Pete Quinones 1:07
Good to be with you, Scott and doing well.

Scott Horton 1:09
Pete I don’t think you’ve written any blog entries about the movie or articles kind of explaining debuting the movie for the institute since it came out.

Pete Quinones 1:19
What I’m waiting to do is the version of it that we put on YouTube has some has some flaws in it, audio level here and there. But it was just one of those things where everything that was happening in the world with the riots and everything we were just like, let’s get this out there and see what people think we’ve only had like 10 people, including yourself, say anything about you know what was in it, and you know, and or audio levels, or maybe a vocal gets clipped somewhere. So what out I was gonna wait until we’re prepping it. Now to upload to Amazon and when you upload it to Amazon, it has to be perfect. So that’s what we’re doing right now we’re re recording a couple of the narration parts. And then we’re going to send it to a guy who is going to professional audio guy who is going to level everything out the sound is going to be perfect. And then that’s what I was gonna start talking about it on the inside.

Scott Horton 2:21
Okay, so it’s, it’s open. The store is open now, but it’s the grand opening is coming up here, and that’s when we’re going to make a real big deal about it. Okay.

Pete Quinones 2:30
Yeah, that that. That’s actually a really good analogy.

Scott Horton 2:34
All right, good. Yeah. So let me read a little bit here from the description on YouTube. It says, This is our crowdfunded documentary about anarchism in the state, featuring interviews with James C. Scott, David Friedman, Michael humor. Scott Horton M. Stephan Kinsella, Max borders, Thaddeus Russell, Tom woods, Walter. Block ron paul Joseph Salerno How do you say is it made Tori mastery mastery? Judge Napolitano, Bob Murphy, Mark Thornton Ryan McMakin. Oh my goodness it’s all of my friends and people that I look up to and other people to a great group of libertarians and then it goes on to when you say many more you really mean it. It is quite a list of people who are featured in here. And so yeah, it’s great as almost an overview of who are the libertarians at this time in history and what’s their position on things he knows there’s a it’s a good sort of thermometer I guess of of our entire movement in one way. But there’s a point to it all. And so why don’t you take us through it a little bit. I mean, not step by step by step but just kind of overall dramatically. What Isn’t that you’re trying to do here? What is it that you succeeded in putting together here?

Pete Quinones 4:05
Well, I’ve been calling myself an anarchist for a long time, and especially in the current climate. When you say that you’re an anarchist, people think that you’re throwing bricks through Starbucks Windows, or, you know, you’re trying to set yourself up as a warlord in Seattle or something like that. And we just wanted to show people, the classical schools of anarchism And now, we have a section where we go back 3000 years and talk about thinkers who talked about anarchism talked about no rulers, we bring it up to the present day talk about some people in the colonies who had anarchist thoughts then when you start getting into the 1800s is when you really start you start getting into production and Bakun in and Benjamin Tucker people like that and then up into the 20th century with, obviously rothbard and yeah, everyone, when we talk about left anarchism, we talk about right anarchism, we talk about anarchism without adjectives, even max Turner who was, you know, like a individualist anarchists. We just wanted to present people with the alternative view the scholarly view of anarchism, where you’re watching a documentary, and the people who are being interviewed are professors, and lawyers, and people who wrote books on foreign policy to see that. Now these aren’t like lunatic looking, you know, Black Bloc wearing masks anarchists. Now, these are people who are deadly serious, who believe that the free market can not only cover toilet paper and food Backing cover security and even national security. That was our goal. It was to just give people an overview of what we believe. And I think as of an hour ago, we had, we’re almost at 54,000 views on YouTube in almost three weeks now. So people are watching it. A lot of people have said they’ve watched it two or three times and they send it to their parents, they send it to their family and say, you know, all that crazy stuff that I’m always talking about, well, these people can tell the story a whole lot better than I can. And, yeah, it’s working out pretty good so far.

Scott Horton 6:42
Yeah, that’s great. Man. You know, I always said that. Not that I practice what I preach here, but I always thought that the Lew Rockwell approach of saying, the most radical thing, the honest truth, but stating it in a very radical way, but with that, very Calm and professional, professorial economists type monotone voice that goes with the bow tie and everything that of course, Harry Truman was a terrible monster. And you know, and it’s just it’s just sounds so true when he says it, you just know it’s true when he says it that this guy that people revere, there’s nothing to revere there. And it starts with an Of course, which goes a long way. And it’s just the tone of voice and the mannerism and everything behind it. And also, it’s true about Truman, the butcher of Asia, as a sort of Neale Hurston call them. But that’s absolutely the right approach, you know, for getting this kind of thing of crosses. You know, Allen Bach, I think, was in my very first interview that I did on the weekend interview show in 2003, where I asked Alan box Are you anarchist or what? And he goes, Yeah, you know, kind of waver. I’m right on the line, sort of, but Jesus, pretty clear to me who it is that really causes the most violence in society. And it’s those who say that they’re here to protect us, you know, and you can’t get a more sober and professional individual than Alan Bach. You know, he’s no bomb thrower. He’s just a truth teller. And so, I don’t know if I fit in your documentary very well, in that sense. But surely, most of the people that you interview do and I think, you know, they do get that point across, in again, that Ron Paul he in way that here’s license for you to go ahead and take a radical position because it comes from someone who’s very moderate and serious in their tone.

Pete Quinones 8:53
Yeah, and it wasn’t only anarchism that we talked about. We talked about many anarchism and Dr. Pol talked about secession. And, you know, he even stated he said, Yeah, I lean more towards secession being the peaceful kind, which when you hear him say that it’s like, well, maybe he may believe in, in violence secession if it has to come to that everything and that’s not what an anarchist would talk about. But Dr. Pol, so it doesn’t call himself an anarchist. But we had sections where we were going to talk about the solutions that some people believe that there were solutions through the state, and just being able to really have those people up there who, you know, like Bob Murphy, I mean, you look at Bob Murphy, and you just, you don’t see Oh, that guy’s obviously an anarchist and everything. I mean, he just looks like a professor. And it’s

Scott Horton 10:00
No, and the substance is there, too. It’s not like we’re sitting here just trying with a gimmick, trying to pull a wool over somebody’s eyes or something. And these guys are talking some real substance about, you know, history and, you know, the kind of definitional sort of conceptual framework that everyone else just takes for granted and doesn’t even really consider about where do these government’s come from, and why do we put up with them anyway? And so, yeah, it ain’t just the tone. It’s the real science they’re dropping to throughout this thing.

Yeah. And we had jamesy Scott, who wrote the book against the grain in the book, The Art of not being governed, and he is a he teaches at Yale anthropology and we knew that we wanted to get him actually flew back across the country to get the interview with him because one of my producers moved to Oregon in the middle of all this. He had to come go across the Country twice. In order to get him on, we tried to get David graeber, who is an anthropologist, but sort of more of on the left side. But we had him nailed down and then some things happened and just communication stopped. But you know, having somebody like James Scott, who basically covers the first seven, eight minutes of the movie, I mean, this is a, this is an 80 year old man, and 80 year old professor who’s talking about the history of the states and is talking about how well how do we know? How do you know when a state starts becoming totalitarian and overbearing? Well, they start instituting, instituting taxes on a regular basis. And when you hear that coming from someone like someone like him, it’s just, it’s mind blowing, you know, to just to realize that, wait a minute, there are people out there who are serious people who teach at Yale who believe that society can function without a monopoly on force and violence. And that was really, that that’s the message of the whole movie is the fact that the state is a monopoly on force and violence, and that we can do better. Right? And the society can do better than me this way. Yeah. And I think it came out really well, because like I said, it’s pretty much we’ve had a couple people say, you know, they didn’t like it and everything like that, but I mean, it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen. I mean, it’s an hour and 45 minutes.

3000 likes 36 dislikes on YouTube right now. So that’s not so bad of a ratio. I don’t think

that’s a pretty good. That’s actually an excellent ratio for YouTube. But the I have

a major complaint here though. Where’s Sheldon Richmond?

Well, I mean, we’ll have to go get Sheldon Richmond. And you know, in our Saw and everything and we just ran out of money. We mean, there were people that we wanted to get in Southern California, and we just ran out of money. So, I mean, we have 30 people in the documentary right now. I think the only person that I would have taken money out of my pocket if he would have said yes to get Chris to go and fly and record would have been Chomsky. But Chomsky said, No,

or Bob Higgs, man. Well,

he I asked him to come on my podcast, and he says, Sorry, I’m retired. Yeah. Well, let’s ask him for a very

long time. He wouldn’t do interviews at all. And then for a very long time after that, my show was the only show that he would do. Because everybody else was so lousy at interviewing him, he thought, and then now he won’t even do my show anymore, either. So

Pete Quinones 13:49
yeah, he says, I miss the

Scott Horton 13:52
guy. I mean, he’s really the very best one of us, I think, but

Oh, yeah. He’s the maybe the greatest celebrity Living libertarian right now, but a lot of people will argue, who wants to start arguing over that?

Yeah. Well, you know, I’m right now I’m working on editing Shelton’s book, his new one. It’s a collection of essays that he’s written over the years. It’s called what social animals owe to each other. And, man, it’s great. It’s so great. You know,

it’s so underrated

libertarianism and human nature and economics and natural rights and it’s everything that you’d want it to be man, so good.

So underrated. Sheldon is such a great thinker.

Yeah. So chapter two will be an interview of Sheldon Richmond, a monopoly on violence part two, Sheldon and Bob Higgs.

Pete Quinones 14:47
Well, the way we’ve done it the way we’ve done it is this with this vast overview, so now we’re going to start breaking it down into subjects that are in the movie, so Sorry that

Scott Horton 15:00
my part sucks, man, I really wish I’d done a better job.

Pete Quinones 15:04
I think

Scott Horton 15:05
I, I really know now what I would have said instead, you know what I mean, if I had had a better idea of where I fit in the movie and what I was supposed to what part I was supposed to play there, could I at least I wrapped it up well at the end with so therefore they suck and we don’t need him or something. So it was it ended along the theme of what you were saying, but it could have been constructed so much better. So yeah, sorry.

Well, you also have to remember, this is the first documentary we’ve done. So we’re putting together questions for different people. And we know that there are certain subjects that we have to hit. But really, we’re just rookies at this. So when you watch the whole thing, and you watch it in its totality, and you see how everything was framed, how it was set up from the beginning, and how it progress aggresses through, then, you know, that’s Chris, who is a rookie director and rookie editor. Just take, you know, taking the transcripts of the interviews and look into what questions we asked and saying, Okay, this is how we’re going to do it. I mean, that the original transcript that I got was three hours long. Now we had to, we had to chop that up and there was a whole, I mean, there was one whole section on one subject that just hit the floor, and it just, we took it right out of there.

So one whole subject of what I hit the floor

was the subject it was on argumentation ethics. So yeah, you have natural, you know, some people argue natural law and then hapa came up with this argumentation ethics, and then we just decided, we’re not going to really hit natural law or argumentation ethics, we’ll just concentrate on certain subjects. So we had that whole sub, and that’ll be on the bonus features for the blu ray and I think we’re gonna upload a whole bunch of bonus features to Amazon, too. So, yeah, the Um, but yeah, I mean, it’s, I mean, we’re rookies at this. So, you know, I read Chris looked at everything that you did your whole interview and he’s like, Okay, this this part works perfectly with

definitely should have cut the rest of that he did cut I agree with that much.

Well, the what? And that is available right now on YouTube. Your whole interview is actually up on YouTube.

Oh, the whole thing is, yeah, well, it must be severely edited. It was totally unusable and just raw form. I know you didn’t post that.

Well, yeah. Chris edited at all and everything.

Oh, I hope it’s severely edited. Even for the long version. Don’t tell me it’s just on edited.

Pete Quinones 17:41
Oh, no, no, I mean, he

Scott Horton 17:44
just one thing I remember too was it was a Friday. It was like the end of the day on a Friday. And I had done like 10 interviews and was completely wasted out of it by then. was terrible. I was terrible. And it was I know exactly what would have said, I don’t see it on here. Thank goodness, it’s not there yet. But I know what I would have said I would have set it up a lot better about how they just like with all government programs on national security, they have an incentive to fail and create crises, because they’re the only ones who can solve the crisis they created because of their monopoly and that kind of thing. And then, for example, look at the way they did this, this and that, and then what I what I did say about the war on terrorism, there would have fit, but it just would have been a lot better if I had introduced it as a case study in how government fails upwards. You know what I mean? I didn’t really introduce it that way, or frame it that way until I just at the very end, I said, and so that’s why we don’t need them, which was like, pulling my parachute at the very last second so that it wasn’t completely meaningless. Anyway, I hope everybody likes that part a lot.

Yeah, well, I mean, Daniel did a I think Daniel did a good lead in for you. Yeah, that that a lot. I think the whole section on foreign policy, starting with Salerno and then I think it went into Klein, then it’s a Daniel and then you finished it up. I think that whole section worked out very well.

So I will as soon as I’m done interviewing you here, I’ll watch this and cringe myself to death. How terrible I was. And

there was one section of me in the documentary that I had them take out because I was cringing so hard on myself. I was like, Alright, take this out, because I really can’t get rid of that. I can’t I can’t look at that. I

i embarrassed really easy for an extrovert, man. I just it is what it is. But so anyway, Hey, you know what? As bad as it was, and as kind of tangential and all over the places it was, at least I’m always right about everything. It’s not like I was screwing up myself. Details over which terrorists Obama was backing in Syria or whatever it was all right, it was just not constructed Well, for the purpose it was serving to my liking, but anyway, but I don’t want to sit here and talk bad about the movie other than my own self, because there’s so much great stuff in there and so many great libertarians with so much great stuff to say in there. So, back on the optimistic and positive note, why don’t you tell me about some more of your favorite interviews that you guys got for this thing?

Pete Quinones 20:31
Well, Judge Napolitano was we had no idea that we could actually interview him. Most of these interviews were done at Lisa’s University, because I knew that that was the one place that we could get because everybody’s going to be there that week. So we set up over there for like four days recording, and every Mrs. University judge nap is there. So one day I’m just like, man, we got to get a judge nap in this If we can, so he hasn’t, they give him an office when he’s there, went down to the office said, Hey, we’re doing a documentary and when asked me some questions about the founding, will you come down? And he’s like, I need a half hour and there’s this. There’s this just gonna conflict with Fox at all. It will compete with Fox. And I’m like, No, not at all. It’s like, Sure. So we got him in there. And it was awesome. There’s we didn’t use it, but there’s a great he does a great take on waco in there. And there’s a great part that he talks about the Articles of Confederation. And but which didn’t. These are things that didn’t make it into it. That’ll be in the bonus features and everything. So judge nap of course was amazing. I think Jeff diced is fantastic in every part. I mean, he’s, he may be in it more than anyone else as far as runtime goes and Everything he just nailed and his first appearance in it where he’s just talking about how absurd it is government is where they’re like the judges have their own criminality. So they not only have monopoly on force and violence, but then they get to judge themselves on it. And that was great. And our buddy Dave Smith, Dave, just so good. Present so well, just so smooth, and he just nailed everything. We released the full footage of our interview with him. And I watched the full interview footage and we used more than half, but we used almost all of it that he had. And so, you know, Dave talking about Minar schism is great. And then Dave also does this thing where he he quotes Tom woods where Tom Woods has this thing of talking about how absurd public schooling is and he’s like, so you go to school and there’s, you know, the schools are sponsored by Walmart and all and you go into the classroom and all the pictures of the CEOs of Walmart are on the wall. And there’s all these tales about it. Why? Oh, the first CEO of Walmart never told a lie and everything like that. And then he was like, then you have a whole he says, you have a whole society that favors Walmart. And it’s like, well, why? That’s because kids are being propagandize from the time they can talk. And it was just such in Dave just nails it, you know, I mean, I hate the fact that I just did like the whole thing. But you know, he presented so much better than I did. But yeah, Jeff diced and Dave Smith. I mean, they just really nailed it and Ryan McMakin, right having right, Ryan McMakin, we weren’t even scheduled to interview him. I just asked him to come up there, because he was at niece’s University and his son, can you sit and answer some questions and I just took questions. From the I was asking other people, and we ended up using his answers because it also when you’re doing a documentary, the way somebody talks that they talk in a really good cadence, and they talks, they talk fast, a little a little fast. It helps keeping the documentary going. Yeah. You know, somebody who talks slower, it’s gonna, you know, it’ll, it’ll drag and they’ll just be a little bit of bring it down a little bit and take the take the energy out of it a little bit. So, yeah, those guys. They did fantastic. I mean, they, they really just nailed their parts and couldn’t be happier and Peter Klein to Peter Klein talking about the importance of the entrepreneur in society that was just he just nailed that. So well. Peter Klein’s another guy who’s like, made for documentaries, where he just talks about Just fast enough, and he’s quick, and he doesn’t pause a lot. Yeah. And, and our buddy Mark Thornton, too. I mean, every I mean, really? I mean, I can’t say enough about just how well everybody did. And how they answered the questions and how just yeah, it’s just like I could really couldn’t be happier with it.

