02/12/08 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

So once again, I want to thank you very much for tuning in and paying attention and listening to this update.
There's no reason in the world that we should back off.
This is a time to march forward.
Thank you for listening.
All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And I'm joined on the phone by my friend Will Grigg.
He is the proprietor of rightsourceonline.com and the great blog freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
I'm glad I have the Adobe Audition.
I can go back and edit and make that sound smart, which I guess now I probably can't since I said that.
Welcome to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's great to have you on the show today.
The first thing I wanted to say, something I noticed listening to that Ron Paul audio, is this guy is just incapable of referring to himself.
I mean, here's Mr. Individualist, and he says we, and I'm, you know, it's not a royal we.
It's not, oh, we think this and we think that.
It's more like a humble we.
Like he can only refer to himself if he includes all of his campaign and everybody behind him too.
He just cannot bear to say I this and I that.
I know.
It's really kind of weird, especially when you're running for president and your opponent, John McCain, is up there saying, I am a great leader for this reason and that reason, and I will save the old people and I will do this for the Mexicans and whatever his thing.
Ron Paul just cannot bear to describe himself in any way.
Yeah, the expression the humble we is a perfectly suitable one to describe what Ron Paul is doing here.
And that's one of the reasons why he's completely unintelligible to most of the pundit class.
He speaks in the tones of humility, not a mock humility.
It's not an effective humility.
Humility is an idiom with which the political class is completely unfamiliar.
When he talks about we, what he means is that we group of individuals, we individuals who have on a voluntary basis pulled our efforts to try to accomplish something worthwhile.
He sees himself as simply part of a movement of individual minded people who want to do something about throwing the government that is ruling us back into a constitutional cage.
And that's one of many reasons why Ron Paul is so refreshing.
He is a man who is thoroughly over himself.
I've met him and spoke with him, I sat next to him at a dinner about a year and a half ago, a little more than that, actually, it was in December of 2005, and he only has one face.
He doesn't have a face for private consumption and another one that he shows to the world.
What you see on television, what you hear when you listen to an update or what you read, for the most part, I mean, obviously there are ghost written elements of some of what he's put out we found out to our discomfiture recently, but for the most part, when Ron Paul is signing his name to something, and certainly when you see or hear him on television, that's exactly what he thinks and what he believes, and he's not going to step back from that one bit.
Yeah.
Well, you know, actually, the first time I ever got a chance to interview him was in, I guess, late spring, early summer of 2004 at the Libertarian Party Convention in Atlanta, and I actually somehow worked out a deal where he came up to my hotel room and I just put a tape recorder on the table and interviewed him for about 45 minutes, something like that, and you're absolutely right, I mean, he's just exactly the same in person as he is on TV.
Self-effacement is a rather peculiar posture for a politician, particularly when you're running for president, and a president is a limited term messiah, I guess, and that's certainly the nature of what's being done here is this institutional awe is being wrapped around Barack Obama, and every four or eight years we have the privilege of voting for some kind of divine emperor or king according to the common perception of what the presidency is supposed to be, and Ron Paul understands that the Constitution defines the presidency as a much more modest office than we've even saddled with in recent decades, and that's why, once again, he's so completely foreign to the expectations of much of the public and so completely enigmatic to the pundit class, they don't understand that he's completely sincere about this, and that's why he's so refreshing to so many tens of millions of people.
Yeah, I mean, it really is something to have somebody running for president against the presidency, and as he told, I thought it was a great line in the debate where he said, look, the commander-in-chief, I mean, of course, he's the only guy on the stage who's actually familiar with the text of the Constitution, the president is the commander-in-chief of the military, yes, but not of the economy, not of the country, not of the people, he's the commander-in-chief of the military.
Other than that, he's just the president.
Yes.
The commander-in-chief label is a function of the office, that's not the name of the office, and that's not the central purpose of it, and the reason why you have that, obviously, is because you don't have a militaristic order of government, which is what we've got now.
Through attrition and corruption and default, we've got a militaristic scheme in which the common citizenry, supposedly, is under the necessity of genuflecting before their commander-in-chief, unless you're a member of the military, and the military branch you serve in has been called into the actual service of the United States, the president is not your commander-in-chief in any meaningful sense.
And furthermore, and this is something that a lot of people don't understand, we as citizens do not really have a president.
The president presides over one of the three branches of one of the governments created by our federalist system, which is to say that if you're an employee of the executive branch, yes, he presides over you, but there's no reason why a common citizen of this country should look upon the occupant of the Oval Office as, in some sense, his leader or his ruler, and you hear that type of language all the time, and it is something that is omitted by people who know better.
That's what really disturbs me.
There are a lot of people who just, by inertia, have been led to believe that the president is in some sense a royal figure, a monarch, or a dictator, at least in function, if not in specific form of the office, but there are some people who are constitutionalists who know better who talk about the idea that, well, we as Christian constitutionalists cannot vote for a non-Christian to rule over us, and I hear that sort of thing, and I let the safety catches off of my pistol, so to speak, in a mental sense, and say, no, no, no, wait a second, that's not the function of the presidency.
