04/26/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is our friend Phil Giuraldi.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They put America first over there at the CNI.
Also, he's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's the anti-war conservatives and have been all along, and also a regular contributor columnist at antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And now I want to ask you all about this Constitution Project report, but first I've got to get your take on the accusations about Syrian chemical weapons and whether this is a red line, and what does it mean if there's a red line, and all these things.
Please.
Well, I mean, let's discuss the red line first.
The red line is allegedly linked to a statement by Obama that if the Syrians either used chemical weapons or started moving them around, that would be a red line, presumably meaning there would be U.S. intervention.
But Obama wasn't very specific what that meant or what degree to which the Syrians would have to use weapons or move them around to create some kind of crisis situation.
So I would dismiss that as the usual kind of political commentary.
And then if you look very carefully at the statement by the Pentagon, by the Defense Department, you will see that they are admitting that the evidence for this varies in reliability, which means, of course, that they have multiple sources, that they're tapping for this, and some of the sources are saying, yeah, it looks like it's happening, and others are saying it's not.
So I wouldn't put too much weight on this.
I don't think that Obama is keen to get involved in Syria in spite of John McCain and some others screaming for him to do so.
So I don't think the crisis is as serious as it's been portrayed.
Well, good.
You know, I thought you were going to say that, and I was sure hoping you were going to say that.
And it really has been the case, right, that, well, I don't know, I think the way you put it before, I was just reminding the audience, the way you put it on the show before was, he thought this was going to be easy, the Turks too, and then they kind of realized that, well, we might be careful about who might come next, what we're missing.
Yeah, yeah, there would be Syria.
You know, for the U.S., there was one estimate in one of the media sources today saying to actually go in and take the weapon, take the chemical weapons away from Syria, you'd have to have anywhere from 75,000 to 100 troops.
Nobody has 75,000 or 100,000 troops available.
So the whole concept is kind of silly.
Now, is that the military also saying, oh, yeah, and we'd have to take the whole kitchen sink and all our tanks, and so basically they're trying to stay out of it by adding all these poison pills?
Is that what's going on there?
Because it wouldn't really take 100,000 men, right?
Yeah, Pentagon is nervous about any more engagements that are kind of open-ended, and this would be your ultimate open-ended engagement.
It's a civil war.
We'd be right in the middle of it, and Syria has major cities.
You'd have this kind of urban fighting, which is designed to kill soldiers and kill civilians.
I can't remember where I read it, but it was just a quote.
I didn't read the whole thing, but someone was quoting Henry Kissinger saying, I think in the New York Times, was it you quoting him, saying don't do this?
No, I did not quote Henry Kissinger, no.
No, it was, look, hey, the dove side of the debate here is being led by Henry Kissinger, at least at that level, and he's saying, look, man, if we're going to get involved in every civil war, every time somebody's dying in a civil war, then that is the kind of open-ended policy that we cannot maintain.
I mean, he ended up sounding like Rob Paul by the end of the damn thing.
Yeah, well, Henry's right on this one.
You know, it's just common sense.
I mean, this is not our fight.
It's not a fight where we have any vital interests, and it's not an issue.
Yeah, sure, everybody, I think, should empathize with the killing of civilians by the thousands in Syria, but it's being done by both sides.
And we have the horse in the race.
Yeah, and, you know, I don't know if you ever hear these, but I've been interviewing David Enders from McClatchy Newspapers, who's been writing from Syria, you know, every couple of two or three weeks or so, and he says there are other rebels who would like to have elections and who aren't as ruthless as the Jabhat al-Nusra guys, but this is their war, that they outnumber everybody, that unlike in Iraq, where al-Qaeda in Iraq was really a very small part of the insurgency, they tried to take a lot of credit.
The Americans wanted to give them all the blame to deflect from, you know, regular Iraqi individualists and nationalists fighting for their own reasons, you know.
But in Syria, apparently, like, no, that's pretty much it.
Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda in Syria, it's their war.
They're the leaders of this thing by far.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it's a, and again, you know, separating bad guys from good guys is just something that is beyond our capability.
All right.
Now, so let's get to this torture report because it's very important, I think, for people to understand before we get into this, actually, too, that you're a former CIA and DIA officer.
I almost always include that in your introduction.
I forgot this time to say that, but for people who aren't familiar, Phil Drawley is a former CIA and DIA officer.
