01/08/13 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Full interview archives are at scotthorton.org, more than 2,500 of them going back to 2003.
10 years ago now.
And more than a few with Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
Check out their brand new website at fff.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Jacob, how are you doing?
Fine.
Great to be back, Scott.
Well, good.
I'm happy to have you here.
And I'm happy that you're interested in this Lynn Stewart case, because I am too.
And I haven't seen or heard a word about it in quite a while.
But I was hoping, first of all, you could explain to the people who's Lynn Stewart, and then let's talk about all the crazy lawless stuff that the government did to her.
Well, she's a 73-year-old lawyer who had a very brilliant criminal defense career in New York.
She's a fierce criminal defense lawyer.
Worked with guys like William Kunstler and stuff.
And she just was the type that's a real bulldog for her clients, which is one of the reasons why the government didn't like her.
And she was prevailed upon by Ramsey Clark, who had served as attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, to defend Rama, the terrorist that was accused of conspiring to blow up buildings here in New York City.
And she was reluctant to do the representation, but finally agreed to do so.
And as part of it, she signed an agreement not to disclose communications from this guy.
And the prison regulations prohibited her from disclosing the communications.
Well, she violated those restrictions and read at a press conference, read a message that this guy was delivering to his Islamic organization in Egypt, which had been denominated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
And the note said something to the effect of, the ceasefire that we currently have with the Egyptian government.
I'm not calling on you to withdraw it, but I think that this should be discussed and it should be considered.
Well, they construed that message as exhorting the Egyptian people to rise up and violently overthrow the Egyptian government.
And for that, they accused her of supporting terrorism.
And now this is when?
This is what, 2003 or 4?
Yeah, 2002.
Okay.
And so it was right after 9-11 when everybody was all hyped up about the fear of terrorism.
And this was, of course, when they were doing the invading of Iraq, the Patriot Act.
Everybody was shaking in their boots, and so they knew they could get away with anything they wanted.
And so they go after this lady who's just a criminal defense lawyer and say, oh, well, now you're a bad American and you're a terrorist and you're supporting terrorism.
And of course, from our perspective, all she was doing was violating some prison regulations or some agreement she had signed.
But boy, they threw the book at her and they convicted her in the whole post-9-11 emergency terrorism environment.
And they disbarred her.
And then they sent her to jail for 28 months, despite the fact that she had breast cancer and despite the fact that a lot of prominent lawyers were saying, like, give the lady probation.
And, well, as she steps out into the courthouse steps, she opens up her mouth again and tells the press, ah, I can do this sentence standing on my head, in other words, scoffing at the 28 months.
Well, that hacked off the prosecutors and the judges, and so they called her back in for resentencing and upped the ante to 10 years in jail.
And so that's where she sits now, with a 10-year jail sentence with breast cancer at 73 years old.
She's effectively given a life sentence now.
And so I wrote this article, you know, a lot of it...
Hang on, hang on one second.
Let me ask you real quick, just technically speaking here, was she, I forget now, it's been so long, but was she actually convicted of material support for terrorism or was it just violating those prison rules, that agreement?
No, she was convicted of supporting terrorism.
Let me ask you this, too, because just, you know, as a devil's advocate kind of thing, right?
I mean, here she is, she's representing the blind shake from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, right?
She can't outright say, hey, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, go and kill a bus full of civilian tourists or something like that, but she can pass coded messages like, jeez, I'm not saying you should kill a bus full of people, I'm just saying maybe you should talk about it.
I mean, is it possible that the right-wingers, the accusers in this case, or the consensus against her, that those people are right, that really she was passing a message to these crazy civilian-killing terrorists over there?
Well, it's possible, but you see, it's not real clear what exactly that means.
That was the thrust of my article, is that, you know, for one thing, there's the freedom of speech argument, is that why shouldn't people be free to exhort anybody to do anything they want?
I mean, you know, it seems to me that that's the real core aspect of free speech, is that if I go and tell you, hey, go murder somebody, and you go murder somebody, I'm not responsible for the murder.
I mean, I'm free to exhort you to do anything you want, unless I participate in the murder.