Because nobody in this entire system of government is supposed to be ruling over us, we're supposed to be ruled by law, all of us, whether you're in the government or not.
Which is why it shouldn't matter what religion the president is, because his authority is so limited that it shouldn't matter at all.
This is why people butcher each other to death with machetes in other places, is when the other group comes to power, they can fully expect that their rights are going to be denied.
And the reason we tolerate losing an election, different factions in America, is because we figure that things are going to be, you know, more or less the same, and we'll have a chance next time, but we're not going to be, you know, shackled to a chair or anything.
Exactly.
It's not a reductionist or a zero-sum type proposition if you lose an election, because the only thing that somebody wins in an election, at least according to the Constitution, is the privilege of being forced by the Constitution to protect your rights.
Right.
Okay, now, the centralization of power in the presidency is obviously inextricably tied with the warfare state, the permanent state of war overseas.
And one of the most alarming and yet least analyzed, for some reason, developments of the very recent past is the escalation of kind of tit-for-tat diplomatic plays and basing and war games and so forth between America and Russia.
Now, damn it, the Cold War is over, and yeah, it turns out the whole thing about even, you know, the Cold War being a sham, and they're going to get us after all, like, that didn't work out either.
It's America who's taken over the world, and it seems to me, Will, like, we're picking a fight with the Russians, which is still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, which is beyond the ability of anyone in history to invade and regime change.
Can we, you know, other than Baiku and so forth, can we not just back off the Russians?
Oh, I would certainly hope so.
I mean, Russia is ruled by an oligarchy that is more overtly criminal than some.
It is not as overtly criminal as ours.
Let's just confront this right up front here.
After the Cold War ended, there was a brief interval in which some of us were hoping that Russia would develop into something akin to a constitutionally normalized state, which is to say it might not be Madisonian in its outlook, but at least it would become a normal state, not a crusader state, not one bent on propagating a revolution based on a universal ideology of compelled egalitarianism or some other trope of that variety, that they'd abandon the Leninist messianic foreign policy of seven decades.
We thought it would be a wonderful thing if they'd become like us.
Well, unfortunately, the reverse has happened.
We've got a government in power right now that is thoroughly imbued with the Trotskyite version of Lenin's vision of universal revolution.
And Russia has become more modest in its aims, and it's not cutting up trouble anywhere that I can find in any plausible sense.
Yes, certainly, it has client states, one of which is Iran.
They have relations with Iran, just the way that we have relations with a number of client states.
I mean, our client state in the Middle East, Israel, is somewhat problematic as well.
And unlike Iran, Israel actually has nuclear weapons.
And they have indicated in the past that they're willing to use them.
So yeah, there are some problems here that our foreign policy would present to other people who are on the receiving end of it, just as we have certain issues historically with the Russian foreign policy.
But theirs is less truculent, less expansionist than ours right now.
And ours is more overtly ideological.
You've got the President of the United States talking about igniting a fire in the minds of men in order to advance this global democratic revolution.
That's an expression with a certain pedigree that goes back to 19th century radical politics of the same sort that spawned the Soviet Revolution.
Now, internally, domestically, Russia's system is pretty awful.
It's not as awful as it used to be.
But if you happen to step on the wrong set of toes, you can end up being treated more or less the same way dissidents were treated 30 or 40 years ago.
That's their problem.
That's not our problem.
We're making ourselves the world's problem right now.
And that's something that I think the Russians, the common, educated, politically aware population of Russia, that's a problem they're having with us right now.
And I don't doubt for a second after talking with a number of people who are libertarian-minded Russians who understand our system a lot better than most Americans do, who read the writings of people like Jefferson and Madison and Paine and try to bring about a change in their system in the direction of liberty used, adumbrated by those thinkers, they're wondering what on earth has happened to the Americans that we're willing to countenance the same type of expansionist, aggressive foreign policy that the Russians had to live with for 40 or 50 years.
Yeah.
And...
We tore down the...
They tore down the Berlin Wall.
We are rebuilding it in Washington, D.C.
Exactly.
Yeah.
We're rebuilding all kinds of walls, you know, throughout the length and breadth of this country.
We're rebuilding all kinds of barricades and institutionalizing permanent police-day-style surveillance and creating a system where the head of the ruling oligarchy has the discretionary power to imprison anybody for any reason for any length of time and treat that person any way he sees fit.
You know, all these things are the type of developments that Russians are very familiar with from reading their history.
I mean, Vladimir Bikovsky, the noted Soviet dissident who was thrown into the Psyhuska, the psychiatric gulag back in the 1960s, a few years ago, was mortified to find out that the Bush administration was thinking about normalizing torture and making it not only an official instrument of state policy, but more or less making it completely inaccessible to any kind of legal recourse.
And Bikovsky said, you know, basically that torture, in addition to ruining the society that practices it, it ruins the actual law enforcement and intelligence-gathering capacity of that society.
Because torture is a lousy way to obtain intelligence, but it's a really good way to get people to say exactly what the state wants them to say.