As I said, he writes for the American Conservative Magazine here, and you've got this piece about, I think, paraphrasing a newspaper editorial, A Necessary Reckoning with Torture at the AmericanConservativeMagazine.com.
A lot of important points in here, but first of all, basically, this is your reaction to this study by the Constitution Project.
What is the Constitution Project?
Is that a bunch of stinking hippies?
Well, actually, I'm a member of the Constitution Project.
It's a fairly diverse group.
It mostly consists of lawyers because I'm a key person.
I love hippies, by the way.
People on the right like to assume that anyone who disagrees with them is a hippie so they don't have to listen, and I'm trying to make the point that Phil Drawley is not a hippie.
You do have to listen.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yeah, no, it's a group of mostly lawyers who are focused on constitutional issues, but they have a number of people like myself, a few former intelligence officers and FBI people who try to put it into a real-world perspective.
I was not involved with this specific project that they did on torture, but I am involved with the group, and they basically do good work.
I mean, they've done reports on FBI surveillance, which they've condemned.
They've done work on the ability of the government to get into your e-mails and phone numbers without any judicial process, which they've condemned.
So they're pretty much good people in terms of trying to return to constitutionalism and the Bill of Rights.
Well, good.
I hate to give into that, because if it's just a bunch of ACLU and Human Rights Watch lawyers, that ought to be just fine too if the facts are the facts, but it really does matter who the messenger is, and so I'm glad I had a chance to highlight that before I let you get into it, because, well, for example, why should anybody care about this, Phil?
We've already had 10 torture reports one way or the other.
Now it's 2013, and you're trying to get me to pay attention to some old news.
Why?
Yeah, well, I think this is important, and that quote came, incidentally, from the New York Times editorial about why this is important to do.
It's because the United States systematically committed war crimes, and what this report does is it goes through all the evidence based on United States positions, positions that the U.S. government has taken over the last 50 years defining torture.
What did someone do that the United States then responded and said this is torture?
And it turns out, of course, that most of the things that were done by the Bush administration in these enhanced interrogations had previously been described by the U.S. government as torture.
So what the report is saying is that there is no ambiguity here.
The waterboarding, the stressing, the various things that were done to prisoners that we all have heard about were torture.
The report comes from actually two of the people on the report were Bush administration officials.
So this was unanimous where everyone was saying, yes, it's torture.
And the second conclusion they came to, which is also critical and why it's received so much attention, is the fact that the Bush administration actually sat down with their Justice Department lawyers and went through the motions of debating whether we should do torture or not and decided that they should do it.
And so they're saying, yes, it's not only torture, but the government made a conscious decision to carry out torture.
And then their third conclusion, which is probably the most important, is that this must never happen again and we have to do whatever it takes in terms of creating a legal basis so that no one will ever in the future consider that torture is anything but completely illegal and that.
So that's essentially the message that they give with this report.
All right, so the first point again here to rehash that, they did not go and ask the French what their definition of torture is and they didn't go ask Chelsea Clinton what her definition of torture is.
They went to previously existing American law from the days of George Washington and then up to September 11th and applied that definition.
This is not a term of art.
It's not a matter of opinion.
This is the legal definition of torture if there's such a thing.
That's the argument.
Yeah, that's the argument that basically, look, if the U.S. government is defining torture and in fact, one of the real ironies is that they got some documents from the Bush administration where Bush was accusing other governments like Sudan of committing war crimes and torture and the Sudanese were doing exactly the same thing that the Bush administration was doing.
So on one hand, they were condemning it.
On the other hand, they were doing it.
So yeah, they said what is the U.S. definition of torture in terms of historical precedence and in terms of the legal practice and they came up with the conclusion unanimously that the U.S. government had engaged in torture.
And now the second point there, it ought to be old hat for everyone and I think maybe it is but then again, I also fear that people really were duped by that whole bad apples meme that some very low level, very, very jerky National Guardsmen on the night shift at Abu Ghraib got out of hand one time but then the government took care of that.
And what you're saying is that this report concludes exactly the opposite of that interpretation that this really came from the principles committee and that means the president and his national security cabinet, correct?
That's exactly right.
They followed the chain of custody as it were and it demonstrates that it wasn't a bad apple situation.
