06/10/13 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

So, you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scothorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
The Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
You know, a good way to get to this show is to go to talkstreamlive.com and click from there.
That way I rank up high next to Rush Limbaugh and Geraldo.
Get some new listeners there, talkstreamlive.com.
And knowagendastream.com, of course, every weekday from 11 to 1 Texas time.
And, of course, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scotthortonshow.
I promise you, Ron Paul's coming up.
But right now we're going to Bumper Hornberger.
He is the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
And he's got this new article, The Role of Foreign Policy in Security State Surveillance.
Welcome back to the show.
Jacob, how are you doing?
Doing fine, Scott.
It's always an honor to be with you.
All right, well, good.
Thanks for showing up.
I appreciate it.
All right, so this is fake, but I'm sick and tired of your complaining, Mr. Hornberger.
Don't you know we're at war?
Yeah, we often hear that.
Less often now, but it's ridiculous.
You know, the war on terrorism is like the war on drugs.
And it's a metaphor that they use for going after a criminal offense.
And we all know that terrorism is a criminal offense.
That's why they're out there indicting people in federal court and extraditing people and so forth.
And what we've permitted them to get away with in the name of this so-called war on terrorism is unbelievable.
And we're just seeing it just now with this massive surveillance state that makes you feel like you're in a communist country.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy, right?
Except, you know, what's funny is I guess they call it outrage fatigue, where, you know, they've been torturing people to death for a dozen years in a row now, and longer than that, really, if you go back to outsourcing it and that kind of thing.
And so at this point, yeah, of course they're tapping everybody's phone.
I've got to tell you, Jacob, back in the 1990s when I first decided that I would be willing to make my name known publicly in order to talk bad about the government all day, it was just over this exact kind of thing.
Tapping everybody's phone, reading everybody's email.
I just took for granted that it was like this and that if we didn't stop them, hey, we have everything to lose here.
We have to stop them.
So, you know, and that was back in the mid-1990s.
I guess I assumed the worst about good old Bill Clinton if he wasn't keeping these exact same kind of records.
But, you know, like I remember meeting an old, you know, you know in the Simpsons, rich Texan, cigar chomping, cowboy hat, big fat whiskey and lots of money.
I met a guy like that in my cab years and years ago who talked about how he and his brother created a telecom down in Houston and how they were scared to death of the NSA.
The NSA, they didn't operate by the law.
They were pure gangsters.
And they just came in and said, you're going to build your entire company the way we say.
Simple as that.
Just like the entire rest of the entire telecommunications infrastructure of America.
It all runs through NSA headquarters.
It always has.
And so, anyway, I mean, I'm just as pissed, but I can't say I'm surprised by any of this.
No, I mean it's really a sad thing that we live in a country where most everybody just accepts that the government is likely monitoring their activity, reading their emails, recording their telephone calls.
And it may not be the case that they're recording everybody's phone calls.
We don't really know.
We certainly can't trust the government's denials on this.
But the fact is that everybody has to operate on that assumption.
And that's exactly the way people live in communist countries.
I've been to Cuba, and I would talk to people on the street about the system and so forth, and they would always look around.
They'd look to see, and then they would escort me over to an area where it was clear there was no cameras on the street or secret microphones.
And I thought, my gosh, this is the way they live.
Well, that's pretty much the way Americans live now.
They have to assume that the government is monitoring their activity.
And they'd be stupid not to make that assumption.
I mean, even the government's saying, yeah, we're monitoring everybody's records of their telephone calls and the social media and so forth.
That's a real horror story in terms of what a free society is all about.
And, of course, the worst part of it is that so many Americans consider this freedom.
I mean, they thank the troops for defending their freedom because they honestly believe they are free under this massive surveillance system.
It's incredible.
Well, you know, it's funny.
In the interview with this new whistleblower, this NSA whistleblower, he paraphrases.
I'm not sure if it's knowingly or not, but he paraphrases Frank Church, saying that what the NSA has, if it's turned against the American people, it's the makings of a turnkey totalitarian state.
No one would ever really be able to organize a hardcore libertarian faction inside either party to ever get elected to any position of power where they could ever do a thing about it again, even with the function of regular elections or whatever, that the government would be able to use its police power to disrupt any attempt to dislodge the permanent establishment in charge, that kind of thing.
And really, they could clamp down on all of us much harder than they already are doing.
I mean, hell, there are millions of people in prison.
I don't mean to downplay it, but I also kind of wonder, Jacob, don't you ever wonder, what are they waiting for?
Why do they even pretend we have a Bill of Rights at all?
Why do they even let FFF.org publish a single thing?