So it creates a really bad feedback loop where the government's preconceptions are codified through the supposed intelligence obtained through torture, and expectations are changed within intelligence agencies in ways that make them completely useless as an instrument for finding out what's really going on in the world.
You end up with generation after generation of people who, as torturers, become ruined individuals.
They become abusive husbands, they become abusive fathers, they become psychological basket cases because of the things that they inflict on other people in the name of state policy.
Bikovsky was pleading, this was way back in 2004, 2005, he was pleading with America not to go down the Soviet route.
And now, right now, we find out from the people who were the moralites of the Republican Party that one of the few reasons why John McCain is so consummately unacceptable is because he is weak and squishy on the issue of waterboarding.
You know, unless John McCain is willing to take a forthright stand in defense of water torture, of controlled drowning of terrorist suspects and other criminal detainees or accused criminal detainees, unless he's willing to take that position, then he's morally unsuited to the office of Commander-in-Chief.
That's what conservatism is right now in Bush-era America, late Bush, almost post-Bush-era America.
It's completely defined by the torture function of this emancipated state we're living under.
Yeah, well, and that's really the incredible part, too, is McCain's not conservative enough because he's not pro-torture, and yet he put his anti-torture seal of approval on the Military Commissions Act, which, of course, legalizes torture and provides retroactive immunity for all torturers in American government employed back to 1997.
Yeah, the whole series of measures that were passed in late 2006, it was clear they were losing the Republican majority in Congress, the Bush administration, not only making retroactively legal torture, but now, of course, we're seeing that they're trying to get legal immunity retroactively for the telecom companies that collaborated in the war on wiretapping.
And then as well, of course, you have the Military Commissions Act and the assault on habeas corpus, the effective murder of habeas corpus, the destruction of the posse comitatus principle, which is supposed to keep the military separate from domestic law enforcement.
All these things were really rammed through in 2006, and some of them are being picked up now later, like the telecom immunity proposal.
Yeah, well, and we'll be talking about all that with Glenn Greenwald in the next hour.
Yeah, he's forgotten more about this subject than anybody else has ever learned, so he's exactly the right guy to talk to.
Yeah, his blog at Salon.com is just incredible, and he is the kind of guy who says, oh, yeah, and breaks out the law from 100 years ago.
He knows the numbers on the laws from back then.
But wait, let's stay on foreign policy a little bit before we get too far into how much America has become like the Soviet Union domestically.
I want to focus on America putting anti-missile missiles on the Russian border, and the announcement by one defense minister or another, I'm sorry, I don't know the exact position, of the Russian guy that came out a couple of weeks ago, preemptively undercutting the NATO announcement of the exact same measures by a couple of days or something, I guess, announced that Russia has now adopted a policy that they're willing to use nuclear weapons in preemptive war to protect not only Russia's integrity, but that of their allies and associates around the world and so forth.
And this is a major escalation, when NATO came out and announced the same thing two days later.
I mean, what is this?
Are they really trying to create a new Cold War against the Russians?
You've got to wonder about that.
I sometimes wonder if the defining document of our foreign policy towards Russia isn't the Michael Moore film, Canadian Bacon, where they were trying to blow it back into existence, the dim and cooling embers of the Cold War, as it were.
The Russian premier showed up at the hastily arranged summit of the White House and said, look, you people won.
You're just going to have to live with it.
You won.
We went through.
I'm happy.
I'm gone.
You know, we've got to go back and rebuild the economy that we wrecked through this arms race.
You know, you drove us into an arms race, you wrecked the economy.
Good job.
Now we've got to go back and rebuild.
But this announcement by General Yuri Balayevsky, who is the military chief of staff for Russia, came out, if I remember correctly, on a Friday.
And then two or three days later, we see this announcement from NATO that they were actually considering a doctrinal change that would codify the option of a nuclear first strike on the part of NATO.
Now, bear in mind, NATO has historically been treated as a defensive alliance against the Warsaw Pact, against Russian expansionism, when actually it was created as a regional affiliate of the United Nations and sort of as a quasi-standing army on behalf of the United Nations as a regional arrangement.
I mean, if you go back and take a look at the documents, take a look at the Charter of NATO and the Charter of the United Nations, it clearly was created with this role in mind.
And it really is, if there's anything in the United Nations system, you can say this of it, is really the only thing in the UN system that works is NATO.
But it works in a way it wasn't intended to, at least supposedly.
It was purportedly a defensive alliance, but the very first time that it was put into use was in 1995, when American bombers and British warplanes that were attached to the NATO alliance were used to bomb Serb positions in and around Bosnia.
And then the first full-scale military conflict the NATO was involved in was the 78-day terror bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999 for the purpose of turning over Kosovo to a group of people attached to, of all the unlikely things, Al-Qaeda, the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army that was armed and aided and given material support by Washington, CIA in particular.
So you have this NATO alliance, which you would think would wither away with the end of the Cold War, which was always looking for out-of-mission, out-of-area missions rather, to justify its continued existence.
And now, after proudly advertising its role as a defensive alliance, it's talking about the preemptive use, which is to say the aggressive use, for all intents and purposes, of nuclear weapons.
