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All right, folks.
Well, that's obviously a joke.
Joe Biafra from the Dead Kennedys there doing shut up, be happy.
But seems like we're headed that way more and more.
And, gee, there have been different news stories over the years in the Bush term, haven't there been, guys, about continuity of government and national emergencies and so forth like that.
I guess we can all consider ourselves lucky that George Bush hasn't suspended the Constitution and declared himself emperor, at least not yet.
But seems like, at least according to Christopher Ketchum in Radar Magazine, that, well, the powers are there.
The statutes are on the books and ready to go.
And their ability to track you and I to where we are on the day they want to come and round us up seems like is pretty advanced, too.
And you guys are probably familiar with Christopher Ketchum.
He's a freelance reporter and writer for Antiwar.com, Harper's, GQ, The Nation, Salon, Mother Jones, Men's Journal, Good Magazine, Radar, Counterpunch, National Geographic.
He's a Livingston Award finalist.
And we welcome him back to the show.
Chris, how are you doing?
Hey, how's it going?
It's going good.
I'm glad I could finally get you on the show to discuss this article.
Yeah, sure.
It's the last roundup in Radar Magazine.
Well, let's just go ahead and start with what does continuity of government mean?
What's the topic here in the general sense, Chris?
Well, continuity of government, or COG for short, is basically government plans that have gone back to the 1960s and the 1950s that originally were conceived to allow for literally the continuance of some sort of version of the federal government in the event of the decapitating nuclear strike on Washington, D.C.
So it was really COG developed out of the Cold War and out of planning to deal with a nuclear apocalypse.
Right.
I think I even remember learning as a little kid that if there's ever a nuclear war with the Russians, then the military will take over and the president will still be the president and he'll command everything.
I think I learned as a little kid that there were some kind of plans for that.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, they've been around for a long, long time.
The first COG plans were developed under Eisenhower and then solidified under Kennedy.
And then they were developed and expanded under Nixon and Ford and then reached new incarnations, which we'll get to later, under Reagan.
And as I report in the Radar article, there's an even new iteration happening now.
But basically, yeah, the thing about COG is that it does, in at least a sense, the Nixon era COG envisions a extra constitutional system of governments and whatever national emergency is declared.
So that, in fact, the president may no longer be the president.
Rather, the leader of the country will be some sort of extra constitutionally appointed person from either within industry or within somewhere from the private sector, someone from the military, someone from Congress.
There was actually a list that were kept of people who would possibly be appointed to various positions.
Did you get access to that list of the possible dictators under national emergency?
Gene Kirkpatrick was on the list.
Rumsfeld was on the list at one point.
This was a list kept in the 1970s.
It's public knowledge.
You can Google it and find it.
Yeah, there was, you know, there were also, I don't have it in front of me, but there were a whole number of people who are rather known figures.
When I first saw the list of executive orders that outline the president's authority to basically seize our entire economy and any person that he wants and so forth, a critic, a friend of mine said, yeah, but you know what, they've had these executive orders since Nixon and he didn't even try it in 1968 when the country was pulling apart at the seams.
So if they didn't deploy these national emergency orders in 1968, what kind of horrible future would we have to have here in America that would justify them?
Well, you know, yes, that's absolutely true.
I mean, the country has been through all sorts of crises since the creation of these various national emergency orders and they've not been invoked, as you note.
But just the fact that they're on the books, that they're cached within our legal system, I think is odious.
It should be exposed and they should be, or rather not exposed, they are exposed.
I mean, we know about it, but rather they should be excised from the system.
And these are some of these powers that are given to the executive branch are just far overreaching.
All right.
Now, Chris, I have an audio clip here that I have.
I got from the great movie The Panama Deception, which is narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched.
And they have this short clip.
It's just a minute long from the Oliver North hearings.
This is a Texas congressman named Jack Brooks asking a question of Oliver North.
The other voices you'll hear are, I believe, Colonel North's lawyer and then Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii.
Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?
