Scott Horton 0:00
For Pacifica radio June 28 2020. I’m Scott Horton. This is anti war radio.

All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys introducing Hans Kristensen from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And he is also at the Federation of American Scientists as well and SIPRI that’s sipri.org. have just put out their latest study the sipper yearbook 2020. And part of that, of course, focuses on nuclear weapons, and they have a story here at sipri.org nuclear weapon modernization continues, but the outlook for arms control is bleak. Welcome to show Hans. How are you, sir?

Hans Kristensen 1:25
Thanks for having me.

Scott Horton 1:26
Very happy to have you here. So I’m sorry, I didn’t get a chance to read the whole PDF file and everything here. It’s been a very busy time. But I did read the introductory article here. And there’s so many important points brought up here. But I guess if we could just start with reminding the audience which all countries are armed with nuclear weapons, and approximately how many of them etc, like that, if you could?

Hans Kristensen 1:51
Yeah, so they’re about they’re now nine countries today that have nuclear weapons. And that’s the United States and Russia, France, Britain, China. India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. And all together, they possess something in the order of 13,400 nuclear warheads. Most of those are in what you can sort of call military stockpiles that are ready to use on relatively short notice. But there’s also a chunk of them some something in the order of 1800 to 2000 that are on high alert, they’re ready to fire within just minutes.

Scott Horton 2:28
And then, and those are mostly America and Russia’s,

Hans Kristensen 2:32
the alert weapons are American, Russian, French and British. Yes.

Scott Horton 2:38
And then, is there a ratio handy about how many of these are vision bombs versus thermonuclear h bombs.

Hans Kristensen 2:46
Almost all of them are thermal nuclear weapons to stage, thermonuclear weapons. Those are the more advanced weapons that countries like the United States, and Russia and France and Britain and China have have developed over the years, newer countries that have only conducted relatively few nuclear tests don’t yet have that capability India, Pakistan and Israel and also North Korea, although North Korea has demonstrated in their last test that they can produce something thermonuclear something that it that can produce a very high yield, but it’s a little unclear with it that is to stage device or, you know, some other technology.

Scott Horton 3:29
And are most of those still measured in the kilotons are there up into the megaton range?

Hans Kristensen 3:34
No mega ton weapons, so sort of becoming more and more rare. Those were things that people built early on. Now it’s it’s in the hundreds of kilotons or or even 10s of kilotons. So if you look at it depends on the mission of course also, if countries have more hits that are intended for blowing up deeply buried underground facilities, or knocking out hardened ICBMs or commands structures and that type of stuff, then they tend to be higher yield, because they have to, you know, do more damage. But if you’re looking at weapons that are needed for sort of more warfighting scenarios, you know, against shallower targets or troop formations or basis or something like that, then you can do the job with, you know, just, you know, 10 a few 10s of kiloton.

Scott Horton 4:21
And then now, did I hear you right, that you said India does not have h bombs?

Hans Kristensen 4:26
That’s correct, although there have been claims in India that they did that they do. And also one of the devices that was tested back in 1998, apparently, was an attempt to make a thermonuclear design, but it fizzled. And so we do not, we don’t anticipate that they have a two stage thermonuclear device to deploy it in their arsenal.

Scott Horton 4:47
Okay, because I had read and actually talked to an expert to I think, I guess about that one of the real problems with the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan was that Pakistan really only had these much smaller yield tactical battlefield type nuclear weapons that they would use against the armored column or something like that. But that the Indians had focused on building higher yield strategic nuclear weapons for killing cities with and this kind of thing. And that because their armor was so desperately matched as well, that if the Indians launched a conventional attack, the Pakistanis might have to use low yield nukes to defend themselves. And then the Indians would have no choice but to retaliate with genocidal weapons of destruction, because that’s essentially all they have something like that. But so I wonder about how you conceive of that whole scenario there.

Hans Kristensen 5:41
Well, the scenario bar is a little about different aspects of the reality. It’s too simplistic though. The point is that both countries have developed a medium range ballistic missiles with you know, more hits in several 10s of kilotons that can hit each other of cities. But what’s unique about Pakistan is that in addition to that, they have also developed a weapons that are more tactical, and appear to be intended for use against like you mentioned, Indian conventional forces massing inside Pakistan territory. So that’s a unique feature of the Pakistani arsenal. And that, of course leads to a lot of concern about, you know, how they’re going to do that, or are they going to delegate launch authority to the to the local units, so they could use them early if necessary? How is that gonna play out so there are differences between the Arsenal’s but there also are a lot of similarities.

Scott Horton 6:42
So um, I guess the numbers of Chinese nukes are happily surprisingly low here in the triple digits.

Hans Kristensen 6:52
There compared to the US and Russia, of course, they’re very low. That’s enough

Scott Horton 6:55
to kill us all. I mean, but yeah,

Hans Kristensen 6:57
ya know, the Chinese have had a different approach to their deterrence posture for many decades. They basically didn’t buy into the using of nuclear weapons in sort of warfighting scenarios. They thought if they had, you know, a few, a few hundred 100 200, whatever in, in, you know, in in the posture where they were, when they could retaliate, they could not be knocked out, so they would always be available to retaliate. That should be enough, they thought for nuclear deterrence. What we’re seeing now, of course, is that China is increasing its arsenal. We have bumped up the number this year to 320 warheads that we estimates are in this that we estimate are in their stockpile. And it’s increasing, but it has been increasing for for a long time, just sort of slowly. Now, we’ll have to see if they’re going to, you know, increase faster. But whatever they’re doing, they’re not sprinting to parody. It’s not like whatever you hear about the Chinese nuclear arsenal, it’s not like they’re trying to catch Up to the Russians and the Americans, they still have a fundamentally different perspective on the role of their nuclar weapons.

Scott Horton 8:06
Yeah. Hey, it’s important to note that historically speaking at the height of the Cold War, there were 10s of thousands with 40,000, approximately on the American and Soviet Union side each. And so we’ve made a lot of progress since then, right?

Hans Kristensen 8:22
That’s correct. Yep. At the peak in the mid 1970s, and mid 1980s, I was 70,000 nuclear weapons. And on both the Russian and American side, 10,000 of those were on high alert, ready to go in, you know, within a few minutes, and just totally crazy circumstances. And so of course, when the Cold War ended, they started slicing a lot of the that excess capacity out, and so we saw a huge drop there in the early 1990s. And also a little later on, but what we’re now beginning to see is that the two sides are starting No slowing down significantly and even even to some extent reversing that trend, and looking to maintain significant Arsenal’s for the indefinite future. And so, you know, all sides are sort of increasing the value they say that they attribute to nuclear weapons. They’re increasing the role of the nuclear weapons and the way they talk about what functions they should serve. So this is a very troublesome development.

Scott Horton 9:26
And I’m sorry, what did you say the number was at the height? I thought it was much higher

Hans Kristensen 9:31
70,000

Scott Horton 9:32
Oh, 70. I’m sorry. I thought you said 17. And I thought, well, I was way off. Yeah, no, that’s more like what I thought it was 70,000 nukes.

Hans Kristensen 9:41
Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, you can imagine. You can just imagine spending a couple of hours on on Google Earth and trying to put 70,000 x’s on the map, right? What are we gonna do with all that stuff

Scott Horton 9:54
So there’s an anecdote about dick cheney back in 1989 when he was first Secretary of Defense being shown, I guess on a computer screen is simulation of what it would look like when where they just nuke Moscow hundreds of times over and Dick Cheney finally says that’s enough turn this off and and wanted it redone because it was just completely insane. And of course, he’s notoriously the greatest American

Hans Kristensen 10:24
Hawk alive. Right. Yeah. This is ironic that you can find some of those realizations in what what some characters like cheney did. And he said one of his officials, Frank Miller out to two Strategic Air Command as it was called or stratcom. As of now it’s known and they went through the entire targeting list, there is a very, very important anecdote or reading of that episode in in the memoirs of one of the first of the first stratcom commander. So that was just they discovered not surprisingly that There was an enormous overkill because the nuclear planners had been allowed to essentially do this by themselves with very little oversight. And so things have changed since then is also in the oversight. But even that, even though we were we’ve moved beyond some of that stuff. The nuclear planning today is still, you know, surprisingly similar to what it was during the Cold War.

Scott Horton 11:43
Yeah, Daniel Ellsberg has talked about how, you know, a lot of it is just bureaucratic politics where it’s not fair that the Air Force gets to blow up this city where the Navy wants a crack at it, too. Okay. Okay, Navy, you guys can also hit it with missiles. And so it’s just kind of like an episode of some sitcom some bureaucratic politics.

Hans Kristensen 11:46
You know, there’s an element of sort of institutional competition and turf wars and all this stuff. That’s part of it that dynamic. And mind you early on, the army also had a dream that they wanted exactly, one Hundred Thousand nuclear weapons just the army. I mean, it was those are crazy days.

Scott Horton 12:06
Hey guys just real quick if you listen to the interviews only feed at the institute or at Scott Horton. org I just want to make sure you know that I do a q&a show from time to time at Scott Horton. org slash show the old whole show feed. And so if you like that kind of thing, check that out there. Hey guys, here’s how to support this show. You can donate various amounts at Scott Horton. org slash donate. We’ve got some great kickbacks for you there. Shop amazon.com by way of my link at Scott horton.org. Leave a good review for the show and iTunes and Stitcher. Tell a friend. Oh, yeah, and buy my books, fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan and the great Ron Paul. The Scott Horton show interviews 2004 through 2019 and Thanks. Hey guys, check out listen and think audio books. They’re living And think.com and of course on audible.com and they feature my book fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan as well as brand new out inside Syria by our friend Rhys, Eric, and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there. Reese might be one exception, but essentially they’re all libertarian audio books. And here’s how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks. just donate $100 to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton. org slash donate. Alright, so now the Israelis I actually had the opportunity to discuss this briefly with Mordecai Vanunu on Twitter, where he confirmed to me that he stood by his original leak to the Sunday Times of London, that Israelis have 200 nukes. And I don’t think he would clarify if that included h bombs or not, but we know from grant Smith’s foil lawsuits and stuff that that does include h bombs as of 1987 But anyway, so you guys here count what I think 90 something like that. But of course, we all know that Israel doesn’t have nukes, they’re completely deniable and not official and so forth. So I wonder where you come up with that number in that kind of.

Hans Kristensen 14:15
Yeah, so that’s that’s a long history. They think about how you come up with a number for the Israelis, because there’s so little factual information about it. The way it happened back in the 80s, when Vanunu and others came out with the estimates of the Chinese Arsenal was that people looked at how their reactor had operated and calculated for from that how many units if you will, of plutonium they could have produced over the years and then they translated that into the number of potential weapons they might have. That’s how you got to those high numbers. the intelligence community, the US intelligence community, looked at it a little differently. They said that yes, even though that production might have happened, they haven’t turned all of that plutonium into warheads, and so their number has been much lower. Over the years, and so we’ve we’ve gone with that ladder number and said, you know, those are the weapons that we think they have actually assembled, although they keep them partially unassembled on the normal circumstances, and but that they have other, you know, they have more plutonium in stock that they could produce if they needed to. So that’s how these differences emerge about the numbers.

Scott Horton 15:24
And that includes second strike missiles deployed on submarines. And do you know how many?

Hans Kristensen 15:31
That’s that’s a big uncertainty right now, there was a consistent piston rumor that Israel has put some cruise missiles or develop more hits for some cruise missiles on it. So conventional attack submarines. So we we’re cautiously including that in our estimate this year. And I’m just saying this because because there’s so little information about exactly what the Israeli Arsenal includes. There’s also a lot of room for speculation and rumors and And even hype. And so one has to be a little careful not to get sort of swept up in that in that kind of excitement and get to all sorts of capabilities. And and you mentioned people saying that there was thermonuclear capability? Well, some people believe that we tend not to think that the Israelis have developed a functioning to state thermal nuclear capability, we do believe they have a boosted a single stage design. But doing that requires the development of more technology, it’s more complex to do and you have to look at what is what is Israel’s intention with its arsenal? What function does it have to serve? The reason people develop thermonuclear weapons was because their targeting strategies required them to blow up things with great explosive power? At first that had to do with accuracy, you just couldn’t hit precisely enough. So you develop large scale thermonuclear weapons, so you could compensate for that. In accuracy, but Israel is not in that situation. They have relatively accurate missiles. And so their calculation, it seems to me at least would have to be a little different. They probably don’t need these super high yeld boards.

Scott Horton 17:14
I don’t agree with it. I don’t think anybody does. But I understand what you mean. So now let’s talk about North Korea a little bit here. As you said, they tested a nuke that was possibly boosted, but nobody really knows exactly for sure. Right.

Hans Kristensen 17:48
Yeah, the US intelligence community seem to say that the the last test that was about what was it 150 Some say 200 kiloton. There’s uncertainty about the specific range because different agencies that monitored have put out different estimates, but it was big, it was significant it was in a yield that you would have to either have a very large very significantly boosted single stage weapon or some form of thermal nuclear design. We’ve heard that characterization from US officials saying that there was some thermal nuclear event involved in this. But whether that means this is a two stage thermal nuclear warhead of the kind of warheads that that do United States and Russia developed over the years, that’s a little more uncertain. But it was set as a different nuclear yield that was produced by that weapon.

Scott Horton 18:44
Right. So supposedly, their missiles can reach DC now, I guess they reached a high enough orbit that they say could have reached DC, if that’s how it had been targeted. One of those tests, maybe two of those tests, but then they also say that even if they do have h bombs, they haven’t been able to successfully miniaturize them to the point they’d be able to marry them to one of these rockets and deliver one to DC. So we have a little bit of breathing room there. But everybody, all kinds of politicians from both parties say that that’s the red line. We can never allow them to have h bombs or I guess atom bombs and the means to deliver them specially not to our capital city. Hey, the West Coast man, maybe but not DC. But then. So I wonder if you think like on the timeline of their development, we know when they started making nukes right after they withdrew from the treaty in oh three and all of that. And and so on the timeline of their progress. Are you worried that they might be able to miniaturize their nukes and marry them to their missiles sometime within the next few years? Or what do you think about that?

Hans Kristensen 20:40
Yeah, our s our, you know, our sense of the where they are, is that they’ve developed ballistic missiles that can reach the US, but it’s a little mirror a little less clear. Whether they have a war functioning warhead for those missiles that can reach the United States. And this is a distinction that’s normally lost in the public discussion about the threat from North Korea. it’s more likely that they have warheads that they’ve developed. Left initially for their shorter range ballistic missile and the medium range systems that they have. So basis in the region, US allies in the region was most certainly be be be at risk. But like you mentioned, they made a lot of progress very quickly. And they seem to unsent intent on continuing that we’ve just heard some very strong statement from the North Koreans about continuing refining and improving their nuclear arsenal. And, and that’s one thing we’ve learned from the North Korean, you can you can pretty much stretch target what they say on this issue. If they say they’ll do it, that that means something real, so they’re not done and we’re likely to see more things coming in the future.

Scott Horton 21:00
Okay, so now let’s talk about this modernization. And part of this, I think, is just a welfare program for the nuclear arms industry. From it was part of the negotiations in the Senate to get the start. The new start passed under Obama was okay, you Get a trillion dollars, it’s now almost two, it’ll probably be four by the time they’re done. And so I don’t know how much of this is just make work. I know that they came out they’ve already deployed the new lower yield cruise missiles. But you know, what else do we need to know about the so called modernization here other than just the special interest aspect, but what about the actual change in the nuclear forces?

Hans Kristensen 21:27
Yeah, so um, the the, the bulk of the US Modernization Program is a complete replacement of the entire arsenal. So everything that was built in this were developed and built from the 80s and 90s, is now coming up for renewal. And the commitment that has been made is that all elements of what’s known as the triad, the sea based the land base, ballistic missiles, and the long range bombers, all of that will be replaced and also the shorter range fighter jets. will also be upgraded and replaced. And so, in addition to this comes nuclear production facilities, expanded plutonium pit production facilities that are being planned. We see a modernization of the nuclear command and control system that’s supposed to support and manage these nuclear forces. So it’s a very, very broad and comprehensive modernization plan. And like you said, it’s going to cost a lot of money. Now, the question is, does it change anything fundamentally compared to what we had before. And so that’s the way you have to look under the hood and sort of see what kind of capabilities are being built into these new systems. Because of course, when they built a new ICBM, it’s not just a copycat cat of the the old one, they put advanced capabilities on it and would like to improve its effectiveness. Likewise, when they upgrade the nuclear gravity bond, for example, the B 61. That is used both by speakers gt bombers, but also by Tactical Fighter wings get the United States and also in Europe, when they upgrade that they don’t just, you know, repaint and dusted off the one that’s there. No, they improve it. So they add a guy to tailgate so he can hit its target more accurately. So even though the numbers may not go up, and even though you don’t may not have fundamentally new nuclear weapons, you you take the chance to, and the opportunity to improve the capabilities of the weapons they can have inthe future.

Scott Horton 23:32
All right, so what do you make of all the new hypersonics ours and the other guys?

Hans Kristensen 23:38
Well, so that’s the next chapter in the arms race, of course, everybody is on that bandwagon. They were trying to get on it. And so at first here, the focus of that is conventional, but they’re also nuclear elements of it. The Russians have rushed into deployment a few missiles that have a hypersonic glide vehicle with a nuclear war. ahead, we’re seeing them working on other types of hypersonic weapons that have nuclear capability. But they tend to be dual capable, if nuclear is involved at all, we’re seeing the Chinese working on similar systems. They’ve even deployed already a, what appears to be a glide vehicle of some sort, for its rocket force. There’s some uncertainty about whether it’s nuclear, but hey, they’re certainly working on that. And the United States is, you know, obviously pointing to them saying, well, they’re doing it, so we need to do it. So there’s sort of a real crash program on the way to try to develop these capabilities. So we’re probably going to see some kind of hyper glide, or hypersonic capability for long range bombers, as well as for submarines and some surface ships. So this is really happening. Now. How much does that change? Does it make the world more dangerous? It certainly does in I think the regional scenario or where you were the timelines and the reaction time To these weapon systems will be much shorter. And so that will put all sides on their toes and be nervous, more nervous about what’s going on etc, etc. At the strategic level, I think it has less impact compared to the type of forces that are out there already now. So I think it’s more in the region you see this dynamic?

Scott Horton 25:18
Yeah, seems like the reaction time thing is everything right? If we have half an hour to decide if we’re really being nuked to death, then that’s already not very much time. If we have five minutes, then essentially, they’re almost guaranteed to choose believing the threat and reacting to it, to err on the safe side kill us.

Hans Kristensen 26:05
All right, exactly. It’s the worst of scenarios because you know, all sides inevitably get into this corner themselves, they paint themselves into this corner of worst case scenario, always have to assume and plan for the worst etc, etc. So, you know, stability becomes much more brittle. In that scenario, and it bothers me, it’s really, I’m really confused why? Why military powers want to go down that route? And because it decreases their security and that other LS. Yeah.

Scott Horton 26:16
Well, you know, I’m a bit of an extremist on this topic. But I wonder how far you go with me on the idea that Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, as much as they did to negotiate away our nuclear weapons stocks back then, that bill clinton right then could have picked up where they left off and negotiated an end to the entire global nuclear arms race and complete disarmament at that point, with the threat of the Soviet Union and world communism over that they could have just called the whole thing off. They didn’t have to be this way at all. We could have, I don’t know 10 nukes each, just to make sure nobody fights and then that’s it. But instead, it was just sort of like we’re talking about with this new start deal. that hey, we get to build a whole new Nuclear Weapons factory that’d be expensive. And the whole thing becomes a self licking ice cream cone. Even though we’re not talking about m 16. We’re talking about h bomb, you know?

Hans Kristensen 27:19
Yeah, I mean, you know, this business has a lot of sort of self serving dynamic in it an element of that. Absolutely. There were huge opportunity missed after the Cold War ended. We’re like you say, we could have fundamentally changed the role of nuclear weapons play and reduced Arsenal’s around the world didn’t happen for a variety of reasons and mistakes were made on all sides about this. And here we are. Now we’re seeing an invigoration of the role of nuclear weapons and an increase of them people countries are rattling the nucleus sort of each other again in a very old overt way. So things are definitely going back, but I can’t help them. I can’t help sort of remarkable so that one, one curious fact about the way that nuclear reductions happened. I looked at this closely. And it’s really interesting to see that the periods where most cuts or the biggest cuts happened, all were during the republican presidents. And it’s big. And there’s a dynamic between the White House and the Congress about why that is.

Scott Horton 28:27
So only Nixon can go to China, that kind of thing.

Hans Kristensen 28:30
Right? Right. Right. And democrats can have to be tough and all that kind of stuff and can’t be seen to be weak and so forth. But I just want to mention one other thing. I think on the on the issue here of nuclear weapons, I think it’s important to think about the problem of the issue of nuclear weapons not just as nuclear weapons in isolation because the role they play, and the reasons for why countries have them also have a lot to do with how they perceive the threat from conventional capabilities. So countries We’ll use nuclear weapons to some extent to compensate against what they think are inferior conventional forces. So there is a much more complex dynamic going on in terms of what shapes the direction that nuclear forces take, and what countries think they can do to reduce their role. So one of the things we’re seeing right now, that is in the context of a non proliferation in the context of the nuclear non proliferation treaty, the nuclear powers in that the P fives as they call, that’s the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China. They they’ve sort of found that, you know, a common theme where they’re trying to say to the other non nuclear weapon states, which is the predominant numbers of countries in that treaty, that Wait a minute, guys, it’s not just about us. It’s not just about nuclear, you also have to work to create the security conditions in the world so that it is possible to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons. So they’re trying to, you know, pass Quite a pass some of the responsibility on to other countries as well.

Scott Horton 30:04
Yeah. All right. I’m sorry, I could do this all day, but I gotta go. But thank you so much for your time, Hans. It’s really been great.

Hans Kristensen 30:10
Great. Thanks for having me.

Scott Horton 30:10
Alright you guys that is Hans M. Christensen. He is Associate Senior Fellow with Zypries nuclear disarmament arms control and non proliferation program and director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, and check out Tsipras new 2020 year book on global arms and especially on nukes. here@slippery.org Alright, y’all, and that has been anti war radio for this morning. Again, I’m your host, Scott Horton from anti war.com and author of the book fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan. Check out my full interview archive more than 5000 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton, org, and youtube.com slash Scott Horton show on here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine kpfk 90.7 FM in that way, see you.

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, Joe. Welcome to the Scott Horton show. I am the director of the libertarian Institute editorial director of anti war.com, author of the book fool’s errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org dot org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed full archive is also available@youtube.com. Slash Scott Horton Show. Hey guys on the line, I’ve got Jim Beauvoir. He wrote most of the books that are out including public policy hooligan, which I know you’ll love, and he’s been writing for us at the libertarian Institute. Thank goodness. This one is called Kosovo indictment proves Bill Clinton 10s Serbian war atrocities. That is at libertarian. institute.org Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Jim?

Jim Bovard 1:09
Hey, doing good. Scott, thanks for your kind words. Thanks for your encouragement to write that story. I’m glad

Scott Horton 1:14
you did. But I’m so confused because, geez, I seem to remember the Bill Clinton years being peace time, Jim. No.

Jim Bovard 1:24
Well, that’s true. I mean, that’s the fairy tale. I mean, it’s it’s sort of like the fairy tale that there was not any corruption scandals under the during the Obama administration. And the George W. Bush was more honest than he seemed at the time.

Scott Horton 1:39
Oh, yeah. He kept us safe. That said, you know, that one big thing?

Jim Bovard 1:45
Well, if you’re in the military, or if you’re Iraq or Afghan D or about 25 other nationalities, right? ethnic groups.

Scott Horton 1:56
Right on Okay, so I do remember 1999 Actually, I was just pretending. And so what happened was, is he was impeached but not removed. And then he celebrated by starting the war. Pretty much. Oh, and in fact, I guess we know right from Gail, she’s book that Hillary essentially wouldn’t talk to him unless he would bomb Serbia. And that was how they put their marriage back together after the Lewinsky scandal was based on spilling this blood. And so yeah, fancy that. Who? Who would have guessed that? Hmm. But anyway, well, so but it was all for good cause to say the people are what?