And when you couple that with an expansion of NATO through the Partnership for Peace and some of its other appurtenances, right into the near abroad of Russia, and the fact that there is this move to install anti-missile defense systems in Poland and other places around Russia's periphery, if you're looking at this as a Russian, as your common Ivan on the street, Ivan Ivanych, the equivalent of John Smith, on the streets of Moscow, you take a look at this and then you see how Washington's been behaving in terms of cutting up trouble in Iraq and trying to provoke a war with Iran.
You're going to draw certain presuppositions, not even presuppositions, you're going to draw certain logical inferences from this, and one of them is that Washington has gone stark staring nuts.
You've got the world's largest war machine, in the history of the world there's never been a war machine to compare with that that Washington has at its disposal right now.
You've got the world's largest war machine, the most formidable strategic arsenal in the hands of crusading maniacs, and they're encroaching in what has historically been looked upon as the logical sphere of influence of Russia, its own near abroad, and trying to find ways of provoking Russia, it would appear, into certain types of behavior, and congratulations, they seem to have provoked from Russia a contending preemptive nuclear doctrine.
And I look at this and I wonder two things.
First of all, how could people be so deranged as to pursue this type of a foreign policy?
And secondly, why aren't people frantic about this?
I remember back in 1983 when the Pershings were put in Europe and carrying out a policy that had been put in place by Jimmy Carter and it was executed by Ronald Reagan, that we saw a steady stream of commentary and a couple of made-for-TV movies, including the day after, that underscored and italicized the horrors of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and much of that was probably generated by what remained of the 1960s era peace movement.
We know that at least some of this was distantly, very distantly connected to KGB propaganda operations within the United States, and so maybe the absence of that type of a movement right now attests to the fact that the KGB is not what it once was, which is good news, albeit ambiguously good news, given what's going on domestically here as a result of our own government's actions.
But I wonder why people aren't frantic about the fact that you've got these people in Washington, in Brussels, and in Moscow, talking about preemptive nuclear war.
I honestly thought that one of the definite good things that had happened over the last 15 or 18 years was that we had taken a couple of steps away from the nuclear brink, and apparently we're to be deprived even of that.
Well, you know, when I interviewed Chalmers Johnson a couple of weeks back, that was my joke was that Putin had hypnotized him.
When Bush looked into his eyes and saw Putin's soul, Putin hypnotized him, and now Bush is secretly a KGB agent deliberately overextending and destroying America.
None of this is really in our interests, as much as it's to the detriment of theirs.
But let me ask you this, though.
Do you think that Russia would really get involved if we bombed Iran?
Because I guess I can't remember why necessarily, but I'm sort of under the impression that the Russians would just as soon sit back and watch us do it.
They would prefer we didn't, but that they're not going to, you know, risk real conflict with us over Iran.
I don't think they will.
I think Putin, as a matter of fact, has said something to that effect, namely that it would be looked upon by Moscow with profound and lasting disfavor, and it would injure relationships, the relationship between Washington and Moscow.
But I really don't think that they'd be willing to go to war over Iran.
And in large measure, I think that's because Putin, whatever you think of the guy, and as somebody with his background, I obviously, I would have to consider him to be immensely troubling as an individual, but once again, he's not our ruler, so he's not our problem.
But Putin is trying to practice logical statecraft.
He's trying to think of what the interests of his country and his government would be, and he's trying to calibrate his policy to suit those interests, as opposed to acting on abstract ideological calculations.
And so I think he would understand that as injurious as it would be to the prestige of the Russian government to see one of their clients come under attack by Washington, and as big of a wound as it would inflict on the Russian economy, because they do have a lot of commercial deals with Iran, that it simply wouldn't be proportionate to go to war with the United States over Iran.
And you know, the thing is about the preemptive doctrine, you know, I'm for complete unilateral disarmament.
We have enough conventional war machine to blast any capital city on earth to rubble, so I don't think we need any atom or hydrogen bombs of any description.
But it seems like during the Cold War, they at least had the excuse that, look, the Russians have a much larger tank and army force, although their tanks were pieces of crap.
But anyway, they have a much larger force, and if they come pouring through the fold a gap into Western Europe or whatever, then we'll have to blast them with nukes.
We'll have no other way to oppose them.
So we can't explicitly renounce the doctrine of using nukes against them.
But now we've explicitly stated the policy that we would.
But there's nothing like the Soviet military poised to, you know, march into Western Europe to even point at.
We're talking about, what's our enemy on earth today?
Aside from, you know, the make-believe radical Islamic extremism in the sky, what we're really talking about is Osama Bin Laden and his few hundred friends in exile in the Hindu Kush.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, when you're talking about the former Warsaw Pact, and it is very much the former Warsaw Pact, a lot of it has been folded into NATO, which is one of those developments, I think, that would make the average Ivan Ivanovich on the proverbial Russian street wonder why Washington is acting as if Russia is a threat to us.
I mean, it's completely irrational.
