06/28/13 – Fred Branfman – The Scott Horton Show

Admit it, our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
Scott Warren 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.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We're streaming live from ScottHorton.org, NoAgendaStream.com, and TalkStreamLive.com, among others, AnomalyRadio.com, and yeah, I like that.
All right, first guest on the show today is Fred Bronfman, the great anti-war activist, and he's got this incredible new piece at Alternet.org.
I mean, this thing is going to blow you away.
The world's most evil and lawless institution, the executive branch of the U.S. government.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Fred?
Great.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I really appreciate you joining us here on the show today.
And, boy, you hit them hard with it in this thing.
I think I just want to be quiet and let you go.
What's the body count of the U.S. government since, I don't know, say, World War II?
Well, I don't get into Korea because I don't know very much about it, but since Vietnam, that's to say over the last 50 years, the United States executive branch has killed, wounded, or made homeless over 20 million human beings in total.
Most of them are civilians.
All right, well, let's count them up, because that sure sounds like as many people has died on the Eastern Front in World War II or something.
Well, 20 million Russians died.
This is 20 million killed, wounded, and made homeless.
But it's still more than any other government on Earth, and I think that's what I find most shocking over the years I've said that to people.
You know, what government do you think has killed, wounded, or made homeless more innocent people than any other government?
And nobody ever says the United States.
They've killed all these people in plain sight, and yet most Americans are completely unaware of it.
And when you think about it, it's pretty disturbing that we don't even realize what's gone on.
The Secretary McNamara estimated that we killed 1.2 million civilians in South Vietnam and North Vietnam, and to that there were 11 million refugees estimated by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Refugees, as well as over a million wounded.
That right there is about 12 million people.
And then the second biggest total is in Iraq, where there have been over 5 million people killed, wounded, or made homeless.
There's a lot of dispute, by the way, about that number, because that number of 5 million includes about 100,000 civilians killed, and there have been estimates by Lancet Medical Magazine, for example, that the number's as high as 600,000.
Then you've got in Cambodia an estimated 600,000 killed and wounded.
Excuse me, just killed alone.
That's on all sides.
But the United States, both in Iraq and, what do you call it, Cambodia, the U.S. Executive Branch bears the responsibility for all the deaths because in both cases it invaded the country in a classic case of aggressive war as defined under the Nuremberg Tribunal.
And in my piece, I quote a Nuremberg prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, saying that a prima facie case exists, meaning an obvious case exists, that the United States waged aggressive war in Iraq.
After all, the Iraqis have never attacked the United States or thought about doing so.
We went, you know, whatever it is, 8,000 miles, went into their country where they posed no threat to us and occupied the country.
Now, under U.N. law, that was our second crime.
The first crime was waging aggressive war, which is a supreme international crime, according to Robert Jackson at Nuremberg, the chief justice of the United States, actually, as well as the chief justice at Nuremberg.
But then after we entered Iraq, as the occupying power, a separate body of law required us to provide law and order at a minimum.
I mean, it's also a crime to destroy the economy, to let people starve, and so forth.
But the minimum is you have to provide law and order as the occupying power.
That's just, you know, a basic international law.
And, of course, the United States did not do that.
I can't say we.
They, the Bush administration, disbanded the police, actually disbanded the military, but did not provide law and order.
And what happened was, as a result, as you would suspect in any country, including this one, marauding gangs took over, and it was entirely our responsibility.
You know, the Bush administration tries to blame what happened in Iraq, you know, on sectarian violence, but there wasn't that level of sectarian violence.
There wasn't sectarian violence before we invaded, and it occurred because we failed to fulfill our legal responsibilities.
Then, you know, there was the bombing of Laos, which I knew about.
Many tens of thousands killed and wounded there.
And then there's Afghanistan.
And those have been our major wars where we directly murdered people.
On top of that, we bear a major responsibility for the death squads in El Salvador.
You know, once again, we try to wash our hands.
It wasn't us.
It was the Salvadorans who did it.
But we were the ones who trained, equipped, directed the death squads in El Salvador, 30,000.
And then the Contras in Nicaragua, another 30,000.
The U.S. supported the genocidal regime in Guatemala, 200,000.
And the numbers go on.
And the point of all this is simply to say that when I say evil, I'm not name-calling.
You know, I hate having to use the word, because I think the word evil is a very special word, and it should only be used, you know, when it applies.
I mean, we throw the word around too much.
It can lose its meaning.