I think they need a crisis in order to really start doing what Putin's doing, and that is going after people who are expressing dissent toward the government.
And that's why it's imperative that we continue doing what we're doing now, and that is raising people's awareness of how dangerous this is.
In fact, there's a great op-ed today by Conor Friederdorf over at The Atlantic.
In fact, I'd recommend getting him and talk about this op-ed.
He says, look, the whole structure for tyranny is now in place.
You've got a government with the power to assassinate people without any judicial review.
I mean it's an omnipotent power to take people out, torture people, rendition people, kidnap them, secret prisons, indefinite detention, massive society-wide surveillance.
And it's all based on trust.
Obama is saying, trust me.
Trust me.
You elected me president.
And as Friedersdorf points out, there is no guarantee that a so-called bad person, a person you can't trust, won't be elected president one of these days… … or that the person you can't trust with these powers won't be elected to Congress.
Now I would say you can't trust anybody, but from the standpoint of the status, Friedersdorf is saying the structure is now in place for a very, very dangerous thing.
And don't believe for a second that this only happens to foreign governments and foreign nations.
It can easily happen to the United States, and that's why it is so imperative to dismantle this whole structure.
And I've blogged today that this national surveillance thing has to be looked at in the context of US foreign policy.
Because notice the cute little system that has been evolving with this national security state apparatus.
They've got the Pentagon and the CIA going abroad and getting people angry with the invasions, the occupations, the support of the dictatorships, the torture, the renditions, and so forth.
That produces the so-called terrorist threat that the NSA is now using as its justification for this massive communist-like surveillance system.
We have to keep you safe from the enemy that – the threat that we ourselves have produced in this what I call the fourth branch of government, the national security state branch of government, which consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
STEWART ROGERS Yeah, well, and when it comes to – I guess people really are shocked about this, like regular people finding out about this who aren't politically active, don't sit around reading FFF all day or whatever.
And they're saying, really, you're reading the emails of little old me when I'm just – I work at Pizza Hut, man.
I'm not political at all.
Why would you care what I'm doing?
But it seems to me like if I was somebody like that, I wouldn't be on Facebook or anything like that given my whole life over.
The Onion did a parody, what, a few years back, right, about how the CIA is celebrating the creation of Facebook.
Now they never have to work again because everybody's just doing all their work for them, clicking on all their associates and all their friends and connections and every kind of thing like that.
And it just occurred to me like this – I'm not sure if you ever read Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly and the End of Education.
You know what I'm talking about?
No.
Well, anyways, he points out how really all this computer-powered technology, government-subsidized technology from World War II on, it's always been about control.
I mean going back to IBM and their punch card system for keeping track of Holocaust victims, making sure that you can get all the most gold fillings and hours worked out of a body before you dump it in a ditch kind of a thing.
And that's what it's always been about.
So to me, when I look at FFF.org, and especially with a URL like that, we can tell you've been doing this since before 1994, 1995, when the URLs went up for auction and whatever, and you got FFF.
But what this is, this is you using the police state's computer system that they created to enslave us with really way back in the first place, and using that double-edged sword back against them.
And so that to me is what's beautiful about something like Facebook, which I'm completely addicted to.
I got the 5,000 friends on there.
I get to see all of what they're interested in all day, and I get to get my opinions out there and information out there that I want to highlight and get instant feedback on it and that kind of thing.
And I know Facebook might as well be on a CIA server in the first place, but let them see that there are so many of us who have the limit of friends that we can have.
There's libertarians everywhere.
There's millions and millions and millions.
Gun owners, people who are very familiar with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and prefer that to what we have now, hardcore.
You know what I mean?
And I think that that's really our best hope, is using their technology back against them and just letting them see that it ain't just Greenwald and it isn't just Snowden.
There are a lot of us out here who are willing to push back and can.
I'm sorry for going on so long.
I think that's what frightens them, is that there is more and more people waking up to the threat, the dangers of the national security state apparatus and what it presents to the American people.
I mean our founding fathers, the framers of the Constitution, look at the First Amendment.
They talk about Congress being the primary threat to freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble.
I mean they understood that we're talking about two separate entities, the federal government, which consists of American citizens, and the American private sector.
And that the government sector is the primary danger to the private sector.
That's the whole purpose of the Bill of Rights, is to protect us from that danger.
And I think all too many people lose sight of that fact.
Now look at where we stand now.
Now everybody knows that they have this massive surveillance system.
They say, well, it's to keep you safe from the terrorists.
Well, the terrorists are not going to be using – if they were even stupid enough to use this as their planning devices before, they're not going to do it anymore.