It was basically this was a decision made by the White House to carry out these practices and once they made the decision, then yeah, you had bad apples lower down in the food chain doing it probably more than the White House would have ever envisioned but that's not the point.
Once you allow the practice to begin, once you allow torture to be acceptable, it's going to happen.
Well and part of this is sort of like we were just talking about how they blamed Al-Qaeda in Iraq for the entire insurgency because they wanted to push this myth that all regular plain old Iraqis love us.
It's just the terrorists who are just hell-bent on being terrorists who are the entire resistance.
That propaganda ended up being the justification of going along that same theory, the same legal theory from Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay that the Geneva Conventions do not apply at all in this situation to these so irregular Al-Qaeda fighters that no previous laws apply to them anymore ended up applying to the people of Iraq I talked with the other Scott Horton at length about some of these other reports and there's this documentary, The Torture Question on PBS where they interview Tony Lugaranis and he just says, you know, we were torturing tens of thousands of Iraqis.
We were torturing them on the side of the road.
We were torturing them in their living rooms in front of their wives and their children.
We were torturing them in the morning.
We were torturing them with green eggs and ham.
We were torturing them all damn day for years and years and years.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis suffered this policy.
Yeah, yeah, and what the report here is saying is, yeah, you know, all right, for the first time we have a bipartisan, actually nonpartisan committee of senior government officials, including people from the Bush administration saying, yes, this torture took place and this torture took place because the United States government made a conscious decision to torture.
And then the conclusion is if we're ever going to become a normal country again, we have to confront this.
There has to be something like the South African Truth Commission where we're confronting what we did, which is not to say that we're necessarily going to throw George W. Bush in jail, as much as I'd like to see that.
But the point is that unless there is transparency and accountability on this issue which Obama is primarily to blame for not allowing that to happen, then we're never going to become a normal country again.
We're going to become a country that everybody looks at and says, yeah, it's a country that's run by rule of law when it's convenient.
Yeah, you know, Bruce Fine even said, at least pardon them.
You know, it'll be scandalous and horrible, but at least it'll be within the framework of our system.
Otherwise, what is this, look forward, not back?
You can't do that.
Right, exactly.
So, I mean, I would hate to see pardons.
I want to see them all in the dock, and obviously life in prison would be the worst that anyone should ever threaten them with.
But they belong in life in prison for breaking the law, and they knew they were breaking the law, didn't they?
Absolutely, and that's the point.
When they would have these meetings at the White House and they'd bring in, you know, Dick Cheney would be there and they'd bring in these accommodating lawyers from the Justice Department.
In fact, I quote in my piece that John Yoo at one point said that it's not a legal issue whether we do torture or not.
It's a political issue.
Now, how can a lawyer say that?
I mean, are you saying murder?
You murder somebody?
It's not a legal issue.
It's a kind of personal choice.
That's exactly what he's saying.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, to him, the Commander-in-Chief Clause, and not even the whole thing, it's just the part where the President shall be Commander-in-Chief.
That's the whole Constitution, and nothing else counts at all.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So these people have to be held accountable, and the point is the only way to really hold them accountable is to basically reveal everything that happened.
So, yeah, we tortured 10,000 people, and we killed maybe 100 of them.
And this stuff has to come out if the United States is ever going to regain its self-respect.
And basically then Congress has to sit down and say, yeah, and these are the laws that we are now passing, so there's no ambiguity at all about torture statutes, and that anybody knows that if you slap a prisoner, that's torture.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
With so many of these where we talk about just a pretty reasonable-sounding course forward of some sort of reform, right?
Not libertarian paradise or anything, but just, geez, maybe we could make it a little bit better by just doing this.
It just sounds so fanciful, Phil, to hear you talk about it, that there would ever be accountability here.
You're living on another planet.
Yeah, I suspect I am, and I suspect this report is going to go nowhere.
But, you know, one of the things that really was interesting about this, and what caught my attention when it appeared, and of course I knew it was coming, was the fact that the New York Times jumped on it, and they had an editorial.
They had a lead article on it.
They had some blog entries on it.
Even the Washington Post, which is neocon central, reported it in full.
It had some blog entries on it and some commentary on it.
And, you know, basically people are, I think, kind of waking up, finally, to the fact that just how horrible the United States behaved, how horribly it behaved in the aftermath of 9-11.
I think most people want to forget it.
They don't want to think about it.