And I think that one of the elements of this that's not getting any discussion, or at least it didn't until last week, was the fact that Russia and China and a number of other countries are becoming an economic threat to us, but it's an economic threat of our own making by virtue of the fact that so many of these countries, China in particular, Saudi Arabia is another example, are the ones who hold so much of the paper on our debt that they could more or less flush the United States simply by unloading their T-bills, or simply by refusing to buy any more of them, they could bring about the collapse, the complete collapse of the dollar.
And once that's gone, our military system will not endure much beyond that.
I mean, that's pretty much what happened to the Soviet Union in terms of their forced draft and militarization and the buildup of their huge military arsenal.
I mean, we're only 20 years behind the Soviet Union in that respect, in terms of spending ourselves into oblivion by building a redundantly huge military sector and ruining our economy as a result.
I think it was just last week that the Director of National Intelligence in testimony before Congress said what a number of us have been saying for years, which is that the real threat here is that we're increasingly in debt to potential foreign strategic rivals such as China and Saudi Arabia, and that if that isn't addressed, then that's probably going to be what will bring about our demise as a superpower.
And that just goes to show that if something isn't big enough and obvious enough, eventually our intelligence sector will come to understand it.
Yeah.
Oh, you mean all empires fall?
Well, I didn't learn that when I was four or anything.
Okay.
Now, listen, we've got to talk about the domestic consequences of this, too.
And reading your blog, it's freedominourtime.blogspot.com, and this thing will just break a heart.
It's an atrocity on a one-at-a-time basis going on here in America.
It's basically our government at every level, according to your writings it sure seems like, is at war with the American people.
And if they can find an excuse to grab pretty much anyone and prosecute them for pretty much anything, they will do it, and they'll go to the kind of extremes that, well, I grew up to expect to happen in other people's countries, not my own.
I know.
And that's the most heartbreaking of the many bad things that have happened over the last five or six years, is that while we have been told to direct our attention outward and to imagine that wave after wave of Mohammedan Mermedans are going to come swarming over our undefended borders and start splitting throats and forcing women into burqas, what we found is that the government that is supposedly protecting us has escalated a war upon us in the name of homeland security, and that the entire ethic of the homeland security state, as I've started to call it, is based on the idea that the primary function of government is to defend itself against the people that it is supposedly protecting.
And we see that ethic at work, obviously, in the federal government.
On the morning of 9-11, what was the priority of the federal government?
It wasn't to prevent attacks on or injury to the American people at large.
It was to make sure that the highest decision-making echelons of the government were secure.
And on that morning, after spending how many trillions of dollars on the military and on national security, we found that really the only people who acted in defense of national security were the people who were part of that spontaneous citizen militia that formed on United Flight 93.
But if you take a look at what's going on right now with our law enforcement agencies, our state, local law enforcement agencies, sheriff's departments, and so forth, they're thoroughly imbued with this idea that they are, in some sense, on a war footing, and that it is the duty of the citizens to defer to law enforcement as if, once again, we were under some kind of an obligation of quasi-martial law status.
You can find yourself being arrested for resisting arrest simply by questioning a decision by a police officer.
They have been taught over the last 25 years, if you take a look at the literature, police officers have been taught to expect immediate, reflexive deference from the citizen.
They've been taught that all citizens are, to some extent, criminals, and that's of course, in a positivist way, true, because it is impossible for a normal, rational human being to avoid violating some obscure municipal code or regulatory enactment that has the force of law.
You can find yourself getting crosswise with the enforcers of the state's whims by doing practically anything.
And so, what liberties we enjoy, we exercise by the grace of the state until the state sees fit to revoke them from us.
And this horrible story out of Ohio, of Hope Steffi, this 46-year-old woman who called the police after she was the victim of an assault, and ends up being arrested for resisting arrest, and taken to a local jail, and then molested by seven corrections officers, three of whom were male.
Three males, and I think four females, pin her down and strip her clothes from her, and then leave her naked in the cell for six hours.
This is, I think, paradigmatic of what our entire system has become.
I mean, this is the sort of thing that would strike people, if they really paid careful attention to it, would strike people as exactly what you described, Scott, as something you would expect to read about in China.
That was the first thing that flashed through my mind, is I have read accounts of women who have resisted the mandatory birth control policies in China, or otherwise done something that provoked the wrath of Chinese authorities, being treated the way that Hope Steffi was.
If she had been a Chinese woman, and this had been video smuggled out of China, and broadcast on CNN, I think there'd be a lot more indignation and outrage over what was done, because people have been conditioned to expect this sort of thing on behalf of other governments, but they don't see how this is the sort of thing that could happen downtown in Main Street, USA, whatever town you live in.
This could be happening right now in your county jail, and statistically, it's likely the things that sort of happen at your county jail, and that reflects this mindset that has been retrofitted into our law enforcement apparatus, that they are more or less permanently at war with the population, because they have to make us submit to the state's will.
You know, I saw an episode of Cops 15 years ago, or something, where they're on patrol, and the guy's driving and talking to the camera, you know, his 15 minutes of fame, and he says, well, the way I figure, there's two kinds of people in this world, suspects and victims.
And I guess now it's, there's enemies and victims.