Mr. Chairman, I believe the question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area.
So may I request that you not touch upon that, sir?
I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of an emergency that would suspend the American Constitution.
And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked.
May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage?
If we wish to get into this, certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.
Okay, and I have the article here, Chris.
It's July 5th, 1987 in the Miami Herald.
Reagan aids in the secret government, and you can find it online.
So this is in the 1980s.
The question for Colonel North, were you at one time part of a plan for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster, including a plan for suspending the American Constitution?
Now, this wasn't a subject fit for your ears and mine.
I don't know if they even discussed it in executive session, as suggested by Daniel Inouye there.
No, they didn't.
What all do you know about Colonel North's involvement in a plot to do these things back in the 1980s?
The plan was known as RECS 84, Readiness Exercise 84.
And indeed, it called for a suspension of the Constitution.
Control of the United States government would be passed over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Military commanders would run the country, which would be broken up into military sectors.
Upwards of 400,000 illegal immigrants were to be targeted.
Now, I think that may have just been a ruse for the actual targeting of U.S. citizens as well.
The concern was that because of policies, Reagan policies in Central America, that there would be some sort of unrest among Central American immigrants in the United States, and this is particular with regard to Nicaragua and Reagan policies there, the war there.
At the same time, the RECS 84 under Oliver North had also envisioned the transformation of at least 10 military facilities, into concentration camps, effectively, where various people rounded up under RECS 84 would be kept.
This was a pretty scary plan.
What was Garden Plot?
That was part of the same thing, right?
There was a related plan called Operation Cable Splice.
There was Operation Garden Plot and Operation Cable Splice.
Both of these were developed under Louis Geofreda, who was the later head of FEMA from 1981 to 1985 under Reagan.
When Geofreda was head of the National Guard in California, Geofreda's plan under Garden Plot, Cable Splice, was to target what was envisioned as millions of, quote-unquote, Negroes, as the documents put it, and particularly targeting militant Negroes, quote-unquote, who were making trouble in Watts and elsewhere.
Let me ask you something real quick.
I recognize that name, Geofreda, and maybe it's just from stories like this in years past.
Do you know where else I might know him from?
Geofreda?
Louis Geofreda?
He was head of FEMA, 1981 to 1985, and he was well-known for the fact of putting out documents advocating the centralization of powers to the executive branch in the event of national emergency, advocating the use of civilian preparedness programs as a cover for the development of martial law plans.
One of his deputies, I think, prepared a report for the U.S. Army War College talking about some of this stuff.
So maybe you heard his name in one of those contexts.
Yeah, I think that probably must be where I heard it.
Now, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton had an executive order, and this is basically the continuity government plan that I'm most familiar with.
It was something to the effect of national emergency defense resources preparedness or something like that, executive order number 12919.
And as far as I could tell, and I'm no lawyer trying to read through this stuff, but as far as I could tell through there, Clinton was basically claiming the authority himself, not that he would have to go to Congress or anyone else, that he could declare a national emergency, basically make the head of FEMA the dictator of America, and then to read through this executive order, Chris, it seemed to lay out an absolute fascist dictatorship.
I mean, the seizure of all distribution, all food, all transportation, seaports, airports, semi-trucks, skateboards, and everything else.
Everything.
Skateboards especially, yes.
Skateboards especially.
Yeah, skateboards especially.
They're right there on the list next to your Humvee if they want it.
Is that really right that the president, on his own word, can overnight turn America into a dictatorship like that?
You know, though, that what Clinton was doing there was simply reiterating or reconfirming the executive orders that were signed in 1961 by Kennedy.
So a lot of those powers that he's outlining in that particular executive order that you're referring to, they're nothing new.
They've always been there on the books.
But just so we're clear, it is the president himself who can declare this emergency and fight it?
Yes.
Recently there was an executive order issued by the White House.
It was issued in, I think, May of 2007.
It's called Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20.
What H.S.
P.D.
20 does is, again, it reaffirms the power of the executive to unilaterally declare a national emergency.
