11/27/12 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Jacob Orenberger, founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
Welcome to the show.
Jacob, how are you doing?
Hey, doing great.
Nice to be back with you, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and, man, am I happy to be pointing my eyeballs toward your new website.
It looks great.
Yeah, it's awesome, isn't it?
Yeah, it is awesome.
And if you don't mind me saying so, it's so long overdue that it makes it especially super-duper awesome.
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It's wonderful.
Yeah, it's taken us quite a while, but there was just so many complex programming and other stuff that went into design that went into this that, as you can imagine, we have thousands of articles that need to be transferred over.
Right.
I mean, that's the hang-up, right, is you've got so much content.
You've got 20 years' worth of content up there.
Exactly, exactly.
But, boy, we are just so psyched about the final result.
We just love it.
Yeah, it turned out great, absolutely great.
That's fff.org.
That doesn't prove just how long they've been at it over there, that they got fff.
That was the day that the dot-coms went on sale.
You nabbed that one, huh?
Yeah, exactly.
Gosh, if only I had foreseen how important that was going to be, I would have bought a lot of others.
I wish you'd got Scott Horton dot-com for me.
Yeah, well, we could have sold that one for about a million dollars, no doubt.
Yeah, yeah, because I got that to spend for sure.
All right, so, yeah, I'm Scott.
Jacob Hornberger is on the show, and we've got a few good articles to talk about here.
I really like this one.
You're always really good with the irony.
Outrage over Morsi, but not over our dictator.
So this is about, and we talked with Adam Morrow from Interpret Service about what's going on over there in Egypt.
And he was somewhat defending the power grab, actually, in context, and saying, well, he's grabbing power from a judiciary that a lot of people, not just the Muslim Brotherhood, think is way out of control and needs some power grab from it and some things reordered.
And it'll be a contest to see who's really got the support.
But meanwhile, in the American press, and I guess probably the European press, too, oh, no, this guy Morsi, this is the worst thing anybody ever did was try to grab authoritarian power in Egypt.
Jacob?
Well, yeah, and let's not forget with respect to Morsi that that guy's right.
It's a dysfunctional system.
I mean, the judiciary is effectively controlled by the military, and it was part of the military dictatorship.
But this whole dysfunctional system was built up, established, and reinforced by U.S. foreign aid, where they've been funneling in trillions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money decade after decade to support this brutal and oppressive dictatorship that people finally rebelled against.
And we keep that in mind.
But it's just so funny, as I wrote in my blog today, that you see the mainstream U.S. press just shocked and outraged over this power grab.
But when it comes to what Bush and Obama did with the post-9-11 power grab to assassinate Americans and take Americans into custody, put them in military dungeons, torture them, incarcerate them for life, execute them after some kangaroo tribunal, oh, that's all normal.
That's all pro-freedom.
That's part of living in a free society.
I mean, it's just fantastic, because these powers that Bush and Obama have adopted are the exact same powers that the Egyptian dictator has, whether it's Morsi or Mubarak, that the Egyptian protesters were demanding that they surrender.
And, of course, the military dictatorship said no.
We have the war on terrorism, and we have national security.
Even after 30 years, we will not surrender these emergency powers we have.
They take the same position that Bush and Obama and the Pentagon and the CIA are taking.
We can't relinquish these powers.
It's only been 11 years since 9-11.
It's kind of funny.
Yeah.
Well, it is funny, the permanent state of emergency and the complete lack of, well, it's the lack of memory and irony, right, that the TV news anchor people, they don't know anything, so they're not even really being dishonest.
They just, they don't have enough in their brain to really make the comparison.
So they don't make the comparison between Obama's powers and Morsi's powers any more than they make the comparison between Mubarak's powers and Morsi's powers, right?
It has to be the alternative press that points out that, well, you know, America wasn't on the side of the Democrats in the revolution in Egypt.
America was on the side of Mubarak until they absolutely couldn't be anymore.
But the TV news people, they never even really understood.
So, you know, they just go right on with the no irony, no memory, no irony.
Well, that's right, and any pro-U.S. dictator is considered an ally, a partner, and pro-freedom.
And so if people are trying to oust that dictatorship through violence, the Egyptian government under Mubarak considered them terrorists, but so did the U.S. government.
You know, the U.S. government took the position that if you try to oust one of our pro-U.S. dictators, you're a terrorist, despite what the Declaration of Independence says.
And now that, you know, they're kind of in a quandary with Morsi, because Morsi was democratically elected, and this is the other amusing part of this, is that the U.S., you know, what have the troops been dying and killing for in Iraq?
Okay, for democracy.
And this was after they didn't find those scary WMDs.
And the same thing in Afghanistan.
What are they doing in Afghanistan?
We're here establishing a democratic system.
Well, as libertarians have argued since the beginning of all this junk, that democracy is not even in the Constitution.