It doesn't make any sense to me why a person should be convicted just for, you know, exhorting people to go murder people or have a revolution in a foreign country.
But let's assume it is illegal, all right?
My point was that there's this, and I've written another article on it today, I've written two articles on this case, that it's this corrosive aspect of the national security state that really warps values.
Because here you have this dictatorial, tyrannical regime in Egypt.
And my question is, well, what's wrong with exhorting people to overthrow a government if it's a tyrannical government?
And isn't that what the Declaration of Independence says, that people have a right to violently overthrow a tyrannical regime?
Well, what the national security state has done in terms of warping American values is that if the U.S. national security state is partnered with a tyrannical regime like the Egyptian dictatorship, that all of a sudden Americans are bad people, they're unpatriotic people, they're traitors for calling on the Egyptians to violently overthrow this tyrannical regime.
That's nuts.
I mean, look at Syria right now.
You've got U.S. officials exhorting Syrians to overthrow the Syrian dictatorship.
Well, that's no different from what Stewart supposedly did.
That's what makes Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorists, is that they oppose a government that our government supports.
Exactly.
I mean, we're not necessarily talking about blowing up people in buses is what I'm saying.
We're talking about overthrowing dictatorial regimes, many of which have been supported and re-fortified by the U.S. government.
Over the years, the Egyptian regime is the best example of this.
For 30 years, they've had this brutal, tyrannical regime, and guess how it's been fortified with cash and armaments throughout that time?
By the U.S. taxpayer, compliments of the U.S. government.
Well, people need to just think back two years to the revolution against Hosni Mubarak, which luckily was almost entirely peaceful other than the government's reaction.
When they overthrew him, the American government was caught so off guard that they were kind of stumbling and mumbling the truth.
Well, geez, we really like this dictator.
We don't want to lose him, but I guess if we have to lose him, we at least want the head of the secret torture police, Omar Suleiman, to be his replacement.
That's on the front page of the New York Times, because they didn't have time, I guess, to get all their PR together to make it really seem like they were on the side of the people in the street, which they were trying to claim in a way, you know?
Right.
I mean, what I point in my article is that the U.S. national security state never considered the Egyptian regime to be tyrannical.
In their mind, these emergency powers that came into existence 30 years ago, the power to arbitrarily arrest people, torture them, cart them off to a military dungeon, execute them, no due process.
To U.S. officials, they bought into the Mubarak rationale that all these powers were necessary to protect national security.
The people they were going after were criminals and terrorists.
The same thing that Assad's saying about the people that are rebelling against him.
Well, the U.S. government bought into this and said, no, this is a stable regime.
It's pro-U.S.
What they're doing is maintaining national security and protecting order and stability.
Well, the victims of this tyranny were the protestors out in the streets.
They were saying, enough's enough.
We're sick and tired of these emergency powers that stretch back 30 years.
We're sick and tired of them being employed against us, the torture chambers and so forth.
And that's when they went into the streets to risk their lives.
And that's when the U.S. says, oh my gosh, these people may win.
They may end up ousting our little partner and ally here.
We need to shift gears here so that we're on the right side of the equation.
But throughout those 30 years, they were on the wrong side of the equation.
And that's why they went after Lyn Stewart.
They consider Lyn Stewart to be a bad person because she supposedly read a note that called for the violent overthrow of the U.S. partner and ally Hosni Mubarak and his dictatorial tyrannical regime.
That's war, Scott.
It is.
It's crazy.
And if the problem really is, as they claim, Egyptian-Islamic jihad, then in the time, all the years leading up to 2011, they were the ones pushing people into the arms of Islamic jihad.
If that's the only opposition, organized opposition to the Mubarak regime that you can find, then that's the only place people are going to have to go.
Well, and then you've got people that are going to be coming after the United States for supporting these tyrannical regimes.
And this is what we've kept saying as libertarians even before 9-11.
We were telling people that the U.S. government, it doesn't have this little saintly attitude about it.
Oh, we support democracy and freedom, which is what they teach in the public schools.