Yeah, and combatants.
It's, you know, there's been a lot of history of a lot of brutality by state governments and the national government against the people of this country, all throughout our history, and a lot of ways, you know, you have the right to not be tortured into confessing is sort of a fairly new advent in American history, but I don't think it was ever really the code before.
It was the code, at least, the law always said the minimum amount of force required, not overwhelming force.
Overwhelming force is how the Marine Corps treats Iraqis.
Minimum force is how law enforcement is supposed to protect the rights of suspects and victims alike in this country.
Yeah, well, take a look at the standard issue police officer that you'll see on Cops or on Dallas SWAT or any of these other quasi-reality programs that serve more or less as an infomercial for the Homeland Security State.
Or if you can, go to your local police department, your local sheriff's department, take a look at the demeanor and the accoutrements of office, the haircuts, the hairstyles, listen to the language that these people increasingly affect.
It's militarized.
I mean, the modality, the mean, the mode of presentation, very rarely do you find somebody who does not come across as somebody who is part of an army of occupation as a deputy sheriff or as a police officer, as opposed to being a conspicuous peace officer, a member of a professional police force whose role it is to be a conspicuous presence, once again, so that citizens who are having trouble with somebody who is threatening them can seek out the police officer and get his help in order to protect his rights, which is the only excuse we have for having police forces to begin with.
They're supposed to be there basically as an auxiliary protection to the individual who is facing a threat to his personal property, whereas now they are more and more frequently becoming overtly militarized.
Even when you're talking about common-line police officers, this is something that validates, once again, the biblical principle that a little bit of yeast can leaven the entire lump of bread.
When we started creating these SWAT teams and tactical teams about 35 years or so ago, the idea would be that they would be used very rarely and only in circumstances where they had to intervene in order to protect the lives of the innocent, and that to the extent that shots were fired and an actual enforcement action had been undertaken by a SWAT team, that represented a failure of policy, but over decades they've become more thoroughly integrated into standard law enforcement departments, and their demeanor, their mode of thinking, their approach to the law enforcement as being basically a domestic war, that has leavened the entire police system now to where you've got SWAT teams in communities as small as 2,000 or 3,000 people, they're almost always funded by the federal government, they're funded through the law enforcement support organization from the Pentagon, they're funded through the Department of Homeland Security, and the way that they approach law enforcement has an immediate impact on the other members of a given police agency.
They start to adopt the same expectations and the same perspective, that their role in the community is to control and dominate, it is to clear and hold, to use an expression that actually started here with domestic law enforcement and is now being used over in Iraq, when they're talking about clearing and holding neighborhoods, that was an expression that has been used in urban police work.
Counterinsurgency.
Exactly, yeah, and it's a terrifying development here, and the logical concomitant of the effective abolition of the posse comitatus, when Mr. Bush signed the John Warner defense bill back in September 2006, even before that, a year ago in New Orleans, during Hurricane Katrina, when he had the National Guard come in and act as the posse comitatus, and Blackwater mercenaries, who are a quasi-governmental outfit, that's a public-private partnership, which is to say, it's a form of fascism, when you've got people who are part of a nominally private group, or a private corporate group, carrying out official functions of law enforcement, and they all follow this ethic, which is that their job is to make sure that the population submits.
They even have counties where they just fire the Sheriff's Department and hire Blackwater to be the Sheriff's Department, in some places.
Yeah, I've been looking into that as well.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that ought to happen in some crazy Orwellian future, not this month, what are we talking about?
Yeah, that's the RoboCop future, where the whole world is run by a corporation that interfaces with the government, and which runs the government, and law enforcement takes the form of being overtly militarized and entirely totalitarian.
You have five seconds to comply.
Four seconds, three seconds, et cetera.
Yeah, and you know, the other thing here, too, and this is the one we featured on antiwar.com the other day, was the domestic face of the torture state.
And along with this, and we only have just a few minutes left, I guess we can go a little bit over, but we've got to address here, or you've got to address torture by local cops, and also the immunity and the impunity that goes along.
It's been in the news that this cop murdered his girlfriend and is getting in trouble for it, but that's only because he murdered her when he was off the clock.
If he had done this in a jail cell, or by the side of the road, it would have been perfectly okay.
And that impunity is something that goes along with the degree of suffering that we have to endure.
Yeah, well, the Hope Steffi case in Ohio was just one example of somebody being sexually assaulted in detention by the county detention officers.
There was a case about a year, several months earlier, where three teenage girls had been accused of trespass on a public sidewalk, which strikes me as another completely contrived charge, had a scared, straight experience.
They were taken on a tour of the jail, and while they were there, these male corrections officers were making derisive remarks about their female anatomy.
They were forced to undergo a strip search, a cavity search.
They were threatened with jail rape, prison rape, what an infinite source of amusement that scenario is.
And they're suing the same Stark County Corrections Department that Hope Steffi has been suing.
But you also have the spectacle of something called the restraint chair, which is, as I refer to in my blog, sort of a retro-medieval device, where you're strapped down for several hours and immobilized.