Jim Bovard 2:37
Well, the clinton folks said there was genocide going on the Serbs were guilty of genocide. The Clinton folks compared this Serbian leader to Hitler, and almost all the American media went along like, you know, train dogs and just follow the administration line and they tend to ignore the Carnage when the US and NATO allies blew up hospitals, trains marketplaces. And they didn’t really care when the US scattered cluster bombs all over the landscape, cluster bombs that would be going off for many years afterwards and maiming young children and

Scott Horton 3:19
deplete geranium.

Jim Bovard 3:21
There. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was so many, so many things that should have outraged Americans at the time. But they, but the most of the American media that bill clinton get away with this storyline of him as a great Savior, and the Serbs as a great demon. I mean, it’s surprising that the, the so many American policymakers had not learned the folly of getting into a quarrel about European borders, which was kind of what this was. But they weren’t deliberate. Well, you know, I hope we find out more details of what Clint knew and At the time, but what we already know is that the Clinton administration had previously condemned the Costco Liberation Army as a bunch of terrorists. That was accurate. But 1999 basically, as part of the PR scam, the KLA was, you know, magically turned into freedom fighters, and they were portrayed as heroes by the clinton ministration. And by much of the bootlicking American media.

Scott Horton 4:27
Yeah. And so, this war, I guess I could have clarified the beginning introducing the subject matter that the war was essentially to break off this province of Serbia, Kosovo to be an independent. somedays. Sort of pseudo state there, right.

Jim Bovard 4:43
Yeah, that was the that was the goal. I mean, it wasn’t I mean, what the clinton folks would usually say, Well, we’ve got to stop the ethnic cleansing and they, they were saying 100,000 people might have been killed or missing hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of their eyes. kind of embarrassing after the war ended, there were not, not the mass graves that the clinton folks had implied would be found. And you had a lot of dead Serbs. You had some dead ethnic Albanians. But you didn’t really have the carnage that the clinton folks used to justify bombing dog raid, which is, you know, it’s a European city. It’s a foreign capital, and it had done No, no harm to us, Bill Clinton felt morally obliged to, you know, blow the hell out of that city and the entire country of Serbia.

Scott Horton 5:33
Yeah. And, you know, it’s such an obvious bunch of crap at the time to 100,000 people have been killed when there’s no real reason to believe that other than, you know, the US and NATO’s claims at the time. And then, but the point being, though, that that was the weapons of mass destruction here, right, if Bill Clinton had not said 100,000, but it said, Well, you know, some fighters are being killed in the fighting, then that would not have been a pretext. For war 100,000 was, you know the magic number, right? Like when your odometer rolls over to 100,000? And you’re like, yeah, it’s a that’s a big round number man to go a bunch of dead civilians. And then it turned out that that wasn’t true at all that it was a few thousand almost all fighting age males whose bodies were found in Aftermath there.

Jim Bovard 6:21
Well, yeah, I mean 100,000 makes a nice headline. But there have been so many times where the US government was, you know, use similar storylines to justify Carnage, Carnage, launch and Carnage abroad. But I was fascinated at the time of the war to see you know, you know, day after day there was a video of the US bombing the Chinese Embassy there is the the intentional bombing of the radio television headquarters of Serbia. There is bombing these bridges, there’s bombing of this, and it’s, you know, having fun having read a lot about World War Two history and the history of some of the subsequent wars is like, Well, you know, we’re killing a lot of innocent people. But it did not seem as if that registered with much of the American media. I, you know, I was I tried to sell some articles criticizing the war at the time as like, you know, Irish need not apply. There was just almost no collards for criticism as far as from the editors who I dealt with.

Scott Horton 7:29
Yeah, another big part of it at the time, two boys were just gonna bomb for the weekend. It’d be easy, and they’ll do what we say after that.

Jim Bovard 7:38
And then it turned out to be 78 days and wrecked much of the country and, you know, it was kind of embarrassing. They also went and blew the hell out of at least one refugee column of ethnic Albanians. And there was systemic lying by the Pentagon about the atrocities which were unleashed by the bombing, communist same thing that happens after Every war but there was there was a level of media gullibility is a phrase that came to mind but it’s not. That’s the you know, we need a much harsher phrase. Because it was as if the the most of the American media turned off their bowls, radars. As soon as a bomb started to drop.

Scott Horton 8:24
Yeah. Hey, as long as it’s not another sex scandal good enough for us. They cried. You know, and Meanwhile, the lady from CNN married the guy from the State Department right in the middle of the thing.

Jim Bovard 8:37
Well, that that probably explains something so you know what? No. But

Scott Horton 8:45
you know what they agreed before they got married. They agreed about the board. Oh, yeah. I think the car came after the horse for sure there. But what a confluence though. Hmm.

Jim Bovard 8:57
Well, I mean, there are so many different levels of You know, in which the US media utterly failed in this war, as did the clinton ministration. And, you know, as usual, when the truth came out long after the bombing, it stopped. I probably got 2% as much coverage as the lies that got that were promulgated during the war. So that’s part of the reason Americans are a lot of Americans are so gullible when the politicians trying to drag us into another war,

Scott Horton 9:28
right. Yeah, we always find out the horrible truth. It’s out there on every single one of them, but we just find out later, that’s the problem.

Jim Bovard 9:36
Well, most people find out later, but I mean, if folks are watching I mean, I, if memory serves, there was much better coverage of the Serbian war and the US bombing campaign of NATO, US bombing campaign of Serbia better coverage in the European press than the American press. But that’s not surprising.

Scott Horton 9:55
Yep. In fact, there’s a story there about antiwar.com where they had sources They’re who were going living through the war. And we’re running original stories at that time. And that was their first, you know, big thing. I remember driving down the road listening to talk radio, and hearing some war propaganda. And then the caller says, That’s not true, man. It’s on anti war.com right now that Oh, that’s great story is this or that? That was I had seen them once before in in 98. Or maybe earlier in 99. I had seen the site and I’d seen that they were libertarians. And then I remember hearing about them on the radio then and thinking all right, man,

Jim Bovard 10:35
I should let him a little Did you? Yeah. A little Did you know that? That the anti war would become your life mission?

Scott Horton 10:43
Yeah, seriously? Hey, it’s a great website. You know, what am I going to do build my own website and just write these guys, coattails. They’re doing a good job.

Jim Bovard 10:52
All right. Yeah. And it was such a good website. 20 years later, they still have it.

Scott Horton 10:58
Yeah. And it’s still good. Just before you interviewed Dave decamp and Jason did from news.antiwar.com because I had all

Jim Bovard 11:06
that good that’s good. Well okay, I will I will I will not make any rude comments about the website

Scott Horton 11:12
yeah you better not okay it’s been since about the start of Iraq war two that we had a redesign if that’s really gonna say for the front page anyway, yeah, no game. It’s still important website on the internet though. No question about it to me.

Jim Bovard 11:28
Um, yeah, I wasn’t aware the website was that new?

Scott Horton 11:33
Yeah, got me. Oh,

hey, I’ll check it out. The libertarian Institute. That’s me and my friends have published three great books this year. First is no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Greg. He was the best one of us. Now he’s gone. But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom. I know you’ll love it. And there’s coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richmond. It’s a collection of 48 Important essays he’s written over the years about the truth behind the Israel Palestine conflict. You’ll learn so much and highly valued this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation. And last but not least, is the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton show, interviews 2004 through 2019 interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years, on all the wars, money taxes, the police state and more. So how do you like that? Pretty good, right? Find them all at libertarian institute.org slash books. Hey, you guys may know I’m involved in some libertarian party politics this year, but you can’t hear or read about that at the libertarian Institute due to 501 c three rules and such. So make sure to sign up for the interviews feed at Scott horton.org and keep an eye on my blog at Scott Horton. org slash stress. Hey, y’all Scott here, if you want to real education History and economics he should check out Tom Woods is Liberty classroom. Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn’t teach you in school but should have follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Horton. org for Tom Woods is Liberty classroom. Hey, Louis, let’s talk about this indictment. That proves Bill Clinton’s Serbian war atrocities. You started to bring that up and then I changed the subject to something else or something. But you were talking about the KLA these been last night at least tide gangster terrorists that America fought that war for and but what’s this indictment and who’s indicted and what’s it matter and proven What?

Jim Bovard 13:46
Okay, well, this is where I’ll tap your expertise on pronunciation.

Scott Horton 13:54
I’ve only ever read it quietly to myself. So I don’t know.

Jim Bovard 13:58
Well I’ve never pretended to be fluent in Albanian but So anyhow, casado, President hushing that Sachi was charged with 10 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague. He was charged with murder and forced disappearance of persons persecution torture. He and the other folks charged are accused of being criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders. And prior to this, the the the bosses of the KLA have been linked to body trafficking, where they would kidnap people often serves that this is the allegation and then murder them and then sell their body parts, which is kind of bad even for a you know, terrorist group. So but so it’s not surprising this guy was indicted because the US government the State Department was saying similar things about the cat KLA 22 years ago, prior to them becoming sainted freedom fighters, but it’s it’s interesting to see how this guy’s career is gone. Now, there’s a lot of, you know, a lot of corruption in Costco. It’s one of the more corrupt nations in the world according to Transparency International. The political situation there is not good. But but they have a statue of Bill Clinton right in the in the capital city, and I think there’s a bill clinton Boulevard. I’m not sure if there’s a Monica Monica Lewinsky back alley, but you know, we’ll let that go. But, and Bill Clinton was there last year for the 10th anniversary of the I guess the statue being unveiled. He had Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State were treated like rock stars when they pose with this guy that just got indicted that tea and Clinton declares I love this country and it will be always wanted The greatest honors of my life Dave stood with you against ethnic cleansing and for freedom. And so, so thoughts he gave Clinton and Albright The, the local version of metals of freedom. And it’s like, Well, okay, so they got the same bullet there, which which we got here as far as Presidential Medal of Freedom. But Albright is interesting because she was one of the most fanatic people in favor of bombing Belgrade. Very, you know, in favor of bombing Serbia. She’s, she’s more recently reinvented herself as a visionary warning against the dangers of fascism, but I would think that launching a bombing campaign that kills a lot of innocent civilians. Yeah, maybe it’s not fastest, but it’s also you know, you know, as part of her permanent record, but but the American media, again treats her like she’s a visionary when she should be known as being the butcher of Belgrade.

Scott Horton 16:59
Absolutely. You know that rumble yay accord, which was this was a peace deal. Well, go ahead tell him. No, no, I can tell I triggered you there, Jim.

Jim Bovard 17:09
Ah, yeah, I think you’re a little more fluid on the details. Base. Our call was a crock. And it was, you know, it was a bolster ultimatum to the Serbs, that the I think even Kissinger said it was obvious that they would never accepted. But the whole point was given a pretext for to start bombing. Now. It’s it might be in that sense, similar to the Australian demands to Serbia in 1914, after the assassination of the Archduke.

Scott Horton 17:39
Yeah. And which, by the way, you know, she could have really tried to negotiate there. It was such an obvious fake pretext. I mean, the the one thing that was the deal killer was that they had to agree to allow NATO troops to occupy the entire country of Serbia. Apparently like up to and including the presidential palace or whatever. You know, all of it. Yeah.

Jim Bovard 18:01
And I come on. Yeah, it was a completely bullshit demand. That was that was mostly ignored by the American press. I mean, I think there were some very good European British, maybe john pillager, as well wrote about that at the time, but for the American press as well, the Serbs are unreasonable. We made them an offer. And it’s kind of like, Well, yeah, it’s like having an offer by the local police. Well, okay. We don’t have a search warrant. But we’re going to occupy your house for the next five years. Yep. Yeah, I don’t think so.

Scott Horton 18:33
Yeah. And you make the point here, too, about how this really helped to set up sort of the background of the argument for rack war two that, hey, if the democrats can have a war to save the people in Serbia, of course, the Republicans can have a war to save the people of Iraq. And of course, if we can’t get a UN resolution to authorize it, we’ll just do it anyway.

Jim Bovard 18:53
Yeah, and I mean, it was a Clinton’s war in Serbia. It’s, it’s a Pandora’s box. And there’s evil still coming out of that it’s set a precedent for humanitarian intervention, military humanitarian intervention, to stop ethnic cleansing genocide. That was how it was sold. And the fact there turned out to be complete both was irrelevant because the politicians, the media manage to sell it. So it was a similar arguments that bush used for the US has to bring democracy to Iraq. summer when Obama used to justify bombing Libya, and Trump Trump’s people probably said similar things on Syria, but they’ve talked so much contradictory bs it’s hard to keep track. Yeah.

Scott Horton 19:44
All right. Now listen, man, I want to talk about this thing that you wrote for the American Conservative to about the Korean War. And there you go. They say it’s the Forgotten War. But you know, don’t forget Afghanistan. That’s another Forgotten War. Don’t forget, you know, Somalia. We forget that when every day, but this one boy it’s really important what happened there and there’s so many things about the world right now that trace themselves back to the crisis back then. And you got into the real, you know, nitty gritty of just who’s the good guys and the bad guys when America intervenes over in these countries to save the people, again, the same kind of narrative like we’re talking about in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, that we’re America is Superman and the Christopher Reeve you know, Richard Donner Superman just trying his best to liberate France from the Nazis just like always, and but it doesn’t always and in fact, the French got bombed the hell out of two during that people don’t know about that but talk about the Korean War for the people because most of them don’t know thing about it.

Jim Bovard 20:58
Well, the the point of my opinion was the biggest lesson of the Korean one of the biggest lessons of the Korean War was to never trust the Pentagon on atrocities. There was there were a lot of atrocities by US forces, certainly a lot of atrocities by communists as well. But the thing about a lot of the American atrocities was that they were mandated by the top level, the military command and the State Department. They were ordered to shoot civilian refugees who were coming close to American lines. There was a case in July 1950, in which the US playing submachine guns scraped a bunch of Korean refugees for three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children were killed. There was a This was you know, this vanished for 49 years until the Associated Press brought it out and talked about and expose the mask read the bridge of no gun rye which is might or might not be pronouncing right. So the AP story sparked a big investigation a year and a half later at the end of the Clinton administration, Pentagon issues a 300 page report proving that the massacre was it was an unfortunate tragedy, simply caused by Trigger Happy soldiers. And President Clinton commented that, you know, that he did that he didn’t have to offer an apology. Because, you know, the because the people who looked at it in the Pentagon had said it was not a deliberate act. It wasn’t decided the high enough level in the hierarchy to acknowledge that the US government had participated in something terrible

Scott Horton 22:42
it’s just the National Guard on the night shift man some bad apples, you know how it goes.

Jim Bovard 22:46
Yeah, but and so I mean, what intrigued me on this was an okay, so you had a pentagon claim you do a thorough investigation. 300 pages. Four years later, you’ve got a Harvard University doctoral student History. Sar Conway Lance. He found a letter in the archives, showing that the US ambassador to Korea had sent to the Assistant Secretary of State, Dean Rusk on the on the day that massacre started saying that it would be US policy if you see the refugees from the north, you know, fire a warning shot and then shoot them. In those those rules of engagement were sent to the US troops prior to the massacre. Same guy Conway Lance comes back the following year, finds a lot more stuff and shows that the you know, inferences are inefficient artificial army history said it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night. So it doesn’t say except for women and children. No they were moving. There was a US aircraft carrier justified attacking civilians because the army said that groups of more than eight to 10 people should be considered troops and work To be attacked. Okay, so army does another investigation Two years later, there was no policy author authorizing troops to shoot refugees never never gave such orders. Associated Press goes back finds more dirt. My name is Charles Handley that did some great work on this and finds a lot more evidence that the US government had mandated this. And there were a former Air Force pilots who said that they were told to stray through refugees, time and again, the South Koreans launch their own truth and reconciliation reconciliation commission and find a lot of other horrendous atrocities by the US and allies as well as by communists. But it was obvious from the get go that there had been that the US rules of engagement were horrendous. General Curtis, Curtis LeMay said that we burned down every town in North Korea and summit, South Korea. 2 million civilians could have been killed in that war. And yet what the Pentagon did was bottled up so that the truth was found out by historians and not by the policymakers. The facts about these massacres finally came out 10 presidencies later. And, you know, people something I hear as a journalist all the time. Well, truth will out. I said, Yeah, well, you know, I’m holding my breath on this 110 presidencies later. And it was tragic, because you had rules of engagement that were horrendous for Korea. And because they were covered up, you have the same rules in Afghanistan as a rules in Vietnam, and the same rules in Iraq, and to a lesser degree in Afghanistan. And you had vast numbers of civilian casualties, most of which the government swept under the rug.

Scott Horton 25:53
Yeah. Now, that’s a really important point that hey, if they had been forced Somehow, I don’t know by Congress or something.

Jim Bovard 26:01
Oh, yeah,

Scott Horton 26:02
to tell the truth about this then

Jim Bovard 26:05
I was I was too soon. They’re having some good people on congress who pushed on this, but most of the time they have ducked and run. I mean, I think the experience with Ellsberg, Ellsberg was begging senators to take those Pentagon paid right and public whether everyone was a coward except for Mike gravel,

Scott Horton 26:23
right. Yeah, it’s certainly true. But anyway, just in the pretend of vertical there that it might have made a difference in Vietnam. If before Vietnam, there had really been a big scandal about the atrocities in Korea instead of a bunch of PR nonsense about how heroic and innocent it all was.

Jim Bovard 26:44
Yeah, and there’s a second wrinkle on this and that is that the you know, that the Pentagon, you know, once this controversy flared up in 1999. What they did is take their frontline soldiers the the, the, the, the right For many others, they threw them under the bus because yeah, it was their fault. It wasn’t it was the fault of the military high command. And this is, you know, that’s unsavory.

Scott Horton 27:12
Yeah. Well, and then there was another one where it was just one earthquake and a mudslide or something revealed this giant mass grave a few years ago.

Jim Bovard 27:21
Oh, interesting. And this is in Korea.

Scott Horton 27:23
Yeah, in South Korea. Okay. And I think it was all just falsely accused. Look, they’re all reds kill them. In fact, I want to go back to this thing about the airstrikes since I’m springing that one on you. People can look that up. The bodies were revealed in the mud and it became a big scandal. But now they were citing as you say, in your article here, they were saying, well, geez, we’re afraid that infiltrators might be coming across if they’re North Korean refugees, who would make sense that they would, you know, infiltrate a communist agent in there. So I don’t know how likely that was or what damage they thought those people could do. Or If the South Korean government had just said that they had no ability whatsoever to separate, who was who or what? The actual circumstances, but then they decided that based on that, just kill them all. There’s a giant group of refugees coming across from the north. Which for all, you know, that it’s the North Korean right wing that’s fleeing the communist tear who wants to all be South Koreans now or if I’m just waking it up, right.

Jim Bovard 28:28
yeah, yeah, Scott. And there’s a second rake on this because the military guidelines were for people who were north of the front line and their front lines and Korea shifted all over the place. So it was likely it’s at some times, a lot of those rough refugees would have been South Korean. So because who were fleeing the communist Yeah. So, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because they were, you know, you’d ask about the bombing campaign. It was fascinating how the US military kept expanding its definition of military target. And it eventually became any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies. And they would both I mean, it was it was kind of like back in Vietnam, you had body counts that were mostly BS. But during the career war, you had Air Force press releases that bragged about the square footage of enemy held buildings. And me held buildings. Does that include the peasants?

Scott Horton 29:31
Yep. Yeah, no, I mean, there’s a quote from I think, MacArthur I don’t know who but it’s a prominent one of the people who was certainly in a position over there who talked about we didn’t leave one brick stacked on top of another. Well, they had just burnt they napalm the whole damn country to the ground there.

Jim Bovard 29:50
Well, it was a very aggressive lot of innocent people were killed and that’s you know, it’s it’s a it’s an active legacy in North Korea. I mean, they’ve got a horrible government. But I mean, there’s a reason they still hate us. So

Scott Horton 30:07
yeah. Well, you know, I’m glad you brought that up because it seems like you know, I’m not for government doing things or anything, but it seems like they could really make peace with North Korea right now, based on a big apology for Harry Truman. And what happened back then, and that man if it was us, we wouldn’t kill though y’all like that as terrible man, you know, Harry Truman is burning in hell for sure. In a, probably a giant vat of napalm, but still, we can get along now. And since America is the 6 trillion ton gorilla and all of that stuff, that we could just drop all the sanctions and open up trade and just be nice and sign a peace treaty formalizing an end to that old war and just really push the know hard feelings line as hard as we could and have a perfectly normal relationship with North Korea. After all this time, it wouldn’t really cost us anything at all.

Jim Bovard 31:08
I don’t know. Maybe that would help. Maybe it would work. I don’t know. I’m, I don’t know, the North Korean government that well, they seem like they’re batshit crazy pretty often, but it’s unfortunate one of the changes over the last 32 years is that American leaders have become too proud to apologize for American atrocities. And the example that comes to mind is the 1988 when the US a US I guess, aircraft carrier, whatever destroyer shot down an Iranian passenger jet and killed what like 300 civilians, it was a mistaken identity. And I think memory serves President Reagan said, basically, you know, it wasn’t groveling, but I think he did signal you know, some type of apology say was sorry, whereas doing George HW Bush basically said, Well, I’ll never apologize for anything the US government does. That’s not his exact phrase. But that was just so bad. He was running for president.

Scott Horton 32:10
Yeah. You know, he said, I don’t care what the facts are.

Jim Bovard 32:14
There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So whereas Ronald Reagan had the class, if my memory is correct on the US to at least make some statement. So, but no, I mean, that’s, that’s going back. I can’t recall. Similar things like that from the time. I mean, there was a president obama did a tour and made apologies for things that happened long before he was born. But that’s not the same

Scott Horton 32:44
Yeah Well, it seems like they have so much to gain and we have so much to offer that. And, you know, if I was president, I’d be like, let me tell you about Harry Truman. All right, and then spit on the ground and it’d be clear that I hate him as much as they do. And, and we all should and it’s fine. And I think that would be a great first step toward establishing trust, you know? Well, Scott with that attitude towards premium afraid you’ll never be on the PBS NewsHour. You know, I, I’m pretty much betting that that’s not the case. In fact, I’ll go ahead and tell you a funny thing. The young Americans for liberty, we’re trying to get john bolton to debate me on this PR people were really working on it for a long time, but then they only told him kind of later in the process who it was that he was supposed to go up against. And they answered back that yet no, he is not going to be debating Scott Horton from antiwar.com. So Isn’t that great?

Jim Bovard 33:42
Find a way to use that for your fundraising seriously.

Scott Horton 33:46
Yeah, I might Could I don’t know man, because on one hand, I know I could spin it like Haha, he’s afraid of me or something. But the reality is that he’s hot right now and why would he debate me You know, that’s really Really the answer why he wouldn’t do it.

Jim Bovard 34:02
So it doesn’t matter. I’d spin it. So I guess I might I mean, it’s funny. It’s funny

Scott Horton 34:08
Yeah. You know, Bill Kristol agreed to do it, but and they were trying to get him to come to Austin and sort of combine the whale thing with the Jean Epstein debate in New York. But crystal didn’t want to come to Austin. So I think we’re still on to debate someday in New York, but I don’t know when that might be.

Jim Bovard 34:27
Well, I hope you I think you’re fine with him.

Scott Horton 34:31
And he’s the same difference as john bolton mostly so that’d be fine.

Jim Bovard 34:41
I think he’s a little more polished. And john bolton has a record that you can nail on so that’s that’s a huge difference.

Scott Horton 34:43
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Bill Kristol is he was dan quayle speechwriter, but other than that, it wasn’t exactly his fault. Just a lot.

Jim Bovard 34:55
Dan quills brain.

Scott Horton 34:57
Yeah, man. Wouldn’t that be a great title to carry on? with you.

Jim Bovard 35:01
Legacy

Scott Horton 35:03
Yeah, man, that and a few other things. All right. Well, listen, I’m glad you wrote about this in the American Conservative. I hope people go and read it because it’s, you really do make a lot of great points in here about that war and this specific war crime and the broader context and all this stuff. I do hope people will check that out. It’s at the American Conservative calm. The Korean War atrocities, no one wants to talk about. And then of course also at the libertarian Institute, Kosovo indictment proves Bill Clinton’s Serbian war atrocities. Thank you for that, Jim, and thank you for your time on the show again, my friend.