They are one of the premier supporters of brutal dictatorships in the world.
We see that time and time again.
The Shah of Iran, brutal dictatorship, Pinochet, brutal dictatorship, the military dictatorships in Guatemala, the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan.
And people, the victims of this tyranny, end up hating our country because we're the ones, our government's the ones, that's over there fortifying these dictatorships.
And then they sit there and scratch their head and say, oh, 9-11's because they hate us for our freedom and values.
Nonsense.
They hate Americans because of what this government has been doing, partly to support these dictatorships along with other things involved in U.S. foreign policy.
Well, you know, in The Looming Tower and in that movie The Power of Nightmares, they do a good job of explaining that Ayman al-Zawahiri, who really I think he's the one, at least they say, he's the one who won the argument that we need to focus all these local jihads into one group and target the United States first.
He was the one who convinced Osama bin Laden to take on the far enemy and merge Islamic jihad with bin Laden's group, the Azzam group, and really created al-Qaeda, Dr. Zawahiri.
Well, he was rounded up after the assassination of Sadat because he knew a guy who knew a guy whose brother-in-law was in the Muslim Brotherhood or that kind of thing.
I guess he was in the Muslim Brotherhood, but he was way outside of the conspiracy to kill Sadat.
It had nothing to do with that.
But he was rounded up and tortured with the rest of them.
That's what radicalized him and turned him into the madman, civilian killer, 9-11 bomber, etc., etc., that we've been dealing with since then.
The same thing goes for Zawahiri Jr.'s Zarqawi, who was nothing but a two-bit rapist nobody until the American-backed dictatorship in Jordan tortured him.
All of a sudden, he got politics and then became the leader of what became al-Qaeda in Iraq, who are now our heroes in Syria, as you were saying, fighting for the United States.
He's the guy bombing all the marketplaces and killing all those women and children in Iraq during the civil war there back in 2005 and 2006.
Those are fascinating accounts, and they just buttress what we libertarians have been saying since 9-11 and before 9-11.
This is what Chalmers Johnson, who's written a great trilogy of books on U.S. foreign policy, says this is the blowback.
In fact, just a few days ago, there was that attack on an American security contractor in Afghanistan.
This Afghan soldier kills this contractor, one of these green-on-blue-whatever-the-things-they-call-them-over-there.
The New York Times interviewed this guy.
I think it was the Times that interviewed this guy.
He escapes to the Taliban after shooting the American.
Friendly force kills the American.
Escapes to the Taliban, and the newspaper interviews him.
I think it was the New York Times.
This guy just made it real clear, he says, this is all about your troops over here.
They don't belong here.
They're arrogant, they're pompous, they're occupying our country.
This is why I retaliated against your troops.
It's just a microcosm that when you look at the entire ambit of U.S. foreign policy, the invasion of Iraq, the Persian Gulf intervention, the sanctions against Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, the unconditional support of the Israeli government, the stationing of troops near Islamic holy lands, I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
And then when you add on this corrosive aspect of the national security state, I mean, it's amazing to watch, to read these lawyers and judges castigating and condemning Lyn Stewart as if she was just some kind of horrible, evil person, because it's because their values are so warped.
They've seen nothing wrong with the U.S. partnering with a brutal, tyrannical regime.
And let's not forget that it wasn't just the bulgaric regime that they partnered with.
They also partnered with the Assad regime.
Yes, the regime right now that they're saying should be ousted, and they're exhorting the revolutionaries to oust this guy, they partnered with him to torture Meher Arar, that Canadian citizen that they sent to Syria, to Assad for the primary purpose of torturing him.
I mean, it's just the whole system is so crooked, corrupt, and sordid, and it's just warped our values so terribly, and that's why, as you know, Scott, I've been harping for a long time now that the ultimate solution to this is to dismantle this national security state apparatus that was engrafted onto our constitutional order back in the late 40s.
It's time not to reform it.
Don't rein it in.
Dismantle the whole darn chute, Mitch.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we're so far gone now.