The Constitution protects us from democracy.
And Morsi is showing, just like Bush and Obama have shown, that you can have a democratic system that results in dictatorial powers.
Democracy is not freedom.
It actually can be very antithetical to freedom.
The only benefit to a democratic system is it enables people to change public officials peacefully, where they don't have to go through a violent revolution.
But the free society turns on limitations on power, and those limitations are what Morsi has ignored or did ignore in this power grab.
But they're also the limitations that Bush and Obama have ignored with their assassination of Americans and their power to assassinate Americans, a non-reviewable, non-accountable power, a power to get the military now to take Americans into custody, torture them, hold them forever as they did with Jose Padilla, and which they can now do to all Americans.
That's the system under which we're now living.
Now, our dictators have been nice.
They're not rounding up people in mass.
But that's not what determines a free society.
Everybody knows it was a game changer, Scott.
They now have the power to take us into custody, and they know it.
And don't give us a trial, torture us, do whatever they want to us.
All they've got to do is label us as terrorists.
That was a big game changer.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing, right?
It might be a controversy on TV if Obama outright said, well, I now claim the power to overrule whatever the Supreme Court says, or something like that.
That might confuse them enough that they would think there was a problem.
But they can overthrow us, no problem at all, right?
They can overthrow any of the protections that are supposed to keep them away from our life and our property and our liberty.
But if there was some kind of battle inside the state like that, that would be what it would take to get the attention of the media that something is going wrong here.
Well, and they know that the courts are going to be submissive to the Pentagon and the CIA.
I mean, there's not going to be – the federal courts in this land, the last thing they're going to do is jack with the CIA and the Pentagon.
There is an extreme deference, the same kind of deference that the federal courts in Chile were doing under the Pinochet regime to what the military was doing and the intelligence forces in Chile.
Sure, the Supreme Court says, we're going to have jurisdiction over these things, Guantanamo and so forth.
But then as a practical matter, they can do whatever they want.
I mean, look at Guantanamo.
You've got people that are sitting there without trials for 11 years, despite the Constitution that says the right to a speedy trial and there's no due process there, people being tortured.
So as a practical matter, sure, some habeas corpus petitions have been granted.
But as a practical matter, all the Pentagon and the CIA have to do is walk into court, say national security, state secrets, and the courts are going to – the federal judges are going to get so nervous their knees are going to start shaking.
They're going to immediately grant whatever relief the military wants and the CIA wants, and that's it.
And so if they try to do what they did to Obama – I mean to Padilla, to other Americans, the federal courts are going to say we can't get involved with this.
This is a military decision.
If they try to assassinate an American like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki or his teenage son, the courts are going to say we can't get involved with this.
This is national security.
So, I mean, that's dictatorial power in its purest form.
I mean, if you don't have a judiciary willing to enforce the Constitution, then you've got an executive wielding dictatorial powers.
Right.
Well, you know, there's this story in The New York Times about how Obama was really worried that if Mitt Romney won, they would have to hurry up and write the law that determines, you know, inside the executive branch, inside the White House, they would have to determine who gets on the kill list and who doesn't.
Right now it's just the emperor's will, thumbs up or thumbs down, and they need some way to, you know, codify.
And it was – we have to hurry.
If the Republicans are going to come into power here, we have to hurry up and codify.
As though Romney couldn't just rewrite it however – which way he wanted.
But, I mean, really, that's the joke, right, is it's dictatorial power, but pin the tail on the emperor every four years, and they'll never call it fascism, right, just as long as they keep a semi-regular rotation of figureheads at the top.
Yeah, as long as they've got elections and they leave people relatively free to criticize what's going on.
Oh, yeah, you've got freedom of speech.
You can criticize as much as you want, but we'll just keep assassinating people.
I mean, what do they care that people are complaining?
I mean, look on the assassination of that 16-year-old boy.
I mean, there's people criticizing the press.
Nobody knows why they assassinated him, and they say that.
Can you please tell us why you did this?
And they don't have to answer.
They just go about their business and say, we're not accountable.
We don't have to answer to anybody on who we assassinate.
And your point's fantastic, that what good was this new rule going to do?
They're doing it by decree.
They're not going to the legislature or the legislative branch of government saying, we need you to pass a law to establish when we can assassinate people.
They're just ruling by decree, the same way Morrissey is doing.
And every dictator does.
Well, your point's great.
What would stop Romney from coming in there and saying, I'm burning these rules.
I'm setting my own rules, which means I get to assassinate anybody I want just like Obama was.
Well, now have you taken a look at this amendment, the Rand Paul amendment on the NDAA?
Because the way I understand it, he's conceding military and arrest and detention of Americans.
He's just saying, and all U.S. persons, he's just saying if you're an American citizen, then you should still get a civilian trial, I guess, on the military base where you're being held.