Jim Bovard 35:42
Hey, thanks so much,

Scott Horton 35:44
Scott. The Scott Horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com Scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right shall welcome Scott Horton show. I am the director of the libertarian Institute editorial director of anti war.com, author of the book fool’s errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org dot org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed full archive is also available@youtube.com. Slash Scott Horton show. Archie guys on the line I’ve got Dave de Kamp again, he is assistant news editor at anti war calm that’s news dot anti war.com. And also at original dynamic Werner comm find his opinion pieces in the right hand margin there. Welcome back. How you doing, Dave?

Dave DeCamp 0:58
I’m good Scott. Thanks for having me back.

Scott Horton 1:00
Very happy to have you here. Important things to talk about starting with the single most important thing in the world. And that’s not opinion. It’s a scientific fact, presuming the importance of the continued existence of humanity at all to you. Seems like a probably commonly accepted premise. America and Russia are in the midst of nuclear arms talks in Vienna, Austria. Tell me every single thing you know and have to say about it, please, sir.

Dave DeCamp 1:30
Well, okay, so the so US and Russia they met for talks this week, Monday and Tuesday, in Vienna, as the New START treaty. The Strategic Arms reduction treaty is set to expire in February 2021. And that’s the last major arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. And that limits the amount of nuclear warheads that they can have deployed and also, importantly, It includes verification regime, which allows up to 18 on site inspections per year meaning the US can go inspect Russia’s nukes and the rock and Russia can go inspect the the US and Russia has offered to extend this treaty because it could it could be extended for five years if both sides agree. And the Trump administration has rejected that saying that they want China to be involved. So they keep inviting China to these talks. And now, you got to look at the nuclear arsenals all these countries so the stockpile for Russia in the United States, it’s around 6000 for each and that’s including old warheads that are set to be like dismantled their stockpiles of active warheads. Right now the US has about 3800 Russia has about I think 4300 somewhere around there. Now China current estimates put their stockpile at 320 which is, you know, significantly smaller so that China has no interest in participating in these Talks, and they’ve said it over and over again. So when the talk started on Monday, Marshall Billingsley, he’s Trump’s envoy for arms control, he posted a photo on Twitter kind of like a cheap stunt of empty chairs, like Chinese flags around saying, oh, China’s a no show and and that, you know, they’re still secretly building nukes. And but, like, China told Billingsley in the United States that there was nothing, everybody knew that they weren’t gonna show up. They have no interest in in participating in these talks. But the US still is keeping the conversation about China and Russia. Is th

Scott Horton 3:42
re anything honest about that? They’re really trying to strong arm the Chinese into joining the talks are they really just this is the most obvious charade as a poison pill sort of an excuse to screw up the talks with the Russians has nothing to do with China at a

Dave DeCamp 3:55
l. That’s what it looks like to me because like I said, I mean, just the difference. In the amount of nukes that they have, and it’s expected that China can double their arsenal within the next 10 years, which would put their stockpile at 600 something. And right now the New START treaty limits the amount of warheads that they could have deployed at, like 1500 and 50. Which even if China doubles their arsenal, it doesn’t even come close to that. I mean, you know, when Russia has said it’s unrealistic, they they’re kind of they kind of seem annoyed by this whole stunt by the US because they their argument is okay, well, let’s get France and fall because France is 300 warheads. Let’s get Britain involved. They the UK is about just over 200 I think. So. Yeah, I really just think it’s just the charade. And I mean, this, it makes sense to get if you want to get talk to China about nuclear arms control, but I mean, the US would have to make a real big statement and really start dismantling their stockpile if they want if they want to. work on it with China where, you know, reducing, reducing their stockpile, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything honest about it to me. talks are are over for now. They only lasted two days, not many details have come out. US is still saying they want China involved. Russia’s you know, saying it’s unrealistic and they’re supposed to start again at the end of July. And they established what they call like working groups. So it is they want to replace the new start with something else. But I just don’t. I just don’t see it happeni

Scott Horton 5:30
g. Yeah, well, no. Was there any discussion? Do you know about the intermediate nuclear forces treaty or the open skies treaty, both of which have now been abandon

Dave DeCamp 5:41
d? Yeah. Now in these new talks, not that I heard. But yeah, that’s a good thing to bring up the open skies Treaty, which the Trump administration just announced they’re withdrawing from which allows surveillance over this signatories countries which is US and Russia and many other countries, a lot of NATO countries have signed on. It and INF Treaty which prohibited the development of nuclear and ballistic missiles, you know, medium range nuclear and ballistic missiles, which the Trump administration pulled out of, you know, they always cite Russian violation, but it doesn’t look like they ever tried to really negotiate. Because I mean, the Pentagon was developing those missiles that were banned under the INF like, the next week. They’re testing them. And now they’re actually trying to put them around China. So, yeah, it’s becoming much more dangerous word.

Scott Horton 6:34
Yeah. And you know, of course, if it’s true, and apparently it is I guess no best information is maybe there really is something to the idea that the Russians were violating the treaty by creating these medium range missiles, but they were deploying them along their frontier with China, not introduce them into Eastern Europe at all. I mean, obviously, that could change. But it didn’t seem like it was just a loophole. For them to invent medium range missiles to get around their treaty with the US. It was because I mean, they don’t need long range missiles for China. They share frontier there, you know? Yeah. And so but then the Americans, it was quite clear. In fact, Chas Freeman, who’s authoritative on this issue, who was with Nixon when they shook hands with mouse a tongue and opened up China? He was saying that, yeah, no. Yes, it’s right that the Americans wanted out of the INF Treaty, so that they too could confront China with these intermediate range nuclear missiles, which, you know, I’m no nuclear war strategist, but I don’t see what difference that makes compared to America’s pre existing ability to nuke China with submarines or long range missiles or bombers, whatever they want anyway. But so they’re willing to to risk reintroducing intermediate range missiles into Europe and escalating the nuclear arms race with Russia in Europe, because both America and Russia want these nukes for confronting China is completely bananas. Yeah. And a few hundred million people in Europe who might dispute that. That’s worth it, you know? Yeah.

Dave DeCamp 8:29
And then But back to this Marshall Billings, the guy who’s heading these talks, you know, he’s not sending the best signals to Russia. Before the talks he he said that if a new nuclear arms race starts that the US is prepared to spend Russia and China into oblivion was the quote. So he doesn’t seem too interested in actually making a deal here. And another thing that happened Earlier this month, it was revealed last week was the the Senate Armed Services Committee. They put aside $10 million in their version of the NDA, to yearly Pentagon spending bill to resume live nuclear testing. Which is alarming. Because there was a story in the Washington Post in May that that the Trump administration was disgusting, doing live tests. Some people dismissed it because like the preparation to actually go into that is is a lot. But this is a little This was Tom Cotton’s idea, which is no surprise. So this is the senate version of the NDA. It might end in the Senate and the House, you know, they have to negotiate their version. What goes to Trump’s desk. This might have some pushback in the house to the money for the for the live test, but yeah, it’s definitely alarming. It looks like we’re gearing up for a new nuclear arms race here.

Scott Horton 10:00
Yeah, I love that whole thing about spin them into oblivion. Is that a thing? A country can be spent into oblivion Hmm. And we’ve seen that before. Is that right? And yeah, we know that that can’t happen here because wat goes Way? Anyway, yeah, me and my bad grammar. Hey man, you guys are gonna love No dev no ops no ID by Hussein bodek Johnny. It’s a fun and interesting read all about how to run your high tech company. Like a good libertarian should forget all the junk. Read no dev no Ops, no it by Hussein bodek. Johnny, find it in the margin. It’s Scott horton.org. Hey, y’all, here’s the thing. Donate $100 to the Scott Horton show, and you can get a QR code commodity disk. As my gift to you. It’s a one ounce silver disc With a QR code on the back, you take a picture of with your phone, and it gives you the instant spot price. And lets you know what that silver that ounces silver is worth on the market and Federal Reserve Notes in real time. It’s the future of currency in the past to commodity discs.com. Or just go to Scott Horton. org slash donate. Hey guys, Scott Horton here for expand designs calm. Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing building and maintaining my sites. And they’ll do great work for you need a new website? Go to expand designs comm slash Scott and say 500 bucks. All right, let’s talk about one of our many wars in the Middle East, this time Yemen and in fact this is the sub War Within the Yemen war. This is the split between the southern separatists the southern Transitional Council as it’s called, and their us He allies who had an alliance previously with the Saudi and American back, Totti government, but then they’ve had some troubles and back again, can you fill us in there?

Dave DeCamp 12:15
Yeah, um, there’s been a lot of fighting between the STC and how these government the biggest battle looks like, was the island of kotra. If I’m saying that, right. They, this DC took it from the hottie government. And you know, they raised their flag of South Yemen, the former country that was disbanded in 1991, North and South turned into the Yemen, the borders that we know today. And then they it seemed like the Saudis brokered a ceasefire, because they don’t want to have to deal with these guys in the south while they’re having so much trouble with the Houthis. But Jason just wrote a story yesterday on Thursday that it looks like that ceasefire did not last long enough. I think at least 54 fighters were killed in the in the southern province of Yon, which is where the STC are. So yeah, so it looks like they still have a big headache in the south there the Saudis and the Saudi government that they’re fighting to reinstate the war is not going well for them.

Scott Horton 13:20
And then I mean, when we say the Hadi government, is there actually land that they control anywhere?

Dave DeCamp 13:28
Yeah, there is. There is land that they control. They technically control Aden, the port city of Aden. I mean, when

Scott Horton 13:37
they have an alliance with STC they

Dave DeCamp 13:39
do that’s true. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s real. It is complicat

Scott Horton 13:43
d. They occupy the Radisson in Riya

Dave DeCamp 13:46
h. Yeah, yeah. Well, it does. Yeah. Yeah,

Scott Horton 13:54
the rebels have ruled the capital city for five and a half years now but they’re still rebels. The guy hiding in a hotel in another country is the government there.

Dave DeCamp 14:05
Yeah. And you all know that it’s important to know that the area under Houthi control, that’s where 70% of the population is. And there’s been a lot of aid cuts lately. The World Food Program, USA D. and the UN cut a lot of programs. And I know it might seem kind of silly. It’s like the United States is the country that is causing the crisis there and also giving them aid. But when you have a population, I mean, it’s like 80% of them are reliant on this aid. There’s no blockade on the country like they need it, or people are gonna really I mean, people are dying people are starving. But these aid cuts are, are, are no good when you have such a big population relying on it.

Scott Horton 14:50
Yeah. All right. So let’s talk about the annexation of the West Bank, which is imminent now. was the 26th. We’re talking here. And they say on the first of July, they’re going to outright annex how much of the West Bank day.

Dave DeCamp 15:11
Well, so the Trump peace plan out the amount of land allocated to Israel in the Trump peace plan. So he’s paint peace in quotes. There was the parts of the Jordan Valley and the settlements, most of the settlements, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which it made about 30% of the West Bank. And now Netanyahu, he wants to do the whole thing, you know, unilateral annexation of those areas. But he’s having trouble with Benny ganz who’s the defense minister and they brokered a power sharing deal after the there’s like three back to back elections and and that putting either one in power, so ganz is set to take Over next year, and for the United US officials have said for Netanyahu to get the green light he needs to work out with ganz and ganz is a little more cautious. Yeah, he’s not. He wants the same areas to be under, you know, Israeli sovereignty. He wants to annex the same areas, but he wants to do more cautiously. He’s worried about the King Abdullah in Jordan and peace treaties with Egypt and kind of inflaming the region because, you know, that’s, I mean, that’s gonna happen if Israel takes all that land, it’s gonna be a lot of violence is gonna erupt. And then there is meetings this week between you know, Kushner and Friedman and all the US officials involved in this Pompei. I think Trump was involved. And it looks like nothing publicly really came out. They’re supposed to make a decision that apparently they did it, but I mean, mondo, I was reading on Mondo Weiss that it looks like Like they did come to a decision yet some sources. Were saying that it looks like they’re going to start with just two settlement blocks for now. So it’s going to be kind of a gradual thing, which was a big, which was under consideration that the whole time. That’s kind of what Kant’s was saying, like a process of annexation.

Scott Horton 17:21
Yeah, establishing facts on the ground, they call it so. But I mean, that would make a bit of difference. If you know, public relations wise, I guess if they slow it down and do it in smaller steps here. I read just a headline. So I won’t characterize the article too bad because I don’t know exactly what it said. But it’s known as the headline, I think, at the Washington Post, you know, opinion page where they were saying that, you know, if this happens, then the Palestinians The danger is that they will be deprived of hope. And then of course, you know, I don’t know how cynical the actual piece was. But the reality of that is, of course, the word false should be in brackets right there before hope. And the point being that the Palestinians might be driven to absolute despair at this point where now they no longer by the propaganda campaign, that some day, if they just hold their horses, they’ll get their Palestinian state. And now that they’ll know that they will never have independence, then they’ll have nothing to lose and things will get worse for Israel. You know, that’s, of course, the way it’s all framed. But yeah, seems like there’s a real danger that right, like, why not have another Intifada at that point?

Dave DeCamp 18:40
Yeah, no, you’re right. I mean, they will have nothing to lose at that point. And and that does seem to be the concern, because some democrats are speaking out about annexation, but it’s all about how it’s gonna affect Israel. It’s not that they really care about the Palestinians.

Scott Horton 18:53
It goes to show how cynical the entire Oslo process has been and the remnants of it and the different so called You know, peace process campaigns under clinton, Bush and Obama and all the way through right now. It’s all hoax.

Dave DeCamp 19:08
Yeah. And it’s there’s so many. There’s so many things that play to like a lot of the settlers, the settler like leaders. They don’t think Trump’s plan is enough, because they don’t want to be in like what they call enclaves. They don’t want to be in Israeli territory surrounded by Palestinian territory. And that, you know, they don’t want a Palestinian state at all. And then Yahoo has said if he goes through the full annexation, no Palestinians are going to become Israeli citizens. And there will be no desert like state and he won’t and one of the concessions Israel’s supposed to make under the plan was a settlement freeze for like four years. And he says there’s gonna be no settlement freeze. So I mean, then then Yahoo just just wants to land and wants to just continue to creep into the rest of the territory in the West Bank. And I mean, he what the Palestinians are desperate, I mean, This plan is just ridiculous. If you ever if you look at the map, the there’s like Israeli only roads going through the West Bank and it’s just it really just like makes apartheid rule official, you know?

Scott Horton 20:15
Right, which is a major, you know, rhetorical change anyway, I mean life, I don’t know how much it’s really going to change for the people in Palestine. But you know, it’s not just the Palestinians who’ve been put off by this narrative of the two state solution. It’s, you know, the governments of Western Europe have at least hid behind it, of course, and American liberal Zionist Jews who support the State of Israel, but who don’t support the subjugation of the Palestinians have been able to have it both ways. For now 30 years since or more What? Yes, 30 years almost since Oslo saying that Well, yeah, no, look, what’s happening is wrong. But we could fix it if only we just didn’t have Sharon or didn’t have Netanyahu or whoever the problem is this or that particular point. But someday, once they have independence, and it’ll be fine, and we can have our Israel or the Israelis can have their Israel and the Palestinians can have their Palestine. But now they can’t really hide behind believing that anymore, because now No, no. Well, as you just said, it’s cranking up the official status of the apartheid system there. What do you do when Israel takes all the land and they take all the people to I mean, they’re essentially kidnapped and what the hell is going on here? And how is anybody supposed to rationalize it now that they can’t hide behind the Oslo process that really broke down back in 1995. And which wasn’t really going to grant them a Palestinian state anyway, if you look closely at it, but still, I mean, so now, the game is up as far as that goes, and so what effect that has liberal Zionists and liberal Zionism in America, I think we’re only going to just be at the start of seeing what happens with that. But it should matter a lot to design this consensus inside the United States, certainly, according to what they’ve been saying all this time. You know, not not the right wing Hawks. But the the liberal, the more liberal Zionist organizations. In fact, even APEC has officially supported a two state solution all along. So I guess it’ll be interesting to see.

Dave DeCamp 22:34
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then there’s another thing at play here is uh, so that is that there’s a possibility that net Yahoo might call for new elections, because there’s some polls that show if there was a new election is his block in the Knesset would get enough seats for him to form a government without GaNS? There’s some there’s a story Look food sources told like the Jerusalem Post that, you know, they were kindof there that they would take the

Scott Horton 23:06
absolutely nuts to do that again, right? Yeah. Oh my god, they would all know what a circus right and what a better way to get out of that trial again to you know?

Dave DeCamp 23:16
Yeah, yeah. And also like Netanyahu if he doesn’t pull off the annexation he can blame it on the GaNSes blue and white party. If he does pull it, like, pull it off, you’ll probably get a lot more support. So like that’s all at play to hear. Because I know like the Likud party they want. They wanted to spend that coalition government according to, you know, the sources that speaking to Israeli media, like they don’t want anything to do with that coalition government, apparently. I don’t know, man. I mean, he’s already by election. Yeah, it’s true.

Scott Horton 23:50
It’d be crazy for him to do that. And, as you were saying before, ganz has complained enough. It’s not like he’s some kind of hero for power. Standing independence or anything here?

Dave DeCamp 24:02
No, he, he said the other day. Palestinians are taking too long to lke subjugated were’t Yeah, yeah, they weren’t just complaining how they weren’t coming to the negotiating table. And he said something like Palestinians are Indian. And I don’t want any part of it so he’s definitely not a hero for the Palestinias.

Scott Horton 24:23
In his first election ads bragged about reducing Gaza quote to the Stone Age.

Dave DeCamp 24:29
Yeah

Scott Horton 24:30
helpless, defenseless, imprisoned Ga

Dave DeCamp 24:34
Yep. Yeah, that’s the kind of guy he is. He’s just a little smarter.

Scott Horton 24:38
He’s a moderate. See he’s a moderate. He’s a moderate lead

Dave DeCamp 24:43
He’s more diplomatic than that. Yeah, that’s it

Scott Horton 24:46
Don’t make me dig up. Ariel Sharon. Yes, the threat right. Gotta settle. Good for these guys. All right now and speaking of Israel and Israel In the United States, let’s talk about these crushing new sanctions on Syria.

Dave DeCamp 25:06
Oh, yeah.

Scott Horton 25:08
Well, by the way, I think you picked up on the narrative here that Dave has stories on all these stories@news.antiwar.com. Go ahead.

Dave DeCamp 25:20
So these new sanctions under the Caesar act, we’ve ran a lot of stories on at anti war calm, a lot of good people writing about it. So right now, before these new sanctions took effect, our US sanctions, blocked the assets of Syrians in Syria trying to rebuild the country. And these new sanctions can target anybody, regardless of nationality, who’s investing in the country for the what they call the corrupt reconstruction effort. So it’s dangerous and it’s driven a lot of investors out of Syria. It’s really Having to put a squeeze on Lebanon. It’s it’s discouraging the regional neighbors like Lebanon and Jordan and Iraq to help the reconstruction effort after the almost, you know, nine year war that ripped apart that country. And it’s just and it’s like specifically targeting construction and energy sectors. It’s like for the purpose of not letting Assad rebuild the first round of saying of these new sanctions. I’m not I forget exactly who they went against. I know one of them was on Assad’s wife. But yeah, it’s just really brutal. And after all those years of war now, the United States is gonna do anything they can to not let them rebuild the country. And it’s just a shame and and including keeping troops in eastern Syria. They’re stealing their oil

Scott Horton 26:55
and where’s that oil going? By the way the Americans are funneling it off to Turkey. What are they? They’re just sitting on or wh

Dave DeCamp 27:02
t? I don’t know. Actually, I I’m not sure certainly

Scott Horton 27:05
keeping it out of the hands of Damascus.

Dave DeCamp 27:07
Yeah, we’re definitely not making any money on it. But yet we’ve there’s been a lot of good stuff written about it. Daniel garrison at the American Conservative wrote a good story. People want to look for more detail, but it hurts, you know, I mean, there was some story that we ran. There’s Syrian Americans protesting in Allentown Pennsylvania the the sanctions because they can’t send money home they’re not gonna be able to send money home now.

Scott Horton 27:34
Yeah, to their family, which is just, it’s just cruel. You know, theres, I guess I got to find the time to read this stupid thing, man, this john bolton book. I got the PDF of it but I did read one news story about it. Where they talked about this conflict. I like it when they talk about in stark terms because it’s very rare. You can read a piece in the times of the post where they really frank about this where, look, we have a real split between, for example, General Mattis, who is the Secretary of Defense, the Marine Corps General, he wanted to kill Islamic State guys. And he’s an Iran Hawk. Nobody ever confused him for not being one. He got fired for being too much of an Iran Hawk in the Obama years. Alright, but his thing was, let’s kill ISIS guys. And there’s this giant push by Bolton and others and pompeyo and the others in the administration that knows when we’re in Syria, essentially, this is the part they don’t say out loud. We’re on ISIS aside the enemy is Iran. And, you know, they’re friends, in Hezbollah in the Syrian government, and that’s who ought to be the target there. But it’s not just the biggest bait and switch in the world from one thing to another, but it’s from one thing to its opposite, where it’s again, you know, essentially helping to accomplish the goals of the bin Laden Knights by fighting against their worst enemies when not outright perfect. Writing direct aid to them, which is part of the story too, of course, but always, you know, essentially taking their side in that thing. And this is great because you know, TV, usually with TV, I’ll never explain it and the post in the times very rarely explain that. Okay, here are the sides. And, ironically, here’s whose side we’re on or anything like that, you know, but that a bit of that is coming out in the Bolton book.

Dave DeCamp 29:27
Yeah. And it’s tough to know what’s true and what’s not true. But I think there’s a story in the national interest about that stuff.

Scott Horton 29:34
Yeah. Well, like you said schemas are our troops are right now they’re not fighting these llama state at all. They’re they’re keeping the oil out of the hands of the Assad government

Dave DeCamp 29:42
Yeah. And James, Jeffery, the US envoy to Syria, recently said that his goal is to make a quagmire for Russia in Syria.

Scott Horton 29:50
So Oh, he said that again? Who said that? Oh, James, Jeffrey saw Yeah, recently. Do you see that?

Dave DeCamp 29:55
Oh, that was a few months ago.

Scott Horton 29:58
oh, hang on. I gotta write that down. Make sure And find that.

Dave DeCamp 30:01
Yeah, because he’s I mean, you know, the, the stated goal for the US is to prolong the war and not let the country rebuild.

Scott Horton 30:10
You know, they started talking like that as soon as Russia intervene in 2015. They’re like, haha, it’ll be just like Afghanistan for them. And like, it’d be just like what? Yeah, it’d be just like Afghanistan, the place where we’ve been bogged down in the quagmire for 20 years now. It’d be just like that. Well, at that point, 15 years. I, these people, you know, we’re still in Afghanistan. They’re going yeah, we’re gonna bog them down and give them a quagmire like we did in Afghanistan in the 80s like we’re doing to ourselves in Afghanistan right now. Still would not hire these people to run my national government. Dave, you picking up the note here? No, they’re not good at it, not by my lights.

Dave DeCamp 30:55
Now, there was a recent us airstrike in in like Northwest Syria. It lib province against the al Qaeda guy. And it’s like that’s kind of a perfect encapsulation of US foreign policy like we’re backing. We’re working, you know, supporting Turkey to support those rebels in England to fight Russia in Syria, but also drone bombing some of them,

Scott Horton 31:20
like picking off just one guy that we kind of don’t like, he’s not so moderate. Let’s get him but the rest are cool. Joe Lonnie, still okay, nobody seems to be too bothered by, in fact, the entire presence of what’s a mini Islamic State there in the invalid province. You know, when ISIS declare their Caliphate, that was the biggest deal in the world. It lib province or major portions of it are still just al Qaeda, Stan, and that’s been the status quo for what three years or something now?