We've been talking, you and I just, you know, since I've been at this, we've been talking for years and years about, you know, our jet skis down the slippery slope here, and we're at the point now where there is a piece, I'm sure you saw in the New York Times, saying, you know what, why do we even pretend to go by the Constitution anymore anyway?
You know what?
We could just have a tradition of free speech and just adapt.
We don't have to have a First Amendment or any of the rest of this.
And of course, it's been so long since the Constitution applied to the form of our government and what it can do to us that the guy's got a great point, not from a Lysander Spooner point of view that this this Constitution has created an illegitimate government, but that the Constitution itself is illegitimate in its attempts to constrain this thing anymore.
That's how far down the slippery slope we've gotten where I mean, here it's you just sort of mentioned the free speech issue there real quick.
And then that's that's kind of taken up a small portion of this interview.
But like here, what this lady, Lynn Stewart, said, the national government is forbidden in the contract from doing anything about that period.
That's it.
It says so right there.
And the courts have actually gotten this one right and said, you know, even when that Klansman said, you know, one day the Klan is going to kill all you government people or whatever.
That's protected speech.
As long as you're not directly inciting a riot or, you know, hiring a hitman or something like that, your speech is protected, period.
And here we're talking about not even sedition against the American government, but sedition against Hosni Mubarak.
That is what's so warped about this whole thing.
You're absolutely right that, you know, and actually you have to reach a very warped interpretation of this of this this statement that she read, because it actually says, I'm not calling for an end to the ceasefire.
I'm saying that we should discuss calling an end to the ceasefire.
But they said, well, that was like a coded message to call for an end to the ceasefire.
All right, well, let's accept that interpretation.
You are absolutely right, Scott, that at the worst, she's exhorting people to rise up against a brutal tyranny overseas.
Why is that not protected?
She's not inciting a riot.
She's not going to say, hey, go start killing people right now.
She's not participating in the revolution.
She's just reading the message.
But it shows you how warped this national security state has done to people, including the federal judiciary.
I mean, you read the way that the reaction of this woman, and they just consider her just the worst person in the world for daring to, you know, oppose a U.S. government partner and ally in the national security state syndrome.
This is disgusting.
To me, it ranks right up there with what the national security state has done to the conscience of the American people with respect to the killing of foreigners.
I mean, as I've written, they have essentially stultified conscience.
Americans, especially the Christians, they have no conscience when it comes to the U.S. national security state's killing of foreigners, including children.
I mean, you know, with the exception of libertarians and a few liberals, who was speaking out about the government's killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with sanctions?
Nobody, except libertarians and a few liberals.
Because people's conscience is not bothered by any of this.
You see these drone assassinations, and all you hear in the churches across America is, let's pray for the troops.
They're defending our freedoms.
This mindless, rote idiocy.
But not one single prayer for any of these people that are being killed.
It's just conscience is out of the picture.
That's what the national security state has done to the American people.
Yep.
You got that right.
And you know, I'm going to try to interview Christopher Coyne.
I'm not sure if you saw this, but there's this great study done by Christopher Coyne and Thomas Duncan called the Overlook Costs of the Permanent War Economy, a market process approach, an Austrian approach to the military-industrial complex here.
And just how they've just skewed everything.
They've twisted every part of our society.
I mean, even if, this is the example I like using.
I think I got this from Nick Terse.
Tube socks.
If you make tube socks, then man, it's all about scoring that military contract.
And if your competitor gets the Marines, you better get the Army, because man, think of all the tube socks you could sell.
And if you don't get the Pentagon contract, you're done in the tube sock business, pal.
You need to do something else now.
Every part, down to the toothpaste, down to everything, comes down to, or is in some way, not just influenced, but is warped and twisted and made disgusting by the military state, you know?
Oh, it's like a cancer.
I mean, it's a cancer that pervades the entire body politic.
They've got this thing so well figured out where they have contracts in every state, so that if anybody suggests a reduction in the rate of increase of Pentagon spending, they can threaten to shut down operations of some contract in some congressional district, which gets the congressman all riled up and fighting for his fair share of the loot.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
On the economic side, the pervasiveness of the military-industrial complex is just so enormous.