And people have been left in these things, literally for days on end, to sit there and wallow in their own feculence.
And some people have been tasered while they've been in restraint chairs.
They've been pepper sprayed.
On a couple of occasions, people have been permanently injured, one of whom was a paraplegic, didn't have the use of his legs.
He had the misfortune of being arrested by the goons and the hire of Joe Arpaio down in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Joe Arpaio has made a reputation as the world's toughest sheriff by maintaining what has to be called a gulag, a huge tent city and other facilities of people who have not yet been convicted of any crime.
That's an important point here.
But yet are subject to incredibly grotesque punishments for misbehavior of very trivial kinds.
This poor fellow was a paraplegic, and because he had requested a catheter in order to urinate, that's something that a paraplegic has to have, he ended up being strapped in this chair with such force that he's now deprived of the use of his arms.
His neck was broken.
He was treated to all kinds of vulgar abuse.
That's just one of several hundred cases of this sort, where these restraint chairs are being used as a punitive device as opposed to being used for the purpose of restraining somebody who's become an actual threat to himself.
That's the only excuse for having such a thing to begin with.
But there was an incident at the Ballpoint Penitentiary in Utah where a fellow was kept in a restraint chair for eight or ten hours and ended up dying of positional hypoxia.
In other words, he suffocated, which is a very easy thing to do if you restrain in a certain way.
And Lance McCotter, the fellow who ran that jail on behalf of a Texas-based private corrections or quasi-private corrections company, went from this experience to consulting in how to run the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Oh, I thought you were going to say Bush nominated him to be a federal judge, but close enough, I guess.
Close enough.
But people were so shocked by what they thought of Abu Ghraib, they didn't reverse-engineer Abu Ghraib appropriately in a mental sense.
They should have said, okay, who are the people running Abu Ghraib?
Well, we have people who are running the corrections system here in the United States.
Who are the people who conducted these atrocities?
Well, they were people who were reservists and guardsmen who, in their private life, were correctional officers, were prison guards.
And they didn't understand the implications that that has for what's going on here in this country with the world's largest prison population, larger in absolute numbers than the prison population of communist China.
Yeah, see, this is the real elephant in the living room here going on, where we live in a society of 300 million people, where we just, what, pretend that we don't have the biggest prison population in the world?
We get all teared up at the land of the free and the home of the brave, and yet we have 7 million people who are either in jail, prison, probation, or parole?
I mean, this is becoming a police state, torture notwithstanding.
Just raw numbers.
Yeah, and the assumption is, if you take a look at a lot of these economically depressed communities, there's some up in northern upstate New York, for instance, where manufacturing has fled.
So what do they do in order to revitalize the economy?
They build a prison in the serene confidence that if you build them, they will come.
And when you have a prison population the size that we have and a population the size that we have, obviously, only a fraction of the people who are in prison or jail, probation, or parole should be there for offenses against persons and property.
The numbers have been hugely inflated by the so-called war on drugs.
They've been inflated again by the ancillary wars that are being waged on such things as DWI, DUI.
If you're somebody who's never actually committed an offense against an individual through force or fraud, you've got no business being in prison.
It's inexcusable.
But the overwhelming majority, the absolute and overwhelming majority of people who are in our corrections system right now have never committed an offense against another human being.
They've run afoul of one of these positivist enactments that we call laws in this country, but they've never harmed anybody.
Yeah.
And let's talk about the new black codes, too, which are the laws against crack.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
You know, this is a big deal.
And to their credit, I guess the Washington Post, you know, deemed this important enough to cover last week the fact that there's this agency created by the Congress called the National Sentencing Commission.
And they said, listen, this apparently they have the power to do this, to say we have to get rid of these sentencing guidelines that impose hundreds of times the sentence for possession of crack cocaine as compared to the same weight of powdered cocaine when it's clearly a racial divide among consumers of the different products of cocaine that, you know, the CIA brings into the country to pay for their illegal wars anyway.
And so hundreds of times the sentences, people doing life sentences with no possibility of parole for simply possessing crack, not even necessarily trading in it.
And in fact, you have one of these detailed on your blog.
This woman who was accused by an informant of this.
She had the rather puzzling name Geneva France.
She's a 22-year-old single mother from a town just outside of Cleveland.
She may have the misfortune of meeting in a social setting a guy she didn't know was an informant for the DEA.
And when this guy asked her out for a date, she turned him down in large measure because he'd creeped her out considerably by saying that he could kill her and stuff her in the trunk of his car and take her to Cleveland.
And he'd be completely protected.
He thought this was a come on or something.
But she turned him down for a date.
And about a week and a half later, she was raided at her home as she was getting her kids ready for school.
This is where the drugs the police did.
She said, I don't have any drugs.
But on the strength of the testimony of this one drug dealer who'd been given immunity from prosecution as a cooperating witness, she ended up going to prison for 16 months.
And the only reason she wasn't there for years was because this guy, his name was Jarrell Bray, ended up getting involved in a drug deal that went bad and shooting somebody.
And in order to keep himself from getting a lengthy prison term, he started to rat on his DEA handler.