Dave DeCamp 31:52
Yeah. And that’s even turkeys preventing,

Scott Horton 31:54
you know, Russia and the Syrian government from ending that situation. Of course. Mm

Dave DeCamp 32:03
mm and that’s been like even in the mainstream press now like they call them al Qaeda yeah it’s not even a secret anymore like the Associated Press I read a lot they always call you know al Qaeda linked groups

Scott Horton 32:13
that’s hired to rear all Shazam which is which is Al Jelani, which is al-zawahiri the butcher in New York City. Yeah, you know, I’m not saying that America should carpet bomb or anything like that, but for us to be on their side, yet now that seem to be, you know, counterproductive for Americas.

Dave DeCamp 32:36
Yeah.

Scott Horton 32:38
All right. Listen, I’m sorry, man. I’m late and I gotta go. But thank you so much for coming back on the show. Dave. Great stuff.

Dave DeCamp 32:44
Yes, Scott, thanks for having me. All right, see

Scott Horton 32:47
e. The Scott Horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA. APSradio.com antiwar.com. ScottHorton.org. libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. Okay, guys on the line, I’ve got Jason ditz. He’s the news editor at antiwar.com news.antiwar.com. And he’s got a whole series on this extremely important series of events. Man I said series twice in a row like that. That’s just terrible. A bunch of stuff happened. Turkey attack the PKK than Iraq. And then so did Iran. Huh. Welcome back to the show, Jason, how you doing?

Jason Ditz 1:04
I’m doing good. Scott. How are you?

Scott Horton 1:06
I’m doing great. So June 17. You wrote this thing. Turkey launches ground offensive against Kurds in northern Iraq. And so who’s who and what do they fight about?

Jason Ditz 1:17
Well, this has happened. Honestly, a lot. Turkey’s been at war with the PKK, who are Kurdish separatists since the 80s. They consider them terrorists like they consider most Kurdish groups. And a few years ago, there was a very brief ceasefire that was supposed to lead to peace talks in Turkey. And as part of that ceasefire deal, the PKK sent a lot of their forces into northern Iraq like the the really just barely still Iraq, Northern Part of the country of Iraqi Kurdistan officials really didn’t seem to mind at the time they thought they were helping out a regional ally. But ever since that a ceasefire collapsed, which was seems like a few weeks after it started, a turkey has been attacking the PKK in northern Iraq for fairly regularly at least once a year. And this time, what’s different is they’re doing the same, you know, send some ground troops in an attack. But Iran has actually gotten involved, to some extent firing some rockets and artillery at the PKK as well.

Scott Horton 2:57
As Do you know, is there a recent crackdown on PJAK inside Iran or something like that.

Jason Ditz 3:03
There were there were reports of it a few weeks before this started

Scott Horton 3:08
PJAK. I’m sorry, everybody. That’s sort of the uranium branch of the Turkish PKK. There.

Jason Ditz 3:14
Right? Every, I mean, Kurds live in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. I mean, obviously, they live elsewhere. But that’s the historic Kurdistan. And they’ve got little separatist groups in each of those countries. And as far as Turkey is concerned, they’re all PKK. They’re all basically run by the PKK. Even though that’s not really the case in some of those countries. I’m not so sure about PJ the the Iranian version. But there were reports of some clashes in Iran with them around denied that that was the case. Instead, everything was fine, but now we see them firing on the PKK in Iraq and it kinda, it raises some questions.

Scott Horton 4:08
Yeah, so now the I’m sorry man, I forgot now. I’m embarrassed. Which one died Do you remember Barzani or Taliban? He those are the two major Warlords of Northern Iraqi Kurdistan. They’re a think it was Taliban. He did dive right.

Jason Ditz 4:28
I think so. Yeah.

Scott Horton 4:30
I’m sorry, man. Anyway, but so this isn’t them. But this is the PKK. They’re quite separate from the PKK and their factions. And yet so I’m curious, is there do you know, any way to tell you know, how much permission that they have given the PKK to hide out in Iraqi Kurdistan? I mean, we’re talking about a very mountainous region. So I don’t know if they’re just sneaking around on their own or if they have permission to be there by the ruling factions. Do you know

Jason Ditz 5:00
Well, at the time when they got there during that brief ceasefire with Turkey, it seemed like the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq was more or less fine with it. There was no real objection to them coming in. And that part of that part of Iraq is so sparsely populated. It’s all mountains and tiny little villages. And it was like, they didn’t really seem to care. Even for them. It was like an insignificant region, they felt like wow, that’ll be fine. Which is interesting because that political bloc in Iraq is one of the few major Kurdish political bloc’s in the region that doesn’t generally get along with the PKK. They see the PKK and the YPG as kind of the Contrary to their interests, and sometimes there’s some. I mean, there’s a lot of political fighting. Sometimes it’s it’s escalated into actual violence, but it seemed like they were fine with them coming. I don’t think they imagined the PKK would still be there. This is a few years after the fact. I don’t think they imagined that Turkey would be attacking the northern provinces. So regularly, which the Iraqi central government has been complaining about, every time it happens. I mean, they say, well, no turkey can’t send troops in here. They’re not allowed. That’s a violation of our sovereignty, which it is. But turkey does it anyway. And it just sort of happens. So Far as Iraq is concerned so far, I haven’t really been able to do anything about it.

Scott Horton 7:08
And now, what’s this about the UAE? Who are they bankrolling there and what are they got to do with it all?

Jason Ditz 7:17
The UAE when this first happened, like the first day when the reports came out of attacks, issued a statement backing the Iraqi government at the Arab League saying Iraq is right. Turkey has no business doing this or violating the sovereignty of an Arab state. And they have to stop and Iran to although it was really more aimed at Turkey. Now the UAE is interested in this, I think is mostly just being mad at turkey over what happened in Libya.

Scott Horton 7:59
I know our Sounds like that is what it is right there.

Jason Ditz 8:03
Feel like you know, Turkey came in to Libya backing the opposite side from who the UAE was backing and that civil war and all of a sudden the tides turn just huge and quick were you know, General haftar that the UAE was backing and what’s basically been a coup attempt. He went from controlling you know, basically the whole east of Libya and a good chunk of the area around Tripoli to now he’s lost pretty much everything in the in the West and has been pushed back into just part of the East so I mean, he’s lost big time. Turkey made a deal with the Government of National Accord which is the rival force in Libya. For oil and gas exploration rights in the Mediterranean. Which is a really weird. You look at a map, it’s weird to think about, but the maritime rights of Libya and Turkey actually do kind of intersect, huh?

Scott Horton 9:22
Yeah, I see it. I actually got a big map here for exactly that reason. Yeah bisect the Mediterranean there. I like how it’s just business in the Syria war. The Turks and the UAE, they might have back competing malicious, but they were both working to overthrow Assad here. They’re outright on opposite sides and it’s all about the petroleum.

Jason Ditz 9:45
Right. And Wow, that’s really all Libya has. I mean, realistically, you’ve got oil fields in the interior of the country and Huge oil ports on the coast. That’s and that’s basically Libya. Everything else is kind of non consequential for any foreign powers. You got to control the oil fields enough to get them pumping, and you have to control the ports enough to get boats out of there. And that’s

Scott Horton 10:18
now Oh, as far as the attacks on the PKK there in northern Iraq, I mean, not to play down those debts. But again, because this isn’t the ruling faction, they’re attacking or anything like that, they’re basically guerrillas off in the mountains. So it doesn’t seem like the kind of situation where there’s a lot of collateral damage of neighborhoods being bombed or anything crazy like that, right.

Jason Ditz 10:44
No, although there have been reports of some Iraqi Kurdish civilians getting caught up in it. Yeah, there’s, you know, a if you look at that, Northern most Iraqi province There’s a lot of rural roads up in the mountains and they’ll get hit with air strikes. And it’s a, you know, you’re hitting anytime a car passes by, you’re just kind of hoping that’s your target, because that’s basically the US strategy of air strikes, which is hit anything that moves. turkeys have picked up on that. But yeah, I mean, obviously they have some ideas or the small caves or villages or whatnot, where they’re living and they get them directly there. But other than that, you just looking for targets of opportunity, and sometimes that’s gonna be civilians.

Scott Horton 11:45
[ADS]

Jason Ditz 13:28
Ah, it seems to have quieted down quite a bit. Although I don’t mean to

Scott Horton 13:33
say it’s been coming and going since the Bush years but yeah,

Jason Ditz 13:38
right. I mean, one of the first things that happened when the US invaded Iraq was the turkey invaded. on a smaller scale turkey invaded northern Iraq to go after Kurds and that still happens sometimes. But It’s it’s not really something that is probably going to stop anytime soon. Like you say, they’re not hitting tons of people with these airstrikes or these ground offensives. It’s not like that. A few day ground offensive is done and they’re like, well, all PKK are out of Iraq. Now. There’s doubtless more left and it’s gonna be a pretext for more offensives in the future.

Scott Horton 14:32
Yeah. All right. So move a few thousand miles over to the east here to the Himalayan mountains, where the Chinese and the Indians had their dispute. I talked with Eric Margulies about this a bit last week and can give us a little bit of outline of the status of that conflict right now.

Jason Ditz 14:52
Well, it’s really interesting because again, if you look at this on a map, and sort of get satellite images The Line of Control, because, you know, a lot of these countries in that part of South Asia don’t really have proper borders, they have lines of control. It’s like, Ah, this is China controls this side, India controls this side, Pakistan controls this side. And everybody’s disputing exactly where the border should be in the future. But if you look at it on the map, and in the satellites, he realized, especially the India China, Line of Control is a whole lot of nothing. I mean, to the world’s two largest population countries, and their border is this rocky sort of mountain side, near the side chain glacier. Almost nobody lives there. There’s two patrols go by and by sides and that’s the most activity either side really gets and the border region. So it’s not like they’re fighting over something valuable, it just becomes a matter of national pride that the other side can’t violate their borders.

Scott Horton 16:17
Right. Does that also mean though, that since there’s so little at stake, that it’s easy for them to back down? And so don’t worry,

Jason Ditz 16:26
you would think so. But when they make it about national pride, they tend to insist that they’re not gonna back down. Neither side wants to be seen as the one that backed away from the conflict and might lose some might lose some credibility that way. But at the same time, it is really puzzling. They had one war in this area, decades ago. And both sides kind of private themselves on the fact that nobody’s neither sides troops have fired on the other side’s troops in 40 some years.

Scott Horton 17:09
Yeah, I mean, these guys were killed with baseball bats with barbed wire wrapped around, like, boards with nails through it or something. That’s what I read.

Jason Ditz 17:18
All right, there’s a

Scott Horton 17:20
picture of Moses lack chasing the aliens on the Halloween episode of The Simpsons, you know,

Jason Ditz 17:28
there was a picture of some of India’s I guess, arms in this case. And it’s really kind of gruesome because it looked like just a bunch of rebar and

Scott Horton 17:43
sweet. I mean, hey, it’s better than the mall blowing each other away with a case I guess. It’s a shame that the government’s won’t allow them to carry guns or else they wouldn’t use their AKs’, Right?

Jason Ditz 17:57
It’s it’s really a puzzling situation I mean II think about see upwards of 60 people got killed between the two sides doing this with no guns these are both nuclear powers with major militaries and they’re fighting with sticks and boards with nails and barbed wire and the picture I saw of one India’s sort of sets of rebar and and other assorted equipment wrapped in barbed wire is kind of gruesome because it’s got blood on it and everything from hitting Chinese people at it. But yeah, I mean, yeah,

Scott Horton 18:43
within about that just between the daggers and the valley kids and thrashing sounds brutal.

Jason Ditz 18:52
It’s like, it would be really scary. If these two sides were trying to kill each other with the weapons They actually have available instead of just what they can get away with without losing there and no guns have been fired in this area. But yeah, I mean, it really is quite out of hand. And honestly, a lot more out of hand, then either side of that border is worth. I mean, India’s never going to both sides say the other started it but India is never going to get deep enough into China to take anything valuable. And China’s never going to get deep enough in de Indian Kashmir that take anything valuable. So there’s really, there’s no point to this fight. It’s just they’re mad. And there was enough sticks and bats and whatnot, that they figured out how to kill each other with them.

Scott Horton 19:55
So, but I mean, I had read one headline where it said that Chinese are kind of backing down And then I read, see you tell lazy I’m getting in my old data, really read the article Jason. I saw a headline said Chinese backing down some. And then I saw another headline said Chinese talking about the Indians, again, ratcheting up tensions there. So it doesn’t look like it’s over yet but at least the killings over now. Right?

Jason Ditz 20:20
Yeah, I mean that that particular flare up is over but after that happened what she had, you know 2030 troops on either side, which is about normal for that region, just kind of keeping an eye on each other since that’s happened. Both sides have sent a lot more troops. I don’t know if they’re armed yet. But they sent a lot more troops China’s built a couple of kind of observation posts at the top of hills looking down on the line of control. Most of China’s statements are that the India is fully to blame for everything. happened and that they’re not gonna stand for it. Andy, his statement is like, well, we don’t really want to see this escalate, but we’re not going to back down either. So nothing really got resolved that, but at least they kind of stopped for the time being.

Scott Horton 21:17
Yeah. All right. Well, man, we’re all out of time but you got 100 more important news stories here at news Don antiwar.com urge everybody to go over there and check it out and get caught up on all of well, not just America’s wars, but you know, some of these other conflicts too. Great stuff as always, Jason Thank you. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow.
All right, so introducing Jonathan. Hey Fitz, senior staff attorney at the ACLU, welcome back to the show. How you doing?

Jonathan Hafetz 0:47
Very well in yourself.

Scott Horton 0:49
I’m doing great. appreciate you joining us here. And you know, I read this incredibly interesting story. I’m not sure if I ever heard about this specific case or not. Hum. mean, how soon and I hate to quote The Daily Beast, but I do somewhat respect Spencer Ackerman, so Okay. It’s a Spencer Ackerman article at The Daily Beast. And it says here that you guys have been representing this guy, and that he has been held since when and for what again?

Jonathan Hafetz 1:23
It’s a good question. He’s been held. Well, he was he was convicted in the 2000s for what’s called material support for terrorism. But as the judge in his case found he actually had nothing to do with a group like Al Qaeda and was not directed to us essentially, he was caught up in some kind of broader operation and he was, he was convicted of basically giving money to or supporting charities in places like Chechnya. That We’re intended to uh, you know, it’s just people there during conflict in Bosnia and Chechnya, nothing directed the United States and he was caught up in the overreaction and the sweeping kind of abuse of authority after 911. And he was anyway but anyway, that he was convicted and he was sentenced to a term imprisonment, the government sought to sentence him to a longer term, much longer term. But the the judge refused, said he was not a threat to national the US national security. And so the case was done. And then he was released from his prison term ended. And he’s a loser, longtime resident United States. He’s not at his family here, children born here, sister, he’s a he’s not a citizen. And so he was. He was ordered removed from the country he was going to be deported after his term of imprisonment ended. The problem is that he’s stateless Palestine. And he was born in Lebanon doesn’t have Lebanese citizenship and the government was not able to locate a country to deport him to. I’m thinking part because there, this administration’s ability to conduct diplomatic negotiations has been totally stymied by the Trump administration, which has got at the State Department. But in any event, they couldn’t find a place to transform to so rather than letting him go, after they weren’t able to deport him, they decided to keep him locked up on it. And one of the most sweeping versions of executive power that I’ve ever seen, they’ve they’ve they’ve they’ve invoked a patriot act, which was the legislation passed right after 911 overbroad legislation, and they’ve latched on to a provision that they actually haven’t used in 20 years since the back almost 20 years since the Act was passed. And and the provision says that if someone if a non citizen is ordered removed from the country or deported, and they can’t be removed, and it’s clear, there’s no country that they can be sent to, they can be detained indefinitely if they post Quote, threaten national security or public safety and quote, and so they have invoked that claiming that Mr. Soon is a threat to national security and can’t be released. We think this is an unconstitutional statute essentially allows for the government to imprison people without charge. But we’ve also fought said, Well, if you’re going to invoke it, you’ve at least got to give him a fair hearing in court. And we’ve been fighting for that for the last six months. The government’s view was initially that if they invoke the statute declared no review with the executive. The executive said you’re a national threat to national security. That’s the end of the story. There’s no judicial review of the facts. No one gets to examine them. It’s just trust us. We think this person’s a danger. We got we get to lock them up maybe for the rest of his life. And we’ve challenged that in court and our our, we’re ready to go for a hearing all set to where we’re ready to challenge and expose the government’s allegations as lies. We’re supposed to start this On Wednesday of this week, Wednesday, November 24, it was supposed to start and the government at the last minute said, guess what? We have no case we can’t prove our case. But it’s still trying to keep him locked up.

Scott Horton 5:14
So they’ve admitted they don’t have a case to present or they’re not hiding behind secrecy or anything like that.

Jonathan Hafetz 5:20
They’re not they’re not hiding behind secrecy. There’s no secrecy. There’s no classified information. They said we can’t meet the burden that the district court established in the case. And we you know, the if the under the district court’s ruling, we cannot prevail, and they that that means that they can’t they can’t prevail before court, where they have to show that Mr. As soon as a danger and the judge initially and

Scott Horton 5:43
then their argument is, but they shouldn’t have to show that he’s a danger because they can do this anyway.

Jonathan Hafetz 5:48
That’s exactly right. Their view is weak. The judge erred that the fundamental error was that the judge actually required that we have to put on proofs. So the only way they win the case is if if if the job they appeal If the appeals appeals court says, You’re correct government, you don’t need to put on any evidence. And the judge erred by actually holding a hearing you supply providing a fair process and making you provide some shred of credible evidence to back up your claims. But if not, if the if the, you know, as we maintain and I think as manifest if there’s the Constitution requires that you get a hearing before you’re locked up for the rest of your life, and you get a chance to, you know, to, to examine the evidence and to present your side to the judge, then the government loses, but their position is chilling.

Scott Horton 6:37
I mean, does it matter that he’s illegal immigrant and not an illegal immigrant or anything like that? I mean, clearly, he’s going to or less, but we’re talking about not deporting him but locking him up. So

Jonathan Hafetz 6:50
great question. It makes no difference. He’s in the United States. He’s, he’s protected by the due process clause as a as a longtime resident. I mean, the theory that Government invoking here is the same one invoked after, against us citizens after 911. On the in the military detention context where it said, we can lock you up indefinitely based on, you know, executive say so. And I think it’s another excellent point you make, which is he’s not challenging his removal I did. He’s eager to participate. He loves Americans. He’s had, you know, many wonderful experiences the United States, but he wants to just be free and he would be eager to go to another country just to live the room, his remaining years and freedom and peace. So he’s not he’s not challenging his right to remain in the US. He’s just challenging his right not to be locked up, that if they can’t deport him, and he can’t be removed, at least until he’s another country is found. He shouldn’t have to languish behind bars.

Scott Horton 7:45
[ADS]

How much of your case is well, first you’re just trying to get the hearing but then obviously you have a case that he’s that you would like to present that he’s not a threat but first you’re trying to argue that they can’t even do this. This is unconstitutional overreach or how resigned are you to Their power to buy as he said, He’s not contesting his his removal. But well, as you said, he’s a Palestinian refugee, he can’t go home. And so, since he has nowhere to go, do they have the right to lock them up indefinitely with a one good hearing?

Jonathan Hafetz 9:19
No, I think they absolutely do not. They this was this, this issue came up in a case called Zed vitesse, versus Davis, which decided in June of 2001. And it’s, you know, it’s not a, you know, it happens in a number of cases, in this case in vault where you have someone who’s, you know, been ordered removed based on a criminal conviction, including, you know, perhaps for violent, violent offenses of violence. The people in this case had been convicted of armed robbery and other violent offenses. they’ve they’ve served their time. And as in this advisors case, they serve their time and they then it’s time that you They get out the, you know, what used to be the ins the immigration, Naturalization Service. Now, it’s DHS or ice takes custody of them in order to remove them. But because of some, you know, vague for some reason, they may have some issue, they can’t, they’re stateless, or there’s a concern, they’ll be tortured in their home country, they can’t be removed. And so the court has ruled that if once if, if a non citizen is been ordered removed, but after some period of time, you know, around, say around six months or so could be longer, but not much longer. If they are, if they if they if the government is unable to find a country to send them to, and their removal is not foreseeable, like looks like they’re not going to be able to find a country. They have to be ordered, released, unless they’re going you know, that’s it. They can’t just you can’t keep people locked up. So that was the settled law. And after that the government passed a well, the Congress passed the statute, the Patriot Act, and there was a provision in there saying, that may be the law. But if we say it’s national security, that’s different. And then we can just keep you. And we think this is unconstitutional, like the government could not do this under any circumstances. But and we’ve made that argument to the court. But the other argument and the one that we’ve been focused on for the last, you know, since last year has been, if the government’s going to do that, it has to at least give the person a fair hearing before a court, right to put on evidence to examine government witnesses, you know, what anyone in their, you know, what he understands is as basic due process, right, and that the judge agreed with us back in December and a ruling and said, You know, I’m not going to decide whether they could do this administered, you know, to someone who, in fact does pose a threat to the security but I want to find out what the what the facts are here first, and so I’m going to order a hearing and she ordered a hearing in December and you January, she told the government that if you have to put on actual witnesses, you can’t lie behind jailhouse informants and unreliable hearsay. And so we’ve been proceeding towards trial. And we were scheduled to have the five day trial report. It’s a bench trial before the judge on starting on June 24. And then six days before the trial was was supposed to start, the government said, they filed a notice saying we’re moving to cancel the trial, cancel the hearing, because we can’t meet the burden. We can’t we can’t prove our case to a judge basically. And so we’re, we, you know, we’re saying give up, we’re giving up and enter judgment, or, you know, under judgment for Mr. Assume, but then they said, instead of saying, what allow him to go free, they said enter judgment, but then stay your judgment, freeze your judgment, so we can appeal your decision to a higher court and keep him locked up. While we fight over this question of whether we can imprison someone based solely on on executive say, so.

Scott Horton 13:00
Yeah. And now, so about this guy’s statelessness in the first place. He said he’s born in Lebanon. So his parents are refugees, I guess, parents or grandparents? Yeah, he’s old enough. His parents were refugees from Israel. So Palestine was Palestine. But so they can’t send him back to Lebanon? Or if they did, he’d have to go to a refugee camp in Lebanon. And is that that you can’t send someone back to a refugee camp in Lebanon or what’s the deal with that?

Jonathan Hafetz 13:29
Well, I mean, he can’t his rubles not possible. I mean, if I mean, I think that they would have to you have to give him citizenship or you know, he would but he’s not able to can’t send him back there. So they’re trying to find another

Scott Horton 13:40
because because Lebanon already said under no circumstances will they take him

Jonathan Hafetz 13:44
or I mean, the data I mean, we don’t know the full details but he’s not doesn’t have citizenship. So he’s not able to go back there doesn’t have residency there. She’s not a citizen there. So he’s essentially still you know, he’s stateless. Is he stateless? Maybe

Scott Horton 13:54
you can live in an airport somewhere.

Jonathan Hafetz 13:57
Yeah, well, that would be better than his his car. situation in the federal prison in Batavia, which which also has one of the highest COVID-19 outbreaks or poverty or you know, number of cases of institution. So is he I should say his hearing was supposed to be in April but got just compounding the unfairness got delayed for two months because of the COVID-19 Coronavirus crisis. So, he’s a human, he’s just been, you know, kind of languishing, he’s done it. He has, you know, health issues. And he also, you know, to facilitate his release, prompt release. He also agreed to, I think what I would say are very stringent conditions, especially since, you know, he’s as he maintains his as is completely innocent. And the government hasn’t put on any evidence to the contrary, but he just, you know, in order to address any potential concerns the government or court might have, he said, I will remain, you know, essentially in a home confinement in Florida. We’re starting resides and the government can watch me they can surveil me, I don’t care. I just don’t want to be in jail anymore. I don’t want to die in jail.