So what's the purpose of the system now?
Why even keep it in existence when we know that the so-called terrorists are not going to be using it anymore?
And I think it's going to – the fact that they want to keep it in place is going to expose the real purpose of it.
That is to monitor what every American is doing, so as to see if people are talking about shifting America in a new direction, getting rid of this giant military empire that we have, the interventionist foreign policy, the whole thing.
That's creating the justification for this thing.
I mean this is a Cold War apparatus.
It should never have been implemented in the first place as far as I'm concerned.
The CIA took us to the dark side with their MKUltra project.
People can Google that, their LSD experiments, their assassination attempts, coups, the invasions by the Pentagon, all this stuff.
It took us in a bad direction, but it certainly should have at least been dismantled after the Cold War was over.
And it wasn't, and so now here we are with this massive surveillance system that exists in totalitarian countries.
It's just amazing.
Yeah, I mean honestly, I remember being afraid of the Soviet Union, but I was really a kid.
I was in junior high when the wall fell and that kind of thing, so I don't really remember it as an adult the way you do.
But you know, James Bamford said on the show the other day that really this is like East Germany.
Where, no, they got tabs on everyone and you better not stick your neck out.
It's really like that.
This is what Americans, we used to tell ourselves that we're Americans because we don't have a system like this.
Not because we live between Canada and Mexico, but because we would refuse to have this kind of thing ever done to us.
Well, that's right.
And another important thing about this, and I think it's really great that Clint Greenwald's at the forefront of this thing.
Because they're expecting your standard namby-pamby journalist that tries to play like he's just neutral and he's just reporting the facts and so forth.
But now they're tangling with Greenwald, who clearly has this fierce commitment to civil liberties.
And he's not taking their flack at all.
They're over there threatening him with an investigation, and he comes back and says, it's you people that are being investigated.
Get used to it.
Well, Americans aren't used to that type of thing.
They want that little deference to authority.
You show respect, reverence for the federal government.
And Greenwald is saying, hey, we in the private sector are the bosses here.
You people are the servants.
Well, we haven't heard a journalist talk like that in a very long time, if ever.
And it's fantastic because it really shows up the journalists in the mainstream press, the ones that are deferential to authority.
But it also shows up, Scott, the people in these telecoms and these social media networks that just rolled over on this thing and said, oh, well, the court ordered us to do it.
We don't have a choice.
Instead of standing up to the government, filing a lawsuit, declaratory action, we're going to protect the rights of our citizens.
We're not going to let this government get away with this.
No, they just roll over.
And so it's fantastic that Greenwald is over there showing people what it really means to be an American and standing up for the principles of freedom.
It's awesome.
Yeah, it is.
They're right to be terrified of him because, you know, well, partially it's just because it's not just his principle, but I think it's his experience being a trial lawyer, much like yourself, too.
But he's just got this thing where he will destroy anyone in an argument in just the most methodical kind of way.
And I mentioned this from time to time.
Maybe you first mentioned this to me on the show and then I went and watched it, Jacob, was his debate at Cato with the former drug czar.
And that former drug czar, he was formidable, man.
He that was the best pro-drug war argument anyone ever assembled.
And Greenwald just mopped the floor with him without even taking a single note.
He just had he was as you could see him writing the article in his head as the guys talking.
And then he just read the article off, you know, the inside of his imagination there and just whooped him.
And that's the kind of thing you can read him on a daily basis and see how he is.
But, you know, if anybody missed him this morning on the morning, Joe, you can't push him.
He pushes back every single time and he'll destroy you.
So, you know, figuratively speaking.
So and he's also set the precedent that if someone takes the chance to liberate a document and leak it to Greenwald, that he will publish it.
He will follow through.
He's not going to leave you hanging like the New York Times or something.
Yeah, he's like a surgeon in a way.
You know, he's got the scalpel and he will just rip apart anybody who tangles with him.
His depth of knowledge and understanding is passionate commitment to civil liberties.
It just exudes.
And it's just fascinating to see.
I'm sure these congresspeople that are used to rolling over people and just steamrolling them and intimidating them and abusing them.
I mean that's their whole shtick this whole time, you know, in terms of trying to diffuse opposition.
It ain't working now with this guy.
And I'm sure they're sitting there saying, what the heck should we do?
And now they've got this 29-year-old guy who from all appearances – I mean I've just seen the guy's interview, his video interview, Snowden.
But he looks very presentable.
He looks very sincere.
He's done this for the right reason.
He's done it very methodically and carefully and said, I need to bring this to the attention of the American people because this is not what a free society is all about.