Scott Horton 25:28
Man, you’re gonna have to get some kind of post production special effects on my hairline here. This is just an atrocity. It’s like the war in Somalia or something. My my hair. Just Sorry, I know yours is way worse. But still, that doesn’t mean that. Hey, no, it’s just I’m watching this and I’m just thinking, My God. Everyone watching this must be thinking, what a terrible hairline this poor bastard has the whole time and not even hear a word. I’m saying. And then I know I do have it on mute. That’s probably why But no, still. They will. They’ll mute it. And then they’ll just look at my hairline and be like, God, that guy should just shave his head and give it up and stop trying to pretend.

Yeah, you’re, well, they definitely are now that they’re listening. That’s exactly what they’re gonna do, man.

Anyway, I don’t care about anything else. But that, that really gets me now I’m just gonna

[ADS]

anyway. Um, no, it is great other than the the me parts I hope you don’t publish the whole interview anywhere. But otherwise it is so great. And you know you have David Friedman in there too, which I really like the guy that wrote the machinery of freedom and machinery of freedom era, Milton Friedman’s son, and so what does he talk about? I forget now does he kind of give a structural case for how anarchist society could work.

He talks about just government and he reiterated a little bit of what dice was talking about how government is just has no accountability, that they can just pretty much do what they want. And then there’s another time where he that heats Talks where he talks about, about rights. And he uses this really wild scenario to say, we, we believe so much in property rights. But you know, just maybe just maybe there can be situations where we don’t, we can’t be completely strict on property rights. And he comes up with an outrageous scenario that I’ll I’ll let people let people watch it so that they can, they can get it. But I was just thinking of another person who just really nailed it. And especially in the beginning, when we start talking about education was Thaddeus Russell.

Oh, yeah, he’s great in this.

Yeah. I mean, he really kills it in this and his. There’s a whole section where he talks about government schooling, and I’m

channeling john Taylor Gatto for us there.

Yeah. By the time he gets if you get to the end of And you’re not questioning government being in charge of schools you’re just it’s not time yet you know, revisit it in six months and see what you think because he really really nails it and then towards the end when talking about just how people really how it’s inherent in people to be rebels and rebel you know he brings up like 80s movies where all the john Hughes movies were you know Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or it’s just we’re gonna go against the authority and all these movies that go against authority and everything and I just that is one of those guys I can I can just listen to him talk and every time I have my my show, I wait.

No. So what’s his point there about the movies?

Then we’re, we have a natural we have a natural rebellious streak. Oh, it’s authority. Yeah,

I was gonna say cuz that’s part of john Taylor Gatto. His thing is that they Really divide the smart kids by the teacher’s pet Hillary Clinton straight a first row kids, but then the other smart kids who aren’t so compliant, that they really emphasize being cool. So that we will all use bad words and sit at the back of the class and not dress respectable, not talk respectable, and therefore, we’ll make sure that we never have any power and influence. Because we and you know, we think we’re rebelling, but really, it’s a channel that’s made for us in inside that same Prussian style school system, to channel us away from power and influence. If we’re the Nair do well types, but the capable ones, you know, which makes sense. And I knew he was talking about me when he said that, but what is what is?

Well, I have one of my oldest closest friends is a teacher and he openly admits that every year there’s maybe three or four kids that he said He’s that he can actually reach, you know, and that are really actually interested in. Yeah, they will get more of his individual attention. And he’ll give to the, you know, the kids that don’t want to be there. And I mean, I think that that’s the problem when it comes to public schooling. Yeah, is that they have to be there when, you know, a lot of kids can be 14 or 15 years old, and they should be apprenticing on a job site somewhere, learn, you know, learning a skill or learning how to code or something like that.

So learning how to have the imagination to decide for themselves what they want to learn and what they want to do.

Yeah, that should be from the youngest age. Really? Yeah.

Well, man, I gotta tell you, you and your guys to you took on a major project here and sure looks like you got it done. Can’t wait to see the final draft of it. But the current version is great. It’s The monopoly on violence. It’s on YouTube right now. It’s stateless productions is the name of the channel. They’re on YouTube. And you can see the full interviews of Tom woods, and Dave Smith and match story there as well. And as well as the entire thing. And so please do everybody check that out. And thanks again. Pete got anything else I should have mentioned?

Pete Quinones 33:25
Yeah, um, if our website is themonopolyofviolence.com, Oh, God, there is a free download in 720 P of the movie there. And right right next to that there’s also a donation button so we’re not charging for the 720. But if you want to donate something, there’s a PayPal link. There’s crypto addresses, right?

Scott Horton 33:45
And like you were talking about earlier, you guys have this as an ongoing project to get it completely tightened up all the way to put out on Amazon and iTunes and all those things right?

Pete Quinones 33:56
Yeah, and and Netflix, but we’re gonna get it on Amazon. Get a buzz on Amazon before we send it to Netflix because Netflix will be out and that’s the monopoly on violence calm. And we also have a 4k version of what’s on YouTube for $10 but the link there’s a link to the YouTube video right there and the monopoly on violence calm so if you don’t want to go search in YouTube, just go to monopoly the monopoly on violence calm and it’ll link you to a link to YouTube right there.

Scott Horton 34:27
Killer man. All right, well, great work again and tell the other guys who worked on it that I said that too, if you want, okay. But I mean that to praise everybody’s work here. Great job, everybody. And, and thank you again for your time.

Pete Quinones 34:42
No problem, man. Thanks a lot, Scott.

Scott Horton 34:44
All right, you guys. That is Pete Jonas. He is my partner over there at the libertarian Institute, managing editor there and co producer of the monopoly on violence which you can find at themonopoliesOnviolence.com, 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

Danny Sjursen 1:32
Well, you know, I

Scott Horton 1:34
welcome the show, Danny, how are you?

Danny Sjursen 1:37
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. And, you know, I’m always happy to geek out a little so Mexican wars. Great.

Scott Horton 1:43
Yeah. And you know what, this is one that I know a little bit about, cuz I did read Zen. But, and I know a little bit about it, other than that, too, but Well, I’m sure. happy to hear all about it all over again. So please go ahead.

Danny Sjursen 1:58
Yeah, you know, I got it. A very different take on the Mexican American War as I, you know, read past the sort of triumphalist histories, especially in grad school and then having the opportunity to teach it. And you know, I do a lot of historical analogy pieces, and anybody who specializes in anything or has an interest in anything wants to tell you that their war or their subject is the one that’s, you know, most relevant to today. So, you know, that can be exhausting. But I think that on a number of levels, while there aren’t, you know, perfect parallels in history and there aren’t perfect lessons to be learned. The Mexican American war is not only fascinating in its own right, but does have certain significant parallels to today. So what do I mean Well, we’re talking about an era of regime change wars right the first the first American regime change of a you know, large fellow Republic, which is you know, interesting, a flawed republic of course, and, you know, we kind of like pick the rulers of some Barbary pirates states a little bit during Jefferson, but for the most part, this is the big regime change war. There’s a race factor. There’s an internal sort of civil war factor in the United States, mainly political. There’s massive political dissent. There’s even a significant amount of military dissent up to an including, you know, mutinies and folks joining the other side, you know, from the American army. And, and it really does divide the nation. You know, Emerson said something to the effect of, you know, will win the Mexican War, but it’ll be you know, basically the poison, that victory that will divide the nation. You know, of course, the Civil War comes later and his prediction came true. It’s sort of the end of a two party system or the first or second two party system in America, the Whigs and the Democrats. And what it the reason it ends is not only because they became so tribal but because it became so regional. And so I’ll get to that but you know, there used to be northern democrats and Southern Democrats and northern wigs and southern wigs and you know, after the Mexican War There wasn’t much of that at all. And so to say, you know, I’ll start quick, but then kind of let you guide it. I mean, the thing to keep in mind as we think about Iraq and God, how many American wars, the Mexican American War, which was an invasion, which was ultimately an occupation that everyone forgets about that part for, you know, several months, like a military occupation, civil disorder, all this guerrilla war, but an regime change, quite literally. And it was all sold on false pretenses. The whole shebang. We made war inevitable, through, you know, the posturing of our military on the border and actually crossing the internationally recognized border, but also just political rhetoric and dealings with the Native Americans and then just you know, annexing Texas, annexing Texas, which you know, was still considered Mexican territory by most countries in the world and certainly by Mexico. So, you know, we set the wore out, we set the conditions we drive Mexico to the point of war. But then even when the you know, causes belly kind of happens, the president Polk, you know who’s a true believer, by the way, you know, he says, well, American blood was spilled on American soil, what he’s referring to is that some American Calvary man, about a dozen of them were were killed. But the problem is that he said American blood on American soil. Well, it’s true that American blood was shed. What’s not so clear is that that American blood was shed on American soil because, you know, this was, you know, south of the waste River, which was the recognized border and not the real ground at the time. So it was really iffy across the board. That center center was a lie.

Scott Horton 5:48
No, no, no, it was the new oasis.

Danny Sjursen 5:50
Yeah, it was the new Oasis was

Scott Horton 5:52
embarrasing the hell out of me, I’m from here.

Danny Sjursen 5:55
But But you know, but San Francisco is of course interesting because that goes back to the text and we’re so you know, For now, my point is that we set the conditions for war we just ended up and then we actually, at the moment of conflict, we lied about it right? The President lied about it. And you

Scott Horton 6:10
know something about that, too, just makes it easy to remember also is that Abraham Lincoln helped make himself famous by making a big deal about this on the floor of the US House, and they nicknamed him spotty Lincoln. Like, this is a nickname that he got making fun of him for saying, Wait a minute, which spot on the map? Did this skirmish take place again, on this side of the line or that side of the line? It’s kind of relevant?

Danny Sjursen 6:34
Yeah, I mean, look, one of the things I say in the first section is that like the Mexican American War, this largely forgotten war kind of defines or helps define the careers of five American presidents. And so the one is a former president john quincy adams, one of his finest hours is, you know, totally intransigent and unwilling to go along with this war, when the rest of the Whigs who remind me a lot of Democrats when the rest of the wigs folded over the Iraq, I mean, Mexican War, right? He wouldn’t. Right there was I think about a dozen of them and they call I forget what they called them. They were basically the intransigence, you know, they just they weren’t going to have it like the insufferable and he led that and I mean, I mean, john quincy adams dies on the basically on the floor of the house, okay. He’s, like, carried away after he has like an aneurysm. And what he was doing in that moment, was loudly yelling, no refusing to even pass like an end of war legislation. That was totally symbolic. All it was gonna do was like, basically thank the generals for their patriotic service in the war. And he wouldn’t even do that. He was like, this is a bad war. This is a lie. This is evil. You know, so that’s, that’s quincy adams kind of

Scott Horton 7:49
I didn’t know that story that that was how he died.

Danny Sjursen 7:52
Dude, it’s a wild story. It’s in my last segment, but yeah, you can look it up. There’s a lot of good books that cover it. But Amy Greenberg is one of the newer ones. So then the GOP Hulk, right so Polk is the Democratic president. He’s a, they called him young Hickory, because he was a protege and an admirer, almost a funding admirer of, you know, Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson. So he kind of is actually hand picked as a dark horse to become the Democratic president handpicked I mean by jackson and does get the nomination wins. He’s an odd guy. For a number of reasons. One of them is that he says and follows through that he’s only going to run for one term, you know, but he also is very political and wants the democrats to succeed him you know, he doesn’t want like the wigs to take charge but he’s a true believer from all intents and purposes he works hard. He’s got a wife who’s almost a little bit like a feminist and he like lets her help him with decisions which is weird given his background as you know he’s a southerner and a Tennessee guy but uh, you know, Polk a true believer, he’s a manifest destiny sea to shining sea, you know, points, political generals, all that. Then you got a three future generals President Zachary Taylor, who commands the northern army though the one that’s you know, along the Texas border, he becomes a wig president. Most of the generals in the army at the time were wigs, actually, the professional generals, even though Taylor commanded a lot of volunteers and militiamen, and then you got grant, and grants interesting because it’s his first war. And his quote is that it was a wicked war, and that he had a terrible time of the Mexican War. And he felt awful about it. And the quote, he said, is I but I had not the courage to resign. So grant was anti war in his first war. Now he didn’t, you know, become a conscientious objector. But through the rest of his life, it really bothered him. And he and he spoke about it just constantly, you know, especially later in life. And then finally, Lincoln, who you brought up right old, spotty, Lincoln. Lincoln, kind of makes his career initially during his opposition to the Mexican American war, but actually in the short term, it hurts them. So Lincoln’s from Illinois and he’s from it. Or he represents Illinois. He’s a freshman, a class of 1848 end of the war wig in a district and in a state that is highly pro war, for the most part, the South and the, what was called the the West. The time was really the Midwest today was highly pro war. He’s told by his friends, you know, go easy on this anti war thing, you’re going to lose your seat, and yet he does what you mentioned in his first floor speech, which was traditionally the freshmen kinda are like seen but not heard. And they, their first floor speech is kind of conservative and, you know, not very intense. Instead, he calls the president out, you know, and says that he, you know, the whole thing is a lie. Lincoln does lose his seat. He’s a one term, Congressman, and exactly what happened. What could we expect that to happen? But of course, he you know, builds that into a career that’s imperfect but often times built on a degree Principle. And it’s an interesting moment for him. And then the final guy worth mentioning, I promise is, the last one is clay, who’s probably, you know, in some ways, he’s like the Hillary Clinton or something of his day in the sense that he’s like the most qualified person not to be president. Right? Or whatever. You know, I mean, the, you know, I’m not a Hillary Clinton fan, but you know, that people say that and clay, you know, ran three or four times. And clay son, another difference from today, right. Clay son dies. He’s like a colonel. And, you know, he has favorites on volunteers and is killed in combat. And big deal. You know, it was it was it was big news at the time. And, you know, it’s probably his finest moment to where, you know, he sort of, especially after the death of his son, he’d been like, somewhat cautious early on, although he had like hinted again about his opposition to the war. But uh, but he challenges a very strongly in fact, one of the most famous anti war speeches by a prominent politician he gave in Lexington, Kentucky, which is where his wife was from, or knows where he’s promised where he’s from, as well. I’m sorry, I messed that up. It’s where he’s from. And it’s like a very famous speech. I mean, everybody’s there. It’s like a million hours. But it’s really good. If you read if you have the time to read it. Well on his way to Washington, to take his seat as a freshman, Congress person, stopping in town sort of happens to happen is a young Abraham Lincoln, whose wife Mary Todd is from the area is from the same place in Kentucky as clay, Lincoln hears the speech is blown away by it. He’s already a Henry Clay aficionado. He calls him like his idol early in life. And a lot of folks have speculated on the effect that it obviously had on Lincoln and Lincoln does write some of it down in his diary of how profound it was. So look, there’s just a lot of stuff happening in the Mexican War. And so I could make it a story on just how fascinating it is, but and we can go in whatever direction you want next, but what I would say is a lot of this fascination And coincidence is almost too good to be true and therefore well worth telling. But it’s actually pretty relevant to some of like, the forever wars and the lies and the regime change in the internal politics of anti war to the extent that it exists today.

Scott Horton 13:13
Yeah. Here’s where I want to go. Here’s what I want to know. What happened to the Mexicans?