To me, it ranks right up there with the pervasiveness of the Egyptian military and Egyptian society.
It's horribly corrosive, again, on the economic side.
That's why one of the reasons that we're here at the Future of Freedom Foundation, we're calling for the Congress not to lift the debt ceiling at all, which would force Obama to cut about $1.3 trillion in spending overnight, and he'd have to focus at least some of it on the military.
But to us, that's the ideal solution.
I mean, if you want to cut federal spending, you want to balance the budget, don't lift the debt ceiling.
That means they've got to live within the amount of money they're collecting with taxes.
That means a major, slashing reduction in the budget of the military as well as the welfare state would be the best thing that could ever happen to this country.
Yeah, probably right.
And now, let me ask you real quick about guns, and it's sort of just a narrow point.
It seems to me like if the Democrats pass a new gun control law, that they already know that that's absolute political suicide.
They thought it was a great victory when they passed the assault weapons ban back in 1994, and then two weeks later, they got their asses handed to them, and the Republicans took over both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.
And then Al Gore and John Kerry, they learned the lesson from that.
They didn't run on gun control whatsoever, because they know that the American people will hand them defeats.
Period.
Simple as that.
And they care about themselves far more than anything else, right?
So is this even really a worry that they're going to pass a new assault weapons ban, do you think?
Or they're just going to let it die, or what?
Well, my hunch is that it's a real worry.
I don't think they care about what's going to happen four years from now.
They think people will have forgotten four years from now, or even two years from now.
This is right at the beginning of the term.
I think these people are so statist to the core that they see this as a tremendous opportunity to get not just an assault weapons ban, but a comprehensive gun control law enacted.
And I'm concerned that they've got a good chance of doing it.
It's funny, Scott.
You know, when Obama got elected in 2008, people started going there and rushing in and buying all those assault weapons and ammunition, and the statists were saying, oh, you paranoid people.
Obama hasn't said anything about confiscating guns.
He's not interested in doing that.
And they just kept buying and buying and buying, because they knew that a statist is a statist.
And sure enough, those people that were mocking us for being paranoid, they're not saying anything about that anymore, because one crisis, and Obama is now proposing a massive gun ban and confiscation.
I mean, I read, or I heard, that Feinstein even wants to make people register their assault rifles and lose them to the government upon their death.
They can't even pass them off to their heirs, and that thing could be really bad.
Yeah.
Well, geez, I don't know, man.
It seems to be, and this is, I'm only pretending, right?
It just seems like there's got to be some kind of democratic Karl Rove there, you know, with thick glasses, looking at the numbers and saying, this is absolute political suicide.
The Democrats will never win another election again, because the fact of the matter is, the American people still love their guns, no matter what the Democrats want.
And I don't know.
I hope you're right.
You may be right.
I hope you're right.
Maybe they want to do it, but don't they care about themselves more?
I don't know.
Maybe not.
Maybe they're blinded, like you're saying.
They're blinded by their own policy, you know?
It's not like Dianne Feinstein is risking her seat, right?
Well, they may be convinced that the tide of public opinion is shifting, too, whether they're right or wrong.
If they're convinced that it's safe to do it now, they'll do it.
I mean, they're like chameleons, you know?
If they think they're going to lose votes, I think you're right.
They'll be reluctant to do it, but they may be convinced that this is a popular position to take now.
Yeah.
Well, geez, I would hate to give advice to Republicans, but the slogan, the Democrats want your guns, is a winner, man.
Simple as that.
Anyone wants to run against a Democrat, just accuse them of wanting to take everybody's guns away, which is true, and you will win and they will lose.
Well, I hope you're right, except that the Republicans are so bad on so many issues that it's kind of hard for Americans to choose.
Yeah, I know, right?
Yeah, the Democrats want your guns, the Republicans want your sons, so, you know, whichever.
Right.
All right.
Hey, thanks, Jacob.
Appreciate it.
Hey, it's always a pleasure.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's the great Jacob Hornberger, the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, and I'm running late.
Sorry.
We'll be right back with the great Philip Weiss right after this.
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