You don't have to get Congress to go along with it.
You don't have to get any of the branches to go along with it.
Now, Chris, isn't it the case that after 9-11, or even on 9-11, that at least part of this continuity of government plan went into effect?
Yeah, that is true.
POG was instituted by Dick Cheney immediately after the September 11 attacks.
More than 100 hand-picked representatives of a shadow federal government were sent on a rotating basis to various underground facilities throughout Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, where FEMA has a lot of its facilities.
And, yes, they were operating as they are.
The thing about it is this shadow government that was instituted after September 11, there's been no oversight from Congress.
There was one report in the Washington Post, buried in the Washington Post on this, almost no follow-up.
We don't know if this POG government is still ongoing.
We don't have any oversight from Congress.
We don't know what kind of budget is being handed over to this shadow government.
It's all kind of strange stuff.
Wow, so as far as we know, it's still in effect right now.
Yeah.
Huh.
As far as we know, we still have these officials rotating back and forth among these underground facilities, these secret FEMA facilities.
I remember at the time, the majority leader of the Senate, Tom Daschle, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, complained that they found out about this, I guess from the media, they weren't included.
No, they weren't included.
Congress has kept out of the loop.
That's been one of the complaints about FEMA over the years, that there's all sorts of budgeting that's gone to FEMA.
It's black budgeting.
It just disappears into this maw of covert intelligence operations, and we don't really know what it's spent on.
Yeah, I remember that was something going back to the 80s, where they said, look, FEMA's budget is this many million, but then 12 times that amount has gone to, quote-unquote, special projects.
Right.
I tried to confirm that figure, and I couldn't confirm it.
I've seen it published hither and yon on the Internet.
I'm not sure if it's a trustworthy figure.
Okay.
But that is one.
Yeah, there was some reporting out there in, I think it was a 1995 article.
Oh, by a guy named Harry V. Martin, who runs the Napa Sentinel.
He used to run an intelligence newsletter, and that was his figure.
Yeah, that 12 times the actual published FEMA budget went into black operations, covert operations.
But, again, I could never independently confirm the figure, so I didn't use it in the article.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I'll keep that in mind, drop that from my list of things I think I remember about it.
Okay.
Now, well, let's talk about the database here, MainCore.
It's not a database.
It's a table of contents of databases.
Tell us about MainCore, Chris.
MainCore was supposedly developed in relation to COG plans, or at least as MainCore developed as a database, it was conceived as being used in tandem with COG plans.
MainCore is basically, according to sources I spoke to for this article, a massive centralized database on American citizens that is used to track dissidents and track people who might be terrorists, people who might cause trouble for the U.S. government, people like yourself who, you know, read and ask questions and that kind of thing.
Oh, good.
And apparently the MainCore could also be used, or might also be used, in the event of a national emergency as a detention list on American citizens, those people identified as security risks, people who might cause trouble in the event of a national emergency.
And so this detention list would be exactly that.
It would have the names, locations, all the pertinent information on a person in our computerized, digitized age, which means tons and tons of information, which allow for government security operatives, for the U.S. government, whether it be, you know, the National Guard or Blackwater, to find the people on the detention list and snag them and take them to detention camps.
Oh, good.
Well, you know, I already have a bumper sticker like that, that I'll be in the camp with all my favorite writers.
Maybe I'll get to meet you there.
Yeah, well, we'll be fighting over rice, so.
Well, let me ask you this about, as far as the database goes.
Now, this is, I guess I understand, not the Department of Justice.
This is not for FBI agents to use when they want to prosecute us.
This is the military for when they want to persecute us.
Yes, essentially, yes.
It is.
I was told that Maine Corps was originally developed in the DIA, out of the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Now it's being maintained out of the Department of Homeland Security.
Well, that's not the military, then.
Well, there should be some oversight at the DHS.
At least that's a civilian agency, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but apparently, according to, well, according to actually one of your writers, Phil Gerald, the DHS doesn't operate under the same kind of constraints that, say, CIA or FBI does.