Danny Sjursen 13:19
Yeah, that’s an important question. No one really ever talks about the Mexicans, right? We put their name in the war. We even put them first right? We even front loaded them in the name of the war. But they’re not reported on very often until more recent scholarship. I’ve gotten into a lot of arguments over social media about this article, because a lot of folks you know, want to say, Oh, you know, you’re saying America is bad and you’re not pointing out the flaws in Mexico. Of course, they haven’t read the next three parts. So they don’t know that I do. In fact, well, the point is Mexico is there a week in New Republic and they are very fractured at the outset. They have had strong men, but then they’ve also had more liberals. They’re very divided politically at home. and Mexico doesn’t even really have a firm grip on, you know, the northern provinces that we later on next right which become California, New Mexico and all this and Texas, they have very tenuous hold on that. In fact, they can barely fight off the Apaches and the comanches I mean that northern Mexican settlements are getting wiped out and there’s like a great migration South back towards Mexico City. The Indians are winning in many cases, which makes the job of the American army easier, which explains some of the early victories especially out west Mexico is the war in the north the original theater for the first year which is Zachary Taylor the fighting just south of Texas. It goes pretty well for the Americans although the Mexicans fight gallon Lee actually throughout the throughout this war, by the way, they fight gallantly, but you know, it’s slow and it’s a long march to Mexico City and tough terrain and desert and all this so the Winfield Scott, another famous you know, West Point or and general who runs but doesn’t win the presidency is a he leads the first ever major American army amphibious invasion. One of the great logistical feats, frankly, I mean, the Duke of Wellington said it was like the greatest logistical feat like of the time, right? So because he was still alive and so then he marches to Mexico City and like all the guys who become famous Civil War generals, you’ve heard of them, right Robert E. Lee, George picket, all these guys are there and some of them make big names for themselves. pickets, like this flamboyant guy who charges up to pull the peg which is like this fortress, but Mexico City falls. Now here’s where it gets interesting. No one ever talks about this part of the war. The story usually ends with the fall of Mexico City, but the Americans have nobody to surrender to them. Because the kind of temporary dictator back in power after his fault, the Alamo and San Jacinto, you know, Santa Ana, he’s gone. And there’s this like division between the conservative oligarchs in the Met and the liberals, so to speak in Mexico City. By the way, the Mexican people, a whole bunch of them don’t quit. And the guerrilla war continues and actually lots and lots of Americans are killed ambushed, right in addition, all the guys that died of disease, and Scott’s down there with the State Department rep, basically, this guy next slide out who was sent by pull up, but eventually abandoned spoke and they want to make peace as fast as possible and get the heck out of dodge. Because it’s not going so great for the Americans down there. And it turns out that running a messy, broken Republic on the verge of civil war, sound familiar is difficult. Eventually, they cobbled together against the wishes of Polk who wants a harder piece bargain wants to take even more of Mexico wants even more, you know, doesn’t you know, just want to pay them anything and all this. They basically make a deal on the ground largely because there’s no internet and good communications. So there’s a lot of distance and they cobbled together sort of like a liberal coalition and they they make peace with it, of course take the northern third plus of Mexico, but the story Even the more sophisticated scholarship ends there. But Mexico doesn’t ever really recover, you know, for quite a long time. I don’t remember the numbers, although I think it’s in one of my later segments. You know, they go through an enormous amount of governments, presidents and all this over the course of really the next 70 to 80 years. And of course, the the Americans are responsible for all of that. But we certainly played a really great role like we have in so many other countries, some of which that I’ve occupied myself in in creating fomenting the disorder that really made this young Republic remember, it was only 25 years old at the time of the war. So Americans have having to intervene and famously, you know, in the banana War era, several times around the turn of the century dealing with some of this disorder and like civil war that follows through and I’ll just say Finally, in the immediate aftermath, or relatively immediate aftermath around the time of our civil war, Mexico, which has gone through all these presidents and governments and goes massively into debt to the Europeans is invaded by France, right with some help from the British in the 1860s and occupied by the French army for quite some time and a Austrian, you know, kind of second son, Prince Maximilian is put in charge of the Mexican throne for several years until his government falls to Benito Juarez and he’s executed by firing squad. Point is, you know, Mexico becomes what we would now call like a failed state that requires quote, unquote, requires intervention from outside powers, all of which ends very poorly both for the outside powers and of course, especially for the Mexican so long answer, but I think that’s the most interesting part of the story. No one talks a damn thing about

Scott Horton 18:43
Yeah, call it blowback.

[ADS]

Hey, so you mentioned earlier offhand, but then when a different direction, but I wish you’d elaborate about these American army deserters who, as you say in the article, went AWOL in numbers that make the Vietnam War pale in comparison. And not only that, but they actually not all of them, but some of them didn’t just leave, but they switch sides in the war. How could that be?

Danny Sjursen 20:28
Yeah. I mean, just you know, starting with the smaller stuff, although it’s prominent, okay. So the highest per capita casualty rate of Americans of any American War, Mexican War. I mean, who knows that right, just in terms of between disease and combat death and how small the numbers involved because our army was relatively small even with the augmentation of the militias so massive, it’s a death factory next. I mean, guys just don’t come back. massive amounts of gr resistance eight percent desertion rate you know highest ever in American War Vietnam pales in comparison and then a few hundred more than a few less than several hundred mostly Irish Catholic immigrants who populated the regular army in huge numbers throughout the period and well into the Indian Wars of the late 19th century they join the enemy that part of it is the way they were treated in the American army and the way they were treated as immigrants you know, Irish were, you know, depicted as apes at this time largely in American political cartoons. And also just the Catholic heritage had some effect and Mexican propaganda which you know, there is sort of a latent and not so latent strain I can even speak to some extent up till today of like underdog, anti Imperial anti oppression and the Irish character which was probably even stronger than and so this like Mexican problem propaganda which had been calling and targeting especially the Irish and Catholic immigrants. Hey, you’re on the wrong side like you’re the invader It works on a huge number. I mean, I don’t think there’s another instance. Besides, you know, the revolution, which is more of a civil war. I don’t think there’s another instance of a large enough group, going AWOL from American army that they form their own Battalion, the San Patricio Battalion, the St. Patrick’s battalion. And they fight marvelously. For the Mexican army with incredible courage. Most of them die in combat. They bring special skills to the Mexican army because the thing that the American army was best at, right? The the Mexicans were equally brave and sometimes more. The thing that we’ve had over them was engineering skills, and even more so to artillery. And so the San Patricio guys were able to like help the Mexicans with that so they were considered very useful, but most die in combat, because they know what’s going to happen to them if they surrender. So in some cases, Mexican soldiers retreated in the St. Patrick’s guys fought to the end. Those who were captured I don’t have the stats. In front of me, but suffice it to say that many, many, many like scores were executed by the American army for treason, some had their sentences commuted to you know, life in prison. And the Mexicans To this day, have a lot of monuments and celebrate the St. Patrick’s battalion as heroes. So this was interesting. And you know, we talked today about military descent around whether it’s these protests or the COVID response or the wars. And you know, there’s a lot of generals who’ve come out and I’m skeptical of these faults even when I agree with what they say. But yeah, the generals were critical of the war. Scott and Taylor are the two major generals while active in service they didn’t like go public against the war but they were critical of folks policy. They leaked a lot of stuff. They fought him tooth and nail about strategy. They were even dubious about the, you know, efficacy, the war at the mid level. In the lower level, the lieutenants and captains in particular, you know, there’s even more rumblings most stay on and do their duty but grants the most famous guy who was given wildly just turned off by what he saw in Mexico, but it is important to note that, you know, I think of like the 40 odd major battles in the Civil War, I think 39 were commanded by like a West Point or on both sides. The exact numbers are easy to Google, but it’s staggering. Well, what they don’t mention is that, you know, 95 or more percent of those generals who we often list for their Western credentials, were also Mexican War veterans, most of whom were on that triumphant march from Veracruz to Mexico City with general Scott and General Lee, who is much in the news for all the Confederate naming. I was a lieutenant and then a captain and in probably the most important battle campaign to get around the major Mexican bought, you know, defensive position on the way to Mexico City personally scouted like a impossible path, like around the Mexican lines and is, you know, mentioned this dispatches, and so you know, he makes his name and I mean, you name you name a famous Civil War general and I can basically tell you that he was in Mexico and maybe even tell you a little something about it. And it’s, uh, it’s really important. It’s the major combat experience for the guys who become the generals in the war.

Scott Horton 25:27
Yep. Yeah, it’s, that’s the history of American history, right. There is wars and then generals moving to political prominence. Lots and lots of that. But now, so help me remember right, because I mentioned Howard Zinn earlier there. And there’s something very memorable about the Mexican American war there, although I’m not certain. Now, it’s been so many years since I read it, who it was, but I think maybe it was Taylor, who had written in his diaries or letters back home or something. During the war, that this is absolutely disgusting what we’re doing and the atrocities and the aggression and I just can’t stand it. I hate it so much. You remember what I’m talking about there?

Danny Sjursen 26:12
Yeah. So Taylor’s private correspondence is very skeptical of what we’re doing in Mexico a lot of guilt none of it public and completely anti pulk I mean, the the abhorrence that Taylor and Scott but a felt for pulk is really rivals the way a lot of these like retired generals seem to be so reflexively anti Trump, I mean, not to create perfect analogy, but the persona of Hulk was just bothersome in the extremes. A lot of these generals, of course, like in most cases, we found this out later and they didn’t really do anything about it. And you know, Taylor ride says war heroes status to become the Whig candidate. And then Victor in the, you know, 1848 election, so like right after the war, but like, let’s think about this for a second. You want to talk about like cynicism and irony. The Whigs who were dubious about the war from the start, but rolled over because they remembered what happened to the Federalists when they oppose the war of 1812, which is that they were destroyed as a party, they went away. I mean, they were totally discredited as traitors. So the Whigs that learned that lesson, so they go along with the war they don’t believe in until a grassroots anti war movement, the first in American history really at the grassroots forms that everyone knows about Thoreau and civil disobedience what that was about Mexico, and then only then just like our democrats today, and since Vietnam, then then they jump on the bandwagon and Co Op the anti war movement, but so then they become very anti war, and it’s probably the biggest, you know, political anti war effort in American history is a great parallel there

Scott Horton 27:55
with iraq war one, it didn’t quite destroy the Democratic Party, but Bill Clinton and john kerry and Joe Biden had all opposed iraq war one and then never lived it down. And we’re so embarrassed by that. And of course, when iraq war two came around, none of them were willing to make that same mistake again. So they made the opposite mistake by supporting it.

Danny Sjursen 28:14
It’s a great point. I mean, Bob Kerry of Nebraska, a Navy SEAL Medal of Honor winner, was groomed and expected to be president. In many ways. He was the perfect guy, right? He’s from the Midwest conservative state, but he’s a democrat. He’s a war hero, but his opposition to the Persian Gulf War was largely considered to have made him you know, untenable as a candidate. But, you know, my final point I guess, on the wigs is the irony. So the cynical wigs who suddenly become massively anti war many of them principal, most of its cynical, they then in order to beat the democrats right after the war, run, the heat one of the two hero generals from that war and Taylor wasn’t exactly like run on his anti war credentials, he runs on the triumphalism of the fact that he’s a national hero. And so the Whigs wanted power so bad, you know, that they they ran a general and there’s just like a degree of irony there, you know, I think and also just parallels the political calculus of the duopoly and it’s timeless,

Scott Horton 29:18
and they almost did run Wesley Clark in Oh, four. I mean, there’s pretty close parallel there.

Danny Sjursen 29:24
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s an interesting thing. And, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know how long we have. But you know, we’re

Scott Horton 29:31
working on at all um, yeah, that’s

Danny Sjursen 29:33
fine. I’ll tell you some other time. We’ll talk about the Alamo. I’m sure you’re interested in that down in Texas. I am and you

Scott Horton 29:38
have a great write up on it. And I already know that you’re absolutely right. Which sucks. Right? It is what it is. And so we’ll look forward to parts two and three. Of course, we might wait at antiwar.com and run them all together. Something that

Danny Sjursen 29:54
I wish they would do that. I wish that they would run them all together. But yeah, it’s good. Yeah.

Scott Horton 29:57
Yeah. FFF likes to do The tortured legacy of the Mexican American War Danny shirts in@ffrf.org thanks again But

Danny Sjursen 30:09
hey, thanks God always glad to do it.

Scott Horton 30:11
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

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. Introducing Bas Spliet. He has written quite a few articles for us now at antiwar.com dot com, including this extremely important one from last week in Yemen. Western foreign policy is empowering al Qaeda. Welcome back. The show Bas, how are you doing, sir?

Bas Spliet 1:02
Very good, sir. That’s

Scott Horton 1:06
great. Very happy to have you here. And it is such an important story. It’s sort of the Forgotten War in real time, America’s war in Yemen. We’re leading from behind as the Obama is put it, in the war in Libya. Same kind of thing here. The Obama government started it with the Saudis in 2015. Trump has continued it, of course, throughout his presidency. And even though if you just asked a man on the street, you know, who do you think were fighting in Yemen? They might guess well, Al Qaeda, right. Maybe the guys that bomb Nicole tried to blow up the plane over Detroit, and I think they would be shocked to find out that Actually, no, we’re fighting a war for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, against their local enemies. But how could that be that sounds crazy Bas, please take us through it here.

Bas Spliet 1:58
Yeah, definitely. Sounds crazy. And it’s probably results of the fact that they make the war seem very complex. And they give very little information about it, and they don’t really tell people about it. So people just go along with this. But let me just see where I started seeing investigation in late April, after reports came out on the American news sites. alternative media sites, means press news, concerning some very disturbing revelations that a Yemeni journalist had uncovered. That in the fights between the Hootie forces recharged Shiite insurgents that took over the government in 215, and have held the Capitol ever since they took over two desert villages on the front line in the war against the forces of doublemint. So heady, which is the deposed president, which saw you that coalition is trying to reinstall and which are our allies. Which as we’ve said, We are leading from behind. And from these reports, he was clear that there were video shares, spontaneous videos that we made. After the Moody’s took over these villages. And videos clearly showed that in the underground bunkers of these forces, they found documents with the official logo of al Qaeda with the face of I’m sorry, on its, as well as graffiti sprayed flags of the Islamic State on the wall, which clearly revealed seem to reveal the true allegiances of the forces, which are our allies, basically. And yeah, there is some information about this relationship and I read, we I read something like left and right about this relationship, but I wants to find out how is this more of a superficial thing? Is this an exception? Or is there a more deeper relationship from which we can say that’s the There is two, can we actually say like, as that title claims that Western foreign policy is directly aiding and abetting al Qaeda or suppose number one enemy, at least in the Middle East. So that’s what I set out to do. I looked at all the evidence I could find, also with the help of someone you’ve interviewed, it’s quite a few times. So yeah, internist, by the name of NASA IRB. And it’s probably impossible to go into all the details, but I think we can summarize findings in four layers, if you will, that peel the onion. So if you allow me I’ll do just that.

Scott Horton 4:37
Yes, do please go ahead.

Bas Spliet 4:38
First of all, on the most basic level, finding what’s revealed by a new investigation by the Associated Press in 2018, which found that the coalition claimed in 2018 that was advancing on Al Qaeda, which had some actual territory on the front But they claimed that they had made some real advances. And they took over certain villages and strategic points from Al Qaeda. But as the investigation of the Associated Press reveals, actually, there was no real fighting. But they were the result of secret deals made between al Qaeda and Saudi coalition and the heavy government’s in which actually the al Qaeda militants were were allowed to retrieve from the cities and areas they controlled with their stolen goods, which included stolen money, and weapons, and this kind of stuff. And the Associated Press also said that key participants in this deals, told them that’s the US was often part of this deal. And they agreed to stop their drone bombing while the deal was happening. So the US was involved in this in this deal. So that’s the first layer if you will But it still gives the ID that there is some clear distinction between to delineate its parties in the conflicts on the one hand, the head of government in exile, and its forces and on the one hand and other hands up kinda. But if we deeper, we actually found if you look at the weapons that are produced in the West in the United States in several European countries, which include my country, Belgium, where they end up in the conflicts, we find that actually, a lot of the Western produce weapons have ended up in the hands of al Qaeda and ISIS as well. And we know this from from from the research of Egyptian journalists, which was published on among other places on CNN, and it’s revealed that Yeah, you if you actually look at material The videos of this if this jihadists that are online, so in the in the open, open source, there was an open source investigation, you can see that Western produced weapons ended up all the time in in Al Qaeda hands. And this is part of the Bonanza, of course, in which us and its allies, they produce weapons and they sell them to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and they give them on to war Lords part of the Saudi led coalition and part of the head of governments and they appear to have relationship relationships with cozy relationships with with al Qaeda forces in the doing, just give through the weapons. So there is a clear chain of custody in which we are empowering our number one enemy there. A third layer is something that was also discovered by the Associated Press, but in the meantime, it has also been backed up by Emirati officials which is revealed that actually it even goes further. Sometimes, oftentimes, as also, as I said, in the beginning, it looked like in these desert villages, the Qaeda militants were fighting alongside the howdy governments. This is a pattern that is discovered in several cases in which Academy religions are recruited into the fight against the Houthis. And this, yeah, they do this because supposedly, the Houthis are the bigger evil, if you will, because Gulf propaganda depicts them as even worse than al Qaeda. They won’t say that, but they suggest that and thus, even though Iran is not really involved very deeply in this conflict and the Houthis are forced in their own rights, which are not puppets of Iran. They literally recruit all kinds of balances into the fights. And finally, it’s very clear. That’s it Some of the people that are literally on the United States official lists by the Treasury Department’s of global designated terrorists in Yemen. There are several people that are just very connected to the head of governments. I’ll just give two examples. Maybe the most illustrative one is Abdul Wahab McCarney, he’s kind of Salafi preacher turned politician. He looks pretty modern. I saw photos. So it might appeal to extremist Islamic elements. And after the previous president present, not the post heavy present, but the guy before that ruled him and for 33 years, saw that when he was the posting 2012 there were a lot of conferences, power transition conferences, sponsored by the Gulf monarchies, and he participated in that and through some in some reports, he’s They say these, these are very prominent participants in these conferences, but still at the United States in 2013, the end of 2013. They designated him as a terrorist, and they put him on their terrorist list. And because and this is almost literal quote, he does business for arcada. He travels throughout the Arabian Peninsula freely Saudi Arabia, mainly and, and Yemen, and he conducts business for Al Qaeda. I funnels weapons and all kinds of stuff and money. So pretty startling, you would think. But still, this was students routine. In 2015, he participated in a conference sponsored by the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, where he participates in the capacity of delegation of the head of government. So you can literally find that is actually part of the heavy government’s going to be stocks at the same time that he’s on. The US terrorists list. And you can even find photos of him shaking banky moon the Secretary General of the UN, the boss of the world’s if you will. Yeah, pretty startling. Yeah. Did you start? Maybe a last one that I can mention mention is up to mosquitoes in Danny, who was also preacher and was involved with, with the Muslim Brotherhood. I think he even set up, founded the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it’s also a leading member of the Islamic party which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and as far back as students for United States doesn’t need him as a global terrorist. They put him on his list they sanction him because according to the press statements, he is a loyalist of some bin Laden, and he even they even say that he is one of the spiritual leaders have some villain, but even then in 2011, and we’re alive Lucky which is a US citizen that when radicalized and went to Yemen and he ended up dying in a drone strike by the United States he was extra judicially kills, which should be mentioned he like according to an Egyptian newspaper he sheltered at the house have as in them. But still in 2018, this guy, this, Abdul Majeed as in Danny a terrorist, according to the United States, he met our president in Yemen heading and he talked and he appears to advise them on some on some issues. So in these are just two examples. There are at least six people and you can refer to that are on the United States terror terrorists list of Yemen and this is not a list of hundred people or something. It’s just maybe 20 people or something on this list and several one several of these people are directly to tied back to the heavy governance.