What?
I confess I am totally unfamiliar with that proposal.
So I really can't comment on it.
Well, yeah, best I can tell, they're saying he's going to filibuster to stop the NDAA thing.
But what his amendment does is, as far as I understand it, it concedes military detention.
And then when it says, but you still get a trial under the Fifth and Sixth Amendment, that part only applies to U.S. citizens, not other U.S. persons at all.
Yeah, that is totally, if that's the case, that is totally abhorrent.
It's an insult thrown into the face of our founding fathers.
I mean, there's a reason why the Bill of Rights, specifically the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, are not limited to citizens.
Because it says no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
And every person accused of a crime will be entitled to be notified of the charges through grand jury indictment.
Trial by jury inures to everybody.
In other words, our ancestors said we're going to have a criminal justice system that applies equally across the board to both citizens and non-citizens alike.
And that's something we all should be proud of.
I mean, you don't want to go into a foreign country and find out that Americans are going to be treated differently, worse than everybody else in the country.
You want to know that you want the same rights and guarantees that everybody else across the board.
And that's one of the real things, the great things about America's system.
So this idea of, oh, well, we're going to have one set of rules for citizens and one rule for foreigners, that's just abhorrent.
Absolutely abhorrent.
It violates equal protection, equal treatment.
It violates the fundamental principles on which this country is founded with respect to due process of law.
It also, to me, just sounds silly.
It sounds to me like something that they would just outright ignore anyway.
What do you mean we're going to hold a civilian trial on a military base?
If you already conceded military detention, then forget the rest of it.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you know what, that you're going to have military judges running trials?
I don't know.
Or a civilian judge with a military jury.
As long as we're making stuff up here.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's all jerry-rigged.
You know, the whole problem is the national security state.
They brought this war on terrorism with all their provocative actions overseas.
Then they used that to really hijack our constitutional order, our system of federal courts.
Because remember, it's not a question of that terrorism is now permanently an act of war.
It's both.
It's their option.
Because you've got terrorism cases taking place in federal court.
I mean, we know that every day there's some terrorist prosecution taking place.
And it's in the U.S. Code.
Terrorism is a federal criminal offense.
What they've done is say, well, now under the new post-9-11 dictatorial system we have now, in our option, we're going to be able to treat these people as enemy combatants and suspected terrorists.
And we now operate under a totally different system with the Pentagon running things in Cuba and really following Castro's type of system with respect to their tribunals and stuff.
Well, that is the epitome of tyranny.
When the government officials can say, okay, you go down the federal court route and, oh, you go down the Pentagon route.
I mean, what kind of justice system is that?
It's really no justice system at all.
It's a mockery of justice.
Yeah, you know, I've asked a lot of real experts that I've talked to on the show about that very subject.
And their determination is that there is absolutely no rhyme or reason other than bureaucratic infighting or something like that.
So why did they put Hamdi at a military base but John Walker Lynd got a trial?
Because John Ashcroft got in a fight with, got in an argument with somebody and won that one.
But the other time he lost that one or whatever it is.
Or he went along, he agreed with Rumsfeld about Padilla but not about Lynd.
In other words, it's all arbitrary.
It's just like a bunch of Communist Party officials in China figuring out what they want to do for their own interest's sake.
There's no law that decides.
Right.
It's that.
I'm really glad you pointed that out.
This is what so many people can't see.
It's the arbitrariness that makes it so tyrannical.
I mean it violates the whole concept of a rule of law where people answer to the law rather than to the arbitrary discretionary decisions of public officials.
So you've got them deciding, okay, you get the Pentagon route, which of course involves torture and indefinite incarceration.
You get the federal court route, which of course involves the Bill of Rights.
But then you've got people like Padilla where they switch back and forth.
They start out in the federal court system.
Then they push him over into the military system.
Then they take him back out into the federal court system.
And this is just – this is the height of arbitrariness, which of course is the height of tyranny.
I mean you can't have an arbitrary system like that and consider it fair.
Well, you know, and back to Egypt.
This is what back before the revolution Chris Hedges used to say, paraphrasing Nietzsche, about staring into the abyss and it stares back into you.
And he's saying, you know, when you keep all these dictatorships on your payroll because of what efficient torturers and disappearers they are, then you become them too.
You become torturers too.
You end up adopting an Egyptian system of law, which is a quote-unquote law, a pretend wink-nudge law, a thin veneer for what's really a military dictatorship.
And it sure seems like he's right.
We end up there getting rid of their emergency law now just as we're solidifying all of ours.
I think that's a great point.
I mean to me, when you enter into a partnership with a thug, that lowers you to the level of the thug.
And it was more like when the CIA entered into the partnership, assassination partnership with the mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro because Castro – not because Castro had attacked the United States or anything.
It was because he had a communist ideology in his mind.