But the fact is, you know, this kind of war crimes without any accountability on the part of the United States is something unique to our history.
I think that you can go back to every war, and you can say, yeah, it was this bad, the other thing, and people were killed unnecessarily.
But there's always been kind of a sense of after the war is over, you try to fix things.
And that's what Nuremberg trials were about and the Geneva Conventions, the original Geneva Conventions out of the First World War.
And the thing is, you know, there was a sense of you try to fix things.
You know that horrible things happen in war, but you try to fix them.
But the United States, it just kind of walked away from this.
And that's what's absolutely incredible about it.
And Obama, I mean, for a constitutional lawyer and a guy who played the kind of the anti-war, let us bind our wounds numbers to get elected, I mean, this is, well, criminal is one way to describe it, but there are probably other ways too.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the thing is too is it puts us in danger, right?
For Matthew Alexander, the guy that got the information, he was the interrogator in Iraq, the military interrogator who got the information that led to the drone, the airstrike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
He got that information by making, you know, pseudo friends like a cop does with the guy that he was interrogating and got the information.
But the entire, you know, program around him was basically beat him out of him program.
And yet when he would do his style of interrogation, what he found out from virtually, especially, I guess, in regards to the foreigners who were traveling to Iraq to fight, the reason they traveled to Iraq to fight was because, say, from Syria, for example, was because of the torture.
And when they saw the pictures of Abu Ghraib, they said, that's it, man.
My religion mandates that I have to defend fellow Muslims from this evil imperial torture regime.
Right?
The Americans, George Bush was proving bin Laden right about us, about who we are and how we operate.
And so that was why they were traveling there, to fight us in the first place.
So, you know, you look at Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria now, they're not just a part of blowback from the Iraq war, they're part of the blowback from the torture regime.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And also we're seeing the same kind of perversion of the narrative in terms of the guys up in Boston.
I mean, you know, it's like we can't seem to understand that there are basic truths that are behind what happens.
I mean, nobody's exonerating what these guys did or may have done, but the fact is that when they say very clearly that the United States, what the United States is doing to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, as apparently the younger brother has done, why don't you believe it?
Why don't you want to believe it?
Well, you know, you and I have talked for years on this show about how lucky we've been that you don't have more Americans.
Muslim Americans are so well assimilated and have such great opportunities here.
We've had very little of this kind of thing where older brother just can't stand it, decides to join up the army on the other side.
We had Zazi, the Afghan living in Colorado, and we had Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber.
I'm sorry, I forgot where he lived, in Virginia or something.
And those two guys joined up as soldiers on the other side.
But other than that, we've pretty much gotten away scot-free with this.
And, of course, you know, neither of them got away with it.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, it's just, it's a question of, you know, I hate to say it, but sometimes it seems that this has become kind of a revenge issue for the American public and for the American media.
And it's just a question of maybe, you know, killing as many Muslims as we can because they're the enemy, they're the other.
And, of course, that's no solution.
The more Muslims we kill, the more enemies we're going to make.
And, ultimately, we live in a global world, and it's going to come back and bite us.
There's no question about it.
And it already has come back and bitten us.
But it's somehow, you know, is the American public that ignorant?
Is it the politicians are that clever where they're manipulating this narrative in such a way as to come up with that answer?
I just don't know.
I think mostly it's just apathy.
Most people, I can speak for myself on this anyway, and I'm pretty sure that this applies to a lot of people.
When I first got involved in politics, I was so young it didn't matter whether I could do anything about it or not.
When I first started, you know, becoming very interested, I could put off the answer to that question, what are you going to do about it?
But for most people, they don't even get interested in these type of topics until they're an adult.
And if they don't have a real answer for what are they going to do about it, then why the hell are they going to spend their life worrying about things that they can't do anything about?
That's not a healthy way to live.
The only reason I can continue caring about it as much as I do is because I've got this microphone to yell into, and you have your pen.
But for most people, you live in a country where you know you don't have any power over the policies of the national government, so just forget it.
Yeah, that's right.
There is this myth that we live in a constitutional republic, but, of course, that hasn't been true for at least the last 12 years and probably before that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it's just that I went to a conference yesterday on Israel and Palestine on Capitol Hill, and it was like you're listening to people who are telling part of a story and just don't want to talk about any of the rest of it.
It was the strangest experience, but that's like what we get fed from the media all the time.