Scott Horton 13:02
Yeah. Well, it really is something else. And I don’t mind bragging a little bit that you heard that here first on this show years ago from Nasr. rb, that go and look at the terrorist list. These are the very same men that we’re talking about, that the State Department has designated as enemies of the American people are the very same people that are allies in this war against the Houthis, in Yemen, and for, you know, the general public in the audience who might not understand how that could possibly be right? You have to remember that the reason that al Qaeda hates us is because and always has, is because we’re too close of allies with their governments that they want to overthrow. And so they’re not from Iran, Iraq and Syria. They’re from Saudi and Egypt, mostly countries that are friendly with the United States. And so when it comes to our overall strategic position in the region, America’s on the Sunni side. And that means that the al Qaeda guys are our strategic allies if they blew up the coal and tried to blow up a plane over Detroit, and if they help coordinate the September 11 attack, and if they harbored Anwar Al aulaqi, who inspired the Fort Hood attack, and all of this stuff, well, oh, well, don’t you know that the Houthis are rumored to be backed by Iran to some slight degree. And so therefore, the enemy of the American people who are the enemy of America’s strategic rival in the region, are our friends.

Bas Spliet 14:37
Maybe that’s most clear, if you look at the records of the Yemeni governments, we have supported the Sunni one not even Sunni but like the the governments that were previously in power in Yemen, solid was overthrown in the Arab Spring, go look at his records in fighting al Qaeda like on the one hand, he’s allowing the United States to to once in a while While performing drone strike that kills some al Qaeda neither, but on the other hands, according to the Yemeni government, at some point, there were two masterminds of the cold bombing in of 2000s. And they were convicted and put on the death sentence. But before they were put to death, they miraculously escape order. They’re their deals. There’s one guy by the name of Oh, by the way, one of the two, he escaped two different maximum security facilities, one in Samoa and one in the island. And then he was captured a third time, but then he made a deal with the governments in which he agreed that he would help find other senior more senior al Qaeda members if but he was supposedly the mastermind of one of the most deadly terrorist attack in that country. So it’s just a total farce. And it’s true that like, and they’re also very recently there are drone bombings that killed senior kind of people, but I use the phrase I don’t think it’s just Very common phrase in the United States, mopping up the floor without turning off the faucets. So on the one hand, they’re doing their war on terror, which in their United States bombing bombing al Qaeda caters and when they do that will receive a lot of media attention, but on the other hands to a very greater degree. They are literally supporting a car in all kinds of way over there. So it’s important and it doesn’t make any sense and it’s one of the many reasons we should just get out.

Scott Horton 16:35
[ADS]

Now I want to talk about something that you highlight in this piece again called in Yemen Western foreign policy. Empowering al Qaeda at anti war calm by Bas Spliet. And you talk here about General Michael Vickers and his statement about America working with the Houthis when they first took over the capital city at the end of 2014, beginning of 2015, that CENTCOM said, Great, we can use these guys to hunt down and murder al Qaeda guys. And then it was just two months later, that Barack Obama turned around and took al Qaeda side against them. And that, to me, is really something else.

Bas Spliet 18:34
Yeah. They quite understandably, saw the cooties, whatever they thought of them. I don’t think there were Iranian puppets at the time, running through 915 after they had overthrown present that was clearly very unpopular. And as I just mentioned, like the records of the Yemeni government in fighting al Qaeda is dubious at best, very bad at the worst. And they looked at these routines come to power. And you have this is a pretty, pretty senior guy within the Defense Department who admitted that they had an ongoing intelligence relationship with the Hutus because they figured that these guys will probably be way better in finding out guy that because not only are they supposed to sue nice, but they might have better records because they fighting corruption already easily saving they would. But then that was I think, in January 2015. Just author had he had resides under the pressure of the hoodies, of course, he fled to the south, but the hoodies advanced on the south, and then he fled. Second time, but this this time to Riyadh to Saudi Arabia. He was he was still young, but then also young. Hamad bin Salman would just come onto the scene political scene in Saudi Arabia. He set up a coalition and said I will reinstate this guy. He, he got 10 Sunni countries together and he started waging the war on them. And Saudi Arabia is our allies. So the United States said, well, we’ll go along, and then also the Saudis and their allies start saying, Yeah, this Iranians to justify the war, these these royalties, rather, they are puppets of Iran. And this of course, if you say this, Washington, Warhawks will be like, oh, we’ll drill down for death because they hate Iran to the core, of course. And then they indeed just turned around and it should be noticed that it was this was under Obama Pepsi, and now, Trump is in office of coke. So it’s the same thing there. The President changes but the policy doesn’t. And that’s, that’s very sexy indeed.

Scott Horton 20:46
Yep. And now, you mentioned Michael Horton there, no relation to me. He’s a real expert on Yemen. And when this were started back in March of 2015, he talked to mark Perry, the great Pentagon reporter, Mark Perry, and he was at that time quoting john mccain and said, well, john mccain’s complaining. Well, this is during the Iraq War Three, right the war against the Islamic State. And john mccain’s complaining that we’re flying as Iran’s Air Force in Iraq, which is, of course all McCain’s fault. But anyway, but we’re flying as Al Qaeda is Air Force now in Yemen. That was how he put it right, then as soon as the war started. It’s not like this was hard for anyone to understand if they were taking a critical look at it, that we are fighting against al Qaeda, his worst enemies, at the very least, we are de facto siding with them by helping accomplish their same goals. That was just the very beginning. Of course, as you talked about, since then, we’d have almost direct aid and comfort in the sense of American supplies going to al Qaeda through the United Arab Emirates. and so forth.

Bas Spliet 22:01
Yeah, but it bears repeating. I talked about ways in which restaurant foreign policy is directly strengthen al Qaeda, but it’s also on the face of it. It’s also just very easy to see that by instigating the war, which could never happen without our sports, the Saudis have created a power vacuum, they’ve created instability. And in this instability in this power vacuum, are kind of seized on that and that’s why they took control in the first place in the first few years of the war, and then they were supposedly pushing them back, but they were making the deals that were recruiting them. So on a very prima facia level, but also on a very deep level. We’re involved in so many ways, and it’s, it’s I really had to dig deep for some of these things. You know, the Associated Press investigation and CNN reports. These ones are available online and people refer to them but the facts Like the very easy to verify fact that several people on the designated global terrorist list of terrorists in Yemen these same people are in bed with arella it’s just insane if you think about it, and I really had to go to I had to step up my Arabic and re to arabic news reports to verify these kind of things. It’s really not reported them and the moments this would be reported for and whites then people would really clearly see that they would they wouldn’t have to they will need a complicated explanation how we’re backing Okay, if you’re interesting from perspective of the US government, these are terrorists and at the same time, they are in bed with our allies, so we should switch allies maybe

Scott Horton 23:48
or just have none. And And listen, I’m sorry, cuz this is slightly off topic, but it’s the most important point for people to understand here is that this is absolutely the worst thing happens. anything in the world right now? Is America and Saudis war against the people of Yemen. It’s very deliberately designed to be a campaign against the civilian population there. And there’s no question at least the UN has admitted, it’s almost certain that the number is higher. That UN has finally admitted that a quarter of a million people have been killed in the last five years, they’re in this war. And then again, this is not the war against aq AP, but the war for them. And so this war is genocide and treason and goes again, as you’re talking about, they’re almost completely unremarked upon, it’s absolutely as bad as Iraq War Two, and yet goes without notice. It’s it’s almost unbelievable, but it is what it is. But um, I just wanted to throw that in. I know that’s not the focus of your piece here, but I wanted to Make sure that we mentioned that, that civilians are suffering. Of course, it’s children under five who are dropping dead of starvation in this thing. It’s just an absolute atrocity. But I wanted to ask you finally here as we wrap up about the overall strength of aq, AP, because, you know, if you talk about the USS Cole, or you know, their participation in helping to arrange the September 11 attack, back then you think of a pretty small group of guys, even in the days of the war against aq AP, Obama’s drone war from 2009 through 2015 still seem like we’re in and of course, that war only grew them, they only got more and more powerful in response to that drone war, but still, it seemed like we’re talking about what at most a few hundred guys or something like that tops. But so I wonder if there’s a real good study of just how much strength al Qaeda and or the Islamic State groups in Yemen have gained here. As the result of this war, are we talking about 10s of thousands of guys in their militias now or what? Exactly?

Bas Spliet 26:07
Fortunately, I there’s no way to answer that question just because the information is so low, and the lines are so blurred, that same Michael Horton that the Yemeni experts mentions, in response to dissociate the press piece, it’s very easy for a guy to insert itself into the mix. And there there are so many parts of the conflicts and people change sides all the time, militants will maybe fights for whoever pays the best, you know, so maybe the one point it’s the heavy government’s and another point is all Qaeda. So in fighting power, it’s not easy to see, but maybe ideologically. First of all, maybe you should just get out like if you draw away all the funds coming from Saudi Arabia and these very wealthy Gulf monarchies that clearly like they have a lot of people rich people that funds, these kind of groups return into what kind of ISIS? If they weren’t pumping the money in it’s the interest in joining these groups would want to be decreased, firstly, and secondarily, that just bombing country turns people against the country that is bombing them. So that’s probably another very satisfactory answer. But it’s difficult to say, but it’s easy to diminish their numbers, I think in a very simple policy, and that is wrong. Yeah. Well, and

Scott Horton 27:34
if you look at the examples from Syria and Iraq, you know, most of the guys who would fight and been last night groups are really just militia men, rather than international terrorist types. But at the core, they’re still the overall the watery eyed mission of the war against us, the far enemy. And so if the numbers grow from a core group of 20 to a quarter group of 100 that’s still a lot you know, when it only takes a few to carry out spectacular taxes we saw with Charlie Hebdo and so many others by these guys,

Bas Spliet 28:11
let me just mentioned that like back into runs and turn a CIA and other counter terrorist officials, they start to say that actually the al Qaeda branch in Yemen is now the biggest branch of archives after we destroyed one in Afghanistan. So, yeah, then the war starting to run 15 and like until 2015, you have some terrorist attacks, which are Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is involved and with with the Shan the mo tech, of course, Interim 15 January, and then they had to assume they had to turn their attention towards the conflict, but the what is the whatever the conflict ends with all their with the ideology, upon which the breeding grounds upon which they can foster the new weapons that come from our country. The battleground experience all these things I, it would be hard to imagine if they are not more strong than they were. They were before the war. That’s that’s what I can tell you. Yeah.

Scott Horton 29:10
Yeah. Aren’t you guys that is Bas Spliet. He is a master’s student at the University of Ghent, Belgium. And is has now been writing for us regularly at antiwar.com. This one is called in Yemen. Western foreign policy is empowering al Qaeda. Thank you again very much for your time, Bas.

Bas Spliet 29:34
You will, anytime.

Scott Horton 29:36
Aren’t you guys and that has been anti war radio for this morning. I’m your host, Scott Horton on the author of the book fool’s errand time to end the war in Afghanistan and editorial director of anti war calm. 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

Mike Maharrey 0:59
Hey, Scott, I’m doing great. Always happy to be on with you.

Scott Horton 1:03
Great. I hate this subject, but it’s so interesting. But it really is right where the rubber meets the road. So make everyone understand everything there is to know that you know about this subject. Go.

Mike Maharrey 1:19
I’m gonna try to make it as simple as I can because

Scott Horton 1:22
no man make it complicated. I want to know everything, everything.

Mike Maharrey 1:26
Well, I don’t want people to get lost in it.

Scott Horton 1:28
Okay, start with a summary and then tell me everything.

Mike Maharrey 1:32
All right. Well, let’s let’s first off just in case some people don’t know what qualified immunity is that we probably ought to start there. Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that basically shields cops from liabilities, when they take actions in the line of duty. So, you know, cop shoots your kid while he’s trying to kill your dog. You can’t sue the cop for shooting your kid because he was doing it in the line of duty and the crazy –

Scott Horton 1:57
criminal liability or just civil liability

Mike Maharrey 1:59
This is civil liability. So and really when you get down to violating the Constitution, and that’s really what you get down to, with these with these types of lawsuits, you know, it’s not criminal, it’s always civil. And that’s how you ended up with with this mess in the first place is that people had to sue in order to protect their quote unquote, constitutional rights. So let’s go back kind of to the, to the beginning, where all of this started really kind of started with the passage of the 14th Amendment, which ensured that every citizen is is protected based on their basic privileges and immunities, as they call them. And it was passed, in essence, to make sure that black people who had just been freed from slavery would have the ability to access all of the things in society that any other citizen could access. So, you know, things like being able to buy land or travel across state lines or access the court system. So that’s what the 14th The minimum was really intended to do in the 1870s, they passed this law was one of the Civil Rights acts. And it gave people the right to sue, or to sue a state agent under federal law in the federal courts. And so this was to really kind of put teeth into 14th amendment. So if some state agent somewhere, you know, denied your rights to transfer land or whatever, you could sue in federal court, and it makes sense when you think about it, you know, if it’s the, if it’s, you’re in a southern state, and there’s all these racist, black codes and all this stuff, they wanted to give people a remedy, a way out, in order to hold the government responsible, really no problem up to this point. There was always a presumption of immunity to some degree for a state agent doing their job. And think of it simply Imagine if you know you’re arrested on legitimate probable cause You eventually go to court, you’re proven innocent. You can’t sue the cop for arresting you falsely, you know, he’s trying to do his job. And there’s always there’s always nebulous situations and evidence, new evidence comes to light later. So it was always presumed. But in the early days, the way qualified immunity was handled is basically handled on a case by case basis, under what was known as common law. You know, so going way back to the 17 1800s back into the British court system, the judges would have some discretion in protecting state agents from doing their job. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court got involved in the 1970s that we really started to see this doctrine of qualified immunity grow up to what it is today where virtually every police officer in the entire United States is protected under this, this giant legal umbrella and essentially it allows them to Do whatever the hell they want to, without having to worry about any kind of recourse whatsoever. It started with this case called bivins. And you hear about people suing under bivins. And it was originally just applied to federal agents, it allowed people for the first time to sue federal agents for violating their rights. that’s it in a nutshell, that statute that I talked about under the Civil Rights Act passed in 1870, that only applied to state agents. So bivins was a court case, that kind of stablished this idea that you could sue a federal agent for violating your rights. Then there was this series of court cases that came after bivins that created this idea of qualified immunity. And as these court cases evolved, it got more and more difficult to actually hold a federal agent accountable. And what eventually happened the criteria today is that it has to be A willing violation of an established right that’s already established in law, which means it’s already established in the court system. Well, if it hasn’t happened yet, it can’t be established. So you have this vicious circle, it’s almost impossible to prove that they violated a, an established, right? Because there’s so many, you know, multiple situations that can happen. And a defense attorney can always say, well, that’s never happened before, how could he have known? And so that’s where we are today where we’re ultimately it’s almost impossible to to sue police officers to hold them accountable, to ensure that they are punished for doing things that are, you know, obvious violations of our rights. And all of this was created by the federal court system. Now, the incorporation doctrine which we talked about the last time I was on this show, kind of gets involved here too, because like I said, the ribbons case only apply applied to federal agents, but eventually the took that bivins criteria and through the incorporation doctrine, applied it to state and local agents as well. So you’ll very rarely if ever see a state agent sued a cop sued under that Civil Rights Act, that original statute, it’s always through the bivins cases, which are now just completely a product of the Supreme Court. So that’s that’s kind of the the nutshell of where we are today. The qualified immunity is not anything that’s written into law. It’s something that supreme court justices have created over time. And it’s a it’s a prime example of how government protects its own. You know, we always think, well, then the courts are going to protect our rights. So we’re going to sue in federal court and we’re gonna get our rights protect, it never works, because the federal courts are part of the federal government. They’re part of the government system. These are government employees. They may have, you know, law degrees, but they’re still just government employees. Their bread is buttered by the government. They’re not getting To protect your rights, they never protect your rights. And this is why we’re in a situation today, where you see cops getting away with these egregious horrible things. And nobody can do anything about it because they just plead qualified immunity. And since it has gone through this incorporation doctrine, you can’t sue in state court because it’s going to get bounced to the federal level, the any cop that sued is going to insist that it’s remanded to federal court where he has these protections. So you can’t even have a situation where, you know, maybe some states could do something and, and in qualified immunity, you can’t do it. It has to be done on the federal level, it ultimately is going to have to either be an overturning of the doctrine by the courts, or Congress is going to have to take action and actually pass a law to get rid of qualified immunity. So hold your breath through either one of those things happening but, you know, puts me in a weird situation. I almost always say don’t try to do things through the federal government, but really, Congress is the only the only people that can solve this because just last week, the Supreme Court rejected several cases where they could have actually gone back and rein this in a little bit. But they said, Now, we’re gonna let these stand in. The cases that they turned down are pretty egregious One of them was a police officer who shot a 10 year old kid in the back of the knee. The cop was trying to shoot the pet dog. I mean, this is this is like the this the, the mocking stereotype of cops, right, you know, shoot the dog. Well, you miss the dog and shot the kid. And the federal courts up through the appellate court have held that Yeah, the the COP is not liable for doing that because he has qualified immunity. He was doing it on the job and it doesn’t violate a quote unquote, established right. So the supreme court could have gone into that and, you know, maybe overturned that and reined in this qualified immunity but they said they didn’t want to do that. And then another one of the cases that was there was that a, a cop? Basically sicked his police dog on some poor soul who was already basically in custody live On the ground. And the The court said that the law did not, quote clearly establish that it was unlawful or unlawful for police to deploy a Khaimah canine against the suspect who has surrendered. So it’s not established in law, so therefore the cops can do it, and it can never be established in law because the courts will never hear it. And again, the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom passed on reviewing this this case, and so, you know, qualified immunity stands. So that’s where we are we have a federal court system that’s supposed to be protecting our rights, and they’re allowing cops to walk all over our rights and and not doing anything about it. So that’s it in a nutshell. So