So that DHS would, in fact, be a good place to house this database.
I guess he says in the article that because it's such a new agency, the Congress hasn't had years and years to develop their oversight style or whatever.
Their regulatory constraints, exactly.
Yeah.
DHS saying get away with murder over there.
Yeah.
So what about NORTHCOM, the Northern Command?
This is something new in American history, or at least since the Civil War or something, right, where the United States of America domestically is a military command, just like CENTCOM over there in the Middle East.
Right.
Yes, U.S. NORTHCOM was established in 2002, and it does establish the homeland as a sphere of military operations.
So for the first time in the history of the Republic, I think, as you said, aside from during the Civil War, yeah, we are now a ground for military operations.
And, you know, there have been complaints that this violates the Posse Comitatus Act, that violates the Insurrection Act, but there has not been the kind of congressional oversight in this regard that would be necessary to establish whether NORTHCOM really does violate both those pieces of legislation.
Well, so what's your sense of this?
I mean, in a way, I can see, okay, they passed the Military Commissions Act, saying that's okay to turn you or me over to the military.
They, as you mentioned in your article, and as I guess everybody knows now, we've all heard it made the major papers that Halliburton got all these contracts to build all these empty prisons on military bases and stuff around the country.
Is your sense that we're just waiting on the next red alert, and then it's on, or what?
Listen, for the Radar piece, I spoke with a lot of constitutional lawyers.
John Whitehead, for example, former Reagan official.
Bruce Fein, another former Reagan deputy assistant attorney general.
Every one of these guys I spoke to said the same thing.
They said that in the event of the next 9-11, it's over.
The country's over.
The republic is gone.
I mean, Daniel Ellsberg said the same thing.
Francis Boyle, who's a human rights lawyer, actually worked.
He was counsel to Henry Gonzales when Henry Gonzales was trying to get some oversight on a lot of these same issues about COG and about roundup plans.
Every one of these guys I've spoken to, they all say, yeah, the same thing, that in the event of the kind of 9-11 that Al-Qaeda is said to be planning, that is something along the lines of a nuclear attack or something bigger than 9-11, that, yeah, everything is in place for the destruction of the republic.
Well, now, I've got to wonder.
It seems to me like after September 11th, America was all right.
I mean, obviously, there was a lot of grief and that sort of thing, but our economy didn't buckle, I mean, a little bit, but, you know, basically we all kept going to work every day and everything's been all right, unless, you know, you're an Iraqi or something.
Why should we think that we would need any kind of martial law to help us get through?
It seems like if there is a terrible crisis, letting people go about their day in the best way they know how is the best way to survive as a country.
Well, of course, but naturally, yeah.
Who in their right mind doesn't agree with that?
But these are not people in their right mind.
These are power-hungry bureaucrats who are security-obsessed, who live within an infrastructure that is all about security and control and full-spectrum dominance, and bureaucracies naturally like to accrue power.
Once they accrue that power, they don't like to give it up.
So we're talking about, I would characterize them as little bespectacled creatures whose asses are bigger than their shoulders sitting in cubicles somewhere, coming up with all these nefarious plans.
Yeah, and I guess when a crisis happens, they get to put it in effect, no matter how unreasonable it is.
You know, 9-11 happens, they get to write it all up.
The next one they get to put it into effect just because they can imagine it, and nobody's there to stop them.
Yeah, well, I mean, look at the crazy legislation that was passed just after 9-11, the USA Patriot Act.
I mean, complete and total lunacy.
Yet it passed with nary an outcry.
It just slipped on by.
So, yeah.
Well, so tell me, Chris.
Christopher Ketchum, Radar Magazine.
You and I, are we on the red list or the blue list, do you think?
I don't know.
I have no idea.
I mean, look, I never got someone inside government telling me, yes, absolutely, this list exists, and here it is.
All I got are sort of various sources, numerous sources, all corroborating each other, saying, yes, there is a list out there.
It's highly secret.