Scott Horton 15:09
Man. All right. Well, and you know, it is important here too, as they say in the article about how they were trying to get him to become an informant. fact, this was we found out later, I guess I know you know this, but it took years for this to come out that in fact, they were trying to get Jose pedia to become an informant, which raised a lot of questions why he was so dangerous that they had to turn him over to the military and the CIA. When in fact he was so harmless that they were going to put them on the streets If only he would be a rat for them. And apparently it turns out all that they dished up for him was really punishment also for not going along. called the Randy Weaver treatment, you either become an informant for the government or else then we’re coming after you. And so no worries, this guy never really did anything. In the first place, oh, they accused him of sending some money, I guess. And he said that he was sending them to America’s allies in the Balkans and chechi in Afghanistan. Right. So what’s the problem?

Jonathan Hafetz 16:10
Right? It I mean, it’s it’s something that they’re like, it’s something that happened before 911 if there hadn’t been a 911, he never would have been prosecuted. It’s only it’s only because of that. I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s part of it, is it because, you know, they claim he didn’t do quote, unquote, cooperate or or do what they want there, they are still kind of seeking to punish him, and it’s very cruel.

Scott Horton 16:30
You know, what exactly was his association with video? Can you talk about that?

Jonathan Hafetz 16:35
I mean, the very minimal very minimum is in the case. And I mean, the Guardian, and the government never proved really anything and he didn’t have much association with him. So it was, and so that was, he was kind of lumped in. We’re really, I think, dia was lumped in one of the two were lumped into the same prosecution and that and that, I think was harmful to him, but at least he At least he avoided a long you know the sentence that the government was trying to give him the judge was it’s very strong things about him said look under the law what you did may be a crime but I don’t think you pose a danger I’m not going to give you this long sentence double the sentence the government wants and I think the judge would be appalled that Mr. That after serving his time is true as soon as still you know back in you know, he’s still in you know, facing like years more of us detention right.

Scott Horton 17:31
Of course, I mean, pedia was accused of plotting to set off dirty bombs and attack you know, American civilian apartment complexes with radioactive what have you and so this guy was associated with that I could are associated with him I’m not saying that was true at all, obviously was not to say that was the that was in fact the accusations that they had tortured out of poor Binya Mohammed into making against Jose Padilla. We know that but uh, if If this guy had been tarred with those same accusations at the same time as what I’m trying to say that could have certainly been detrimental to his case back then, right.

Jonathan Hafetz 18:08
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, being tried with someone who was linked even unfairly to this plot that was never proven and based on torture was not helpful at all for him.

Scott Horton 18:20
All right. So, and I’m sorry, tell me where it stands again, as far as you have your hearing that has been ordered coming up again sometime soon.

Jonathan Hafetz 18:30
Yeah. So the judge, the government moved, as I said, they dropped the drop. They’re essentially dropped their case that we can’t prove our case. But they said issue a what’s called the stay of release, right. They know he’s going to be released that we’ve actually conditioned and agreed upon conditions in place if he’s ordered release, but they don’t order his release. We, we want you to stay it and then we and then if you don’t do that, we are considering going to a court of appeals to try to get them to to stay it and freezes releasing cases. been locked up. So the judge we’re now in the process of filing legal papers on whether the judge should stay his release, even after the government said they couldn’t put out any evidence against him at the hearing that she ordered

Scott Horton 19:14
once now, by the term stay, I mean, that has a ring of temporary ness to it, but it sounds like what you’re saying is they want to invoke national security and say that under this statute under this part of the Patriot Act, they can keep this guy for the rest of his life nothing temporary about it, that the government the court, they’re asking the court to butt out and let them continue to hold the guy right or not.

Jonathan Hafetz 19:37
Right well that’s their that’s their bottom line position is that they if Yeah, they’re not saying they will but they’re saying they have the power to keep them for the rest

Scott Horton 19:44
of us. Yeah, never mind making a case that Never mind that you’re right that Yeah, no, we don’t we can’t make a case against them. But we don’t feel like we have to. that’s beside the point.

Jonathan Hafetz 19:53
Correct. This and the stay is just to keep him imprisoned while the May while the people plays out. That is while the court the appeals courts decide whether the government whether the government in theory is has any validity, which totally it does not have any that they can keep him for life. But what that means is, as soon practically speaking, would be in jail for months, even years more while the appeals courts decide whether or not the government’s totally bogus theory, his bogus, right so it’s it’s just it’s just being it’s just another way to game for the government to try to gain the legal system and and manipulate it to try to keep him locked up, which after they didn’t put on any evidence they didn’t even try. And that’s what’s so appalling about this case.

Scott Horton 20:35
Well, and here’s the thing too, is that in all those indefinite detentions, including Jose pedia, and including all of the what thousands, couple thousand American Muslims who were rounded up and held as material witnesses and all these things, that this is the first time you said that they have invoked this part of the Patriot Act. It’s been hiding out there that Bush and Cheney never tried to invoke this provision. That set No. I mean, this is like Israeli administrative detention after your sentence we get to keep holding Yeah,

Jonathan Hafetz 21:06
that’s exactly what it is. And I thought yeah, we think it’s unconstitutional and even added a minimum you need to get you actually have to have a fair hearing.

Scott Horton 21:14
Maybe we can ask Joe Biden he wrote the patriot act right

Jonathan Hafetz 21:19
right. Well, I think I would hope he would be a that you know, a future administration another mission wouldn’t do this once they actually see at least even if they want to have the power for the you know, for for some future case, we don’t think it’s constitutional but even if they want it, they would think it’s a total abuse to do it here. And it’s just cool. Yeah, at least

Scott Horton 21:38
we have a choice we can count on the guy who wrote the thing to hopefully maybe not enforced that part of it. Coming up so big, big choice coming up in our election, everybody. Um, but yeah, no, all kidding aside, it well, as is obvious on the face of it, but it should Just go without saying all the time. If you guys weren’t fighting this fight, there might not be somebody fighting it. And at the bottom line, you know, if there’s nobody there to stick up for the Bill of Rights, we don’t have one. So, thanks.

Jonathan Hafetz 22:13
Well, thank you and thanks for your time. Appreciate that.

Scott Horton 22:15
Aren’t you guys that is Jonathan Heifetz. He is senior staff attorney at the ACLU. And you can read all about this case. Spencer Ackerman at The Daily Beast, government case collapses against man jailed indefinitely under Patriot Act. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys on the line, I’ve got the great Joe Lauria. He is the editor of consortium news.com. And he’s got such an important piece here. Assange hit with new superseding indictment spit, reflecting possible FBI sting operation Yeah, who would have thought that Welcome back to the show. Joe. How are you sir?

Joe Lauria 0:58
Thank you, Scott. I’m fine. Good to talk. Again,

Scott Horton 1:00
yeah, for those not familiar, the hero, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was published such great information over the years already has been indicted. He’s in custody in England. And but he’s been indicted in the United States over skipping bail on a fake charge. But he’s already indicted in the United States on Espionage Act charges. They’re saying he’s not a publisher like the New York Times, but he’s a co conspirator in getting the leak. With then Bradley now Chelsea Manning back in 2010, the Iraq War Logs, Guantanamo files, Afghan War Logs and State Department cables there, and all of which are still available@wikileaks.org. And so this is already a huge problem, obviously, but now a superseding indictment which has all kinds of new accusations, but primarily, I think, you helped me Tell me if I’m wrong Hear Joe. It sounds like it’s basically the same accusations again, that rather than being a publisher, he is a co conspirator. This time with labels sec. And anonymous in pilfering certain documents from certain places. Please Do tell.

Joe Lauria 2:16
Yeah, well, the most important thing to understand is there are no new charges in this superseding time. So there’s a lot of window dressing. There’s a lot of stuff that is in there that is accusing him of this, that and the other thing, none of which are against the law or that he’s not been charged for just a quick example. They just threw in there that Assange helped Edward Snowden escaped from Hong Kong. This is already well known, and that he used diversionary tactics such as booking Snowden on several flights that he wasn’t going on except the one that they had hoped to get them on. Or they did get on get him on from Hong Kong and then they were trying to get him on to Latin America. He was not to stay in Moscow. Why is that in this indictment? The Super ceiling and diamond because the purpose of this superseding indictment appears to be clearly to further smear Julian Assange, right in there with the false rape accusations. Three times Sweden dropped them. He was never charged with rape. Sweden would not come to London to interview him because of pressure from the British Crown Prosecution Service. Yet many people’s minds mostly Democrats, he’s a rapist. And they got he helped. He helped Trump defeat Clinton. So this is more piling on against Assange. It comes after. I don’t know if this is linked. I really don’t but they probably had this thing waiting. But there’s a movement growing in Australia, where I am. There was a 60 minutes program on here 60 minutes CBS 60 minutes. There’s a Australian version of that they interviewed Assange his partner Stella, Maurice, the mother of his two children. And it was an incredibly sympathetic and understanding and factual account of a Sunday situation. Very rare. See in the mainstream media and the next day, the Melbourne city council voted a resolution in favor of Assange asking for him to be brought back to Australia. So this is an attempt to make Assange look to look out look to be as though he were a hacker, not a journalist. This is key to the government, US government’s strategy, because if he’s a journalist, if he did, what the New York Times and The Spiegel and the Guardian did, which partnered with Assange on the very leaks and the various stories that are the subject of his first espionage, indictment, then they’d have to indict The New York Times as well. And the guardian and the Spiegel because Assange is not an American. He’s on foreign soil, because the Espionage Act allows us universality of prosecution.

Scott Horton 4:50
Well, isn’t that funny right there that the Justice Department’s idea is that well, you know, if Wikileaks gave stuff to the New York Times, The New York Times published it of course that’s protected. But well Wikileaks publishing it. No, of course not because they’re a co conspirator rather than a publisher.

Joe Lauria 5:07
Well, exactly, because if he’s not a journalist, and he’s something else, what is he that? Well, they’re trying to make him out to be a hacker. And this is what this superseding indictment tries to reinforce this idea that he worked with hackers. He didn’t pay them to work for him that he instructed them and directed him. It turns out, two of these hackers were FBI informants, which raises the possibility this was a sting operation all along, which led the interior minister of Iceland at the time to prevent a plane load. I don’t know many of FBI agents coming to Iceland to try to convince the Icelandic government to work with them on this thing against Julian Assange. And because he’d worked in Iceland at the time, and he kicked them out the the, the interior minister time that would not allow the FBI to enter the country because he suspected this was going on. Well, this of course, is not spelled out in this superseding a diamond would spell out is how Assange was speaking openly and various hacker conferences, saying this is what Wikileaks would like to have. And could you try to get it for us? Now, Robert Perry, who founded the website that I’m the editor in chief of right now, in December of 2010, wrote an incredibly prescient article, in which he said that every journalist is Julian Assange, because what exactly what Assange is doing is what he did not Bob, of course, was one of the best investigative reporters of this generation having broken the some of the major your unconscious stories such as the identity of Oliver North and his role in that scandal. So Bob was saying that he often worked with sources who he encouraged to give more information, but also even to break the law if necessary, to leak something that could prevent a larger crime from being committed. And that one could say is what happened with the Collateral Murder video Well,

Scott Horton 6:56
and especially by the way, I mean, to break the law in This case means to leak anything. I mean, every one of these employees is bound by, right.

Joe Lauria 7:06
Yeah, including the senior intelligence officials who leaked stuff to the new york times in the Washington. Right.

Scott Horton 7:11
But the point being he’s when you say, when you when you’re quoting Bob telling them to break the law, he’s not saying to hurt anyone or commit any crimes. He’s saying, to break the law, their secrecy agreement has the force of law because they’re government employees, and they could go to prison for leaking. And so that’s what you’re talking about there, just to be clear, right?

Joe Lauria 7:32
Absolutely, just to break their non disclosure agreement that they had signed. And also, in this case, maybe there are two crimes that are being committed because in Bob’s case, it was just speaking to government officials to leak something, which would have been the crime of giving on unauthorized disclosure. But in the Assange case, it’s also asking them to hack to get the material to then give to him. So two crimes, but Assange is never accused of directly being involved in hacking if you read the this proceeding, and Diamond, or the first in diamond, which was a computer intrusion carefully, he’s not accused of really being a hacker. But working with hackers. Okay. That’s journalism, as far as I’m concerned as far as Bob Perry was concerned. So this

Scott Horton 8:13
new superseding indictment for all this stuff, saying two points here, they’re saying that, essentially, what they’re accusing him of doing with lowsec and anonymous here in cajoling them or whatever the term is, working with them, assigning them certain things to get or whatever that level of cooperation, that they’re really not describing the level of cooperation that you would see as fundamentally different in any way, then is already described about him working with Manning and asking man, I sure would like to get this or to get that is that right? And then the second thing is, there’s no new charges here, the wall sec and the anonymous stuff, don’t it’s The same old charges, they’re just essentially adding this on, like the 12 page report on our T on the intelligence report here just to make it look thicker.

Joe Lauria 9:10
Yeah. It’s window dressing as john Kiriakou called it just pad the indictment, the Espionage Act indictment. It’s got huge amounts of paragraphs there about how he endangered the lives of informants. Now, it turns out that Mark Davis, an Australian journalist who was there at the time in the bunker at The Guardian in London, when they were working on this, he finally came out 10 years later, and that was only last year to say that, in fact, it was the other way around that the Guardian editors in New York Times didn’t give really didn’t give much of a damn about naming and formats, but it was Assange that worked overnight from Friday into Saturday to purge as many names as he could. before publication on Monday. Davis also pointed out that the New York Times tried to trick Assange they were supposed to publish first and then this week leaks was going to put Their material on their own website. But in fact, the times were held back and they were trying to get Wikileaks to publish first because they were worried, you see, then the times could make it look like they’re on scoop, but at the same time, weekly said published at first. So I don’t really know if this is true or not, but we suddenly had a technical problem and couldn’t get it up on time. So the times did publish first. But the issue is that I’m making here the point I’m making here is that it is, as far as I know, I’ve not found any statute that makes it illegal to unmask the name of an informant of the government. Certainly from the Valerie plam case, it’s illegal to to uncover the name of a undercover CIA agent. But as far as informants go, there’s no statute that is named in that indictment yesterday, that specifically applies to naming informants. It’s all from the Espionage Act. And I have studied that Espionage Act and there’s nothing in there about revealing names of informants. So let’s say he didn’t really actually name these forms or did something As much as he could to redact them, the whole good part of that first indictment is that he endangered lives. And then there was a study by Professor Robert Gerard General, Robert Carr, they looked into at the Pentagon, they spent a lot of money and time and they discovered zero people who had been killed because of the release of those documents

Scott Horton 11:19
emitted that Manning’s court martial.

Joe Lauria 11:22
They did. That’s exactly right. So that’s window dressing where you just pile stuff into there as a PR operation, which is what indictments often are when you don’t really have solid evidence, and they don’t have solid evidence, the only thing they’ve got they have him on a technicality that he did Yes, possess and disseminate classified information and he wasn’t authorized to do it. But if I if I were you or one of your listeners, retweets or emails a week of the document to someone and that’s still considered classified by the government, they’ve also broken the Espionage Act. That’s how absurdly broad it is. That’s all they really got him on. And that’s not really enough because that can be challenged as unconstitutional. It’s

Scott Horton 12:03
gotten away with processing that, even since the Wilson years ever,

Joe Lauria 12:07
never tried that in Woodrow Wilson’s time they did prosecute journals, but for trying to interfere with the draft, not about possession, dissemination, and FDR tried to do it. And then Nixon tried to do it within the Pentagon Papers case. He actually in power panel, the grand jury in Boston, to go against the New York Times report is written on the Pentagon Papers. But in the last minute, when it was discovered that that Ellsberg office had been bugged, and they had broken into a psychiatrist’s office, the two reporters who hadn’t recruited Schmidt and Neil Sheehan, ask the government have we been up to since you bought Ellsberg phone you probably heard us too. They dropped the case. So when Obama went right up to the line and decided we couldn’t do it, because we’d have to also indict The New York Times because they realized that this this part of the Espionage Act that I just referred to about possession and dissemination, so weak, it goes up against it first, remember that if challenged in a way Supreme Court it could be struck down as unconstitutional now

Scott Horton 13:03
slow down on that. So down on that last part there, Joe. I mean, that’s really important that Barack Obama, who prosecuted more sources for journalists than any other president, all the other presidents combined under the Espionage Act, wanted badly to indict Assange. And his lawyer said, we just can’t or then we’d have to indict James Ryan, who by now because of his Russia truth or ism belongs in prison.

Joe Lauria 13:29
Well, he certainly on the establishment side, in that regard, yes. But that’s exactly what the Obama administration wanted true, but could not the context in which Bob Perry wrote the piece I referred to earlier, that he saw exactly what the gun was trying to do. And so that’s what journalists do. And they tried to pretend that the other journalists that were mainstream journals are safe, but they really can’t get away with it. And that was before the Obama administration pullback and then they did, but here’s the Trump administration, and their famous war with the press and and I think it’s really Really not Trump at all. It’s this is Mike Pompeo, its fingerprints all over this first speech he gave CIA director was to call wiki leaks, a non state hostile intelligence agency. And that’s because vault seven, the largest leak of CIA material had just been released. And this is

Scott Horton 14:15
just absolutely, by the way, a completely made up ridiculous thing that does not exist. It’s not an intelligence agency if it’s not an intelligence agency.

Joe Lauria 14:25
Yeah. Well, what’s the difference between a reporter and an intelligence agent, both of them are seeking information, secret information. If the journalist gets it, he wants to make it public. If the agent if an intelligence agent gets it, he’s going to keep it secret for the state that he works for. That’s the main difference. And they of course, have much more means that journalists can employ to get information bribery, blackmail, threats, etc. And they could also the government could also subpoena people and reporters cannot. So that is exactly what why Assange as a journalist because he made it public.

Scott Horton 14:58
[ADS]

so let me try to nail something down here. For years, you were a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. And I think what Christian Science Monitor too, right?

Joe Lauria 16:31
No, but boston

Scott Horton 16:32
globe? Oh, Boston Globe. I’m sorry. It’s been a while. Um, but and I know you wrote for the times in London as well. And so I mean, can you tell us that specifically, you have told government employees sources in meetings or on the phone? Listen, yes, ob Give me that document. I want to see it. And therefore, you know, essentially in a way that makes you absolutely no different than what Assange is accused of doing here.

Joe Lauria 17:00
I cannot remember, I never worked. I worked as an investigative reporter for the insight team at the Sunday Times of London. And I remember on working on a big 911 piece just months after 911 I don’t remember specifically asking that. But I did speak to people who had classified stuff that may have given it to me. So I mean, I don’t remember saying to them, Look, commit this crime doesn’t matter. But I wasn’t really doing the kind of investigative report about Perry was I must cover the United Nations for 25 years. So I was, and there’s plenty of spooks over there. I could tell you that in New York, but I did not. I did not do it in that way. But Bob Perry was uniquely positioned to make this comment because he did do that and he was able to speak from his own experience having done it numerous times. And he was saying this is what Assange is doing whether you like the guy personally or not you know cares about his personality he he’s he’s doing what reporters have to do. And as Bob said at one point the the rules of the game were always traditional rule was the government. Hi things and the reporter tries to find them. That was the game. But we’re in a different era. Now. We’re in a really ugly time by this indictment amongst all the other horrible things that are going on. But we’ve seen the government of the United States and with collusion or the British government, framing really, and stitching up a reporter, who was not a traditional reporter, the journalism has changed. This is internet journalism. And he didn’t go to Columbia Journalism School, but believe me, you don’t have to go to Columbia Journalism School to be a real good journalist. And he published raw material, but there was analysis. And Assange gave many interviews and wrote articles. He understood what he was reporting. With these documents. He is not some clerk who just got material and then put it out on the internet. He understood the material and they vetted it all and it was all accurate. So he’s certainly a different kind of journalists, but in many ways, a better journalist and a lot of the mainstream people and as john pillages also often pointed out, there’s a bit of jealousy here, of reporters from entry papers would Didn’t get the scoops that Assange did. That’s also an element.

Scott Horton 19:03
Well, not just that they didn’t get the scoops, but that the information that he revealed showed them to be not journalists at all, but wasted their lives being meinem birds for the state, particularly on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Joe Lauria 19:19
Oh, yeah, without question, and Stooges for intelligence agencies to allow themselves to be used to launder disinformation, through the mainstream press, if public is more likely to believe something if it’s reported the New York Times and if the CIA says it directly. So it’s a disgusting role that the mainstream and national security reporters in general play and Assange couldn’t stand these people. And that was one of the reasons why there was such personal conflict between the reporters especially at The Guardian, and the editors at The Guardian and Assange because he didn’t have a lot of spectrum but he knew he needed the big media to amplify what he had found what he had gotten what people had given him. And don’t forget, Chelsea Manning was First the Washington Post and the New York Times with her leaks and they never returned to Kohl’s. So Politico, too. She went to WikiLeaks and political rights, right? Yeah,

Scott Horton 20:08
totally ignored. And imagine that you’re the New York Times. And you got an army. Somebody’s going, man, I got the mother lode of secret level documents for you about all the wars and you just say, no, that’s not the business. We’re in here at The New York Times.

Joe Lauria 20:22
And they wound up having to partner with Wikileaks to publish it. And I think they right ended that. And by the way, downplay it

Scott Horton 20:28
yet. Let me just say real quick if people are just notice if you search it, search for the phrase, as revealed by WikiLeaks documents, or as shown in the State Department cables or something like that, and especially if you add Iraq and Afghan War Logs to your searches, you’ll see there probably 10,000 news stories that have come out of those documents so far, or at least you know, one detail on a news story that well it is confirmed in the WikiLeaks set back in oh nine etc etc. And just this has been the absolute mother lode for Good journalism, truth that the American people and the people the world, as Manning said, then deserve to know. Simple as that. But now I got to give you the last word about Assange his situation locked in a cage like an animal in Great Britain.

Joe Lauria 21:13
Yeah. his extradition hearing as resumption of it isn’t put off till September 7 because of the virus. They don’t have a courtroom yet exactly won’t be in London. And it’s going to go on for three weeks. And that’s when it’s going to probably be determined whether Britain extradite seminar, there’s been a huge effort. 216 doctors have just sent a letter to the Secretary of State for justice in Britain and published a letter in The Lancet, premier British Medical Journal, saying that he needs to be released. He’s in danger of not only COVID but he’s other underlying problems physically that he’s had for years, including a lung ailment. So there’s pressure building, but when it comes down to it, you have to be very optimistic think that they won’t find a way to extradite join us Launched Alexandria, Virginia, in the end of the day, the the great argument that his defense team has is that the treaty between Britain and the United States says that no one could be extradited for a political offense. This clearly a political fence that could demonstrate that in numerous ways, but there was also an act that took place, the British extradition act that came out before that, that does not says nothing about political crime. So they prosecution is trying to rely on the act defense on the treaty. And let’s hope that they make the right decision. But the kind of pressure the United States is bringing to bear on Britain and the British intelligence services have their own interests and getting Assange as well. So this is revenge against the guy who did really good journalism to expose corruption and criminality of the state. But of course, it’s only the enemy states of the US that commit these things. We’re the good guys. I mean, this is what he’s challenging Assange, that we aren’t the good guys and I think people are waking up to a lot of stuff the public if they were given the story By the main media, the mainstream media would be on his side, but they aren’t. It’s distorted because the mainstream media is in the service of the establishment and of the state, as you pointed out. So hopefully, we’ll see something coming out in September. That might be good. It’ll be a great presentation, I think, by the defense, but we have to think that he probably will be extradited to the US, but one never knows. Yeah.

Scott Horton 23:24
Well, it’ll be a great test for whether there’s such a thing as the rule of law in England, or just the rule of men and their politics and their will, like usual, a great test case for that. And I’m certainly very pessimistic, but then again, I actually think there’s half a chance that if it was, well, if he is extradited, he’ll almost certainly be convicted in Virginia, but then I got half a mind that the Supreme Court would spring them loose anyway, at the end of the day, but you know, if he didn’t die in prison by then,

Joe Lauria 23:56
well, if they could get that part of the Espionage Act overturned is unconstant There’s a chance there’s also a chance if you got a jury trial, but he probably won’t get a jury trial, that they can nullify this realizing that this is not a this law is not constitutional itself.

Scott Horton 24:11
He gets a jury trial. It’ll be all government employees in Alexandria, allegedly. So

Joe Lauria 24:15
that’s the problem. Exactly. Exactly.