But if killing, as I said in my article, and wounding and making homeless millions upon millions of civilians, innocent people, if that's not evil, then what is?
And if we're not willing to call it evil, isn't it an act of moral cowardice?
If the Soviets did it or the Chinese did it, we'd call it evil.
But if our own leaders do it, we're not willing to call it evil.
And I think, you know, it's one of our big problems in society, although the U.S. executive branch leaders, and by the executive branch I mean the leaders of the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and so forth, the foreign military and police agencies and the Department of Homeland Security and FBI at home, they bear the major responsibility.
But all the rest of us who've remained silent, who've even supported their activities, we bear some of that responsibility.
Well, you know, there's so much to go over there.
But yeah, first of all, I think the ideology of American murder, you know, I just saw the other day one of my Facebook friends, and I'm an anti-war activist, and anybody who's my Facebook friend, they friended me.
I don't know these people.
They're, you know, presumably listeners to my show, I guess.
I don't know.
And I saw this lady praising her granddaughter's decision to join the Army.
After a dozen years of, never even mind everything that went on before September 11th, but just 11 years of the Republicans and the Democrats taking advantage of September 11th to rain fire across the world to commit so many crimes and so many well-publicized crimes.
I mean, there's just no, you know, it's not like it's a secret that they've declared a long war against the people of Earth from now on and all this kind of thing.
And yet, that doesn't matter.
It doesn't count.
It's like, I don't know a better way to say it other than it's like last weekend's golf scores also have nothing to do with it.
It has nothing to do with whether it's still honorable, and I don't golf, so that's how meaningless that is to me.
It has nothing to do with whether military service is actually service, whether it has anything to do with fighting for freedom, whether it's honor and valor and glory, and it'll be just like that time that we saved Europe from the Nazis and all of those kind of ridiculous slogans and myths.
All that stuff still counts, and none of the actual reality of what everybody knows the military is up to these days has anything to do with whether it's a good idea to send your granddaughter off to join the Marine Corps.
Yeah, it's a serious, very, I mean, it is actually the most serious issue of our lives in the sense that, you know, there's the famous statement during the 30s, first they came, you know, from my neighbors, and I didn't say anything, first they came from so-and-so, I didn't say anything, and finally they came from me.
What's alarming about now, the period we live in, is we as Americans have sat by and watched our leaders kill, wound, or make homeless over 20 million human beings, most of them civilians.
I don't know that number of civilians.
It includes soldiers, although we're responsible for those deaths, too, since we waged aggressive war in Vietnam and elsewhere.
But now that same mentality, and I think what's important to understand is to ask yourself, what's the mentality of the leaders of America, Democrats, Republicans, conservative liberals, that would allow them to kill, wound, or make homeless 20 million human beings, everyone with a name, a face, as I said in my article, hopes and dreams, and just as much right to live as you or I.
And it's a mentality that's indifferent to, in this case, non-American human life.
But the problem is that same mentality is now coming back to America as we see a surveillance state slowly being created.
This is a three-part series.
In my first article, I pointed out that under President Obama, and that's why I talk about the executive branch.
It doesn't matter who's president, if it's a Democrat or Republican.
Here's President Obama, who's a relatively liberal guy, a nice guy.
I'm sure he doesn't think of himself as the kind of people that would create a police state.
But in fact, he's laying in the infrastructure of a police state.
We're not a police state yet.
No, I'm not claiming that.
But the infrastructure's there.
And if there's another 9-1-1, if there's disruption in the streets because of people hurting economically, as I'm afraid is going to happen, because of the inequality and the 1 percent, or I would say more than 20 percent, controlling the entire economy and 80 percent being out of the picture, I'm very afraid that this mentality on the part of our leaders, who are perfectly decent.
And one other point I make out of my article is, in today's world, it's perfectly decent people like Obama who are committing these countless crimes.
You know, we, as I always half-joke, I say Hitler gave evil a bad name.
You know, when we use the word evil, you think of Hitler.
I mean, you would never think of a nice guy like Obama as an evil human being in his present role as president of the United States.
But here he has created the joint—I mean, he's actually expanded, I should say, and given much more power to these drones.
And much more importantly, and never discussed, the Joint Special Operations Command called JSOC.
Now, JSOC is a—estimates run as high as 60,000, all the people involved in JSOC.
And they consist of thousands—the first in U.S. history, this is the first group of U.S. assassins.
Now, these are the people who captured Obama—excuse me, Osama bin Laden, killed Osama bin Laden, and are written up as heroes in this country.