And it's been reported now that he made two donations to the Ron Paul campaign, which is sort of consistent with his apparent principled commitment to civil liberties and privacy.
This is what a free society is all about, bringing a spotlight.
They call them leakers, and I'm wondering – I just tweeted today.
I wonder if we shouldn't call them spotlighters.
I mean they bring a spotlight on the dark, rotten aspects of the national security state where all the bad stuff takes place.
And that's why it's secret because it's bad.
And they shine a spotlight on that.
And man, all the rats are going for cover because they're not used to the sunlight.
And it's like disinfectant.
And yet they consider this guy a traitor and a bad person.
This guy's heroic, just like Daniel Ellsberg was heroic.
But the battle lines are forming, Scott.
This is what's very interesting.
They're going to try to extradite the guy.
They're going to try to prosecute him.
And those of us that are advocates of liberty are going to be on the other side of this thing.
It's going to be a very, very interesting battle that's forming here.
Well, you know, and this keeps happening too, this political realignment.
Boy, it's like trying to whoop a stubborn mule or something to get it to move.
But more and more, each one of these outrages, more and more people wash out of the traditional loyalty to their team and come and join our side in the realignment for peace and liberty against this corrupt empire.
And, you know, it's just one of those things where, you know, how hypocritical could a Bush critic be to defend this, right?
At some point, people got to throw up their hands and say enough is enough.
And so, you know, not to be too cynical about it, but to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel and Condoleezza Rice before him, never let a crisis go to waste, and this is our time, libertarians, to say, hey, we're good on this, that, and the other thing, regardless of who's in power.
You know what I mean?
We don't go silent about foreign policy when liberals get elected, like liberals do.
We stay good, and we'll still be good the next time a Bush or whoever is president, too.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I mean, that's absolutely fascinating how the liberals has rolled over, because through eight years of Bush doing exactly what Obama's doing, man, the liberals were up there screaming about civil liberties and the importance of privacy and stuff.
And as soon as their man came into office, he started doing – he broke every promise he made and every assurance he had made.
All the critiques he had made of Bush, and he adopted and embraced everything Bush was doing and even expanded it.
And what did the liberals do?
They rolled over and started defending it now that their man was in power, apologizing for him, with the exception of Greenwald, the ACLU, and a few other principled liberals.
The others just rolled over.
And that's one thing that distinguishes us libertarians.
If Ron Paul had been elected president, if he hadn't stuck with his promises and so forth, we would have been on him, because that's what distinguishes us libertarians.
We stick with our principles, and we want a free society regardless of who's in power.
But these are exciting times.
Boy, these are opportunities for us too, because I agree with you.
People are leaving the national security state support in droves because they're finally starting to realize this is not a free society.
It violates the principles of a free society.
Well, by the way, speaking of Ron Paul, he's coming up next.
And also remember now why everybody fell in love with him all of a sudden.
It was because he was willing to bravely say what most Americans really know at least in their heart, and that is that when it comes to our conflicts in the Middle East, our government started it.
That doesn't mean that whoever the rebels are are the good guys.
Some of them are horrible civilian butchering monsters, but still America started it.
And continuing, I mean, even you look at in Scahill's new book where he talks about sending JSOC, where they really are just targeting people who are loyal to Zawahiri, and still they do nothing but kill civilians and create more enemies, right?
And this is doing the job that the American people actually assigned to them after 9-11, which is get the guys who did this, right?
Not go and kill whoever you want and declare war on feelings and this kind of thing.
And they still can't even do the most narrow targeted killings of America's worst individual al-Qaeda enemies without just masquering babies.
I mean, at some point you've got to just knock it off, especially when it didn't all begin on 9-11.
It all really began back, you know, whatever, at the end of World War II, or you pick it.
Well, yeah, and I just would say, you know, it's not America that started it.
It's the federal government.
I mean, I think it's important we draw that distinction.
Absolutely.
And that it is up to us, America, the private sector, to set our government straight, put it on the right path.
You see, there's two kinds of patriotism, as you know, Scott.
The blind, supportive government type of patriotism, and then the patriotism that stands up against the wrongdoing of the government.
That's the Green Walls.
That's the FFF.
That's the Scott Hortons.
I mean, those of us that are saying patriotism means taking a close look at what your government's doing, take a stand against it.
That's the genuine patriot, and that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to end the darkness under which we're living, the assassinations, the whole shebang, the renditions, the tortures, the whole thing the national security state apparatus has brought us, and saying, no, America is better than this.
We're trying to move our country in a better, different direction, and that's what distinguishes us from the status.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I've got a chip on my shoulder about just about every American president, but I think it really is, you mentioned this before, but it's worth going back to highlight, I think, that, you know, in the future, you never know really what could happen.