Scott Horton 24:18
All right. And now I’m sorry, give us one more word about Chelsea Manning, too, because she is sitting in jail for a year on contempt for refusing to testify against Assange, and was only just recently released a couple of months ago after attempting suicide again. So I was wondering, you know, the latest on how Manning is doing here?

Joe Lauria 24:37
No, I don’t, I don’t, but I do know that they didn’t rely on her testimony because she didn’t give any for this superseding indictment. It was a lot of speculation why they were holding it was there going to be another indictment coming out there is but there’s no new charges as we said. So she’s free. And I want to point out

Scott Horton 24:55
extra vengeance and punishment. There’s all at once. Hmm.

Joe Lauria 24:58
Oh, that was definitely part of that. I think Question cuz a lot of people republicans in particular upset with Obama for commuting or sentence but I was in the courtroom and the Willetts Crown Court, which is on the campus of the Belmarsh prison for one of the days of testimony and the lawyers for Assange pointed out something extraordinary that the indictment the first exam, which is repeated in this one, by the way, exactly word for word, it’s most of this is not just a repeat of the of the existing indictments said that Assange had helped her break a crack a password to get into a government computer. First of all, it does say in that indictment that she had legal access to that computer. So it was only to get her to get an administrative password to hide her identity, which is nothing Bob Paris said he did all the time because of course, you have to help hide the identity of your of your anonymous sources that I’ve had a lot of experiences with. But it turned out that the lawyers claim and I don’t think they would in open court if it weren’t if they didn’t have anything to back it up with that. Assange was helping a break this great Get into this computer under an administrative name. So she could download music videos and computer games. Why? Because they’re forbidden for us personnel serving to have you’re not allowed to download music videos and video games. So she that’s all she was doing. It’s absurd think a lot of attention. But that’s repeated again. This is what he was supposed to be doing breaking the law by helping her Yeah, get a password that good get into an administrative under IT administrators name. This a very weak indictment This doesn’t do anything but it does feed those people who are already predisposed against Assange to make them look like a dirty hacker, not a journalist and the undermine the security of the United States, you actually undermine the security of the careers of people in the Pentagon and in the intelligence services, and in the White House, and Congress supported these ugly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that’s why they Gotta get him. Yep.

Scott Horton 27:01
All right. Well, listen, man, I’m sorry. Gotta let you go here because I got more questions, but we’ll do it again soon. And catch. Okay, maybe we’ll have some good news to report someday here. Hopefully. All right, thank you very much for your time Joe for shopping again. Aren’t you guys that is the great Joe Lauria. He is the editor in chief at consortiumnews.com. And go read this important piece, Assange extradition. Assange hit with new superseding indictment, reflecting possible FBI sting operation. We didn’t focus so much on that angle in this interview, but it’s in there. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. Alright guys on the line I’ve got the great Mike Swanson while he wrote the war state, all about the Truman Eisenhower and Kennedy years there and the rise of the military industrial complex after World War Two. Have you read that man? It’s great. Oh yeah. Also, he’s a former hedge fund manager. Very successful guy on Wall Street and now he gives investment advice at Wall Street window calm. Yes, of course is a sponsor of this show, and has great stuff to say about money issues all the time. Welcome back. How are you doing, Mike?

Mike Swanson 1:14
Oh, I’m doing great. Scott, how are you?

Scott Horton 1:16
I’m doing okay. I’m a little bit worried about the future of the country, to be perfectly honest with you. I think when the washington post is talking, like Mark Thornton, that I should be really worried. And they did. I sent you this piece. I’m sure you probably saw it anyway. The Washington Post says, here’s one more economic problem. The government’s response to the virus has unleashed zombie firms. troubling rise in number of US companies that can’t make enough profit to cover debt payments. So obviously the thesis of the story here is the lockdown, among other things, the virus itself and other economic pressures and whatever have resulted in these massive bankruptcies. But importantly for this issue here is should be bankruptcies would be bankruptcies, but instead these companies are being kept afloat by artificial bank credit expansion. What do you know about that Mike Swanson?

Mike Swanson 2:25
Well, quite a bit, actually.

Scott Horton 2:31
Right now I’m listening.

Mike Swanson 2:32
Well, that does debating what how much I should say. But, okay, the article, it’s a good article. And, you know, I know we’re in a strange moment in the economy and everything we all feel it. In article points out that there’s all these companies Let me see the exact number here because it’s a massive one in five publicly traded US companies they claim as a zombie company, meaning that they have massive debts. And if they weren’t being helped, which the government is now doing, you know, not simply through these stimulus programs, but the Federal Reserve is buying corporate bonds, individual bonds, something that no other central bank has ever done. And these moves keep these companies alive in which if they weren’t happening, they would simply go bankrupt. And the argument in this Post article you sent me is that this can have long term economic costs, because what it’s doing is Miss allocating capital, you know, we’re keeping these zombie companies alive, maybe if they vanished, more efficient companies would take their place, or the money going to them could go to something better and you know, Similar arguments have been made more articulately than I can do by other guests you’ve had such as Bob Murphy in the past or david stockman and so forth. But I think that this is actually almost what the entire economy is at the moment. I mean, this says one out of five but firms, however, I don’t think this is just something happening is the result of the lockdowns and the economic situation we’re in, but is a legacy of the past decade at least, of the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates so low, it creates a bubble in the corporate bond market, of course, the treasury bond market to and when everything went down in March this year, stock market fell over 33%. The most alarming thing is that the bond market froze in essentially locked up in the Federal Reserve announced, oh, endless quantitative easing to prevent that from continuing and they succeeded in preventing the treasury bond market in the corporate bond market from completely collapsing. But the end result is I would suggest is where we are now, which this article is indicative, but I just want to one quick story when I said I know a lot about this. I am very lucky, because in 2008 when the stock market crashed, I made some money as shorting the market, but I didn’t know what to do. That’s it. 2010 11 and I took a large portion of my money and invested it in a real life business. It was a chain of body shops that me and a couple people got started. And I only had an interest in a few of them. And they grew though to almost 20 body shops regionally and last last year they got bought out by a private equity company that paid let’s say, twice what we pay were these people are my partners are paying for these stores. They would run you know, to a city or wherever and buy a body shop that’s already in business from someone who wants to retire. Give them let’s say, three to four times earnings, will we the chain got bought, bought twice that and then within a few months got flipped to an Another company that bought it paid even more. And that company most likely use debt to do all these purchases, and they’re a giant, private equity company. Now, I’ve been told that every single one of their businesses that they now own is losing money, because of, you know, the economy. But the point of this story is that over the past 10 years, these sort of private equity things have been going on all over the country. And the regular stocks you see in the stock market, they have also borrow, you know, massive amounts of money to buy back their stocks and debt is on their balance sheet. So all these problems of huge debt is why the bond market locked up in March in why now we I would say we have a zombie economy sitting in front of us

Scott Horton 7:58
well, and mean this is the thing right? All you Austrians been saying that, boy, we got a big bubble and it’s been 12 years and we’re due for a poppin. And then here comes the virus in the lockdown. Talk about popping a bubble. Now, I don’t know how deep of a depression we’re in. I think the numbers are something like 50 million people unemployed. And that’s according to the way they count him, which must undercount them. I mean, if you’re like hanging and kudos in orbit, and you’re looking down at the United States and our economy, and it’s medium term future here, what are you looking at? How bad is it really?

Mike Swanson 8:39
Well, this is, you know, yeah, I think. So, the official unemployment rate is I believe it’s 14.7%. That was the May unemployment rate. Now. Then, unemployment rate has a little anomaly In it in, in which they’ve doing something strange. There’s a segment of millions of people that they’re claiming are unemployed because they lost their job, then they got it back then they lost it again. And that adds 3% to it. I’m about so just to say it’s around 17%. And I have told people over the years, just friends, that if we ever get to 20% employment, that is when we would start to see protests and social turmoil. And obviously, we’re seeing that or have and when that started happening, I wouldn’t look back and thought, well, baby, by 20% ideas wrong. And actually, during the 1800s, there are several times where unemployment was over 13% and that was considered a depression. And there were, there was social turmoil. For example, In 1877, there’s a giant railroad strike. So 13% unemployment is enough to cause social stress not, you know, you don’t need to be over 20 or up to 30 or something. As far as what’s going to happen with the economy or we’re at when the market stock market was rallying sharply in April in May, there are a lot of people out there, claiming we were going to have a V shaped recovery, meaning that when the economy opened back up, everything would just boom and be back to normal essentially, I didn’t believe that was going to happen. Because I thought, these debt problems were going to just prevent it, basically, and also that the virus itself probably would cause enough people to remain cautious, but more The debt problem is my main concern. However, that seems to now be happening that the boom that we saw for a couple weeks on this reopening, it appears to be running out of steam already. One proxy I’m using is what’s going on in Las Vegas. In the casinos there opened up about six weeks ago and saw a lot of people return the first weekend driving from California and locals, and now they’re reporting in these casinos is that’s all dropped off not just this week. When the news is the virus is now creating more headlines but starting two or three weeks ago just dropped off. And a lot of these high roller people have not returned to the casinos. They’re evidently staying at home and saving their money or whatever they’re doing. And I just think that’s a metaphor for the hill economy. However, I don’t think that means we’re about to see an economic crash, because we already did in March and April, I don’t think, you know, we’re gonna get to 30% or 40% employment in the Federal Reserve itself, they’re claiming that by the end of the year, the economy will shrink 6.5% and then grow 5% next year, that would suggest that the economy’s kind of just gonna be like it is now for the foreseeable future, and we’re just gonna muddle around. I think that’s the most likely scenario. And that also kind of fits into the metaphor of zombie companies, you know, uses economy that just kind of moving around in the dark and not really booming but not getting dramatically worse than it already He is I think that’s really what the story is gonna be for maybe the next year.

Scott Horton 13:06
Or the next year, man. I thought you’re gonna say, yeah, you know, the rest of the decade?

Mike Swanson 13:13
Well, the big question is what happens after that? So there’s an article, I sent you a link to it in, it’s behind a firewall, but it’s in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the tie in the articles the title of the age of magic money. And it’s, it’s advocating for all these Federal Reserve programs, and more government spending and stimulus. Look, the government spent 1.3 trillion in 2008, or the Fed did as the QE bailout, and I think Obama spent about a trillion in 2009. And now we’re talking multiples of that already that just this year, and the article claims Well, you know, Yeah, the problem would be if this causes the dollar to crash and people to worry about government spending and a debt crisis with the government debt. But that didn’t happen in 2008. It’s not happening now. So therefore, we’re in the age of magic money, and we just got to keep spending the money in the article even says we needed to take advantage of the movement to do more public investments, do things to soften inequality and so forth. But the, I’m not advocating for that. I’m just saying what they’re saying. But the remarkable thing about it is they make an argument at the end that no one can predict when we’ll be able to stop doing this. They say the future I’m reading it when the future is uncertain. It can ditch in contingent, a different kind of prediction seems safe. If inflation does break out, the choice of a handful of individuals are determined whether finance goes over the precipice. And they claim that in the past the Federal Reserve was able to hike interest rates to prevent interest inflation running out of control of Paul Volcker did it in Chester Martin under Harry Truman did it. So there’s seem to be saying we just can keep doing this.

Scott Horton 15:31
And what was the national debt when Paul Volcker did that half a trillion dollars?

Mike Swanson 15:35
Yeah, exactly.

Scott Horton 15:38
And the national debt now is, what 28 or something?

Mike Swanson 15:42
Yeah. So

Scott Horton 15:45
in other words, if they raise interest rates like that, the national government would be bankrupt immediately because they wouldn’t be able to pay interest on the debt at all. Or they could just abolish the entire military and even that wouldn’t do it. Probably

Mike Swanson 15:59
not it’s This moment. So, I mean, I knew when I talked with you when this all started and I think it was our interview is in April cited this Ray Dalio book big debt crises and that’s the roadmap I think this is heading to and he study it’s like a reference book going through 100 of these things. And basically we

Scott Horton 16:23
say the name and the author again.

Mike Swanson 16:25
Oh, Ray Dalio D-A-I-L-O big debt crises in the show, not everybody. Yeah, the to make a long story short, basically, we’re probably gonna see the economy continued DAC like be like it is. And then when it does truly bottom out, and go up into a once we’re in a growth phase, it’s going to last now Just a simple bounce. That’s when the inflation would start, the dollar will probably go down, and so forth. And that would probably continue for several years. Basically, it’s and we’ve seen that sort of thing happen in other countries, most recently in Turkey over the past couple years. It happened in Russia twice. Russia had a crisis like that. I think in 2016, was basically, the bottom line is you have a lot of inflation for a couple years. Along with economic growth, the currency goes down, and that process inflates away. All these big debt loads as it plays out. And then the Fed can raise rates in, in, go back to, you know, to put us on a more normal path, sort of like the 1970s. That’s kind of what happened then, but this would be a more extreme version of that. But so in my my feeling is we’re in this strange stasis moment, culturally, politically and economically in with the financial markets this year and it’s just something we’re living through and it’s you know, it’s in the economy’s weird. I mean, there’s so many people without jobs, but yet at the same time they’re getting they have gotten stimulus Jacks that help them.

Scott Horton 18:32
Whether it’s 1200 bucks. I mean, that’s in and out. That’s not even half. That’s not even a month’s rent for a lot of people. You know, you can’t get a one bedroom apartment for 1200 bucks in Austin. So Well, yeah. I mean, I guess the $600 for some people getting the unemployment but that’s hardly everybody.

Mike Swanson 18:53
No, it isn’t. So, and I don’t have you know, I wish I had the article you sent me I read stuff like this. I wish I had a solution or

Scott Horton 19:03
so let me play the reserves advocate here. Okay for a second. I think that my community college teachers would have said that a man a soft landing is better than the hardest crash, you know wily coyote at the bottom of the cliff and trying to scrape yourself up from way that held down there is a lot harder. And so yes, this causes these dislocations. It’s almost like flattening the curve of the the peak of the crash, right? So okay, recovery will take longer, but we’re not going to go to the absolute depths of the worst depression. That’s what they would say.

Mike Swanson 19:43
Well, maybe unfortunate, unfortunately. At this point, I think they might be right. You know, but by doing by by having that mentality for since 19, let’s say 91 when they start bailing out Mexico, ACO and these couple other third world countries and then they in 98, they build out a hedge fund. And ever since, you know, they’ve done this over and over again, I would say if they hadn’t been doing this over and over again, we wouldn’t be where we are in an ethic in 2008, that argument was exaggerated, you know, they didn’t have to bail out all these banks, they could have let some of them go under and then let small regional banks that didn’t have these problems, replace them in some way. But now I think the argument may be cracked. And the The reason why is because that 2008 crisis was a wall street bank crisis. But they put all those bad, they put all those bad debts onto the Treasury balance sheet. So now it’s not simply You know, company corporations or banks with the big debts, but the US government itself and when the bond market locked up in March, the treasury bond market locked up. And now, you know, the bond market is destroyed as a rational investment. And I say that because if I go buy a 10 year treasury bond, right now, the yield I get is 0.68. I don’t even make a percent. I don’t make anything Why would I buy that? It’s completely crazy. And that’s rate is there because of what the Federal Reserve is doing. And you know, if they stopped doing that, it’ll probably would crash overnight everything the stock market, the bond market, everything, but the result is we don’t have a real Economics, you know, a free market system of any degree at all, when the Federal Reserve is doing things, you know, is made it so interest rates, not only are too low, but absolutely have no rational investment sense at all. They just don’t. So how do you invest in that environment? You just it’s very difficult to do so. And how do you have a free market economy when the government is bailing out companies at will, without telling you who they’re bailing out? And so, the Federal Reserve is buying debt. Yeah.

Scott Horton 22:47
[ADS]

You know, in our kind of all other things being equal here, we’re not just talking about a regular old crash. We’re talking about this government enforced lockdown that has just decimated certain many sectors of the economy that we’re only I guess, beginning to take the temperature all but I’ll tell you what, though, if, if you speak line graph, then david stockman articles where he reproduces all these charts from the Federal Reserve and so forth, will give you a nightmare Smith

Mike Swanson 25:00
Well, the thing about the economy and one of the reasons I mentioned this personal thing of having you being involved some body shops that got bought the private equity company that owns the now they own they’re one of the largest in the country and they own things such as Planet Fitness. Pabst Blue Ribbon, and I’ve been told, you know, that almost every single one of the companies they own is losing money. So, just, you know, I don’t The thing about the lockdowns in April or early May, I was speaking with someone locally that’s on the board of directors of one of the Bank of a local regional bank. And at the time, I thought the lockdowns would end in July or June. That’s what some of the health officials were saying and articles we’re kind of making a case for that Donald Trump, actually, in some of his first press conferences about this, hinted at that that the lockdowns might end to July and things would return to normal in August. And this person A friend of mine was basically telling me a bunch of stories that implied that they would have to end very soon because of the economic pressures that they were creating.

Scott Horton 26:32
Yeah, I mean, that was why I thought they wouldn’t last even through April or I mean, I thought they’d last through the end of April, I guess was the original chart to for the downside of the curve. And I thought, you know, look big business rules this country and I could see them accepting four weeks mandatory vacation for everybody okay, fine, but they’re not going to tolerate any more than that. And then I was wrong. They put up with a whole extra month in that so and to all of our detriment to obviously.

Mike Swanson 27:02
So if you, if the person, the listener doesn’t like lock downs, I would suggest no matter what happens with the virus, they won’t return. Again the way they did, were here at the start of them.

Scott Horton 27:14
Yep. Now, I said that all along to once you relax them once, you’re not ever gonna be able to do that, again, that was your one shot at it to build more hospital beds or get more ventilators or whatever it was that you need, but you’re not gonna be able to do that, again. It’s a big country 300 million people and if you ever flown on a plane from one end of it to another, or even better yet driven from one side of it to another one coast to the other. It was an empire even before the Spanish American War. It’s humongous. So there’s just it’s unenforceable. It’s just crazy to try without, you know, Chinese level totalitarianism, which we won’t accept. So

Mike Swanson 27:58
So here we are. Yeah.

Scott Horton 28:00
And things are looking bad right now. I mean cases are up up here in Texas. And I think, you know, in my county in my neighborhood, hopefully nothing more specific than that. But uh, anyway, well,

Mike Swanson 28:16
what I’ve been keeping an eye on is not the number of cases because they are doing more testing. So obviously there will be more cases in the data hospitalizations and you know, where I live in Virginia and it’s, we’re doing fine, I would say but North Carolina the hospitals, hospitalizations are going straight up. They’re doing it the same in South Carolina and Florida. And so it’s, it is but you wonder, Is this something that will just move, you know, instead of these big waves up and down and there were three of them, right and the Spanish Flu if instead this will just be like a rolling situation where say it dies out? Where you live in a few weeks and then it appears in Montana or somewhere you know? Yeah Who knows?

Scott Horton 29:07
Yeah, I was hoping that Texas sun would come and murder that so be by now but hadn’t yet but the Texas sun a murder an sob so why not a virus you know?

Mike Swanson 29:19
Yeah

Scott Horton 29:21
it’s a it’s a thing to behold it’s one of the wonders of the world the Texas sun if that can protect us from a virus what can and I’m so sorry I’m I’m late we got to go Mike but thank you so much for your time again on the show man always great to talk to you.

Mike Swanson 29:35
You too are totally

Scott Horton 29:36
okay guys, check out the great Mike Swanson. He’s at Wall Street window.com WallStreetwindow.com and check out his great book, The War state. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org

Scott Horton 0:10
All right, y’all welcome it’s Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I’ve recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys introducing Vincent Bevins And he wrote about Brazil for the LA Times and Indonesia for The Washington Post. And he’s got this brand new book out the Jakarta method. Washington’s anti communist crusade and the mass murder program that you shaped our world. And unfortunately, I just don’t have the time to read the thing right now. I’m very busy. But I did read this great excerpt adapted from it. At the New York Review of Books, that’s ny books.com. It’s called how Jakarta became the code word for us back mass killing. Welcome back to the show. Vincent, how are you doing?

Vincent Bevins 1:27
Good. How are you?

Scott Horton 1:28
I’m doing great. And yeah, I’m really sorry. I don’t have time to get to the whole book right now. But that’s fine. I really do appreciate the work that you’ve done here. And what an important article, this is here at the New York Review of Books, it’s 5000 words or something definitely worth taking a look at here. And two dirty wars really against the Reds during the Cold War in the 1960s here in Indonesia and in Brazil, and so you kind of Tell the story through the eyes of people who lived through it. And in fact, had traveled from Indonesia and emigrated from Indonesia to Brazil. And so we’re kind of tied up in a way, in both. So if you want to take that angle, that’d be fine. Or if you want to just kind of zoom out and talk a little bit more about the the kind of larger overview of the Cold War and the purpose of it all or whichever angle you want to start with is fine.

Vincent Bevins 2:28
Sure, yeah. In this in this book, I tell the story of the US backed, intentional mass murder of approximately 1 million innocent civilians in Indonesia, and this is one of the most important turning points of the Cold War. Definitely, far more important in Vietnam, I think might have been the greatest quote unquote, victory for Washington, as it perceived its its goals in the Cold War. And this victory was so obvious to allies. of the United States, other right wing regimes potential allies of the United States that they learned from the tactics that were that were employed very horribly in Indonesia. And most famously, in Brazil and Chile, they had the deployment of the word Jakarta to signify mass murder as something that they were going to do to the left in order to make in order to solidify the right wing authoritarian regimes that took shape during the Cold War. And yeah, as you said, to write this book, I I traveled around the world and I met a lot of people that lived through this and I tried to find the people who, who, whose personal stories could really bring home what really happened and how it affected life in all these countries, and I found I found through the research and through meeting these people that in at least 20 countries, US allied regimes carried out intentional mass murderer programs to kill leftist or accused leftist and I think that this was such an important Part of the way that the West won the cold war that ended up shaping the type of globalization that we ended up getting in the early 21st century. And I’m in Sao Paulo now. And I could, I could certainly tell you that we here in Brazil feel the long consequences of the, of the violence of the Cold War. And I think this is true in a lot of countries, especially in the developing world, but also in, in the in the first world as well. The relationship between the rich world and the developing world is is one that has been profoundly shaped by this violence in a way that I think is really been overlooked in the last since the end of the Cold War, partially because these things took place so far from the sort of headline grabbing quagmires that actually involved American civilians like Vietnam, or the sort of embarrassing and explosive Direct confrontations with the Soviet Union like in, in in Cuba, or in Berlin. But for the vast majority of human beings on planet Earth, the Cold War was not about those those small little direct conflicts with between Moscow and Washington, it was between It was about the complex conflicts between the formerly colonized world what used to be called the third world. And at the time, that term was entirely optimistic, it was meant to signify that the peoples of the formerly colonized world would be able to take their place in the world stage. It was the conflict between the third world and the first world I think is the one that is was most important in the in the Cold War. And that is the one that I tried to tell. centering the massacre of Indonesia is one of the most important events because I think it it can be easily considered as important as anything else.

Scott Horton 5:51
Yeah. Well, and as you say, it’s pretty easy to go under the radar when compared to Vietnam, even though Third of the casualties is still a lot compared to, you know, Vietnam was a lot to compare to a million dead. But if it was all by proxy, and it was all by CIA payoffs and briefcases and this kind of thing, then that means that 60 minutes may have covered part of it once or something at most, but this was never, you know, a big deal. In fact, this is part of that documentary about Noam Chomsky, right of Manufacturing Consent, where they take the New York Times column inches that they spent on the auto genocide in Cambodia, and right column inches spent on the auto genocide in Indonesia going on right around the same time, or is already the same time and compare the agenda setting media in which one they want you to care about which one they rather sweep under the rug.