Scott Horton 10:45
well, you know, it’s interesting because on the dog issue, I mean, cops do have the authority under law to initiate confrontations with people and use force if they have probable cause to take someone into custody and all these kinds of things, but one that seem much more clear cut. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong on that. I’m just saying it is what it is. But the one that was more clear cut was the case where they just outright stole a quarter of a million dollars from these businessmen, and they just stole it. And the Court refused to hear that there’s not a law on the books that says, or there’s not a court precedent anywhere in America that they could cite where cops ever got in trouble for stealing. And so how could a cop know that it’s against the law to steal money?

Mike Maharrey 11:29
Right? Yeah, it’s absurd.

Scott Horton 11:32
And we’re not saying to buy themselves a fancy new police cruiser, but for their own personal they just put in their own accounts. Yeah. bought their wives gifts or whatever with it.

Mike Maharrey 11:42
I mean, even looking at some of the things like you know, like you said, yeah, of course police have the authority to utilize the canine to to, to subdue a suspect. We can grant that and we could debate you know, whether that’s that’s,

Scott Horton 11:57
hey, I was only conceding a kernel of truth to the Aside there just say, you know, at least they have some kind of argument. Whereas when it comes to just putting money in your pocket, there’s no argument for that.

Mike Maharrey 12:07
All right, let’s, let’s, let’s kind of flesh that out a little bit. Think about, you know, let’s think about this in this particular situation. You know, every situation has limits, right? I mean, you know, obviously, cops have the right to detain you, they don’t have the right to detain you under any circumstance. So you could say that the police have the right to utilize these dogs, but not under any circumstances. It seems to me that any person utilizing an ounce of common sense, is going to look at a situation where a police officer deploys a dog on a person who is already lying on the ground who has given up who is not running, not resisting who’s just laying there, that that’s not right, in in a sane judicial system, even in the system as it existed back, you know, say in 1870s, when they passed the Civil Rights Act, in this statute, that statutes number 1983 case anybody wants to look it up. But, you know, under that situation, the courts would have to look at that and make a determination of did he crossed the line? The world we live in now they don’t even look at it. They just say, Oh, well, he was doing his job qualified immunity. We’re not going to examine this. That’s the problem. There’s no discretion anymore. It’s just blanket Oh, the cop was just quote unquote, doing his job. Okay.

Scott Horton 13:23
Mike. So what do they call it, their criminal immunity that they have? Because it’s not just lawsuits. Don’t they cite the qualified immunity doctrine to say that they can’t be prosecuted unless in the most absolutely egregious circumstances?

Mike Maharrey 13:40
I don’t think that that that’s not so much like, like, qualified immunity civilly is a legal doctrine that is cemented into the the statutes. When you get into criminal liability, then it really comes down to the discretion of the prosecutors.

Scott Horton 13:58
So it’s just de facto qualified,

Mike Maharrey 14:00
I was getting ready to say it’s de facto because again, not only do the Supreme Court protect their own, but all government agents tend to protect the government. Think about the the prosecutors work with these cops on a daily basis. They’re not they don’t want to, they want to prosecute their buddies, you know, they hang out and have doughnuts together and stuff, you know, not to play on a stereotype but to play on a stereotype. And, and so yeah, you have a de facto situation. So what happens is you have prosecutors who are reluctant to bring a case. criminally, you have a population who by and large, still respects police officers, I think, you know, despite maybe that’s changing for the good, but, you know, generally in the population people defer to authority. So they think, Well, you know, what did the that’s the first question people ask when you talk about excessive force. Well, what did the guy do? Did he resist you know, so it’s hard to get a jury to prosecute a cop. So what happens is Prosecutors are reluctant to take the case to prosecute it unless there’s a lot of public pressure. I guarantee you that if it had not been videoed, the guy that stomped on George Floyd’s neck would never have been prosecuted, right? That’s just that’s just a given. Right? There’s video. So you know, that changes the equation. So what happens is the only reason not only that

Scott Horton 15:21
the video went viral, right, because there are a lot of times where there’s video and they still skate.

Mike Maharrey 15:27
Well, yeah, that’s true. And it’s interesting, because, you know, I’ve been telling people not to, not to side track with too much here, but I’ve been telling people for years I’ve been talking about police violence, I found an article that I wrote like in 2013, talking about excessive force. The case was actually in New York City, where this poor I think he was Chinese didn’t speak English very well. He’s 84 years old, got nabbed for jaywalking. So the cops are, you know, they’ve got them and they’re trying to write him a ticket for jaywalking. He doesn’t understand what they’re saying why they’re detaining him. He doesn’t speak English. He kind of decides he’s gonna walk away. So they throw them on the ground, they rough them up, they beat the hell out of them. And, you know, I’ve been talking about this for years and years. And people who follow police violence, you know, if you follow some of the the websites cop block different websites, you can find these examples almost every single day. So you right, you have to have this huge upswell of public pressure in order for prosecutors to to take action. So what happens is people think, Okay, well, one remedy I have, I can sue in federal court, and because he violated my rights, and then that’s now blocked, because we have this doctrine of qualified immunity. This has to change this is when you talk about police reforms. This is this should be the number one top of the list is to is to roll this back, because it makes it impossible to hold people accountable. And the basic premise of the justice system is that every individual should be accountable. And just because, you know, I work for Government agency doesn’t let me skate but in the world we live in working for a government agency every single time. Let’s escape. It’s pretty disgusting.

Scott Horton 17:09
[ADS]

Yeah, I was just reading thing this morning. It must have been a reason I guess about how a mosh has a bill to abolish qualified immunity, and the democrats in the house, are wrapping it up in a big bill with a bunch of things that will never pass, right as a poison pill essentially. And then they’re up against john Cornyn and the Republicans in the Senate who’ve already vowed to kill it. And corns excuse is that? Oh, yeah, right. Then From now on, everyone who’s ever arrested, gets to sue the cops who arrested them and put them through all this hell, which as you were explaining, was never the case. before the Supreme Court instituted this, judges love to throw out a lawsuit against a cop on a summary judgment without even glancing at it. It’s set in the most egregious cases anyway. Right.

Mike Maharrey 19:46
Right. And you know, as with a lot of things, the market kind of handles some of that stuff anyway, if you’re an attorney, you’re not going to take some frivolous case and in and try to prosecute, prosecute a cop. You’re not gonna do You’re not going to risk your reputation. You know? And, you know, yeah, you’re gonna get flipped frivolous lawsuits. What would you rather have a few frivolous lawsuits or a situation where, you know, a guy can shoot a kid because he’s trying to shoot the kids dog. And there’s no remedy for that. I mean, I’ll take I’ll take the frivolous lawsuit side of that thing every single time.

Scott Horton 20:22
All right now, here’s my problem. I tried and failed to get Scott H. Greenfield to be a guest on the show. He has a rule. I don’t do interviews, growth, growth growth, he said, and so that was it. But everyone should follow him on twitter at Scott Greenfield on Twitter, and he’s a civil rights lawyer guy. And his blog is called Simple justice, a criminal defense blog. And I tell everybody to read this thing. And I don’t know Mike, because I tell everybody I don’t remember if that includes you. In the past, I tell everyone to read this piece. Tamir Rice’s basically reasonable murder. And this is about of course, this story of the 12 year old boy Who was playing with a toy gun at the park and the cops pulled up and the guy in the passenger seat just jumped out and blew the kid away without a moment’s notice. And they had an independent investigation. And as Greenfield says here, the conclusion was foregone. The murder was reasonable. And then what’s great about this piece, and I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this, and and, you know, I should have gone to law school, but I never did. Okay, I don’t know about this stuff. But um, he kind of takes us through layers of different qualified immunity decisions here. So it’s not just that, well, there’s no explicit precedent for this exact crime. So how was he to know which is part of it? But it’s also that whatever they do, the only kind of question, well, I guess the way to put it would be, whatever the exactly as the wording, the law in your state is, if you kill me, then you have to prove essentially the burden is on You to show that you absolutely had to do it, you had no choice but to but to commit a justifiable homicide. But for them, the only question is whether it was reasonable. And then reasonable, as he writes, and this is, you know, four or five different decisions on down the line kind of anything. reasonable, it turns out can only be defined by other cops because only they know what cops know. And all other cops know is that whenever a cop kills somebody, of course he had to. And so they’re the only ones who can decide it’s not up to the jury to decide what’s reasonable. It’s only up to, you know, the cops, lawyers, experts to say, Oh, yeah, I would have taken the shot to and then you have to go with it like you’re bound by that if they have a witness who will say that, then you have to defer to that perspective of what was reasonable or not rather than your own and all of this kind of thing, and I’m not exactly Fisher, this is the exact same qualified immunity doctrine or this is all parallel, you know, decisions that go along to passing out and essentially licenses to kill to these cops.

Mike Maharrey 23:13
Yeah. Yeah, actually, ironically, I just read that article. Maybe when I was researching researching for the article that I wrote, thank goodness within the last so you

Scott Horton 23:24
can comment on what I just brought up out of the blue then. Thank goodness.

Mike Maharrey 23:29
Yeah, absolutely. So you know, there’s a couple of things that you can that you can pull out of that. And the first thing is that it is such a twisted web of court decisions and I didn’t go to law school either, like working for the 10th amendment center for the last 10 years. I’ve spent a lot of time reading bills I’ve written some model language for legislation so I’m, I’m pretty fluent in legalese, probably like somebody who who is not a native speaker, but lived in another country for a few years. So, you know, I kind of get it. But you have to be a lawyer to really untangle the entire web of things. And, you know, I went through about five or six Supreme Court cases in my article, but he goes through a bunch more. And there’s even more than that. I mean, you, you get into appellate court cases, and it’s this huge, tangled web. And, to me, I think one of the things that it shows a weakness in the legal system as it has evolved over the last hundred years or so. And, you know, it’s kind of evolved along with the whole idea of statute law, that we have to interpret law in the way that some legislator somewhere has written it. So we have statutes now, as opposed to what we used to have, you know, prior to the founding of the United States where law was primarily what was known as common law. And I think a common law system is a much better system than this kind statutory and judicial precedent law that we have today, in a common law case, a judge and jury is going to look at every individual case. And they’re going to rule based on the situation that’s in front of them. And they’ll apply past rulings and past, you know, precedents and whatnot, but they’re not necessarily bound to it. It’s more of a common sense system if that if that’s a good word to use, where you look at it, and it’s it’s the reasonableness in the mind of the juror, as opposed to what we have today where everything has to defer to the court case, we have to defer to Well, this judge said X, Y and Z at this point. So we have to go with what this judge said and the jury doesn’t have any discretion. It’s it’s a horrible system that first off it’s impossible to really untangle it and understand it unless you’re an attorney and second off it pulls common sense out of the equation, it all comes down to how do you interpret these words that are written on paper somewhere? And so you end up in a situation where like you said, the the cop has to decide what is reasonable, because that’s what the precedent says in the in the legal system, and there’s no room for the jury to look at it and go, Wait a minute, maybe gunning down a kid with a toy gun isn’t reasonable, which obviously it’s not. And I think I got it.

Scott Horton 26:30
So that’s where, see I just had the two and the two, but I wouldn’t equal in four here. It’s this is why the clearly established doctrine is there is because otherwise, it’s left up to the cop to decide. And in that case, anything he decides is reasonable. And so the only exception then, would be if there’s a specific ruling that said that the exact same scenario was illegal, which is He said, we’ll never be established because it’s never been established. So it can’t be established.

Mike Maharrey 27:04
Exactly. So you end up with this this weird legal I got Whirlpool that you can never got out yet get out of it’s perfect. And and then the second thing that I think is important to understand about the US legal system is that judges and lawyers put so much weight on precedent, that once something is established in jurisprudence, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it no matter how awful and bad that it is. So this is a prime example of what we’re talking about with the Supreme Court rejecting hearing these other cases because they don’t want to have to go back and say that the court was wrong. They don’t like to undo things that are already done. So when you see an awful court ruling come down from the Supreme Court, you’re almost always stuck with it forever. They might try to finagle out of it someday using a different road. But they’ll never go back and say, Oh, we were About that just doesn’t happen, because precedent is almost set to the level of, you know, Holy Writ handed down on stone tablets from on high. And, again, it’s a horrible system because in a sane world, a court would go back and say, you know, that ruling back there in 1967 was stupid. And Ill, Ill thought, and we shouldn’t have this. So we’re going to overturn it almost never happens. They’re going to defer to the wisdom of the prior courts. And I’ll give you a perfect example. Dred Scott awful decision, effectively said that, that black people, even if they weren’t, even if they were free, black people couldn’t be citizens of the United States because they weren’t part of the compact. Dred Scott stood for ever until the 14th amendment came along and actually changed the Constitution. There was no court that ever overturned Dred Scott. They had to actually amend the constitution to ensure that black people actually had citizenship. Yeah, courts don’t like to own Return precedent. That’s why even today, you know, the Supreme Court has said that it’s perfectly constitutional to locked up Japanese Americans in an internment camp. Because we think they’re a quote unquote security threat or, you know, a threat to national defense or national security. That’s still in effect, there’s no turn that they’re not going to because they don’t like to admit that they made a mistake.

Scott Horton 29:22
Yeah. I’m so sorry that we’re out of time, because I could talk with you for the rest of the afternoon. But I sure appreciate you coming on to address this important subject with us here, Mike.

Mike Maharrey 29:32
Yeah, I appreciate having me. I hope people check out the article because it lays out the court cases, and you can kind of get a better you know, how this came about.

Scott Horton 29:40
I’ll be another minute late for my next guy. Um, it’s important to read because this came up earlier in the show about how this is really a matter of keeping your eye on the ball. And we have this huge cultural shift toward police reform right now what’s it going to look like? And there are a lot of takes Some of them pretty wild. Meanwhile, there are some very clear and narrow things that could be changed that would make a world of difference such as overturning qualified immunity, legalizing cocaine and heroin and methamphetamine and getting rid of, you know, a few other things that really are like flipping switches and changing everything. abolishing the 1033 program and the Department of Homeland Security melts, you know, some of these things. So that’s really the point of me doing this great interview with you who wrote this great article is to show that this is where the rubber really meets the road here. This is the license to kill. Is this a fight immunity?

