabee, who I guess he assumed that Huckabee people were reading his blog or something like that.
And he was saying, listen, don't go toe to toe with Ron Paul on the facts.
He's a scholar.
He's got a Ph.D. in everything.
And I don't know, that's not really literally true, but it might as well be.
He's a historian and an economist and a true scholar.
And don't go toe to toe with him on facts.
It's a bad idea.
That is hilarious.
Well, Giuliani learned that lesson.
Giuliani plays a demagogic game, standard politician game, and takes the task on foreign policy.
And Ron Paul within just a few days says, hey, not only am I saying that U.S. foreign policy produced 9-11 and the anger and rage, the CIA said the same thing, the 9-11 Commission said the same thing.
To my knowledge, Giuliani has shut his mouth up in every single debate against Ron Paul since then.
It's very funny.
And in fact, even in the next Fox debate, Chris Wallace leveled, you know, every single question they asked him was just loaded with accusations and false assertions and innuendos and so forth.
But Chris Wallace, even as he accused Ron Paul of treason, conceded that he was right.
The unsaid part of the question, but it was the premise of the question was, all right, so it's true.
They attacked us because we had our bases in Saudi Arabia.
So what are you saying?
We should just take our marching orders from Osama bin Laden?
And of course, Ron Paul said, no, we should take our marching orders from the Constitution, and it's not in our interest to have our troops there, et cetera, et cetera.
But even Chris Wallace in Fox News at the debate accepted the premise of the question.
Ron Paul won the debate.
Why did we get attacked on September 11th?
Because we had our armed forces combat troops with combat boots on the ground on the Arabian Peninsula, period.
That's why.
Well, that's a real testament to the power of truth, because I don't hear people talking like they used to talk, oh, they attacked us because they hate our freedom and values.
You're right.
I think they're finally coming around to accepting the reality.
U.S. foreign policies produce this rage and this anger.
Now the question is, what do we do about it?
Well, the answer is clear what we need to do about it.
And I think the reason they resent Ron Paul so bad is that he's out there telling them what we need to do about it.
All right.
And, you know, for people who want some intellectual backbone to help win their arguments against the war party, we're not all born Jacob Hornburgers.
Go to FFF.org and arm yourself with intellectual ammunition.
I'm always reminded, whenever I talk to you, I'm always reminded of the thing I read where Murray Rothbard talks about how he prefers a radical minarchist to a conservative anarchist any day.
And every time I talk to you, you come on this show and you've got fire in the belly.
You are at figurative war against the state and its criminal behavior against the American people and everyone else in the world.
And I applaud you for it.
It's FFF.org, y'all, for Jacob Hornberger.
Thanks, Jacob.
Thank you, Scott.
It's an honor and a pleasure.