Vincent Bevins 6:53
Yeah, I mean, it’s, I think it’s just a function of the I mean, I’ve spent all of my adult life as a as a correspondent Working for mainstream corporate made in the United States and all of the skills I have as a journalist, for better or worse, come from that experience. But I mean, I know how it works. And I and I know why it would be that narratives which very violently, conflict with our data, our idea of who we are as a country and what the Cold War was just kind of ended up not really fitting. So in the, in the case of Indonesia 1965, there was a brief moment of coverage in the western press and the New York Times, there was a very celebratory column, a basically a euphoric recounting of the way that the largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union in China was eliminated in one of the biggest prizes in the Cold War flipped overnight, almost

Scott Horton 7:47
all important. Yeah, as you point out here that the leader in charge was part of the non aligned movement and was not a communist. And so it wasn’t a matter of overthrowing a communist governments as a matter of overthrowing a neutral grip. Government and then destroying a communist party that had not yet achieved power. Right?

Vincent Bevins 8:04
Yes, and this is something that’s very poorly understood I think in in the English language understanding of the Cold War, Sukarno was not only just a member of the non aligned movement, he was one of the founders. He was one of the founding and driving forces between behind this movement to create a path for countries that did not want to align directly with the United States. They were often very skeptical of what the United States is really up to after, you know, hundreds of years under white, white European colonialism watching the way that the United States was acting in other countries. They were very hesitant to join up completely, but they also didn’t want to join up with the Soviet Union. And what is too often excluded from our memory of the Cold War is that starting with the Eisenhower administration, and then basically for the rest of the Cold War, anyone that was neutral that tried to maintain some kind of independence that did not join an explicit alliance with the United States was viewed as potentially a threat and Who’s justified who’s whose violent overthrow could be justified. So the mass murder of the Communist Party, which by the way, should be stressed was an unarmed and very moderate party. I mean, they always believed that you had to develop capitalism in a broad alliance with the rest of Indonesia. And then the maybe you would transition to socialism in 40 or 50 years. The Communist Party was eliminated, not because they were in power, but because they were part of the support base for president Sukarno. And so they had to be killed so that that transition to the US backed dictator Suharto could be carried out right if they had not destroyed the supporters of the left leaning but independent government and terrified all of the family members and friends of those that had been killed. It would have been impossible to actually transition to this very pro Washington very violent and very dictatorial Suharto regime.

Scott Horton 10:00
Yeah, now. So well tell us a little bit about Sukarno and and how the coup took place against him.

Vincent Bevins 10:09
Yeah. So this is Sukarno came up in the anti colonial struggle against the Dutch. So we did Asia, maybe we should just you know, stress is the fourth largest country in the world by population. It consists of the Dutch colonies in Asia, it’s 13,015 thousand or 18,000 Islands depending on the tide, basically, a huge constellation of ethnicities and languages and cultures. And Sukarno came up in the early 20th century in this meal you in which opposition to European colonialism brought everyone together. And the main forces that were united against this colonialism were Marxism, Islam, and anti colonial nationalism. And he kind of brought all these brought all these disparate elements together and forged this kind of national identity which was explicitly anti Imperial. And explicitly about independence from the colonial world. And in the first years of the cold war after him and the independence forces succeeded and expelling the Dutch, the Dutch tried to reconquer from 1945 to 1949. We forget often that the Europeans came back in a lot of cases and tried to get back their colonies just you know, we, the US government helped France to in this attempt, which is why so many people in the region were so skeptical of us, intentions, the region. And in the beginning of the Cold War, Sukarno was seen as somebody that could be dealt with by the Washington, foreign policy establishment was seen as somebody that was sufficiently anti communist, he was at least keeping the communists in check. And he made it very clear that he wanted to have good relations with the United States, which he really did. Now, two things happen in the 1950s, which cause the people in Washington to change their mind. Number one, the Indonesian Communist Party keeps doing better, better, better and veteran elections. And we know now from declassified files and From CIA reports that it was understood in Washington that the reason they were doing better and better was because they were popular and they were doing effective outreach to the people in the countryside in the cities. It was it was not a trick. It was not coercion. They were just winning. And this really alarmed people in Washington. And number two, Sukarno brought together the countries of the Third World at something called the afro Asian conference, or the bond Doom conference in 1955. And this was this explicit attempt to forge an alliance between all the countries of the formerly colonized world to create a path that was independent of the United States and the Soviet Union. And even though they tried very hard at this conference, to make it clear that to the United States that they wanted to maintain a friendship they even invoked the legacy of Paul Revere at the conference to sort of tried to appeal to this revolutionary history in the United States to say like, Hey, we’re doing what you did. You know, we’re, we just want to be our own country, just like you wanted to be free of the British that Didn’t matter. The success of the Communist Party and Soekarno is very loud, anti colonial anti Imperial posture caused the CIA to unleash a number of attempts to destroy his government or to crush the left or to even break apart Indonesia. And it was only in 1965, that the third attempt finally succeeded the third, the third and final attempt to crush the left involved mass murder. But first they tried just paying just giving money to the right wing Muslim parties. They tried that in the middle of the 50s. That didn’t work. In 1958, the CIA started bombing the country in what was the CIA’s largest ever operated operation to that point. So again, this is very forgotten. But in 5758, the CIA backed rebels out on the outer islands quote, unquote, so in there were sort of regional, there are regions of Indonesia are trying to break off or stand up to the central government and the CIA just started bombing the country and killings. civilians. And an American pilot was caught in 1958, a man named Alan Pope. And so this was the second attempt which totally failed. And then the US reorganized recalibrated to instead of fight directly the Indonesian army to train them into cryo to create a sort of anti communist pro American ideological hegemony within the armed forces. And by 1965 as Sukarno has picked another fight with the West, which is seen as a the last straw and a clash erupts between the the unarmed Communist Party and the very well armed armed forces in 1965. The State Department and clandestine services CIA and in my sex although we still don’t know exactly what CIA and am I am I six did, they very enthusiastically back the army as they violently crush this on armed, very popular Communist Party, probably 25 30% of the country was somehow affiliated. And they were so easy to kill precisely because they were a non violent party. And in a matter of six to 12 months, they’re entirely eliminated. Not a single American is hurt. And the largest country in Southeast Asia is flipped from a vocal, anti imperialist nation that is trying to unite the brown of blind peoples of the world into a reliable ally of the United States. And as you say, for the rest of the Cold War, whatever Suharto is doing gets a pass from Washington in 1975. They invade East Timor on the pretense of anti communism and kill approximately a third of that country which is larger percentage of the population than Pol Pot killed in in in Cambodia. And as you rightly point out, we all know about Pol Pot but very few people know about Suharto or the fact that he was on our side.

Scott Horton 16:23
[ADS]

And so when you say the CIA was bombed in place, I mean, this is what the original version of air america kind of deniable airlines, or Yeah, so you’re using the Air Force planes in there. What kind of airstrikes we took.

Vincent Bevins 17:06
They were taken out from Singapore, they were American pilots. And they were they were dropping bombs on on Indonesian islands. I don’t know. I mean, that’s that’s a good question. I have it in my notes, but, like, whose planes they were? I’m not sure. But it was it was not. It was not like, it was not the kind of more sophisticated deniability that you got later in the Cold War, where you had, you know, you made sure that there was no American pilots getting caught, you know, there was a guy named Alan Pope who was caught, he crashed landed in the island of Cuba on bone with his identifying papers on him. And this was seen as proof to the forces within Indonesia, specially on the left that had been saying for from 1945 to 1958. We can’t trust the Americans, they want to destroy our country. These people were proved right. So that’s the This moment in Tunisia moves closer to the Soviet Union, but still never never allies with the communist bloc. Sukarno always insists on independence. But this was a actual aerial bombardment with several American pilots. You could read, you could read them sort of their their memoirs talking about this bragging about this saying, you know, I killed a lot of people, but they were communist, so that’s fine. And this was based on what they had done in Guatemala in 1954. They were trying to replicate the success they had had in Guatemala before and

Scott Horton 18:37
success.

Vincent Bevins 18:38
Yeah, I mean, they were this was a huge, you know, the CIA when the CIA was first created. Right after world war two ended. They struggled for years to actually crack the Soviet bloc, right? They they sent people parachuting into Eastern Europe, all these people were captured. They were they were totally ineffective at actually taking on the communist world. But when they don’t turn to the quarter, Third World they had quote unquote, success. So in Iran and x 53, Guatemala 1954. This was seen as the Eisenhower administration as like, Oh, we cracked the code, we can flip countries to our side with no, with no cost. And in Indonesia, this failed, and it failed very obviously. So they ended up in entirely changing tactics, bringing thousands of Indonesian military officers to train in Kansas, and one of the main characters in my book, and I end up dedicating the book to him because he passed away. Last year, he was also brought to Kansas to study economics. So he, he recounts what it was like to sort of go out in Kansas in the 50s. Drinking with these Indonesian officers going to strip clubs and sort of recounting what he believes they were actually brought to America for. And he says that they were brought to America so that it can be kind of paid to be to become loyal anticommunist allies. When the mass murder program starts to have the people that are most responsible for really putting it into practice on the ground, both studied in Kansas in the 1950s.

Scott Horton 20:11
Now, in your article, you brought up the name David Rockefeller. And I was wondering if you could be more specific about Chase Manhattan Bank interests in Indonesia at the time. Is this all tied up with the Golden West Papa, or is there more to it than that?

Vincent Bevins 20:28
Yeah, so the so the Golden West Papa was found after immediately after us a corporate interest sort of stream into Indonesia. So I think what you might be referring to, are you so the Rockefellers are involved in in different ways and all in the major coups that take place in the book, so in Brazil, she lays certainly in an Indian age, I believe, will happens is, I mentioned that the Rockefellers stream in as part of this major business conference that takes place in Jakarta as 1 million innocent. Indonesians are still held in concentration camps. So they killed proxy 1 million people, another millionaire, are held in anti left concentration camps for over a decade. While this is happening, all of the big companies in the United from the United States streaming to have sort of business conferences celebrating that Indonesia is open for Western capitalism. Now, the gold issue is very interesting, but that’s discovered after what was very important to us officials and to US corporations in the during the moment of the actual mass murder, and it’s gonna sound like a cliche, but it’s the same thing with oil, right. So even while the killings were happening, the United States government was able to put effective pressure on general Suharto to make sure that Indonesian oil, the Indonesian oil industry would be would remain open to foreign investment and not be nationalized, as was the the initial plan.

Scott Horton 22:12
And now, I wanted to ask you about, really the first thing I ever learned about this was from Christopher Hitchens movie the trials of Henry Kissinger back in the 1990s, where he talked about during the Ford administration, this same exact kind of thing happened again and again, with a green light from the US to the Indonesian right to crack down. Maybe that was over East Timor –

Vincent Bevins 22:37
East Timor is tea is tea market. Exactly. So it’s like, if you the book, the book tries to tell in a very concise and accessible way the the history of the whole Cold War, but you know, sort of it says what what if you told the history of the Cold War, but with Indonesian massacre as the central event, and what if you told the story of the cold war with the people that live Through this violence in Brazil and Chile and Indonesia as the main characters of the Cold War. And doing that, it becomes very clear that there’s no there’s no president that is not involved in or responsible for some really horrible stuff. So the second half of the 70s when you have four Ford and Jimmy Carter, this is the period when Suharto carries out the invasion of and mass murder of approximately one third of these team or then then Vietnam, invades Cambodia to liberate that country from the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Jimmy Carter agrees with China that China should invade Vietnam to punish them for this invasion is forgotten because it was such a failure. But then after that, the United States takes the side of the Khmer Rouge and for the rest of the Cold War. So the United States at that points become at that point becomes a defender of the Khmer Rouge right to represent Cambodia.

Scott Horton 24:02
That’s right. For Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, for the first time you ever learned that it’s a lot of fun. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both back to Pol Pot didn’t they?

Vincent Bevins 24:12
Yeah, yeah. I mean from it there was this brief moment when absolutely from 1975 to 1979. A quote unquote communist regime was carrying out terrible atrocities, although the actual communists in the in the countries nearby didn’t. Once they found out what was really happening, they, you know, stormed into Stop it. Of course, they have their own reasons, but it was this brief period when absolutely yes, we were not on the side of the the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime from 75 to 79 when they carried out these horrible, horrible human rights abuses are much worse than that, that we all know about. But what we don’t people don’t realize is that things before that were very bad in Cambodia when, because in Cambodia 1970 the United States backed a coup of princey how nuke who had who was at Sukarno last figure in that he was trying to maintain independence and neutrality, but this was very, very difficult with the Vietnam War happening on his border. The South Vietnamese government tried to kill him, the CIA tried to overthrow him. He was loudly proclaiming that the CIA was trying to kill him and everybody called him while conspiracy theorists, but it turned out he was totally right. So in 1970, the US did back a coup in Cambodia and installed lawn Knoll. And the period in which he was running Cambodia and the United States was bombing the countryside was horrible. So 1970 to 75 was horrible. And then after Pol Pot actually leaves then we, you know, or the US government insists that the Khmer Rouge is the legitimate representative of Cambodia at the United Nations, and keeps sort of a small contingent of them active on the Thai border, kind of in a way trying to contest Vietnamese control over that country. So In this region, like it’s a it’s very hard to look at the United States and be like, Oh, well, that was the that was the point when they were good here. There’s not there’s no like little gap where things were where the US behaved in a in a way that was that would correspond to the ideals that we profess.

Scott Horton 26:20
Yeah, I mean, this was never about good versus evil. It was just about who had the dominance. There’s a great clip of Eisenhower saying, Now listen, if the Reds get control and Vietnam, we might have to pay the market price for tungsten. And that’s just intolerable. I mean, this kind of thing. cynical calculations about, you know, pennies on the dollar for minerals. I mean, what if we’d had to buy tungsten from the Reds all along? Think of all the money we would have saved instead of trying to steal it and killing 3 million people.

Vincent Bevins 26:55
You mean, there’s a quote from George Kennan, which might be interesting for me to read George Kennan, were the architects of the Cold War 1948. He says, and I quote, We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in this coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. So basically saying, like, we have weight we have we run the world’s economy, and obviously, this isn’t fair. So we have to figure a way to crush opposition to the situation. And, you know, I when I moved to Southeast Asian 2017, like, you know, these people understand this, you know, they understand the relationship between the white world in the and these parts of Asia, you know, they had hundreds of years of direct colonial domination and if you ask a lot of people now they’ll say no, you know, the United States took over and they occupied a position which was very similar. You want to call it Neo colonial, you want to call it you know, Violent hegemony, whatever, whatever is the vocabulary that you use. It’s very, they understood what was happening.

Scott Horton 28:08
Yeah, of course, it’s a demo belie that the American people’s standard of living depends on this imperialism. That’s not right. The American government’s position of dominance over other governments and their ability to pull the strings for Favorite corporations like say, Rockefeller interests in Indonesia, for example. No question about that. But, you know, it’s sort of like cops hiding behind racism for their brutality. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. No, the American people, how would they ever feed their children? If we weren’t butchering Indonesians? You know, you might as well say that we’re dependent on the face of Saturn in the sky. There’s no correlation there whatsoever.

Vincent Bevins 28:52
Yeah, so like, I made that point at the very end of the book. Like I compare, I look, you know, how because I still you know, I spent a lot of time meeting these people in in from Indonesia, especially but South America and around the world and one of the most moving things. And one of the most tragic moments of this research was when when I would ask them about their political lives and their political beliefs in the 50s and 60s. And when they would explain to me what they believed then that the world would be like now, like, you could see their their eyes light up, and they were just kind of like this world that they believed that they were going to get once direct Imperial control ended. They, they thought that they were going to take their place alongside the rich Western world. And at the end of the book, I look at how in a very concrete and quantifiable way this did not happen at all. Almost no country, no large country in the quote unquote, third world that actually caught up with the rich world since 1945. And so what I make the point at the very end of the book that as, as an as a country, as a nation, Unit, the United States benefited from this dynamic. But that doesn’t mean that the average person did it means that certain sectors of the US did. And those are the sectors which have the most control over over the government. It’s not enough to be radical to recognize that powerful economic interests have more control over the US government then, you know, marginalized communities are in you know, or you know, just

Scott Horton 30:28
just the average Joe. Yeah,

Vincent Bevins 30:29
yeah, half of the country, right.

Scott Horton 31:07
[ADS]

So take us over to the Brazil side of this because I think you know what I’m going to tell you a story that I only just thought of I’m glad I did. I hadn’t thought of this in a while. But I know a guy. I knew a guy a long time ago on my first radio show Free Radio Austin 1998 1999. And I saw this guy again in 2001 or two or somewhere around there. And he told me the story of his September 11. And what it happened was he was down in Brazil. I don’t remember if it was in Rio, or in Sao Paulo, one of the other and it was like a scene out of one of those 1950s movies or something where people would gather on the sidewalk outside the department store window to watch the TV news of breaking news. You know what I mean? You see the scenes. It was just like that. September 11, the towers are burning. And all the people are gathered around on the sidewalk watching it burn. And he was there with them. And he said they were all not celebrating, you know, like whooping or clapping or anything like that. But they were doing that thing where it’s like that little fist pump where you kind of hold your fist close to your chest and go, yeah, yeah. And they were all gone. Yeah. And he was like, What the hell? What did America ever do to Brazil? How could these people sit there and say, now you know what it feels like? And they’re not Iraqi. So we’ve been bombing from bases in Saudi Arabia for 10 years, the Brazilians and of course, the answer is America done a hell of a lot to them. But nothing of the American people have any idea about Vinson?

Vincent Bevins 33:52
Yeah, it’s not. I mean, this is the really the big contradiction because you know, when people are well, how do we not know about this? What’s like, you know, if you’re going Have a government which is hegemonic or imperialist are somehow involved in almost the affairs of almost every country in the world. It’s very difficult to have that in democracy at the same time, right? Because the average American has a lot going on in their own lives. How are they supposed to keep track of what it is that the US government is doing in 180 countries? Right. I mean, there’s, there’s limited amounts of attention that we can give to US foreign policy, but it’s it’s basically happening everywhere. And it’s really interesting that you bring up September 11, because September 11, is the day that the CIA eventually succeeded in overthrowing Salvador Allende and installing Augusto Pinochet. Right. So September 11 1973, is the day in which the Jakarta method was implemented in Chile. So maybe I’ll just explain how Jakarta came to South America and what that actually meant in the early 70s. So the US us backed coup in 1964 in Brazil was probably as I as I claim that the Indonesian mass murder was the most quote on the Most important, quote unquote success in in Asia. I think that Brazil 1964 was the most important success in the Western Hemisphere, precisely because it was. It was more subtle there was there was no need for a obvious and catastrophic intervention. There was a long collaboration between the US government in the Brazilian military, the Brazilian military largely did it on their own, the US government made military equipment available to the Brazilian military ended up not needing it. They got the they got sufficient support, among them, the the officers here and among the elite to carry out the coup on their own. Then in 1970, Salvador Allende is elected President of Chile. And now what we know, again from declassified files for from this period is that what the Nixon administration was afraid of in Chile was not that he would take the country down some sort of a Stalinist path and Implement rampant authoritarianism that would starve the people. They were very specifically, then they were very clear about this. They were, they were afraid that salvadorian days, democratic socialism would succeed, and by succeeding serve as a inspiration to the other peoples of South America, they, they were terrified that if they if I end a prove that you could have socialism and democracy, then the game would be up, then everybody would want to do this, there’d be no way to maintain hegemony in, in Latin America. So in 1970, before he ended, even takes power, the US starts backing right wing terrorism. And the first major result of this terrorism is that the leader of the Canadian Armed Forces is kidnapped and murdered. And the reason he was kidnapped is because he was opposed to a Chilean coup. So he was seen as an obstacle to the in the eyes of the right in the United States a necessary step of stop Being ind from taking president even though he even had hadn’t even had the chance to make a single mistake. Renee Schneider, this military leader was killed. This is probably an accident. But the terrorism started before and even gets to gets gets into office. But he does get into office the first, the first attempts to stop them fail. And as I end is running Chile right wing terrorists begin to graffiti, the walls of Santiago, the Capitol, and they would write the message Jakarta is coming, or just Jakarta. And they would send postcards to members of the government or leftists or supporters of Salvador Allende that would say, Jakarta is coming or Jakarta. And what this meant, and it was clear if you were paying attention to the global Cold War at this point in history, was we’re going to kill you just like they killed them. In Indonesia. And this was terrifying and I met a lot of the people in Chile lived through this that were threatened by this It was terrorism, right? The idea was to send the message that you’re going to die if you don’t give us what we want. Even if we get what we want, we’re probably going to kill you anyways. And in September 11 1973, Pinochet eventually succeeds in overthrowing the end government with the act of support of the CIA, of course. And on September 11 1973, Jakarta does come the message that had been sent years before was true. They killed the people that were seen as a threat to the consolidation of right wing authoritarianism in Chile. Now, they didn’t kill nearly as many people because they didn’t have to, and they were proud of the the ways in which they were, say surgical about the killings. They thought that they could be efficient in in killing only a few thousand. And it works right. So just as the United States, let Indonesia totally get away with this To the US played defense for, for Chile. Now in Brazil, you also had something called Operation Jakarta that was discussed in the exact same period among the right wing Brazilian military. Now, we’re not sure if this was actually an official formal title for an operation if it was just sort of a thing that was thrown around in the barracks as a threat as a plan, but ended up not happening right. And there’s reasons in Brazil that the church and human rights movements react to the murder of a very famous journalist Vladimir Hertzog in ways which probably stopped them from carrying out operate operations record if it was ever a real operation, but still in 1975. These two us backed right wing authoritarian regimes come together to form Operation Condor, which is a international mass murder network. So just as Pinochet had taken out as internal enemies in 1973 and just as Brazil had killed the people that it needed to take care of in order to consolidate power in the late 60s and early 70s, they the countries of the Southern Southern Cone most of which by now were us backed right wing authoritarian regimes realized, Oh, well, what happens if one of our quote unquote enemies gets away they get across the border and so they formed Operation Condor, which is a collaboration to kill enemies of the regimes wherever they may be. And this is not like gorillas, right. So Pinochet killed his former boss, right in Britain, Sarris, he was the penis he killed Carlos krotz, who was the head of another head of the Chilean military that was morally and and and politically against the idea of a coup. And Operation Condor countries killed 10s of thousands of people and in the years that came and again, just as in Indonesia, they got away with this to the extent that the United States said anything about this, they came to their defense. And it works, right like the consolidation of crony capitalism, in the least in in, you know, in like, it’s the opposite of the free market. Right. It’s, it’s like it’s the kind of market that is imposed upon you by, you know, a violent dictatorship. Absolutely. Right. This is, is the type of capitalism that is still in place in the vast majority of the developing world, I think,

Scott Horton 41:31
right now. So I think people are probably more familiar with the coup in Chile and the CIA’s involvement there. But can you tell us the direct CIA involvement in the regime change in Brazil?

Vincent Bevins 41:45
Yeah, so drug Goulart takes over in the beginning of the 1960s. This was kind of a mistake. He was only elected as Vice President, but then the actual president resigns thinking that the people are going to like Sweep into the streets are so like take to the streets and sweep them back into power. This doesn’t happen. So it ends up with drug Goulart, a left wing president that does that is not seen as acceptable by the Brazilian elite. Now in 1962 john F. Kennedy has a meeting with his ambassador to Brazil. And you can listen to the recording of that meeting when john F. Kennedy tells him to prepare the ground for military coup, if it’s needed to basically tell the Brazilian military that you know, this is something you can look into. And if it turns out that you think it’s necessary if it turns out that fighting communism, quote unquote, is going to take this path. We’re going to have your back. This of course happens they step up covert operations in Brazil. We don’t know exactly what that meant. But the the explicit support for the Brazilian military and the explicit message which is if you need to find a way to get rid of this president, go for it. This happened from 1960 to 1960. Now JFK also sends in Vernon Walters as his military attache to Brazil. And in the beginning of 1964, we now have declassified files that Indic that indicate that the US foreign policy establishment is coalescing around a an option as a replacement for SRA Goulart and that is a military officer called general Umberto Castello Bronco. Now, General Humberto Castillo Bronco is probably known to Brazilians as the first dictatorship, or as the first dictator to take power in the coup of 1964. What is very often overlooked by history is this this Gen Umberto customer Bronco is the former roommate of Vernon Walters, that military attache that JFK sent in they had lived together in Italy back in the 40s. So although the actual coup happens in in and it’s important to recognize how Important this was for its long term success. The coup is carried out by Brazilian military. Something called Operation brother Sam, if you if you Google that you can see the the declassified authorization of the supply of naval force to the Brazilian military. But that’s not needed. The Brazilian military carries us out on its own. And part of the reason it’s so successful is because the actual president Goulart thinks that this is going to be temporary. He thinks it’s this dictatorships going to just last a couple years and he’s going to be able to run for president again or that because the democracy will be reconsolidated Of course this doesn’t happen. So it is. For this reason, I think the most successful and long lasting intervention in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century and Brazil becomes one of a very, not only compliant but enthusiastic anti communists. partner in South America. So they ended up actively intervening and interfering in Bolivia, Uruguay, and then eventually Chile to make sure that other social democratic or left leaning or just basically mean the elites. Were just afraid of democracy. Right. I mean, one of the worst things that is well, Goulart was proposing was voting rights reform in a way that, you know, is very familiar to what’s happening in the United States at the exact same period, he was trying to extend the vote to black Brazilians who were excluded from democracy by literacy laws, right. And the elites recognize that this would have entirely changed the the the dynamic of politics in South American in Brazil’s us backed dictatorship from 1964 to 1973. Four or five is actively intervening in the smaller countries around here to make sure that they also become us back anti communist dictatorships.