It's got limited access.
It can be accessed only in a limited fashion by certain officials, and I could never get into the database itself, which would have been, of course, a coup.
Well, now, something that's probably puzzling the most, and I guess even to me at least a bit, is the question of the 8 million of us that I guess have been flagged as some level of a problem or something like that.
Well, there's not nearly enough cops to keep track of us all.
How do they know so much about 8 million of us?
Well, listen, that's the thing about computerization, digitization of all our personal data and our movements and our behaviors.
It makes it far easier to centralize this information, and you can aggregate huge amounts of information on the person simply by tracking their Google searches and tracking who they're calling, who they're not necessarily gathering content on their phone conversations, but simply who they call, the e-mail, the addresses of the e-mails to which they send, the e-mails, the addresses of the e-mails from which they receive.
I am so screwed.
I mean, they're purchasing habits on Amazon, the books, music, et cetera, that they purchase, library lending, you name it.
All this stuff can be gathered up through huge social network analysis systems.
So computers, digitization allows for an incredible expansion of this invasive arm of government into privacy.
It's just a natural outflow of that new technology.
So the computers themselves, I guess, their software, they have programs to decide whether or not you or I are worth paying attention to?
Yeah, yeah.
They've got these very complex so-called social network analysis systems or block modeling systems where, yeah, they're going to look at all your various behaviors and your Internet activity, and they're going to look at your travel patterns, tickets you buy for airplanes, ferries, bus tickets, and sort of aggregate all that data and then try to draw up a picture of the person.
I was told by one source that actually main core also has a database of voice prints.
For example, if this call, I'm calling you from France right now, so this is an international call, so under what we know is we know that under the terror surveillance program, this is a, it will be quote-unquote legal for NSA to listen into this conversation because ostensibly NSA's operations are only to track international calls coming in and out of the United States.
So imagine they have your voice print on this centralized system or my voice print, then the computer will be able to correlate that to all the various personal data in main core and then perhaps record the conversation.
That is, gather the content of the conversation rather than just the information, the phone number called from and called to, et cetera.
Right.
I guess the main thing that I want to focus on here is the computerization of all of this.
They've basically outsourced the decision-making to the computers, too.
You have here in your article, you say that there's a database called the Terrorist Identities Data Mart Environment, which is supposed to be a list of all the terrorists in the world, and it's nearly half a million people.
We're not talking about Osama and his friends here at all.
Yes.
Half a million people, and it's probably, well, you know, that was as of 2007.
It was growing.
It is always growing.
So I would assume that maybe we have more like 550,000, 600,000 names on that list.
How do you become a terrorist under this rubric?
I don't know.
I don't know what kind of modeling system they're using.
It could be simply associative stuff where, you know, I make a call to a guy named Mohammed, and, you know, maybe you said Mohammed is selling a mountain bike, and I make a call to Mohammed.
I want to pick up his mountain bike.
That call gets tracked.
Suddenly I'm within the network.
It could be as simple as that.
And Mohammed, of course, may have some connections to other unseemly Arabs, and et cetera, et cetera.
It's almost like it's a government's computerized conspiracy theory program.
Yeah.
In many ways it is.
If Scott knows Christopher Ketchum and Christopher Ketchum knows this other guy and Scott knows this other guy, well, then there may very well be something going on there where they're planning something or whatever.
Exactly.
It's their computer's imagination.
Massive computerized guilt by association.
Yeah.
Which, of course, is a violation of the Constitution.
It's a violation of one of the amendments.
I'm not sure which, but you're not supposed to be.
There's a very specific clause in the various amendments that states that guilt by association is not to be allowed.
Hmm.
Well, I don't know about that exact phrase in the Bill of Rights, but certainly in American law they don't tolerate that kind of thing.
Yeah.
I guess that's what we're talking about is a post-constitutional situation where they don't even pretend to go by it anymore, and they're not even pretending that there's a law that binds their power.
The military, I mean, martial law, this is what martial law means.