But if you look at what they're doing, they're secretly and lawlessly operating in dozens of countries and assassinating anyone they feel like, usually unarmed suspects, because they break into their homes in the middle of the night when they're unarmed, and murder them with no trial, no chance to prove their innocence, killing countless people on the flimsiest of evidence.
And this is done under Obama.
He's also murdered thousands of people with these drone strikes.
And it's a very serious situation.
And, you know, unfortunately, because Americans have been so brainwashed, so propagandized by their government, that they don't realize what's going on.
And those who do, among our liberal elites, simply turn the other way and don't look.
As I quoted the Bob Dylan song, you know, blowing in the wind, we turn our heads and pretend we just don't see.
And that's what's going on today.
Right.
Well, and that's the real trick, isn't it?
That all this evil that you're talking about, so many times it just amounts to a shrug.
You know, you quote in here how they've been bombing Laos to where there was nobody even left to bomb anymore, hardly at least where, you know, in the Plain of Jars and all of that.
And certainly there were no Viet Cong anywhere to be seen.
And some congressman asked the question of the military, well, how come you guys are still bombing them when that was two years ago?
That kind of thing.
And he says, we have excess planes laying around.
And it's really— Here's the exact quote.
And this is really important.
If one remembers one thing from this interview, this is to me the most chilling single thing I've ever come across in my life.
The background, very quickly, is I was interviewing these refugees from the Plain of Jars, and I interviewed over a thousand people.
Every single person said their home was completely destroyed.
They talked about seeing a beloved grandmother burned alive.
Imagine, just think of your own grandmother.
Think of her being burned alive.
Think of a beloved child being buried alive.
Think of people just blown to bits by anti-personnel bombs and all the rest of it.
By a country, they didn't even know where America was.
And they all said that the worst bombing began at the end of 68, on into 69, like the number of bombing raids had quintupled four or five times higher.
And I couldn't figure out why it was.
The official American line was that the North Vietnamese were invading Laos, but I had friends in the U.S. Embassy, and everyone knew there were no more than a few thousand North Vietnamese troops in northern Laos, mainly defending their own country, and they had no intention.
They never did take over Laos.
They could have.
They never did.
And I couldn't figure out why was there this huge increase in the bombing.
And then to my everlasting horror, I read an official testimony to the U.S. Senate.
The deputy chief of mission, that means the American, the number, like the deputy ambassador, testified to Congress, and he was asked, why did you quintuple the bombing?
He said, and this is an exact quote, well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn't just let them stay there with nothing to do.
So they, these good, kind, innocent people on the plane of Jars, I mean, the only parallel is that movie by James Cameron, only it's our government who are the bad guys, murdered, slaughtered all these people just because they had the planes and they couldn't let them sit around with nothing to do.
And it's this total indifference to human life that I find most chilling, because nobody hated the Laos.
You know, Nazis hated Jews.
We hated Japs, quote unquote, in World War II.
Americans liked the Laos, but they had all the planes around.
They had to use them, and the Laos were nothing but human garbage.
They were mosquitoes.
They were cockroaches.
They had no human significance.
They were not recognized as human beings by our leaders.
This is how they treat people all over the world, and this is how they're going to treat Americans who oppose them or are considered problems in coming decades unless there's a big change.
Well, this is how they treat their own soldiers.
You know, for years we talked about how they would use the personality disorder excuse to discharge anyone who had brain injury, concussion injuries, or PTSD, and say, well, we don't want to take care of you, so we'll say we'll claim that you had a personality disorder in order to disqualify you.
We'll claim that you already had it before you joined up.
You deceived us, so now you're kicked out and no health care for you.
And I would always say, you know, these guys, they make idols out of our soldiers, right?
Even the lowest private is our greatest hero.
You better stop at the airport and clap for them and all this kind of thing, and yet they'll just throw them in the garbage.
And then it turned out, after years of saying that, you know, rhetorically speaking and whatever, it turned out they really were throwing their bodies in the garbage.
The families who were asking the military to please take care of them, they couldn't carry the expense of the funeral.
They died in the war, so please go ahead and take care of them and bury them at Arlington for us.
And the Army, or I guess it was the Air Force's response to that, was literally to dump their corpses in the trash pile, in the local landfill.
So the evil is so great, I guess most people just can't look at it, because if you looked at it, you would never see your country again.
You couldn't.
Imagine if there was a simple rule that nobody who's guilty of war crimes is allowed to appear on Meet the Press.