Scott Horton 46:02
And in Brazil, how many people were rounded up and killed or lit up and or killed? I guess two different questions.

Vincent Bevins 46:07
They’re way less than in the neighboring countries. So if you can, if you if you count that disappeared, the actual people, the people that in Brazilian cities were identifiably taken prisoner and never got back out. It’s around 400. Now, if you want to expand that number to all of the indigenous people that my hip they have been killed very far from the media, the numbers a lot higher. But the number of actual murders carried out intentionally by the Brazilian military is very small compared to say Argentina, where there’s 10s of thousands, Chile where there’s 3000, all of Operation Condor. So this, all of the countries that form part of this this coalition in South America kill maybe 70 to 90,000 people in in the 70s and 80s. Then there is a direct line from this up into Central America. And because when Central America becomes the next, quote unquote problem area for us hegemony when left leaning reformist starts to take power and then they are killed. And then that leads to the left reforming into guerrilla groups in Central America. Operation contour Brazil are military officers come into Central America to train right wing death squads in Central America. And the worst violence in the Western Hemisphere in the Cold War happens in Guatemala where 200 to 250,000 innocent people were executed for being quote unquote communist often just for being indigenous because the indigenous depending on your tribe were seen as inherently in a in a very racist way. They were sort of that tribe was marked as communist right like, oh, that tribe is opposed to The type of market that we want to impose on them so they need to be eliminated. 220 50,000, Guatemala and B 70,000. In El Salvador, of course, the the Contra war is more famous and in

Scott Horton 48:14
Guatemala, I mean that the civil war there lasted for, what? 20 or 30 years or something.

Vincent Bevins 48:19
Now it lasted from Well, we, the United States overthrew hookah bargains in 1954. Things were a mess from then until 2000. The Cold War The the actual civil wars, the actual Civil War started in 1960s. And so went on for at least 30 years, and that the Civil War was, you know, in Guatemala, the long consequences of the 1954 CIA coup. Were catastrophic until until basically the beginning of the 21st century. And if anybody knows anybody who talks from Guatemala has some kind of a story of, of the way in which this affected their lives. And you know, we talked about earlier like You know, in the CIA saw this as opponents a good success and 54. And this is very tragic and awful. But by the end of the 50s, they realized, Oh, this didn’t actually work so well. We need to come up with more subtle and more lasting ways to exercise in Germany, but in the actual Civil War started in 1860. And this is often forgotten. The proximate cause, I mean, the real deep causes for the Civil War was that there was a dictatorship with absolutely no popular support. But the proximate cause for the beginning of the of the Civil War in 1960, was that the Cuban exiles that were training for the Bay of Pigs were being trained in Guatemala, and their presence on Guatemalan soil really upset the Guatemalan military because the actual dictator was taking all the money. And these Cubans were sort of throwing their weight around in a way which was insulting to the Guatemalans. And they didn’t they didn’t agree with the use of Guatemalan soil for the training of Bay of Pigs forces. And this was the beginning of the rebellion against the the Guatemalan dictator. This was the spark that set off the fire that raged for 30 years.

Scott Horton 50:12
I see. So in other words, that’s what really made it a civil war was a split inside the military, not just the government versus the Indians. But right the on the Indian side there were some with power too.

Vincent Bevins 50:25
So the first in Guatemala, the first rebel group was former military officers that were left compared to the the the leader of the country. So they split off in 1960 and formed a guerrilla group that was opposed to the dictatorship. And then you had successive waves of guerrilla groups in Guatemala that were trying to knock off the dictatorship that was controlling things in Guatemala City. Now, in the late 70s. You had the rise of a new dictator, sorry, a new guerrilla group that was inspired By the tactics of Mao and their and their job was to try to get the indigenous on their side. And although this didn’t quite work, the fact that they even tried to do so that that the fact that they even went into the indigenous areas and said, Hey, we’re fighting for you. We want you to support us that lead the indigenous to be marked for extermination by the central government.

Scott Horton 51:24
So in my book, so it shows that they weren’t already with the communists in the first place if the commies coming to them asking for support.

Vincent Bevins 51:32
Oh, no, they had very I mean, I in my book at the end of the, the, towards the end, I spent a lot of time in Guatemala in one of these communities that was totally desecrated and two things really pop out the first is that they do these guerrillas came and they were like, Oh, yeah, we’re gonna fight for you. Are you on our side? And they were kind of like, I don’t know like, Well, you know, they they treated them with like the basic politeness and hospitality that they would treat anybody that was not an enemy, right. But then that was that that was enough to mark them for extermination. And they but they didn’t really understand exactly what this guerrilla group was all about, except for the you know, they were against the government. And number two, these communities in Central America and the one that I visited in, in the highlands of Guatemala are still decimated to this day. And the only source of income, that the village that I visited has, is they send their kids to sneak into the United States and learn Spanish because they don’t even know they have to learn Spanish in the United States because they don’t speak Spanish in these parts of the Guatemalan Highlands to send back there, a little bit of money to rebuild these communities, which were devastated by the US back military in the 1980s.

Scott Horton 52:47
Yeah, man. All right now, I’m curious, do you have a chapter in your book about the Baathists in Iraq and the CIA helping them hunt down and murder all their leftists and academics to

Vincent Bevins 52:59
yes to do so. Great,

Scott Horton 53:00
that’s it, man, I gotta get this book.

Vincent Bevins 53:03
Oh, yeah, it’s, I hope you do, and I hope other people do as well. So the the Indonesian massacre ranks in 65 minutes and 66 is, we believe, to the best of our knowledge, the third time that the United States or the CIA hand over lists of communists so that local partners can have them executed. So the first is in 1954. In Guatemala, the ambassador to Guatemala orders the new Guatemalan government to kill very specific communists. And then in 1963, you have the bath coup, which is backed very likely. We don’t know to what extent it was planned or backed, but certainly had the support of the CIA by the by the time everything was done, and in 1963. We believe that the CIA did hand over lists of quote unquote communists for the basketball. Ready to execute. Now I interviewed an Iraqi who lived through this who was in the Iraqi Communist Party and I was in London he was forced out of the country by the the invasion in 2003. And, and he said that Saddam Hussein in 1963 had a reputation for being one of the most brutal and ruthless of the tortures and murders carrying out this anti communist purge. In the bath party so again, this is again it’s it’s it’s often very forgot it’s often forgotten but in the middle of the 20th century, the largest communist parties in the world outside of you know, in the in the in the quote unquote third world or in the in the bond, Doom nations. Were the number one the Indonesian Communist Party number two, the Iraqi Communist Party, and number three, the Sudanese Communist Party. All three of these communist parties were literally exterminated through mass murder. And, you know, this was a party that really had a lot of influence in in in Iraq. I mean, the the idea is often held in post 911 in the United States and after 911, that the Middle East is a sort of a rabidly religious and conservative place would have been completely on, recognizable to people who live through the 50s and 60s and 70s, where the where the the Muslim left was very powerful.

Scott Horton 55:22
And America and Britain back the Muslim Brotherhood and any kind of as long as they could as long as they would oppose socialism and nationalism.

Vincent Bevins 55:31
Yeah, this was a huge a huge part of the the US Yeah, us support for Muslim parties, if not Islamic states. You know, the most famous, of course, is in Afghanistan. But you had this throughout all of the Arab world. So Nasser was a sort of a left leaning leader of Egypt, which should I, you know, was part of this constellation of left leaning anti imperialist Not communist, but you know. And you know, opposed to conservative Islam. Sukarno is probably the most important and famous example of the example of this. Sukarno was a Muslim and you know, in one sense, but he was absolutely not a conservative. And and then this is also very important to understand the rise of us support for Saudi Arabia and for the influence of Wahhabi Islam as a strand of Islam in general. And DJ Pasha does a really good job in his book, The darker nations of showing how the all the money and resources that were pumped into Wahhabi ism we’re at we’re at kind of an anti bond Doom, a desperate attempt to counter the bond Doom idea of third worlds left leaning identity.

Scott Horton 56:55
Yeah, Robert drives his book devils game is also really great on the inside. Cold War history of us support for Islamic parties Shia and Sunni and Wahhabi and whatever you got as long as they’re not nationalists or leftists,

Vincent Bevins 57:10
yeah. And in in Indonesia, this was I said the first attempt that the US This was the first US attempt to stop the rise of left in in Asia. To keep Sukarno down and to stop the rise of the Communist Party was that they pumped all this money into this party called masumi, which was a right wing, conservative Muslim party. And at the bond Doom conference, an American named Richard Wright who wrote native son, he was a he’s an important black author in the middle of the 20th century. He talked to these conservative Muslims in Indonesia being like, Oh, so what do you you know, how do you understand your alliance with the United States and, and these are the guys that are getting CIA money and they’re saying, Look, they don’t understand who we are. They’re not really Really our friends, they tell him something like, if the only basis for a partnership is that we’re the the people that they can pick that are not communists. That’s not the that’s not the basis for a long term friendship and even us, even those even we who are receiving direct funding are not trustful of what Washington is really doing here. It’s it’s they all they’re doing is finding somebody to oppose their enemies rather than understanding the country well enough to develop it in a positive way.

Scott Horton 58:30
What are you worried about some stirred up Muslims, man, what what harm could they be?

Vincent Bevins 58:35
Yeah, exactly. You know, and, you know, arguably, you know, yeah, I mean, scholars of the Cold War, often step back and saying, you know, the Soviet Union failed a sort of structural role in US foreign policy, the second half of the 20th century. And, lo and behold, must, you know, radical Islam or terrorism’s falls right back into that exact same role and you know, States ends up treating, quote unquote terrorism the same way that it treated quote unquote, communism the second half of the 20th century or anything that kind of even smelled a little bit like communists had no human rights. And this is, you know, this led to the, you know, the the mass murder in 6566 and seven in in Asia and then after 911 anybody that could even be cut halfway considered somehow a terrorist or the kind of Muslim that could be a terrorist didn’t have human rights either.

Scott Horton 59:26
Right? Yeah. And, of course, the stirred up Muslims, quote, paraphrase there, that’s a big new Brzezinski who would help launch the project to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the Carter years talking about Yeah, but who cares about that compared to the fall of the Soviet Union? Yeah. 98 so it was before 911 but it was after Khobar Towers and the Africa embassies.

Vincent Bevins 59:49
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, yeah, yeah.

Scott Horton 59:53
And he was still saying, Come on, truck bomb here, truck bomb there. How does that compare to what we were trying to do? You Yeah, I always thought when Gary Johnson had his Aleppo moment on morning, Joe, that instead of saying what’s Aleppo, he should have said, well see it all started when your father embarked on this project, Mika back in 1979, and just taken the argument from there, but

Vincent Bevins 1:00:17
yeah, yeah, it’s

Scott Horton 1:00:19
been one for the ages.

Vincent Bevins 1:00:21
Yeah, it’s just, you know, it’s just I mean, that’s it’s that’s the blowback thesis, right? Is it always you know, you can’t if you just throw support behind anybody, that’s not enemy number one. Once enemy number one is gone, there’s gonna be enemy number two and just it’s another it’s an unending cycle, right? You always you’re always going to be and you’re generating the countervailing forces that ended up being the next big enemy forever. No,

Scott Horton 1:00:45
hey, there was a big knife attack in Britain by a Libyan national who I hadn’t seen the details yet, but I bet you dollars to doughnuts he’s tied to the Libyan Islamic fighting group, just like the Manchester attacker used to the CIA. EMI six, you know, they try to use these guys. I’m sure you wrote about this. They tried to use Li fg against qaddafi back in the 90s and then call that off and make qaddafi an ally. And then they went ahead and sided with the terrorists against them again.

Vincent Bevins 1:01:15
Yeah. Yeah. You don’t hear about Libya too much. For some reason. These days.

Scott Horton 1:01:20
Yeah. Blow the opportunity that we gave them is what Hillary Clinton said.

Vincent Bevins 1:01:25
Oh, yeah, right. No, I was. I was I started in London in that little period where you said that qaddafi was a was an ally because I was studying at the London School of Economics and so was his son. His son was a like,

Scott Horton 1:01:41
which one say

Vincent Bevins 1:01:42
I don’t know. It’s a good question. Okay. I know that it was he was famous around campus for not he wouldn’t come he would send a note taker but it was like I think that ended up being that the mean don’t quote me will now look it up. But I believe that the head of the school and its world economics had to step down because of the Lynx took it off you when when could you switch back to being a bad guy. Anyone that had sort of been friendly with the family in that brief interlude, had to had to sort of take a hit for it.

Scott Horton 1:02:09
Amazing stuff. And then, yeah, I mean with the Manchester attack or it turned out that his family was directly tied to the Libyan Islamic fighting group and EMI six efforts and after their, you know, temporary Alliance, earlier on the first phase of it, they’d been resettled in Manchester. And then when 2011 broke out, they went ahead, EMI six rounded all these guys up and send them off to fight. And then it was actually Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, had given the Manchester bomber a ride back to England, from North Africa. I think he had stopped in Syria where he was a moderate rebel for a time brought him back to England for a bunch of little children at a rock concert.

Vincent Bevins 1:02:51
I remember the moderate rebels. That was a big thing to the quote unquote, moderate rebels in Syria. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, all you had to do to be to be Boehner was was to be a ray of on desktop editor he had to be to be an enemy of our enemy for now. And you know, if you were, I’m sure if they were to have succeeded and taken over then they would have had become the enemy again. And just

Scott Horton 1:03:11
now and again in favor of the Islamised against the secularists which say whatever you want about the Baathists, but they protect all the different religious minorities and ethnic minorities. And yeah, we don’t want to go back in time to some previous century unlike, you know, the leaders of on this right.

Vincent Bevins 1:03:30
Yeah, this is I mean, just just like this is a truism that somehow we forget over and over in US foreign policy, just because something’s bad doesn’t mean it can’t get worse. Right. So the leadership of Saddam was saying, however awful, it was like, you can always make it worse. There’s no reason to believe that just like throwing Western money and military power around is going to automatically lead from bad to good. It could lead from bad to very, very bad.

Scott Horton 1:03:57
Yeah. You know, I never could find this in the Google anymore, but I did see it on TV where a Republican Congressman, I don’t remember the name or the channel, but it was a cable TV news channel. And and he was being interviewed about and was taking the McCain position on the intervention in Syria. And they asked the smart question. Okay, so if we do overthrow the Baathist government there in Damascus, then what’s going to happen after that? Who’s going to take power after that? And what second look like? And he says, Well, we just have to hope that someone comes to the fore.

Vincent Bevins 1:04:32
Yeah.

Scott Horton 1:04:33
And then does it for like, What a weird old fashioned way to say, I have no idea. How dare you ask me that question.

Vincent Bevins 1:04:43
I think I think it’s kind of deeply embedded in our, in our sort of consciousness, this sort of not hanging over is the wrong word, because it’s the opposite of the hangover. But like, the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was just the idea that like, Oh, yeah, if you just like get rid of the bad thing, then the good thing happens in the case. If he’s Germany, that is actually what happened, right? Like, you just you had Western when you come in and say, okay, use Germany, you’re going to join our country and, and the fall of the Soviet Union is very specific and very well publicized chapter of the Cold War, something did come to the fore, right. But in the vast majority of the world, if you just destroy something that exists, there is not a magical process that generates a better thing. You know, if you have a car, that doesn’t work that well, but you shoot it with a bazooka, there’s not a magically generated better car that comes out of the process. And But somehow, I think we believe that all you know, in Venice, I mean, I lived in Venezuela at the beginning of my journalism career. And over the years, the government has been either, you know, a little bit bad or very bad. But again, that doesn’t mean that just sort of throwing stuff at it and destroying it will lead to something better could lead to a civil war, it could lead to a very horrible, you know, record could lead to just a decade of this kind of stalemate that we have until now. Yeah, it’s a strange It’s a strange pathology, we have to the anytime you want oppose an intervention, you said what do you mean you like that government? It’s like No, I just think that it’s not necessarily going to get better if you throw us power at it.

Scott Horton 1:06:14
Sure. Well, of course got no right whatsoever. In fact, even under the constitutional law, the national government is bound and it’s kind of vague, that they are bound to guarantee a republican form of government to every state in the Union, which I guess means that if the Reds took over New Mexico, then the federal government would claim the constitutional authority to go in there and make sure they have a bicameral legislature an independent judiciary or something. Okay, fine. But then, by stark relief, that proves that they don’t have anything like the right to do that to any state in the world. Just members of the Union who signed on to this constitution.

Vincent Bevins 1:06:52
Right, right. Right.

Scott Horton 1:06:54
So But anyway, never mind that like the Constitution has anything to do with anything but anyway,

Vincent Bevins 1:06:59
now Yeah. Foreign Policy tends to be an extra legal space. Right? I mean, international law to the extent that it exists, can be usually avoided when the powerful when the interests are powerful enough, but domestically, it’s a little different. But internationally, it’s you could usually find a way to do whatever you want.

Scott Horton 1:07:17
Yeah. All right. Well, listen. Again, this is such an important article alone here. Never mind even the book, NewYorkbooks.com No, sorry. NYBooks.com. How Jakarta became the code word for us back to mass killing. How do you like that? New York Review of Books. And then the brand new book out is the Jakarta method. Washington’s anti communist crusade and the mass murder program that shaped our world. Thanks very much for your time again, Vince, appreciate it.

Vincent Bevins 1:07:51
Thanks for having me.

Scott Horton 1:07:53
[EXTENDED]

Vincent Bevins 1:07:54
Sure, what I was saying is that in in the Cold War, there were actual socialist movements like it And it was there were actual communist movements like you had an Indonesian. But in a lot of the cases, the communist brush was used to paint governments which were just trying to implement capitalism for the first time in in these nations. So for example, in Guatemala, Huckle barman’s, what he was trying to do was implement a land reform, which would end futile control of Guatemala and allow it to be developed, allow the for the forces of the market to develop capitalism for the first time. And this is what he said he wanted to do. And he wasn’t lying. This is what he wanted to do. The reason that this was a big problem for the United States is because the United Fruit Company controlled the vast majority of land in Guatemala, and they had been lying about how much the land was worth. So when he tried to compensate that company for their, for the land reform, it the amount they were going to get was nothing compared to what was actually worth because they were lying about it and Iran, what they wanted was to have Iranian control of oil and like yeah, in in a lot of cases. It was the transition from Imperial or colonial feudalism to capitalism.

Scott Horton 1:09:08
Right? It was, you know, it was they were just declaring independence. Right? They were not really a leftist regime. And by the way, you know, Murray rothbard and Sheldon Richmond and all the great libertarians are supportive of land reform when it’s, you know, ancient Imperial edicts from the king of Spain or whoever that granted these land titles to these feudal lords. When, you know, we’re john Lockeians it’s the people who work that land that own that land.

Vincent Bevins 1:09:37
And the really interesting thing is that if you look at the countries where the United States really wanted capitalism to take off, Japan and South Korea, land reform did take place under the aegis of the United States in the first years of, of the Cold War. So when countries that were seen as sort of outside or a threat to us hegemony tried to do But the South Koreans or the or the, or what we had done really in Japan and South Korea that was seen as quote unquote, communism. And all it was was really, as you say, transferring this feudal control of land in Latin America and Asia to a modern market economy. And in Brazil, this was this was, I mentioned, voting rights for black people. The other thing that really horrified the Brazilian elites was that john Goulart wanted to carry out land reform. And to this day, I mean, this is something I’ve, in other words,

Scott Horton 1:10:32
property rights for black people was the problem that the American government was right was intervening to help solve.

Vincent Bevins 1:10:41
Yeah, full citizenship, full, full liberal citizenship, the control, you know, like modern capitalist property rights, rather than feudal property rights and voting for everyone. And like I, you know, I’ve lived through this and very tragic ways like the Amazon is still under futile control. Like I had a contact that used to To work in Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency that took me on tours of the Amazon and showed me exactly who destroyed it. And for what reason. I mean, I stayed in contact with him afterwards after as I left the country, and then he was killed, they his his plane was blew up it was was exploded in the Amazon. So like you we still have futile control over much of South America. And this was what was stopped by the quote unquote, anti communist crusade as well.

Scott Horton 1:11:27
And you know, what, let me bring up the Rockefellers again, because, I mean, this is, especially in time at the 60s and 70s. This is the heyday of David Rockefeller and the Chase Manhattan Bank, and their global interest, and they really weren’t getting dirty work done everywhere. And I know that in and, you know, Nelson Rockefeller and other members of the family as well, but that they had these very strong alliances with the Catholic Church and with all these right wing governments, and for a variety of interests, not just oil, but agriculture and all kinds of different things. And I wonder if have sort of a comment on that particular, you know, line of argument here.

Vincent Bevins 1:12:05
I think it’s I mean, I just I just think it’s right. I mean, so. Rob. Yeah. So David Rockefeller was part of this first big business conference that I told you about that took place in Indonesia, as a million people were still in concentration camps purely for their political beliefs. And he gave the final speech at this sort of, you know, a thought or whatever it was the Hilton Jakarta or something, some sort of fancy dinner for American businessmen. And he, he surveys what’s happening in Indonesia, and he said, I’ve talked to a good many people over the course the last couple days, and I have found universal enthusiasm. And, you know, that’s enthusiasm for the creation for the system that was created by, you know, just, you know, months previously, rounding up a million people stabbing them, throwing them into the river, to the point where a third of the countries too terrified to ever talk about what happened and to this day, and he was Encouraged by by the opportunities that are provided to, to him and other US businessmen.

Scott Horton 1:13:07
Yeah. And then and you know, there’s this book that will be done by Colby and I think Bennett that’s about the alliance between the Chase Bank and other Rockefeller interest in The Catholic Church throughout Latin America. Although I gotta admit, it’s been about 20 years since I looked at the thing. But I wonder if you know much about that.

Vincent Bevins 1:13:31
I know I don’t I don’t go into this deeply in, in Brazil. But I know that the Rockefellers were quite active in the, in the run up to the 1964 coup, and then certainly, and she lays so

Scott Horton 1:13:43
right. And people can read about that in trilateralism by Holly Sklar, makes all the direct connections there to the chilla coup.

Vincent Bevins 1:13:52
And then in July, so I worked with a researcher in Santiago to really trace where this quote unquote Jakarta metaphor came from. And we found the first articles that ever spoke about the deployment of quote unquote, Jakarta during this terror campaign in 1972. And in one of the articles we found, they said that playing Jakarta, quote, unquote, had been handed to the in the Chilean military by David Rockefeller. So we don’t know if that’s true, but we know that that’s what the Chilean left was claiming at the time. So the people that were being terrorized by the Jakarta by the St. Paul Jakarta graffiti campaign, believed at the time that David Rockefeller had given that plan to the Pinochet thesis.

Scott Horton 1:14:38
Yeah, I’ll tell you what, man I sure am behind on my history of Latin American intervention. And I sure do need to catch up and this looks like a great place to start. So once again, really appreciate it Vincent. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com antiwar.com ScottHorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org