They choose what to tell us.
The government chooses what to tell us, and as a result, the American people are completely ignorant about most things that are really impacting seriously on their lives.
Yeah.
They tell us mostly the truth but never the whole truth, and that's the best kind of lie, right?
Yeah, exactly.
The modified limited hangout.
That was what Nixon called it.
I don't know where the hell they got that term.
Maybe from the Pentagon or something, but that's great.
I like that.
Yeah.
The modified limited hangout.
Now, one more thing about this torture report, Phil, that you point out that I think is really important for people to understand, too, is that this is not just about the Bush regime.
This is actually about Bill Clinton's presidency and Barack Obama's, too, this torture report.
Yeah, because the renditions, you know, I wasn't really aware of this.
I could have, I guess, assumed it, but the renditions really began under Bill Clinton where we were sending people off to be tortured overseas by, quote, friendly governments.
So that started with Bill Clinton, and, of course, the renditions have, in different modified forms, continued under Obama.
He has publicly said there will be no more torture by CIA or Pentagon officers, but he has continued the renditions, and, of course, Obama is the one that's culpable for there not being accountability or any kind of accountability for the torture regime of George Bush.
Right.
Well, and, of course, the CIA's secret sites in Somalia, that great work by Jeremy Scahill, and the book is on its way here.
I haven't read the book yet, but he wrote that great piece in The Nation about the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA have outsourced the keeping of the torture dungeon to the Somalis, but really who's zooming who here?
That's our war in Somalia.
And, in fact, Eli Lake brought up another example.
Sure, and, you know, so many of these other countries that we think are friendly and everything like that, I mean, they all practice torture, and it's just we've outsourced the whole process, and all they have to do is they have to, the country says, oh, no, no, we won't torture them, and we take that as a given, and, of course, it's just not true.
Well, you know, I wonder how long it can last that the government has the excuse that all the brutality and violence that they deliver to the planet is really just for their own good and that we really are such an enlightened and modern society or whatever that it makes it okay.
We're so exceptional that it makes it okay.
When being a torture state is sort of run-of-the-mill and not very exceptional and, you know, abandoning all the things that made America great, it seems to me it can only last so long that the propaganda that we still have the greatness, but without any of the details, excuses all of the abandoning of the principles.
I don't know how much longer that can last.
I mean, maybe we'll just live in a horrible police state, or maybe we'll finally get sick and tired of this and insist on some real rollback of the empire at home and abroad, you know?
Yeah, I know the one thing that makes me sick every time I hear it is when Obama refers to himself as the leader of the free world.
I mean, if there ever was a phrase that had no meaning, and, in fact, it should be viewed as an ironic statement, it's that one.
And, you know, it's just when does it ever end?
I don't know.
Again, I mean, I guess you've been following the story of the Chechens' connection with the bombers up in Boston and the fact that this group with John McCain is involved and the usual suspects, they free the Caucasus from the Russians.
I mean, you know, the Caucasus thing is indeed a horrific situation from almost every viewpoint, but it's not our problem.
And suddenly we have these U.S. guys getting involved and to the extent of actually, you know, I guess possibly removing this guy from a terrorist list or manipulating the process whereby people come into the country and so on and so forth, I mean, this kind of stuff is, if you read it in a comic book, you wouldn't believe it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, elaborate about that a little bit.
You're saying that the politics of the Americans who are so anti-Russian that they're pro-Chechen jihadist type, that those politics must have been involved in the CIA and the FBI not doing their diligence in preventing this attack?
Well, you know, there's a lot of evidence that, I mean, Justin Raimondo has written on this extensively and Scott McConnell also about how in the past few years, Chechen rebels have been faded in Washington by people like Brzezinski is an obvious one, but Madeline Albright, Bill Kristol, you know, all these people have been involved with the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, which used to be the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, and they've all been involved with these groups and they've been bringing these people over and they've been treating them like they're heroes.
And, you know, Chechnya is kind of like Syria.
There are no heroes there, and we've gotten involved again or we're getting involved in a situation in which we have no understanding and in which we have no real interest.
And it's astonishing how often this happens, because obviously you can argue that the situation in Syria got as bad as it did because of similar forces with people in Washington and in Europe pushing to get rid of Assad and then supporting all these groups willy-nilly that they didn't know anything about.
Yeah.