They wouldn't have any official guests.
You know, what I was thinking yesterday was, and I agree with you on that, you know, 55,000 American boys died in Vietnam.
And of those, many, I knew some, were actually idealistic.
They believed they were fighting for freedom in South Vietnam.
That's what their leaders told them.
When the Pentagon Papers came out, we all found out, in black and white, what was really going on.
We found out that the Tonkin Gulf incident was fabricated.
Johnson lied about that.
And then there was a memo by Assistant Secretary of Defense, McNamara's assistant, John McNaughton, number two in the Defense Department, and he said, we're fighting in Vietnam 70 percent to keep our credibility.
I'll come back to that in a moment.
Twenty percent to keep it from growing communists.
And then, this is an exact quote, seven percent to help the South Vietnamese people.
So we sent our own soldiers, young, idealistic, good people, telling them they were fighting for the good of the Vietnamese people, to keep them from communism in public, whereas in private our leaders admitted that they had no interest whatsoever.
These boys, we killed American boys for a lie, as well as all those Vietnamese.
And you know what bothers me is we call, they call someone like an Edward Stone or Bradley Manning, who reveals their lies, they call him a traitor.
But here they betrayed a generation of Americans, not to mention the people we killed.
And yet that's never discussed.
That's swept under the rug.
I mean, there's a very eerie silence in this country.
And, you know, I began my article by suggesting that if you want to get a sense of why I'm calling the executive branch evil, imagine that you got into your car in New York City and drove to Washington, D.C.
It's about a four- or five-hour drive.
And imagine hour after hour, as you looked out your car, the drivers went up to the left, you saw a body, a line of corpses stretched end to end.
You arrived in D.C., had a meal, got up, and then drove 12 hours the next day, hour after hour.
Just imagine yourself in a car driving along a whole hour, and then another hour, and then another hour.
And the whole time this pile of corpses is continuing.
And you look a little closer and you see that there's no soldiers or young men.
Almost all children, women, old people, older men to be sure.
Then you arrive in Charleston, South Carolina, have your meal, get up the next day, and drive another 12 hours all the way to Miami, hour after hour.
The whole time you would see this line of corpses.
And, in fact, that's 1.2 million people.
It's what Robert McNamara, our own defense secretary, has estimated that we killed 1.2 million people in South Vietnam.
If you laid their bodies end to end, it would stretch from New York all the way to Miami.
And yet it's never discussed.
We're robbing our own children of their history.
The high school, college textbooks today present the Vietnam War as a war between armies.
The death of civilians is barely even referred to, let alone described, let alone understood.
So we're brainwashing our own children.
And not only is that, in my opinion, a tremendous moral stain on this country, but it guarantees that this killing will continue because nobody is held accountable.
We're all sweeping it under the rug.
Right.
Well, you know, you talk about all those that died under the blockade in Iraq in the 1990s.
And, you know, as Ron Paul said in his big fight with Rudy Giuliani in the Republican primary debate in 2007, if we ignore the motivation of those who attack us, we do that at our own peril.
Right.
You guys want to pretend like, oh, we can just go around the world doing whatever we want with no consequences.
And so that's great for you getting away with whatever it is you want to get away with, I suppose.
But then the American people have to suffer from that.
And, like, you know, think back still to this day, even after all the violence, still the single most violent day of the 21st century so far was still September 11th.
You know, what happened to the American people because of what the American government had done.
Exactly.
And, you know, this is the most serious issue as of now, you know, whatever the date is today, June 2013.
What we have to realize is that in my experience, and I've had these conversations many times, you know, maybe after now you can finally get people to admit, well, all this happened.
But then they justify it and they say, yeah, well, look, they were trying to protect us.
You know, this happens in war.
There's collateral damage.
You know, the usual excuses people make for their own leaders' mass murder.
But at least they're protecting us.
And that's the most frightening thing right now.
I published the first article in this series on alternative.
You know, anybody who's interested really should look.
I have 25 quotes from U.S. national security experts, and I'm talking about General Stanley McChrystal.
I'm talking about Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence, saying that we are creating more, that not we, the U.S. executive branch today, President Obama, the CIA, the Pentagon, through its drone strikes and assassination strikes, is creating ten times more enemies than it kills.
These drone strikes are infuriating the entire Arab world.
Our leaders are not only immoral, but they're totally incompetent.
They're increasing the numbers of people who want to kill us through these drone strikes, which are nothing more than military pinpricks from a military point of view.