And so a number of cases were dismissed, including hers.
She had 16 months of her life stolen from her.
She was taken out of the Bozeman River family.
Her children, her daughters had to be raised for 16 months by an aunt.
She can't get a job now because there's a 16 month gap in her work history that she cannot adequately explain in the sentence.
Oh, I was in prison for 16 months, but I didn't belong there.
You know, what prospective employer is going to consider that at face value?
And this is just a perfect example of the this manic, rampant infestation of government employed informants that are creating these criminal cases on the basis of their uncorroborated testimony.
The FBI has at least 4000 of these parasites on its payroll, according to the budget authority request from last year.
The DEA has thousands more.
Those are just the ones they're willing to admit to.
Yeah, it's becoming like East Germany.
Oh, and the the finish up of that thing about the sentencing guidelines here, Congress's agency said we got to undo this.
This is just absolutely unjust.
And then the White House, in the form of John Michael Mukasey, the attorney general of the United States, sent out an official letter to Congress demanding that they undo the decision of the body that they created, because this is going to let the worst of the worst, you know, violent, terrible criminals in America free.
And I thought, well, the worst of the worst violent criminals in America and all they ever were able to convict them on was possession charges or or selling.
Yeah.
If that were true, we'd be living in a nearly crime free utopia.
You know, if the only if the worst of the worst consists of people who, for their own dubious recreational pursuits, have obtained a substance that was perfectly legal 100 years ago, in essence, the crack wasn't around.
Cocaine certainly was.
If that's the worst problem we have to deal with, then we pretty much solved the social equation.
We really should be doing away with jails anyhow.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is the thing that really gets me is the idea that, wow, some bureaucracy I've never heard of is trying to undo this.
This is one of the greatest triumphs in the war against the drug wars in years that I've heard of.
And immediately, you know, Waterboarder Mukasey and his buddies moved to block it.
Exactly.
That that's what they would call a check and balance, because it prevents it.
It prevents a successful effort to rein in the abuse of government power, which is what they're certainly vigilant about.
Well, not the abuse of power, but any effort to rein it in.
Do you think that with all the joint task forces and all the new homeland security projects and the the kind of layer cake or the marble cake federalism going on in terms of police power, where all the 18000 sheriff's departments and city police departments in the country are all on federal welfare now and and all these new bureaucracies, is there any way that we're ever going to be able to undo this?
Well, I have a fleeting and sort of perverse sense of optimism that the cratering of the dollar and the resulting economic collapse will actually work to our benefit, because when the government runs out of money, as we saw in a number of previous instances, historically, when the empire runs out of money and can no longer pay the legions, the legions generally find something else to do.
And that's what we're talking about now.
We talk about these police agencies that are on the federal dole.
I mean, these are legions of an army of occupation.
And at some point, I don't know how soon that would be, but perhaps within the foreseeable future, just simply through the attrition of our imperial politics and the economic havoc that results, we'll end up with an opportunity to restart the system, at least somewhere.
But if present trends continue unchecked for the next five or six years, five, 10, 15 years in the future, I really can't see any hope for the preservation of liberty.
And these people are talking about a war, a so-called war on terror, that sort of subsumes all these other wars, the war on drugs and so forth, that would last for at least a generation or two.
And if this goes on for a generation longer, I don't think that you or I or any anybody else who has some dim memory of what America used to be would be able to recognize the country would be living in.
Yeah, it's always the...
Actually, I read somewhere that a frog will jump out of a pot if you turn the heat up even slowly.
But anyway, the analogy is still good.
I mean, I know that in 1981 or 82 or something, when I was in elementary school, if Ronald Reagan had said, all right, everybody, we're going to have national ID cards, and we're going to put cameras up all over your neighborhoods, and we're going to have sneak and peek warrants to come in your house whenever we feel like, the American people would have grabbed their rifles, even if he was a Republican, at least here in Texas, they would have just said no.
Yeah, exactly.
But you just, I guess, as long as you have a scary enemy with brown skin and a funny hat, then who could strike at any moment from the shadows, I guess you can get away with anything.
I guess so.
The problem is we've lost our ability to communicate with our ancestors in the sense of being able to read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers and understand the principles that are inscribed therein.
When we're living in the middle of this protein change of our Republic into whatever it is our Republic is becoming, it's really difficult for people who are not thinking in historic terms to have some baseline understanding of what a normal society looks like.
And one of the very valuable things that people can do now in this modern zombies dot that is internet journalism and independent radio and so forth, is to try to describe to people what a normal society would look like.
What we're living in right now is common, but it's not normal.
A normal society defined by our Constitution and the better parts of our heritage will be radically different.
You know, you would have, as Ron Paul likes to say, liberty, peace, and prosperity, rather than being organized around the proposition that we have to support the commander-in-chief and the regime that he heads in this perpetual war against whatever enemy it is that will be named later.
All right, everybody.
That's William Norman Grigg.
He writes at freedominourtime.blogspot.com and rightsourceonline.com.
His new book is called Liberty in Eclipse, The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State.
Thanks very much for your time today, Will.
Thanks, Scott.