Mike Maharrey 30:42
I’ll say something here that you’ll very rarely hear me say. But, uh, Matias bill needs to be supported because this is something that has to be done at the congressional level. Normally, I’ve tried to find state solutions. You can’t fix this at the state level because everything gets bounced to federal court. So you know, if you’re inclined To call your congressman which I never had been, this would be a good reason to do it because this needs to go through this needs to be passed.

Scott Horton 31:07
Okay, great. Thank you again so much. My appreciate it. Thank you, buddy, everybody. That is the great Mike meharry. He is at the 10th amendment center. That’s 10thamendmentcenter.com. This one is called how federal courts and gave us qualified immunity a great one. 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

Jacob Sullum 1:26
All right, how are you?

Scott Horton 1:27
I’m really good. appreciate you joining us here. So well, do like you do in the piece here. Take us through some of the statistics. Help us understand the landscape and then tell us what it all means you think.

Jacob Sullum 1:41
Okay. Well, I mean, there are very clear racial disparities in law enforcement. I think a lot of conservatives and republicans want to say that you have to look at crime rates. Perhaps you have to look at I don’t know how to say this without sounding racist. You have to look at how black people react when they have encounters with police versus how white and black. I’ve heard that as well. But I think that if you look at the data, these are not adequate explanations very clearly. And I’ll just give you a few examples. When people do have encounters with police, according to a national survey that’s sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Black people are much more likely about two and a half times as likely to report that the police officers use or threatened to use force. That’s hard to explain by reference to differential crime rates. When you look at drivers who are stopped by the police for routine traffic violations. One study after another all across the country has found that blacks Drivers are much more likely to be searched than white drivers. And when they’re search, the searches are much less likely or less likely, in any case, to turn up contraband. So that suggests that the amount of evidence that’s required to search black people is less than the amount of evidence that’s required to serve wipers. I don’t see any any good explanation of that other than racial bias either, you know, conscious bias bias or, or unconscious bias. It has to do with which drivers sample at least some police officers doesn’t have to be every police officer deemed suspicious, right? What makes you think this guy might be carrying drugs? And of course you have lots of anecdotal reports. This is less systematic but still very striking. If you talk to any black man in America, it’s likely that he has more than a few stories to tell about being pulled over by blue I’ll just give you a couple of examples that are striking because they come from sources. On the right. You’ve got Tim Scott, who’s the only republican senator who is black. And a few years ago, he gave a speech where he talked about his experience with police stops. And he said he’s been stopped seven times in a single year. Typically, for no clear reason, and he suspected it was because he was driving a nice car in the wrong neighborhood. He’s even been hassled by police on Capitol Hill, who challenged him, you know, asking what what was he doing there even though he has a pin that identifies him as a senator. Now, seven times I don’t know about your experience with cops and seven times in a single year. That’s a lot of traffic stops. You have a similar story from theater Johnson, who wrote a piece for National Review recently. Who said that between his 16th birthday when he retired from the military, which is a 20 year career in the military even stopped about 40 times by police. Now, in my entire life, I’ve been stopped fewer than 10 times I would say, certainly not more than 10 times. So that’s a lot of traffic stops. Now this is anecdotal, obviously. But but but the more people you talk to you more, the more you realize how common experiences. So that doesn’t mean every cop is a bigot. It doesn’t mean that American society is systematically racist. But it does mean that there is a problem here that goes beyond just a few bad apples, which is how the president puts it. It’s not just a matter of a few bad cops who are prone to abuse, but it looks like a substantial portion are driven by bias and some of the decisions they make. There’s also this issue of race neutral policies or policies that have nothing to do with race, but have striking disproportionate impacts on black people. So one example is enforcement of marijuana laws where black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as white people, even though they’re only slightly more likely to be marijuana users. Now, does that mean that they’re being systematically targeted because they’re black people probably not probably has to do with where police are putting the resources. If they’re focusing on high crime, low income neighborhoods, then you’re going to expect a disproportionate number of black people to be arrested for marijuana possession just on that basis. That might also be the case that people with smaller homes are more likely to smoke pot outside in which case they’re more likely to be caught by the police. Right? But that sort of thing is very troubling, I think, even if you don’t believe that it is actually motivated by racial bias. Now, I mean, marijuana prohibition in historically was very clearly motivated by racial bias, but we don’t have to believe that Police nowadays continue to act based on that bias. to note the fact that you have these great troubling disparities.

Scott Horton 7:07
So I think a lot of this goes to the definition of systemic and what exactly it all means here it sort of Well, I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It seems like one definition could be that if I Dream of Jeannie made every cop black, that the issues would still exist, because they’re built into the system itself rather than even necessarily the attitudes. Have any particular cops, although, obviously that does come into play.

Jacob Sullum 9:04
Yeah, I guess I’m leery of that term systemic racism. Okay. It’s not clear what it means it’s ambiguous. I think it is definitely true that we have a bunch of policies that lead to these outcomes. Those policies are not necessarily motivated by racial bias at all. But just to give you a few examples, police have vast discretion to stop drivers. The Supreme Court has said anytime a police officer thinks someone has committed a traffic offense, no matter how trivial, they have the authority to pull somebody over, even if their motivation is to investigate other matters. Right. So if I think this guy seems suspicious, I think he might be carrying drugs or maybe some seasonable cash. I just noticed that there’s something tail light or he didn’t properly signal a lane change or whatever, you know, basically complete Police can stop you at will, given how many different rules there are about maintenance and operation of cars. So that so the Supreme Court has said they can do that, even if their real intent is to see maybe this guy is carrying drugs or maybe he has some cash vacancies. So, if you create a situation like that, then even if not that many cops are racially biased, whatever cops are racially bias haven’t now have an opportunity to exercise that bias. And what that means is that black people are going to be searched more often on average, and they may may be victimized more often by not just please going through the cars but perhaps seizing whatever cash they have on hand because larger amounts of cash and considered inherently suspicious. And once the cash is seized, you know this has to do with civil asset forfeiture. Once the point for cash is seized a police it’s very complicated and expensive to try to get it. back. So especially if it’s a relatively modest amount of money, people are inclined to just give up, especially if they don’t have other savings that they can use to pay lawyers fees. Right. So that’s a real problem. And that’s not to say, oh, when they created civil civil asset forfeiture, they really wanted to stick it to black people. I don’t think that’s true. But it’s just a consequence of that policy. And you have similar issues when it comes to pedestrian stops. And the Supreme Court has said, police can stop a pedestrian if they have reasonable suspicion that he that he’s engaged in criminal activity, and then they can pack down that person if they if they have reasonable suspicion that he is armed, you know, to protect themselves. So those are the rules, but those rules are routinely flouted in stop and frisk programs across the country, especially if you look at New York City. You see that in nine out of 10 cases, people are being stopped, supposedly based on reasonable suspicion. There’s no arrest. There’s no citation. Even more striking when the people are searched extensively for weapons, right? They first of all, almost never find guns. And that’s that was the main justification for Neeraj Bergen was to get guns off the street, and then they rarely find any other kind of weapons. So that tells you that police very often are making stops and doing pat downs that are not consistent with the Fourth Amendment as the Supreme Court has interpreted it. That’s a very broad problem. And it is not a racial problem, per se, but it has racially disproportionate consequences.

Scott Horton 12:33
Right. You know, I’m thinking of, it’s a common touchstone for these sorts of issues is the TV show the wire, where the cops, one of the lessons from there is the cops refer to all these people who live in the government projects. They’re all shit birds, and everybody else is a taxpayer, where taxpayer is a human being actually worthy of, you know, possibly protection. You know, if they don’t get there had been in but everybody else who’s not a taxpayer they’re, you know, essentially dehumanized and and treated so much worse. And it’s obviously as you’re saying here, it’s not directly related to race, but boy, is it indirectly related to race, right? And that and then the only thing that counts only thing that can protect you is juice. That’s what they call it. If you know somebody who knows somebody with a little political power, and to me, I always thought that this was the most obvious thing that if cops go picking on a random white guy, there’s like a one in 20 chance that his uncle’s a judge or something like that, and it might cost them their ass, but if they go picking on a random black guy, there’s much less chance that he knows somebody who knows somebody or is going to have a lawyer who golf’s with the judge or is going to be able to get out of it in a way or or even. You know, it makes it much less likely that’s gonna blow Back on them, they’re actually gonna get in trouble for enforcing an unjust login somebody like could happen if they go to the nice side of town.

Jacob Sullum 14:08
Yeah, I mean, look, it’s impossible to imagine something like stop and frisk happening in a white affluent neighborhood. Now the police will say we’re going where the crime is right. And that tends to be a poor poorer neighborhoods, which tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic. And that’s why we that’s why you see these numbers. It’s not because we’re racist, which is fair enough. But the reality of it is that that middle class white people do not have to be worried about being hassled by police for no good reason. Whereas black people do, so that he can say, Well, our motives are pure, which may be true, but the result is not equal treatment under law. for sure.

Scott Horton 14:51
Yeah, and the important point here, I think, well, there’s a lot of different ones, but one of them is that you know what, even if this is not all directly about Race. It sure is understandable why it sure does seem like it to black people. When when did it stop being about race, it was always about race going back all into history. And so now it maybe, obviously is less worse than it was. But it’s not like they were ever free and everything was fine. And now, things are slipping back for some different reason. You know, certainly from their point of view, it makes sense. Also, I think that they would imagine that the average white guy has any kind of political power, certainly, they would probably assume that we would have more power than they do. And so they feel like forsaken that it’s not just the cops. It’s the 65% white population of the country, because they’re not going through it. Don’t give a damn what happens to them if they’re stopped and frisked and thrown up against the wall or their son. You know, and so no wonder they are so upset. I would be too.

Jacob Sullum 16:07
And and if you look at the history of the war on drugs, it was explicitly racist when it started out openly and explicitly racist in terms of which drugs were targeted. They were the drugs used, not our drugs, the drugs, the those people use, right. So Mexicans, blacks, Chinese immigrants, those were the drugs that were targeted. Does that doesn’t mean that that sincere drug warriors nowadays are racist, but you still see these racially disproportionate impacts. And what one really telling example, I think, is the legal distinction under federal law between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine where even today I mean this the disparity has been reduced, but it still exists. crack cocaine offenses are punished more severely powder cocaine defenses. Now that distinction was supported at the time was established by black politicians. They said, you know, the crack is devastating our neighbors, we need to do something about this. So they supported these heavy penalties. But it turned out what that meant is that federal crack defendants who were overwhelmingly black, we’re getting more severe sentences than powder cocaine offenders who are much more likely to be white or Hispanic. First, actually the same crime. In other words involving the same amount of the active ingredient, right? Same drug, just different forms of it.

Scott Horton 17:37
I’m sorry, we were so out of time here. I’m over. I gotta go. I just got to add to and I know, you know, to the SWAT rates. I mean, imagine the trauma of having a Delta Force type, you know, paramilitary night rate at 4am. How your children would feel if that happened at your house, and it does happen on the poor and the darker side of town in a way That local news doesn’t cover most of the time and even when they don’t shoot somebody kid or dog still going through that is just it’s far more than than this society should tolerate anyone having to put up with it’s just crazy but I’m sorry I gotta go but thank you so much and I’m so sorry I didn’t get to all these other great things that you wrote that I wanted to ask you about but everybody go read Jacobs solemn at reason. calm. Thank you again.

Jacob Sullum 18:25
You’re Welcome.

Scott Horton 18:28
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

Jeff Abramson 0:54
Going? Well, thanks for having me on.

Scott Horton 0:56
Great. Really happy to have you here. And typically We’re not talking about banning small arms in, you know, Second Amendment stuff. We’re talking about International Military arms transfers here. And in fact, unlike usual, we’re not basing this interview off a specific article that you’ve written so much as a question that came up in the Reddit room, which was, hey, Scott, could you get a good expert on to explain really the nuts and bolts so I can imagine how it works about how these massive military arms transfers are arranged. It’s clearly nothing free market about it. It’s all state licenses and different agencies and politics and congressional leaders involved and who knows what kind of lobbying and favoritism and all kinds of mechanics. So, hey, Scott, find somebody who can really teach us the mechanics. And so I asked bill Hartung because he’s about the best on this stuff. And he says, You should talk Dr. Jeff Abramson. So that’s why I’m talking to you. What if, say I was a Raytheon salesman, and I was trying to help commit genocide in Yemen for the bucks? How would I go about doing that?

Jeff Abramson 2:18
That’s an interesting way to frame it. But yeah, thanks for bringing me on. The US does have a really complicated system on how it sells weapons. And it’s true that there are all sorts of actors, including the government, including companies. And I’m happy to sort of piece that through. There’s lots of bits to it. So I’m not quite sure where to start. But this administration in particular, definitely is involved. They want to be and have talked about selling arms as a core part of their arms policy for the economy. other presidents have also talked about the economic benefits to nowhere in the same way that Trump has. So you will see him talking about how great it is to see weapons to Saudi Arabia anyway, and he meets with the prince he shakes hands and holds up big posters of weapons were selling. So the United States government is definitely involved. That’s one piece. But let me let me ask you how you want to go through and I can talk about the different players in whatever order makes the most sense.

Scott Horton 3:17
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I was just kind of picking the Raytheon point of view at random but it could be you know, if I was a Saudi Prince wanting to commit genocide, or if I was a senator trying to make a couple of thousand bucks and so I was committing genocide or whichever, you know, to you is the most interesting way of approaching it, I guess is fine with me. I you have an open floor, I guess, you know, right. Yeah. You know, what would if I would if I was a senator, and I had a lobbyists, lawyer, pay me $2,000 so now I’m pro genocide has been Freeman has shown that’s exactly how it works. And so now I want to make sure that Raytheon can sell as many weapons as possible. To the Saudis and the UAE, to use against the civilian population of Yemen, what all is required? What do I need to do to make sure that this works so I can have my $2,000?

Jeff Abramson 4:12
Yeah, hopefully you’re not committing to genocide for $2,000. But if you’re if you explicitly say you want to commit genocide there, I hope enough safeguards in place that we would stop you, but certainly weapons and ended up doing that. So it is a big concern. At the large level, the United States government has to approve arms sales. Congress has a role in this. So if you’re a senator, especially if you’re a senator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is the committee in charge of arm sales, you can help grease the wheels. You can have the conversations with the State Department, and the government and other governments to try to make the pieces work and come together. It’s not that hard to do, I suppose but it’s also a lot of procedure and it takes a lot of time, but those senators on that committee and on the house, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, by law are supposed to be consulted in arms trade, and some of them will actively promote the arms trade. So having a congressional outreach strategy is a good one. You also need to have insights within the Defense Department in the State Department. They’re the ones that end up helping with negotiations, or at least approving negotiations, depending on how you do it. And that’s when you start getting into the really confusing mix of different programs and ways the United States sells weapons. Sometimes the United States government actually makes a deal with another country. They may say, I will sell you these weapons, and that’s a foreign military sale. That’s kind of what we do with Saudi Arabia and a lot of countries they come to the United States government itself and say we want to do this. Sometimes the deals are made in more of a commercial transaction, which we call direct commercial sales, where the companies and the foreign government might work out the deal, and then they’ll bring it to the United States government floor. approval. But generally the United States government is involved in all those along the way too. So there’s lots of players, but if you know who the right players are, that are making the decisions, you can make things go.

Scott Horton 6:11
And then so essentially, even though these are sort of pseudo private companies that these are all licensed deals, essentially the government is involved. The State Department especially is involved in deciding what all is allowed to go or what I guess do D too.

Jeff Abramson 6:29
Correct. Yeah, I mean, it’s technically it’s an interagency process, which might involve the Defense Department Defense Department is heavily involved, especially on these foreign military. So they will say, hey, you want to buy this, but we think maybe you should have this equipment better, would be better suited for your needs. Sometimes countries care what the Defense Department thinks you might actually need, and sometimes they just want to get prising equipment. But officially the State Department notifies the Congress. Now obviously by the time the State Department does It’s been bought off by the it’s been agreed to by the administration so that the Commerce Department often as well. And then the Congress can block it rarely rarely blocks in arms sales. So that’s why you don’t often see a lot of controversy. But I’m happy to talk about those moments where there are controversy because the process is getting a bit murky here, and I’m very concerned about it. But yes, these are all these major arm sales are approved by the US government and they have to not be blocked by the Congress before actually those deals can be agreed to the Department of Commerce or the Department of State will present to Congress. This is what we want to do. Generally, Congress last 30 days to block it. They generally don’t. And then you can see an agreement made but often it’s then years later before those weapons go out the door.