I mean, you know, if we kill 5,000 people, we killed a million people in Vietnam.
It didn't stop the North Vietnamese from winning.
This is not going to, this has no military significance.
But what it's doing is turning the entire Arab world against us, which is absolutely the most insane thing, you know, our leaders have ever done.
And this is now widespread, understood.
I mean, McChrystal says it, as I said.
Dennis Blair says it.
Many, many.
The head of the, Robert Grenier, the head of the counterterrorism, CIA's counterterrorism center.
It goes on and on.
So now they're committing all these crimes, but they're actually endangering us in the course of doing it.
And not only that, you know, Bob Woodward, no less an expert than Bob Woodward himself has said, and this is almost an exact quote, if there's another 9-1-1, America will become a police state.
So, first of all, they're sucking up billions of dollars.
People are going hungry in this country.
People are going without jobs to wage this so-called counterterrorism campaign abroad.
And then when they, as a result of their incompetence, have finally succeeded in inciting another 9-1-1, then they'll want hundreds of billions more to protect us from the problem that they've created.
And it's absolutely insane.
You know, there are times I have one of those little mottos on my email.
It's from George Orwell, and it says, one has to remain sane to carry on the, all you can do is remain sane to try to carry on the human heritage.
You know, right now we're talking sanity.
We're talking facts.
We're talking numbers, as Bill Clinton said.
We're talking arithmetic.
Mere simple sanity is enough to marginalize you, criminalize you, and the only way you can succeed in America today is to participate in insanity.
I mean, actually turning, increasing the danger of the United States, increasing the danger that Americans are going to get killed.
Not only that, by the way.
As a result, the main place we've done drone strikes has been in Pakistan.
Eighty percent of the people of Pakistan now regard us as their enemy, according to the latest Pew poll.
It's 140 million people regard the United States as their enemy in Pakistan.
Well, Pakistan happens to have not only nuclear weapons, it's the world's fastest growing and least stable nuclear stockpile.
Among the people who regard us as their enemy are the people guarding their nuclear stockpile, and this is not me saying it.
This is U.S. Ambassador Ann Patterson saying that in the WikiLeaks cables, in private, that her greatest fear was that conventional, excuse me, nuclear materials would fall into the hands of terrorists because the Pakistani government is refusing to cooperate with us on safeguarding their nuclear stockpile because we're so hated, and if they come out, they'd be overthrown by the people because the people would think we're trying to steal their nuclear bomb.
The level of just pure, sheer irrationality on the part of our leaders is quite staggering and quite frightening.
Well, now I realize it's a series.
I'm going to go back and read the first one, and I sure hope that people will take a look at these.
Today's or yesterday's is the world's most evil and lawless institution, the executive branch of the U.S. government, and, yes, this will challenge your emotions a little bit, maybe, if you got a little bit of American nationalism left in you, but I think it's important that you take a hard look at yourself, America.
All I can say is if you love this country, you have to oppose what our leaders are doing because they're violating everything this country stands for.
That's what I think, too.
Thank you so much for your time, Fred.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Anyway, that's Fred Bronfman.
The world's most evil and lawless institution, the executive branch of the U.S. government.
The other is America's most anti-democratic institution, how the imperial presidency threatens U.S. national security.
And as he says, he's got a great collection of quotes there of the most quotable, admitting that it's the empire that's causing the blowback rather than the blowback causing the empire, if you take my meaning.
And we'll be right back with Colin Hallinan after this.
Thanks for your patience, folks.
We'll be right back.
No, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Oh, OK.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Oh, easy.
Into the scanner.
Oh, 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 security edition dot com.
Therefore exposing the TSA is 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 security edition dot com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet.
It's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's security edition dot com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey, guys, I got his laptop.
Hey, I'll score in here to tell you about this great new project.
Listen and think audio at listen and think dot com.
They've got two new audio books read by the deepest voice in libertarianism.
The great historian Jeff Rigenbach.
Our last hope, rediscovering the lost path to liberty by Michael Meharry of the Tenth Amendment Center is available now.
And beyond democracy, co-authored by Frank Karsten of the Mises Institute Netherlands and journalist Carl Beckman will be released this month.
And they're only just getting started.
So check out listen and think dot com.
You may be able to get your first audio book absolutely free.
That's listen and think audio at listen and think dot com.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
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 and 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 Council for the National Interest dot org and click donate under about us at the top of the page.
And thanks.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow dot 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 dot com.