The thing I can't understand, though, I mean, it's not like a terrorist can't make a bad decision, but it seems like a really bad decision on the part of the Chechens to send the jihadist resistance against the Russians, Mujahideen guys, to send somebody to blow up something in the U.S. when the U.S. has been so good about backing the Chechens all this time.
What do you think is behind that?
Well, I think that basically these guys were singletons.
I don't think they were sent by anybody.
I don't think there's any evidence for that.
And, of course, there's a lot of arguments going around that this could have been set up by the FBI that went the wrong way.
I mean, who knows?
You and I, I know I've done research on a lot of previous terrorism cases in the United States, and there's almost always an FBI informant somewhere in the mix.
Right.
So I don't know.
I think we have to wait and see what happened here.
But the thing I did find intriguing was the CIA listed this guy as a terrorist, and somehow it didn't make it onto the watch list.
That means that all the trillions of dollars that we've been spending for the last 12 years on security hasn't fixed anything, has it?
Right.
Well, you know, yeah, I mean, assuming that's right.
But, you know, I read a thing by Craig Murray, the former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, who said the only part of the story he was rehearsing was Tamerlan's travels from, you know, the Old World to the U.S., and then the Russians warn about him, and then he goes back, and then he comes back to the U.S., and Craig Murray is saying, I'm sorry, that just did not happen in this universe, that the Russians let this guy back into the country even, much less let him then go from Dagestan to Chechnya, hang around with a jihadist for six different visits, and then just leave.
And I guess that New York Times and NBC are now saying that the CIA and the FBI were notified last fall, in November, that NBC is saying the FBI was given the entire Russian folder on the guy.
Right, and they didn't do anything with it.
It was turned over to Homeland Security, apparently, to incorporate it in the watch list, and it didn't happen.
Who knows?
Is this incompetence?
You know, the Russians are as capable of incompetence as we are.
We'd have to disagree with the ambassador.
And these borders are porous.
People come and go.
And particularly when you have the names that are subject to different kinds of spellings.
We're talking about Muslim names that have been transliterated into Russian script, and then transliterated into Latin script.
So, you know, the question becomes, how easy is it for a guy with that kind of those transmutations to appear in different guises in different places?
I would think it's probably fairly easy.
It's probably pretty easy for the FBI to screw up based on a couple of little misspellings, too.
That's how they throw people off on record searches, is deliberate misspellings, you know.
So I could see that.
That's right.
Possibly.
But now, so when you bring up the possibility of an FBI informant involved in this thing, that raises the question, did they ever, did you hear, did anybody ever answer who was Misha, who was the mentor of the older brother in this thing?
I know, obviously, they're looking for him or trying to identify him, but I haven't seen any follow-up on that.
There's your FBI informant if there is one, I think.
And don't you recall that right after the attack and everything, they arrested some other people that I assumed were roommates of the younger brother and were living in the same building.
But there were three or four other arrests.
Have you heard anything more about that?
I haven't.
Yeah, I think they announced that they had let him go.
I think I read a thing where they talked to them and said, don't leave town.
We might come back to ask you more questions, but they weren't accusing him.
So he was cleaning his gun on the kitchen table and they didn't notice anything funny.
Yeah, I don't know.
Is that what they said?
Because I missed that if that was in there or you're just cracking a joke.
No, I'm just kind of guessing.
Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.
I want to make sure.
That's funny.
All right, you know what?
I'm way over time.
I'm supposed to be talking with Sheldon Richman about sacrificing all our liberty.
Now we've got to go, Phil.
Thanks so much for your time.
Okay, Scott, take care.
I didn't even realize how over time I am.
That's the great Phil Durali.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
He is a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine and a columnist at Antiwar.com and a former CIA and DIA officer.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and, of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out YouTube.com/Scott Horton Show for some examples and email Scott at ScottHorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory, and many more.
Write the op-eds and the books.
Host the events and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom.
Or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of FFF.org.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Man, you need some Liberty stickers for the back of your truck.
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Hey y'all, Scott Horton here inviting you to check out WallStreetWindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by former hedge fund manager, Mike Swanson, who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
WallStreetWindow is unique in that Mike shows people what he's really investing in and updates you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike thinks his positions are going to go up because of all the money the Federal Reserve is printing to finance the deficit.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out.
Also, keep your eye on writermichaelswanson.com for more details.