I mean, think of the Boston bombing.
What if that had been an Oklahoma City-sized bomb, and it killed hundreds of people there that day, whatever, and there had been a real red alert, and not just lock down Boston, but lock down the eastern seaboard, this kind of, we have really given them so much power, well, they've taken so much power without enough pushback so far that, you know, or what if it had been a nuke?
What if somebody actually successfully figured out a way to smuggle a former Soviet nuke into this country to get some revenge, to provoke a response, or for whatever reason, to start a war?
I mean, what would happen?
We would just, I mean, we already know the answer, right?
They would just completely scrap the Constitution and declare a military dictatorship, and we'd be lucky if our great-grandkids ever got to vote again.
Well, I think your point about Oklahoma City is so good because, you know, we libertarians kept raising people's vision to the horror at Waco, and we kept saying look at motive, look at motive.
And that's what had motivated Timothy McVeigh.
Well, by raising people's vision on how bad Waco was – and it didn't start out that way.
A lot of people were supporting the federal massacre at Waco.
But by raising the vision and people's sense of conscience and consciousness about Waco, there had been no more Wacos.
And therefore, there had been no more Oklahoma Cities.
And that's the thing that we're trying to get people aware with respect to U.S. foreign policy, that if we can dismantle this military empire and interventionism, there won't be any more terrorist attacks, so that you don't need all this junk over here.
And so, yeah, I think the analogy works very well.
All right, so for the end of the show here, we don't have too much time.
It's not because you're bribing me.
It's just because I want to tell people about FFF.org.
It's the Future Freedom Foundation.
Jacob Hornberger, obviously, a fearless leader.
But he's got Sheldon Richman, who is walking libertarianism as pure as can be.
He's got Jim Bovard, who is the greatest libertarian journalist in history.
He's got Anthony Gregory, the great scholar, who just published his wonderful book about habeas corpus.
He's got Wendy McElroy, the i-feminist, who's just written a great piece about solitary confinement.
And let me interrupt you.
We also had Glenn Greenwald on.
And Andy Worthington, the world's greatest expert on Guantanamo Bay.
FFF.org.
Thank you very much, Jacob.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
We'll be back in a few.
Hang on.
Just a second.
Over at AIPAC, the leaders of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., they're constantly proclaiming unrivaled influence on Capitol Hill.
And they should be proud.
The NRA and AARP's efforts make them look like puppy dogs in comparison to the campaigns of intimidation regularly run by the neoconservatives and Israel firsters against their political enemies.
But the Israel lobby does not remain unopposed.
At the Council for the National Interest, they put America first, insisting on an end to the empire's unjustified support for Israel's aggression against its neighbors and those whose land it occupies, and pushing back against the lobby's determined campaign in favor of U.S. attacks against Israel's enemies.
CNI also does groundbreaking work on the trouble with evangelical Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in drumming up support for this costly and counterproductive policy.
Please help support the efforts of the Council for the National Interest to create a peaceful, pro-American foreign policy.
Just go to councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
And thanks.
Admit it.
Our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
Scott Wharton here for LibertyStickers.com.
I made up most of them and most of those when I was mad as hell about something.
So if you hate war, empire, central banking, cops, Republicans, Democrats, gun-grabbers, and status of all stripes, go to LibertyStickers.com and there's a good chance you'll find just what you need for the back of your truck.
Own a bookstore?
Sell guns at the show?
Get the wholesaler's deal.
Buy any hundred stickers and they drop down in price to a dollar apiece.
You can spread the contempt and make a little money too.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey y'all, Scott Wharton here for the Future of Freedom, the journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Every month, Plum Line individualist editor Sheldon Richmond brings you important news and opinions on policy by heroic FFF President Jacob Hornberger, hard-hitting journalist columnist James Bovard, and others from the best of the libertarian movement.
The Future of Freedom tackles the most important issues facing our country, from the bankrupt and insane welfare and regulatory states, to foreign wars and empire, the dismal state of our economy, and ongoing assaults on civil liberties.
This society needs peace and freedom for prosperity to prevail.
Subscribe to the Future of Freedom in print for just $25 a year, or online for $15 a year at fff.org/subscribe.
And hurry up, because this summer they'll be running my articles about the wars in Libya, Syria, and Somalia in the Future of Freedom too.
That's fff.org/subscribe for the Future of Freedom.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Oh man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights?
That's right.
It's just a harmless, stainless steel, business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet and it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's securityedition.com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey, guys.
I got his laptop.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
The Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.
So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money and be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.