I like how James Bovard in his article for the American Conservative magazine, Working for the Clampdown, explained martial law means you do what that soldier says or get shot, period.
Yeah.
So it's not the same thing as National Guard soldiers helping out after a flood or something.
No, obviously not.
I mean, I think constitutionally, if there is some sort of compromise of the federal government or the centralized government, I think constitutionally the governors become the supreme heads of the land, and each of the states then deals with its own problems.
And so the states break up, and again the governors become the de facto heads of each of the regions.
Wow.
Well, you know, it's a funny thing, man.
You know, I don't have any information I'm really going on here, but just my gut tells me that this isn't going to happen for a long time, if ever.
I mean, what we're really talking about, I mean, think about the trouble that anybody would have, the U.S. military, FEMA, or every cop combined in this country.
Think of the trouble they would have really trying to conquer America, in the sense of, you know, shutting down the economy, throwing millions of people in camps, and turning this place into a totalitarian nightmare.
It doesn't seem like it would work very well at all.
Well, yeah.
I think the likelihood of it happening exactly as the government envisions and plans it out is unlikely.
Yes.
No, it's not.
I don't think government, fast, overreaching government plans like this really ever work out so effectively.
I think the incompetence of the federal government is not to be underestimated.
On the other hand, you have the American people, who I think are a far more docile bunch than ever they have been in the history of this country.
The American people just pretty much do what they're told, from what I can tell.
So it may be that the establishment of a totalitarian system in this country would not require so much main force, that it could be done somewhat more gently.
Indeed, look at the last eight years.
It's been usurpation after usurpation of various rights, and people just keep on going to Disneyland and, you know, jerking off in front of televisions.
Yeah.
Well, it looks like we're at least facing the possibility of a major financial crisis here.
I was just reading an article the other day about how all the banks are lending themselves money in order to cover their losses by turning their old debt into new debt and whatever, just, you know, pushing the boulder a little further uphill.
But it's going to come back down again.
You know, they're just mirrors and wires and smoke and all those kinds of great things are good for a magician or whatever.
But at the end of the day, the laws of physics still count for something.
Yeah.
The American economy is in deep trouble.
I think American society is in deep trouble.
You know, I'm working on a book right now.
It's called The United States Must End.
And the subhead is The Case for Secession from a Country Grown Too Big for Democracy, and it's about the secessionists of Vermont.
And it's basically how, you know, these giantist systems in the United States, whether it be corporate or governmental or institutional on all levels, are failing.
They're failing massively.
And they are threatening the actual foundation of the democracy.
And it may be that the United States is going to have to go through some sort of real crisis and transformative moment.
You know, the kind of thing that Charles Johnson talks about in his blowback trilogy.
I mean, he, in a Harper's article he published, I think last year, yes, yeah, last year, he talks about how, you know, bankruptcy that the United States is heading, probably inevitably for fiscal bankruptcy due to a military overreach, due to military overstretch.
And that, in fact, the U.S. economy is in a suicide pact with the military-industrial complex.
And, you know, he writes at the end of this essay that, you know, the end of the United States does not necessarily mean the end of, you know, the United States.
It'll just be a change.
And it could be a change for the better.
It could be a change for the worse.
So who knows?
I think we're in trouble.
I mean, I think our economy is a hallucinated economy.
Our energy, our infrastructure is hallucinated.
I mean, if you look, for example, at the, you know, I spend a lot of time in the Southwest.
And so you go down to, I drive down from Utah to a hellhole like Phoenix or Las Vegas.
These places can't last.
They'll be gone in 100 years.
The water will run out.
The oil will run out.
People won't be able to drive the vast distances that they do today to get around.
It's just, you know, it's a joke in many ways.
It's like a tragic joke that the United States has become.
Well, you know, Richard Mayberry has pointed out, too.
He's a guy who, like me, is in favor of return of the Articles of Confederation.
And he says, hey, look at France.
France is, you know, they're on what, the Fifth Republic now or whatever.