Scott Horton 7:50
Well now, so I’m not sure this specific session, I guess I really should read the law. I hear references to it all the time, the Leahy law, but I know there are others that are a lot like it that say If a country is involved in committing human rights abuses, I don’t know if this is just domestically or in international conflict, that the Americans are supposedly forbidden from by the law from dealing with them either given them military troops to use, you know, deploying Special Forces in support of them or anything like that, or selling them weapons or anything else. But I don’t know the specifics of that. How’s that work?

Jeff Abramson 8:29
Yeah, let me give you a big picture piece of that. It’s certainly true. The Foreign Assistance Act in 1961 is really where they started. And then the arms Export Control Act in the 70s. Put a lot of this in place with the provisions that if we’re selling weapons, they should be used for legitimate self defense purposes. They shouldn’t be used for human rights abuses. And in theory, if we actually applied our laws to arm sales, a lot of them wouldn’t move forward. The American Bar Association has looked at a lot of deals, especially those to Saudi Arabia. Given a conflict in Yemen, I would say these just don’t seem to pass muster. But Congress has kind of punted in a lot of cases. And those deals even though our laws are good, are going through the Leahy law in the one you mentioned, there is probably the best known one it’s not as involved is his people think it lady laws, it’s currently being implemented generally has to do with training of forces. So forces that have been known to commit abuses are not supposed to get training. The Leahy law could be applied more broadly, but generally hasn’t been but that is one of the strongest laws we have and has has made a difference. But when we’re talking about these big sales, and delay, the law may not always be taken into account. But the larger laws that do exist are but you will see, and this is probably a controversy. I know you’ve talked with others about in the past last year, the President said, Hey, I need to get weapons to the Saudis and the Emiratis. And it’s an emergency to get him there. And he he asked for when we use this sort of emergency provision, which really wasn’t meant to be used the way he did. And that’s what’s been in the news lately with the linic. Firing who was investigating the sale last year of whether this emergency was for real. So there are ways that the President gets around it. And we saw in our Congress the first time we’re not the first time but an important effort to block and the president actually had to veto Congress’s effort to say, No, you can’t do this. And that, you know, had some Republicans on it as well. So this issue is getting a ton of attention. And it’s confusing also to people in Congress, not just the American public.

Scott Horton 10:31
Right. And now, so, about that, that recent story that’s, you know, a good hook for you know, the overall picture here where Congress had said we want to block some arms sales, they won’t defund the whole thing or, or pass the correct kind of War Powers Resolution, that would be veto proof. Not by numbers, but just by forum. But they do things like say, okay, no, but we want to, you know, block the next Have bomb shipments at least. And then pompeyo says the Secretary of State says, well, we’re gonna check the box that says it’s an emergency so we can do it anyway. And then he was under investigation by the Inspector General. And it seemed like there was a limited hang out there where they talked about walking the dog and baking the cookies and whatever this kind of thing when what was really going on was he was possibly going to be in trouble for as well. I don’t want to misquote you, but you just put it something about, Miss applying the rules there in order to invoke that emergency and send the weapons anyway. Can you be more specific there about? I mean, do you agree with that, that he, you know, twist to the letter of the law to get away with what he did there?

Jeff Abramson 11:48
No, I it certainly seems possible. You know, I’ve tried to pay a little bit of attention to linic testified and he was really careful. Although if you look at it, it does seem that pressure was applied on him early on not to investigate this wasn’t directly by pompeyo, but looks like by others. But certainly the scandal that has arisen about this has shown sort of the murky side of the arms trade, and whether or not compelled did it? I just I can’t tell. It certainly is not impossible for high ranking officials within the government to make things happen, even though they shouldn’t. And that’s I think one of the questions.

Scott Horton 12:28
It seems like it’s up to him to say what’s an emergency or not right, as long as the President agrees with him is right?

Jeff Abramson 12:37
I think the President is the one who’s making the decision and his his secretaries are following his lead. I think they’ve all learned that if you don’t do that pretty quickly, you’re out of the job. I don’t know if I blame them fail as much as I would say this is probably the president.

Scott Horton 12:53
Well, I mean, certainly pumping out supports the policy. So you know, same difference, but yeah, Donald Trump, of course, you know, it should never go without saying even though it should go without saying we should also be mentioned every time. But Donald Trump could stop this war right now with a spoken word, he wouldn’t even have to pick up a pen. He could just tell the chief of staff to tell the secretary defense to turn it off. And that’s it and it’d be over. Nevermind the arm sales, but the overall war itself in Yemen, as it’s continuing now. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of responsibility there. And that ain’t my Mike Pompeo is not in charge of the Pentagon. And it’s Donald Trump. That is

Jeff Abramson 13:34
I’m not gonna disagree with you. I think the United States could pick could certainly be doing a lot more to stop this or instead of fueling, which is what I see them doing right now.

Scott Horton 14:15
[ADS]

So now, it must have been funny to be sitting over at the Arms Control Association and see the democrats impeach a republican president for holding up an arms deal that they wanted weapons to go to the Nazi infested national security forces of the Government of Ukraine. So I wonder where it came down on that one.

Jeff Abramson 15:52
I don’t want to comment too much on the Ukrainian forces, the law you have. What was really interesting is that many of the vetoes And many of the attention that have happened in this Trump administration had to deal with war and arms sales. We have attention on this issue like you’ve never seen, it was certainly amazing that there have been changes of opinion on whether it made sense to arm the Ukrainians. But once that sort of general opinion was out there, the way that Trump misused his authority, leading to an impeachment was was just an amazing show of how he is acting in ways that are not in the norm for what we expect the President to do. He is using power, however, that is not supposed to be used in that way to try and change behavior. And it’s really, I think, unacceptable. So I think it was good that that impeachment process went through, and it was good. We have attention on it. I think most of the attention wasn’t really on the weapon so much as on the process, but I think it wouldn’t be better if we were also paying much more attention to the weapons themselves.

Scott Horton 16:57
It seems like they should have impeached him for sending money weapons to Ukraine.

Jeff Abramson 17:04
I think there’s pretty Yeah, I don’t want to get too much into all the possible reasons for impeachment. I think there’s lots of them.

Scott Horton 17:11
Yeah, like arming Ukraine. But anyway, and the humanities, whatever. But, of course, we understand how it works. It’s not the secret bombing of Cambodia. It’s the burglary at the headquarters of the opposite political party that gets you in trouble. You know, we know how it goes. But same thing here. Okay, so now what about like Taiwan? And there’s one where it’s so politicized and they can afford it? I guess that, you know, we send them all kinds of F 16. And I have no idea what all America has armed them with. I know. You know, f 16 fighter bombers are no joke. As far as naval resources and defensive missiles or whatever, I have no idea. But that is also something that is almost completely decided at the National Security Council in consultation with the different arms companies. But I wonder, you know, how often does it seem like the arms manufacturers are really driving the car there and telling the NSC? Okay, look, we’ve got these weapons we need to sell. What customers do you have for us?

Jeff Abramson 18:27
Yeah, that’s a it’s a great question. And some of that does occur. But I think it’s also you need to have if you’re a seller, let’s say you need to have a government president and a government in place that is amenable to your approach, which I think this president passed. So it’s, it’s a bit harder if you have someone who is in charge who is hesitant or reticent to provide arms this President Trump is not, I mean, he is certainly pivoting towards providing more weapons into the region. You know, he has in his defense department has sort of redefined our security concerns as having a great deal to do with China. And so the army and of Taiwan is certainly consistent with the trumpian approach to the world. past presidents have done it as well, I think they’ve been much more careful about doing so. But I think you can look to arms to Taiwan and other activities that are happening around Asia, to see that this President certainly has a desire to see a military option available, or at least a buildup of capabilities in the region. And, you know, the relationship between the US and China is one that also deals with trade, and it’s a big it’s a big issue. But we have defined China as a threat in a way that wasn’t defined previously, in the last few years, and so does sign up weapons. Taiwan is not a surprise the Chinese is pushed back Immediately, which is also the dynamic mean that this has been going on for quite some time.

Scott Horton 20:05
Well, in fact, on the question of China policy, does it seem like the shipbuilders really have a lot to do with lobbying for more hawkish policy here? I mean, that’s a lot of money for naval capacity.

Jeff Abramson 20:19
Yeah, I, I’m just going to be careful, because I don’t follow the ship industry that closely. So I don’t know exactly what they’re doing. But in general, if you are a weapons provider and a builder, you are in the business of helping to convince the government that your services are needed. So I don’t –

Scott Horton 20:36
that is very polite of you.

Jeff Abramson 20:38
Yes. The best way to put it but I don’t follow quite shipbuilding. And you say, you know, I try to be careful, like, a lot of the people in the defense industry get painted is is evil incarnate. And a lot of what I think happens is not good and it should be stopped. But generally that those people will have a different point of view and they think that what they’re selling isn’t enough. commodity toward safety and we can just disagree about how that works. But it’s got to be we got to be careful because if we demonize which we are doing more and more on all sides, we stopped being able to communicate and move forward.

Scott Horton 21:14
Sure. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Of course, most evil especially in government, bureaucracy and related industries is perfectly bagel, right? It’s not nefarious, you know, secret plotting in the dark, as much as as you just said, perfectly rationalized professional behavior. Hey, Senator, we’ve got some great new hydrogen bombs to sell you here. And then, of course, it’s for defense. No, no, whatever. You’re still making money selling h bombs. That’s just how it goes. In fact, I know a guy used to make h bombs during the Cold War days. He was the former chief scientist of the army and worked at the laboratories and stuff and I asked him, man, how could you make a change? bombs. And he wouldn’t h bomb salesman he actually made them. And he says, Well, I mean, we believe we were keeping the Soviets out of the fulda gap. You know, we’re protecting Western Europe from being conquered by the reds. Now, maybe it’s different, but then perfectly easy to rationalize no question about it, even though you’re talking about building city killers, things that go off in the 10s of megatons

Jeff Abramson 22:23
that somehow there’s certainly good. Someone from the Irish Association, such as I am is anti h box, right. And we’re not billions of selfies now at this time. I certainly hope although we have some concerns about where Trump’s going with nuclear testing as well. Yeah, but this is the this is the common defense or the common statement that the defense industry will sell will say is that anything we sell has been approved by the United States government. So the onus then becomes on changing the mind or the practice of the government, it’s easy to paint and see a lot of the defense industry as pushing for this which I believe they do, but the buck needs to stop at the government policy level and policies that are making this world less safe are really the problem here.

Scott Horton 23:10
Right? And that’s really kind of the fun of it right is the paradox of the diffusion of responsibility all the way around to where the senators are saying, Well, I don’t know, all the experts are telling me that this is what we have to do. And it just goes around in a circle and all of that, but I was just, you know, essentially trying to agree with you that these are not demons at all. These are human men doing jobs, is what they are. And they will even build h bombs if that’s their job. And so yeah, you’re right. It’s up to people like you, and the broader civil society to say that we actually do not have a demand for H bombs, we don’t want them and you can stick your very best salesman on us and it’s not gonna do you any good. But that takes a real consensus against the status quo, which we just don’t have.

Jeff Abramson 23:56
Yeah, it’s interesting, and I want to sort of pick up a little bit on what you Sit in there for your audience might be interesting as well. And that, you know, I, I professionally keep track of the arms trade, right? I’m not the H bomb, there’s not a trading nuclear weapons, but there’s a trading conventional weapon. And we as the public you know I’m part of the public I don’t have security clearance I’m losing transparency what we do it’s a real it’s it’s absolutely true that the public needs to have the capability to pay attention to this and actually public opinion polling shows that a majority of Americans across parties, don’t believe arm sales making it safer, you know, even a larger majority. I think nuclear weapons are crazy. So, you know, it takes a while sometimes it’s a change of politicians. But the way the policies are developing over time right now is we’re losing, losing transparency in terms of what weapons we’re selling. We are trying to convince the Congress to maybe flip the script on how we do this instead of Congress having to lock arms sale them to actually have to approve themselves because there’s a lot more transparency with Congress does sometimes. And then what’s happening in the administration, the reporting on what we are selling is getting worse, can jump into that if that’s helpful. But this issue areas, one where the public does need to pay attention, I think that they get it I think they get when they see images of people in children killed in Yemen with American bombs, that they don’t want to see that kind of behavior happen. They don’t want our weapons going out the door that way, or they don’t want our weapons being used against us, which also happens when we’re not careful. So I think there’s a lot there a lot of awareness that could grow and there’s already some that exists, and we just need to make it a little stronger.

Scott Horton 25:40
And I see you have this recent article about landmine policy and some lawmakers getting good on it and trying to force the issue with the Secretary of Defense can tell us about that.

Jeff Abramson 25:50
Yeah, certainly. So this is another crazy step by this Trump administration to reverse the policy of the past initiation because at least moving us closer to never using landlines again The Trump administration says, well, actually might need to use these, let’s open up to use them around the world. And let’s instead of making the president in charge of the decision, let’s let the combatant commanders do it. And he’s really sort of couching This is a great power competition. And the idea that somehow we need to use these weapons which essentially kill civilians, you put them down on the ground, or you toss them down artillery, and they can’t tell a soldier from a civilian and people getting killed or kids a lot of the time. United States when to use these weapons just is insane. And that’s what the Trump administration is kind of moving in the wrong direction on for years, there’s been a, you know, I’d say a bipartisan consensus that there needs to be a lot more tear around using these weapons. So there’s a lot of questions that have just gone in. We haven’t gotten answers from the Defense Department on this. But 162 countries around the world have agreed never to use these including all of our NATO allies, to the fact the United States wants to go the wrong way on this is just really alarming and another sign of this president not wanting to be a part of the global consensus but wanting to go his own way.

Scott Horton 27:09
Yeah. You know, I don’t know, I think to the broader American culture has got to have a reckoning with land mines. And, you know, for that matter, the cluster bomb units, the old bomb beezus they call them that are left everywhere that kill innocent civilians. We still have hundreds I think it’s what 600 something, Cambodians a year continue to die from the cluster bomb units. After 50 years. Since Nixon, the Iraq war there is just incredible.

Jeff Abramson 27:41
Yeah, that legacy and allow and the countries around there have continued depths after the 60s and the 70s when these were deployed is atrocious. We’re seeing some improvements. It’s it’s easy to be pessimistic, like the problem ever be solved. But I do think it can be over time. But that legacy, I think a lot of Americans do understand that, wow, I can’t believe 50 years later, the weapons we’re using, so killing kids, it’s, it is alarming. And I think most Americans, if they think about it wouldn’t want our country using these weapons. And for the most part, we don’t, but we refuse to say we won’t. And we refuse to sort of be with a global consensus that says against them.

Scott Horton 28:25
You know, one of the coolest things I’ve seen in recent years was a project that was, you know, relatively inexpensive, to have drones that have metal detectors on them go flying around out in the jungle, searching for cluster bomb units and land mines, and then they drop tiny little shaped charges on top and fly away and then detonate them. And they’re just going around and they’re, you know, extremely cost and time efficient. That’s the kind of thing where, if you don’t real money into a project like that you could actually solve the problem and a place or You know, make major headway in a place like Laos or Cambodia or Afghanistan, or Iraq. I don’t know how many land mines are in Iraq, but certainly in Afghanistan, there’s cluster bomb units laying around.

Jeff Abramson 29:11
You have a omnivorous reading list I think that’s it. People know about these, these programs? Yeah, there’s tons of different ways of trying to figure it out. One thing that’s really difficult about mind clearance and cluster mission clearance, is you got to get it right. So there is a lot of promise in some of these drone systems, but you got to really know that it works. So the people who do this stuff are pretty careful. And if you think about it, if you were living next to a minefield, you would never go over there until you were sure it was clear. So you don’t want to make even one mistake. But there’s promising stuff happening in drone technology. There’s all sorts of ways to look at this. And you know, you you probably know and it’s really kind of amazing. The United States is by far the world’s largest funder of these types. efforts and clearances, old weapons that are in the ground or just in stockpiles by far the biggest funder, and then to suddenly come around and say but we want to make it easier to use these weapons it causes problems is really nonsensical. But yeah,

Scott Horton 30:14
it actually makes perfect sense. very horrible in cynical way as a as a continuing racket but yeah, on the face of it it is completely crazy. Um, let me ask you this I’m sure the answer must be yes, it you’re good on all these new treaties with Russia that are expiring right now. Can I ask you about them?

Jeff Abramson 30:32
And they’re not not my specialty, but I’ll see what I can do. Sure.

Scott Horton 30:37
It seems like it matters a lot that Bush Jr. pulled us out of the anti Ballistic Missile Treaty and now Trump is letting three expire the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, the open skies treaty and start to correct.