And so they enter into this partnership with the mafia.
Well, that to me says everything.
If you're willing to enter into a partnership with a murderous, thuggery-type, drug-dealing organization, that pretty much says who you are.
And the same thing with respect to this partnership that has existed for many years between the U.S. government, specifically the CIA and the Pentagon, the national security state, with the Mubarak military dictatorship.
They had this torture-rendition partnership.
They chose them to torture people on their behalf.
I think it says everything about the Pentagon and the CIA, the fact that they not only partnered with that dictatorship.
They were also partnering with the Assad regime.
Let's not forget about that.
I mean you have all this proclamations that we've got to get rid of Assad because he's a brutal dictator.
Well, he is a brutal dictator, but he's a brutal dictator that previously they partnered with as part of their rendition torture program.
And that, of course, was the infamous case of Mehar Arar, the Canadian that the CIA kidnapped and secretly sent to be tortured in Syria.
And then they were trying to cut a deal, or they did cut a deal with Gaddafi to torture people there.
And that's where Human Rights Watch beat the CIA to the punch and found all those secret files showing the rendition and torture that had taken place there.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right that it says everything about the national security state in our country, the fact that they have partnered with these brutal dictatorial regimes overseas.
Yeah, and you know it's so obvious to, I think, pretty much everyone in the world with a satellite dish that, hey, look, the only reason that they're going after or went after Gaddafi are going after Syria is because they weren't that close of sock puppets.
Not like the king of Saudi Arabia or the king of Kuwait or the king of Jordan or somebody really loyal like that.
These two are expendable.
Syria is much closer to Iran than to us.
Yeah, they tortured some people for us, which just goes to show how evil the Americans are using the Syrians to torture people.
But the only reason that they're supporting the rebels is because they want to help weaken Iran.
And they don't support any rebels in, for example, Bahrain or in Saudi Arabia or in Oman or Kuwait or Jordan or anywhere or Algeria or Morocco.
Anywhere where they like it just fine.
The kings there are just fine and do a great job for us and look like they will be able to continue to if we leave them alone.
I mean, it's so cynical.
Oh, yeah.
We have to export democracy to the Middle East, to Iran, Iraq and Syria, the three countries we don't control yet.
Oh, yeah.
And Libya, too.
You know, come on.
Oh, of course.
And Bahrain's a perfect example.
I mean, where they're oppressing their people horrendously.
I mean, they're really no different from the Syria Assad regime or any other brutal dictatorships, the Mubarak regime.
And they're killing the protesters and so forth.
And the U.S. is as quiet as a church mouse.
Why?
Because they're partners.
That's their partner that's doing this.
And it's a loyal partner.
It lets the military have an enormous base there.
And so they're not about to turn on that regime.
But the world can see this, and they can see the hypocrisy and the double dealing and the double standards.
And we libertarians can see it here in this country.
And I think what we need to keep doing, Scott, is just keep bringing people's attention to it that this is not what America is supposed to be all about.
And we can change things.
We can dismantle this whole cancerous tumor on the body politic.
And that's what we need to do.
That's the only way it's going to save our country is if we dismantle this national security junk that is slowly or quickly taking our country down.
Well, and how do we do that?
Because I want to help.
It's through the power of ideas and doing exactly what you're doing with this show and what we're doing at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
When enough people reach a critical mass, when they finally realize and they look through the lies and the propaganda that this is all pro-freedom and this is to keep us safe and this is all necessary, when enough of a critical mass of Americans say, what a bunch of bull, then their lives don't work anymore.
Then the propaganda doesn't work.
And then all of a sudden things start to change because when people say we're not interested in this anymore, this is not what America was supposed to be all about.
This is not our founding principles.
We need to change directions.
And when we reach that critical mass through the power of ideas, things will shift.
And that's the way companies shift their philosophy.
It's the way countries shift their philosophy.
Boy, are we overdue or what?
Big time.
But they don't know where to stop.
That's their problem.
They keep pushing and pushing and pushing.
I never thought I'd see the day when American presidents had the power to assassinate their own people and not have to account for it or explain it or justify it.
They just keep pushing and pushing, and I think more and more people are waking up as a result.
That's true.
Well, hey, listen, especially for the newbies listening, head over to FFF.org.
I'm serious when I tell you this is the best the libertarian movement has to offer, and it's 20 years worth of it, too.
Jacob Hornberger, he writes virtually every day at the blog there.
And, of course, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory, James Bovard, Richard Eveling, and Tim Kelly write some great foreign policy stuff.
And did I mention Anthony Gregory, Anthony Gregory, Anthony Gregory?
So head on over there, FFF.org.
Thank you very much for your time, Jacob.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, thank you, Scott.
It's always an honor to be on your show, man.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Great talking to you, too.
The Scott Horton Show is brought to you by the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
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