They've had all different governments.
But France is always still France.
In fact, that's where you are right now is in Paris, right?
That's right.
And Paris is still Paris.
And the wheat still grows in the wheat fields out in the country out there.
And everything's fine.
Everything's fine.
We could still be the USA.
We'd just be under the Articles of Confederation and undo Hamilton's coup that's caused us so much trouble all this time.
Absolutely.
Listen, yes, that's right.
The Fifth Republic, I mean, they are on their Fifth Republic.
And I can tell you, I am right now in a suburb of Paris.
And it is a beautiful place.
And the French know how to live beautifully.
That is, they live within their means.
And they have a good sense of commonweal and a good sense of being good neighbors.
Instead of, you know, here we are talking about worries about them suspending the Constitution, maybe we need to just repeal it.
I kind of like the Constitution.
I think the Constitution is an amazing document.
And it's done pretty well.
Until the development of our standing army, I think the Constitution has been an incredible engine of democracy.
But maybe we should just divide the country up into smaller units so it's more manageable.
I mean, when you look at it and you consider you've got these 435 representatives in the House and another 100 or so in the Senate, and these guys represent a country of 320 million people, it's ridiculous.
Yeah.
I mean, this is crazy.
It sounds like what you want is to repeal the Constitution and go back to the Articles of Confederation, no?
Well, I mean, as long as we retain the best elements in the Constitution, sure.
Yeah.
Well, I like the Bill of Rights, but the states all have Bills of Rights anyway.
Sure.
And I don't think there's anything else good in there except the Bill of Rights, is there?
Yeah, you know what?
Yeah, you're right.
I like a little bit of Article I, Section 9, but that's just restrictions on the power they just created.
I'm with you.
I guess, basically, maybe it takes the specter of complete authoritarianism to get people thinking along the opposite lines, radical Jeffersonian decentralism and individual liberty.
Yeah, or crisis.
I think crisis is where it's at.
Take an example of France.
Their gasoline here is equivalent to $12 a gallon.
Now, they've developed an incredibly complex and efficient public transportation system and an incredibly complex and efficient goods transport system via rail.
So life doesn't come to a halt at $12 a gallon of gasoline.
They're doing just fine.
What we need to do is we need the United States to start adapting.
I know we're way off topic here, but I think there's a way to get back to it, back to that greater article.
So if the United States, we start to make these adaptations, then I think we'll be okay.
But the thing about it is we have a government that is completely whored out to interests that don't want any of these changes because there's not that much money to be made in it because the status quo is so profitable.
So in the same way, we have this centralized, this calcified national security system that gives us things like main core.
I think there's something almost dinosaur-like about main core in many ways and about these massive surveillance systems.
It feels like there's not really much news in this, that the U.S. government has been doing this for a long time.
It did during the Cold War.
They expanded these powers massively until the Church Commission came in and reined it in and tried to shut down the runaway powers of the executive branch and the runaway powers of the intelligence agencies.
Well, what we need to do today is, again, shut down this centralized power.
To start defunding Congress, for example, would be a great way to spark some change.
That is, let's stop paying taxes.
Stop paying taxes to the federal government.
Stop funding the monster.
If we do that, then they won't have any money to spend, and what will they do?
Well, they'll just print the money.
Well, okay.
I'm with you, though.
Ultimately, what you're saying is withdraw your consent for this empire.
What's the point?
The national government of this country is, bar none, the greatest threat to life and liberty on this planet, and including ours here at home.
Well, I wouldn't go that far.
I think they're like North Korea.
They kind of have a rotten system over there.
The Chinese round up dissidents and kill them.
We're not there yet.
I think in terms of patriots, I think the real patriots should be the ones to be most critical of their country.
And what I find often is talking with especially people who have left the national security branches and discussed, like your colleague Philip Giraldi, they want the country to be so much better than it is.
So I think we should think of it like that.
I don't think that the national government is so much an incredible threat, but it could be so much better, you know?
Yeah.