Jeff Abramson 30:52
New START. We’re hoping Yeah, we’re hoping something can happen on New START before the end of his term. But yeah, he’s backing away from a whole range of sensible arms control agreements, which, you know, threaten new arms races, which makes no sense. And so yes, you’re you hit the nail on it right there that all these agreements that give us transparency into what’s happening and help limit what other countries do. He wants to walk away from for no really good reason. They can all be worked out. And there’s more. I mean, we’re hearing rumors about windy changes on something called the Missile Technology Control Regime to make it easier to sell armed drones which could lead to litigation and those weapons around the world as well. And the the idea of a US going alone approach really starts to fall apart when you realize other people need to agree to process moving forward. Yeah. Now, the new spark the New START one is, you know, just super crazy.

Scott Horton 31:57
Yeah, talk about that. I mean, what’s in the New START treaty. I mean, they Really watered it down to get it passed back in the Obama years I know, or at least they had to make major compromises on building up certain aspects of the industry as a trade off to get it through. But what is it saying? What’s it about to not say anymore?

Jeff Abramson 32:15
Yeah, I’m gonna be a bit careful here on this because my colleagues are much more expert on this. But there were some compromises in any negotiation. But essentially, the New START treaty puts limits on us and Russian weapons, nuclear weapons systems and culture reduction in terms of the numbers that were pre existing. And pretty much we’re reducing, when the treaty expires will no longer be an inspection regime, they’ll no longer be agreements to limitations on how many nuclear weapons you could have, which is nuts. And that’s sort of the basic core of it, and it doesn’t take much to extend it. They just have to say we’re going to extend it for another five years. But the Trump administration has not said that he’s going to do that or he’s trying to convince China to come on board as part of this process, which is not the right way to go about this. But that’s that’s the core of it is we remove the agreement on limits and the transparency we have in looking at what countries what the Russians have.

Scott Horton 33:15
Alright, well, thanks very much for your time. I really appreciate it, Jeff.

Jeff Abramson 33:19
Sure. Good luck, Scott. Thanks for bringing me on this conversation.

Scott Horton 33:23
Aren’t you guys? That is Jeff Abramson. He is Senior Fellow for conventional arms control and transfers at the Arms Control Association. And that is arms control.org. 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

Patrick Cockburn 1:08
I’m great. Thank you.

Scott Horton 1:10
Great to have you back on the show here and great to see you sticking up for Julian Assange again, you know, I think, Well, a lot of his most important work really came out took place a decade ago. And there are a lot of people who may not really be familiar with the saga of Julian Assange, maybe they only know him as being accused of rigging the election for Trump or this kind of thing. But he is in a lot of trouble. And according to your article, he should not be so I was, you know, hoping, or Well, I was looking forward to this opportunity give you a chance to explain to the people who is Julian Assange. Why is Wikileaks so important and why is his prosecution so important, sir.

Patrick Cockburn 1:59
I think You know from us to start with trying to sum it up in a few phrases is that what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did in 2010 was really just that a weaponized freedom of expression. They had I’ll go into this a little more detail in a moment. But they were given or got access to a great trove of American documents. the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Logs, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. And they gave them to the press. They were in the in the New York Times and The Guardian, the Mondale pace, you name it. And this was very revealing about American, the American government and the way it operated. I should say this came from a thing well, you know, the way it was set At the time, but names of us agents were revealed by this. Now the Pentagon afterwards spent three years and 128 counter intelligence officers trying to find somebody who was named and all the oceans of facts revealed by WikiLeaks who’d subsequently been killed by Al Qaeda and Taliban or somebody. They couldn’t find a single person. And they admitted this at the sentencing hearings of chelsea manning the but the private who’d given this information to WikiLeaks in 2013. You know, so that accusation should have sort of disappeared hasn’t disappeared, but it’s still there as one of the reasons the main reason I tried to get him extradited from the UK but you know, that should have been that accusation should have been buried dead and buried a long time. I think that was really important that this really showed you the inside of the government. And governments really don’t like that. It affects their party legitimacy. It affects their credibility. That’s why they spent 10 years pursuing a source. And, you know, people talk about Daniel Ellsberg and make films about him as the patron saint of whistleblower whistleblowing. He gave the pentagon papers to the media in 1971. You know, and is locked up as almost a saint but by many people, but Julian Assange is currently in Belmarsh prison. In a maximum security prison in Britain. The party can’t even get a radio sent to him 23 and a half hours a day in his cell. You know, this is very bad stuff. And they’re seeking to extradite him to the US under the explanation act of 1917. passed at the height of War fever in the First World War. And he could spend 175 years in prison because of this. So I think this is the most important sort of case about freedom of the press that I’ve seen in my lifetime as a journalist. And I’ve also think it’s one of the, the most ill reported, you know, rumors are reported as fact, people think that source was accused, you know, was charged by the Swedes with with rape, you know, that, you know, once you have a rape suspect attached to somebody’s name, they become a sort of pariah. The newspapers, including all the enormous newspapers, powerful newspapers, who which originally published soldiers and WikiLeaks revelations, or distance themselves from him. I think because they got nervous, you know, they didn’t I saw the government’s were coming after him. And they didn’t want to be there. They did sight sort of minor things they didn’t get on with him. They didn’t like his character or something. But these are really trivial excuses that nobody should pay much attention to. But I think what they should pay attention to, is that this is a tremendous challenge for freedom of the press, freedom of expression. And because of this sort of multiple charges that have been hurled at a soldier, that hasn’t been enough resistance or discussion to what the government is seeking to do in this case.

Scott Horton 6:36
Alright, so, you know, a lot of important points there. But on that last one, I think is really the most important is the possibility of the precedent set if he is extradited to the US and convicted under the Espionage Act. You know, it’s commonly said that we don’t have an Official Secrets Act here in America. Like you guys do over in the UK. But that’s not really true we do to it is the Espionage Act. And it’s very broad. And as written, it would include anyone who disseminates classified information, not just a source in the government, who links it to a reporter, but a reporter and his editor too. And yet, they just don’t have a history of prosecuting that we have a tradition of not going after journalists for that, but they could. And of course, it wouldn’t apply to David Sanger and Michael Gordon and all of their favorite pets. It would apply to good reporters doing important work and exposing real scandals. And you could see not just Assange, but a lot of other great reporters start going to federal prison after him if he is convicted of this.

Patrick Cockburn 7:53
Yeah, and then intimidate a lot of people. I mean, what’s important about this and is that You know, the US, you know, lots of other people have been down this road. You know, Turkey used to have a wonderful Free Press. Loads of, you know, newspapers and magazines and television and radio stations. It doesn’t anymore. You know, the government has criminalized dissent. It has put people in jail, who produced reports on things the Turkish government had done, which are completely true and refutable. But the Turkish Government just didn’t like this stuff appearing and accuse them of terrorism and put them in jail for the same thing or didn’t even charge them a toll just put them in jail. You know, worse than the, the tide against free freedom of the press is happening all over the world. But if it’s sort of if this happens in the US, this gives an extra an extra charge to two states that want to do that, you know, Philippines, the main television station there has been taken off the air by the by the government there, the India, freedom of the press increasingly under attack that’s happening all over. But this is the most, the most important place it’s happening is the US was freedom of expression. The press was greatest there. And this is a signal to all these other sort of pop up dictatorships all over the world. Yep.

Scott Horton 9:35
And ain’t that the truth to that there really are very few other societies in the world that have such an iron law as our First Amendment with as much protections as we’ve had, and Lord knows without it, our government would run roughshod over our right of, you know, free speech and freedom of the press and everything to the nth degree if they could, and that’s, you know, the wall in their way and this Looks like a great loophole through that wall. And as you said, and this is the most infuriating part of it, right, is the way that Julian Assange has been forsaken by the entire rest of the media, even though their skin is on the line to, they’re willing to say, you know, go ahead, feed him to the lions and leave me alone, which is never gonna work. And they cry all day, the way Trump insults them and call some fake news and D legitimizes them. But then when it comes to a real concrete threat to their right to continue doing their job, they’re all a wall.

Patrick Cockburn 10:35
Yeah, I think that that’s, you know, it’s a real decline. From what we saw, at the time of Daniel Ellsberg and the the Pentagon Papers, you know, then a lot of papers went in fighting for their Juno famously, probably their degree of attachment to freedom of the press, and finally, government’s grip was greater in the movies, and it really was, you know, but it was there in a way that it’s not now. And, you know, it’s not that difficult in most countries to eventually intimidate the press or drive dissent to the margins. You know. You know, there are some free papers in Russia, you know, but the main, the great mass of the media is controlled by the state or allies of this state. You know, that that’s, that’s the pattern all over. So the fact that they’ve managed to extradite might be able to extract somebody from the UK shows that this new level of repression in the US can be used outside the country as well as inside.

Scott Horton 11:51
And by the way, does it is it pretty much accepted that he will be extradited to the US

Patrick Cockburn 12:00
No, no, I don’t think that’s true. You know, but it’s sort of their various legal things they have to go through, you know, and then there will be appeals. It’s not automatic, you know, but you have a government, you know, which is in power here, which is Boris Johnson and the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, you know, these these, these are the rather muted UK equivalents of Donald Trump. So, they’re likely to be sympathetic to us or on the other hand, you know, let’s know. So, you know, there’s there are still courts, there’s still laws here. This doesn’t all happen automatically.

Scott Horton 12:43
It seems like there’s more law there than there is here. When Bill Hodge been last night that America fought the Libya war for once he won that war, he sued the EMI six for torture, he didn’t even bother suing the CIA. It would have got thrown right out of court. But the Brits actually settled with him. Because somewhere there was a guy with a powder when he talked.

Patrick Cockburn 13:12
He told me on Sunday that after he got back to Libya, and he told me he was going to sue the suit British intelligence, I thought I thought, you know, that sort of thing that people say when they’re angry, I was actually going to do it. So middle of it was sort of, but it’s but you know, the whole case the whole, extraordinary, reckless pursuit of souls, you know, at a number of levels. Immediately after the revelations were produced about Assange. He was accused of betraying American informants and agents who’s who would Then the murder unit. So I mentioned earlier, you know, 120 counter intelligence officers going through all these WikiLeaks documents trying to find somebody, and you would have thought somebody would have been killed by accident, you know, be or just happenstance, you know, that somewhere in Afghanistan, some guy would have been hit by a Taliban rocket. And you could have said, Well, you know, he was mentioned his name was mentioned by WikiLeaks, they couldn’t find a single one, you know, so that accusation should be dead and buried longer, but many people still believe it. Yeah, yeah, they did that again.

Scott Horton 14:33
This court martial.

Patrick Cockburn 14:36
Yeah, the more general thing? Sure, yeah. And then you have the more general thing of sayings of espionage letting classified secrets but you know, I was in Cabo when this when these were first released, and just by chance I was talking to an author record, talk with a

US official

You said we don’t want to Cody on top of these and I can’t remember exactly the circumstances, but these must have been released. And I gave it to them then gave him the code number and he said, Oh, well that’s not really secret. You know, this came from a particular network, which was used by original videos by the Pentagon but after 911 within the the US government bureaucracy and particularly the security society or military side of it, you know, they discovered that there were pockets of information that one lot had that others would have been deeply interested but they didn’t know it was there so they set out for expanded this database called SEPA net that really about half a million people could get access to they would have had to get a password but you know, within the but people who had the right security ratings could have reached this but of course, you know, is this I was talking to her in Kabul said, you know, the US government is not so dumb, but its deepest secrets or things it really doesn’t want to know, in a system which half a million people can get into but you know, Manning was that was a private in the army, he was able to access this, you know, the people all over the place. So it actually it’s not whether deep secrets or even the sort of seek real Secrets of the US. Government sort of things are talking about the names of agents and so forth.

Scott Horton 16:25
Yeah, that’s a starting point that this is stuff that they had clearly taken a calculated risk would get exposed in order to give more people access to it. I was just reminded yesterday that john bolton said that Manning should have been put to death for this leak, even though as you’re sent, this is just secret and confidential level stuff. In fact, it was the perfect leak, right? Because it wasn’t sources and methods and highest level stuff, while at the same time it was the source for 10,000 important news stories about Iraq and Afghanistan and then also with the State Department cables. Stories. So, going back to the 70s,

Patrick Cockburn 17:04
you know, with the most, you know, the most famous part of this was this extraordinary and chilling film taken by the gun camera of a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad in July 2007. And I remember the incident where I was I was in Baghdad, that a 12 civilian 12 people on the ground had been machine gunned and killed by a US helicopter. in Baghdad, the US said they were all terrorists. Two of the people are writers photographers. And so we kind of knew it was very unlikely this was true, we couldn’t quite prove it. And they went on. They went on sort of saying this, and it was known that there was a video of what had happened and The Freedom of Information Act requests, but it was never released until Manning and WikiLeaks released it. And then it showed that, you know, guys on the ground that a, you know, very unlikely that armed insurgents would have been wandering around in the open with our guns, the US helicopter overhead, but leave that aside, you know, they’d mistaken a camera for a journalist camera for a rocket propelled grenade launcher and so forth. And they’ve been sort of laughing and shouting and shooting, getting these people and then kill the people who do you know, in a van that stopped to rescue some of the wounded and so forth. So it was very horrible. This was shown in 2010 pretty intense embarrassment to the US government. Most of the stuff isn’t quite like that, you know, there are kinds of people who’ve been shot at checkpoints and so forth. An awful lot of it just embarrassed the us you know, that as to what you know, diplomats were saying about Saudi Arabia or and stuff like that.And I think they saw that information just released like that, you know, it means a real loss of power for any state for any government that loses, that no longer controls that information, although it’s not really sort of secret. You know, given the ease with which basically, WikiLeaks was able to take it over, you know, foreign states hostile, foreign or hostile or not, I don’t think would have had too many problems getting into that system, you know, and then the UN the Pentagon would have known that. You know, the third thing which and this is what gave us our pariah status was the accusation of rape. In Sweden, and this was pursued by the Swedish government from the beginning, in very sort of murky circumstances. The two women had gone to the Swedish police and they wanted they had sex with Assange. But they want to have him to, to they wonder if you could be forced to have an HIV test. And almost immediately, the Swedish police so leaked to the press that he was being accused of rape. You know, and once that’s one of those sort of allegations, which means that the person can’t really defend themselves because their reputation is so damaged by the accusation itself, that they don’t really get a hearing. The Swedes kept dropping this they kept on bringing it back. Now in my piece when I do quote, at some length, Nils melt melted the UN, rapporteur on torture who did a long judicial review of the treatment of someone And eventually, last year wrote an 18 page letter to the Swedish government asking for to, you know, to explain what had happened, why they’d maintained, you know, for over a long period asking to interview, the source wanting him to go from UK worried, and the Ecuadorian embassy where he taken refuge back to Sweden, but when he offered to talk to them, you know, on video and other circumstances, didn’t really seem to want to do so they didn’t want us the preliminary investigation, which went on for 10 years, it was dropped three times it was returned three times. The it’s pretty clear the British did not want them to drop it because in this report, the Crown Prosecution Service in UK is quoted as saying that The writing to the sweets to Sweden’s chief prosecutor saying Don’t you dare get cold feet? In other words, don’t you get a drop this? Right? Your efforts? Your pursuit of source. So I think this was very much you know, extraordinary persecution of a very long period.

Scott Horton 22:25
Yeah. And I’m really glad you mentioned that report. It’s by Nils Melzer if people just search that and Assange, as Patrick mentioned, 19 page report, it’s the single best piece of investigation on the issue of those accusations. But to wrap up here real quick, Patrick, I wanted to ask you, because it seems like we’re at a real turning point here and it makes sense that Wikileaks would be the thing that really pushes the issue to a head because it is such a step forward in the evolution of journalism and posting so many Raw documents at once like this in a way that neither your times or mind would ever dream of. Right? And so but now it’s sort of given the government the opportunity here then to overreach in their own way. And maybe it, it threatens a future of sort of a Chinese style censorship regime over communication here in the West. And but it really could go both ways. As you said, even with the extradition in England, it could go both ways. And it could be that a jury or Well, I don’t know about a jury in Virginia, but at least maybe the Supreme Court would throw this out and would not allow it to go through in the US there. There would be chances for the right thing to happen. But I wonder if you have a prediction about the future, either without Wikileaks, very reasons,

Patrick Cockburn 23:52
you’re quite right, Scott. That’s what makes it such an important case. You know, it could go either way. But if it goes against it, So, you know, Justice is a tremendous blow to freedom of the press and freedom of expression. You know, governments don’t much mind freedom of expression, the freedom of just expressing things which don’t affect real power, you know, this, it did affect real power. And that’s why they’ve pursued it so long and I’m still pursuing.

Scott Horton 24:21
All right, well, I gotta tell you, while we were talking, I went ahead and ordered the new book. And so it’s coming out on July the seventh, I’ve got my order in, brand new coming out everybody. It is called war in the age of Trump, the defeat of ISIS, the fall of the Kurds, the conflict with Iran. And thank you so much again, for all your time on the show, and especially for sticking up for Assange and all that he represents your Patrick. Thank you. Aren’t you guys and again, this piece is in the London review of books lrb.co.uk Julian Assange in limbo. 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