Well, but then, like you say, one more red alert, and we're going to see them marching around like Italian fascism around here.
You know, that's what a lot of sources have told me.
But on the other hand, you know, as you mentioned earlier, this could be an incredibly far-fetched and impossible scenario to actually implement on the ground.
You know, maybe there are, what, there are 320 million Americans?
How many guns are there?
Aren't there like 600 million guns in the United States?
Yeah, something like that.
So that's pretty good.
Right.
I mean, I own seven guns.
So right there, I could share around at least six guns.
You know, that was my favorite article that you wrote for antiwar.com was, I just read the Military Commissions Act, and then I went gun shopping.
Yeah.
No, that's it.
And I bought beautiful Lee-Enfield, one of the last Lee-Enfield they stopped making.
They were bolt-action rifles, 1947.
I got one at some pawn shop in the middle of the desert, middle of nowhere.
Yeah, that is true.
300 million people, 500, 600 million privately held firearms.
Who could ever take this country over, including our own government, in that kind of way?
I mean, actually picking a fight in that sense where the rule of law is gone, you know that if they come for you, you're never going to see daylight again.
People are going to fight, and they're going to win, you know?
I think there's one key element here, in that all siege warfare has always succeeded best through starvation tactics.
The problem is that food systems in the United States are so, the food supply chains are so elongated, they're so long, that all those systems are centralized.
So if you have a centralized government trying to act in a totalitarian capacity, you could snap those systems at any point along the line, and cut off entire populations from food, if they don't actually have some sort of localized food supply system.
You could have all the guns and bullets you want, but you starve out people who's, for example, Moab, Utah, where I spend a lot of the year, this is a town that would literally starve to death in a week, if it wasn't for the supermarket.
Because they've destroyed all their local agriculture to build stupid condominiums.
So, yeah, they would die if federal government decided to cut off that food supply chain.
Yeah, so it really doesn't necessarily have to be that hard.
I don't know, I got to tell you, I used to really worry about this stuff, back when I first learned about it, you know, feels like half my life ago, maybe it is.
But nowadays, my gut tells me, even though I see, like you said, the main core database, the Halliburton contracts to build camps everywhere, and yet my gut tells me not to worry about this kind of thing, at least for a while.
Then again, I've been wrong before.
Yeah, well, I find that as a journalist, I'm wrong a lot.
And that's the way it is.
But let's hope we're wrong on this one.
Let's hope this main core is never implemented to its full purpose.
I mean, what I do believe is I do believe that there is a centralized database on us, on American citizens, and it's massive.
And it's computerized to the extent that it is crawling through all the data available out there, on us, and gathering as much of it as possible.
Instantly updated.
The bureaucracy, the national security bureaucracy, is to develop this stuff, and they want to use it.
Yeah, and you know, that's really the key, right, is that if they decide to look into Christopher Ketchum, it's not that, you know, any one goofball bureaucrat is sitting there following you around all day.
All they have to do is hit a couple of keystrokes, and they pull up your entire life, then.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
It's the completeness.
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book called Between Two Ages, back in the early 1970s, where he talked about, he could see it already coming.
He said the computer power in the future will be so capable, we'll be able to have instantaneously updatable and instantaneously retrievable files on anyone, and no political power will be able to resist the temptation to implement this.
That's right, that's right.
Yeah, I know that quote.
Actually, I had it in my original draft of this article, but it got cut.
Oh, really?
He saw it long ago?
All right, well, that's where we're headed, folks.
You heard it.
It's Christopher Ketchum.
It's Radar Magazine.
It's just Radar.com.
They can read it online, right?
Radar Online.
Radar Online.com.
Christopher Ketchum, he writes for Antiwar.com, Harper's, GQ, The Nation, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Men's Journal, Good Magazine, Radar, and National Geographic, and Counterpunch, and in 2002 was selected as a Livingston Awards finalist for Salon.com coverage of the 9-11 attacks in New York.
Thanks very much for your time today on the show, Chris.
All right, thank you.
